The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction (8 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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Jozip told her he was in no mood to hear that message.
“Our tribe is now being followed by an American army,” he said. “I have to think of the tribe first. I have also Indian Head to think about. He is my friend. And I have our long journey, and at last the escape to think of which the council has planned.”
Jozip said, “My name is like your father’s name. Think of that and what it means.”
“Please don’t tell me what I must think.”
One Blossom fled into the dark wood.
Jozip called out an affectionate name, but she did not return.
He scattered the glowing embers of his fire.
Three Indians
ON THE MORNING of the twentieth day of the tribe’s long trek to Canada, One Blossom rode with Jozip, who had been riding with Indian Head. For a while all rode together. No one said much to the others. Jozip, uncomfortable with himself, tried to think out a way to put them at ease with each other.
He spoke his mind openly. “My friend Indian Head and my friend One Blossom, let us tulk in such a way that it makes us comfortable to be together. Our big purpose must still be to protect the people from any kind harm, while we gradually leave our country. On this subject I am not always happy, but I have made up my mind what I must do and I will do it. What bothers me the most is that I feel we are angry and without trust for each other.
“Indian Head,” Jozip asked, “are you angry and without trust on account of me, and if so, why? It feels to me like all of a sudden you are suspicious of me.”
“I will tell you at once,” Indian Head said curtly. “Are you trying to take One Blossom from me?”
“God forbid,” said Jozip.
“I am not yours to be taken away from you,” One Blossom said.
“Your father, the good Chief Joseph, wanted us to marry,” Indian Head said. “He told me so.”
“He never said that to me,” One Blossom said.
Indian Head asked her whether she thought he was lying.
“No,” she said. “You and I are good friends. I want us to stay friends, but I don’t want you to try to push me to marry.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” Indian Head said. “We have known each other since we were children.”
“I was not clear in my own mind,” One Blossom said. “I thought I was but I wasn’t. I learn more slowly than I thought. I have told you that often. That’s true, isn’t it?”
“I am not pushing you to do anything, but I want you to be honest when we talk. Have you given me up for Chief Jozip? If this is true in your thoughts, don’t hide them from me.”
“No,” said Chief Jozip. He said it twice.
Indian Head did not hear it twice. He said to One Blossom, “If you don’t want me to feel my feeling for you, you must tell me why, and who you want instead of me.”
One Blossom said, “I will ask the chief of our people to speak now. Jozip, do you feel in your heart any feeling for me? Speak truly and earnestly.”
“Yes, I have my affection for Indian Head, I also have in my heart affection for One Blossom. But I have more feeling for the Indian people than I have for either of you. This is my honest answer.”
One Blossom grasped her horse’s mane and turned him quickly. “We are running from the blue coats,” she said. “I can run from them but I won’t run from Jozip, and I don’t want Indian Head to run after me.”
“Please,” Chief Jozip said, “please don’t tulk anymore on this subject. Let us say we all have affection and maybe love each for the other, but nobody should tulk now—when we are running away from an army of white soldiers—about questions of love and marriage. Not now, please. We got to keep our mind on what is the important thing. Now is the time to move first to Canada. Indian Head, is this right?”
“It is right,” said Indian Head, “but you ought to stay away from One Blossom.”
One Blossom did not hear him because she was galloping away on her white pony.
Then Long Wind, on a black steed, came thundering toward Chief Jozip and Indian Head. “There is bad news,” he said in the People’s tongue. “Our messengers have seen white soldiers riding toward us, only two days away.”
“We got to hurry to make it four days,” Chief Jozip said.
“Why don’t we just stand and fight?” said the young brave. “Our hatred for the blond soldiers will make us fight like battle gods.”
“Like the warriors we are,” said Indian Head.
“First we will tulk, then if they don’t listen maybe we will have to fight,” Chief Jozip said.
“There are no maybes,” Indian Head said.
“Not maybe,” said Long Wind.
That he was a vegetarian suddenly preoccupied and worried Jozip. “So how can I fight a war without the experience of a war?” he asked himself.
His war experience, thus far, had been to practice using the implements of war, bows and arrows, lances and rifles. Of course he had also shot at buffalo, some the size of a small railroad locomotive. Jozip had blessed the beasts as they thundered to their doom, and he did not eat their flesh. He silently explained these thoughts to his grandfather the shochet, long since dead and buried, and thus to himself.
