The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction (10 page)

Read The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction Online

Authors: Bernard Malamud

Tags: #Fiction, #Jewish, #Short Stories (Single Author)

BOOK: The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction
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The Indian raised the white flag, waving it back and forth.
Then to Jozip’s horror a shot rang out.
“Don’t shoot!” he cried out. “We come to be peaceful!”
He shouted as Small Brain, with a choked grunt, fell off his horse and toppled to the ground. The white flag fell with him. His horse, whinnying, bolted away from the sound of rifle shot, but Bessie, shivering, remained firmly present.
“No, no,” Jozip cried, waving both arms. “We come in peace.”
He was at once surrounded by a group of soldiers with raised rifles, one of whom was Colonel Gunther.
“You fools,” cried Jozip. “We came here in peace to tulk good words. Why do you shoot us if we carry a white flag? Don’t you know what it means to carry a white flag? This is an international
sign. Everybody must respect it if we say we live like civilized human beings.”
“That is more than enough outta you,” snapped Colonel Gunther. “Somebody go get the bamboo cage for this wise-ass.”
“You go against the law,” Jozip said. “We came to you to be peaceful and also we carry a white flag.”
“You know what you can do with your flag.”
General Stong appeared. “What the hell is coming off here?” Seeing Jozip, he laughed aloud. “My, our foreign friend is with us again.” He then announced loudly, “You are a deserter of the United States of America. In the name of the U.S. government I arrest you.”
“I have already made that arrest,” said Colonel Gunther.
“I’m making it official,” said the general. “Get the bamboo cage,” he ordered two soldiers.
“Don’t try to put me in a cage,” cried Jozip. “This cage is against the law to put an Indian in such a thing!”
The colonel slapped his face.
“You can kill me first,” Jozip said.
“It would be simpler to break your ass,” said the colonel. “Now get down here and slide your body into that cage.”
“Shoot me first,” Jozip said.
The colonel struck Jozip’s face with his fist. The chief’s nose bled.
Another general appeared on his horse. He was a red-bearded man whom Jozip had never seen before. He looked the Indian over carefully.
“Why are you hitting this Indian?” he asked the colonel.
“That’s no Indian,” said the colonel. “He calls hisself Chief Joseph, but that is a big lie.”
“Why did you slap him?” said the general. He was a burly man with a large mustache.
“He wasn’t following my orders, sir.”
“Why should he if you were slapping him around?”
“An order is an order, sir.”
“Orders are like everything else. There are good ones and bad ones.”
“I had General Stong’s permission, sir.”
“Did he?” asked the general.
“He might of wanted to but he didn’t ask me directly,” said General Stong.
“The Indian chief is free to go,” said the general on the horse. “You are free to go,” he said to Jozip, making a wide movement of freedom with both arms. The officers looked at him as if he had gone mad, but the general fastened his gaze on them and stared them down.
“You are free to go,” he repeated to Jozip.
“Denks,” Jozip said. He mounted Bessie and took off at a gallop, urging the mare on, even threatening her with a whipping if she slowed down, until he thought she might come to dead stop to protest his threats. But a whistling bullet he feared might break his back made no sound in his ears.
 
