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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “It's all pro forma stuff, honey,” Bridie said. “You don't even need to read it if you don't want to. Just sign it.”

  “Fine, fine,” Cris laughed as he signed the codicils. “All Square and Above Board.”

  “How odd that you should use that phrase,” Midas commented. “You could not have known it, but that is the motto of this Castle Cearnog Ficheall which you now own tentatively.”

  “Haven't you grown skinnier since your marriage, Bridie?” Cris asked.

  “Not at all. I've gained two stone since I've been married. That's twenty-eight pounds. Subconsciously I did it for you. I remember you used to say that I was perfect but that I would be even more perfect if I were a bit more ample. And now I am that.”

  “Somehow you seem skinnier, Bridie,” Cris said.

  Daydreams of amplitude. Rather, waking torchlight night dreams of amplitude. The beauties of spaciousness. Why was Cris musing on such things?

  At midnight the trumpet that was inset in the front door blew the angriest tune that ever was heard, like a signature tune of somebody.

  “That is a friend who is taking me back to Cork tonight,” Cris said. “I'll look in on you at the Castle again tomorrow perhaps.”

  “Wonderful!” Midas shouted. “It's been wonderful to see you again, Cris.”

  And after Cris had left, Midas shouted still more loudly: “Wonderful, wonderful! Now I have transmitted the fatal loathsome disease to Cris through the brotherhood rite and the entailment rite. And I am free of the sickness, and he will die of it before two years have gone by. And the Castle and the funds will revert to us. Nothing can go wrong, nothing.”

  “Nothing can go wrong for me at least,” Bridie shouted inwardly to herself. “Even if this trick doesn't work, it will work for me. Even if the disease somehow was not transmitted, even if Midas dies of it instead of Cris, I can always marry Cris. He loves me eternally, and nobody else can ever take my place with him. Maybe it will be even better for me if this doesn't work. Then I will have all the fortunes of both Midas and Cris. Isn't it nice that things always turn out so nice for me!”

  But Bridie was wrong about nobody ever being able to take her place. And she'd be furious when she found out who it was. Bridie had the beauty, yes, but beauty wasn't everything. There were such things as amplitude, as Cris realized when he got into the car with the lawyer's assistant at midnight and had an ample kiss from her. There were such things as spaciousness, and merriment. There were even such things as that business of laughing with a brogue.

  Oh, Bridie was beautiful, but Sharon (Sharon McSorley was the name of the lawyer's assistant) would make two of her with a bit left over. And you can't have too much of a good thing.

  They plighted their troth over an after-midnight supper of rooster hot from the spit, and Spanish sherry.

  “When we move into the Castle, in two years and a day, I'm going to make only one change,” said full-bodied Sharon. “I'm going to fix that tricky square in Checkerboard Dining Hall so that nobody will ever exit that way again. I've already told the Sea Monster. He says that he can get by on bodies as seldom as one every seven years, but I've told him that there'll be no more at all. He thinks that he may get another appointment at a Castle that overhangs Dingle Bay in Kerry County. Sea-rumor says that there's a good fall of bodies from that Castle.

  “I've told the Castle Ghosts that they may remain after we move in. They are pleased entirely with the arrangement. They say that it's always been the case that when the Castle has an ample mistress there will be merry times in the old place.”

  You Can't Go Back

  A note, a musty smell, a tune,

  Some bones and pebbles from the moon!

  Today they set a-flow a spring,

  Remembering, remembering.

  —The Helen Horn-Book

  One evening in the Latter Days, Helen brought over some bones and rocks that belonged to her late husband John Palmer. She brought the Moon Whistle too. And she left those things with us.

  Helen had married again, and to a man who hadn't known John. And she left all those things with us. And she thought that she'd better get some of those funny old things out of her house.

  “The Moon Whistle will be no good without you to blow it, Helen,” Hector O'Day said. She blew it then, very loudly, with her too-big mouth; and there was laughing lightning in her eyes, still undiminished. Then she was away and down the stairs and out of the building with that rush of hers that was a sort of breakneck tumble.

