The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  The wolf came out of the rocks and moved towards Clela. There was confusion as the animal seemed to have three shadows following it. Pidgeon could see its shagginess before he could make out its form. There was the feel of menace, of murder in the making. Pidgeon caught the white blaze on the head of it before he could make out much else. It erected itself curiously, and so did its three shadows.

  And Pidgeon was quite surprised to see that it was now a man on two legs, though losing none of its fierceness or shagginess. It was the wolfish Jules Lamotte with a rifle on his arm. Oh, and that white blaze on his head!

  Pidgeon slipped his own rifle onto ready as he heard the sudden rough voice of Jules. He watched Clela put her hand to her mouth and totter, trembling like a staked-out lamb. He'd kill Lamotte if he touched the girl. Man or wolf, he'd kill him!

  Lamotte came within a foot of the girl, and Pidgeon could see Clela's eyes widen to great balls of white. Then suddenly the fire was banked and the storm died.

  “This is a very rough place to be at night, young lady,” Lamotte said in a tight voice. “Your father wouldn't care if you were abroad here, but you should care. I all but shot you. I might not have made sure. Walk on down the road, young girl, and then follow it to your home. I'll keep watch on you as you go. Ah, but I see that I'm not needed in this. Is it not the sheriff who slips up so clumsy and heavy-footed behind me?”

  “I'm the sheriff, Lamotte,” Pidgeon said. “And what are you doing here?”

  “Walking on my own land. That's all you need to know. Why are you here?” Lamotte seemed to have invisible or shadowy supporters with him. Not to be seen now, though, and not certainly to be smelled either as men or wolves. Present to extra senses or to imaginations.

  “I'm hunting a wolf-man,” Pidgeon said. “I came near to killing you for him. It mightn't have been a mistake if I'd done it.”

  “And I also lacked only a little of killing,” Lamotte said, “and you interrupted me. Yes, you were very close to the wolf-man, Sheriff. So was I. But this time it was you and the girl who nudged my elbow and prevented my shooting. Why do you hunt with an agneau?”

  “With what?”

  “With a little lamb staked out. Is that how you hunt a wolf-man?”

  On the next day there came new evidence against Jules Lamotte. Ribaul brought Madelon Lamotte to Sheriff Pidgeon. “Mr. Pidgeon, Mr. Pidgeon!” Ribaul called from outside. Ribaul never knocked. He followed the country custom of standing in front of a house and calling out. Pidgeon opened the door to them. “I'm here. Come in,” he said. “I will leave her with you,” Ribaul said, and he left.

  “It is only to talk to you a little,” Madelon spoke when she was inside. She was very fair for a country woman, and her hair was the color of polished walnut.

  “I hope that you can tell me something to clear things up,” Pidgeon said.

  “No. What I tell will clear nothing up. It will tie it all in knots like snakes. It is possible that I am mad, Sheriff. If that is so, then lock me up at once. Better to be locked up than torn to pieces. Better to be a mad woman than a dead one. But I am selfish: it is of my husband that I must think. For myself I no longer care if I am mad, or even if I am dead. It is the wolf in everything. Everything that I eat or drink has the wolf in it. I see it everywhere, I see it in our yard and house. But wait! Before I speak more, promise that you will not kill him.”

  “Not kill the wolf?”

  “Not kill my husband Jules. Promise that you will not kill him.”

  “I promise nothing. Tell me what you came to tell.”

  “I see the wolf in our yard. I scream for my husband. When he comes, the wolf is gone, and he says that I only imagine it. Then I see it again and I say ‘Look, Jules, look!’ But then my husband is gone.”

  “They are never both there at once?”

  “Never. And Jules says that he does not see the wolf at all, but I see it a dozen times. Jules goes out at night. Oh, if I only know where he goes! Then I begin to smell the wolf, strongly and all the time. And in my own house! Yesterday I come on the wolf face to face in my own house, in the room that we call the cool pantry. I screamed, I ran to my own room, I blocked the door with a trunk. I lay on the bed in terror. I am a country woman. I have seen wolves. Another wolf I would chase like a big dog. This is not like another wolf. I hear it pant at my door. I hear its feet go back and forth. Its teeth scrape the balks of the door and they seem to splinter and tear. Then I feel a change as if it is two things at once.

