by Steve Stern
“A feller can’t unstopper a keg or raise a bucket from a well without he turns up a corpse,” the suitor would repine. “They’re after saying there ain’t enough living to bury the dead and it’s the niggers are having to do it.”
Of course there was always the question, never expressed, of their own survival. Phelim himself wore as a charm against misfortune a moonstone amulet sold to him by a fishwife who was later stoned for a witch. “The world’s gone plain medieval and no kicker.” Eavesdropping from where he lay on his pallet, Pinchas silently maintained there was no impediment so great that he couldn’t surmount it, as long as the girl felt about him as he did about her. But so far there was little evidence in support of that.
Perhaps the barkeep Mulrooney was right and he was nothing to her but an ephemeral pet. Living among louts in the absence of her mother, she was in need of a creature on which she could expend some tenderness, and in lieu of a broken-winged bird a sick Yid peddler would have to do. As soon as he was mended, she would set him free without a second thought. So he continued to call forth the odd fit of coughing and dissemble a frailty he no longer felt. Then he would try to count the freckles that sprinkled her cheeks like spilled nutmeg as she passed a saucer of rum vapors under his nose. He held his breath to glimpse the shady contours of her camisole as she knelt to give him a mustard footbath, and spied her emerald eye peeking at him from behind a helix of strawberry hair. Her hands, as she dried them in her apron, darted like sparrows in a bath; her slight breast lifted suspensefully before a sigh. Sometimes she caught him ogling her and they both blushed in mutual discomfiture, though he might think he detected the hint of a smile. Then he could believe that, along with the turbid light that filtered into her hovel from the hellscape outside, she had allowed herself to bask an instant in his adoration.
“Katie,” he had resolutely confided in her, “the man I was before you have saved me I am no more.” To which the girl inquired, “Are you then no more a man at all?” Ignoring her retort, he stood by his statement: because the previous Pinchas had had no tolerance for magical thinking; the credulity of the Russian Pale with its deathless prophets and hidden saints was a world he’d long since left behind. But how to argue with the fact that he’d been raised from his coffin by an angel? And now he felt his identity as erstwhile revolutionary and peregrine merchant was a casualty of that event. All that once defined him had been displaced by his overriding passion for the girl. “Katie, I am gornisht vi a vantz,” he avowed, “nothing but a insect without you.”
They tickled her, his singular confessions, which she occasionally countered with melodic Irish equivalents: “We say amadán, a fool.” She seemed to enjoy listening to his fractured syntax, often correcting his speech, as if in healing his body she must also knit his broken tongue. Sometimes, however, his relentless expressions of gratitude seemed to get under her skin. Was it that she’d simply had enough of his malarkey, or had she come to feel the burden of a responsibility for his very existence? In his most hopeful moments Pinchas suspected that she knew he was malingering and was complicit in prolonging his convalescence.
He offered her tortured versions of biblical verses recalled from his cheder days, whose meaning he felt he’d only begun to understand: “Your eyes are toyvn … pretty doves / your hair a flock of goats—”
“A flock of goats!”
“Your teeth are ewes that they sheared already the fleece—”
“For the love of Jaysus!”
“Your breasts—”
“Shut your gob!”
But she hid her amusement in her apron.
Once, when the men were out peddling their poteen and he was alone with the girl, Pinchas dared to venture, “Katie, you are, I think, mayn bashert.” He lay sprawled across the tattered quilt, his back against the bowed wall of the kip, eyes moist behind their small oval lenses.
“The cheek!” she exclaimed, though her potato masher remained poised in midflail; then in a whisper, “What does it mean, bashert?”
“It means a destined one.”
Lowering the masher into the bowl, the girl became thoughtful. “We say m’anamchara, soul mate, or macushla machree, pulse of my heart.” Her roseate complexion deepened as she returned to mauling her spuds, and Pinchas thought she glowed like a synagogue’s everlasting lamp.