He might fight, he thought, because he was an Indian, and Indians, more than whites, had to fight for their lives.
Later Jozip threw up and searched his vomit for barley grains, of which there were more than a few.
What Does the Dead Pigeon Say?
ONE NIGHT One Blossom feared death and screamed aloud. Indian Head came running to her tent and said there was nothing to fear.
“I am a child in my sleep,” One Blossom said.
An old squaw appeared in the tent and told One Blossom she would stop screaming once she was married. “It is the screaming alone in bed that is hard to do,” said the old woman. “I stopped when I was married,” she said to them, “but now that my brave is dead I scream again like One Blossom. Maybe it is your father the chief who whispers in your ear and makes you scream. What does he say to you?” she wanted to know.
“I don’t know what he said in my ear,” One Blossom replied. “He said something I thought I understood, but then I awoke.”
“You ought to take a husband,” said the old squaw as she left the tent.
“You heard what she said,” said Indian Head. “Why don’t you take me as your husband? We have been friends since we were children in the missionary school.”
“I enjoy you as a friend, Indian Head, but I don’t think of you as my husband.”
“The no is yes and the yes is no,” said Indian Head. He shouted at her for having talked so badly to him that day when the two of
them were riding with Jozip. Indian Head said her medicine was bad medicine and bad medicine was who she was. He said she was shaming her father’s memory, and that was what the old chief had shouted into her ear. As he said these words Indian Head’s nostrils were drawn thin and tight with anger.
One Blossom spoke coldly to him. She said that Chief Jozip was kinder to her than the friend she had had all her life. “What is this special kindness you ask for?” he said. “And why should I be kind to someone who shuns my wish to marry her and stands with two feet planted in her bad medicine? That is no life for me, and if that’s all you give as my portion of your friendship, I will have no use for you, either as a mate or as a friend, or for anything else in my life. Possibly I will leave this tribe.”
Indian Head left One Blossom’s tent, his nostrils pinched white. He said he might go back to the States and not return.
“Perhaps that’s what my father’s ghost whispered in my ear,” One Blossom said to herself. “For my part I want you to stay,” she said as if she were still talking to Indian Head. “You are Jozip’s friend as well as mine.”
When One Blossom told Jozip that she feared death at night when she lay alone on the sack of branches she used as a bed in her small tent, he said, “So do I once in the while, but now I am alive, so if you will podden me, I will not tulk from death. When I think about you I think of life.”
“Then why don’t you say it,” she said to him through the sadness in her eyes. “When you first came to our tribal home in the valley of the winding river, you smiled often as we talked, but now your face is always grim and you look too stiff and important when you wear your white feathered headdress.”
“I smiled on account of I thought that someday I might love you in my heart,” Jozip said.
“Then why don’t you say you love me when I can see that feeling clearly in your eyes?”
“Sometimes my eyes tulk better than I tulk with my tongue,” Jozip admitted to her.
He said this with hope, yet spoke as though with regret. He felt he spoke mildly when she wanted him to speak wildly.
“But don’t you feel a heart-feeling for me now as we talk? I have that feeling for you.”
He said perhaps he did, but there were reasons she already knew why he could not say that now. He thought he might say it after the tribe had passed safely into Canada.
“Will you speak your heart then?”
“I will say what I have to say to you and I will also say it to Indian Head.”
“In English or in the People’s tongue?” She laughed.
“You will hear the words when I will say them to you.”
“I can see those words in your eyes as you look at me. I can feel your hands touching my flesh.”
Jozip closed his eyes. “Please don’t tulk to me like this when I said already I don’t want to tulk to you this way now.”
“Yes, Jozip,” One Blossom said joyously.
 
 
Last Days privately told Chief Jozip, in the People’s tongue, that he did not like the omens he had read in the body of a pigeon he had killed that morning.
“So what did the pigeon say?”
“The pigeon said nothing, but the omens were bad. I think we ought to break camp and go once more on the move.”
“In this case I will break it,” said Jozip. “The messenger said we were two days ahead of the soldiers, and tonight we have made it three days.”
“What does our Crow spy say?”
“He says we are three days ahead,” said Jozip.
“Do you trust him?”
