Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

But I still wasn’t sure of her story, or even that she was really who she said she was, or believed her after I asked why she’d looked so sad when she first saw me and she said it was because she knew I had no one to play with and that Jesus had no one to play with when He was my age either, that once He went into the temple and answered all those questions the rabbis asked Him, how no kid His age ever went near Him again, that they called him “egghead” and “stuck-up brown nose” even though nothing could have been further from the truth (although even if she was His mom, she didn’t see how He could have failed to be at least a little conceited, knowing who He was and all, and the connections He had). And then she said how I only pretend to enjoy keeping to myself, and even told me about the yearbooks. But she could have gotten that stuff anywhere. Robert Hershorn knew (a man I know who has Alzheimer’s and that I tell my troubles to) and he might have come out of his fog long enough to say something, even to that vicious anti-Semite, Seels. I still couldn’t really be sure.

Holy Mother must have read my mind or something because she suggested we walk down to the cemetery together. (I was plenty terrified of what we’d see. Even though she’d explained it to me a couple of times already, I still didn’t have a real good idea of what “harrowing” was exactly, or what it might look like. I thought everything would be all dug up or something. Even if it was just the graves of people she’d already rescued it could still have been pretty grisly. And it was! At Pineoaks, in the new section of the cemetery near the landing field, there was a cluster of terrible gashes in the ground, the broken earth wet as fresh wounds. There was a smell like, and I guess I almost cried out. Didn’t, but almost. And would have run off if Holy Mother, who was very smart — that’s the thing about her, that she’s so smart as well as so nice — hadn’t put her hand on my arm, not in the way you’d catch a person’s sleeve and hold them there, but as if you were just reaching out to help them with their balance, and told me hush, don’t cry, that they were only fresh graves, not even graves yet actually, just holes for the Povermans, graves where they’d go when Daddy buried them tomorrow. Then I asked what’s that smell, and she said it was just what deep, fresh dirt smelled like in cold weather, a little like steam rising off of manure. I suppose I looked a little surprised when she said that about manure, but Holy Mother just smiled and said I mustn’t be priggish, it was bodily functions that kept us alive in the first place, and didn’t she just get through telling me how after the Crucification she and the Magdalene prepared his body — and that Son of God or no Son of God, that was no picnic — and then just rinsed off afterward in the river with a little ash log soap and went in and made supper? But I depose that even if those holes were only for the Poverman family, two kids and their parents killed the day before in a tragic accident where no one wore their seat belts, harrowing was pretty grisly anyway, probably all the more so because nothing was disturbed — not the graves or the gravestones or the perpetual care. There weren’t even any footsteps in the snow! “The only way,” Holy Mother said, “anyone could tell I was even here is by the little stones and pebbles I left underneath the snow on the tops of the markers and monuments.” Which made me, though I suppose I ought to be ashamed to admit it — and really am, now —a little suspicious, because there she was, talking about lentil soup and boiled flanken and farmer’s chop suey and steam rising off manure and bodily functions and washing the dead one minute, and sneaking little stones and pebbles in under the snow so you couldn’t even notice where they’d been slipped in the next. It was grisly. It was a contradiction. I told her it was a contradiction. “Lord love you, child,” said Holy Mother, “but didn’t you know that eating and drinking, sleeping and moving your bowels are bodily functions, and that magic and faith and seeing to it your soul is saved are bodily functions too? I swan but you’re a funny little girl. You’re a funny little girl, I do declare.”)

Maybe I just didn’t get the hang of harrowing.

“Think of it as a good, brisk spring cleaning,” Holy Mother told me.

But I still didn’t get it, didn’t get it really. When she said that about the good, brisk spring cleaning, all I could think of was moving the dead people out of the way to vacuum their pillows and coffin linings, or polishing their caskets with Lemon Pledge.

“Think of it as a legal loophole, as an ambiguity, or outright omission in the wording of a contract. As a means of escaping a difficulty,” my counselor, Christopher Rockers, just put in.

But I meant then. Now I get it. I’m saying what I meant then.

So we came to a part of the cemetery where I was walking with my dad just this summer, the part where his old friend Jacob Heldshaft is buried, the one who used to sing in the minyan with him, that they called all those funny names—“Puffy Pisher,” “Yiddish Mockeybird,” “So-and-so Canary.” The part where Samuel Shargel is buried, who my father told me was related to a man in the slipcover business, and Ira Kiefer, that Dad says used to be this big-time uncle with ten nephews and nieces that Mom invited to come swimming over at our place after the funeral. The reason I remember all this so clearly is that Holy Mother happened to mention that Jacob Heldshaft had been harrowed because he had such a wonderful voice and Jesus wanted him not so much for his righteous soul as for his beautiful falsetto.

Which I really didn’t think was fair.

“Pshaw, child,” Holy Mother scolded, “fair? Don’t go getting started into fair or we’ll be here all night.” She looked around the cemetery. “I need this? All my people have been Jewish,” she said.

“These people are Jewish.”

“Sure,” she said, “and I have to roust them. What am I, a bouncer?” She confessed she didn’t like being away from Joseph, and she started to giggle.

“What,” I asked, “what?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“No, really,” I said, “what?”

“You’d have had to have been there.”

“No, really, come on,” I said, coaxing. (Because in all the time I’ve lived here, Holy Mother is the closest I’ve come to having a best friend, or any friend at all.)

“Well,” she said, “it’s so hard for him, he’s always been such a good sport about it.” Holy Mother had the giggles real bad. It was good to see my friend laughing.

“What?”

“Well, he says he doesn’t know what to call Him.”

“Who?”

“Jesus. God. Either one.” She was really laughing now. It was the second time that day I’d seen her in tears. “He calls Them, he calls Them — his mahuten! He calls Them his moketenestah!” And her nose was running too. From laughter. From pure joy. She wiped her eyes, then blew her nose in a Kleenex I gave her. “Oh,” she said, recovering, “oh. I can’t remember when I’ve had such a good laugh. Well,” she said, “what were we talking about? Oh, I remember. You were mentioning about what was fair. Don’t come to me with such notions. Is it fair that one man gets hauled off to Heaven because he sings falsetto and another like Ira Kiefer over there should die all alone not only without a wife or children to mourn him, but not to leave any relation behind, even a niece, even a nephew? Or Samuel Shargel, what about him? Everyone in his family a miserable failure, everyone, never to have had even a distant cousin in the slipcover business he might have been proud of!”