The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction by Bernard Malamud Page B

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