Jeremiah, Catch the Devil
From Tales the Wind Told

By Brooks Mencher

There is a ballad that was once complete and beautiful, but which now exists only in fragments, like small and incomplete memories or scraps of fallen dreams that a person might pick up from the floor near the bedside at the first dim light of day.

The song itself, the written words of it, were said to have washed up on a riverbank a very long time ago, the words written on birch bark, as if the river itself had, after an eon of consideration, decided to give up one of its songs, sat down, and with an ear on the melody, revealed the rhymes in a graceful, flowing script.

Where did it come from? How was it found? No answer. It was found by a child one afternoon. Though so much of it is missing, it is clearly the story of a golem, a creature made from clay into which a breath of life had been blown.

The few remaining verses have been reassembled as best they can be. They must be sung as a noteless song, however, for the melody remains lost somewhere deep in the river.

The translated lines are the barest glimpse of the tale the ballad told, and they read like this:

Tupenah Halech gathers up the songs that have been stranded during the night. People, of course, consider her mad. They are, if not afraid of her, reticent to share her company and will cross road and mud and water to avoid her eyes, one of which is milky blue with blindness, the other brown and piercing. She trudges through this village and that, the lower villages mostly, wandering from door to door before dawn, her frayed wool skirt dragging along wet stones or brushing the tall, thin grass, and she runs one old hand along tree trunks or goat sheds or outcropped rock until she is black with soot or dirt and wet from the night mist. In her other hand is clamped the small hand of her daughter, whom she pulls along as they make their rounds. Tupenah Halech taps on the doors until they open, finally, and stands there with a small, coarsely woven bag, holding it open, walking into the small homes of this rather small people who live along the north banks of East River. She coaxes the songs into her bag, gathers up her daughter wherever she may have wandered off to, and departs, and it is still dark for the day has not yet come.

Where ever do such songs come from? And how is it that Tupenah Halech can see them, and follow them into the villages along the river?

One question at a time. The songs come from the river itself. There is a frail mist that forms at night along its clay banks, and after it gains strength, this fog wades up from the river into the valleys and the lower villages, even into the city and its ghetto.

Tupenah Halech says: "On the mist, there are voices. Always voices. Early in the evening, they sound like the tinkling of tiny glass chimes in a scattering breeze. I must wear my shawl!" She shivers. "They are dim and uncertain, and though I may strain my good ear, the words cannot be made out; the language . . . I don't know. It is so early, you see. My joints hurt and that is, I suppose, distracting.

"There are voices in the river because the river keeps its memories just as the heavens keep the stars, and the crystal chimes of the river are very much like the twinkling of the stars in the sky. They are the same . . . they are the same . . . and we are the same, we are the stuff of the stars and the echo of the chimes."

Lilting memories are carried on the mist from the river, up the riprap banks, up the mud, the clay, through the fields and villages, the puggered streets of the city far downriver. What words! What songs!

"You have to wait," she says. "Wait! Let evening pass and let night approach! The glass chimes soon sound like the buzz of a little bee or the chirping of a cricket. This I know! Then, a slice of breeze ripples along the water in the dark. I know this, too . . . the ripples catch the stars or perhaps the moon on a lucky night. And then some more time, more waiting. Time. Waiting. Finally the chirping grows into wispy voices, and words and scraps of songs and bubbles of ancient poems can be heard by my straining ear; and I am carried away by their beauty and their significance. My eye, the blue one, sees in the mist the form of a beautiful song, like a person, in the shape of a girl, sometimes, or like a cat or a bear, a maiden, like smoke, and the stars can be seen through them all.

"A dozen, or a hundred songs in the mist, I see them! We talk. "How are you? They think me a witch!' say I. "They call me mad and I say "To hell with them!' The maids and bears will sing, "A child of clay, a child of clay . . . to chase the clouds away.' "

And the old seer will sing it in a soft whisper that cracks along the edges like a smile in a dry face.

"And if, by dawn, a single song has not returned, I must find it and lead it back, carry it back to the river in my little yarn bag. Who else would do it? Not a soul! There among the strands of yarn, my needles, patterns, yarnover, two together, and behold! here is a little song I have searched so long to find. And I have found it and tucked it in among the roving or the plied strands of gray and brown and white wool, and I will bring it back to the river, there to let it dive back into the water of my memory."

They say that Tupenah Halech is mad and that she is a witch -- a clever woman, as the saying goes. She lives along the river, in a mound of sticks, and it is there that she cares for the child whose name is Hannah. Some are convinced that Tupenah Halech is a beaver, or has a beaver as her witch's familiar. Because of the mound. Others say she's a heron. They say the child, Hannah, is just a foundling and not Tupenah Halech's child at all, and they will have nothing to do with Hannah or with the old witch, Tupenah Halech. But when it rains in the spring, the witch and the girl lodge with one family or another for a short period of time . . . whoever will have them, and someone always does.