“I have to trust him. He was also Chief Joseph’s messenger and his best spy.”
“I will read my omens again in the morning,” Last Days said.
“Maybe we ought to leave this camp tonight,” Jozip said. “Tell the warriors not to sleep with their wives tonight.”
“You can tell them that, Chief Jozip,” said Last Days. “I will tell them what the pigeon said.”
Then Lone Bird, a tall warrior with a cracked face he had broken
years ago when he fell off a wild running horse and landed on his head, came to Jozip and said his face and head hurt, and he took that to be a sign of danger.
“What kind of danger?”
“We ought to be on our way now.”
“I have given already this order,” Jozip said.
“Give it again.”
Jozip said once was enough.
“We ought to go as fast as we can. This morning my father said he had received a strong impression of coming danger. The old man said, ‘The danger thunders like a horse with four legs.’ He also said, ‘My shaking heart tells me that death will overtake us if we don’t go faster on our way to Canada. I cannot hide what is revealed to me.’ I too say we must hurry on to the North. We are taking much too long.”
“Genuk,” said Chief Jozip. “You should stop tulking like this. It will frighten the women.”
Lone Bird said, “It is not wise to stop talking. Some who do that never say another word.”
“Get all our horses together,” the chief said calmly. “We will move as fast as we can go. Today should be a day of rest. It is the Sabbath. But if you rest on Sabbath you can die on Sabbath, so I guess we will move along on our trek to Canada tonight.”
“We will have no real days of rest as long as the white dogs are in a pack behind us,” Lone Bird said.
The tribe was on the road within two hours. The hard night trek made it a fourth day they were ahead when they stopped and wearily celebrated by cooking buffalo meat. When the fires were damped, the braves sought their wives in the dark.
Morning Massacre
JOZIP WRESTLED himself in his sleep.
He dreamed he was wrestling death, but when his eyes sprang open he had no company other than himself.
He rose in the moonlight and poured a jug of water on his freezing head. He wiped his moonlit body with a ragged cloth and drew on his breechclout and a pair of buckskin leggings. He wandered among the tepees trying to think about the tribe’s next move.
Jozip reminded himself he was white. “I am white but I think like I am red. The old chief told me this when I went in his tribe, that I was an Indian. I said if you think so; then he asked me who I was and I couldn’t answer him with the right words. When I told him this he said to me, ‘I will tell you that you are a red man. Feel your face,’ and when I felt my face I felt it was a red face. But I said, ‘I am an Indian who is a Jew.’ ‘And I understand that too,’ he said. And I said to myself, ‘Why should an Indian give me this particular lesson?’”
Jozip went among the sleeping People lying on the ground or in the field, some naked, some covered with buffalo robes. They slept as if exhausted as he wandered among them trying to foresee the future of the tribe. What kind of warrior chief was a Jew who lived among a tribe of Indians with peace raging in his heart?
His thought troubled him when he saw his braves outstretched on the field as though wounded in war while Jozip urged them to run faster, run harder. Maybe they would outdistance the white soldiers, outrun them even in sleep, so there would be no war;
and once they were securely in Canada, they would deal with the Canadians about where they could live in the future. Or perhaps the Americans would send messages on the singing wires, saying they were ready to discuss better terms than before. And maybe the People would be allowed to return to their own valley, their own place on the earth, and live at last in peace.
“Who needs now a war?” Jozip said.
Then he realized he had awakened in the middle of the night, asking himself impossible questions, and rousing men and women who still wanted to sleep in the cool air. He heard himself being mocked in the distance by the young men, being called names he did not like.
But Chief Jozip responded to their taunts with these words: “I don’t think there will come a war. So we will go to Canada, and when we reach there, we will meet in a council with other tribes and plan out where we should go next. Maybe these Canadians will let us live on their land near to the Eskimos, or maybe we will go someplace else that we don’t know yet what is this place, or even where it is?”
So Jozip walked on, carrying his thoughts in a circle as he pondered a way to be free of them.
In the morning an army of blue-coated soldiers appeared in a forest, at the foot of which the People had camped by a stream after a night of dancing and celebration that Chief Jozip had disapproved of in silence. It was true that the tribe had thus far outrun the enemy, their soldiers thought to be three full days behind them, although they were not. And now the soldiers were hidden in the woods spying on the People as they planned an attack they hoped would turn into a slaughter of Indians.
