God's Grace by Bernard Malamud Read Free Book Online Page A

icebox. They ate twice daily; nobody suffered hunger.
    Despite the mortal insult the earth had endured, it yielded fruit and flowers, a fact that said a good word for God. Cohn had become a fructivore, except when fruit was unripe or unavailable—fortunately not for long, because they picked and stored it for reasonably lengthy periods.
    When there was nothing else to cat they opened tins of sardines or tuna fish. Though the young ape relished these specialties, Cohn felt he was violating an ethic if he ate them. He had pledged himself never to ingest what had once been a living creature.
    Therefore he boiled up rice, and with the flour from the ship, baked—since there was no yeast—matzo-like unleavened breadcakes on flat stones in the wood fire on the round stone ledge. The large cave acted as a ventilator, and once in a while a not always comfortable damp draft blew out of it.
    Buz ate the thin, often burnt breadcakes in small portions, unable to work up an appetite for Cohn’s rice and bread
cookery unless he added a fistful of leaves to the collation—his little salad.
    The late autumn months were a dreary time of damp and cold on the island. Cohn hadn’t expected the chill. He wore long johns, wool socks, and his overcoat on two sweaters; and he permitted Buz to borrow his poncho if he wanted it. Cohn suspected that something unusual had altered the climate, perhaps ashes of the destroyed world imprisoned in winds in the atmosphere.
    That meant hotter and colder than ordinary weather; and he sometimes wondered whether vegetation would continue to endure if God looked away a few celestial seconds. And whether the rain forest would turn black and expire. Cohn was concerned that a new ice age might be in the making, not usually likely on an equatorial island of this size and climatology; but the Lord had His mysterious ways and was not about to explain them.
    Cohn insulated the cave as best he could, with two sacks of cement and some rocks he broke up with his hammer; he filled the opening between the caves to a height of six feet. That left space for ventilation, especially important when the wood they burned was wet and smoked heavily. But the cave was comfortable and on dry days smelled of grass; and on wet days smelled like a wet forest. For himself he had added short legs to the cot he had constructed, and made of it a bed of split saplings covered with a layer of mimosa leaves, and a canvas sheet with his overcoat as blankets.
    Buz, when it wasn’t raining, preferred to rest in a nearby acacia; and when it rained at night he slept in his holding
cage, despite the fact that he had grown three inches since he and his friend had met. His head, when Cohn pulled him up by his hands, reached to Cohn’s chest, appreciably narrower than Buz’s. Though his legs were naturally bent, the chimp covered ground rapidly, sustaining his balance with ease, and propelling himself forward with his knuckles touching the ground. When they raced for fun, invariably Cohn fell behind.
    They played tag, hide-and-seek, nut-in-the-hole, an aggie game he had taught him that Buz liked extraordinarily well, although he rolled his nut clumsily and Cohn often let him win by rolling his own so forcefully it shot past the hole. Victory, however arranged, made no difference to Buz so long as he won. He grunted as he ate, danced on occasion, and if Cohn tickled him, responded by tickling Cohn. Cohn enjoyed laughing helplessly—it fitted the scheme of things. And he often thought what a fine friend Buz would make if he could talk.
    As spring neared, Cohn, wearing an old army cap to protect his head in the sun, worked with rocks and dead tree limbs to divert the stream that flowed from the waterfall across the savanna below the farther hills. Cohn dammed it and fed the water as irrigation to a rice paddy he had constructed after reading an article and studying a picture in his encyclopedia; and he seeded it with rice sprouts he had grown in the