Tupenah Halech says: "On occasion, then, a song may wander through the world at night, having left the river, riding on the mist and fog. And then it may knock on a peasant's door with knuckles like cotton wool, barely heard, or stand expectantly in an alley amid weeds and straw, staring at the door like a cat whose paws are wet. I have seen it!"

Then she shouts: "Jeremiah! I know you are in there! Jeremiah, you have my song, I say!"

The Seer, Tupenah Halech, had walked with Hannah for five long days and four nights from her stack of twigs and mud batting on the river, past a handful of villages and a second handful of farms, until they arrived at the outskirts of the city, which loomed like damp felt made up of shadowed designs of brick and stone, churches and synagogues, slate roofs, cobbled streets. All for a single song that had meandered away from the river and lost itself in the stick-thin woods. From there it had drifted about on wind and amid falling leaves, singing, and it had walked among the dried leaves on the forest floor, singing, leaving no trail that could be seen with the common eye.

"More blind than I!" said Tupenah Halech. "In the light, they cannot see! Where have you gotten, my dear? Jeremiah!" she shouted at the back of the building.

She had no doubt that the song had arrived at the alley door of Jeremiah's shop. Jeremiah, the merchant Jeremiah: The song was still inside the shop. Hannah had asked how she knew this, though she knew the answer. Well, they had followed the melody, Tupenah Halech reminded her, followed it up the mud bank five days ago, tracked it through the forest, back up along the river, through the fields to the stone streets of the city and across the wide avenue where white horses pulled enameled carriages. She followed it through the streets to soot-stained tenements that made up the ghetto, and watched it brush its cuffs against the door of Jeremiah the merchant, and smile. Smile because the door budged -- it swung back very gently, just a few inches. But that was enough to enter.

For the seer: five days, and this day was over. She was tired and she ached and she was hungry. The child was miserable, and cold. Why stand outside and yell? It was dark and cold. She went inside! The door was open and she was, after all, considered mad, so she invited herself and Hannah in quite safely and felt very welcome, after all. How nice to find such hospitality in the city. She had never visited the city and rarely tasted hospitality!

Jeremiah had a wonderful shop. He lived in a small, narrow brick building that was squeezed between two larger, narrow buildings, one of stone and the other of wood and slate. The interior of his shop was narrow, of course, and consisted of a number of shelves running from the door at the front to an open area and fireplace at the back. The shelves rose from knee height up to the vaulted ceiling, and along the shelves ran ladders on wheels. On the shelves were deposited the general merchandise needed in every home, no matter how grand or how humble. Crammed into the spaces, and sticking out from them into the narrow aisles, were rolling pins, pots, wooden stools and wood tools, saws, carders, chisels, and contraptions that, with the turn of a crank, tied bows from lengths of satin ribbon. There were apple peelers and apple chips, chimney bricks, brooms of twigs and straw, there were combs, honeycombs, dewdrops and dust. There was nothing that Jeremiah did not have or could not have by evening of the next day.

The shop widened toward the back, creating a square room of moderate size. It smelled like old books and older bread, and was, in fact, a veritable library of leather-bound volumes, shelf upon shelf, covering various topics of general interest, and there were many volumes on magic and the mystic arts and common sleights of hand, and an occasional book of Eastern incantations and ancient lore. On the left, situated in the corner, was a small spiral staircase of dark maple wood leading to the second and last floor of the building. Placed in the inside corner of every step was a small stone and the colors of the stones varied, running like a rainbow from bottom to top. The top led to Jeremiah's living quarters.

Downstairs on the right: a cushioned lounge; and between it and the spiral stairway was a small fireplace for burning wood or coal, made of smooth gray stone. There were two other wide, cushioned chairs near the center, before the fire, with wings on either side to deter the drafts.

There were only coals in the fireplace when the Seer arrived. It was late. The stars were out. The winter chill was abroad, for it was the night of the solstice. Inside, the coals glowed amid light-gray ash on a wrought-iron grate, and on either side were andirons in the shape of angels with feathered wings extended vertically over their heads, and they were blackened and encrusted with many years of soot.

Tupenah Halech, the Seer, seated herself and placed her bag and the girl in the chair beside her, spreading out her aching legs and slumping back into the chair. To the andiron on the left, she said, "Without the hearth fire, your wings grow cold; but inside, I consider that you may not be cold at all. Fool me? I am Tupenah Halech, the witch! For, in my opinion, your heart is not made of wrought iron, and neither is it made of bronze, and so, it is not cold! And if Jeremiah, whom I have heard about for all these years, though we have never met, were to warm this shop of tall shelves and narrow aisles with two scraps of wood, or one scrap of wood and a lump of coal laid over the coals of the wood, your wings would grow warm, and your legs would grow warm and so on, but the heart of you would not grow warm from the fire because it is neither iron nor bronze and, though buried deep within you, it is already warm!"

Jeremiah, hearing a voice in the shop below, poked his feet into his socks and wearily made his way across his small room to the spiral staircase at which point he saw the Seer, Tupenah Halech, seated in a chair in the room below, sitting before the waning fire, and speaking to the andiron on the left. He saw also the woman's wool sack and beside the sack a girl who was asleep. He came downstairs and sat in the available space on the lounge, and slumped back into it and stretched out his legs.

