A Blessing on the Moon

by Joseph Skibell

  The bucket offers other treasures: a pair of pointed hammers, two railroad ties, boots with rows of spiked teeth across the toes and heels.

  According to Kalman, I am to curl like a worm along the upper and lower surfaces of the moon’s great horns, digging in with my feet, hoisting myself along with my arms, and pulling the chain behind me like a thread.

  “The difficult part,” Kalman says, “will be pushing through the bones.”

  He leads me to the edge.

  “We suggest you proceed feet first,” calls Zalman.

  “With your belly flat against the moon.”

  Zalman assures me, “This is the most efficient procedure.” He is growing impatient with my delays, I can tell.

  Kalman returns to the pier and to the large spindle on which the lengths of chain are coiled.

  “I’ll be here at the spindle, letting out the chain. Should anything untoward happen—”

  “Which it will not!” interjects Zalman, from above.

  “Which it will not,” repeats Kalman, “but if, God forbid, it does, I have only to reel you in and you’ll be perfectly safe again on the pier.”

  There is no gentlemanly way out, and so I kneel on the far side and look over the moon’s glossy edge. It is cold against my knees, and the sensation makes me laugh. However, under Zalman’s scrutiny, I suppress my hilarity. I turn, so that I’m facing Kalman, and lower my abdomen against the moon’s slick hide. It burns with a sharp sting and I very nearly lose consciousness.

  “Easy,” Zalman cautions. “Take it slowly. Allow your body to adjust.”

  Kalman makes the chain taut, until it pulls over my head and against my back. I take the railroad spikes, one in each hand, and force them into the crunchy soil. My body is now pressing entirely against the moon. What little blood I have rushes to my head. A tickling from someplace beneath the surface caresses my belly in waves. I can feel it through my coat and my vest. It’s as though a thousand tiny fish were puckering my skin, their tingling kisses bringing with them a pervasive warmth. I cry out involuntarily.

  “What?” shouts a concerned Zalman.

  “It’s nothing, nothing!” I shout back.

  I descend an arm’s length, crunching knee-deep into the sea of bones.

  75

  Narrowing my eyes, I lower my head in, chin first, my mouth tightly shut, my own skull disappearing beneath the others. The skeletal mass is not as dense as I had feared, and I am able to sink into it, scrambling down and clinging to the moon’s glistening side with my spikes.

  “It’s only me,” I whisper. “You needn’t be afraid.”

  Her gentle light, through the weave of dry bones, is not without its beauty. Skulls stare at me with darkened sockets, grimacing through gnashed or broken teeth. With each of my blind steps, bones rattle and crunch, shifting to make room, their sounds reaching my ears as though through water.

  “You cannot stay here,” I tell her. “You mustn’t punish yourself. What good does it do, hiding in such a desolate place?”

  Down, down, down I go, and it isn’t long before I’m dangling beneath her jagged spine. I release the spikes from one side, attaching them to the other. My arms and my elbows ache. “Don’t drop me,” I plead. Hanging by one arm to her chine, I reach into my pockets for the pointed hammers. Arching my back, I struggle, biting in with my spiked boots, throwing hammers wildly above my head.

  The first revolution around the thickest part of her girth is, of course, the longest. Girdling her in chains, I am up and out finally, crawling along on my hands and knees, collapsing upon her bosom.

  Kalman and Zalman cheer. Kalman steps near to assist me.

  “Should he take a break?”

  “Do you need a break, Reb Chaim?”

  “How does he feel?”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Fine, fine,” I cry, rotating my arms and sitting up, while Kalman dusts bone fragments from my clothing.

  With Kalman’s aid, I tighten the first loop of chain around the hooked tip and fasten it with clips. Kneeling again, I climb around again, and then again, three revolutions, with Kalman easing the chain carefully from his spindle. I repeat the process on the other side, inching myself along the underbelly with my spikes and my hammer tongs, until the moon is laced in six strong loops of chain.

  “And now how do you feel, Reb Chaim?” Zalman shouts down.

  “Very cold,” I say. “But, curiously, also warm. There’s a quality of warmth underneath, from inside.”