Colonel Gunther was among the officers present, and so was General Stong, who had fought in the Civil War. Neither of them liked the other, but a war was a war and not much else mattered. Gunther was the envious one who had been harassing Chief Jozip. General Stong, the other officer on the chase, was surer of himself than the gravel-voiced colonel. In any case, they and almost a thousand men were closing in on the People. Colonel Gunther wanted the credit for the approaching victory to go to his regiment.
General Stong didn’t care who got the credit, so long as the soldiers defeated and destroyed the blasted Indians. The general had been shocked by Custer’s disaster, and he bore an uneasy hatred for Indians.
It was 5 a.m. The soldiers had slept in their greatcoats, and now the colonel’s orderly woke them up one by one. They arose in silence for a cup of cold coffee. No fires had been lit anywhere, not so much as a flicker of flame. An officer with binoculars watched the Indians from across a rushing stream at the edge of the woods. There were no Indians watching the soldiers sipping their cold coffee, shivering.
An Indian woman came out of her tepee to stir up the fire. She swallowed a mouthful of water and spat it out on the sizzling flames. Another squaw was drawn to the campfire, and they talked. After she returned to her hut, the second woman told her brave that she sensed something wrong outside.
“What is wrong?” the brave asked.
“I smelled something dead,” she said. “At the same time the coyotes were howling.”
“You smell too much,” he said. “You smell everything. The more you smell, the more I smell. I don’t like to live like that.”
“How do you like to live?”
“Without so much smelling,” said the brave. “You go to sleep.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I feel nervous.”
“You are a stupid woman,” the brave told his wife.
 
 
When dawn opened the sky, a single shot sounded within the woods and the soldiers pressed forward silently toward a hill of tepees arranged in a V-shape up a slope. They sloshed across the waist-deep stream and then charged with a roar to the lodges, shooting low to kill the families sleeping on the ground. The braves, when they could, bolted out of the tepees. Some remained where they were, wrestling the soldiers until they were killed or were able to escape into the woods. The soldiers shot or clubbed everyone in sight. They shot an old man reaching for his breechclout, and they beat the screaming children who got in their way. The
People scattered in panic, whenever they could grabbing up a child and running with it into the woods at the edge of the stream. One woman whose child had been shot in the face ran screaming with him deeper into the water. She laughed as she drowned.
Other women fleeing the soldiers were shot in the back and fell as they fled. Soldiers’ boots crushed the skulls of infants, and the force of their rifle butts broke open the heads of dazed old men no longer able to fight. After a warrior shot at a captain, and the captain killed the warrior, his wife snatched up his rifle, shot the soldier in the head, and kept on shooting until she fell riddled with bullets.
 
 
Chief Jozip, who had taken for himself the topmost tepee, awoke running.
“Get together,” he cried to the warriors. “We got to get together for defense.” In a few minutes he succeeded in organizing the braves on the upper slope into a defense force. “Get ready to attack,” he cried.
Then he realized that he carried no rifle. Jozip turned himself around and ran back to his lodge.
“Why were we so stupid that we didn’t post guards last night? What did we celebrate if we are still running from the soldiers?”
One Blossom, half dressed, was waiting in his tepee. She handed Jozip his rifle. “Shoot,” she said. “They are murdering the children.”
“I will shoot,” he said. “If you see Indian Head, tell him to look for me.”
“And you must look for me.”
He swore he would.
Jozip left the lodge and ran toward a group of soldiers who had appeared on horseback. He urged the warriors to fight them as best they could with their arrows, old guns, and single-shot rifles. The People were the better marksmen and knocked several soldiers out of their saddles. The troops, equipped with the latest arms, sprayed bullets blindly.
At the other end of the camp two sub-chiefs rallied the People
and began to mount a counterattack there against the soldiers still coming up the hill. “Now is the time to fight,” the scattered warriors shouted to each other.
Jozip divided his time fighting on the slope and directing operations at the bottom of the camp by the stream. He felt an urge to do battle but controlled the feeling lest it shame him when he wasn’t attentive to his thoughts. How, he thought, can a pacifist fight in a war?
