The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction (3 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

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

BOOK: The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction
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Kidnapped
YOZIP, slightly drunk, walked into a wall.
At once his arms were pinned to his sides by two strong Indians who he knew had been trailing him, and a gag that smelled of horse was thrust into his mouth. Yozip wasn’t sure they were Indians until he smelled the sour head of the brave squeezing his hard arm around the former peddler’s neck. Yozip fought as best he could, grunting, rumbling, coughing, and though they made no attempt to cut off his breath, he felt himself about to fall unconscious. He heard an aborted groan he assumed was his, and when he was once again sanely aware of life and fate, he found himself seated stiffly on Bessie, his mare, who had been tethered nearby, both arms bound with leather thongs behind his back, the horses trotting crisply in the direction of the high Western half-moon.
For a long while three horses, spread single file, moved swiftly along the shore of a stream, then turned into a forest, Yozip’s mare running rhythmically with the others, though her master, blindfolded and dismayed, had no idea where he was. He felt the shadows of trees flit by. Nobody tried to lead his horse, who moved on as if she had been born in the territory. Yozip felt the aftermath of a dyspeptic headache and cursed the beers he had drunk last night in the saloon. His bladder was cutting him and it shamed him to think how it would be if he was to let go his water in his buckskin pants.
The Indians galloped west, then abruptly changed direction and galloped east.
Now when Yozip counted the hoofbeats there was an additional horse and he realized that a third Indian had joined the company. Having no sense of his fate he began to fear it. The riders splashed across another stream, then galloped up a rising hill before descending into a long valley. Yozip sensed dawn risen on his head. When the offensive rag was snatched off his eyes, he counted five braves present, who were his captors and silent companions.
They were approaching an Indian village of large and small tepees decorated with symbols Yozip recognized from nowhere. His arms were unbound. He was allowed to dismount and was delivered into a tall tepee that rose like a mast above the earth. Then a gray-haired, weather-faced chief, in a ragged eagle-feather war bonnet, appeared and claimed his visitor. He pointed to a pit of cinders where Yozip was able to relieve himself without disgrace.
Having been kidnapped, he was already tensely running through his mind various plans of escape from this place he didn’t know and couldn’t describe.
The old Indian cast off his ceremonial bonnet with a suppressed yawn. He was at least seventy, with furrowed brow, deep eyes, tightly braided long hair, and a bent nose. For a minute he studied Yozip’s face with a blank expression, saying nothing. Yozip attempted a short smile, as if to determine if it was still working, but evoked no serious response from the chief.
The old Indian at last spoke. “I had forbid you to be hurt,” he said in English. “Did my braves hurt you?”
The ex-peddler, relaxed by the question, replied he hadn’t been mistreated.
“They gave me also a gless water.”
The chief grunted. He touched a finger to himself, then to Yozip. “We meet equal.”
Yozip agreed in principle.
The old Indian admitted that the white man’s tongue was not comfortable to him although he had once gone to a missionary school.
“It is a tongue of wind and noise. I do not trust it. But if you speak slow words I will answer to them.”
“Slow is slow,” Yozip agreed. “Excuse me that I tulk with my eccent. I am not an educated man.”
This confession embarrassed him but he felt he must make it.
The chief stared at his mouth as if to discover the source of the accent. Unable to, he grunted, which might mean he took a man’s word for what he said about himself.
“But I listen,” Yozip said, forgetfully touching his shirt pocket to give his marshal’s star a serious rub, though that was from another time and he was no longer a marshal. If anything, he was an unemployed carpenter adrift in a forest among a tribe of Indians. If the chief could use him to repair an old chest, or rebuild some shelves, they were in business. If not, he had no idea what the red men wanted of him.
The old chief, after a tick of silence, told Yozip he had seen him punish two evil men who had twice shot off his hat.
Yozip recalled the Indian who had skillfully caught his horse by the bridle and with a whisper calmed her. He explained to the chief that he was personally a peaceful man. “I am not anymore a town marshal. This is not my business.”
“My tribe is of peaceful people,” said the chief. “Only one white man has lost his life by an Indian’s hand in the time of my life. We do not kill white men, though they bring no good to us. We live in peace.”
