The Rabbi of Lud (16 page)

“I don’t even bother taping sheets of plastic to the windows anymore, tacking felt strips to the threshold.”

“You don’t?”

“Nah,” Rabbi Petch said. “What, are you kidding me? Insulate
this
place? Ol’ Hawk want to come through, you think he let some itty piece of felt stop him? A dinky piece of plastic? Don’t make me laugh.
Shit!
He huff and he puff and he
blow
the house down.”

I gathered the rabbi was hipped on weather. He seemed to read my mind.

“I think about it more than I do about God,” he said. “I
reflect
on it!”

“On weather?”

“What then?” he said. “Of course weather, certainly weather. You have to. You see anything else around here? You want to stay alive in this climate you have to.”

“Actually, it’s rather pleasant out.”

“It can turn on you like
that,”
Rabbi Petch said. “Storms blow up in a minute. A tempest, a blizzard. Gales, cloudbursts, the avalanche. Hoarfrost and rime. Lightning and thunder. All the inclements. There’s no telling what could happen. The northern lights could melt your frostbite, take off your toes. A glacier could fall on your foot, sandstorms from Araby put out your eyes.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” Petch said, “absolutely. Spit, fire! Spout, rain! Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow, you cataracts and hurricanoes! Hey,” he said, “you want a cup of tea?”

“I wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble.”

“What trouble, I’m glad of the company. Go to the southwest corner of the room and sit down. Make yourself comfortable, I’ll put on the kettle. No,” he said, “push the piano out of the way. Try to squeeze your behind
past
the desk and sofa. Watch out for your knees, that wooden bench is murder. I think you’d be more comfortable in the La-Z-Boy. Just don’t lean back.”

I could hear him humming to himself in the kitchen, apparently as free of worry as any happy-go-lucky kid who’d never even heard the
word
“meteorology.”

As I had reminded the rabbi, we’d been corresponding. He was listed under Alaska in
Who’s Who in the Rabbinate,
and I’d first written him a week or so after I’d answered Alyeska’s little classified in the
Times.
He hadn’t mentioned weather in those letters and now I thought I understood why. He didn’t want to scare me off. It was supposed to be a tradeoff. If things worked out. A good word from him to his board, a good word from me to Tober and Shull. (Who would have snapped him up, who even back then, in the seventies, weren’t besieged by rabbis who wanted any part of their job—my job—who’d had to replace me with a kid still in yeshiva and, in return for my promise to return to Lud after a year, had permitted Shelley and the baby to stay on in that company house in that company town.) He’d been the one to introduce the possibility of my staying in Anchorage in the event I liked it up here. He’d made Alaska’s frontiersmen Jews sound fascinating, hunters, fishermen, firemen, farmers—all busted stereotype, exotic, say, as black cowboys. In one letter he’d written that gentiles controlled the garment and jewelry store industries, that if you wanted to buy your wife a mink coat for your anniversary or have a nice cocktail ring made up for her birthday you went to guys named Norton or Adams or Jones to get one wholesale. It made perfect sense, he said. It had to do with the East India and Hudson’s Bay companies. It had to do with the L.L. Bean catalogue and the deep, goyishe roots working the frozen soils of the mercantile.

“So,” Petch bubbled when he came back with our tea, threading the obstacle course of his cornered furniture without ever spilling a drop, “so.” He eased himself onto the piano bench, set his burden down on the desk and, despite the fact that he’d drawn his legs as far back as he reasonably could, crushed his knees against the sofa. “So,” he said again. “Cozy.”

“Very cozy,” I agreed.

“Yes,” he said, “but it’s hard sometimes to tell the difference between what’s genuinely cozy and what’s only cabin fever. That’s why I won’t wear the sort of shirt you’ve got on.”

It was a red-and-black checked wool Pendleton I had on, and I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“That lumberjackie stuff. You look like a wood chopper. It gives me cabin fever just to look at you. Brr. I’ve got the chills. Brr. My teeth are chattering. I can smell your long Johns.”

“They wear these shirts up here.”

“More folks die of cabin fever in this state than they do of cancer, than they do of the heart attack, shoveling snow. It’s why I wear a suit, it’s why I wear a tie. It’s why I go around the house like it was Yom Kippur downtown. When they find me I’ll look like I put up a fight.”

“Really,” I said, “it’s not that bad out.”

“I know what I know,” the rabbi said darkly.

“What do you do about services?”

“I call off services.”

“They don’t object to that?”

“I tell them it’s a snow day, we’ll make it up later.”

“They stand still for this? Does everyone have cabin fever?”

“Everyone.”

