The People

by Bernard Malamud

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  “Yes or no, damn it.”

  “Then no, damn it,” Herm said, his face flaring. “I hate butcher stores. I hate guts and chicken feathers, and I want to live my own kind of life and not yours.”

  And though the butcher called and called, he ran out of the store.

  That night, while Herm was asleep, the butcher took his riding pants and locked them in the closet of his bedroom, but Herm guessed where they were and the next day went to the hardware store down the block, bought a skeleton key for a dime, and sneaked his riding pants out of his father’s closet.

  When Herm had just learned to ride he liked to go often, though he didn’t always enjoy it. In the beginning he was too conscious of the horse’s body, the massive frame he had to straddle, each independent rippling muscle, and the danger that he might have his head kicked in if he fell under the thundering hooves. And the worst of it was that sometimes while riding he was conscious of the interior layout of the horse, where the different cuts of round, rump, and flank were, as if the horse were stripped and labeled on a chart, posted, as a steer was, on the wall in the back of the store. He kept thinking of this the night he was out on Girlie, the roan they told him he wasn’t ready for, and she had got the reins from him and turned and ran the way she wanted, shaking him away when he tried to hold her back, till she came to the stable with him on her like a sack of beans and everybody laughing. After that he had made up his mind to quit horses, and did, but one spring night he went back and took out Girlie, who, though lively, was docile to his touch and went with him everywhere and did everything he wanted; and the next morning he took his last twenty-five dollars out of the savings account and bought the riding pants, and that same night dreamed he was on a horse that dissolved under him as he rode but there he was with his riding pants on galloping away on thin air.

  Herm woke to hear the sound of a cleaver on the wooden block down in the store. As it was still night he jumped out of bed frightened and searched for his riding pants. They were not in the bottom drawer where he had hidden them under a pile of his mother’s clothes, so he ran to his father’s closet and saw it was open and the butcher not in bed. In his pajamas Herm raced downstairs and tried to get into the butcher shop, but he was locked out and stood by the door crying as his father chopped the tightly rolled pants as if they were a bologna, with the slices falling off at each sock of the cleaver onto the floor, where the cat sniffed the uncurled remains.

  He woke with the moon on his bed, rose and went on bare toes into his father’s room, which looked so different now that it was no longer his mother’s, and tried to find the butcher’s trousers. They were hanging on a chair but without the store keys in the pockets, or the billfold, he realized blushing. Some loose change clinked and the butcher stirred in the creaking bed. Herm stood desperately still but, when his father had quieted, hung the pants and tiptoed back to his room. He pushed up the window softly, deciding he would slide down the telephone wires to the back yard and get in that way. Once within the store he would find a knife, catch the cat, and dismember it, leaving the pieces for his father to find in the morning; but not his son.

  Testing the waterspout, he found it too shaky, but the wires held his weight, so he slid slowly down to the ground. Then he climbed up the sill and tried to push on the window. The butcher had latched it, not knowing Herm had loosened the screws of the latch; it gave and he was able to climb in. As his foot touched the floor, he thought he heard something scamper away but wasn’t sure. Afraid to pull the light on because the Holmes police usually passed along the block this time of night, he said softly in the dark, “Here, kitty, here, kitty kitty,” and felt around on the pile of burlap bags, but the cat was not where she usually slept.

  He felt his way into the store and looked in the windows and they too were empty except for the pulpy blood droppings from the chickens that had hung on the hooks. He tried the paper-bag slots behind the counter and the cat was not there either, so he called again, “Here, kitty kitty kitty,” but could not find it. Then he noticed the icebox door had been left ajar, which surprised him, because the butcher always yelled whenever anyone kept it open too long. He went in thinking of course the damn cat was there, poking its greedy head into the bowl of slightly sour chicken livers the butcher conveniently kept on the bottom shelf.

