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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Bonny, why are you mean?”

  “I wish I knew, Moysha, I wish I knew.”

  After a week of this he went to sea again, and did not come back to his home port for two years. He learned of the sea-leaning giants. “I do not know the name of this tree,” said Sour John, “though once I knew it. This is the time of a story where one usually says it's time for a drink. However, for a long time I have been worried about my parasites who are to me almost like my own children, and this constant diet of rum and redeye cannot be good for them. I believe if the young lady would fry me a platter of eggs it would please my small associates, and do me more good than harm.”

  He learned, Moysha did, of the sea-leaning giants. They are massive trees of the islands and the more fragmentary mainlands, and they grow almost horizontal out toward the sea. They are not influenced by the wind; from the time they are little whips the wind is always blowing in from the sea, and they grow against it and against all reason. They have, some of them, trunks nine feet thick, but they always lean out over the sea. Moysha began to understand why they did, though most people would never understand it.

  He acquired a talking bird of great versatility. He acquired also a ring-tailed monkey and a snake that he carried around inside his shirt, for Moysha was now a very salty seaman.

  He was prosperous, for he had never forsaken the trade of the moneylender, and he was always a shrewd buyer of novelties and merchandise. He turned them over as he went from port to port, and always at a profit.

  He became a cool student of the ceaseless carnage of the ocean, and loved to muse on the ascending and descending corpses and their fragments in the old watery grave.

  He spent seven months on a certain Chinese puzzle, and he worked it, the only Occidental who ever had patience enough to do so.

  When she was fifteen Bonny married a seaman, and he was not Moysha. This happened just one week before Moysha came back to port and to the Blue Fish. The man she married was named Oglesby Ogburn; and if you think that's a funny name, you should have heard the handles of some of them that she turned down. The very day that Moysha came to the Blue Fish was the day that Oglesby left; for the honeymoon was over, and he had to go back to the sea. Bonny was now all kindness to everyone. But she still put the old needle into Moysha.

  “I've had a husband for a week now, so I won't be able to get along without a man. You stay with me while you're in town; and after that I'll get another, and then another and another. And by that time Oglesby will be back for a week.”

  “Don't talk like that, Bonny, even if I know you're joking.”

  “But you don't know that I'm joking. You never know for sure.”

  “How can anyone who looks so like an angel talk like that?”

  “It does provide a contrast. Don't you think it makes me more interesting? I didn't know you were the kind who chased married women.”

  “I'm not. But O Bonny! What am I to do?”

  “Well I've certainly offered you everything. I don't know how I can offer you any more.”

  And a few days later when Moysha was leaving port they talked again.

  “You haven't even given me a wedding present or wished me luck. And we do need it. It's always bad luck for a seaman to marry a crippled woman. What are you going to give me for a wedding present?”

  “The only thing I will give you is the serpent from my bosom.”

  “O don't talk so flowery.”

  Then he took the snake out of his shirt.

  “O, I didn't know you had a real snake. Is he for me? That's the nicest present anyone ever gave me. What do you call him?”

  “Why, just a snake. Ular, that is, he's a foreign snake.”

  So he went back to sea and left the little girl there with the snake in her hands.

  Bonny was a widow when she was sixteen, as everyone had known she would be. It's no joke about it being bad luck for a seaman to marry a cripple. They seldom lose much time in perishing after they do it. Oglesby died at sea, as all the Ogburns did; and it was from a trifling illness from which he was hardly sick at all. It was many weeks later that Moysha heard the news, and then he hurried back to his home port.

  He was too late. Bonny had married again.

  “I thought you'd probably come, and I kind of wanted it to be you. But you waited so long, and the summer was half over, that I decided to marry Polycarp Melish. I'm halfway sorry I did. He wouldn't let Ular sleep with us, and he killed him just because he bit him on the thumb.

  “But I tell you what you do. What with the bad luck and all, Polycarp won't last many months. Come around earlier next year. I like to get married in the springtime. I'll be a double widow then.”

  “Bonny, that's a terrible way to talk even when kidding.”

  “I'm not kidding at all. I even have an idea how we can beat the jinx. I'll tell you about it after we get married next year. Maybe a crippled girl gets to keep her third husband.”

  “Do you want Polycarp to die?”

  “Of course I don't. I love him. I love all my husbands, just like I'll love you after I marry you. I can't help it if I'm bad luck. I told him, and he said he already knew it; but he wanted to do it anyhow. Will you bring me another snake the next time you're in port?”

  “Yes. And you can keep the monkey in place of it till I come back. But you can't have the bird yet. I have to keep someone to talk to.”