Jozip posted sharpshooters to the rear of the soldiers attacking from the opposite direction. Caught in a deadly cross fire, the soldiers were surprised to be falling, hit by bullets in the back. Only a few shots were exchanged with the Indian marksmen kneeling on the ground.
One soldier shook his bloody arm at the Indians. “You’ll get yours, you red bastards.”
“Shoot him again,” Last Days ordered a marksman. “If he isn’t dead, he ought to die.”
The marksman shot; the soldier died.
“The pony soldiers are good fighters but they don’t know where to shoot,” Jozip said as Indian Head appeared from another part of the battleground. Jozip told him to get the older people to strap the children onto ponies and start them moving.
“I hope you know what you’re talking about,” Indian Head said. “We are dying like flies.”
“You must get the children out of here before the whites try to stop us.”
Jozip went from one group to another, pointing out where the soldiers were most exposed. That whole morning he fought among them. The People’s situation was bad, but not as desperate as before. The soldiers were taking a fearsome punishment, but many of the People were also scattered dead on the field.
When he saw himself fighting against white men, Jozip was astounded. He never knew whether he had killed any of them. He assumed he had and he tried not to think of it.
I am chief of this tribe, he thought. I got to protect the Indians.
 
 
“Them Indians fight too damn well,” General Stong said to Colonel Gunther. “I think we’ll need about a hundred more bodies on horses before we can turn them back.”
“I telegraphed for a hundred men just after we left to surprise the Indians,” the colonel answered. “I got a message from the wireless operator that my request had been approved. I hope that don’t interfere with any of your plans, General.”
“That didn’t,” said the general, “but if you ever want to know what my plans are, you better get them direct from the horse’s mouth. I am that horse. I don’t want any of my subordinates out there guessing what I might attempt next. I want you to ask me. My plans at this very minute, if you would like to know them, are to wipe out these bloody savages before they eat our hearts with ketchup.”
“There I go along with you,” said Colonel Gunther in his gravelly voice.
 
 
Three Indian boys appeared in the meadow below with a dozen ponies. They led the animals forward at a fast trot, and quickly some of the warriors mounted and armed themselves with strong bows and arrows. They shot at whatever moved or fell out of a tree. They were sharpshooters.
Then Jozip heard the sound of a cannon bombarding them and felt sick. His horsemen rode forward to attack the cannon, but it had already fallen off an army wagon and lay with its nose in the mud.
A woman appeared on the battleground near the rifle pits the People had dug to protect themselves as they fired. Jozip said to her, “I have told the women not to fight against the white men. These men don’t fight by rules. The rules frighten them.”
She said to him, “One of the women asked me to go to you and say your friend is dead.”
“Which friend? Oh, my God. Do you mean Indian Head?”
“No, not him. I mean One Blossom. She was loading guns for the braves. A soldier shot her in the teat.”
“Is she alive?” Jozip asked.
“No, she is dead.”
A cry broke in his throat. “I told her I would look for her. Where is she now?”
“There at the opening of the wood.”
Jozip plunged into the wood and saw two white soldiers before they saw him. He beheld One Blossom’s body lying on the bloodstained ground. Jozip aimed his rifle but did not shoot. He stood deep in the arms of a pine tree, waiting for the two soldiers to leave.
“Christ,” said the younger man, “I feel kinda sorry we shot her. Why did she have to get herself shot?”
“Leave her be,” said the lieutenant with him. “She is good and dead.”
The young soldier touched One Blossom’s body.
“I’m not doing anything wrong,” he told the lieutenant. “I just want to feel how warm her cunt is.” He lifted her dress and looked under it.
The lieutenant pointed his pistol at the young soldier’s head, and at the same moment Jozip fired. The lieutenant fell heavily, sucking his last breath.
The young soldier ran, expecting a bullet to break his neck.
Jozip looked at the lieutenant lying on his back. “I killed already more than one human being,” he said.
He dragged the lieutenant away and then fell on his knees before One Blossom. For a moment he embraced her body, then he lifted the girl and carried her in his arms.
“Meine kleine fegele,” Jozip said as he carried her away. “My dear girl. Why did you go away from me if I love you?” He wanted to carry her until she came back to life. “My dear dead girl, don’t go away from me.”
He carried her out of the woods. But even as Jozip held her body, he rallied the Indians. “We fight for our lives,” he shouted.

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