The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction Read Free Page A

manuscript and notes, has been invaluable. Jill Hays helped with the research and typing during the Malamuds’ summers in Bennington. I am grateful to my co-executors, Timothy Seldes and Daniel Stern, for their friendly advice and cooperation. I owe thanks to Saul Bellow and Paul Malamud for quotations from their writings. For editorial and copy-editing help I am grateful to Kerry Fried, Claudia Rattazzi, and Lynn Warshow. Lastly, without the unstinting help of Ann Malamud in tracking down and making available unpublished manuscripts from her husband’s papers, in helping to verify dates and references and to decode numerous handwritten notes, it would have been impossible to bring this volume to conclusion.

ONE
    Yozip
    HERE’S YOZIP rattling around in his rusty wagon.
    After escaping military service in the Old Country, he worked a year and bought the vehicle in St. Louis, Missouri. Yozip wore a Polish cap and trimmed his reddish beard every second week. Yet people looked at him as if he had just stepped out of steerage. An officious Jew he met in Wyoming told him he spoke with a Yiddish accent. Yozip was astonished because he now considered himself to be, in effect, a native. He had put in for citizenship the day after he had arrived in the New World, five years ago, and figured he was an American by now. He would know for sure after he had looked through the two or three official documents his cousin was keeping for him for when he got back from wherever he was going. He was going where his horse led him. They were drifting westward, a decent direction. Yozip thought of himself as a traveler who earned his little living on the road.
    In Nebraska, he peddled for a peddler who had rented him a wagon full of dry goods. This man had struck it rich in California and now lived on his interest, though he kept his small business going. In Wyoming, they parted for ideological reasons: one hated pacifists, the other considered himself to be one. Yozip bought his fifth wagon and third nag, a beast called Ishmael. He sold a variety of small goods and knickknacks to farmers’ wives who lived not too far off the main road. He sold them thread, needles, thimbles, ribbons, pieces of lace, and eventually dresses his cousin Plotnick shipped him from Chicago; he imagined the women who bought
them liked to remember the figures they had once had. Some were ecstatic when Yozip appeared with his load of dry goods. He added new stock to his old stores. Now he moved farther west than he and his horse had gone before. Yet he often cursed himself for his restlessness because it added nothing to his life but restlessness.
    He tried to recall the names of the states he had passed through. Some were words he could not remember, so when he came to a place with an Indian name he slowly spelled it out, more or less phonetically, and wrote it on a card he kept in his pants pocket. He moved into Idaho, stopping off for a while at Moscow. Nothing in Moscow reminded him of Moscow. Yozip trundled down into the Willamette Valley in Oregon and then tracked up into Washington. It amazed him to discover that he had come at last to the Pacific Ocean. He gave a short hooray and stopped to weep at the water’s edge. Yozip removed both boots and tramped on the blue water in the Pacific. It was barely spring; the ocean was freezing but Yozip thoroughly washed and dried both feet before drawing on his leather boots. He soaped Ishmael and washed him down from head to hooves. Yozip cooked vegetables in a tin pot and treated his horse with respect. He spoke to him often, whispering into his good ear.
    “You may be a horse to your mother,” he said in Yiddish, “but to me nothing less than a friend.”
    The horse whinnied emotionally.
    Now that he had traversed the land, or what was ultimately to be the United States of America—for the time of this story was 1870 and the country was astonishingly young and fertile—Yozip felt the moment had come to invent his