  “From the source of its light, I imagine,” he says.

  Kalman unlocks the chain from my waist, he removes the harness, and I’m invited to sit on the pier with my feet in a bucket of steaming water, wrapped in five heavy blankets. Kalman slides agilely to the center of the moon’s curving surface. There, he stands on a stepladder and raises the chain high above his head, linking it to Zalman’s suspended hook.

  76

  Zalman descends from the narrow bar. Kalman skates back to his place on the pier, carrying the stepladder with him. Hastily, I dry my feet and return them to my shoes. I don’t want to miss anything. Except for a soreness in my upper back and forearms, I’m feeling quite myself again.

  The two brothers-in-law practically run to the edge of the forest where, with a pair of needle-nose pliers, Kalman makes the final adjustments on a grimy motorized winch. Where all this machinery comes from, I have no idea. I cross my arms and wait for further instructions. Zalman murmurs a blessing and then, bracing his foot against the machine, pulls the ripcord with all his might. The motor starts up with a barking cough, before shuddering back into cold silence. Zalman yanks the cord once more, but the machine only splutters reluctantly. On the third pull, some essential thing ignites within it and the motor roars like an impatient bull.

  Grunting with satisfaction, Zalman wipes the grease from his hands on a dirty chamois. He opens the throttle, adjusts a latch. The spiral bevels bite into each other, reeling the steel cable in, until the chain loses all its slack. The motor grinds against the resistance of the moon’s great weight.

  “Easy, careful now,” Zalman whispers to himself, monitoring the winch’s speed.

  Slowly, the bones give way and the moon is lifted up. The winch grinds without hurry until the crescent is finally exposed, suspended in its chains. Bones drop from it like water from a hooked whale. My eyes accustom themselves to its intense new light. The bright opalescence engraves deep shadows into the faces of my two companions. Soon, however, it becomes apparent that the moon’s surfaces are not clear, but have been mottled, as though with dark and purple bruises.

  “The core is spongy, as opposed to its harder, icier crusts,” Zalman says when I draw his attention to these discolorations. “It must’ve drawn the blood into itself.”

  The sight nauseates me.

  “Luckily, we brought push brooms,” says Kalman, presenting one to each of us. He and Kalman exchange sly smiles: to their minds, nothing has been left to chance. God has provided for everything.

  We return to the pier with the brooms.

  In the vat where I steamed my feet, Kalman now prepares a brew of seawater and silt. The moon hangs, quavering, a few feet above our heads, beetling like a hoisted boat. Following Kalman’s lead, I dip the bristles of my brush into the briny vat and raise the broom against the moon’s curved side. Zalman does this as well, each of us concentrating on a different section. Standing on the stepladders when we need them, we scrub and we rub, and although the mottling lightens, the stain is too deep. Our burnishing cannot make it disappear. Again on ladders and with dark glasses to protect our eyes, we rub the moon down, drying it with towels until it gleams even more brightly than before, despite the mottling. Forever now, the moon will appear this way, no longer the smooth and gleaming pearl I remember from my youth.

  Also, I can’t help commenting on the many pockmarks its surface has sustained.

  “Bullet holes,” is Zalman’s grim-lipped reply.

  We
climb off our ladders and fold them away. The brooms we store upon our cart, leaning them against the vat of seawater. I rub my hands together. They are coarse and dry with blisters. All that remains now is to return the moon to its niche in the proper quadrant of the sky. Kalman must be thinking the same thing, for together, we turn to Zalman, who stands upon the pier, his arms hugging one another, as though he were shivering.

  He meets our gazes. “Gentlemen,” he says, pinching at his sleeves, “I have no idea how to proceed.”

  77

  “Perhaps,” Kalman suggests, “if we untie the chains, the moon may float on its own into place.”

  Dark planes shift across Zalman’s hawk-like face. He shrugs gloomily. “Nothing I understand of the process gives me any confidence an approach of that sort will succeed.”

  I clear my throat. “May I suggest we recite the sanctification over the moon. Whether it helps or not, surely it wouldn’t be inappropriate.”

  Zalman’s spirits seem to lift, if only slightly, and the three of us gather close together. At first, however, no one can remember the words of the prayer, so long has it been since anyone had cause to recite them.

