God's Grace (19 page)
Authors: Bernard Malamud
Tags: #Fiction, #Dystopian, #Science Fiction, #Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic, #Religious
Buz stood up and clapped loudly but sat down before Cohn could say anything.
Cohn rose and remarked that since the Day of Devastation,
followed by the Late Unlamented Flood, this island had become a privileged place, a sanctuary for the few lives that remained in the world. “And it’s got to stay a sanctuary, even if that means a certain amount of food monotony and a few other minor inconveniences.”
followed by the Late Unlamented Flood, this island had become a privileged place, a sanctuary for the few lives that remained in the world. “And it’s got to stay a sanctuary, even if that means a certain amount of food monotony and a few other minor inconveniences.”
He asked Esau and his hunter friends to promise they would not terrorize any of the other baboon children; and Esau said if that was what the community wanted, that’s what they would get, even if it went against his personal grain.
Cohn did not suggest a voice vote, although tempted to; he wasn’t sure he had the votes to win—but he told Esau to raise his right arm and pledge “I will not kill. I will obey the Seven Admonitions.”
Esau raised his left arm and solemnly swore he would never again “quote, never again”—kill an innocent female baboon child, and Esterhazy and Bromberg swore along with him.
Pat and Aloysius, groomed immaculate by their mothers, went with them for a root-dig and soon outdistanced and lost the ladies. Climbing a tree to see where they were, they found themselves staring through some branches at Esterhazy, he as astonished as they.
His fur risen, Esterhazy let out a long distress-hoot.
The baboon boys, not waiting to hear the end of it, leaped to the ground and discovered they were being chased by the chimps who had immediately responded to Esterhazy’s call —Bromberg, Luke, Saul of Tarsus, and after several minutes, Esau himself. Esterhazy also pursued the baboon boys. Nobody
mentioned a pledge of any sort. Besides, that was a pledge not to interfere with a female, and these madly running boys were no girls. Girls couldn’t run that fast.
mentioned a pledge of any sort. Besides, that was a pledge not to interfere with a female, and these madly running boys were no girls. Girls couldn’t run that fast.
Twisting and darting amid a grove of palms a short distance from the sea, Pat and Aloysius, unable to contend with the speed and agility of the adult chimps racing after them, scuttered up a nut palm, Aloysius behind Pat, both emitting screams as they hastened into the crown.
Esau stationed his men at the base of the bearded date palms nearest the one the boy baboons had gone up, and hand over hand, he climbed the tree after them.
Aloysius, seeing him coming up, flung himself into an adjoining, shorter, broad-crowned palm; and Pat, making a similar large leap, stayed on Aloysius’s tail, still scream-barking.
Because Bromberg was stationed at the trunk of this tree, without stopping they jumped into the top of the nearest stout palm—at the bottom of which, they discovered, Esterhazy stood guard.
Esau had plunged after them into the broad-crowned palm.
The baboon children leaped at the trunk of a long palm arced like a scimitar, held tight, and quickly raced up to its feathery small crown. At that moment Max and Arthur, the adult baboons, came roaring into the palm grove with ferocious barking and fangs bared.
They simultaneously attacked Bromberg, who tried fending them off with sharp barks and both arms flailing, but the baboons penetrated his defense and tore at his legs and pink scrotum. Bromberg, shrilly screaming, snarled, and in a
moment of pause, hobbled off, then ran, bleeding down his legs.
moment of pause, hobbled off, then ran, bleeding down his legs.
The adult baboons fought fiercely with Esterhazy, who ran up the long arced palm pursued by Max.
Arthur, noisily jabbing at Luke and Saul of Tarsus protecting each other back to back, snapped at them in feinting leaps, but was afraid to charge two male chimpanzees. They hooted, barked, showed their teeth, and pawed at the jumping baboon, holding him off.
Esau had catapulted himself into the slender curved palm the little boys were in now, both screeching as they peered down at the baboon males on the ground.
Aloysius jumped back onto the shorter palm, lost his grip on a swishing branch, grabbed and lost another, and tumbled twenty feet to the ground, hitting Luke and knocking him out. Aloysius escaped into the bushes, followed by Arthur. Max soon scampered after them.