He wondered how he could want so much to worship and possess her at the same time, and how either option seemed to him equally holy. But no sooner had Pinchas realized that she was fond of him as well than he began to anguish over her well-being. Enslaved to a family of ingrates who conspired to sell her into the servitude of a loveless marriage, she was in dire need of being rescued from her fate. And that was to say nothing of the threat of the plague itself, which she might contract any day in her comings and goings—that is, if her wayward father and brothers didn’t bring it back home to her from their knockings-about. Unable to contain his anxiety on her behalf, Pinchas found himself risen to his feet, taking hold of Katie’s free hand. She again ceased pummeling her boiled tubers to level at him a dubious gaze.
“You saved me my life,” he said. “Now you will please to let me”—he recalled the cardinal utterance of his profession—“settle the account.”
She snickered, rolled her eyes, but made no effort to withdraw her hand from his. “Give an ear to who’s talking salvation,” she quipped.
“Katie, I got for you shpilkes,” he admitted, “which it means I am afraid.”
“Faith and didn’t the Gypsy assure me I’ve nothing to fear from the distemper? It’s other ills the years have in store for me.”
But she could see he was far from appeased.
“Pinchas”—his name on her lips was pure music—“say after me: From tinker and pooka …”
“From tinker and pooka …,” he solemnly repeated.
“… and black-hearted stranger …”
“…and black-hearted stranger …”
“God keep”—here she squeezed his hand—“God keep my treasure this day from danger.”
He completed the incantation and vowed to himself he would never leave her side.
It was a difficult vow to keep, given that his sham condition kept him from accompanying her into the perilous out-of-doors. He was torn, wanting at once to show himself as her protector and loath to reveal the extent of his fitness lest he be abruptly sent packing. Of course Katie would never turn him out, but the rest of her brood had become ever more voluble in expressing their discontent. Their neighbors were dying like flies, the virulence of the fever so great in their quarter that the remainder of the city claimed that it originated there. The Irish were a long-standing scapegoat, there being none lower on the social ladder but poor blacks, at least not until Pinchas had come along. But the Keough men had grown tired of the harmless persecutions—gluing his toes with molasses, painting his phiz with boot polish while he slept—they’d inflicted on the freeloader in Katie’s absence; they were weary of appearing repentant in the face of their sister’s wrath when she returned. They were ready to be rid of the Yid for good and all. His situation, Pinchas understood, was untenable and could not endure, but the love that steeled his resolve had also, he believed, made him cunning. It was time to devise a plan.
On an August evening—humidity so dense it curled the roof shingles—the brothers sat sharing a jar as they gutted a string of crappie. Fish innards slithered from the listing table, plopping onto the toes of their plow shoes and the floor. Across the room lay the peddler under a sodden sheet, pretending to sleep as he listened to their discussion of the topic that absorbed what little air was left in the room: for even her “gombeen siblings,” as Katie called them, had begun to recognize that their days might be numbered. Who knew but their da might return this very night bringing the infection from the tavern, or their sister from her foraging?
“They say,” reckoned Murtagh, his stubbled face flecked with bits of bloody intestine, “you can tell by his breath on a glass who’
s a carrier. Put a microscope to the glass and it’s tiny bogeys you’ll see.”
His sheepdog eyes peering through a fringe of cornsilk hair, Tighe remarked, “Sure, and your carrier can make a gamecock go roupy by coughing upon it.”
“That, I think, is moonshine,” disparaged his older brother, “though your smaller bird will succumb.”
Sentimental when soused, they fell to brooding over their fellows who’d been recently taken by Mister Jack: Rory Kavanagh, Spanker O’Malone—the list went on. “Fine lads gone too soon to glory and it’s himself that survives,” said Murtagh, tilting his square head in the direction of the recumbent Pinchas. “There’s justice for you.”
“Bang on,” Tighe nodded in assent. “And there lies the Jew like a great-I-am in the place of old Finbar.” For he still nursed a bitterness that the swayback hound, whose treble yelps he’d so savored when lifting it by the ears, had been banished from its pallet to the out-of-doors. Still feigning sleep, Pinchas manufactured a raucous snore.