  “Here, kitty,” he whispered as he stepped into the box, and was completely unprepared when the door slammed shut behind him. He thought at first, so what, it could be opened from the inside, but then it flashed on him that the butcher had vaguely mentioned he was having trouble with the door handle and the locksmith was taking it away till tomorrow. He thought then, Oh, my God, I’m trapped here and will freeze to death, and his skull all but cracked with terror. Fumbling his way to the door, he worked frantically on the lock with his numbed fingers, wishing he had at least switched on the light from outside where the switch was, and he could feel the hole where the handle had been but was unable to get his comb or house key in to turn it. He thought if he had a screwdriver that might do it, or he could unscrew the metal plate and pick the lock apart, and for a second his heart leaped in expectation that he had taken a knife with him, but he hadn’t.

  Holding his head back to escape the impaling hooks, he reached his hand along the shelves on the side of the icebox and then the top shelf, cautiously feeling if the butcher had maybe left some tool around. His hand moved forward and stopped; it took him a minute to comprehend it was not going farther, because his fingers had entered a moist bony cavern; he felt suddenly shocked, as if he were touching the inside of an electric socket, but the hole was in a pig’s head where an eye had been. Stepping back, he tripped over something he thought was the cat, but when he touched it, it was a bag of damp squirmy guts. As he flung it away he lost his balance and his face brushed against the clammy open side of a bleeding lamb. He sat down in the sawdust on the floor and bit his knuckles.

  After a time, his fright prevented any further disgust. He tried to reason out what to do, but there was nothing he could think of, so he tried to think what time it was and could he live till his father came down to open the store. He had heard of people staying alive by beating their arms together and walking back and forth till help came, but when he tried that it tired him more, so that he began to feel very sleepy, and though he knew he oughtn’t, he sat down again. He might have cried, but the tears were frozen in, and he began to wonder from afar if there was some quicker way to die. By now the icebox had filled with white mist, and from the distance, through the haze, a winged black horse moved toward him. This is it, he thought, and got up to mount it, but his foot slipped from the stirrup and he fell forward, his head bonging against the door, which opened, and he fell out on the floor.

  He woke in the morning with a cutting headache and would have stayed in bed but was too hungry, so he dressed and went downstairs. He had six dollars in his pocket, all he owned in the world; he intended to have breakfast and after that pretend to go for a newspaper and never come back again.

  The butcher was sitting in the rocker, sleepily stroking the cat. Neither he nor Herm spoke. There were some slices of uncooked bacon on a plate on the table and two eggs in a cardboard carton, but he could not look at them. He poured himself a cup of black coffee and drank it with an unbuttered roll.

  A customer came into the store and the butcher rose with a sigh to serve her. The cat jumped off his lap and followed him. They looked like brothers. Herm turned away. This was the last he would see of either of them.

  He heard a woman’s resounding voice ordering some porterhouse steak and a chunk of calves’ liver, nice and juicy for the dogs, and recognized her as Mrs. Gibbs, the doctor’s wife, whom all the storekeepers treated like the Empress of Japan, all but kissing her rear end, especially his father, and this was what he wanted his own son to do. Then he heard the butcher go into the icebox and he shivered. The butcher came out and hacked at something with the cleaver
and Herm shivered again. Finally the lady, who had talked loud and steadily, the butcher always assenting, was served. The door closed behind her corpulent bulk and the store was quiet. The butcher returned and sat in his chair, fanning his red face with his straw hat, his bald head glistening with sweat. It took him a half hour to recover every time he waited on her.

  When the door opened again a few minutes later, it almost seemed as if he would not be able to get up, but Mrs. Gibbs’s bellow brought him immediately to his feet. “Coming,” he called with a sudden frog in his throat and hurried inside. Then Herm heard her yelling about something, but her voice was so powerful the sound blurred. He got up and stood at the door.

  It was her, all right, a tub of a woman with a large hat, a meaty face, and a thick rump covered in mink.

  “You stupid dope,” she shouted at the butcher, “you don’t even know how to wrap a package. You let the liver blood run all over my fur. My coat is ruined.”