  “All right. Please come in the spring. Don't wait till summer again or it'll be too late and I'll already be married to someone else. But whether we get married or not, I'm never going to be mean again. I'm getting too old for that.”

  So he went to sea again happier than he ever had before.

  When she was seventeen Bonny was a widow again as everyone had known she would be. Polycarp had been mangled and chopped to pieces in an unusual accident in the engine room of his ship.

  Moysha heard of it very soon, before it could have been heard of at home. And he took council with his talking bird, and with one other, technically more human.

  “This other,” said Sour John, “was myself. It was very early spring, and Moysha was wondering if it were really best to hurry home and marry Bonny.

  “ ‘I am not at all superstitious,’ he said. ‘I do not believe that a crippled woman is necessarily bad luck to seamen. But I believe that Bonny may be bad luck to everyone, including herself.’

  “We were on a chocolate island of a French flavor and a French name. On it were girls as pretty as Bonny, and without her reputation for bad luck: girls who would never be either wives or widows. And there is a way to go clear around the world from one such place to another.

  “ ‘The Blue Fish is not necessarily the center of the earth,’ I told him. ‘I have always necessarily believed them to be a little left of center. And Bonny may not be the queen. But if you think that she is, then for you she is so. Nine months, or even a year is not very long to live, and you will be at sea most of the time. But if you think a few weeks with the little girl is enough, then it is enough for you. A lot of others who will not have even that will be dead by next Easter.’ I said this to cheer him up. I was always the cheerful type.

  “ ‘And what do you think?’ Moysha asked the talking bird.

  “ ‘Sampah,’ said the bird in his own tongue. This means rubbish. But whether he meant that the superstition was rubbish, or the idea of marrying with a consequent early death was rubbish, is something that is still locked up in his little green head.”

  Moysha hurried home to marry Bonny. He brought a brother of Ular for a present, and he went at once to the Blue Fish.

  “Well you're just in time. I was going to have the banns read for me and somebody tomorrow, and if you'd been an hour later it wouldn't have been you.

  “I was halfway afraid to come.”

  “You needn't have been afraid. I told you I knew a way to beat the jinx. I'm selling the Blue Fish. I wrote you that Papa was dead. And we're going to take a house uptown and forget the sea.” />
  “Forget the sea? How could anyone forget the sea?”

  “Why, you're only a toy seaman. You weren't raised to it. When you go away from it you won't be a seaman at all. And crippled women are only bad luck to seamen, not to other men.”

  “But what would I do? The sea is all I know.”

  “Don't be a child, Moysha. You hate the sea, remember? You always told me that you did. You only went to sea because you thought I liked seamen. You know a hundred ways to make a dollar, and you don't have to go near the sea for any of them.”

  So they were married. And they were happy. Moysha discovered that Bonny was really an angel. Her devil talk had been a stunt.

  It was worth all five dark years at sea to have her. She was now even more lovely than the first night he had seen her. They lived in a house uptown in the heart of the city, and were an urbane and civilized couple. And three years went by.

  Then one day Bonny said that they ought to get rid of the snake, and maybe even the monkey. She was afraid they would bite one of the children, or one of the children would bite them.

  The talking bird said that if his friends left he would leave, too.

  “But Bonny,” said Moysha, “these three are all that I have to remind me of the years when I was a seaman.

  “You have me, also. But why do you want to be reminded of those awful days?”

  “I know what we could do, Bonny. We could buy the Blue Fish again. It isn't doing well. We could live there and run it. And we could have a place there for the snake and the monkey and the bird.”

  “Yes, we could have a place for them all, but not for the children. That is no place to raise children. I know, and I was raised there. Now my love, don't be difficult. Take the three creatures and dispose of them. And remember that for us the sea isn't even there any more.”

  But it was still there when he went down to the Blue Fish to try to sell the three creatures to the seaman. An old friend of his was present and was looking for an engineer first class to ship out that very night. And there was a great difficulty in selling the creatures.

  He could not sell them unless he put a price on them, and he was damned if he'd do that. That was worse than putting a price on his own children. He had had them longer than his children, and they were more peculiarly his own. He could not sell them. And he could not go home and tell his wife that he could not sell them.

  “He went out and sat on the horns of the dilemma and looked at the sea. And then his old friend (who coincidentally was myself),” said Sour John, “came out and said that he sure did need an engineer first class to leave that very night. “And then what do you think that Moysha did?”

  “O, he signed on and went back to sea.”

  Sour John was thunderstruck.

  “How did you know that? You've hit it again. I never will know how you do it. Well, that's what he did. In the face of everything he left his beautiful wife and children, and his clean life, and went to the filthy sea again. It's incredible.”

  “And how is he doing now?”