  And she left behind her a tumble of memories of the times when we decades before this had gone to White Cow Town four times. It had never been crowded in White Cow Town when we were there. It wasn't a place you stumbled over, not unless you were a pretty high stepper.

  In Osage County there were some pretty small towns: Bigheart, Hulah, Okeas, Wild Horse, Shidler, White Eagle, Horseshoe, Kaw City, Hog Shooter, Rock Salt, Bluestem, each of these towns being smaller than its fellows. But smaller than any of them was White Cow Town. There just weren't many people there, and those that were there were pretty narrow. There was a saying “There are no fat people in White Cow Town.”

  (An informant has just told me that Hog Shooter isn't in Osage County, that it's over the line in Washington County. Not in memory it isn't! The informant must be wrong.)

  In these latter days it was Barry Shibbeen, Grover Whelk, Caesar Ducato, Hector O'Day and myself who were together in our cardplaying and discussion den when Helen had brought those mementos over.

  But back in the old days John Palmer had been with us, and Helen had been there too for the events at White Cow Town, and some of the Bluestems.

  That first time, we had ridden up to Bluestem Ranch Number One with Tom Bluestem and his mother in her Buick sedan. The Number One was the oldest of the Bluestem Ranches and was run by Tom's grandparents. They were wonderful people and they said that the place was ours.

  The Moon Whistle was hanging on the wall in the ranch-house, and Helen who was a horn-blower and whistle-blower asked if she could blow it.

  “Oh, we'll give it to you,” Tom's grandmother said, and she handed it to Helen. And Helen blew it loudly.

  “Don't blow that damned thing in here!” Grandfather Bluestem shouted. “Take it down to Lost Moon Canyon if you want to blow it. We'll have White Cow Rock breaking in our roof here if it hears it. Oh, that damned whistle!”

  This was a surprising outburst, for Grandfather Bluestem was always a friendly and soft-spoken man.

  Well, that Moon Whistle did have an eerie and shrill and demanding tone, even a little bit insulting. It was a ‘call’, and somebody had better answer it.

  “I don't know where Lost Moon Canyon is,” Helen said.

  “Oh, I'll take you all over there,” Grandmother Bluestem told us. Barry, Grover, Caesar, Hector, John, Helen, myself, and Tom Bluestem, we all got in the ranch truck and Grandmother Bluestem drove us to Lost Moon Canyon. We were all nine years old except John Palmer who had recently had his tenth birthday, and Grandmother Bluestem who said that she was either fifty or a hundred years, she forgot which, she was weak at numbers.

  Lost Moon Canyon, through which ran Hominy Creek, was the roughest place on the Bluestem Ranches. There were large and dangerous-looking overhanging rocks, unnaturally large for a canyon no bigger than that, absolutely threatening in their extreme overhang. There was the feeling that one of them was about to fall right down. Then the biggest of those rocks moved, and we howled in near fear.

  “Oh, that's only White Cow Rock,” Grandmother Bluestem. “It's different from the other rocks. It's a moon. And it won't fall. It moves slowly. Blow the Moon Whistle, Helen, and it'll come on down.”

  Helen blew the Moon Whistle (oh, that damned shrill whistle!), and White Cow Rock descended a hundred feet, with a slow and wobbling motion, and hung right over the ranch truck. There was an upside-down goat standing on the bottom of the big rock, but it didn't seem as if it were going to fall off. There were also some du
cks walking upside-down on the bottom of White Cow Rock.

  “Let's go up,” Tom Bluestem said. “There's a shaft or channel right here in the middle of it, and you can climb through it all the way to the top. You can if you're not afraid. It's scary, but that's all.”

  “I'm not afraid of anything,” Caesar said, “but some things make me kind of nervous. I don't know when anything's made me as nervous as that big, bobbling rock does.”

  From the top of the cab of the truck we could get to the bottom of the shaft in the rock. Tom Bluestem climbed up that shaft followed by John Palmer, Barry Shibbeen, Grover Whelk, Caesar Ducato, Hector O'Day, myself, and Helen.

  “Aren't you coming up too, Grandmother Bluestem?” Helen asked.