"Am I to assume," asked Jeremiah, "that the heart of the andiron on the left is warm whether or not I have a fire in the firebox? Are you saying that the left andiron is alive while the right andiron is not?"

The Seer ignored Jeremiah, and went on with her discussion with the andiron. "Your companion angel," she said, "is iron through and through, alas. Cold of heart, you say? Yes, I say, cold of heart! An interesting proposal! A pair of twins that for all appearances are identical to the last degree, yet the fellow on the right might as well be made of stone, without form, uncarved; that is to say, dead and without the spark of life, without his humanity, and so, naturally, without speech! Yet the andiron on the left, which has the spark of life, the warmth of heart, can therefore speak!"

Jeremiah could hear a cricket chirping near the andiron, as if the angel were indeed talking, and he tried to convince himself that the sound was coming instead from somewhere in one of the shelves. He could not hear the andiron on the left speaking, though apparently the Seer was listening with great interest. Then she laughed and settled back and closed her eyes for a moment.

"I have been in the mercantile trade for quite some time, as you well may know, for my reputation has traveled far afield and people whom I do not know, know me," he said to the Seer. "I am a merchant, and therefore I buy and sell goods at a profit, and can repair broken crockery by using small drills and wire staples, and I might also mend a pot with tin and various blends of solder. I have been here for a certain number of years, here in my shop, and I am not, however, a moneylender of any kind, and while I am comfortable and reasonably happy in life, I am not rich and am quite alone." He looked over at the girl. "I have no one, as well you may see, alas.

"Yet, for all my years," he continued, "I have not, in my life, spoken with an andiron in any way, and while I am quite fond of my little angels, as I call them, never have I heard them speak. Neither the one nor the other."

"You missed your song as well," snapped the Seer, sitting up. But then she smiled toothlessly and sat back. "You are a magician, Jeremiah; that is what I hear, and I know it to be true."

"I am a magician of sorts," he said, "a minor master of parlor tricks, and have been such a magician for a number of years. I perform on occasion when the occasion demands. I can perform certain tricks and sleights of hand at will. But I am also a student of the arts of prayer and summoning and therefore I understand the magical realm and so on, and know of the casting of spells, the transmogrification of rats into parrots and conjurification of spirits."

"Do you catch devils?" asked the Seer.

Jeremiah thought for a moment. "I have seen an ancient device, very simply constructed, which can imprison a spirit or a devil. It is unfortunate, however, that this device, as small as it is, as I understand it, requires a master and an apprentice. It needs two people to operate it."

"I have come after a song tonight, Jeremiah; a song that you have not heard. An you a magician, no less! Bah! But you have not heard it, and this I know, for it hovers there," she said, pointing to the corner where two bookcases came together at right angles, "just in front of and above that bleak book with the binding held on with gum tape. I can see it . . . I can hear it."

"I can hear it, too," said Hannah, opening her eyes. She crawled up to look over the back of her chair and said, "and I can see her, too!"

Tupenah Halech picked up her bag and walked slowly to the corner as if she were coaxing a kitten into her hands. Then she closed up her bag and sat back down. "Back to the river with her!" she said. "They lose their way after the mist returns to the river, and I have to pick them up and carry them back. Imagine! I will tell you this, they can't see worth nothing! During the daylight, they can't see! And imagine being lost in the world when no one has the common sense enough to listen to you!"

"I am a magician of minor standing," said Jeremiah, returning to his point. "I can neither see nor hear the song. Yet I know it was there, and that it is now in your bag of woven wool. I see, if nothing else, that you are truthful and that you have a daughter."

"Excellent!" she said. The Seer stood, and wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, and put the straps of her bag over her arm. "Jeremiah, Merchant, Magician, I will see for you. Your little andiron is urging me to do so! What do I see? What do I prophesy? Oh, what do I see for you, Jeremiah? Trouble enough! Oh, trouble, trouble, trouble. Beware of fire, my Jeremiah, beware of fire! Flames beneath the late summer sun! Then, three years from this very night, the Devil! But no more devilish is he than certain inhabitants of that devil's village! Dare you face him alone? What do you say to that, Jeremiah?"

Jeremiah pulled at the beard on his chin and thought. He looked at his clock, which showed that it was now shortly after 3 in the morning. A small cat wandered out from behind his chair and batted at his feet as he pondered the Seer's question.

"That is a cat," said the Seer to Hannah, leaning toward it in her chair.

"Yes," said Jeremiah.

"The cat's fur is brown, predominantly, black for the middling part and white being the minor color," said Hannah. That was all she said.

"Correct," said Jeremiah.

"What is your answer?" Tupenah Halech asked.

"I do not know what to say," he said. "I had been, oh, I have not been uncomfortable. But I will face these trials with a sense of purpose, for I have been warned by you, and that is most beneficial."