  “Then it opened the door as if the trunk against it was a toy. It opened the door and came in. It stood at my bed, and I am too frightened even to open my eyes. ‘My poor Madelon,’ said my husband Jules, for he was the one standing there. ‘What has frightened you? Have you dreamed of the wolf again?’

  “He is there, my husband, and there is no wolf. ‘I have seen him, Jules, in this very house,’ I say. ‘You know that is impossible,’ Jules tells me, and he comforts me. But as I looked I saw something, and I froze. His left hand was only becoming a hand again. The claws were going back in and the fingers were coming out. The heaviest part of the hair was disappearing. It had not been a hand a moment before. Is that possible?”

  “No. That is not possible,” Pidgeon said. But what was possible? “Mrs. Lamotte, are you afraid of your husband?”

  “Not when he is my husband. Only when he is the wolf.”

  “Go back and stay with him today and tonight. Tell him not to leave his house at all for any reason. If the wolf shows in the open tonight, we will kill it. And if the cornered wolf turns into a man, we will still kill it.”

  She left then. She still had her bearing and her beauty, for all her distraught state. Pidgeon had wanted to ask her one more thing.

  But how do you go about asking a woman whether her husband has a tail?

  A little later in the day, Clela Ragley came to the sheriff.

  “I have proof now for sure,” she said. “Jules Lamotte is the wolf.”

  “Have you really anything to go on? Anything tangible?”

  “I think he got pretty tangible with me. I dreamed of the wolf and the man just before dawn this morning. It was a real liver-twister of a dream. He was Jules the man and he came at me. Then he was Jules the wolf as he closed in. He fastened on my shoulder with those terrible teeth, and I only awakened in time or I would have been done to death by him.”

  “Clela, you half-pint witch! Won't you ever grow up! I want tangible evidence.”

  “Is this what you call tangible?” she asked. She showed it to him with a sudden motion, and it set him to shaking. He wasn't sure whether it was Clela herself who had this effect on him, or the horrible wounds. She'd been bitten and mauled pretty badly where she dropped her sack dress off her shoulders. They were deep, tearing bites that had gone livid, two of one sort and one of another. They could be deadly.

  “Clela, where did you get those?” Pidgeon asked in amazement.

  “I told you,” she said. Pidgeon wouldn't accept it. He'd close his ears and not hear such stuff. Clela was talking some more, but he only heard the end of it.

  “After you kill him, Sheriff,” she said, “then cut off his head and bring it here and see if it doesn't match the bites. That way we can be sure.”

  The wolf had struck again the night before and many sheep were missing. So it had to be the wolf hunt all the way now.

  “Why do you cut those funny notches into the lead part of your bullets?” Ribaul asked Pidgeon before they started out.

  “So I'll know which shots I shot,” Pidgeon said. “I want to be clear on that.”

  They went after the wolf as night came on, four of them in one bunch, Ribaul, Ragley, Pidgeon and Kenrad. These four men could track. They knew the country, and they knew animals.

  “I hear, Ribaul, that you were once with a carnival,” Ragley said as they went along in loose skirmish. “I hear that they paid to see you and thought you were a new kind of animal.”

  “Were you with a
carnival, Ribaul?” Pidgeon asked. “How did Ragley know?”

  “I was with a carnival. I was not on exhibit. I worked. I cared for animals. I had a tame bobcat and a tame coon and a tame bear.”

  “Did you have a tame wolf?” Ragley asked.

  “No. There is no such thing as a tame wolf.”

  “Why are you carrying the stake and the maul, Ribaul?” Kenrad asked. “Are they your idea, or the sheriff's?”

  “What matter? He says it doesn't hurt to have them, so long as I'm the one to carry them.”

  “You'll have to catch the wolf, Ribaul, before you can kill him with those.”

  “They are not to kill the wolf with. They are to make him stay dead.”

  The wolf was there all right, in a general area. For a long time it did not seem to move at all. It waited for them to come. Then, as though by sudden decision, it began to move. So did the men, with absolute sureness now.

