Authors: Stanley Elkin
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.
And couldn’t stop thinking about them. The dead. The poor souls who remained unrescued.
Because if there were righteous souls then there must be
un
righteous souls, too.
The earth of Lud stocked as any lake or river. (My dad this Johnny Appleseed of the damned. Sowing the not-just-dead but downright unacceptable. Scattering and casting, tilling and turning with some special sorry husbandry, pitching his seed and vegetive milt into all the imponderables and mixed variables of the foreclosed earth, its busted topsoils and clays and unknown weathers—moisture and light and temperature. With blind abandon shifting from one medium to another without even knowing, offering to the soil what was the water’s or sky’s.) All Lud a ruined continent, a land of drought and blight. Each plot this failed farm.
And how do you think
I
felt? Second-guessing Daddy’s handiwork, not wanting to but mixing in anyway? Already, for that matter, mixed in from the minute I first ran into Holy Mother window shopping along Lud’s main street? My sympathies shot. All that loose grief I’d felt all my life, or at least for as long as I’d understood where I was living, suddenly altering from one state to another like those solids and liquids and gases they tell you about in school and which are always in some perpetual tumult of rearrangement. That grief. That loose grief. Now you feel it, now you don’t.
Because what they kept in those coffins, besides mere personal effects, I mean, the jewelry, eyeglasses, hip wallets, watches, snapshots and belt buckles, and just sheer meltdown of the remains, all the corrupt soup of their spoiled biodegradables, was some hot elixir from which, in time, anything could grow except a serviceable soul. (Coffins, I supposed, would slosh if you shook them.) Plus that other, impersonal effect, their nonviable souls like counterfeit coins or rotten teeth. (Though something about them at once animate and doomed as cut blossoms or dime-store turtles.)
My niggled, watered, here-today/gone-tomorrow griefs downshifted as some truck on a steep grade to something more like sorrow than grief, and then taken down another tick or two to sadness, say, or even gloom. Until it wasn’t even unhappiness anymore (though I couldn’t stop thinking about them, I mean worrying), was out of
that
spectrum altogether and had entered some new stage with which I, for all my power to take melancholy’s measure and my perfect pitch for heartache, was unfamiliar.
Until it came to me. Until what bothered me so came to me. Just came to me. I hesitate to say with the force of revelation. (I mean I’ve been there. Hadn’t I spent almost an entire snow day with Holy Mother? Didn’t we hang together? Weren’t we pals? Best friends even? Hadn’t she already told me some fairly intimate stuff about her immediate family that wasn’t even in the Bible—I know, I looked it up—and that would probably be worth a small fortune to me and set me up for life if I could just get to the right people with it? Hadn’t I, for that matter, taught her to read? Anyway, the point is, revelation isn’t forceful at all. It’s subtle as sunlight, spotty and gradual as shade.)
It was taste. What I felt for those unrighteous souls in Pineoaks and Masada Gardens and everywhere salting Lud’s earth, turned out to be just a question of taste. It was a matter of civic, or even of hometown pride. Maybe not even taste finally, maybe nothing so grand as taste—didn’t I already tell you I’m no anti-Semite, and isn’t it already in the record that the big thing I got out of the time I spent with Holy Mother was chiefly to do with the joy parts and not much to do with religion at all, because I mean, what the heck, hey, I’m still a kid, there isn’t any Song of Bernadette going on here or anything—maybe only good old-fashioned boosterism, more like who I might want to win the Homecoming Game than anything as serious and important as God. And maybe in back of taste or boosterism or hometown loyalty I was just my mother’s little girl running on pure baleboste instinct. Maybe that’s the real reason I wanted them harrowed. As baleboste as Holy Mother herself. Wasn’t she the one who’d told me to think of it as a good, brisk spring cleaning?
I went to Pineoaks.
It was easier this time without the snow to deal with.
“Harrow Simon Fingerweiss.”
“Harrow Philip Pfeiffer,” I said, weeding the garden.
“Harrow Rose and Frances Feldman.”
“Harrow the Mitgangs, harrow the Blooms. Harrow the Helfmans and Goldstones.”
“Stop!”
shrieked Holy Mother. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Oh,” I said, “you scared me.”
“Just what do you think you’re doing?”
she demanded.
“Nothing,” I said. “I was sprucing up a bit. Did I do something wrong?”
“Oh, child,” she said, “oh, my poor child.”
Let the record show that I make no claims. Let the record show I’m no better than the next person. Let it show I make mistakes too. That just because the Holy Mother revealed herself to me and once chose to spend the better part of a day in my company doesn’t entitle me to go all hoity-toity, or get a swelled head, or lord it over the next guy. It didn’t give me any rights in the swanks and swaggers, high-and-mighties, or holier-than-thou’s at all. Where do I get off throwing
my
weight around, I mean?