 
Later in the morning Jozip sent back the young officer who had been held in the woods. The lieutenant thanked him sincerely. Jozip grunted and gave him an Indian pony to take him back to the army camp.
That night the Indian chief returned to the vicinity of the soldiers’ camp with two braves, and in the pitch dark they found and buried Small Brain’s stiffened body.
The next morning, after they had broken camp and were once more on the way to Canada, Jozip sought out Indian Head and said to him, “You were right and I was wrong. The whites did not honor the flag we carried. They shot at it the minute they saw it. I barely escaped with my life and our friend Small Brain is dead. I should not have made contact with the white men. They can’t be trusted.”
“Why do you always talk with shit in your mouth,” said Indian Head.
The Last Battle
ONE DAY IN September, the People, still moving northward, where the world was frozen white, beheld a body of galloping troops across a wide river. The Americans, a cavalcade of sixty horsemen, had discovered the Indians and were moving against them at a crossing point of the river. Jozip scanned the soldiers with a pair of binoculars that a cross-eyed brave had given him after the battle of Buffalo Hills.
“What do you see?” Last Days asked.
“I don’t think we will have to fight them,” Jozip said, pointing upstream. “They are trying to ford the river, but it is too high for an easy crossing. They will lose supplies and some of their horses. We will let them cross the river, but when they have come to this shore, we will be gone when they arrive. After that we will be invisible to them. They won’t know where we have gone, and by the time they discover our tracks, we will once more be on our way. My thought is that Canada can’t be more than twenty miles to the north. That is what the map says.”
The braves who had surrounded their leaders to hear them talk about their next move heard little concerning future plans. Later, talking among themselves in the lodges and tepees, they praised their chief’s astuteness and his strength as a warrior. Usually he read a situation clearly, as it was, and not as he thought it might be. One of their sub-chiefs had led them into nasty scrapes; but this one, whom the tribe had adopted and made their leader, Jozip himself, thought of and carried out moves that had almost magical
consequences, once, for instance, stealing two hundred government mules, all stupidly left untethered. That was a successful foray, inconvenient for the white soldiers, who were then forced to comb the fields for miles before rounding up a single mule braying on a hilltop.
Who is doing this to me? Jozip thought, or am I doing it to myself? When I take chances I feel a big—almost too big—excitement, as though I had poured a two-quart pitcher of beer into a one-quart glass. I know the People are happy when we outwit the whites, although I have no idea what they will do or say if the white men should outwit me. The old chief who is dead reluctantly instructed me in matters of warfare. Jozip remembered in his first battle being aimed at by a soldier fifty feet away who was shot in the face by an Indian brave riding his pony behind Jozip.
The braves asked Indian Head what he thought of Jozip as a warrior, and at first he refused to reply. “Have we nothing more to do than play games of fantasy? I will say that he seems to be a good leader, but I am not sure of him and will watch him as the skirmishes increase. So far I can say that he hasn’t made any big stupid mistakes that some other chiefs have foolishly made.”
Then one brave spoke aloud to Indian Head: “Do you, by some chance, expect to replace him as our leader whose eyes sweep the ground in a glance as he leads us north?”
Indian Head did not directly reply to his question.
“Let us watch what he does as he goes through the forested mountains on our road to Canada. If he can go through them able to read the lines of his map, risking no foolishly extended battles, and holding us together and properly fed, then when we come out of the mountains and descend to the Canadian plains with our women and children safe, I will have no bad names to call him. Nor will I rail against his leadership, even though I know there are some among us who could lead better than he, without his nervousness and signs of frequent doubt.”
Once Chief Jozip had responded to the appearance of a detachment of soldiers across a wide field by signaling the People to enter a wood. They quickly followed his orders, and soon a small band
of troops trotted by, not knowing how close they had come to being ambushed. “But why didn’t we ambush them?” one Indian complained. “They hadn’t seen us enter the woodland, and we could have trapped them and slit open their throats before they could think what we were doing. Why didn’t we take advantage of the opportunity to wipe out of this world a few more of our enemies?”
“In sparing them,” Jozip said, “we have earned some credit with the Great Spirit, who protects us in the same way we protected them, by letting their soldiers live as they went by these woods.”
“Let us not fool around with words,” said Indian Head.
Jozip replied that he had answered the brave as honestly as he could. He was then tempted to flee the Indians and their pursuers the first chance he got.
Then a long thought crossed his mind how that might happen. Suppose Jozip had gone hunting alone one day, refusing to look at the pinched faces of the starving children who had less to eat than ever before. Jozip had waited most of the day with his rifle on his knees, watching for a deer to appear out of the woods. He would fire with his rifle on one knee and would knock the animal off its feet and with his knife slit its throat, saying a blessing. Then he would carry the bloody carcass on his shoulder to the Indians, who would have wondered why he had left the tribe so early in the morning without a word of explanation. They had not known what he intended to do, though they had tracked him and guessed his intentions, but weren’t sure until they saw his bloodstained hands and face. Jozip would then hand the heavy carcass to the braves who had wordlessly appeared. He would not tell them it had been his first desire to flee from his brothers, even though he could not bring himself to do so.
 
