The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction (6 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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The Settler
ONE NIGHT three young braves beheld a white settler wandering in their woods. He was carrying an empty kerosene lamp, and every forty feet or so he sat down in the snow and tried to light the lamp. The wind blew out his sulphur matchsticks. The settler shook out the dead matchsticks and one by one flipped them over his shoulder into the bushes.
“He is in our woods,” whispered Small Horse. “He moves as if he is drunk.”
“He must be looking for a place to piss,” said Windy Voice.
“He’s spying on us,” Foxglove said. “We are fifty miles from the white fort. The big-ass colonel has sent him to spy on us to see if the tribe is getting ready to leave the valley.”
The three braves gravely observed the white settler sitting in the snow watching the rising half-moon.
“Let us show ourselves,” Small Horse whispered. “We will say we are ghosts. He will jump out of his shoes.”
“If we had brought a feathered bonnet with us,” Windy Voice said, “I would do a war dance around him.”
“I say he’s a spy,” said Foxglove. “He has no business being on this land. Let’s find his horse and take it with us. He’ll freeze to death trying to find his way out of the woods.”
The three Indians approached the white settler. He was a sturdy man of sixty, half asleep, still staring at the half-moon.
Then the settler rose and wheeled around. After an instant of
fright he casually studied their Indian faces and laughed. They could smell his whiskey breath.
“Welcome, friends,” said the white man. “I have strayed off the beaten path and have to ask you to point me in the right direction. I left my horse in the woods and can’t find him. I tried to figger out where I was by studying the moon, but all I can figger is it’s rising in the east. This is for your trouble.” He handed Foxglove a half-empty whiskey bottle.
Foxglove then handed the settler an almost empty whiskey bottle. The settler shook that bottle to see if the stuff fizzed. It didn’t, so he took a half pull and held up the bottle to see how much was left. It was empty so he tossed it into the snow.
Small Horse took a long pull of the new bottle and handed it back to the settler; he took another pull, wiped his wet chin with his coat sleeve, and passed the whiskey to Foxglove.
“I am feeling no pain,” the elderly man said to the three Indians. “You gents are my friends—right?” He said he was on his way back to the fort and had got lost.
None of them spoke.
“No speak?” he said. “When we make powwow?”
The settler resumed sitting on the snowy ground. After a while each of the three Indians sat with him, first Small Horse, then Foxglove, then Windy Voice holding his ankles.
“What should we do with him?” Windy Voice asked in the tongue of the People.
“Are you talking about me?” asked the settler.
“No,” said Windy Voice. “We talk about your firewater. Where you get it? It steals my breath away.”
The settler said, “I hoped you wasn’t talking about me.”
The Indians said nothing. Their faces were motionless.
“He must be the one who tried to rape Penelope,” said Foxglove. “He also touched One Blossom in the crotch. Indian Head said he would kill him on sight if he ever came across the white bastard who had done that.”
Small Horse pulled out a short pipe and lit it with sparks from two pieces of flint. The settler also had a corncob, which he lit with a spark from Small Horse’s pipe.
They smoked.
“What will we do with this white bastard?” Windy Voice asked in their tribal tongue.
“Where you want to go?” he asked the white man.
“Home,” said the settler, “if I knew where it was. I thought I came from the east, but my head is spinnin’ so it feels like east, west, and north. Still and all, what I want to do most is take a hot piss and go back to the fort. My horse is waitin’ somewhere t’other side of them pines.”
“We take you back,” said Windy Voice, imitating a white man.
“Will you? Thanks, old chum. You boys are the nicest fucking Indians I do believe I have ever met.”
Even Foxglove laughed at the man’s expression.
 
 
A brave came galloping into camp one morning as Jozip was sensing spring on its way. The brave ran to Jozip’s tepee, tossed open the tent flap, and proclaimed trouble. “Chief Jozip, we have found a dead settler in the woods. He is a bald-headed man who was scalped.”
“What do you mean, scolped?” said Jozip. “This tribe does not do such terrible things. We don’t teach our braves to scolp strangers. This we don’t do. My God, where did they leave the body? First we must bury it. No. First call for me Indian Head. Tell him to come fast.”
Indian Head came on the run. Jozip asked the brave to repeat his story. The brave said he had been in the woods and had found a dead white man lying in the bloody snow. He swore he had never seen him before.
Jozip told Indian Head the man had been scalped. “Is this possible?”
Indian Head said it was. “It is not possible until it happens.”
“Who would do such a terrible thing?”
“Some stupid fool. Maybe somebody who wants to make trouble between us and the Indian agent at Fort Boise, or the fat-ass colonel. What will you do?” he asked Jozip.
“Maybe I will ride to the fort and talk to Cohnel Gunther. Also
I will tell him our braves did not kill this man. I say that this man who got killed was lost on our land. If he got lost this is no crime, but we did not kill him. We are a lawful people. I will say this to the cohnel.”
“Maybe you ought to call a council meeting.”
“I will call this meeting after I talk to the white man.”
“Do you want me to ride with you to the fort?”
“No, I will go alone. One Indian makes them suspicious. If they see two it’s already an attack. This way they will see that I come in peace.”
Jozip rode off to the fort. Bessie had lost weight and traveled swiftly and lightly.
It took Jozip a while to get into the colonel’s office; and once inside he wasn’t sure he should have come. The aide-de-camp searched Jozip’s pockets, ran his hands over his buckskin pants, then reluctantly admitted him into the office. Jozip did not like being searched.
The colonel appeared when he heard an Indian had come to see him.