"You have three years to prepare," she said. "In your hands are the lives of many, my dear! During this first cycle of the four seasons, you must take the clay of East River and with it you will create, yes, a golem, an assistant who will be in the shape of a person, and this person will carry out your orders and do all things requested of it, though it will lack the gift of speech, for, Jeremiah, it will be a golem and will not have the true spark of life. Dull-witted will it be, and large and strong! But without the spark of life, there can be no speech! We all know that, don't we, my love? I warn you, do not get too attached to the creature! And don't mix cat fur in the clay!"

Jeremiah went pale. "I dare not create a golem!" he said. "Create a golem? Such magic has never come to any good and always ends in tragedy! So I have heard, and so I know!"

"Nevertheless," she said, "You must meticulously follow the directions from the book and your project will neither fail nor go poorly. You cannot confront fire and demons alone, for you are but a silly human, the smallest of the creatures of the Earth, and there is not enough strength in you to defeat what must be defeated when the time comes."

"No such book have I!" said Jeremiah. He had begun to pace back and forth across the floor before the rekindled fire. "And, what is more, I have neither seen nor heard of such a book, and this is a field of interest in which I have broad experience -- I am a collector, a buyer and seller of fine books, many of which are old enough to be considered ancient! Yet have I seen this book? Not page or binding, I tell you!"

"That book," said the Seer, pointing with her bag to a thick pamphlet that looked like a stack of papers glued together irregularly. It lay on the floor near the small cat who was brown, black and a little white.

Jeremiah stopped his pacing, and, leaning down, he patted the cat and gently picked up the book.

"Don't open it!" she shouted. Then, more softly, "Open it when you are ready to begin, and are of such a state of mind that you are relaxed and your memory is retentive. Why? For the simple reason that as you read each letter and word in this book of incantations, they will rise from the page, glow briefly in a certain color or colors, and then burn up in the air, leaving nothing but a wisp of tinted smoke and the slightest smell of almonds. Or roasted walnuts, I think."

Jeremiah held the book out at arm's length, studying it carefully, turning it over and over in his hands, and then he placed it carefully on a shelf with a hundred other books. "Alas," he said, "my life will never be the same. I suppose there are no other options."

But the Seer and her daughter, carrying the sack with the song, had already left the room and had walked through the door into the pre-dawn dark of the ghetto. Jeremiah quickly found a small loaf of sweet bread, located a few fall apples, dug out a jar of cider, and ran after them.

Winter ended. Spring arrived and it was warm. Tupenah Halech perched on a rounded granite rock on the tight oxbow curve of the river. Her home. The wind, rolling west with the water, brushed against the green grass tufts that pushed up beside the rock and then sprinted back to the river. It was springtime.

"I can tell where the wind has been," said Hannah to Tupenah Halech. They sat side by side.

"Is that so, my dear?" said Tupenah Halech. "Where has it been, and what has it been about, for we all would like to know the answer to this riddle."

"It comes from the river, then runs up along the bank, springs on the yellow flowers, leaps straight up, falls straight down, tumbles and flips and then hides beneath your rock!" Hannah leaped down from the rock and dove into the river and was entirely submerged, her hair taking on the wavy pattern of the bright green moss and tan stone of the river bottom. And when she came up, an elm leaf caught two strands of her golden hair and whisked them downstream.

"What is it, then, that lives in the past, present and future at once?" asked Tupenah Halech as Hannah pulled herself from the water. Hannah reclaimed her seat beside the old woman on top of the rock and made sure that Tupenah Halech got soaked with river water.

"Well, Mother, I don't know the answer to that," said Hannah after thinking it over as she sat down.

The old woman laughed and said, "It is the river, surely! The river in front of us, we can touch. Or swim! Ten days upriver is the village of Borschev. The water has already been there, and carries news from Borschev that is ten days old. The river in front of us knows this past. And in many months, this water will reach the sea, and yet here it is before us right now, and the river has already reached the sea. That is how the river is in the past, the present and the future. And that, Hannah, is why it keeps its memories, and why there are songs in the river."

"What does the river say to you, Mother?"

A long pause. "Trouble," said Tupenah Halech. "And amid the trouble, Daughter, we will have a visitor in our small home of twigs, but there will be room. It will be like a visit from the sun."

"To chase the clouds away?" asked Hannah.

They watched the river. The leaf, small and green, carried two strands of Hannah's hair into an eddy, escaped, and leaped downriver until it was out of sight. Tupenah Halech watched until it vanished from sight. Trouble, she thought.

Jeremiah closed his shop for the day. It had been gray and raining, and the beginning of a green-yellow spring approached. With the spring, of course, came more rain. Jeremiah pried one of his books from the shelves and turned the pages briskly until he stopped the flipping pages with his thumb. Clearly, this was the night. According to the almanac in his hands, the moon of the spring equinox would be one hour after midnight. He had to walk through the city, the fields, and to the river, then back, before the clock struck 1. The small cat of mottled color rubbed against his trouser cuff, and Jeremiah leaned over to pat it.

"Alas, Grunion, my fate is at my heels," he said.

The cat sat down.