 
One day behind the Indians, an American general and his troops caught up with them unexpectedly. Knowing that he outnumbered the People three to one, he had arranged his men on a rise that looked into the valley below. The general had brought his artillery, a four-inch howitzer and two Gatling guns, and began to spray shot
at the dumbfounded Indians. Jozip realized at once that he must keep the army from going around a nearby ravine that would give the soldiers easy access to the Indian camp.
As the braves pulled and pushed their women and children out of sight, a number of Indians fought their way up the side of the hill and toppled the cannon to the ground. Some of the braves spat at it, others dragged it with ropes along the ground until it sank in a mud hole; then with a cheer, they went on fighting as they had before. At the same moment Jozip and his band of Indians attacked. He did this with twenty-four men. Their sharpshooters were so effective that the whites at the side of the hill were compelled to go on the defensive. The People were able to hold their lines throughout the daylight hours. Now the white troops, needing water, were pinned down by the Indian sharpshooters, so the Indian camp in the valley was comparatively safe. The battle temporarily stopped and renewed itself in the morning.
But the People were tired of fighting in the dark and wanted to end the engagement. They were not conditioned mentally and physically for long battles, but were accustomed to fight or leave as they chose. Jozip slept hurriedly for twenty minutes and woke to wonder where he was. The whites had about two hundred men. The Indians had fewer than a hundred on their line. They stepped away from the firing line a few at a time, and withdrew through the woods to last night’s camping ground without the soldiers knowing that the number of their foe was diminishing.
Then Jozip regretfully informed the council of twelve that he could no longer stand the losses in battle of some of their best warriors, and the continuing pain of the People, so he had come before the brothers of the council with a request that the People surrender.
“We have fought well,” he said, “but the Great Spirit has turned away his head to our needs. We cry for peace but his ears are deafened by the noise of men. The sounds we make are strange to him. The People must prepare for surrender. I speak with sorrow in my heart, with lamentation for those who have fought so well and never won, though our spirits are still indomitable.”
None of the sub-chiefs argued against these words, but Indian
Head showed contempt for them, and he mocked the warriors for keeping Jozip chief of the tribe.
Jozip, resisting tears, thought of surrender as his last act of pacifism. Where will I live? he thought. I have nowhere to live.
The next morning he rose and put on his best buckskin shirt and his buckskin trousers, and hung three strings of glass beads around his neck. He took his battle sword out of its case and went from one tepee to another asking the braves and their women to accompany him, so that all, in the future, would have proof of the words they spoke if ever the whites should question them. About fifty Indian men and women offered to walk with him to the campgrounds of the army.
Jozip then handed his sword to a general, who greeted him respectfully and asked him to carry the sword to the colonel.
“The colonel is no friend of our people,” Jozip said. He carried the sword to the colonel. “This is yours,” he said. “I have no need for it anymore.”
The colonel took the sword and kissed it. “I had my mind set on having it,” he said to the officers present, “and I thank the general for passing it along to me. Not everybody gets what he deserves and I sure am happy I got it.”
He lifted the sword and kissed it again.
Jozip felt slightly sick to his stomach.
He told himself that he must in his sadness not cry. He turned to watch the windy snow rising from the ground and he thought of himself as homeless.
The next day the Indian warriors, the People, were rounded up and given places on freight cars going to a reservation in Missouri that they had all heard of as a miserable place, although the good general had told them he would help to get them settled in a Northwest reservation they had once thought of asking the Great White Father in Washington to give them. Last Days said that he thought he would not live to see it happen. “We are being sent to a place of death and my thought is that I will die there. This is my only thought.”
The moaning of the Indians began as the freight cars were moving along the tracks.

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