Then Murtagh, who was not above goading his little brother, suggested that he might perhaps introduce a red pepper to the dosser’s bony arse. Whereat Tighe, rising shakily to his feet, offered to go him one better and introduce the whole of the sheeny’s anatomy to the night.
“Whisht, boyo, our Katie would be having your guts for garters.”
“The biggety minx,” exclaimed Tighe in a burst of pot valor, “she can start with these,” plucking the entrails stuck to his trousers and flinging them at the wall. “The divil take Katie and her reasty rabbi!” Tottering forward, he leaned over the peddler and gave his shoulder a rough shake. “Here,” he shouted, “it’s time yer mushed along up the yard.” Then a cuff to the back of the counterfeit sleeper’s skull.
But Pinchas had provided for just such an eventuality. With the sheet pulled tightly over his head, he dredged with furtive fingers the reserve of ingredients he’d tucked into the deep pockets of Cashel’s nightshirt. From the right-hand compartment he scooped the saffron pollen he’d collected from the overripe irises that Phelim Mulrooney had bestowed on Katie during his visits. He rubbed the pollen rapidly over his face, then took from the other pocket the pulpy blackberries he’d filched from Katie’s larder and pressed them into his squinched-up eyes. He stuffed the fistful of tea leaves into his cheeks, so that before Tighe could tear the sheet from his head and haul him to his feet, Pinchas’s skin was turned a saffron yellow and purple tears leaked from his nostrils and eyes.
“He looks a bad dose,” judged Murtagh, giving a wide berth to both his little brother and the peddler, whom Tighe was attempting to march toward the door. Noises that seemed to have their source in Pinchas’s diaphragm had begun to emerge from his throat. “Leave off your hold on his oxter, brother,” Murtagh warned. “The man’s about to spew.” Then sure enough, announced by an animal caterwaul, a black substance began to issue from Pinchas’s mouth like feathers from a punctured pillow. Tighe leapt away from his captive to join his big brother as witness.
“The feller’s a fair volcano,” he observed.
At that moment the door opened and Katie appeared, her arms evenly burdened with her produce basket and the earthen slop bucket. Dropping both, she cried, “Lord save us, he’s that sick again!” She straightaway directed her brothers to help her get the afflicted back to bed, though neither would come near. Draping Pinchas’s arm over her shoulder, she returned him to his pallet, where he lay floundering like an eel, alternating his tormented moaning with a racking cough. In the midst of his travail he was heard to ask for a rabbi.
“I fear there’s no such creature in this town, my heart,” Katie assured him.
“Then get for me a priest!”
Lifting a brow in consternation, Katie nevertheless turned to her brothers, who remained stock still. “You heard him, you fluthered elephants, get him a priest!”
Murtagh wondered aloud what the sheeny might be wanting with a man of the cloth.
“Thimblewit,” barked his sister, “would you deny a dying man his last rites?”
Murtagh and Tighe exchanged looks, shrugged, then started for the door, clearly glad of an excuse to quit the wretched scene. As they exited the shanty, they were met by their pickled old man, who was stumbling in arm in arm with his future son-in-law, the barkeep Mulrooney. Florid-faced, Cashel Keough turned briefly to regard his departing sons, then back toward the misery on the pallet.
“What’s all this ruction then?” he inquired.
“As you see,” breathed Katie, with no will left to explain what should have been self-evident.
Pinchas yawped, yammered, and writhed, while Cashel winced and became defensive. “Sure it’s no fault of mine,” he said, though no one had accused him, “and didn’t I tell you from the start he was crow bait?”
Katie paid no attention. She was up again and at the distillery in the corner, dousing a loofah sponge with a beaker containing the dregs of their vile poteen.
“Hold, lass,” cautioned her father, “that’s good shellac yer after wasting on a dead man.” He made to interfere with his daughter, who pivoted in her fury and flung the tin beaker at his head. But her aim was wild and the receptacle sailed past her da’s shoulder to bounce off Phelim Mulrooney’s noggin. The barkeep touched the swelling node on his forehead, whose slope extended hairless to the crown of his meaty skull, and tasted the blood. It did not seem to meet with his approval. “This isn’t the complaisant girl I was promised,” he pouted, and turned to leave, but Cashel held him fast by the rubber collar, insisting, “We had a bargain.”
