Read Online God's Grace by Bernard Malamud - Free Book Online

pledging his heart and soul to the song of the impassioned cantor. The phonograph was suddenly stilled—silent. Cohn heard nothing more outside the cave. He carried the kerosene lamp to the hut, holding it high so he could see to the edge of the forest.
    Amid the shadows wrought in the uneasy night, he had the startled impression he was gazing at a huge man in a black suit seated on the ground twenty feet beyond the hut.
    Cohn almost dropped the teetering lamp.
    “Who are you?”
    The man, rising slowly, became a gorilla lumbering away. When he stopped to look back, his deep, small, black eyes glowed in the lamplight. Cohn wanted frantically to run.
    The chimp at the cave stood hooting at the giant ape, preaching against his kind. He shrieked as the gorilla, reversing direction, moved toward him, halting, staring with
blank gaze all the more frightening because it seemed to be his only expression.
    Cohn ducked into the cave, set down the lamp, and instinctively grabbed a shovel. As though he had touched hot metal, he tossed it aside and reached for an orange.
    Buz, sounding more like monkey than ape, retreated as the gorilla loomed up at the cave entrance. A musty, rank, yet heavy herbal odor filled the cave.
    Cohn in a quick whisper warned Buz to quiet down, but the half-hysterical animal, scooping a coconut off the shelf, pitched it at the gorilla. It bounced with a thud off his sloping skull, yet his eyes did not flicker in the lamplight as he stared at the two frightened inhabitants of the cave.
    Cohn, sotto voce, informed Buz that the gorilla would not attack if he did not bother him. “But he will rend you limb from limb if you act like a hysteric.”
    The chimp protested this strategy, but the gorilla, as if he had decided he would never make a home in this cave, mercifully fell back, turning again to cast an impassive stare at them. Or was it a depressive type they were contending with? As he knuckle-walked to the rain forest he expelled a burst of gorilla gas and was gone.
    Cohn wondered how many more apes, large or small, he must confront if the Lord’s computer had stopped telling Him the numerical truth.
     
    The next morning the gorilla sat alone under a bearded palm tree fifty feet from the cave.
    He seems a peaceful gent, Cohn thought, and I’ll pretend he isn’t there unless he gives me a sign to the contrary.

    He was a burly beast, almost ugly, with a shaggy blue-black head and heavy brow ridges. His nostrils were highlighted like polished black stones, and his mouth, when he yawned, was cavernous. The gorilla’s black coat was graying on his massive shoulders. Still, if he was frightening, he was not frightful. Despite his size and implied strength—perhaps because he seemed to have a talented ear for devotional music—there was something gentle about him. His dark brown eyes seemed experienced, saddened—after the Flood? —in a way Buz’s weren’t. Cohn respected the giant ape.
    All morning he had remained nearby, as though listening, waiting perhaps to hear the cantor singing. No doubt he was looking for company. Cohn asked Buz not to disturb him. A large friend in a small world had its advantages. But Buz, though he listened obediently, at least respectfully, on catching sight of the gorilla sitting under his favorite white acacia, persistently banged an aluminum frying pan against the escarpment until it howled like a metal drum. He orated at length, growing hoarse, and barking like a baboon. But the gorilla sat motionlessly watching.
    Cohn figured he might put on a phonograph record to test his theory; instead he ventured forth and sat in the grass about ten feet from the gorilla, his heart pounding. One false move—for instance, threatening the beast by staring into his eyes—and goodbye Cohn.
    Calvin Cohn then experienced an extraordinary insight: I know this one. I know his scent. We’ve met before.
    “Are you the one,” he asked humbly, “who fed me when I was sick? If so, please