The Rabbi of Lud (29 page)

Though you mustn’t think I’d forgotten that “rescue the poor lost souls of righteous Jews” remark.

I even called her on it, but she was real surprised, insulted I think, and explained how her family had always been Jewish, that she kept Shabbes even on the evening of the day her son got crucificated, busy as a bee, too busy to think, rushing around, so busy she didn’t have time to think about the neighbors, whether they’d remember to bring something, not to bring something, so she and the Magdalene doing it all, preparing the body, preparing the meal, the soup and boiled flanken, quick kasha cholent, kugel and sponge cake (though to tell the truth she wasn’t real hungry, no one was, or, if they were, they were too ashamed to admit it, and made the excuses people do at such times, that they were watching their diets, or it was too hot to eat, though she couldn’t think of anyone who’d come empty-handed—dishes of all sorts, dishes of all kinds, for every appetite—knishes and blintzes, latkes and noodles and farmer’s chop suey, challah and strudel, cabbage soup, beet borsch, lentil and barley bean), then lighting the candles like on any other Friday night. “It was a waste of good food,” said Holy Mother, “a sin with kids going hungry,” and then somebody suggested they go find some Roman soldiers who might still be peckish after eating their pound of flesh and maybe offer
them
some of the food, and Holy Mother saying how she knew that the person speaking meant it as a joke, but that she didn’t happen to be in the mood for joking right then (and added how she didn’t know at the time, telling me how you could have knocked her over with a feather, how, quite frankly, she would have thought you were a cuckoo clock if you’d have told her that two days later her son would be out of His tomb, gone, pfffft, just like that, and up in Heaven having the last laugh, or she wouldn’t have snapped at that fellow who made the joke about giving the soldiers some of the food, and that she might actually have gone out and done it herself, or invited them in, and that, who knows, it might have made better people out of them because didn’t they say you are what you eat, and would anyone in his right mind honestly argue that good kosher cooking wasn’t better for your disposition, personality and character than having to live on dry hardtack and stale Roman rations, but that seriously, it was a shame she
hadn’t
known, that not only would it have bucked them all up to have known what was what, but just to have had a sign,
something,
that remark to the gonif on the cross—“You will this day be with me in Paradise”—what, this was a
sign
? this was something you said to a child to calm it down), and that believe it or not, of all the things that happened that day, this was what she regretted the most, her rudeness to the fellow who’d made that remark about feeding the soldiers, that—and here she asked if I could keep a secret, and, oh, if ever there was a time for me to think, Well, good for you, Connie, that’s just exactly what best
friends
say to each other! that was the time for me to think it, even though I know that by going on the record like this I’m not keeping it—she personally had a very particular problem about hurting people’s feelings, what with all her husband Joseph was put through and suffered because of her. I didn’t know what she was talking about but understood just from the way she said it that it was something really important. I suppose I was testing her friendship, but I asked her flat out. She told me what had happened. “Oh, wow!” I said.

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!”

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.)