by Steve Stern
“Your boy, the ganef, that he took by me the shmattes from my wagon,” he was complaining, when the blacksmith abruptly wilted and sank onto his bench. The junkman was peering curiously at Oyzer when the culprit himself wandered in with an armload of secondhand clothes. Seeing his father in this uncustomary posture, he demanded of the fossil Zlotkin, “What you did to my papa?”
“I didn’t do nothink,” stated Zlotkin, who seemed disgusted by the blacksmith’s woebegone attitude. In truth the whole of North Main Street had grown so accustomed to Oyzer’s explosive temper as almost to rely on it as a natural feature of the neighborhood. Shrugging his bony shoulders, the junkman shuffled out the open doors of the smithy, snatching back his clothes from the boy as he left.
“Papa?” asked Hershel tentatively, still braced for the inevitable volley of curses, the boxing of his ears that would follow Zlotkin’s charge. He was waiting for the branched veins to stand out on his father’s broad forehead as he rose to deal with his son. Once, he had lifted Hershel by his unruly hair and the boy felt his scalp come unstuck from his skull, admitting whole galaxies of pain.
But the hulking blacksmith remained slouched on his bench. “It smells from your mama’s challah, the hearth,” he said at last, an unprecedented exhaustion in his voice. Hershel looked toward the glowing firepot, which exuded as usual the trenchant stench of burning coal.
Though it fascinated him at first, in the days that followed, the son found his papa’s chastened behavior even more unnerving than his late evil humor. Hadn’t the boy become the neighborhood scapegrace less from cupidity than the wish to provoke a father whose attention he could command in no other way? He would take the blacksmith’s abuse over his quiescence any day. Rascal he might be but no fool, Hershel knew his father’s emotive torment was a last defense against paralyzing despair, and it was the son’s job to keep that torment alive.
With a mind ordinarily geared to capers and practical jokes, the boy set about hatching a serviceable plan. It was nearly Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when the entire population of the Pinch paraded beyond the trolley lines out to Catfish Bayou and tossed into it the crumbs representing their sins of the past twelve months. Although the blacksmith had long since dropped all pretense of religious observance, the tashlikh ceremony was a custom he’d always insisted on performing back in Hrubeshoyb. They’d made a family excursion of it every year along the myrtle-thronged banks of the River Wieprz. Thus did Hershel decide to take advantage of his papa’s docility by persuading him to take part in this year’s ritual.
His idea was that, since the unpardonable sin that fueled his father’s fury now seemed only to weigh him down, perhaps a symbolic unloading of that sin would allow the rage to return. It was worth a try. So on the day in question he dissolved the yeast and mixed the flour and milk himself; he kneaded the dough in the trough but didn’t wait for it to rise. Molding it into a substantial glob, he delivered it to the blacksmith, who received the lump of dough like a convict receives a ball and chain. Then, a little intoxicated by the new power he wielded over his father, Hershel goaded Oyzer into the train of citizens marching to the banks of the bayou. There he pressed the blacksmith to heave his burden into the murky inlet, where a large, stipple-scaled fish leapt up to swallow the dough before it even entered the water.
Despite the miscarried gesture, Hershel waited for his father to be transformed back into the man he’d been before the junkman’s visit, or even—halevai!—back before the destruction of his home and family. But if anything he appeared even more deflated, as if he’d jettisoned what little was left of his spirit along with his burden of sin. The brawny blacksmith now seemed as vacant as a passive clay golem. He still pottered bare-chested about the forge in his dangling suspenders, listlessly busying himself with whatever work came his way. (Ironically, there were more jobs since his customers seized any excuse to view the spectacle of a tame Oyzer Tarnopol.) But he could scarcely muster the strength to pump the bellows or manipulate his hammer and tongs. His inefficacy made his son’s freebooting among the businesses of the Pinch all the more needful, but Hershel’s forays went far beyond mere expedience. On a spree, he stole items that had no practical application—bust food, secret society buttons, a Heidelberg electric belt; he engineered dangerous pranks involving gunpowder. His out-of-hand antics culminated in the theft of a cumbersome shot-metal clothes wringer from Pin’s General Merchandise. Its employee, Muni Pinsker, recent refugee from a Siberian labor camp, fed up with the kid’s terrorizing of the neighborhood, gave chase. He pursued the boy as far as the bayou, where Hershel leapt from the bank and was swallowed by a bloated fish grown immense on the misdeeds of North Main Street.