  “How does it begin?” I ask. “Does anyone remember?”

  78

  “Hallelujah, praise God?” This is Kalman’s shy suggestion.

  “That’s it!” Zalman cries and immediately the sentences flow into the dried riverbeds of our brains.

  “Hallelujah! Praise God,” our voices rise as one. “Praise God from the sky, praise Him in the Heavens! Praise Him all His angels, praise Him all His Hosts! Praise Him sun and moon, praise Him stars of light. Praise Him skies of skies, and the waters above the skies!”

  The words burst from our dammed hearts. And at the appropriate passage, we address the moon itself, quivering above us, so near.

  “Blessed be your Former, your Maker, your Possessor, your Creator!” We repeat the formula the required three times.

  “Just as I leap towards you but cannot touch you,” we say, leaping into the air, “may my enemies not touch me with their evil! Let them fall from dread and terror! Let them be as still as stones!”

  We turn to one another and exchange the traditional greeting, “Peace to you. And to you, great peace,” our eyes moist with tears.

  “Let every soul praise God,” we whisper. “Let every soul praise God.”

  We utter the rest of the psalms and benedictions, our arms bracing one another for support.

  “The Eternal will bless us, all peoples of the earth, all peoples of the earth. Amen.”

  At Zalman’s directive, we station ourselves at key positions, near the clips that fasten the chains in which the moon is bound. Zalman himself climbs aboard the moon’s gleaming prow, planting his feet in the middle. On the count of three, Kalman and I release the clips from the twin horns. The chains unravel and fall from the moon like clattering snakes. The moon rocks perilously and we scramble for firm ground. Zalman, balancing himself, barely has time to release the hook and jump to the pier, before the crescent crashes with the smashing force of gravity, sending bone fragments flying in all directions.

  “Look out!”

  We turn against the bony gale, teeth and knuckles pelting our backs, pounding into us like hail stones.

  When it’s safe to look, the moon is once again stranded in its bed, a pregnant woman who cannot lift herself without assistance.

  “Zalman, Zalman, I’m so sorry!” I say, running to him.

  But my words are ridiculous and small. Absurd to comfort Zalman, as though this enterprise were his alone.

  He sits on an overturned bucket, his back bent, his beard in his hands, staring at the luminous wreck before him.

  I doubt he even hears me.

  79

  I myself am about to sit, when, nearby, a tree limb breaks. Its cracking and peeling, familiar to me from a life in the lumber business, fills the air and a metallic voice cries out “God in Heaven be praised!!! Whooooooo!!!”

  I search the tree line. Against the starry patterns of night, the black outline of a figure can be seen spiraling to the ground.

  By the time we reach him, at the far end of the field, the man is up, limping in small circles, attempting to dust the debris of the forest from his black and somber clothing. My hopes of seeing my Rebbe are once again dashed. This man is far too old and with a whitened head, too delicate and so very frail.

  “Old man, what were you doing in the trees?” I ask, offering an arm for him to lean on, while Kalman and Zalman brush the leaves and pine cones from his shoulders.

  “Chaimka,” he says. “It’s me!”

  The voice has grown reedy with age, but it is unmistakably his. He raises his burning blue eyes, so bright I can see them even in this dark, and looks at me from beneath the brim of his black fedora. The skin, tightening against sharp cheekbones, creates a rueful smile.

  “Once again, don’t you even know your own Rebbe?”

  “Rebbe?” I say. But it cannot be! Surely, this is not my Rebbe, but his own father, or even his grandfather, both of whom were saints. “Rebbe, how old you have become!” I say. No, it’s impossible. It’s as though an artist had sketched over his portrait with chalk, whitening the outline and all the small details. His frame remains thin and vigorously upright, it’s true, but he must be nearing ninety!

  “Stop gawking, Chaimka,” he says. “It’s me. It’s me.”

  The two Hasids and I escort our revered master to the bucket, where we make him sit, despite his protest that nothing is the matter. Kalman prepares a glass of water, which the Rebbe drinks awkwardly, spilling a line across his snowy beard. With the back of his hand, he pats the spot until it’s dry.

