It was then that the girl in her sequined leotard flashing the last rays of the setting sun began to slide headfirst down the thick rope.
She had thought of him often during the jumps from show town to show town, had always missed his spooky music; none of the windjammers had ever adjusted their rhythms to suit so well her aerial turns. Lately she’d missed the old-timer like she missed the river itself and wondered why his fiddle couldn’t be added to the brass jig band that played the sideshow. She imagined him taking his place alongside the ensemble of darky musicians, such as Calliope Clarence, who played his Apollonicon with a sickle grin. The blind fiddler could play in the band and double-stage as a bumbling auguste, like the whiteface Negro clowns who were as thoroughly assimilated into the circus community as the freaks.
She knew that back in Memphis his days were numbered: he’d been marked (and marked again) for blue ruin since the time of his maiming on the north Mississippi plantation where he was born into bondage. He’d told her the tale: how he had the misfortune to stumble upon the overseer involved in an unspeakable act in the corn crib. “I ain’t seen nothing!” he protested to the cap’n, who assured him that nothing was what he would see from then on, and straightaway proceeded to gouge out his eyes with a penknife. The master, enraged at this wanton destruction of his property, dismissed the overseer and thereafter made of the blind pickaninny a house pet, awarding him — when he’d observed him admiring it with grazing fingers — the gift of a spruce trade violin. Demonstrating an innate aptitude for the instrument, the boy expressed his gratitude by taking to the open road with his gift, only to be returned in chains soon after by patrollers. The overseer, rehired for his redoubtable efficiency, flogged the boy and salted his wounds in a bath of brine. Unable to relieve the pain that inflamed his back, the blind boy displaced it by stroking the wounds and welts of others, thereby touching nerves whose oscillating vibrations he translated to the strings of his fiddle.
The next time he ran away he was put in stocks, and the time after that branded with an iron, during which procedure his refusal to cry out earned him the honorific that stuck. After his fifth or sixth attempt at escape it was noticed, when the serial fugitive was stripped for punishment, that he’d begun to mature — an observation that inspired the cap’n, always handy with his blade, to geld him on the spot. A generation or two later, when the blind man came to guide other fugitives through the tunnels that the old bayous were converted into after the fever, it was said he stuffed nugget-sized stones into the hollows of his eyes; legend had it that the stones allowed him to see in the dark. But the cops who finally apprehended him at his illicit business, and the mob that wrested him from the hands of the cops, aware of the rumor, never recovered any such stones.
If Jenny were honest, she would have had to admit that her reasons for wanting to retrieve the fiddler from his station in the Pinch were mainly selfish; her motives had more to do with missing the company of his eerie music than securing his safety. Then, too, the dreams that had saddled her with an unwieldy ballast on the wire caused her to teeter precariously in the direction of her old hometown. None of which excluded the providence of her arrival at the eleventh hour, when she stole into the roots of the tree in the park and did what came naturally: peeling off her garments to the costume beneath and lowering herself headfirst down the rope, she began to spin.
She performed a series of one-arm planges, looping her hand in the rope and flinging her body up and over her shoulder as if throwing herself repeatedly into a sack of air. She executed cunning jackknifes and dislocations, rolled herself up into a ball, hung by her ankles and knees. As she caracoled above the crowd, the rope swayed and the noose twirled like a lasso about the Negro’s neck until it was lifted clear off over his head — though, riveted as they were by the acrobat, no one seemed to notice. Some of the assembled held their breath while Jenny gyrated in circles; others, such as Muni Pinsker, could not have drawn a breath if they tried. In fact, so staggered was the retired scribe by battling emotions that he was on the point of passing out; he had to pound his chest with the heel of his empty right hand, as in the prayer of repentence, to coax his lungs into filling again. Then the pain of his breathing brought hot tears to his eyes. What did the girl intend with her unscripted exhibition? he wondered. Did she mean to beguile the crowd until the condemned man could be spirited away? If that was the case, she had badly miscalculated, because the spectators were so spellbound by her performance that no one — even had they been so inclined — stepped forward to rescue Asbestos, who remained standing patiently atop his nail keg, his face upturned despite his sightless eyes.
The merest meniscus of a moon had appeared in the lapis sky, prompting the Hasids among them to begin mumbling the Rosh Chodesh blessing. The sequins on Jenny’s costume, catching moonlight, seemed to throw sparks, which a few of the fanatics tried to snatch out of the air. Between their antics and those of the girl on the rope, most of the spectators missed the rueful blue chord soughed by a breeze on the remaining strings of Asbestos’s fiddle. But the chord was apparently loud enough to snap the Grand Syklops’s attention back to the task at hand. He bade his fellows hoist him to a height from which he could replace the noose around the fiddler’s unresisting neck. Lowered again after tightening the knot, Lawyer Poteet gave the nod to his henchman—“Klaliff Peay!”—who yanked the rope taut and tied it off on a nearby hydrant. The minstrel’s stick legs appeared to execute a two-step in the air above the keg that the klansmen had kicked over; then, only inches from the ground, the legs grew still. Transfixed, Muni Pinsker was unaware that his clenched fist had opened and the dust of his aunt and uncle — at least that which hadn’t already been trodden underfoot — was dispersed by the mild evening breeze.
16 Hostage to Destiny
The day was bright and the blades of the ceiling fan stirred the cool spring air in the shop, raising the dust in miniature twisters about the floorboards. The radio announced that Senator Eugene McCarthy had defeated LBJ in the New Hampshire primary; Walter Cronkite was urging negotiations to end the war; and I had been gloriously seduced. So why did I feel like I was in helpless freefall? Because, if I wasn’t Rachel’s lover anymore, then what was I? “Gornisht!” I proclaimed aloud. I’m nothing — and heard my old boss remarking, “Look who thinks he’s nothing.” Where was his therapeutic abuse when I needed it?
Not that I couldn’t get along on my own. I had my resources, didn’t I? My memories, though they seemed these days to have dead-ended around the time I came across Muni’s book. Since then I’d done such a good job of covering my tracks that I’d almost managed to hide them from myself. This was of course only a temporary amnesia, the lingering effects of a period of wretched excess; it would pass. Then I remembered how the population of the Pinch — after the tree in Market Square Park had been hauled off for cordwood and the crater filled with tons of gravel from a convoy of dump trucks — how they seemed to have jointly misplaced the past. One morning they looked around and the world was no better than it should be: the neighborhood was a slum, its primary thoroughfare strewn with drenched unmentionables and broken furniture (and perhaps a drowned hippogriff). They shared a universal hangover that felt as if it might last the rest of their days. Like me, they’d become marooned in the present.
Muni’s book lay on the desk in front of me, looking as nondescript as ever, though the hard reading I’d subjected it to had given the binding some character. I recalled the first time I’d opened it to that random passage — somewhere toward the middle or was it the end of the book? — when Lenny Sklarew makes his shambling entrance into the chronicle. So far I’d steered clear of that chapter, not wanting to encounter some fate incompatible with the one I might choose for myself, assuming I had a choice in the matter. Now, however, I wondered what the text could reveal beyond an account of Lenny opening a book to read about a moment when Lenny opens a book. Like Moses receiving the Torah in which he reads the story of Moses receiving the Torah, world without end … (“Look who thinks he’s Moses.”)