Yozip, heartened, said it would interest him to know why the braves had kidnapped him last night. “What do you want from me?”
“We seek to do what the Great Spirit told us when this earth fell from the ocean sky. The sun and moon were candles. All men come from the Great Spirit, who made us born as men. His name is Quodish. Man spoke his words. They spoke then in one tongue. Quodish is the sun who is sacred.
“Is it not so?” he asked Yozip.
“To me this is reasonable,” Yozip answered. “And if a man tulks to me reasonable I don’t say to him no.”
“Once red man and white were brothers. What one brother had of two he gave one to the other.”
“Of cuss,” Yozip said. “Who needs everything?”
The chief nodded seriously. Yozip responded with a nervous laugh.
“You must speak my words to the white man,” said the chief. “Many moons past, when we signed the papers to live in peace in this valley, it was promised to us that white people would not interfere with our lives. Now we have been fifteen winters on this land that lives in our heart. But the settlers do what they please and now they push against us on this land we were given for our reservation when we signed your papers with the white man. But when gold was found in our hills they have made bad trouble for us. They cross our land when they wish and interfere with our cattle and horses, and they also brand their letters on the flesh of our animals. When we recognize our stock and claim them, they are quick to reach for their guns. The white men have loud voices and they lie and swear that our tribe does not belong in this valley. When I tell them about the papers I have signed they say these papers were meant to be for an entirely different valley. In disgust I turn away from them. They speak an endless stream of lies but we do not wish to fight with them. The Great Spirit who made us told me to speak these words. He said you would understand.”
“Me? Yozip?”
“You, with your name.”
“Aha,” said Yozip. “I give you my honest word that when I will go among people again, I will tulk to them and say what you told me. If you don’t hurt white men why should they steal from you your land?”
“There is further to say,” said the old chief. “As the moons change so does the world change. I have told my braves that the old moons are gone, and now is the time for new change, but never of our forests or sky.”
The chief nodded and Yozip nodded. They were sitting cross-legged on the ground.
“We are an ancient tribe,” said the chief. “Some call us the first
of this land. Our ancestors said they were the children of Quodish. We live in his word. We speak his name in our hearts. We touch our heads when we think of him. I say my words to him. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Of cuss,” said Yozip, though he did not say what the words might mean.
“We are descended from the first tribe.”
“This I understand. From the first comes the second.”
“Where do you come from?” asked the chief.
“I come from Russia. I am a socialist.”
“What is socialist?”
“We believe in a better world. Not to hurt but to help people.”
“These are our words too,” said the old chief. “We are the People.”
“Amen,” said Yozip.
“Aha,” said the chief, with a nod of his head. “Now I come to your adventures of last night.”
“Please.”
The chief said, “I wish you to know it is possible we might ask you to stay with us in our tribe if we think you are worthy. Perhaps you can help us. We will teach you many things we know. When the old ways die we must think and speak in better ways.”
Yozip answered almost in fright: “Please, Mr. Chief, I told you I am not educated. Also you hear how I tulk with my eccent. What can such a man do for you?”
“I do not hear this accent. It does not say any words in my ear. I have told my braves and sub-chiefs we must do more than in bygone moons to protect our tribe. They say they understand my words and will preserve them. They know and have agreed with me that if you go through our rites and vigil we may ask you to live with us and speak for us. We will ask you to speak from your heart. You must tell the white men to let us live in peace on our land. We will not be led like animals to another reservation. This is our dear land. My father told me when I was a young man and he was old and dying: ‘You may give up anything but you must never give up the land. The bones of your father will soon lie on the land and you must guard these bones forever.’”
The chief then said: “The white men must respect our ways. He must live in peace with us and not kill Indians with bad thoughts and words that burn. You must say this to them with drops of blood in your mouth.”
“Naturally,” Yozip said. “But how can I be an Indian if I was born in Zbrish, in Russia? This is a different country, far away, where was born my father and mother. I live now in America, and also maybe I am by now a citizen. I will know when I see my cousin Plotnick in Chicago, if you will be so kind to tell me where to buy a ticket for the train.”