  “I’ll get used to it again,” he chirps. “I’ll get used to it again.”

  He stands and stretches his arms, folding them behind his back.

  “Now what do we have here, what do we have here?” He warbles this, strutting to the edge of the pit, his beak-like nose leading him there. He turns his head sharply, this way and that, from one horn of the moon to the other.

  “Who can explain this?”

  He looks over his shoulder through one cold eye.

  “Rebbe,” Zalman steps forward. “We followed the map, which I devised.”

  “Followed the map? Good, good,” the Rebbe clacks.

  “After waiting for Reb Chaim.”

  “Exactly as you specified,” Kalman forces his way into the conversation, hungry for the Rebbe’s attention and his praise.

  “He appeared, as I said he would, did he not?” the Rebbe nods.

  “Exactly according to your exact specifications,” Kalman repeats needlessly.

  “We excavated the pit,” Zalman says without pride.

  “Yes, I see, very good.”

  “The moon was there, beneath the bones.”

  “Beneath the bones, yes, I see,” the Rebbe’s eyes sparkle, catching the light of the moon. Although Zalman may berate himself, that he managed to achieve even this much is not insignificant, and the Rebbe is obviously pleased.

  “I slept on it, Rebbe,” Kalman offers, a clumsy attempt to garner more attention for himself, “so that it not disappear.”

  “You slept on it, did you, Reb Kalman?”

  “Yes, Rebbe, I did.”

  “In chains, I suppose?”

  “Yes, Rebbe.”

  “Ah, what dreams you must have had, what dreams!” the Rebbe looks at him directly.

  “Hoops, Rebbe, I dreamt of hoops.”

  “Ah, yes, the hoops, the hoops! Remind me to tell you of my own experiences one day.”

  “Yes, Rebbe,” says Kalman, stepping back. “I will very much enjoy hearing of them.”

  “But now, as you can see, Rebbe,” Zalman interrupts, doggedly putting forth his despairing account. “The moon is free, but we have been unable to force it to rise.”

  “You recited the benedictions?”

  “Of course.”

  “At Reb Ch
aim’s suggestion,” Kalman adds, in a showy display of generosity.

  “Hmm … Well, then, this is a complicated matter.”

  The Rebbe circumnavigates the pit with vigorous strides. We have difficulty keeping up with him and tag along in an uncertain gaggle, waiting to supply whatever information he might need.

  Every now and again, he stops and fixes his eyes upon the sunken crescent. During these intervals, we also cease our walking, the three of us, and gaze ignorantly at the moon, hoping to see there whatever the Rebbe himself is seeing.

  “Chaimka,” his thin voice finally calls to me and, for a moment, I hear in it the familiar raven’s clack.

  “Yes, Rebbe?” I leave the two Hasids and join him. The moon lies, swollen, at our feet. I am a head taller than my Rebbe and, for the life of me, as I watch his face now, standing behind him, I find it impossible to believe he ever was a crow.

  “Chaimka,” this the Rebbe says, so quietly and almost like a child. “Hold my coat so I don’t fall in.”

  The Rebbe’s shoe dislodges a small stone that jumps over the edge and into the pile of broken bones. The little rock dances, pinging against one hollow stick to the next, before spinning down a crack and disappearing for good.

  “I understand,” I say.

  With the Rebbe leaning over the edge of the pit, I dig in my heels, keeping the tails of his long black coat bunched together in both hands, so that neither he nor I fall in.

  Raising his arms, the Rebbe shouts, “In the name of God, and with the merit of my righteous ancestors, I command you, O fallen luminary, to return to your place in the Heavens above!”

  Zalman and Kalman move near. They stand behind us, peeking over each other’s shoulders. The Rebbe takes three steps back and smoothes down the wrinkled tails of his jacket.

  The moon grinds and chafes against the bones, as though waking from a slumber. Slowly, it begins to float and soon is swaying above our heads, bathing us in its light. If the wind happened to blow it even slightly in our direction, we might be crushed, should it fall. And for a moment, my heart grows faint with terror. But no, it ascends steadily, lurching from side to side, gaining momentum and speed.