They recognized each other.
“Good morning, Chief,” said the colonel. “I have to request that you tell me quickly the reason for your visit to this office. I have a painful toothache. I hope you’ve come to tell me that your tribe is getting ready for its move.”
“Excuse me that I come when you have such a bad toothache,” said Jozip, “but since I bring now some bad news I will tulk fast.”
“The faster the better.”
“Cohnel, I am very sorry that we found on our reservation this morning a dead white gentleman that he was scolped and died there in the woods. I came to ask you what we should do with the body.”
“A dead settler?” The colonel brooded. “Was his name Ezra Pence? His wife reported him missin’ last night.”
Jozip was sorry he did not know the man’s name.
“But you found him scalped by your Indians? This happens to be a very drastic offense, Chief Josephs.”
“Cohnel Gunther, I wish to mention to you that I came here on my free will to explain you what hoppened.”
The colonel went to the door and called his aide.
“Mr. Carpenter,” he said when the man entered, “this is Chief Josephs. At least that’s what he calls himself. They have found a dead settler on the reservation ground that may be the man we are missin’. Lock him up in the hoosegow until I get a dentist to pull my goddamn tooth in the morning. After that we will assemble fifty men to accompany us to the reservation. I want to get to the bottom of this scalpin’ incident. A mean thing like that could start off a war.”
Jozip said in astonishment, “You wish to arrest me and put me in jail? Mr. Cohnel, I don’t think my tribe will like this.”
“Don’t threaten me, Chief. I am locking you up because I think it might be the best thing under the circumstances. Now don’t make any more trouble or you will get your ass broke.”
Jozip, disliking the man, said nothing. He wondered what Indian Head would do if he did not return before nightfall. Then he decided to let the colonel get away with the arrest though it humiliated him. Tomorrow he would be free, and when he got back to the reservation he would call a meeting of the tribe’s council. Too much was happening too fast. He needed the council’s advice.
The aide led Jozip to a small cell in the interior of the fort. Jozip spent half an hour reading the filthy inscriptions on the wall and decided the white race did not know what to do with itself. He was glad he had become an Indian.
That night he dreamed a woman had got into the cell and was beating him with the handle of her umbrella. He woke in pain. A woman with an umbrella was beating him in the dark. He shouted at her, “Stop, stop, you bitch, go home!” He tried to grab the umbrella but she was strong and fought him for it. Jozip struggled for breath, vigor, enlightenment.
“You bastard murderer!” she screamed. “You have killed my husband!”
He caught the umbrella handle in the dark but she clawed his face. Jozip cried out.
Two men appeared then in the dimly lit cell. Jozip shouted for
help but there was none. The men beat him brutally. One man held him down while the other hit him until his face was wet with blood. The second man kicked him in the head. He could not recall what had happened after that.
Jozip fainted and lay on the cold planks until the colonel’s aide came for him in the morning. He was allowed to wash his swollen face before appearing in the colonel’s office.
“Chief,” said the colonel, looking at him with distaste, “I am sure distressed to hear about your unhappy adventure last night. I had a toothache and took a slug of gin before I went to sleep. I owe you an apology, but this revenge against you was done behind my back. You have to believe that one of your assailants was the wife of Ezra Pence, the settler who was killed by Indians of your tribe. The other was his brother, and with him came a dear friend of Ezra’s. We had all we could do to prevent the brother and Ezra’s friend from cuttin’ your throat and scalpin’ you. I always said that bad leads to worse. I assure you I was dismayed by this incident and am releasin’ you at once. I would have done it sooner but I had my toothache to attend to.”
The colonel permitted Jozip to wash his face in a bucket of water in the toilet. He looked at the mirror and shrank from the sight of his battered head.
“This serves me right,” he said to himself, “because I went to the fort and first I did not tell the tribe. This was wrong, to go without a friend.”
Indian Head was waiting for him on his pony. He let out a shout. “Great God, what has happened to your face? Who beat your head like that?”
“I made a mistake,” said Jozip, “which I will not make the same mistake again.”
One Blossom was disturbed by his face but said nothing.
“Now we must find those braves that they killed the settler,” Jozip said.
“We know those who killed the settler in the woods,” said Indian Head.
“Aha,” said Jozip. “Did they confess to you?”
“Nobody confessed but we know who they are.”
“I will tulk to them,” said Jozip.
Windy Voice, Foxglove, and Small Horse assembled with Indian Head in Jozip’s tepee. They stared in surprise at his black-eyed, beaten face but said nothing. Two were young men. Only Foxglove was as old as thirty.
Jozip shook his finger in their faces. “Why did you kill a white man for nothing, which we have never done such a bad thing before?”
Small Horse said they had drunk firewater before going into the woods. “The old man had another bottle with him and we drank it and gave him ours. It was a fair exchange.”
“Except that he is now scolped and dead, and you are all alive. Who took his scolp off?”
The braves said nothing.
“Are you sorry you did this terrible crime? If you don’t answer me, then I got to ask you to leave this tribe. Now is not a time for more trouble than we already got. Now is the time to stay together because they want to take away from us our land.”
“I don’t feel sorry for that drunk bastard,” said Foxglove.
“I will apologize,” Small Horse said, “because it was the wrong time.”
“That goes for me too,” said Windy Voice after a minute.
“I will not apologize,” Foxglove said. “The whites are spying on our tribe. They are trying to force us off the land. I have no love to waste on them.”
“This is not a question of love, this is a question of justice.”
“How much justice have they given to the Indians?” Small Horse asked.

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