Read Online The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction by Bernard Malamud - Free Book Online

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EIGHT
    The New Jozip
    JOZIP OFTEN THOUGHT of himself as Yozip and experienced days of wonderment and doubt. He questioned his abilities, yet felt he had taken up a cause he increasingly cared about, that of the People. Many of his Indian brothers were still unknown to him, but he thought of them as his Indians and had begun to feel responsible for their welfare, as though there was a gap in their experience he might fill. “Don’t ask me why,” he said to himself. “Ask the Great Spirit who looks at us from the sky.” But the cause he had taken up helped him understand what he had lacked in his former, lonely life.
    “If I am a man like me, what should I do next?” he asked Indian Head.
    “First we must settle the land question with the whites, but before that we must prepare for the long winter. We will hunt buffalo in the mountains and in the snow. The animals will not know which way to run when we appear before them with drawn bows. They will stampede and thunder away as our braves shoot their bellies full of arrows.”
    “This I don’t like to do,” said Jozip.
    “You will get used to it.”
    After ascending the western pass for two weeks of hunting on the cold plains in Montana, Jozip, when the meat was plentiful and the hides many, called a halt and the hunters descended toward their long valley accompanied by a dozen shaggy huge beasts, lassoed and led by squaws who had traveled with the hunters.

    The buffalo, Jozip observed, was not a very intelligent animal, yet if treated humanely it would go where it was led. The hunt had gone well: they had not encountered any rival tribes and this was a year of plentiful beef. Jozip had been told that large numbers of buffalo were crossing the railroad tracks and interfering with the movement of trains. Conductors distributing rifles, and passengers potshooting from windows, were energetically slaughtering droves of animals before the trains could plow free of them and chug forward on the bloody tracks.
    Jozip, from youth a vegetarian at heart, disliked this useless destruction of innocent animals, but now he was an Indian and lived as they lived. Yet he was also the grandson of a shochet, a religious slaughterer in the Old Country, who killed devoutly, gently, aware of the sin of taking a living life even though he blessed the beast as he slit its throat. Maybe it was in partial revulsion to his grandfather’s holy profession that the grandson avoided eating animal flesh and had ultimately become a vegetarian. Night after night, as the braves gorged themselves on meat, the new chief devoured buckwheat groats and fresh vegetables when available. Though some braves snickered at Jozip’s ways, still for a novice he was a decent chief—organized in his head, and sensibly aware of the needs of the braves and of the pride of warriors and sub-chiefs.
    “Passable anyway,” grunted the warrior known as Hard Head.
    The Indian hunters climbed down the Idaho foothills and moved toward their green land, where they at once encountered bad news that caused them quickly to forget the pleasures of the hunt. When they returned to the tribal grounds they were at once surrounded by women, children, and older men, who informed them that there had been a visitation of settlers, and one of the young women describing the incident angrily cried out, “Rape!”
    “So who made a rape?” Jozip asked indignantly. “Who did such a terrible thing?”
    One cheery woman with wild hair spoke up: “I was raped by a disgusting fiend.”
    “Who is she?” Jozip cautiously asked Indian Head.
    “She was raised in a missionary school and is interested in rape.
Her name is Penelope. Her father was one of our best hunters. Her mother is a loudmouth.”
    “Do you think someone raped her?”
    “I am not a medicine man and you are the chief of our tribe.”
    Indian Head asked One Blossom, “Were you bothered by anyone? Touched?”
    “One fool tried to touch me but I hit my knee between