  The anguished butcher attempted to apologize, but her voice beat him down. He tried to apologize with his hands and his rolling eyes and with his yellow straw hat, but she would have none of it. When he went forth with a clean rag and tried to wipe the mink, she drove him back with an angry yelp. The door shut with a bang. On the counter stood her dripping bag. Herm could see his father had tried to save paper.

  He went back to the table. About a half hour later the butcher came in. His face was deathly white and he looked like a white scarecrow with a yellow straw hat. He sat in the rocker without rocking. The cat tried to jump into his lap but he wouldn’t let it and sat there looking into the back yard and far away.

  Herm too was looking into the back yard. He was thinking of all the places he could go where there were horses. He wanted to be where there were many and he could ride them all.

  But then he got up and reached for the blood-smeared apron hanging on a hook. He looped the loop over his head and tied the strings around him. They covered where the riding pants had been, but he felt as though he still had them on.

  1953

  A Concession of Murder

  WITH THE DOING of the deed embedded in his mind like a child’s grave in the earth, Farr shut the door and walked heavyhearted down the stairs. At the third-floor landing he stopped to look out the small dirty window, across the harbor. The late-winter day was sullen, but Farr could see the ocean in the distance. Although he was carrying the weapon, a stone sash weight in a brown paper bag, heedless of the danger he set it down on the window ledge and stared at the water. It seemed to Farr that he had never loved the sea as he did now. Although he had not crossed it—he thought he would during the war but didn’t—and had never gone any of the different ways it led, he felt he someday ought to. As he gazed, the water seemed to come alive in sunlight, flowing with slanted white sails. Moved to grief at the lovely sight he remained at the window with unseeing eyes until he remembered to go.

  He went down the creaking stairs to the black, airless cellar. Farr pulled the rasping chain above the electric bulb and, when the dim light fell on him, searched around for a hiding place. As his hand uncoiled he realized with horror that he had forgotten the sash weight. He bounded up three flights of stairs, coming to a halt as he saw through the banister that an old woman was standing at the window, resting her bundle on the ledge—on the sash weight itself! Agitated, Farr watched to see whether she would discover the bloody thing, but she too was looking at the water and made no move to go. When she finally left, Farr, who had been lurking on the landing below, ran up, seized the package, and fled down to the cellar.

  There he was tempted to draw the weapon out of the paper to inspect it but did not dare. He hunted for a place to bury it but felt secure nowhere. At last he tore open the asbestos covering of an insulated water pipe overhead and shoved the sash weight into the wool. As he was smoothing the asbestos he heard footsteps above and broke into a chilling sweat at the fear he was being followed. Stealthily he put out the light, sneaked close to the wall, and crouched in the pitch dark behind a dusty dresser abandoned there. He waited with indrawn breath for whoever he was to come limping down. Farr planned to yell into his face, escape up the stairs.

  No one came down. Farr was afraid to abandon the hiding place, stricken at the thought that it was not a stranger but his father, miraculously recovered from his wound, who sought him there, as he had in the past, shouting in drunken rage against his son, stalking him in the dark, threatening to beat his head off with his belt buckle if he did not reveal himself. The memory of this so deeply affected Farr that he groaned aloud. It did not console him that his father had at last paid a terrible price for all the misery he had inflicted on him.

  Farr trudged up the steps out of the cellar. In the street he felt unspeakable relief to be out of the grimy tenement house. He brushed the cobwebs off his brown hat and spanked a whitewash smear off the back of his long overcoat. Then he went down the block to where the houses ended and stood at the water’s edge. The wind, whipping whitecaps along the surface of the harbor water, struck him with force. He held tightly to his hat. A flight of sparrows sprang across the sky, flying over the ships at anchor and disappearing in the distance. The aroma of roasting coffee filled Farr’s hungry nostrils, but just then he saw some eggshells bobbing in the water and a dead rat floating. Surfeited, he turned away.