"You have a nice life," he told Grunion. "A sardine here, a lap of milk there, the occasional mouse. A pillow, a fire!

"I have had a good life, Grunion, yes, I have no regrets but one, and that is my solitude. What loneliness?! A thousand friends knock upon my door! A hundred learned scholars share their wits with me! A score of business associates ask me, " What of such and such, Jeremiah, and should I so-on and so-on, Jeremiah? A handful of beggars stand before my door -- no, they will not hold out their hand to me . . . but we have an understanding, don't you see? A loaf of bread, the smallest of silver coins, a hat, unsold and shelved one season too many. These I give away! But are there any, are there any who can make my loneliness go away?"

Grunion the cat sat down and washed behind its leg.

"The hour grows late, Grunion," he said, looking up at the wide hands of the clock. "And I will do what the Seer has asked of me. Already more than three months have passed, and I have waited for the full moon, that I might find my way along the streets to the old highway that crosses the river and then follows it from village to village. With the lantern moon, I will wind my way along the river to the banks where the clay is richest, and I will fill my burlap sack with the purest clay, the most beautiful clay, and carry it on my back along the river, the highway, the streets, the alleys, and I will return to my door by the hour of 1. Until then, you are in charge of things here, Grunion. Mind the store, open the door for no one, and there is an extra sardine in the bottle on the edge of the table. Just knock it off and the jar will hit the floor and break open, and you may have the sardine for your evening snack!"

With that, Jeremiah pulled on his heavy boots and a wool jacket that smelled of lanolin. Into his knapsack he stuffed some small cakes and a jar of tea. He locked the door from the outside and walked silently through the alleys and streets of the ghetto, out into the broader city and finally into the countryside. It was 6 in the evening.

By the time the moon had risen, he had nearly made it to the river. "The moon over my shoulder is surely much lighter than my pack will be," he said to the trees.

The river seemed brilliantly black in the moonlight, like the back side of a mirror should look, but doesn't. It was very peaceful and there was not another soul around. There was only the sound of the river and the sight of the silhouette trees, the scant glimpse of a moonlit spider web in grass and branches.

From where he sat, Jeremiah could see both banks, the far and the near. And it appeared, in the moonlight, that the far bank was made of clay and it looked like very good clay from what he could tell. So Jeremiah unlaced his boots and pulled them off, put his burlap sack under his arm, pulled up his cuffs and waded into the river, very carefully taking step after step until he had reached the middle and approached the other bank.

A few leaves and sticks had drifted up on the far bank, so Jeremiah brushed them aside and began to fill his sack with the clay of the river. One last leaf he picked up and placed to the side, but he did not see the strands of golden hair that the leaf had left behind, and as he dug out the final handful of clay from the bank, the golden strands were taken up with it and deposited in the sack, which he closed up with a rope and carried back across the river.

He returned shortly after midnight, and the timing seemed auspicious. In one hour would be the hour of the equinox itself.

"Grunion," said Jeremiah, "please be good enough to take your place on the stairway. You remember the words of the Seer, when she said, "Don't mix cat fur in the clay!' I am certain she had reason to say this, and we must keep her words in mind. I fear we have but one chance to do things right." The cat walked nonchalantly across the room to the stairway, and then sprinted up the entire spiral in a flash, as though the devil were after him. At the top, he looked over and watched Jeremiah's preparations.

On Jeremiah's thick wood table was the book. It was not open. It was to his right as he stood in front of the table. His room was lit by candles and by the fireplace, which had the angel andirons on each side. He listened, but could not hear the voices of either of the angels. On his left was the mound of clay from the river. Even in the candlelight, he could see small stones in the clay, rounded and smallified by years of grinding in the river. He had removed what twigs he could see, and plucked out a few pieces of old leaf. Directly in front of the old man was a wool pad that had been felted in a pattern of sunflowers.

"What better manner to enter the world, than on a fine wool blanket amid a field of sunflowers," he said to Grunion, who peered down from above.

He turned the first page of the book. He read the first word, the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first page. And as he read, the letters rose off the pages, turning various colors and shades, and they dissolved as if they were powder and when only the barest grain of a letter remained floating in the world, it caught fire and left a poof of tinted smoke and the smell of . . . what? . . . roasted almonds?

He read each word, recited each incantation. He moved as he was told, thought what he should think, and kept his heart pure. With his hands, he molded the clay into a shape and patted it down.

"We have to wait until it rises, Grunion," whispered Jeremiah. "Then pat it down and give it the final shape, let it rise the final time." Grunion crouched and watched from above.

Jeremiah finally turned the last page of the book, covered his clay sculpture with a thin veil of spider webbing as the pages had instructed him to do, and sat down in his old chair in front of the fireplace. Even the coals had gone out, and an early morning chill was creeping in around the edges of the room. It was two or three hours until dawn, and he had been hiking and working since early evening. He said, "I found that book very interesting, Grunion, but try as I might, I cannot remember one word of it! What did the pages look like? What language was it? Did I see the pages at all? Did I read the rhymes therein, or did I just pass the night in sleep? No memory have I!"

