Muni could hardly remember the person who’d shouted those words so defiantly in that Moscow courtroom. Bereft now of ideology, even curiosity, he felt nothing when looking back but a deep lassitude. There was little that engaged his interest — though now and again some character out of the cavalcade that passed through the general merchandise might briefly capture his attention. He might look up an instant from sweeping the floor to observe Mrs. Gruber the bootlegger, accompanied by her flame-bearded familiar Lazar der Royte, as she waddled in to purchase a sack of corn. Or the chapfallen Mr. and Mrs. Padauer, widely regarded in the Pinch as objects of pity, holding the hand of a toddler who resembled a wizened old man. Or Jenny Bashrig, upsetting a pyramid of butter churns as she gazed at Muni with unblinking black satin eyes. (Once or twice she had inquired of him concerning the use of a nickeled emasculator or fly powder in a bellows box, items whose utility Muni had no knowledge of nor Jenny any intention of purchasing.) There was Hershel Tarnopol, scamp, liar, and thief, whose petty pilfering was largely tolerated in deference to his talent for sleight of hand; and Rabbi ben Yahya and his disciples, some of whom entered the store trailing bits of rope they’d neglected to remove from their ankles. These were the strands they tied to furniture and doorknobs during prayers lest they levitate beyond a height of easy return.
It was nearly sundown on the first evening of Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Days of Awe, and the population of North Main was heading en masse toward Catfish Bayou. A stagnant inlet of the Mississippi only a few blocks north of the Pinch, the bayou was the site where Irish refugees from the Great Potato Famine had beached their johnboats decades ago. They had dismantled the square-ended boats to build makeshift shanties, some of which still stood, or rather leaned, though they’d long been abandoned by their previous tenants and taken over by destitute Negroes. The Irish had since emerged from the muck around the bayou to become the original inhabitants of North Main Street, which was then a lawless corridor atop the river bluff called Smoky Row. Their pinch-gutted countenances were the source of the neighborhood’s eventual name. Muni had been cajoled by his uncle to come along and enjoy a spectacle that Pinchas regarded as yet another example of his neighbors’ quaint delusions. Katie held Pinchas’s hand as they walked, sashaying more like a sweetheart than a veteran wife, though her winsomeness seemed a trifle subdued to her nephew tonight.
“In this hekdish, this sink, was my Katie raised,” explained Pinchas, indicating the marshy banks surrounding the brackish body of water; for the dredging of the river had reduced the once broad bayou to an overgrown cowpond. But Katie was quick to contradict him, recalling the hand-to-mouth childhood that Muni had heard her ruefully allude to more than once. “It was a paradise.”
Their neighbors had come together to perform the tashlikh ritual, which involved emptying one’s pockets of the breadcrumbs you’d stuffed them with and casting them upon the waters. The crumbs were meant to symbolize the sins you’d committed during the past year. It was supposed to be a solemn ceremony, but the cadre of citizens parading past the old auction block at Jackson Avenue had about them a carnival attitude. They gossiped and joked (Mr. Sebranig to his wife: “How about a bissel henky-penk after?” His wife: “Over my dead body.” Mr. Sebranig: “How else?”), accompanied by the Widow Teitelbaum’s windup gramophone, which she hauled behind her in a little wagon. The gramophone played a medley of Victor Herbert standards plus the Jazarimba Orchestra’s exotic rendition of “Ain’t We Got Fun.” When the music began to drag, the broad-bottomed widow would pause to crank her machine, looking as she leaned toward the speaker in her blowsy apricot frock like a bee at the mouth of a trumpet flower. Rabbi ben Yahya and his knot of disciples in their holiday gabardines brought up the rear, beating their shallow breasts and singing wordless niggunim.
“Ay yay bim bom yiddle diddle do …”
Once they’d arrived at the bayou — the mud along its bank alive with polliwogs, ooze sucking at the soles of their shoes — some began reading psalms by the failing light. The five Alabaster children were enjoined by their papa to sprinkle generous portions of crumbs on the water, as if a multitude of sins were a proof of their prosperity. Old Ephraim Schneour scattered, instead of pumpernickel crusts, the ashes of the wife he’d abused for half a century, spreading them like a man sowing seed. Looking forlornly at one another over the head of the ill-favored child that stood between them, Mr. and Mrs. Padauer heaved a mutual sigh, having perhaps decided to throw bread in place of the boy. Jenny Bashrig tossed a few crumbs, only to have a breeze blow them back into her face, which she turned toward Muni, her soft eyes beginning to tear from the motes that had settled therein.
Hershel Tarnopol hopped excitedly in his patched plus fours beside his bullnecked father, whose volatile temper seemed uncharacteristically restrained this evening. He was carrying a lump of dough the size of a bowling ball, which, without ceremony, he flung toward the murky pond. The dough was still in the air when a huge pewter fish with scales like a coat of mail broke the surface, stretching its mouth impossibly wide to swallow the ball then diving back into the water with a mighty splash. “Mazel tov, Papa!” shouted Hershel, doing a squelchy hornpipe while the blacksmith, slumped in his undershirt, looked as spent as if he’d rolled aside the stone from his tomb.
At a signal from their baggy-eyed rebbe, the Shpinkers released from their slingshots a blizzard of ryebread crumbs that caused an equivalent storm of hungry blackbirds to swoop toward the bayou. “Grandstanders,” sneered Pinchas in disgust, swatting a mosquito at his neck with his open palm. Then his eyes strayed beyond the water to an out-of-step phalanx approaching from the Shadyac Avenue side of the bay. It was in the nature of a counterparade that turned out to be, as they drew nearer, a delegation of local members of the Ku Klux Klan. They were decked out in their Halloween finest, white robes and pointed hoods, several of them carrying a large wooden cross horizontally on their shoulders like pallbearers. Muni’s stomach tensed at the mob’s resemblance to one of those Old Country Easter processions that were often the prelude to a pogrom, but the North Main Streeters retained their holiday mood, seeming if anything more amused than afraid. In fact, they began to make a game out of identifying the men beneath the robes.
“There’s Joe Hankus Munro,” said Mr. Bluestein. “I sold him the sheet he wears that it’s cut on the bias.” It was a signature feature his fellow citizens would recognize, as Mr. Bluestein, the tailor, was also a mohel.