Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

I dusted snow from one of the monuments.

“What about this one?” I said, pointing to the stone, to some big Hebrew carving from which poor old Mr. Hershorn had taught me to read. “Did she get harrowed?” Holy Mother looked in the direction I was pointing and squinted.

“I can’t read, child,” she admitted.

And I’m ashamed of this part too.

Because I thought for a moment my friend was a phony. If she couldn’t read, how did she know who to harrow? Or did she just run helter skelter through a cemetery, harrowing at will? Or how did she know who Shargel was? Or Kiefer? Or the Puffy Pisher?

“I just do,” she said softly, reading my mind, “I just know,” and she began to cry.

When I asked why she was crying she said it was because I doubted her, and that when she was my age it was unusual for a girl to learn to read and that if she did, ninety-nine times out of a hundred it turned out she was a witch and she’d had enough trouble just trying to explain Immaculate Conception and the virgin birth without being called up for being illiterate too. This must have brought back some pretty bad memories because she started weeping harder than ever, so I fished around in my pockets and found another fresh Kleenex and gave it to her.

“Oh,” she said, glancing down at the Kleenex I’d handed her, “I’ve wiped off my stigmata, haven’t I?” She touched her dry eyes. “I’ve rubbed it all away.”

I didn’t know what stigmata were.

“Usually blood, usually wounds and sores,” said Holy Mother. “But tears and runny noses too. Even a rash, even gas. A statue on an altarpiece puking.”

Then something unusual happened. I noticed I wasn’t cold anymore. I mean I hadn’t been conscious of the cold for a long while anyway, but now I was aware I wasn’t cold. And of how beautiful everything is if only the weather doesn’t get in your way. I mean a rainy day if you don’t get wet, or a bright, sunny summer afternoon if you aren’t hot. Well, that goes double for the ice and snow when the wind is howling and the sky is leaden and the temperature is hanging around negative ten or fifteen. I guess winter would be just about the most beautiful season there is if it wasn’t for the cold. People are pretty perky in it as it is — having snowball fights and going skiing and putting on ice carnivals and making snow forts. And all of a sudden I wanted to frolic, had this incredible urge to frolic, and felt this just tremendous burst of energy. It was all I could do to keep myself from scooping some snow off poor, sad Samuel Shargel’s grave and popping Holy Mother with a snowball. I guessed what I felt was the opposite of stigmata. Joy like a sort of brush fire. And knew even then that I’d better resist my impulse, not only because it would have been disrespectful not to, but because with all I was feeling, the joy and high energy, I would have knocked Holy Mother halfway into the middle of next week. (But knew, too, that it wasn’t all I could do to keep myself from packing a snowball to fling in her face, that with all I was feeling I could probably resist anything, any temptation, any pressure or urgency, the very heat and cold I was suddenly so conscious were no longer factors in my life.) (“A state of grace, yes,” Holy Mother said, breaking into my thought.)

But had to do something, and felt myself pulled by a stronger force than even my own high spirits toward poor old Sam Shargel’s tombstone and, before I knew what was happening, reached down toward the snow. Which I pulled off the marker, brushed off the marker.

“I’ll teach you.”

“Oh, Connie, no.”

“I will.”

“No,” she said, “you don’t have to.”

“I’d like to. I want to.”

She saw I meant it and let me.

I, Constance Ruth Goldkorn, of 336 Main, Lud, New Jersey, do hereby depose and affirm that I taught Holy Mother how to read a sort of Hebrew for Beginners off the clean, snow-swept tombstone of Samuel Shargel, 1921–1973, one school snow day in Pineoaks Cemetery. We used his epitaph, reading the big Hebrew letters off the marble slab like Moses calling out the Ten Commandments. As I say, it was how Mr. Hershorn taught me .

Mostly we worked on learning to recognize phonemes and blends, her syllabication skills, homophones, consonant digraphs, hard and soft c and g sounds, and reviewing vowel patterns, affixes and suffixes.

If I gave her a report card I’d have said: “Holy Mother works conscientiously and completes the assigned work with consistent effort. She takes pride in organizing the material and cheerfully accepts constructive criticism, and is always on task. She was a joy to work with this semester.”

As a matter of fact, I think she enjoyed it too. She told me it was very moving and that she hadn’t had such a good time since Christ knows when. She said I reminded her of the Juggler of Our Lady.

I remarked how she was such a natural scholar it was a shame they didn’t have women’s lib back in her day.

“Well, I don’t know about that ,” said Holy Mother.

“But it is,” I said. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

“Oh, Connie, my dear,” she said, looking around Pineoaks, looking across Lud and over to Masada Gardens, “a soul is an even more terrible thing to waste,” and she invited me to come along as she completed her rounds. (Which it turned out weren’t so grisly after all. There’s really not very much to harrowing. It’s one of those words that sounds worse than it actually is. Like a dog whose bark is worse than its bite. We’d be going along and Holy Mother would just pause by a grave. What took all the time was having to stop and brush the snow off the monuments so Holy Mother could practice her reading. I wasn’t a bit cold. It was still ten or fifteen below out — it had quit snowing, but the sky was grayer than it had been earlier and the wind was blowing more forcefully, so it may even have been a bit cooler — but I didn’t feel it. I still had all this energy left over from my state of grace. It could have gone down to absolute zero and it wouldn’t have meant any more to me than if I’d opened a window on a fine day in spring.)

When she suddenly pulled up and stopped.

“You harrow this one.”

“Who, me?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Oh, but I couldn’t.”

“Certainly you can.”

“But I wouldn’t know how.”

“There’s nothing to it.”

“I don’t know what’s involved.”

“Didn’t you ever have a birthday party?”

“Yes.”

“Was there a cake?”

“Certainly.”

“Were there candles on it you had to blow out?”

“Of course.”

“Well, there you are then.”

“I blow out the candles?”

“You make a wish.”

It was scary. I mean, so much was riding on it. It wasn’t like teaching Holy Mother how to read. Suppose I made a mistake? It meant that the person wouldn’t be rescued, that his lost, Jewish soul would never see God. It was so grisly.

“Go on,” Holy Mother said, “go ahead.”

I shut my eyes tight. I took a deep breath.

“Harrow Harry Jacobson,” I wished.

“Well,” said Holy Mother, “I guess that about does it.”

“I’m finished?”

“I think so, yes.”

“How many souls of righteous Jews did we rescue? How many did there turn out to be?”

“Counting the ones I did before I met you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” said Holy Mother, “seven or eight.”

When she left that evening she thanked me for teaching her to read and said what a pleasure it was to have met me. I told her likewise I’m sure, and that she’d been like a friend, or at least a big sister. I already missed her by the time I got home.