Jeremiah stood up, and walked back to the table. He looked at the small mound of clay that he had formed, as it lay quite still beneath the spider webbing. It looked like a ginger cake, a coffee strudel, a pie of mud. What had he done? Was it the business of him, a little human, a very small person, to create life from lump of clay? He was no real magician! He was a merchant! Who was he, anyway? He opened the book. "All the pages are blank," he said. "Not a mark upon them, not a poem or a period. Nor a scratch nor a fold. Only smudges along the edges as if something wished to escape from the pages and, with great effort, did so! I have read the book and it is gone, and gone is the memory of it!"

He closed the pages and set the book aside, gazing at the clay, then at the fire in the fireplace. "Alas, dear cat, what have I done? What have I done? What magic have I wrought? What life have I created?

"Was I wrong to have done? Have I changed the course of the universe, have I done what no man should do, and set heaven astir?" Jeremiah put his face in his hands and wept. Then he fell asleep, and he had no dreams. In the night, Grunion and the andirons watched over the silent room, and they watched the sun rise and fill the little shop with the yellow sparkling light of a clear spring day.

The immensity of Jeremiah's fear and remorse on that night was equaled only by the immensity of his happiness the following morning and in the days and weeks, in the months that followed. No longer was he an old man alone in life, but in his world now was a child, as beautiful a child as one could imagine. Jeremiah named him Uriah, which had been a family name from the reaches of time, and it fit the boy very well, somehow, as if he had always been Uriah, and had always been part of Jeremiah's life. As if he had actually been born. But never did Jeremiah tell the boy that he was a golem, made of clay and dust and spider webs.

Uriah spent his days creating small things from sticks and paper on the shop floor in front of the fire, and often he wrapped the andiron on the left in red yarn or brown, with whatever he could pull from the lower shelves, like scraps of fabric or thin, wrinkled paper that crinkled when he folded it around the wings.

As far as anyone knew, old Jeremiah had done nothing more than provide a home for an abandoned grandchild or the grandchild of a brother or sister of his who had died, or who had run off to another land, or had landed in prison for some crime of horror, which could happen in the best of families, and whoever might enter the shop of Jeremiah was sure to mention the child, and, of course, make note of his very beautiful hair, which was golden.

When Uriah grew tired of making stick people, or dolls and animals from the husks of corn or from straw tied with yarn, he played with Grunion or pored through Jeremiah's old books, looking for pictures or coins that Jeremiah stuck along the spine of this volume or that, between the pages, for safety. Uriah and Jeremiah often walked along the alleys and streets of the city together in the afternoons, hand in hand, visiting shops and people, and Jeremiah greeted everyone in the streets very kindly, and spoke of the wonderful things on the Earth, like sunflowers and knitted socks and holidays. They flew kites. At night, Jeremiah read great adventures to Uriah, chosen with care from his library, or they walked the alleys, squinting up between the looming buildings, and Jeremiah pointed out the stars and told stories about them.

Uriah, being a small child, said very little. In fact, he said nothing at all, and at first it simply seemed that he would not speak. No matter what Jeremiah did to encourage him, not a word was uttered. But Uriah understood everything perfectly, and communicated with gestures and pointing, stomping, and motioning with his eyes or head.

Jeremiah, for his part, finally admitted to himself that the boy, being a golem, would not have the gift of speech. "I am troubled deeply, however," said Jeremiah to himself one day, "by my knowledge of this situation. Yes, I find it confusing to the core of my heart. For I know that my dear child, Uriah, has not the gift of speech, for no word has ever crossed his lips. Not word or syllable, not sound or cry. For he is mute. And yet, this I know: A golem cannot speak because he has not the spark of life. . . . And I ask myself, how can this be? How can this golden-haired child have no spark of life when each day he smiles and brings the sun to me! To all the ghetto! The very sun! How can this be? O dreaded day, that Uriah has no spark of life! He has, I tell you! As surely as the sun is in the sky, as surely as the moon pulls the ocean tides!

"And what of our future," Jeremiah continued as he sat down near the fireplace. "There are only a few months left until the first year is out, and the Seer predicted devastation in the villages in precisely three. Spring and summer will draw to an end. A demon! A devil! How can I ever help capture a demon when it would endanger my Uriah! What can I do? I will never risk this child for the sake of any village, or any people. Alas, if this life without loneliness! Such anguish, I say!"

It was known widely that Jeremiah had taken a mute child under his wing, a child without speech, a child whose face seemed radiant, even angelic. Perhaps he was some unwanted child . . . who was to say? That was certainly common enough. Who was this Uriah, this adopted child of Jeremiah the Merchant, they asked? Why didn't he talk? Not a word! Suspicion began hissing like a hundred scorpions! With the slow passing of days, crumbling summer days that ended with a furious sun screaming that autumn would soon arrive, a discomfort began to grow among the people. The child seemed other-worldly, his radiant face was too radiant, his golden hair too golden, his smile too sincere. Jeremiah's summer of joy, the only happiness he had known, was over.