Or so Muni reported. Nobody disputed him though neither was he especially believed. Since the arrival of the Shpinker Hasids, who conducted their mystical experiments above a Commerce Avenue feed store, the citizens of the Pinch were aware of goings-on that did not comport with the prosaic routine of their days. But even Muni wasn’t entirely convinced that he’d seen what he’d seen. “It’s a fact even if it isn’t true,” he’d declared to Jenny, further confounding himself with the qualification “or vice versa.” He wasn’t in any case too surprised when Oyzer Tarnopol came into his uncle’s store in his stained leather apron to purchase a jointed bamboo rod and reel. Every morning after that the blacksmith was seen to set out for Catfish Bayou, where he baited his hook with a rubber frog, cast his line into the still water, and sat on the muddy embankment all day. And every evening he returned empty-handed to his ill-lit rooms above the smithy. Still, he persisted even during the period immediately following the earthquake, when a breach in its banks caused the bayou to be nearly drained. With something akin to his old energy the blacksmith flung himself into shoring up the rupture, rallying others to pitch in until a dike was constructed and the shallow basin replenished again. Then, while most residents of the Pinch seemed to go bughouse in the wake of the quake, Oyzer Tarnopol continued sitting his stationary vigil beside the bayou with his rod and reel.
Owing to the peculiar time zone that the district occupied after the earth’s upheaval, the prehistory of the Pinch was as available to Muni, from his current perspective, as was the present. In fact, past and present were often indistinguishable, jumbled as they were with visible auguries from the future. As a result, Muni could include in his chronicle, alongside an account of Mrs. Elster’s dancing fever, an appearance by the demagogue Davy Crockett haranguing the tipplers in Bell Tavern; and Yankel Zlotkin hondling malbushim (soul garments) to the lawless flatboat fraternity—half men and half alligator—that tyrannized Smoky Row. Then there was the shiftless kid who found Muni’s “history” in a used book store on Main Street, its contents bleeding into his own late twentieth-century neighborhood; and the golden child of Mr. and Mrs. Padauer, who was stolen from his bassinet by marauding shretelekh and replaced with one of their own.
The shretelekh are a largely innocuous class of Jewish elemental, though known in their caprices to hinder as often as help a human being. Mostly, however, they prefer to remain, unless disturbed, in subterranean habitats—cellars, caves, grottoes, and the like. This particular tribe had dwelled for some time under Market Square Park, in and out of the crannies and tunnels beneath the roots of the great patriarch oak. Only once before the quake had they ventured as a body aboveground. That was when they’d surfaced in order to rid themselves of a superannuated member of their society, a decrepit old specimen who’d long outworn his usefulness. With the hog-tied party in tow, they skulked (knee-high and semitransparent) about the tenements of North Main Street after midnight, surveying the fresh crop of newborns in their cradles. They settled on a crocus-curled, angel-faced little kaddishel, the offspring of Rose and Morris Padauer, a weary-winged couple with an apartment over Dlugach’s Secondhand. Poor in spirit as well as pocket—she a footsore hausfrau, he a luckless traveler in ladies’ corsets and stays—the Padauers had always felt that their beautiful child was an a
nomaly; he was more good fortune than humble folk such as they seemed entitled to. They were therefore disheartened but not entirely surprised to find that the boy had turned overnight into a shriveled homunculus; though how he’d gotten himself trussed like a Passover pullet remained a mystery. In any event, after the shock had worn off, they continued to care for the “child” as their own, which they after all believed him to be.
