The People

by Bernard Malamud

  “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.

  FOURTEEN

  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 sizzli
ng 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.

  Indian Head appeared. He had been shot in the left shoulder. “I lost the ponies,” he said bitterly. “I lost some of the old people and some of the children. I barely got away from the whites alive. You were wrong to order me to take them away when I did.”

  Then Indian Head realized it was One Blossom Jozip was carrying, and he let out an anguished cry.

  “What happened to One Blossom?”

  “She was shot by the soldiers. Do you want to hold her?”

  “No,” said Indian Head. “She was no longer mine to hold. She was not my woman.”

  Jozip held One Blossom as the battle went on around them.

  Maybe she isn’t dead, he thought.

  “You were a fool to think you are the equal of an Indian,” Indian Head said. “This trek to Canada has destroyed many of the People.”

  “I had the approval of the council,” said Jozip. “Isn’t that true?” he asked three braves watching him.

  None of them said it was true.

  Then two women appeared and took One Blossom away from Jozip. He tried to hold on to her but the older woman said it was time to bury her or she would stink forever.

  “No,” Jozip said, “she will smell like a flower.”

  “Indian Head should be our true chief,” argued one warrior. “Now our medicine is bad because our chief is a stranger to us.”