Little Pat, still in the palms, hopped into a live oak at the edge of the palm grove, and as Esau swung in after him, jumped again into the grove, still chased by the Alpha Ape. Pat, taking a desperate chance, dove into the bushes below, and as he lay gasping on the ground on his belly, trying to breathe, was pounced on by Saul of Tarsus and Bromberg.
Max and Arthur returned on the run, searching for Pat, but Esau, who had snatched the squirming, terrified boy away from his captors, standing erect, his body hair heavily full, swung the screaming baboon by his legs at the adult baboons. They drew back, snarling, and were at once savaged by Luke and Esterhazy. Max and Arthur rushed into the bushes.
Esau, whirling the boy baboon over his head, slammed him hard against a rock. The breaking skull made the sound of a small explosion. Pat now hung limp in Esau’s hand.
Squatting on the ground, facing his hungry companions, he began to peel the bone fragments off the baboon’s bloody skull to dig at once for the brain.
Bromberg, still bleeding from wounds on both legs, timidly requested the testicles, and Esau promised him one if he behaved while he ate his meal.
The twins, their palms extended, in small voices begged for a bit of flesh; and Esau stopped chewing little Pat’s remains long enough to give them both a good tickle until they broke into excruciating laughter.
Esau resumed eating the yummy brain after reminding those present what they already knew—that little Pat could in no way be described as a baboon girl.
While strolling with Buz, as Cohn attempted to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics and his boy corrected his dod’s facts, they came upon four chimps silently observing a fifth voraciously feasting on the boy baboon.
Cohn ran furiously into their midst, tore the partially eaten cadaver out of Esau’s bloody hands, and with a cry flung it deep into the bushes. Saul of Tarsus watched it in flight, and when it fell, was about to bolt for it, but seeing the other apes sitting frozen, did not move.
“Each devours his neighbor’s flesh,” Cohn shouted from Isaiah, swearing he had begged them not to repeat this heinous crime.
“Wouldn’t you think you owed me some consideration
for how comfortable I have helped make your lives? You have work, leisure, free schooling and health care. You have survived a Disastrous Flood and live in comparative peace on an indescribably beautiful island. We have a functioning community and are on the verge of an evolutionary advance, if not breakthrough. And how do you show your appreciation of these advantages? In the murder of children!”
for how comfortable I have helped make your lives? You have work, leisure, free schooling and health care. You have survived a Disastrous Flood and live in comparative peace on an indescribably beautiful island. We have a functioning community and are on the verge of an evolutionary advance, if not breakthrough. And how do you show your appreciation of these advantages? In the murder of children!”
He accused them of ingratitude. He called them hypocrites. “Wasn’t it only yesterday that three of you raised your hands in a solemn oath to obey the Seven Admonitions, yet hadn’t the slightest intention to do so? You’re a disgrace to decent chimpanzees wherever they may be.”
They listened with interest as Cohn castigated them. Only Esau was restless as he rubbed the blood off his hairy fingers with oak leaves. One by one he wiped the fingers, then with a broken twig cleaned under his fingernails.
Cohn ran on: “After all the poems and stories we discussed in class regarding the sanctity of life, and after the homily I preached at little Sara’s funeral; to wit, a child’s right to experience the awakening of sensibility, thought, the discovery of self, and afterwards to emerge in the world in the majesty of youth—despite that, you have with your hands and teeth torn their bodies apart and cannibalized them.”
“What the hell are you—some crazy kind of vegetarian?” Esau asked, still cleaning his fingernails.
Cohn called them corrupt and brutish evildoers, hardhearted beasts with little understanding or compassion.
“Remember man destroyed himself by his selfishness and indifference to those who were different from, or differed
with, him. He scorned himself to death. At least learn that lesson if you want to evade his fate.
with, him. He scorned himself to death. At least learn that lesson if you want to evade his fate.
“I have no desire to punish you corporally,” he announced, “therefore by the authority vested in me as Protector of the Community, I hereby officially exile the three of you—Esau, the falsely redeemed—you fake—and Bromberg, who has no second thought after a limp first—and Esterhazy, coward and fool.”
He said he would chastise Luke and Saul of Tarsus at a later date in a manner befitting their age.
They both cheered.
“Quiet,” ordered Cohn. “Now, therefore, I order you three to pack your gear and leave this end of the island. If there was another island in the neighboring waters, I would exile you there, provided there was a ferry boat to transport you —but since there isn’t another island, so far as I know, I want you to go elsewhere on this, far away and out of sight. If we lay eyes on you again, I warn you of direst consequences.”