For his part the obsolescent little imp, who came to be known like his predecessor as Benjy, had had enough of geriatric abuse at the hands of his own kind. And Mama Rose and Morris were indulgent parents, sensitive to his delicate condition, indignant at the kaynehorehs, the “no evil eyes,” that some spat in his direction when they wheeled him by in his stroller. Despite their slender means the Padauers appareled their creature in sailor suits and flannel drawers; they made sacrifices to ensure him a protein-rich diet full of boiled brisket and herring with smetana—a welcome change from the blue mold and lichen that were the regular fare of the shretelekh. They powdered and diapered him after the spells of incontinence his diet sometimes induced, bought him a windup Kabongo African dancer and a wooden pelican on wheels. Although he remained misshapen, Benjy thrived in the Padauers’ charge and even regained the ability to walk, albeit at an unsteady bowlegged waddle. If he occasionally balked at playing the part of his adoptive parents’ little manikin (he was after all several centuries old), he understood that infantilization was a small price to pay for the pampered existence he enjoyed.
So he persisted in the imposture and considered himself fortunate. As for the Padauers, why disabuse them of their fond delusion? The guardianship of their special child gave them a unique status in the community as universal objects of pity, and besides, they seemed genuinely devoted to the counterfeit boy. For all this Benjy was grateful after his fashion, and even sought to reward his foster family’s generosity. Though what conjuring powers he’d once laid claim to were mostly depleted, he could still provide them with certain luxuries that would otherwise have been beyond their reach. Morris Padauer, returning with his paltry profit from the road, liked to refresh his spirits with a drop of brandy, and Benjy was able to ensure that his de facto papa’s flask remained bottomless. He assisted Mama Rose’s unending efforts at rendering goose fat by making certain that the schmaltz never ceased to overflow its jar. While he couldn’t produce the pot of shekels that his species had been rumored to possess in more storied times, he could see to it that the pennies in Rose’s piggy bank were inexhaustible. The Padauers never knew the source of these small blessings but came to accept them as gifts complementary to the abiding gift of Benjy himself.
Meanwhile the Shpinker Hasidim, a ragtag quorum of celibate bachelors, performed their penitential rites with a wanton zeal in their shtibl above the hardware and feed store. Under the auspices of their venerable rebbe Eliakum ben Yahya they initiated liturgical practices regarded as heretical if not downright obscene by lay observers, practices that ultimately resulted in a neighborhood apocalypse. The earth shook, the waters rose, and the ground opened beneath the great oak in Market Square Park. The tree toppled crown-foremost into a yawning chasm, so that its muddy roots were upended, and the creatures inhabiting those roots were thrust suddenly into the galvanic air. Thus exposed, they scurried from their perches and scattered abroad into the shadows. A few hung on around the flooded North Main Street to further nettle the already arsy-varsy lives of its citizens, but most, with an aversion to water, abandoned the Pinch. They went in search of places where no one would recognize them for what they were.
The outcast Benjy Padauer caught sight of them from his elevation atop the geyser that had erupted beneath him in the backyard of Dlugach’s Secondhand, where his mama had been hanging out clothes. Riding the crest of that fountain, he suffered a pang of anxiety that the shretelekh might be coming back for him. Then the pang was superseded by the pain generated from the hot waterspout that was scalding his keister through his knickerbocker pants.
When the spout subsided and the temblors ceased, a dazed Rose and Morris Padauer carried Benjy to Doc Seligman to be treated for his burns. The good doctor had set up an impromptu clinic behind a standing hospital screen in Market Square Park, to which the majority of the neighborhood had retreated after the quake. Despite the trauma of having lost their homes and livelihoods, the survivors seemed for the most part in an unaccountably convivial mood. Families with salvaged tea urns and featherbeds occupied their outdoor dormitory like castaways on a charm-bound island.
Physical injuries among the local population had been thankfully slight, but even the superficially wounded insisted on battlefield dressings, which they wore like badges of honor. Thus was the doctor, though capably assisted by a humorless Miss Reudelhuber, exhausted from his labors. His cotton-wool hair was matted, his varicose cheeks puffing like gills, when the Padauers presented their aged child, the seat of whose pants was still smoldering. Rallying somewhat, Doc Seligman welcomed them as he folded the privacy curtain around them and asked Miss Reudelhuber to please fetch a basin of cool water. He yanked down Benjy’s trousers against the “peanut’s” (his mama’s term of endearment) croaking protests, and sat him in the basin, which sizzled from the immersion of his scarlet tush. The peanut emitted a sigh like a rattle; then the doc raised him up and rubbed an aromatic ointment on his blistered nates, while the Padauers looked away, respectful of their child’s modesty. The doctor, applying a gauze plaster with a frown, was not so tactful.