  A skinny man in a green suit was standing at his elbow. “Sure looks like snow.” The man wore no overcoat and his soiled shirt was open at the collar. His face and hands were tinged blue. Farr cupped a match to his cigarette, puffing quickly. He would have walked away but was afraid of being followed, so he stayed.

  “Just a whiff of a butt makes me hungry to the bottom of my belly,” said the man.

  Farr listened, looking away.

  After a minute the man, staring absently at the water, said, “The chill bites deep when there’s no food between it and the marrow.”

  Suspecting him of planning to trick him, Farr warned himself to confess nothing. They’d have to ram a crowbar through his teeth to pry his jaws open.

  “You wouldn’t know it from the look of me,” said the man, “but I’m a gentleman at heart.” He wore a strained smile and held forth a trembling hand. Farr reached into his pants pocket, where he had five crumpled dollars plus a large assortment of coins. He pulled out a fistful of change, selected a nickel and five pennies, and dropped them into the man’s outstretched hand.

  Without thanking Farr, he drew back his arm and pitched the money into the water. Farr’s suspicions awoke. He hurried up the block, glancing back from time to time to see if he was being followed, but the man had dropped out of sight.

  He turned on the half run up the treeless avenue, angered with the bum for spoiling his view of the harbor. Yet though Farr was now passing the pawnshops, which reminded him of things he did not like to remember, his spirits rose. He accounted for this strange and unexpected change in him by his having done the deed. For an age he had been tormented by the desire to do it, had grown silent, lonely, sullen, until the decision came that the doing was the only way out. Much too long the plan had festered in his mind, waiting for an action, but now that it was done he at last felt free of the rank desire, the suppressed rage and fear that had embittered and thwarted his existence. It was done; he was content. As he walked, the vista of the narrow avenue, a street he had lived his life along, broadened, and he could see miles ahead, down to the suspension bridge in the distance, and was aware of people walking along as separate beings, not part of the mass he remembered avoiding so often as he’d trudged along here at various times of day and night.

  One of the pawnshop windows caught his eye. Farr reluctantly stopped, yet he scanned it eagerly. There among the wedding bands, watches, knives, crucifixes, and the rest, among the stringed musical instruments and brasses hanging on pegs on the wall, he found what his eye sought—his mandolin—and felt a throb of pity for it. But Farr had not been working for more than a year—had left the place one ra
iny day in the fall—and the only way, thereafter, that he could keep himself in cigarette, newspaper, and movie money was to part, one by one, with the things he had bought for himself in a better time: a portable typewriter, used perhaps now and then to peck out a letter ordering a magazine; a pair of ice skates worn twice; a fine wristwatch he had bought on his birthday; and lately, with everything else gone, he had sold this little mandolin he’d liked so well, which he had taught himself to strum as he sang, and it was this bit of self-made music that he missed most. He considered redeeming it with the same five one-dollar bills he had got for it a month ago, but didn’t relish the thought of strumming alone in his room; so sighing, Farr tore himself away from the window.

  At the next corner stood Gus’s Tavern. Farr, who had not gone in in an age, after a struggle entered, gazing around as if in a cathedral. Gus, older, with a folded apron around his paunch and an open vest over his white shirt, was standing behind the bar polishing beer glasses. When he saw Farr he put down the glass he was shining and observed him in astonishment.

  “Well, throw me for a jackass if ’tisn’t the old Punch-Ball King of South Second!”

  Farr grunted awkwardly at the old appellation. “Surprised, Gus?”

  “That’s the least of it. Where in the name of mud have you been these many months—or is it years?”

  “In the house mostly,” Farr answered huskily.

  Gus continued to regard him closely, to Farr’s discomfort. “You’ve changed a lot, Eddie, haven’t you now? I ask everybody whatever has become of the old Punch-Ball King and nobody says they ever see you. You used to haunt the streets when you were a kid.”