“Rabbi Petch,” I said, “I’m drinking your tea, I’m eating your biscuits. It’s not my place to quarrel with you, but I’ve got to believe you’re having me on. That maybe this is something you do up here. Some initiation thing, to see can I take it, do I have the right stuff, as if I’d crossed the equator for the first time, or passed the international date line. To tell the truth, you’re mixing me up. In your letters you made it sound attractive. Now it’s as if you were trying to spook me. It’s not necessary. We had no deal. I’m not moving in on you. The people in New Jersey don’t even know about you. They don’t know my intentions. I
have
no intentions. I told you what the position is, what my situation entails. That this was just supposed to be a break for me, to see how I worked out in the parishes, to see could I handle the pastoral parts.”

“The pastoral parts,” he said. “That’s nothing. That’s the least of it, the pastoral parts. Even the weather, that’s nothing too. Even the cabin fever. What you’ve got to look out for are the Russian Orthodox. You’re looking at me as if I was nuts. Russians
discovered
this place. They battled the natives years, some hearts-and-minds thing. Then they converted them. They did. The Russian Orthodox church is very popular with the natives. All those onion-shaped domes that you see. You do. You see them everywhere. In Sitka. In Juneau, the Aleutians. Up and down the Kenai Peninsula. Kodiak. Even right here in Anchorage. (You know there are scholars who believe the igloo is a serendipity? That some native was trying to build a little Russian Orthodox church out of blocks of ice and snow? Monkey see, monkey do. Who knows?) Anyway, watch out for them. You see any Russian Orthodox Cossack Eskimo momzers come roaring in on their dogsleds, waving their whips over their heads, hollering ‘
Mush!
’ and thinking whatever the word for ‘pogrom’ is in Eskimo, in Ice, get out of their way because they’re looking to beat the living shit out of you. Hey,” he said, “they learned from the best. Free Soviet Jewry, yes, Rabbi? So that’s another reason I don’t go out, why I declare so many snow days.”

“Mush?”

I swear I knew what he was going to say. I swear it.

“Ice for ‘Jews.’ It eggs on the dogs.”

And let them pass, Petch’s pensées. Only the distraction of the rabbi’s high-grade cabin fever. Some distraction. Some only.

One of the disadvantages of being without a wife in company is that when it’s time to vamoose there’s no one with whom you can make eye contact. Your body language falls on deaf ears. One of you can’t signal to the other of you that it’s time for the baby-sitter line to be offered up, the tomorrow’s-a-working-day one. I was on my own. There should be no hurt feelings. He means no harm. Be polite with this all-cabin-fevered-out colleague. I shifted my weight, I cleared my throat, I tamped at the corners of my lips with my napkin, Ice for “be seeing you,” for getting the hell out of there.

“The deal’s off then?” Petch said.

“What deal? We had no deal.”

“You know,” he said. “I can’t come to New Jersey? We can’t trade? The prince and the pauper?”

“Rabbi Petch,” I said.

“Listen,” he interrupted, “I make a bad first impression. I know that. I do. I’m paranoid. Hey,” he said, “if Jews had priests and bishops I’d be on the first boat out. They’d hang me out to dry in the diocese’s designated hospital.”

“Please, Rabbi.”

“No, please, come on. The way I talk? A learned man? Listen,” he said, and lowered his voice. Close as we were, I had to lean forward to hear him. “Listen,” he said, “they don’t know what to do with me. The congregation wants to be fair. They come over. Machers and shakers. Boiling mad. Determined. Minds made up. Once-and-for-all written all over their faces. But you know? They’re stunned when they see. Humbled. All of a sudden the cat’s got their tongue, they don’t know what to say. They’re thunderstruck in the southwest corner. They can’t do enough for me. However they were feeling, whatever was on their minds, on the tip of their tongues, it’s forgotten. All is forgiven. And I
know
what was on their minds, the tip of their tongues. I could say it
for
them. You know something? Once I did. I really did. I spoke their piece
for
them. From the tip of my tongue to the tip of their tongue.

“ ‘Rabbi Petch,’ I said, ‘how are you today? Cold all better? Good, excellent, alevay! We were worried. As a matter of fact, Rabbi, now that you’re feeling so much better, it might be a good time to tell you something that’s been on our minds, on the tip of our tongues. Some of the board members have noticed that you don’t quite seem to be feeling your good old self of late. Not precisely a hundred percent, not specifically par value. Well, it’s this winter, Sidney. It’s been a terrible winter this winter. It’s taken its toll from the best of us. Dan Cohen, for example. A shtarker like Dan. Heck, Rebbe, weather like this, unrelenting, you’d be a shvontz
not
to get shpilkes. We’re
all
shlepping. Anyway, we had a meeting, we put our heads together, we had a discussion.’

“ ‘Loz im gayn. It’s been a hell of a winter, he’s starving for light.’

