The Pinch (26 page)

“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 rattling 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.”

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.