  They hunted without dogs, and they were quickly onto the wolf much closer than they could have got with dogs. They had the wolf boxed into the same rough double section of land where Pidgeon and Ribaul had hunted him before. They had him in the poke, and there was nothing left but to pull the drawstring.

  It was clear moonlight, and they had him. If he had broke to the open, he would have to display himself for an easy shot against the clear hillside. If he stayed in the thicket, they would beat him out. If he holed in anywhere, they would burn him over and dig him out. He was big and dangerous, but they had him tight.

  The wolf broke to the open hill, and he turned as if at bay. And it was as if three shadows of him turned also. He was as big as a grown puma. He'd go more than two hundred pounds. He actually sparked fire off his raised hackles, as a lynx at bay is said to do. He had his high white blaze and his eyes of a man, and he looked at them with fevered hate.

  Ribaul and Ragley must have hated to let it go to another. But it was the sheriff's case, and so it was his shot. Sheriff Pidgeon shot the wolf clearly, right at the edge of that white blaze on the head. And one shot did it.

  “Now he turn to a man,” Ribaul said. “Watch him turn as he dies. See how he begin to shiver and turn. This will show that he is loup-garou.”

  But he didn't turn. He'd been a wolf, and he stayed a wolf.

  “He's dead,” said Pidgeon. “That lays one ghost, for me at least.”

  “Here is the maul, here is the stake,” Ribaul said. “Use them, Sheriff.”

  “You really believe in that, do you, Ribaul?” Pidgeon asked.

  “That if you drive the stake through the wolf's heart he'll stay dead? I believe it.”

  “Somebody find where that hellish noise is coming from,” Pidgeon sputtered, “and put a stop to it.” There had been an awful wailing going on since the wolf was shot.

  Pidgeon drove the stake of bois d'arc wood in through the chest of the wolf at the line just behind and under the front shoulder, so as to go through the heart, or at least to make the fiction of going through the heart. It was a very tough wolf and it took some driving. But the stake had been sharpened as only tough bois d'arc wood can be. Staking the wolf became like an orgasm to all the men.

  “He'll stay dead now,” said Ragley.

  “Then why doesn't that damned noise stop if the wolf is dead?” Pidgeon asked. The noise was coming from the farmhouse of Jules Lamotte. Pidgeon's feet recognized the approach before his eyes did. They had been less than two hundred yards from the house when Pidgeon had killed the wolf. They went to it.

  The kitchen door was open and there was a light inside. It was Madelon Lamotte standing in the doorway with her hair streaming. The hellish noise was her screaming. It went on and on to chill your blood.

  Pidgeon got there first, white-faced and with a crazy clatter as he caromed off objects in the dark kitchen yard.

  “Mrs. Lamotte! For the love of God what is wrong? Mrs.—”

  But Sheriff Pidgeon never finished, nor did he get all the way through the kitchen door. He staggered back with crimsoned vision. He went down crazily and hard.

  “Killer!” screamed Madelon Lamotte. “Murder my husband! I'll—”

  Pidgeon had risen dazed and made for the door again, there to be met by a second impact of sound and another shredding blow. It was Madelon who clawed him like a lioness and left a bloody swath as she swung. She had felled him twice. She had nearly taken his head off, and a great part of his face was surely left beneath her fingernails.

  Ragley and Kenrad had her restrained in some fashion after a while. The screaming fell to a series of splitting sobs.

  “Now what is this?” Pidgeon demanded. “Hold her, dammit!” He wasn't sure how badly he was injured. He could barely see.

  “You lick-spit sheriff, you kill my husband!” Madelon howled. “Kill me then, men, but give me two seconds with that white-faced fool first. We see who kill who—”

  Ragley had her pinned down then, and Kenrad went deeper into the house to see what had happened. He didn't have to go very deep.

  “In here, Sheriff,” he called then. “In the little room off the kitchen here. It's worse than you think.”

  Pidgeon followed in. Jules Lamotte lay dead in that little earth-floored room off the kitchen that is called the cool pantry. He had been shot in the head, right at the edge of that white blaze that so resembled that of the wolf.

