Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“Yeah, well, that’s bullshit about the Eskimo bush pilots,” Philip said sourly. “It’s right up there with the crap you hear about igloos. I’ve been in lots of them and never found a warm one yet.”

Which led to a discussion of Alaskan architecture, Philip speaking of his preferences, the Quonset hut, the trailer, even the sod house. “Something solid,” he said, “more substantial. That you know it ain’t going to melt on you the first sign of spring.”

“I don’t know,” said the man in the flowered beard, “would you really want to be tied down like that?” And began to tell of his travels: of the summer he spent among millions of brood seals on a beach in the Pribilofs, and of another summer, on Little Diomede Island in the Bering strait, not two miles from the international date line, contemplating time. He’d been to regions where you could see blue glacier bears clinging to the ice, wide and spread as rugs, embracing the sides of the ice mountains with their powerful claws. And to great potlatch feasts and ceremonials all along the Inside Passage and up the high Yukon where the host provided great quantities of grizzly and musk ox and moose meat.

“Tons,” he said, “literally. All you could eat.”

“Is that stuff kosher?” I asked. “Bear meat, musk ox?”

“Go know,” he said.

And told of one spectacular potlatch to end all potlatches.

“It’s the custom, as you know, that at the end of these feasts the host gives valuable gifts to his guests, and sometimes actually destroys his property just to show he can afford to. It’s a lot like the beautiful, graven chopped-liver swans you see at some of our affairs. Well,” he said, “but what do Indians really have? Their artifacts, of course, their gorgeous, custom duds and decorated furs. The whale’s carved-up bones and etched ivories. Their blankets, certainly. Well, John Lookout, the founder of the feast I’m speaking of, was a particularly rich man. He even had, don’t laugh, a refrigerator. (You’ve heard the saying—‘It’s like trying to sell a Frigidaire to an Eskimo.’ As far north as I’m speaking of, Indians too.) Though the village where he lived had no electricity.

“Well, let me tell you, Father Lookout decided to go all out on this one. And we all knew it, too. Just to give you an idea, the potlatch took place on a day that commemorated nothing, absolutely nothing. Not the opening of the canneries, or the liberation of the Indian slaves — oh, yes, the Indians kept slaves; for that matter so did the Eskimos — or some battle, defeat or victory, in the Russian and Indian wars of the early nineteenth century. It was no one’s birthday. None of the Lookouts had made a rite of passage. He’d had an ordinary year, neither fat nor lean. Ordinary. The potlatch was neither to celebrate nor propitiate the gods of hunting or fishing. You couldn’t even say it was a celebration of ostentation itself, because John didn’t even bother to invite more than one or two people to come to it. Maybe it was the incense from his fires that drew us. The burning polar bears and king caribou, the greasy lava flow of shlepped blubber. Or the overnight skyline of the bright, patiently carved but hurriedly planted totem poles out there on his lawn like so many decorative flamingos or jockey hitching posts. Maybe just rumor.

“The food was like nothing anyone had seen before. The sheer amounts of it, I mean. Oh, what a spread! It could have kept entire villages well fed for a winter. And the drink! Not just the ordinary Black Label Scotches, imported beers and French champagnes, but sparkling reindeer blood, horned sheep ales and moose liqueurs, fermented lichens, spruce wines, and the cedar sherries.

“Oh, and that thermostated, G.E. frost-free, fresh-fruit-and-vegetable-crispered, makes-its-own-ice-, butter-trayed and egg-nesting icebox of his had been filled up with packaged white bread. (A great delicacy among the Indians, he was going to serve them toast for dessert.)

“So there we were, seated politely, our hands folded in our laps, mouths salivating, stomachs rumbling with hunger, our very noses watering from the delicious sights and wondrous smells of all that fabulous food, all the guests waiting for John to rise and make his toast so the feast could begin. He never made a move, and we might be sitting there still if some wise old man from a different village altogether hadn’t somehow suddenly divined the point, risen, flip-topped a beer, and offered, offhandedly as he could—‘To Nothing at All!’

“That was the open sesame, all right. It was as if some movie director had called out ‘Action!’ All of a sudden the wines and boozes were flowing, and the platters of meats and fowl and tureens of soup were being passed around the tables as fast as the white men — yes, white men — John Lookout had hired could serve them. (Though it occurred to me that that village elder could have said anything, and the same thing would have happened. He could have said ‘Here’s mud in your eye,’ or ‘Permafrost Forever!’ or ‘So’s your old man.’ Anything. I could have started it myself with a bo-ray p’ree ha-gaw-fen. Then I thought it wouldn’t even have taken that much, that it wouldn’t have taken anything at all, maybe just one of the guests getting up from where he sat at the table, strolling over to the icebox and tearing open a package of Wonder Bread and pulling out a slice. Now I know it needn’t have been a guest at all. One of the white hired help could have done it.)

“It was something, let me tell you. It was really something. It really was. There was ox bacon, there were bear chops, there were caribou roasts. There were great Kodiak porterhouses and sheep feet and walrus shoulders. There was smoked lemming and barbecued musk ox liver. And the drinking? Like there was no tomorrow! Well, you know — they’re goyim. They’re Indians but they’re goyim. Do I have to tell you? Goyim is goyim.

“They were so sated and drunk by this time you’d have thought he wouldn’t have had the energy for what happened next. It’s what often happens. They fall asleep with their faces in their plates and when they wake up the next day their heads hurt so bad they’re no longer interested in even the gift-giving part, to say nothing of the host’s destroying his property for them — even if he still had enough left in him to do it. The taste in his mouth alone is enough to make him wish he was dead.

“But I’d been watching him, John Lookout, the host. And they’d been watching him too. He hadn’t touched a thing. Practically. He’d picked at his food. And though I won’t say he was on the wagon, he’d been abstemious, and seemed, well, to have drunk only out of politeness, a sort of social drinker, to make his guests comfortable. And that’s what kept them interested, I think, helped preserve that last bit of alertness in them. Gave them their second wind. Kept their peckers up.

“So they really didn’t know what to expect. Even after he rose and proposed that toast we had all been waiting for and thought he was going to rise and propose at the beginning.

“ ‘I thank you all for coming, and drink,’ he said, ‘to your healths, and ask, as a favor to me, that you accept a few lousy tokens of my appreciation.’

“Whereupon he began to give away the store. You know, the artifacts I was telling you about? His beads and his blankets, his scrimshaw and tsatskes. But big stuff too, the stuff they use to live by, the tools that earn their bread. The harpoons, nets, rafts and kayaks. The paddles. The very machinery, I mean, that made the potlatch possible, and not only that but his down parkas, the qiviut wools that kept his family warm, the oil that burned in his lamps during the long dark year.