Well, I don’t. I just don’t. Because it’s one thing to whine and complain and criticize the way your dad might do a certain thing, and another altogether to go and do it any better yourself. I’m only sorry for whatever confusion or inconvenience I may inadvertently have caused the Mitgangs and Helfmans, the Goldstones, Feldmans and Blooms. I’m only sorry if I got Philip Pfeiffer’s or Simon Fingerweiss’s hopes up. Though I perfectly understand that it’s too late and can make no difference to their families, I would like the record to show that none of this was my intention when I undertook to harrow their souls. I hereby apologize to Heaven, too.
On the other hand, how was I to know? Any more than my father? I’m not trying to set myself up as any big-deal Bible scholar or anything, but it’s my opinion—and soon I’m going to show how I got the wherewithal, as it were, to back this up—that the reason I fell into this trap is the old business of the forcelessness of revelation. (It’s already in the record how it’s subtle as sunshine, spotty as shade?) Rome nor anything else worth bubkes wasn’t built in a day. My experiences with Holy Mother have taught me
that
much, at least! (Don’t feel bad, Daddy.Those evangelists on TV have no more authority than Jews in this respect. “Accept Jesus, accept Jesus,” they cry. “Let Him come aboard your hearts.” As if that was all there were to it. As if Jesus has no say in the matter. As if all you have to do is declare the war and the day is yours. When it’s got nothing to do with stand up to be counted, sit down, Bingo! you’re saved.
Because what it’s really got to do with isn’t just declaring the war but laying the siege!
)
“Oh, oh,” groaned Holy Mother, “my poor, poor, sweet lost child,” and took me in her arms and guided me to one of the benches where she sat down and drew me onto her lap and held and comforted me, undone and forlorn, crooning “poor child, sweet child,” over and over again above me like we were figures in a Pietà.
The next day she started sending the saints. Because, make no mistake, this was
her
siege—Holy Mother’s. She went to a lot of trouble with me. An all-out effort.
(A footnote should go here, what, back when I was learning how to write term papers last semester, I was taught to stick beside an asterisk and write N.B., Latin for nota bene, or note well—a sort of disclaimer, a sort of alarm. My footnote has to do with the disinformation there is concerning the so-called supernatural “visions” or “manifestations” made by the saints and even the Godhead when It chooses to present.
(I understand this is only one girl’s experience, and how if anyone appreciates that there might be more than one way to skin a cat it would certainly be God, but it all seemed so direct and straightforward a procedure, I find it almost impossible to believe it’s ever, or ever very often, otherwise. I acknowledge it could be, and agree there are historical instances when it probably was, but I’ll lay you dollars to donuts those precedents were rare exceptions. For one, there’s the forcelessness-of-revelation thing. By which I never meant feints and codes, riddles and misdirection. Put yourself in Heaven’s place a minute. Walk a mile in its golden slippers. The name of the game is communication. Why revelation is forceless has less to do with the subtlety of the message than with the stubbornness, or even stupidity, of the person for whom it’s intended. Didn’t I already say I’m still a kid? So even if I’m wrong about the forcelessness of revelation, tell me, who’s more set in her ways than a kid? Who takes more convincing? Anyway, the point is, it’s always one belief looking to take over another belief. That’s the reason for the hard, though forceless, sell, the constant repetition. That’s the reason they kept coming at me from all sides, the reason it was always a little like Rush Week.
(So let the record show, and let me begin by laying to rest, some misconceptions.
(Ready?
(Divine agency does not work through the medium of barely legible images showing through certain kinds of paint in certain lights at certain times of day. It doesn’t rub itself into the warp and woof of cloth. The Shroud of Turin, for example, is no Polaroid of Jesus. I showed Holy Mother a picture from a magazine and asked her directly. You know what she said? “What,
my
Jesus? How do people come up with such mishegoss? This fella? Where’s the resemblance? This isn’t Jesus, this is just some stubby little gypsy.”
(And statues of saints neither weep nor bleed. They don’t wink or perspire or pull a long face. They never move their lips or open their mouths to speak. God doesn’t use ventriloquists’ dummies to make His points. Neither does He rely on Nature. Oh, He splits the Red Sea if there’s a need, or throws a Flood, but in the piecemeal One-on-one of a conversion He doesn’t like to disturb the topography. He’ll hesitate to pull a river from a rock, say, or lay down an instant copse of trees onto the barren earth like you’d put up a fence.