Then it would be my turn, though her interrogations tended to be less specific, as when she asked, “So Lenny, why are you such a — to put it mildly — such a case?”
“Blame it on my childhood.”
“Your childhood.”
“As you know I was snatched from my cradle by a buzzard that dropped me on the doorstep of a London blacking factory …”
At which point during that particular exchange she had stiffened and turned away from me. I sat up in bed to find her staring at the opaque glass of the window that gave back the reflection of her seal-sleek body. My eyes slid down her breast and clung to the nipple like Harold Lloyd hanging on to the face of a clock.
“You’re not really an authentic human being,”she mused, and in case I hadn’t got it that she had my number, “are you, Lenny?”
“Me?” I said, dodging the subject lest she think she’d struck a nerve. “I’m an open book,” I insisted, reaching for the book and opening it to the place where we’d left off reading — the part where old Yoyzef Zlotkin, who sorted tin at Blockman’s junkyard, developed the faculty for what is called kfitzat ha-derekh, or the seven-league leaping of the way.
“I interviewed his granddaughter Mindy Gerber last week,”put in Rachel, albeit a bit mechanically. “She graduated from White Station High School and went to Yale on a full scholarship, one of the first women to take a PhD in physics. All she recalled of her zayde was a disagreeable odor.”
In 1855, according to Muni Pinsker, Mayor Israfel Baugh and Dr. Roscoe Dickinson settled their feud with pistols for two, coffee for one, behind the slave pen on Exchange Street. In 1924, Clarence Saunders of Piggly Wiggly fame built a palace of pink marble out on Central Avenue, and in the thirteenth month of 1913, a month that included all others, the blacksmith Oyzer Tarnopol, in his frustration, threw his anvil into the soup of Catfish Bayou. It was a ponderous anvil that took what remained of the blacksmith’s once fabled strength for him to toss it, and the colossal splash caused a shower of displaced fish to fall all about him. Walleye, garfish, and even a Cretaceous alligator flopped in the mud at his feet, though none appeared to have swallowed his lost boy.
Poking about the bank inspecting the fish, the blacksmith did unearth a beaver-felt shoe he recognized as having once belonged to his son Hershel. Contemplating it awhile, he reasoned (aware that his reasoning was skewed) that perhaps the fish that took the boy might return for what it had left behind. So he hung the shoe on his hook and cast it into the muck. Still no luck. Then Oyzer did a thing that would have been unthinkable during his ferocious days. Though he set no store by religion anymore, and assumed that God had as little use for him, he went to visit the Shpinker rebbe. Why? Because that’s what North Main Streeters had done — furtively, to be sure — whenever the absence of all other options left them wondering if there was more in heaven and earth than they cared to believe.
Oyzer’s neighbors, starry-eyed from an excess of belief, ogled him from atop the sandbag seawall as he trudged through hip-high water on the way to ben Yahya’s shtibl. But the rebbe wasn’t there. His disciples, however, were still in residence, behaving more like a mob in a tavern than daveners in a holy place. Their monkeyshines ceased abruptly upon the entrance of the terrible blacksmith.
“You can tell me please where is Rabbi Eliakum?” inquired Oyzer, his hangdog humility annulling his bull neck and barrel chest.
The schnapps-soaked Hasids looked at one another. Surely the blacksmith’s subdued condition was further proof (if they needed it) that the messianic age had arrived. One of the Shpinkers, reclining on the floor with a dead chicken for a pillow, informed him to the amusement of his fellows, “He went in the Cave of Machpelah.”
Another, plucking a still-wriggling fish by the tail from Oyzer’s pants pocket, chimed in, “He went like Akiva in Abraham’s bosom alive.” Others got into the act, enjoying the fact that the blacksmith could be teased with impunity; they gathered round him, continuing their taunts: “The rebbe went in Gehinnom to lasso with his tefillin the devil Asmodeus.” They danced around him, a manifest version of the internal demons that had harassed him throughout the years. At some point the blacksmith’s neck tendons began to swell and he trembled in all his limbs, seeing which the disciples left off their sport. They grew quiet again, bracing for the violent outburst that was surely at hand, but all Oyzer released was a spate of hot tears.
So daunting was this display that it convinced at least one of the Hasids, a rodent-faced lad with a pronounced overbite, to abandon the high-handed antics in favor of pity. He attempted a serious explanation of the rebbe’s disappearance—“When is exposed the hidden saint, his work here is done”—then looked dismayed that the explanation sounded so much in line with the taunts.
With no reason to tarry, the still-sniffling Oyzer turned to go, when the earnest disciple seemed possessed of a realization: “No more is he the blacksmith,” he proclaimed, indicating their visitor with a gesture. “The fisherman is he become!”
“The fisherman!” echoed others of their minyan, as if a veil were lifted and the blacksmith’s true identity revealed.
The earnest Hasid had moved to the long table upon which lay a double-crowned Torah scroll. Reverently peeling a negligee from the scroll, he began to unroll the vellum parchment until he found the passage he was looking for. “Toyreh is the best of merchandise,” he declared, producing from a pocket a pair of pinking shears. Then like a haberdasher cutting fabric, he guided the scissors in their munching progress across the passage and held the clipped fragment of scripture aloft. The others seemed disappointed that the fellow wasn’t instantly atomized by a fist of lightning but accepted his demonstration as more evidence that a new order obtained. All was permitted.
“The Toyreh one studies in this world,” stated the rodent face, “l’havdil, it’s nothing compared to the Toyreh one studies in the next.” The implication being to all within hearing that they hadn’t seen anything yet. Then coming forward he pressed the passage into Oyzer’s thick mitt. “Fisherman, put in your pipe this and smoke it.”
Of course Oyzer did not smoke or drink or engage in any kind of profligate activity; his remorse had always been sufficient to fuel his immoderate wrath. But despite the dubious authority of the Shpinker disciples, cantankerous in the absence of adult supervision, he began to think of himself as “the fisherman.” As if that designation relieved him of the onus of being Oyzer Tarnopol. Plucked from his cheder at an early age to become his father’s apprentice, he’d forgotten the little Hebrew he knew, and so was unable to read the scripture he’d been given. But it nevertheless assumed for him a talismanic cachet.
Early next morning — a morning like the others that came and went without advancing the calendar date — the fisherman was back at the bayou. Dawn, he recalled from his days along the Wieprz, was an optimum hour for angling, though that was the extent of his knowledge of the pastime. The fog hung like lace tatting over the water, on the other side of which Oyzer was able to descry some figures emerging from a large conduit. This was the conduit that the old Gayoso Bayou, converted after the yellow jack plague to a sewer main, spilled out of into the Catfish cove, and from its mouth appeared a procession of spectral figures. A fever blister of a sun shone through the fog, illuminating the blind fiddler Asbestos as he picked his way at the head of a plodding file of colored men. Pausing in the sludge outside the tunnel, the musician clamped his cane between his teeth, removed his instrument from the gunny sack, and began to improvise a humoresque. It was a mercurial air in marked contrast to the dirge-like pieces he was generally heard to play around North Main Street, and the men seemed to scatter in time to its sportive rhythm. Some made for the shanties north of the cove while others stepped into pirogues and paddled for the narrow channel that led into the Wolf River tributary. A little stimulated by the music himself, Oyzer stuffed the passage of scripture into Hershel’s shoe; he snagged the shoe once again on his hook — a hayhook he’d optimistically fastened to the end of his line — and cast it over the pond.