“If our tribe accepts you,” said the chief without moving an eyelash, “you will be a red man of this tribe. The Great Spirit spoke this to me in words of smoke and fire. When you see yourself in a silver glass you will see your true color.”
Yozip looked around for something that might resemble the baptismal font he had seen one day when he had peeked into a church in Antwerp, on his way to America. What he saw now at the top of the tepee was a smoke hole through which a shaft of sunlight shone.
“Peace is the word of Quodish,” said the chief. “It is the best word.”
“Peace comes first,” Yozip said, “and after comes business.”
He considered wringing his hands for his freedom, but the chief then offered the ex-peddler his peace pipe. The smoke was strong and bitter but Yozip drained the hot pipe to its core, although in the process he felt like vomiting.
“Yah,” said the chief.
As Yozip clawed at the flap of the tepee to let in a breath of air and escape the heartburn and sickness he had got from the chief’s bitter pipe, he walked into a warrior entering the tent, who beheld him with contempt as he spat into Yozip’s eye.
The eye felt as though it had been plucked out of his head. The old chief, trembling with anger, threatened the warrior with severe punishment, as the young man reluctantly apologized.
The Tribesman
“THIS is the tepee of solitude.”
Yozip was led by the chief’s plump daughter to a thin, tall tepee. She was a woman of eighteen who wore a bone necklace and large circular metal earrings.
After her announcement she paid him scant attention. She was assured, calm, almost austere. He admired and feared her. An Old Country boy finds it hard to forget where he was born.
Their walk through the high grass, the sight of the long valley below sloping upward toward distant green hills, awoke in Yozip a hunger to be out of the forest and on his way. If only a man knew where to go. It shamed him still to think that one place was as good as another. What does one attach himself to?
Yozip had never been able to understand his inclination for a complex fate. Many men lived lives that flowed easily. Others tangled their fates with every word they spoke: Yozip was that type. Best say little.
He dutifully followed the Indian girl. She was good-looking though stout, her business if that was how she liked the shape of things. But he couldn’t call her fat without thinking pretty. Yozip warned himself to keep his mind clear and his options open. He guessed he would need all his wits, whether he expressed himself in plain Yiddish or by Indian signs.
“Our people use this tepee to meditate,” said the girl. “My father, our highest chief, wants you to be in touch with your self
so that you can feel the Great Spirit’s presence in the light on earth.”
“So why is it,” Yozip asked, “that everybody here speaks such a good English?”
“Not all,” said the chief’s daughter. “My father was raised in a Christian school after the murder of his father and mother in a raid by white settlers. So was I, many years later, with my father’s s permission, after the death of my mother. And Indian Head, my true friend, attended a school in Pocatello. When the People broke into two tribes my father became chief of the lower tribe, and now we are one tribe in this long valley.”
She said some of the braves spoke a few white words but not many. She said that once a few People had been enrolled in Christian schools in the past, but nobody was now.
“We detest all pale skins.”
“If I had another skin,” he told her, “I would take this off and put on the other.
“So who is Indian Head?” Yozip then asked. “What kind of a name is this for an Indian man?”
“He was so named in the Christian school. His name in our tongue means ‘He who fights eagles.’ His true name also means ‘Man of strong feeling.’”
She pressed two fingers to her lips.
“Indian Head loves me.”
Yozip offered sincere congratulations.
“So what is your name?” he asked.
“One Blossom. I was named after a small flower.”
“About flowers I don’t know much,” he confessed. “Where I was born was no flowers. If somebody found one she cooked it.”
One Blossom led Yozip into the tepee of solitude. She glanced in, listened to the heavy silence, and hastily left.
 
 
Yozip, sitting alone in the silent tepee with his thoughts in his fingers, tried to think out his situation. It looked as though the chief had plans to turn him into an Indian. On the other hand, he wanted to go back to his own life, not very rewarding but bound
to improve. America was a fine country. Who had ever heard of such opportunities for an uneducated man? He had already given his word he would do his best for the tribe, whatever that meant. Yozip felt strongly sympathetic to the Indians and their furrow-faced old chief.
