The Rabbi of Lud (21 page)

“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.

“Then forced whatever the Indian equivalent is of the doggy bag on them, pressing them with food that had not yet been eaten, then with food that had not yet even been prepared.

“His generosity was shameless, and John’s guests, both the one or two who had been formally invited, and those of us who, like myself, had merely been attracted—it was us, incidentally, who walked off with the biggest prizes; he was scrupulous about this—were beginning to feel more than a little uncomfortable. That kind of pride and ostentation went beyond tradition and custom and was starting to seem, well, destructive. Yet to refuse a gift was not only rude, it was taboo, a little higher than incest on the scale of things you don’t do.

“When he had given away all the gifts he had to give, and disposed of all his food, he seemed physically to slump, somehow to collapse in the face as though he’d been rendered suddenly toothless, all expression fled from him. He seemed—we all felt it, I think—not only to have used up all his worldly goods and chattels, but all his ideas as well, all the hope he might ever have had for a future. This is important. I must make myself clear. Understand that he did not suddenly appear bereft or deprived. He did not seem desolated or stripped. No grief was in it.
Nothing
was in it. As if all the wise old man from the different village altogether who’d brought the potlatch to life by rising and proposing his toast to nothing at all had to do to see the toast bear fruit right before his eyes, was just stay awake long enough to see John Lookout’s face at that moment. It was the empty, vacant, neutral face of someone not very interesting in pre-REM sleep.

“But just then, quick as it had emptied out, quick, that is, as a tire blown on the highway, it filled up again. Lookout jumped up, smacked himself in the head, ran out, and was back in a minute with an unopened case of French champagne. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he said. ‘I’m all farblondjhet tonight. There’s still some champagne left. Who needs a refill? How about it? How about it, Nanook?’ Nanook, who looked as if he was going to throw up, groaned and covered his lips with his fingers as you might cover your glass with your palm to decline wine. ‘You? Charley Feathers? No? How about you, Patricia Whale-water? No one? You’re sure? No takers? You’re sure? All right, it’s going going gone then, everybody,’ he said, and started to smash the bottles of champagne. He threw them against the walls of his house, he threw them on the floor. With all his might he threw them through his closed windows. He uncorked the last two bottles and emptied their contents over two handsome woven rugs he had apparently forgotten to give away.

“In the silence that followed we were not only too embarrassed to look at John, we were too embarrassed to look at anyone else either. I suppose that’s why we never knew who the guest was that finally spoke, who broke the silence and pierced that tight ring of eyewitness shame we all feel when someone fails to bridle an enthusiasm that has passed beyond mere enthusiasm and spilled over into the red zones of lost control and flagrant zealotry.

“ ‘That is a fine icebox someone has sold you, John Lookout,’ the guest said. To alter the mood. To save the party.

“ ‘Oh, do you think so?’ John asked. Then he opened the door of his G.E. frost-free refrigerator and ripped it off. He removed its blue plastic crisper, set it on the floor and jumped up and down on it until it was in pieces. He did the same with the butter tray, tore out the wire shelves, destroyed the icemaker, and then went to work on the motor itself, being careful to spare, out of respect and courtesy to his guests, only those parts where the freon was stored.

“A strange thing happened.

“The mood altered once more. The zealotry retrograded back into enthusiasm again, and the enthusiasm re-metamorphosed into that ostentatious generosity which is the impulse and impetus of a potlatch in the first place.

“There was a
frenzy
of generosity. One Indian was so moved he gave away the lead dog of the dogsled team that had fetched him. The man he gave it to was so moved he shot the dog.

“Desperately they tried to part with the gifts they’d been given, and, when they couldn’t, they destroyed them. And when they ran out of things to destroy that John Lookout had given them, they turned on their own property and destroyed that. Mukluks went, parkas. Snowshoes, canoes, curved ulu blades for gutting fish. Everything, everything! All were caught up in the spirit of the celebration. After a time, when there really
was
no more property left toward which they could demonstrate their indifference, they seized upon their own families. Braves beat their squaws, squaws hit their papooses, papooses scratched at their mosquito bites until they became infected. Even then that terrible nexus of generosity cum enthusiasm cum ostentation cum zealotry wasn’t finished. When you thought it was over, something else would happen. Someone rose, for example, stuck his finger down his throat, and regurgitated the entire feast he had consumed just hours before. It was awful,” he said, remembering, “awful. You couldn’t know how they would ever manage to end it.

“It was the major trope of that particular potlatch, and the source of an important new Indian stereotype—the Indian-
taker
.” He paused. “It was a sort of Black Thursday for them, you see, and effectively destroyed the Indian economy in that part of the high Yukon for years.”

“How
did
they?” I said.

“Pardon me?”

“How did they manage? To end it.”

“Oh,” he said. “When I took out my ulu and started to shave off my beard.”

It was stuffy in the cabin and I cracked open one of the plane’s Plexiglas windows, surprised to feel the air, soft and dark and balmy as the sweetest spring. It was even a little warm, in fact, and Philip and I removed our outer garments. Flowerbeard seemed oblivious to the weather, and not only didn’t take his parka off but hadn’t even lowered its hood, which still covered his knit woolen watch cap. Indeed, he was talking again, launched, I supposed, into another tale, as oblivious to his audience as he was to the temperature.