After he had said this, Cohn felt himself trembling.
The three adult apes glanced uneasily at each other and then Esau rose with a bellow to his full height and advanced on Cohn with four fangs gleaming. Buz, Esterhazy, Bromberg, Luke, and Saul of Tarsus noisily scattered.
Cohn, frozen an instant, began to back up slowly, wishing he had brought along his spear when he had started out for a walk with Buz. What can I do that Esau can’t—or doesn’t expect? If I try force against his force I won’t have much to show, if anything.
He planned at least a quick kick in the groin, and if that worked, to take off for the cave hurriedly, and once there, to shove the defensive wall across the opening. When Esau had left the scene he would sneak out and round up Mary Madelyn and the baby.
Yet Cohn knew that if he got close enough to kick Esau where it hurt, he was close enough to be upended by Esau’s longer reach.
The Alpha Ape pounded his chest. “You busybody horseass, you stole my natural food out of my mouth. You possessed my betrothed and forced her to bear your half-breed child. I will break every Jewbone in your head.”
He advanced toward Cohn, standing erect, both arms extended, hoot-barking, the ferocity of his expression fearsome.
This is no place for me, thought Cohn, wishing for a slingshot; but he had none, so he retreated, making ugly faces and disgusting noises, but without a frightening mask they had no effect.
“Maybe we ought to talk, Esau. Let’s reason together.”
He turned to run as the ape pounced on him, snatching Cohn like a fierce lover, lifting him off the ground. Instead of embracing him he flung him down like a dead dog. Cohn grunted in pain and tried to roll into the brush. Esau dragged him forth by his leg and with a snarl fell on him.
“Help—Buz,” Cohn cried.
But there was no Buz, until Cohn caught a split-second glimpse of him sitting on an upper branch of a tree, looking down at the combat with absorbed interest, as he peeled an orange.
Life grew dark for Cohn. Death was a white eye centered in a staring black face. That was how he saw Esau, who seemed to be choking him to death. Afterwards he would bash Cohn’s skull with a rock and eat his brain as a delicacy. Cohn hoped it poisoned the evil ape.
He himself wandered in Paradise, trying to exit, but all portals were locked. Woe is me, he muttered, how does one get back into life? He had asked this question of the Lord and heard no answer. He heard his own rapid, choked, diminishing breathing.
At this moment of his dying Cohn felt already dead; but Esau, as though he had heard a telephone ring and had decided to answer, loosened his hands on Cohn’s neck and fell to the side like a sack of flour. He lay utterly still.
That was no miracle. Mary Madelyn, holding Rebekah in her arm, had sneaked up behind Esau with Cohn’s claw hammer, and as the chimps in the trees gazed in stupefaction, had bounced the tool against his head.
That evening, a throat-bruised, hoarse-voiced Cohn bandaged Esau’s wound after sewing twenty-one stitches in his scalp; and in the morning the bandaged ape hobbled forth, with a severe headache and small borrowed suitcase, into permanent exile.
Bromberg and Esterhazy had vanished. And Luke and Saul of Tarsus were let off with strong reprimands. Both promised to mend their ways. Buz swore he had been about to drop like Tarzan out of the tree onto Esau’s back to rescue Cohn, but Mary Madelyn had got there first.
He did, however, say he hadn’t taken kindly to those nasty curses Cohn had laid on the race of chimpanzees.
In a week Cohn paid a census visit to baboon rock and noticed that Aloysius was missing.
“Where’s the little baboon boy?” he politely inquired, and the two males roused themselves with malignant roars and showed threatening fangs. The Anastasias, one pregnant, barked mournfully. Cohn hastily ended his visit.
That evening he found little Aloysius’s half-eaten, decomposing body smelling up a fig tree full of rotting fruit, the cadaver lying athwart a branch where it had been tossed.
Cohn felt himself a failure.
I have failed to teach these chimpanzees a basic truth. How can they survive if they do to fellow survivors what men did to each other before the Second Flood? How will they evolve into something better than men?
“Who did that terrible thing to Aloysius, Buz?” he asked, and the chimp, devouring a juicy mango, said he had no idea.
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