Soon enough, the old man's business fell off. Fewer and fewer customers came calling. His door chime hardly chimed.

In the alleys, he was no longer greeted by passers-by. In the streets, people crossed the road to avoid him and the strange child.

A month, a month. Trash of various sorts lay at the doorstep of the shop, and soon the rags and cans, the filth of city, turned to warnings, to demands and curses. The bakery would no longer sell Jeremiah bread; he baked it himself. He could get no milk; he bought a goat by way of a distant village. He repaired his own trousers and jackets.

It was rumored, finally, that Jeremiah the Merchant . . . Jeremiah the Sorcerer! . . . had created a golem. It was a rumor long in gestation, but once it was out, it spread like thin oil and coated everything. Fear that had begun like a lace grew to become a thick gray storm cloud. Jeremiah's golem! It was unnatural . . . a violation of the laws of man and God.

One morning, Jeremiah was drinking a cup of hot tea and Uriah was dressing Grunion in Jeremiah's slippers. "Attend!" came a shout at the door. Jeremiah peered from the back of the shop near the fireplace, out to the door. He looked at his clock on the wall. It was barely evening, but it was dark. He could see people assembled outside . . . he could make out their silhouettes. There was, indeed a mob out in the street, and a great fear came over Jeremiah. The people in the mob had sticks and bats, they had torches to light up the darkness.

Suddenly, a rock was launched through the door window, smattering the glass across the floor. Jeremiah could hear the voices now, angry and cursing. He couldn't count the number of people, there were so many. But he could smell the kerosene of the torches.

"The future is clear to me, Uriah," said Jeremiah hurriedly. "We must run for our lives! We will leave by the back way and sprint through alley toward the edges of the ghetto . . . "

A fire broke out near the door and in only seconds it engulfed the old, dry woodwork and the shelving of the shop. The crackling of the flames grew immediately deafening, and Jeremiah had to shout his final instructions to the child. "Uriah!" he yelled above the din, "Flee! flee! out the back, don't stop running! Follow the moon, then the stars that I pointed out before!" Jeremiah grabbed a small jacket and covered the child, and shoved a dry loaf of bread into the pocket. "Follow the stars to the river, follow the river upstream. Upstream, Uriah! Don't stop . . . listen to no one! Five days, six days Uriah, follow the river! Look for the Seer, Tupenah Halech! . . . Sneak through every village at night until you find her . . . the Seer, with one blue eye! She is our only hope, Uriah! Now go! Run!"

Flames were pouring from the timbers of the ceiling, and they began to creak and bend and snap. The room was engulfed in flames. Smoke throughout. Neither the old man nor Uriah could see, but Jeremiah, in his last strength, threw the child though the rear entrance and into the alley just as the ceiling collapsed upon him.

YYou have made it to the river, Uriah," said Afa Sabilius. "That is saying very much, for the odds were not in your favor."

Uriah sat on a flat stone on the river's edge. The fire had been nearly a week ago, and during that week he had wandered aimlessly the labyrinthine alleys of the ghetto, unable to find the moon or the stars to guide him, and he trudged through the tangled streets of the broader city, never certain of a place to sleep, searching always for a shadow in which to hide during the day. This was no simple matter; with him were the cat, Grunion, and Jeremiah's goat -- they also had to be hidden. It was not easy, he thought, being a fugitive.

He was sad, and the splendor of the late-summer nights he had spent wandering from the city across the fields and farms to the river did not comfort him.

He dangled his feet in the water. The surface was tepid, warmed by the sun, but below it was cold, and the deeper he pushed his feet, the colder was the water. His soles were sore from the journey. He splashed water on the cat, whose ears were scorched, and he cupped water in his hands for the goat to drink.

"I am a song," said Afa Sabilius. "Because it is night, I am therefore free to leave the river and tend to the memories of the people, or to practice my verses, the melodies, the words. I may visit the villages, the farms, even knock on the doors of the tenements if I so desire. Should I sing? Will they remember, or will they sigh and say, "Remember what?" And then, say I, Afa Sabilius, ghost, song, "Remember . . . humanity,' but my words are too soft and they fall like straw upon a stairwell." He sat down beside Uriah, who moved over to make room for him on the flat rock at the river's edge. Grunion moved to the foot of the rock and sat in the grass. This is what Afa Sabilius looked like: Ghostly, for Uriah could see through him; tall, for he loomed over the child and the animals. Yet he was not as tall as a tree.

He wore a skirt of black or dark brown, wide and flowing nearly to the ground. His shirt was white and his buttons were light mother-of-pearl. A white cowl covered his face and hid it totally. And Afa Sabilius was like a butterfly for two reasons: First, he did not walk or run, but floated soundlessly across the grass or the rippled surface of the river; and second, he was like a butterfly in that a person, such as Uriah, had a natural, irresistible tendency to gently reach out and touch him . . . if they could see him.