He considered speaking to him and perhaps probing the chief’s s plans for him, and with luck maybe even being delivered home to his boardinghouse if the plans came to nothing much and the red man agreed to let him go.
Yozip thought he ought to try to convince the chief that what the People needed was a better man to represent them—certainly not a greenhorn, at least somebody educated in the lore and history of the tribe; someone who would know how to speak for them against the self-serving whites. He had heard of their dirty tricks against the Indians. But Yozip had serious doubts he could do anything for them, or they for him.
An Indian brave entered the tepee of solitude.
“Our chief commands your initiation to being.”
Yozip recognized the young warrior.
“Why did you spit me in my eye?” he cried. “This you learned in a Christian school?”
“It was meant to tell you to keep your nose out of Indian affairs.”
“My nose was invited by the chief.”
Indian Head glanced into the tepee, then turned to Yozip. “The chief of the People ordered me to make sure of your presence. The trials will begin now. This is your initiation.”
“Why should I have a trial if I didn’t do a crime?”
“These are trials, not a court trial. This is an initiation according to our customs.”
Yozip allowed himself to think of breaking away from Indian Head, leaping onto the back of his mare, and galloping off as fast as he could in whichever direction.
Instead, he accompanied the warrior to the chief’s tepee, where more than three dozen braves were crowded together, several of whom seemed to be in a mood of celebration. Some of the Indians stared at Yozip as if he were a small animal they preferred not to name.
Among them was an elderly medicine man with a missing front tooth, wearing a headdress of purple flowers. He shook his flowered head.
“How,” he greeted Yozip.
The old chief frowned at the expression.
The medicine man frowned at Yozip.
The chief, standing near them, addressed the ex-peddler: “We will now begin the ceremony of your entrance into our tribe.”
Maybe it’s like a bar mitzvah, Yozip thought. If it is, why should I say no?
The chief addressed the sub-chiefs, warriors, medicine man, and braves in a dialect strange to Yozip’s ears. He spoke solemnly in words that sounded like Chinese, though Yozip was sure he had never heard Chinese; yet he would not be surprised if the dialect he was listening to resembled it. A remarkable thing about a language was that it sometimes sounded like a different language. He remembered once hearing a Hungarian play in Warsaw that, for all he got from it, might have been Chinese. On the other hand, his Russian was fair and he was tempted to address the chief with a quotation from Pushkin, but didn’t want to astound him. The chief addressed him with probing eyes as he said these words in the language of the People:
“I have chosen a man whose bravery I witnessed, and whose words I trust, to be among us as one of our brothers. I may ask him to speak in our names to some of the whites, and once more tell them who we are, and why our words and ways must be honored. He knows he must pass our tests of initiation, and if he does I shall order you, my people, to accept him as I already do deep in my bowels, and as I have been instructed by the Great Spirit, whose presence I feel on my back and shoulders and in the depths of my being.”
“Ha yai,” said the chief.
“Yai ha,” said the medicine man in the purple-flowered hat, breaking into a long-legged dance. The chief clapped his hands, then spoke first in Indian words and then in English: “Braves, warriors, medicine man, and sub-chiefs: I will speak to you. Listen: I propose this Yozip, who seems to me to be a good man, to work
and speak in the name of our tribe. You must honor his efforts.”
Those who listened answered with silence.
The old chief clapped his hands and pointed in the direction of a flock of Indian ponies, among them Yozip’s mare chewing grass in a nearby hollow.
“We begin our ceremonies and rites.”
Then he said the same in their tongue, and the Indians broke their silence in muttered words.
At this moment One Blossom entered the chief’s tepee in the company of three squaws. He, observing their entrance, spoke to them: “I will order my daughter, One Blossom, to accept her new brother under these conditions I have spoken, after they are justified by rites of initiation.”
One Blossom turned pale and Indian Head swallowed his spittle as if he had been chewing a dead mouse.
The three squaws standing nearby whispered among themselves. Indian Head threw up his mouse head as the medicine man in purple chanted a blessing in reverse.