  What was even more weirdly wrong was that Jules Lamotte had a stake of bois d'arc driven through his chest and into the dirt floor of the little pantry. And Madelon was still spitting fury in the kitchen. It seemed wild to try to reason with her in her state, but it must be attempted.

  “Tell me who did this thing, Mrs. Lamotte,” Sheriff Pidgeon begged.

  “You vile pig, you did it! Spitting hypocrite, you killed my husband! Right in that room. Just minutes ago. You shot him, and you drove a stake through his heart. Let me at that sheriff, man!”

  “I couldn't have,” Pidgeon said weakly. “Ragley, hold her! Where is Ribaul all this time?”

  “But I am right here all this time,” Ribaul banged out the words. “Here, let me hold her. I have a way with wild animals. She'll not get loose from me.”

  Back in the cool pantry Pidgeon swooped down on dead Jules Lamotte and began to do a thing that was illegal, outrageous, really mad. Kenrad and Ragley tried to stop him, but he was not to be stopped. Working feverishly he began to cut into the starred head of Lamotte with a jackknife. He went in after the shot that had killed the man. He grasped a meat cleaver from the pantry wall and used it as a pry and wedge. The shot had spent itself in smashing through the bone at an angle and was barely inside the brain case. Pidgeon brought it out and held it in his hand.

  “It's my shot,” Pidgeon said. “I marked my shots before starting out tonight. I wanted to be certain of what ones I shot.”

  “Well, then, it's certain that you shot this one,” Ragley said. “It's certain that you killed Jules Lamotte.”

  Pidgeon left the Lamotte farmhouse and took Ragley and Kenrad back to the wolf-kill site. Pidgeon wandered back and forth, and the other two looked at him puzzled.

  “What are we looking for?” Ragley asked.

  “For the spot where the wolf was killed!” Pidgeon said wildly.

  “We're standing on the spot, Sheriff. Those are the scuff marks. There's the hole where your stake went through the wolf and into the ground. Wipe the blood out of your eyes, Sheriff. She near took your eyes out with her claws.”

  “But where's the wolf?” Pidgeon asked in a daze.

  “Sheriff, are you crazy?” Ragley asked. “You saw Lamotte dead. How could the wolf be here and he there? Lamotte was the wolf. Lamotte is the dead wolf now.”

  “No. A wolf is a wolf and a man is a man,” Pidgeon insisted. “There has to be a dead wolf around here somewhere.”

  “You can find out tomorrow, Sheriff,” Ragley said. “It's going to be another hot one tomorrow. Give that sun seven or eight hours on this rock pasture, and you can find the wolf if he is h
ere. The buzzards will be turning in the air over him and shuttling down on him. A dead wolf would get real ripe in the sun if he was here. But he isn't. We all know who killed the wolf and the man with the same shot. Let's call it a night.”

  Well, a man had been shot to death, and Pidgeon himself was Pidgeon's only suspect. But why, leaving the unnatural stories out of it, should anyone want to kill Jules Lamotte? Possibly for his gold coins. Likely Lamotte hadn't any gold coins, but one of the stories was that he had piles of them somewhere. Or possibly for his more-than-handsome wife. Since he'd seen her in a fury, Pidgeon had known that Madelon might have enough fire in her to draw a man to murder.

  Or Lamotte could have been killed because he was really stealing the farmers' sheep. But there were wild elements left over from all these motives. Why couldn't Lamotte have been killed in a rational manner?

  “Where is the wolf?” Pidgeon quizzed himself. “Where is my maul that drove the stake or stakes. Why was only one of my marked bullets shot? Oh, I remember the maul now.”

  They had told Pidgeon that his maul, overlooked at first, had been found on the earth floor of the cool pantry in Lamotte's farmhouse, right beside dead Lamotte.

  In the hot afternoon of the new day Pidgeon went to check on the buzzards. The sun should have done its work. The wolf, if he still lay in the rocky pasture, would be ripe. There were a couple of buzzards wheeling near where it should be. Not quite near enough though. They seemed rather to be above the Lamotte farmstead.