He was speaking of the alienated Tinneh Indians, who are not only tribeless and clanless, but are without families, too. He was telling us how generation after generation of Tinnehs break away from each other, how parents divorce and children are placed in orphanages or live for a while with a mother or a father and then run off. (Identical twins, he told us, everywhere else handcuffed together by the genetic code, will, among the Tinneh, over time, burst their mutual bonds, drift apart, fall away, dissipate affinity, annihilate connection, disfigure resemblance, climb down some great, ever-attenuating chain of relation, and move from sibling to friend, friend to neighbor, neighbor to acquaintance, and acquaintance to stranger.) And how at one time they probably outnumbered the Tlingit, Haida and Athapaska tribes combined but were now reduced to perhaps a handful of individuals, rare in the general Alaskan population as Frenchmen. It was actually pretty fascinating. I know
I
was interested, and even Philip seemed to have lost, maybe even forgotten, his odd hostility to this man who was now clearly become our guest—I felt my host’s role and offered to share the last of my portion of our survival biscuits with this queer Elijah of a fellow—and was concentrating on what he was saying as hard as I could. When suddenly he broke off. “Oh, look,” he said, “the sun’s up. Now we can work the plane down off these logs and get out of here.”

“Oh,” said Philip, fixing his hostility in place again, “and once that’s done, how do you propose we take off? Seeing, I mean, as how the lake is all melted and more suitable for a toddler with a pail and shovel than for some bush pilot stuck in an airplane without a pontoon to its name?”

“Isn’t it frozen?” said the wandered Jew. “Maybe it’s frozen. I think it’s frozen.”

“What, are you kidding,” scoffed Philip, “in weather like this? Like Opening Day in the horse latitudes?”

“I’ll go check,” the flower-bedecked man said and, limber as someone a third his age, was past my knees, had the cabin door open, was out of the plane and onto its wooden perch and dancing down the thick jigsaw of logs as if they were stairs. The next we knew he was leaping up and down on the surface of the frozen lake. “It’s solid,” he called, jumping. “It’s frozen through. If it holds me it can hold the plane. I weigh thousands of pounds.”

“I hate a showoff,” Philip muttered.

“Shh,” I cautioned.

“Yeah, yeah,” Philip said, “nevertheless.”

And before we could accommodate to the queer disparity of temperature between where we were situated in the plane and where, not fifty yards off, the lake existed in a different climate altogether, he had come back, shrugged out of his heavy outerwear (more, I guessed, for our benefit than his own), had signaled us out of the cabin and, clever as a moving man, was directing us in the this-goes-here/that-goes-there displacements and arrangements, furiously pulling the timbers away as if they hid children covered in a cave-in.

Maybe because there were three of us now. Or that one was a man with flowers in his beard. At any rate, we finished just as the sun was going down and were rolling the airplane out onto the ice when Philip offered his objection. (And me silently pleading with him: No, Philip, please. Not, Don’t bother. Because that wasn’t the point. The bother, the wasted energy. But because I was a theologian, even if only of the offshore sort. Because I was a theologian and knew that when you’re sitting in the wilderness rubbing on a Torah’s wooden handles and hocus pocus, lo and behold, who should appear but some stranger that he’s got something as out of the ordinary as chin whiskers on him that look as if they might have been cultivated by the very folks who brought you the Garden of Eden, let alone trimmed at and mowed on by magic Jap floral arrangers, and the newcomer mentions he weighs thousands of pounds though he’s light enough on his feet to jump up and down on water, you don’t whimper and whine at him or make nag-nag at your human condition.) But the last thing this Phil is is shy. Something’s on his mind, he lets you know. “I suppose,” Phil says, “you have some special way of starting up a dead, battered-up engine that’s seen its last days.”

“Turn the key in the ignition.”

“Right,” Philip said, and we got in the plane. Before you could say abracadabra it was full dark, the engine coughed and turned over, and we were roaring down the ice to a blind, treacherous liftoff, Philip not knowing if he could risk pulling her nose up now or whether he still had some room left to muscle her a bit and maybe gain a little more speed and momentum before crashing into the razor pines on the opposite shore of the little lake, when at the last minute the northern lights came on like the bombs bursting in air and it was suddenly bright enough for him to see what to do.

“So,” Flowerbeard says once we’re at cruising speed and Philip’s established radio contact again, “be it ever so humble there’s no place like home. Even the sky seems familiar. It’s good to be back. You know?”

And I’m thinking: Sure, if you live in the sky. If you live in the sky and your house is on fire. Because that old aurora borealis was blazing away in front of our eyes like a forest fire. The primary colors at kindling point. At green’s ground zero, at yellow’s, blue’s, red’s. (It was like being in the center of the midway at a state fair among the garish, glaring, glancing illuminations and kindled neon of the rides, the blazing calliopedic centripetals and centrifugals of light, in altered gravity’s dizzied sphere, hard by the game booths bright as stages. Or like hobnobbing among all the invoked wraiths of light and color like some Periodic Table of the Sun, the conjured avatars and possibilities of its bright erogenous zones and all the heightened decibels of heat, silent banging bursts of fireworks exploding like bouquets of semiprecious stone, amethyst, sapphire, topaz, garnet—the gem boutonnieres. Commanding the spicy savories of hot solstice and, oddly, remembering wicker, recalling bamboo, mindful of, of all things, summer’s swaying, loose and ropy hammock style, the interlocking lanyard of the deck chair and chaise like a furniture woven by sailors, recollecting—most queer at this altitude—the littered life outdoors, stepping on candy wrappers, condoms, the sports pages like a dry flora and everywhere setting off the sounds of localized fire like a kindled shmutz, or the explosion of all our oils and fats and greasy glitter like stored fuel.)