The first contest, Yozip learned, was to be a circular horse race to a rotting oak tree about three miles away, then around the split oak and back. First returned, first winner, and bets were permitted by the braves, though the chief himself thought it was a waste of good beads. Yozip had not participated in a horse race even when he was a marshal in charge of public safety, although he had once led a Fourth of July parade. But now he was personally instructed concerning the rules of the horse races, as some of the braves sniggered. He also listened attentively to the chief’s instructions in his native tongue, trying to pick up a word here and there.
The ex-peddler, edgy on his mare, hoped to perform well, yet feared he would make a mess of the old chief’s faith in him as a talisman meant to come up with some sort of unusual performance. It was not only a question of the importance of the race, but it would also give him a chance to explore the surroundings on Bessie’s back, and maybe make practical plans to escape to his boardinghouse.
The five riders lined up by a stand of pines, four braves seated on slender, speedy ponies. Indian Head rode a small white horse,
Corn Talk sat on a prancing chestnut, and Foolish Eyes reined an Appaloosa. Seven Fists was mounted on a strong gray, and Yozip, the stranger, sat on Bessie’s warm back.
The chief cleared his breath of a pocket of phlegm, then uttered a strange harsh cry that shook Bessie to her withers and threw her off stride for six steps. Indian Head and his friends had streaked past Yozip on his mare, but Bessie impelled herself forward in leaps and exalted bounds, and was soon pursuing the Indian racers and gaining quickly on their lithe ponies.
The course was a short one, about three miles through rough turf and then into what might be a section of smooth terrain.
At the first half circle Indian Head led on his white charger, pursued by Corn Talk wearing black braids, and followed by Yozip’s s Bessie, making nightmare noises as though in pursuit of a dream; she quickly overtook Corn Talk, then Indian Head, and completed the circle with her immigrant master triumphantly in the lead.
The chief grunted when Yozip stopped before him as if expecting his blessing; One Blossom stared at the white stranger in embarrassment; at the same time her poignant eye met Indian Head’s in an expression of regret at his loss of the race. Since no one had cheered for him, Yozip let out a sob of self-approval and Bessie produced a gay fart.
 
 
When he had dismounted after the horse race, Yozip was surrounded by the braves he had competed with and had left in the dust. He extended both hands to forgive them, or to acknowledge congratulations, but got instead a sharp slap on the mouth by each Indian. One by one each plucked five red hairs from Yozip’s inflamed chin.
And the chief slapped him on the face on three separate occasions.
In this way they will make me into a red man, Yozip thought. So who needs paint when a slap shows better?
The ex-peddler remembered Gussie, his mother, plucking feathers off a dead hen.
At the chief’s whispered request Indian Head informed Yozip
that the forthcoming trial would measure his skill with a bow and arrow, and his courage under pressure. Yozip then explained he wasn’t sure about his courage, and he barely knew a bow from an arrow. His landlady’s son in the boardinghouse had once shown him a picture of an Indian gentleman in a fur cap shooting a tufted arrow with a long bow. The ex-peddler asked Indian Head if he would mind a fistfight instead. Yozip hated fighting in any form but occasionally he had such an experience.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t like to hurt somebody who doesn’t hurt me.”
“I don’t like fist games,” said Indian Head.
“So let’s play something else.”
Indian Head said the chief wouldn’t permit that. It would nullify the contest and Yozip wouldn’t be allowed to enter the tribe.
The ex-peddler feigned disappointment. He sighed audibly. Indian Head then produced a long large sheep-horn bow and cutting arrow. To test them he aimed at a tiny cloud in the sky. A black hawk striving for altitude shrieked and fell to the ground. Neither Indian Head nor Yozip had seen the bird begin its fall and both were astonished.
Bessie bolted, attempting to run, but Yozip grabbed her by the tail and deftly held tight until the horse, kicking at imaginary enemies, gradually calmed down.
The Indian braves, standing in a circle around their venerable chief, now looked at the peddler as if he might be human. Though on the verge of crying gevalt after he had been slapped red and raw by them, and chastened by the objectivity of the chief, Yozip forcibly biting his lips managed to keep his mouth shut.

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