  “No, I can't,” that lady said. “Since I've gotten older I can't do it. There are no fat people on White Cow Rock or in White Cow Town.”

  As we climbed up the shaft we could see why there were no fat people on top of that rock. That shaft got pretty narrow in some places. It was tricky climbing up it, but not as dangerous as it might seem. There was no place so wide that we couldn't put one hand on each side of the shaft, and there were no smooth or slippery places in it. But it was a very high and long climb and it was pretty dark in there. We had climbed about fifty yards when we came to a short tunnel leading into a little cave.

  “We can crawl in here and rest for a little while,” Caesar said.

  “No, we can't either,” Tom Bluestem contradicted. “There's some real mean and peculiar people who live in that nook, and the gnawed bones on the floor of their cave are real weird. Some of them are bones of kids about our age. Let's keep climbing.”

  “What lives in that cave are gnomes and trolls,” Helen said.

  “How'd you know?” Barry asked her. “You've never been up here before.”

  “Every moon everywhere has a family of gnomes or trolls or whatever their local name is living in the exact center of it,” Helen said. “And all the caves have real weird bones in them, dire wolf bones, wooly rhinoceros bones, human bones, things like that.”

  There was sharp, strong smell there. It was the most characteristic smell on the whole of White Cow Moon. We climbed the rest of the way to the top. And then we were in the middle of White Cow Town and in the brightest and friendliest sunshine ever anywhere.

  White Cow Rock was a rough, rock-and-clay sphere about a hundred yards in diameter. White Cow Town on the top of the rock had thirteen houses and one store in it. Nine of the houses had outhouses behind them; but the outhouses that had been behind the other four houses had fallen off that rock or moon in times gone by. Of necessity, for there wasn't much level space on White Cow Rock, those outhouses had been built quite a ways down the slope, and sometimes the whole rock wobbled. It had never been very safe to use any of those outhouses of the rears of those lots in White Cow Town.

  “I tell you though,” said an elderly citizen of the town, “there comes times, at least once a day, when it's not very safe not to use them either.”

  Listen, it was plain magic up on top of that rock or moon. There were never such bright colors or such nourishing air anywhere. The rock was free-floating. It had now drifted about five hundred feet higher in the air and about half a mile to the North. It gave us a good view of both Lost Moon Canyon and the Bluestem Ranch House far below, and you could even see the towers of Pawhuska off in the misty distance north-east. This was much more magical than being up in a balloon even. All of us had been up in a balloon once, at the Barton's Show Grounds in T-Town. But that balloon was held up by three cables worked by winches, and it rose only about seventy-five feet up in the air. This moon had it beat by a sky mile.

  All those houses up on the moon were old-looking and unpainted, but they had a sharpness of outline and a liveliness of detail that isn't to be found in the houses down on Earth. This was like being in really bright daylight for the first time in our lives.

  The only animals that the people up on White Cow had were chickens and ducks and goats. The saying about the place should have been amended to say “There are no fat people nor no big animals on White Cow either.” The goats were native to that moon, a man said, and so were the chickens. The ducks had come there about five hundred years before this, and the people had come about a thousand years ago. But big animals wouldn't have been able to go up that shaft.

  The delight and magic of White Cow was just the ‘living in the sky’ that was the condition there. There was an immediacy, a wininess, a happiness, an exhilaration, a music, a delight about ‘living in the sky’.

  Four of the men on White Cow worked for the Bluestem Ranches down below, mowing and baling hay, mending fences, moving cattle from one pasture to another, doing whatever workers do on a ranch. One of the women taught at the consolidated school that was between Bluestem and Gray Horse. And nine of the children of White Cow went to that same country school down on Earth. One of the men up there had a still and made moonshine.

  “You show me a law that says you can't make moonshine on a moon,” he used to challenge people. His still gave a sour-mash smell to the whole moon, but it wasn't the strongest or sharpest smell that they had.