"Are my eyes like yours, my dear friend?" said Afa Sabilius. "I asked myself this, while I was deep at rest in the river bottom barely a night ago. Before you came. You were in the fields, then, yes, in the fields with the two animals. The thick water above me floats by and brushes me with the dust of eons, swirling and turning, with flakes of mica, like stars in heaven, churning, glimmering, the sun setting, moon rising, ghost of a moon crawling over the bank of my river (oh, it is wonderful to see the moon rise from the bottom of the river!), an edge peaking over, bravely shining, lighting the surface of the water above me, the mica catching the scattered rays of the moon and splitting the scatters into a thousand atoms. A million!

"Night! I sit up. I stir! I push myself up from the river bottom. And then, today, this night, I see you really, and I have been asking myself about you for days! How can that be? How can I know I will see you? An explanation have I! The timeless river has told me what will be! A child will I see, and you appear like a ghost to me, for I can see through you to some degree.

"I keep the memories of the people, though they cannot see me, Uriah. I am a song. I know you can see me, but do you see me as I see you? Will I ever know? I see you as one sees a ghost; you are a wisp to me, a mist to me, fog adrift to me; you are a cloud against the moon, a spider's white web high in the distant branches of a tree. I can see well enough to know you are a child by nature, but not a child of men. You trouble me."

Afa Sabilius sighed. It was so difficult to talk, yet so easy to sing. He was an old ballad, after all, and what business did he have sitting along the riverbank at night? He stretched out his long legs, and Uriah could see he wore sandals and these sandals had mossy soles and straps of lichen.

"Can you see me," asked Afa Sabilius, "and if so, how? Am I a specter? So few can see me that I can count them on my finger! Tupenah Halech, the witch, can see me! Only she! She sees me with the blue left eye. The daughter can see me! Only she! She swims in the river and can see me with her left eye, though she is young! And what am I to her, you may wonder? And what am I to you? Do you see me clearly? and why is it that I even ask you, why am I concerned? I ask you, and you say to me, in a voice that is hidden to other ears, "I am a golem, Afa Sabilius. I am a golem.' That is the magic of your voice to me, though you do not speak."

Uriah had been listening intently as he sat beside the half-visible, faceless giant named Afa Sabilius. The voice he heard seemed distant and resonant, as if a bamboo flute had been speaking -- a strange, airy sound.

"Why do I trouble him so," thought Uriah. "Am I a golem? Did I know this? I am a golem?! I do not want to be anything else, particularly. Is golemness my nature, and was I made by Jeremiah Old Man from clay and mud, as I have heard? And so I have become a child of clay and mud, and some stones mixed in, and I have a cat and a goat that accompany me, and little else . . . I am a golem!

"A coat of wool with burn marks on it from the fire -- I have that. But does a golem wear a coat? A cat with scorched ears, a goat, I have those. Does a golem have a cat with scorched ears, a goat with woolen fleece? I have one sock that is sitting on the riverbank with Grunion. I do not have the other sock and do not know where it might be, and, I am so sad to think this for I do not know if a golem might have socks!"

Uriah looked up at the song who sat beside him. "Have I violated the universal laws, Song?" he thought. "I have but one sock. It was made by an old woman who lived one building over, two buildings over, and up one flight of stairs, and Jeremiah Old Man traded her something dear for two socks. And now I have one, and now that I know I am a golem, I fear that I should not have even one sock!"

Afa Sabilius began to sing, and Uriah, who had risen and was standing on the rock, sat back down and leaned against the ethereal shape of the song. Afa Sabilius was a ballad, so he said, and an old one at that. Hundreds of years, and from a place far down the river. Yet here he was, singing at night, and the child was very happy to have the song sung in such a manner, and it seemed that the river itself became the lute of accompaniment. So Uriah smiled, and reached for Grunion and put the cat in his lap.

The night passed into dawn. "Troubled am I," said Afa Sabilius finally, "for three reasons. Yes, let us discuss these immediately, in the light, for I must return to the water so soon, and then I can rest my mind, for the questions will be answered, and if not answered, at least a course of action will be decided upon and the water will flow over me and I will be happy, knowing we have resolved these matters.

"And so, one: Jeremiah did not cast out all the twigs! His eyes were old, his vision dim. There is a twig lodged inside you! This is my secret knowledge, for I see what others cannot. I am a song, I live in the river, I see what others cannot!

"And so, two: Jeremiah did not cast out the golden strands! His eyes were dry and squinting, and he refused to wear his spectacles. He mixed hair with your clay! This, too, is my secret knowledge, for I know what others do not. I live in the river beneath the rocks, and I see what others cannot!

"And three: Jeremiah did not hide you away, but walked about in the streets! People talk! Gossip spreads! Golem on the loose, they said!

"Therefore, I say this to you, Uriah: We will find a remedy for the twig, which is a mystery yet to you, and an explanation for the golden strands, which you know nothing about, and a refuge for your fugitivity! And we cannot do this without my dearest friend, Tupenah Halech, known as a witch. She will help us! Wait for me, wait until night! Pass the day watching my river, play with your animals, and by dusk we will begin our adventure, for I can travel where others cannot!"

Please continue to Jeremiah, Catch the Devil (Part Two)