“But he’s a gobshite Jew!” bawled Cashel, looking now to his sons for encouragement. The two of them wagged their heads in dumb accord but appeared more interested in than appalled by the situation. Cashel then uttered what he must have assumed would put the controversy to rest: “Nor ain’t the man even baptized!”
Katie replied almost dismissively that Father Farquhar could certainly remedy that, though the priest showed no sign of compliance. On the contrary, summoning something of the gravity of his office, he submitted, “One should look, in extremish, to the welfare of the soul rather than the rites of the flesh.”
At that the apparently moribund peddler reared up one more time. “Give to me for a blessing Katie’s hand,” Pinchas rasped, “and it wouldn’t leave from this life in despair mayn neshomah, my soul.” Then seemingly spent from the effort the words had cost him, he fell back again onto the soggy quilt, his eyes rolling into his head. He flopped a moment, twitched, then lay still.
Katie spoke for the priest’s ear only, “If it’s a crime to wed us, sure it’s the greater not to honor his dying wish.”
With his face still screwed up in thought, Father Farquhar could be heard quoting various opposing church canons to himself. At length he confessed, “Thishishmost irreggaler,” as Katie advised him to take another sup off the sponge. He did so and shuddered like a palsy, after which the scales seemed to have fallen from his glassy eyes. “Leave ush make haste then,” he announced, “for the lad’s essence is already in his teeth.”
“Bollocks!” sputtered Cashel, dropping his bulk into a chair beside the deal table. “You’ll put the heart crossways in me.” Behind him Phelim Mulrooney, muttering “Feck the lot of yer,” took the occasion to slip out the door. But Father Farquhar, having turned toward the patriarch, was now become the voice of reason: “It’s the one vow they’ll be making this evening,” he stated, his speech surprisingly lucid, “for the nuptial bed of this marriage will be the grave.” A momentary grin rent his wadded face. “Then the relict may go to her second husband as pure as from her father’s side.”
Cashel threw up his hands in a gesture of defeat. “Marry him, then bury him,” he grumbled. “Then somebody make me my supper.”
The priest rubbed his palms together. He was evidently energized by the prospect of presiding over a wedding rather than administering the viaticum once again, though the distinction here was admittedly a fine one. Swiftly he dispensed with the baptism, splashing the peddler’s face with brackish water from the chipped basin the girl had provided. “I baptize you in the name of the Father …,” et cetera. Katie had hauled Pinchas to a sitting position, his back against the splintered boards, but before she’d finished patting dry his snuffling features with her apron, the curate had moved on to the nuptials. He was asking the bride and groom if they had come of their own free will to give themselves to each other in marriage. Would they raise their children according to the law of Christ and his church? Here Pinchas was aware of having entered a degree of apostasy beyond anything he’d known to date. All religions were opiates of course, but some residual sense of the magnitude of this particular trespass seemed to rankle in his vitals; it might take one of Katie’s sodium clysters to purge it. But what was he thinking? Love was the physic that dispelled every ill sensation the body was prey to.
Father Farquhar was saying, “Do you, Kathleen”—he looked to her sire, who grudgingly supplied “Fiona Aoife”—“Kathleen Fiona Aoife Keough, take as your lawful husband”—the bride provided the peddler’s name—“to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in s-sickness”—his tongue tripped over the word—“or in health, to love and to cherish till death do you part?”
She did, and Pinchas’s heart became a living flame. When the priest repeated the formula for the lovelorn peddler, he replied with a resounding “I do!” Much too resounding in fact, because his sudden robustness awakened a shuffling skepticism among the witnesses.
Next came the exchanging of the rings, and Cashel objected to Katie’s transferring the ring that once belonged to her mother from her own finger to the sheeny’s extended digit. She ignored her father even as she pressed upon the peddler a curtain loop brought by her hapless ma from Ireland in anticipation of curtains that never materialized. Pinchas encircled her finger with it like a quoit. Then Father Farquhar proclaimed, “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder,” and the pale groom, lifting his bride along with him, rose up from the bedding with a self-congratulatory “Mazel tov!” He pulled her to him and kissed her full on the lips, the contact banishing — just as he’d expected — all fear.
It was a banishment on the heels of which the newlyweds themselves were soon to follow. For Cashel was also standing and, even as the gawking Tighe exclaimed “A bleedin’ miracle,” shouted, “We’re played for patsies, lads!” Thus rallied, they would have set upon the peddler in a body had not his defiant bride stood between the groom and his assailants.
“It’s too late, Da,” said Katie, radiant in the assurance of her new estate. “Deny him and it’s myself you’re denying as well.”
“So be it!” her father roared.
It would not do in any event to murder the Jew in front of a holy man, however dissolute he might be. That could wait. And if in the meantime the Keoughs lost their appetite for homicide — since their father’s death soon after from fever or drink would dampen the brothers’ bloodlust — they might satisfy themselves with malicious pranks; though the pranks themselves would diminish in cruelty and decline into habit with the years, when it became clear that nothing was going to drive the peddler from the neighborhood.
Not that Pinchas hadn’t wanted to take his bride far away from that festering slough. During the time he’d spent as the guest of her family, the Pinch had become nearly deserted: a handful of hollow-eyed survivors still reeled and debauched in the streets, though in their halting danse macabre they were already three-quarters ghosts. Some slept, for convenience sake, in coffins rather than beds. But the peddler had no money for travel, and the roads around Memphis were anyway barricaded, the bridges burned; refugees from the city had been shot on sight. Thrust into the night with no more than the clothes on their back — and Pinchas’s borrowed at that — the newlyweds clung to each other, their eyes smarting from the carbolic acid dumped into the seething Bayou, its surface mantled in dead fish. Of course there were other parts of the city where the houses were built of stone, where crape myrtles bloomed and people died in their beds, but there was no place among those for a pauper and his disinherited bride. And in any case, Katie surprised her new husband with her stubborn refusal to stray from what she called home.
“But Katie, ziskeit,” Pinchas had demurred, as admiring of her iron will as he was daunted by it, “the Pinch is geshtank, a shitcan.”
“Then we’ll fill it up with Easter lilies,” she assured him.
They found shelter on their wedding night in the Court Street Infirmary, where the mortally ill squirmed under mosquito netting like weevils trapped in spiderwebs. Their bridal banquet was brined cabbage ladled from a tin dinner pail by a nun. In the morning, turned out on account of their good health, they took up what they assumed would be temporary quarters in an abandoned tenement above a boarded-up saddlery on Smoky Row. (They would remain there, but for a brief excursion into the Underworld, for the remainder of their days.) It was in that apartment, in an iron bed vacant of corpses, with the tar barrels still smoldering beneath their window, that they finally consummated their marriage. That’s when Pinchas discovered, to the delight of his ardent bride, that he was the victim of a persistent satyriasis. It was a condition that left the couple unable thereafter to rid themselves of a bashful self-consciousness in each other’s company. (At least until, after the decades of their failure to conceive, Pinchas began to lose courage and heart.) Their heady pleasure in one another, plus whatever they managed to scrounge in their forsaken district, was nourishment enough during the period of their honeymoon.