  “How can the goats and the ducks walk straight out or even upside down on this rock?” Hector O'Day puzzled to us. “They walk on every part of this sphere.” “It's all a question of gravity,” John Palmer said. “A weak gravity will hold little things but not big things. It'll hold goats or ducks on a moon maybe, but it might not hold the people on. One of you lighter kids try walking around this moon to the bottom and up again if you want to. If you don't fall off, then the heavier of us will try it.”

  “The mathematics of the gravity here is really rum,” Barry Shibbeen cut in, but he had that crooked grin on his funny-looking face that meant that he couldn't be trusted. “Recall Foxley's Formula Five, and you'll understand the gravity a little bit better. Think about Edwardson's Elliptical Equation. Remember Mumford's Monotreme!”

  “That sounds like a good battle-cry slogan, ‘Remember Mumford's Monotreme!’ ” Grover Whelk giggled. “I wonder what it means.”

  “I know what Foxley's Formula Five means,” Helen contributed, “and it doesn't have anything to do with gravitation. It's for women's sickness and it comes in blue bottles. Mama takes it sometimes.”

  There was one ‘wanted’ man who lived in White Cow Town, and the sheriff wouldn't go up there to get him. “The sheriff is afraid of me,” the man said.

  “I'm not afraid of any man on Earth,” the sheriff answered when that was reported to him, “and I'll go anywhere on Earth to get a man. But White Cow Town isn't on Earth. I'm not afraid of that man. I'm just spooked of those off-Earth places.”

  In the general store they had a little radio, homemade, and superior to anything that might be bought. It would get station KVOO fifty miles away in Bristow. It would get it clear and loud whenever White Cow Moon went up more than five hundred feet in the air.

  They had Nehi pop in that store, but it cost six cents a bottle instead of a nickel.

  “That's because of the transportation,” the lady said. “We have to get a penny more for it up here than they get for it down on Earth.”

  The kids in White Cow Town had a rope and they were playing tug-of-war, but they were playing it like a bunch of sissies. They didn't show us much pull at all.

  “Look,” Barry Shibbeen told them, “there are eight of us and nine of you, and I bet we can out-pull you all over the place.”

  “No, there are just seven of you, Barry,” Tom Bluestem said. “Count me out of it.” That was odd. Tom had always been very competitive in all games and sports. Well, there were seven of us then, and there were nine of the White Cow kids, and some of them were quite a bit bigger than we were. And we still pulled them all over the place. We pulled them all over the place until—

  Well, we pulled them until, if they had let go of that rope, we would have fallen clear off of White Cow Moon. We were that far down on the slope of the s
phere.

  “Help, Tom, what'll we do?” we called to our friend, our friend who had been acting a little bit funny and not joining in the game.

  “When you play tug-of-war up here, the name of the game isn't checkers,” Tom said. “The name of the game is ‘give-away’.”

  “Don't let them give us away,” we wailed.

  The kids finally dug in and held the rope fast, with the aid of a loop around ‘Last Chance Tree’. We climbed up the rope to safety then. But those moon kids sure laughed and hooted at us a lot after that. We had been beaten about as bad as anybody can be beaten at any game; and we were the smart kids and they were just a bunch of sky bumpkins.

  Helen said she was going to stay on that moon forever since they had plenty of the two things she loved the most, duck eggs and goat milk.

  “You'll want to go back home and get your cornet,” John Palmer told her. “And you can always come back here.”

  “That's right. I can always come back here,” Helen said.

  We were adopted by several nations of birds. They gathered on White Cow Moon like clouds, black clouds of crows and blackbirds, gray clouds of doves, brown-and-yellow clouds of larks. There were congregations of cat-birds up there, and of night hawks, even of king birds and mocking birds, and of hawks and eagles. Most of these birds had a contempt for the people of Earth, but they were friendly and genial to the people on the moon.And there were other things up there that were not quite birds. We didn't know what to call them, but they were things of a different wing. And the bones in their nests were as strange and varied as those in the trolls' cave.

  Seedling clouds nested on White Cow Moon, and some of them glittered like jewels from all the sparkling water in them. When they wanted to start a shower down below one of them would say ‘now’, another one would say ‘now’, and a third one would say ‘now’. Then they would zoom down and start a shower and spill all over place.