“ ‘Loz im gayn?
Loz im gayn?
Loz im gayn where? Sid’s a widower. His brothers are dead, his sisters. All the mishpocheh got eaten up and picked clean in the Holocaust.’

“Someone said no, someone said yes. Someone said no again. Someone looked it up.

“ ‘Sidney. Sid. Kid. The long and the short. We made up a collection, we collected your airfare. We dipped into capital. We collected something extra. You’ll be home for Xmas, Rabbi. Come April, alevay, you’ll be searching for leaven, licking a hard-boiled egg, sucking parsley and charoses from between your teeth and having Pesach with your Aunt Ida in Arkansas hiding the afikomen from the pickaninnies. Next year in Little Rock, this is your life!’

“They never had the nerve. Even after I said it
for
them they never had the nerve. They went off biting their tongues, kicking themselves in the behind. So New Jersey was my idea. I can do what you’re doing. Bury people, say a few words. They’d put up with me in New Jersey, with my ways. In New Jersey I wouldn’t even have ways. Only here I have ways.

“I’m a spiritual, God-fearing guy. God-fearing? He scares the bejeesus out of me. I’m very impressed. Well, He makes an impression. All the ice and that darkness, the disproportionate strength of a bear. The whiteness of whales.

“Listen,” he said, “go in good health, but promise me.”

“Promise you what?”

“You’ll keep an open mind.”

“Certainly,” I said. “I will. I promise. But now,” I said, “if I could just use your phone. I’ll call a cab. I have to get going.”

He nodded in the direction of the telephone.

“You’ll write me?” he said when I’d made my call.

“Write you?”

“From the pipeline. You’ll let me know how things are?”

“Sure. I’ll drop you a line. Well,” I said, carefully making my way through Petch’s obstacle course, “thanks for the tea. And thank you for seeing me.” But he wasn’t listening. He was peering out the window, looking hard at whatever it was he thought he could see in the gloom, March’s short daylight already shutting down.

“Is it my taxi?” I asked him.

“What?”

“Is it my taxi? Has my taxicab come?”

“What?” he said. “No. I don’t like the looks of it out there. Something’s up. If I were you I wouldn’t even try to go out this month.”

Remarkable. Wait. This is remarkable. What happened. Just remarkable. Maybe I should tell you—the guy? That I shared the ride with? In the wrecker? He turned out to be my bush pilot. Same guy. The law of no loose ends. What goes around comes around. The law of the return.

Well. We didn’t have such smooth sailing. To Moose Lip. Or Bear Claw. Or Seal Shit. Or Caribou Dick. Or Wolf Tit. Or whatever other made-in-its-own-image totemics the municipalities, settlements, campgrounds and wickiups went by in those cold arrondissements along that booming Ice Belt.

We came down in trees. Sergeant Preston and the Rabbi.

“I want you to know,” Skyking said, “I take complete responsibility for this disaster.”

“You do.”

“Complete
responsibility. The FAA won’t have to come up with any black boxes on this one.”

“They won’t.”

“Pilot error pure and simple.”

“You’re some up-front guy,” I said, shivering, jumping about, blowing on my mittens and pounding my hands together now we were clear of the plane.

“Mea culpa, Rabbi.”

“Nobody’s perfect, my son,” I said, larky, in extremis the wiseacre.

“I just can’t for the life of me figure what happened,” he said, and launched into a song and dance I couldn’t follow.

“We were never higher than five or so angels,” he said. “Our attitude was always righteous and the artificial horizon might have been turned off for all the pitching and banking it displayed. We weren’t below, and I never busted, minimums. We enjoyed CAVU weather straight up in the civil evening twilight. There wasn’t any clear-air turbulence to speak of, and I never had to crab. I could have used some cultural features certainly, but what’s a fellow to do, make them up? Heck,” he said, “we even had eminence. And no use for a DF steer even if there’d been an FSS on our right wing. I didn’t have to lean and seemed to be greasing it on. My Pop Teases Fat Girls. Everything going so smooth we could have joined the mile-high club if either of us had felt the need or been better looking. We were never close to issuing a pan pan pan let alone a mayday, and if we were even close to coming out of the envelope I never heard about it. I didn’t red line or run scud or catch any lint in my transponder. I topped off in Anchorage so
that
wasn’t it, and if we didn’t get any pireps, airmets or sigmets, it’s because there just
weren’t
any weather conditions. True Virgins Make Dull Company? Perfect, A-OK. I wouldn’t have said boo to them over the Unicom frequencies even if I’d had the chance. Hell, my V speeds were good, to say nothing of that nice VASI light effect I was catching from the ice. Red over white, pilot’s delight. I never even needed VOR, and you were with me during the walk around. I’ve got good paperwork, Padre. I can’t for the life of me figure what could have gone wrong. If anything even did. It’s against all odds.”