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

cave. Within about four months he harvested a crop of rice and planted another. So long as the Lord was in a genial mood there would be rice forever. Cohn played with thoughts of immortality.
    He also planted—from seeds he had collected and saved—
yams and black-eyed beans. Unfortunately there was no lettuce or tomatoes anywhere on the island. Cohn relished salad but could not enjoy leaf salads, passing them up when Buz arrived with his offerings. He presented him, too—from his mouth into Cohn’s palm—with a chewed-up green gob of leaves; but Cohn was not tempted.
    Buz now and then assisted with the gardening. His fingers weren’t subtle and he was inefficient in planting, when Cohn, on his insistence, let him help. Buz cupped a small mound of beans in his palm but found it difficult to insert them individually into the soft soil; so he chewed up some and flung the rest away. Cohn thought he might be of more help in harvesting.
    But Buz was comparatively handy with a few tools. He liked plunging the point of his can opener into the top of a can, working it raggedly around until the tin was cut and he could get his fingers under the lid. He had learned to slice fruit with a knife and he used a hammer fairly accurately. All Cohn had to do was tap the tip of a nail into wood and Buz would drive it in all the way.
    Cohn crafted things. He carved wood with a jackknife and chisel, and made bowls, platters, pitchers. He carved a variety of wooden flowers and animals for remembrance. He wove fibers of cactus into stiff little cloths he wasn’t sure what to do with, and gathered and polished stones.
    One day he fixed up a small hammock for Buz, converting a topcoat of Dr. Bünder’s. He tied it between two live oak saplings, and Buz lay in it, swinging gently until he fell off to sleep. The chimp liked sunbathing in his hammock.
He also enjoyed sniffing Cohn’s bare feet as he lay in his hammock contemplating his fate.
    Would He have given me Buz if He intended to slay me?
     
    That night in the cave, Cohn said the island was shaped like a short, stubby bottle.
    Buz pantomimed he disagreed, a grunt with a shake of the head. He pantomimed peeling a banana.
    “A little like one, maybe,” Cohn nodded, “but a lot more like a stubby bottle, in my eye.”
    A banana, Buz insisted.
     
    Cohn had brought from the Rebekah Q five of Dr. Bünder’s fairly legible, waterlogged notebooks. He had discovered in one of them approximately forty partially blurred small drawings of sign-language images the scientist had taught the chimp. Cohn practiced as many signs as he could read.
    One day, as he sat in his rocker with Buz on his lap, he signaled to the chimp: “We—you and I—are alone in this world. Do you understand?”
    The chimp signaled, “Buz wants fruit.”
    Cohn signed: “I feel alone (lonely). Is Buz lonely?”
    The chimp signaled, “What is alone ?”
    Cohn, excited by the ape’s genuine question, pantomimed signs that might mean sad, unhappy, oppressed.
    Buz signed, “Play with Buz.”
    Cohn impatiently spoke aloud. “What I want to say is that the situation is getting on my nerves. I mean we’re alone
on this island and can’t be said to speak to each other. We may indicate certain things but there’s no direct personal communication. I’m not referring to existential loneliness, you understand—what might be called awareness of one’s essentially subjective being, not without some sense of death-in-life, if you know what I mean. I’m talking, rather, about the loneliness one feels when he lacks companionship, or that sense of company that derives from community. Do you read me, Buz?”
    The chimp signaled, “Drink-fruit (orange or coconut) for Buz.”
    “First Buz speak to (answer) what I ask (my question).”
    The little ape yawned—a gaping pink mouth and lively tongue within a semicircle of strong teeth. His breath smelled like a fragrant mulch pile. Cohn coughed.
    Buz attempted to suckle his left