“Good as new,” he pronounced, resisting an urge to give the little oddity’s bandaged bottom a patsch before helping him lift his pants. Then, perhaps realizing the irony of his pronouncement, he added sympathetically, “You folks ain’t yet too old. Why you don’t try for a human child?” Upon which the doc, clearly regretting what he’d said, began to busy himself with his instruments.
He hadn’t meant to let the cat out of the bag, though it wasn’t as if the bag hadn’t already been poked full of holes. This wasn’t his first examination of the Padauers’ stunted entity; the parents had brought him to the doctor early on with the question of why he didn’t seem to grow. An old-school physician cautious in his diagnoses, Seligman had allowed for the rare possibility of a premature aging syndrome for which there was no known cure. He’d suggested they seek confirmation from specialists, whose fees the beleaguered couple could never have paid. Besides, Seligman’s judgment, speculative though it was, was good enough for them. But that night in the park, his weariness infected by the uncommon lucidity of the post-seismic environment, the doctor let slip a truth the whole community took for granted: that the Padauers’ prodigy did not belong to the race of men.
Husband and wife exchanged evasive glances, each trying to hide from the other what they had failed to hide entirely from themselves. Attempting to conceal his stubbly beard behind an upturned piqué collar, Benjy mumbled apologetically in his froggy voice, “Nobody’s perfect.”
The senseless jubilation that had overtaken the Pinch in the aftermath of its earthshaking event served only to salt the Padauers’ wounds. Morris, in his chinless despondency, and Mama Rose, heavy-laden with the freight of her saddlebag hips, seemed in that moment to have lost their knack for comforting each other. At one point Morris even put the question in plain words to their peanut, “Benjy, what kind of thing are you?”
His response was a half-hearted bleat: “I’m a red-blooded American boy?”
It was perhaps the electric atmosphere itself that renewed the Padauers’ motivation to find a solution to the mystery of their charge. Having given up on gleaning enlightenment from the medical community, however, they thought they might consult with clergy. They ruled out the stuffy Rabbi Lapidus of the Baron de Hirsch Synagogue as too insensible to preternatural affairs and chose instead to seek the crackpot wisdom of Rabbi ben Yahya. Like the rest of the neighborhood they’d shared a skepticism bordering on animosity toward the Shpinker fanatics. But as all parties now agreed that the Hasids’ ritual antics
were responsible for shifting the planet’s tectonic structure, the Padauers had revised their attitude; they wondered if the Shpinker rebbe might have some special knowledge concerning the origin of their ill-made little shaver.
They gave the Dlugach boys a few coins to row them as far as Commerce Avenue, where they disembarked at Hekkie’s Hardware & Feed. At the top of an exterior staircase they were admitted into the loft above the store by an idiotically grinning young Hasid. Behind him a chorus line of his fellows had linked arms in a frantic kazatsky, chanting psalms and balancing bottles and books atop their heads as they danced. In a corner a solitary disciple waltzed with a Torah scroll wrapped in a corset cover trimmed in Valenciennes lace. (Mr. Padauer recognized the style of the garment as the Esnah Ingenue from the catalog of a company he represented.) The room itself, with its floor like a deck listing to starboard, was strewn with penitential paraphernalia—trays of tacks for rolling in, a cat-o’-nine-tails—that had apparently fallen into disuse. There was a long table piled with books at the head of which sat Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya, instigator of the providential new order. His eyelids were swollen and heavy, his complexion chlorotic, his beard spilling like cinders from a scuttle over his vest. The cushions that held him wedged in his throne-like chair looked to be all that kept him from pitching into the revelry.
Nervously the Padauers approached the rabbi, each holding on to one of Benjy’s nipper-like hands.
“Rebbe,” said Morris, not wishing to disturb him, though how could he not be disturbed by his disciples’ buffoonish behavior? “Rebbe, this is our son.”