Again the door swung open and in lurched the brothers with a gosling-headed party wearing a Roman cassock and collar in tow. Other than his soiled vestments, there seemed little of the divine about him; in truth, his pie-eyed visage with its wine-red snoot attested that he was as advanced in drink as Cashel himself. The sweat rolled off his wrinkled countenance in rills.
“God and Mary to you, Father Farquhar,” greeted Cashel somewhat perfunctorily.
“Where lies the candidate for shanctification?” replied the priest.
The sad article whose thrashing and wailing arrested all other eyes and ears was indicated to him. Squinting at Pinchas, Father Farquhar began automatically to recite his office from where he stood, the Latin purling from his lips along with a thread of drool: “Miseratumtuiomnipotensdeush …” Having thus acquitted himself of the sacrament, he made the sign of the cross and turned to leave, only to find his way blocked by Murtaugh and Tighe. Still functioning as their sister’s agents, they were responding to her appeal from the death pallet that Father Farquhar not depart without first administering extreme unction. Dutifully they turned the priest back around and shoved him forward toward the infirm.
Forced to his brittle knees by the brothers, the priest fetched a small flask from his cassock. He uncorked it and extended a limpet-like tongue to receive its contents, which were not forthcoming. “It appears I’m fresh out of the holy chrism,” he complained.
Katie offered some cooking oil, but Father Farquhar allowed as how “your mortal soul favors bonded shpirits to attend its journey home.” Katie frowned, but in lieu of the poteen—the better part of which was dripping from Squire Mulrooney’s chin—she presented the sponge with which she’d been bathing her patient’s brow. The priest squeezed it, catching the drops like a nectar on his tongue; then shuddering, declared, “Thish’ll do.” Reinforced by the stimulating drizzle, he began again to recite his office at the parting of the spirit: “Peristamshanctumunctionem …,” sprinkling whiskey over the fever victim’s forehead and hands. The aggrieved girl pressed her fingers to Pinchas’s chest to try and still his agonies. The front of his nightshirt was coated in the lees of the ersatz vomito negro, and when Katie withdrew her hand bits of the awful matter remained stuck to her fingers, which she sniffed. Then her frightened face passed through several seasons of expression, from flummoxed to suspicious to the wry suggestion of a smile. Father Farquhar was merrily ratt
ling off a litany of the sins the poor man must be excused of—sins of sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and carnal delectation. He was interrupted, however, when the afflicted sat suddenly bolt upright and cried in a voice that caused pismires to fall from the rafters, “Katie, mayn gelibteh, marry me!”
Then he fell back and recommenced his spasmodic moaning, giving every indication that he was half-dead already. But the reverent mood of that crooked house was broken, the onlookers stunningly disconcerted. As they awaited the peddler’s last gasp, which was surely impending, Pinchas sat erect again. “Marry me,” he pleaded, “so from your kiss I can die!”
Having entwined her fingers with the peddler’s, the girl made an effort to arrange her sheepish features in a show of solemnity. “It’s in the way of being his final wish,” she proclaimed to the priest, as if no other argument could be entertained.
His knees worn out from genuflecting, the befuddled Father Farquhar rolled backward onto his haunches in a most unvenerable fashion, revealing the calves under his cassock like spiny ninepins. With a foot Murtaugh scooted a low wooden stool beneath the priest’s nates to prop him up, but the more dignified perch did nothing to resolve the issue at hand. For the combustible Cashel, however, there was no quandary at all. “I’ll be scragged and gibbeted first!” he bellowed, and confident of allies added, “My friend Phelim here will have something to say about this.” He pounded the barkeep on the back, who fought to keep his balance, muttering, “I wouldn’t have a widder woman.” Then taking heart, he asserted, “The girl is anyhow a sack of cats. The dead man is welcome to her.”
“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.”