  “God knows. I mean it literally. Naturally he's dead. That's been a year. You don't expect a seaman married to a crippled woman to live forever do you?”

  “And how is Bonny?”

  “I went to see her this afternoon; for this is the port where it all happened. She had out an atlas and a pencil and piece of string. She was trying to measure out what town in the whole country is furthest from the sea.

  “She is lonely and grieves for Moysha, more than for either of her other husbands. But O she is lovely! She supports herself and her brood by giving piano lessons.”

  “Is there a moral to this?”

  “No. It is an immoral story. And it's a mystery to me. A man will not normally leave a clean home to dwell in an open grave, nor abandon children to descend into a sewer, nor forswear a lovely and loving wife to go faring on a cesspool, knowing that he will shortly die there as a part of the bargain.

  “But that is what he did.”

  Aloys

  He had flared up more brightly than anyone in memory. And then he was gone. Yet there was ironic laughter where he had been; and his ghost still walked. That was the oddest thing: to encounter his ghost. It was like coming suddenly on Halley's Comet drinking beer at the Plugged Nickel Bar, and having it deny that it was a celestial phenomenon at all, that it had ever been beyond the sun.

  For he could have been the man of the century, and now it was not even known if he was alive. And if he were alive, it would be very odd if he would be hanging around places like the Plugged Nickel Bar.

  This all begins with the award. But before that it begins with the man. Professor Aloys Foulcault-Oeg was acutely embarrassed and in a state of dread.

  “These I have to speak to, all these great men. Is even glory worth the price when it must be paid in such coin?”

  Aloys did not have the amenities, the polish, the tact. A child of penury, he had all his life eaten bread that was part sawdust, and worn shoes that were part cardboard. He had an overcoat that had been his father's, and before that his grandfather's, willed for generations to the eldest son.

  This coat was no longer handsome, its holes being stuffed and quilted with ancient rags. It was long past its years of greatness, and even when Aloys had inherited it as a young man it was in the afternoon of its life. And yet it was worth more than anything else he owned in the world.

  Professor Aloys had become great in spite of — or because of? — his poverty. He had worked out his finest theory, a series of nineteen interlocked equations of cosmic shapeliness and simplicity. He had worked it out on a great piece of butchers' paper soaked with lamb's blood, and had so given it to the world.

  And once it was given, it was almost as though nothing else could be added on any subject whatsoever. Any further detailing would be only footnotes to it and the sciences no more than commentaries.

  Naturally this made him famous. But the beauty of it was that it made him famous, not to the commonalty of mankind (this would have been a burden to his sensitively tuned soul), but to a small and scattered class of extremely erudite men (about a score of them in the world). By them his worth was recognized, and their recognition brought him almost complete satisfaction.

  But he was not famous in his own street or his own quarter. And it was in this stark conglomerate of dark-souled alleys and roofs that Professor Aloys had lived all his life till just thirty-seven days ago.

  When he received the announcement, award, and invitation, he quickly calculated the time. It was not very long to allow for traveling halfway around the world. Being locked out of his rooms, as he often was, he was unencumbered with baggage or furniture, and he left for the ceremony at once.

  With the announcement, award, and invitation, there had also been a check; but as he was not overly familiar with the world of finance or with the English language in which the check was drawn, he did not recognize it for what it was. Having used the back of it to write down a formula that had crept into his mind, he shoved the check, forgotten, into one of the pockets of his greatcoat.

  For three days he rode the riverboat to the port city hidden and hungry. There he concealed himself on an ocean tramp. That he did not starve on this was due to the caprice of certain lowlifes who discovered him, for they made him stay hidden in a terrible bunker, and every day they passed in a bucket to him. And sometimes this contained food. But sometimes offal.

  Then, several ports and many days later, he left the ship like a crippled, dirty animal. And it was in That City and on That Day. For the award was to be that evening.

  “All these I have to speak to, all these wonderful men who are higher than the grocers, higher even than the butchers. These men get more respect than a policeman, than a canal boat captain. They are wiser than a mayor and more honored than a merchant. They know arts more intricate than a clock-maker's and are virtuous beyond the politicians. More perspicacious than editors, more talented than actors, these are the great men o
f the world. And I am only Aloys, and now I am too ragged and dirty even to be Aloys anymore. I am no longer a man with a name.” For he was very humble as he walked the great town where even the shop girls dressed like princesses, and all the restaurants were so fine that only the rich people would have dared to go into them at all. Had there been poor people (and there were none) there would have been no place for them to eat. They would have starved.

  “But it is to me that they have given the prize. Not to Schellendore and not to Ottleman, not to Francks nor Timiryaseff, not even to Piritim-Kess, the latchet of whose shoe I am not—but why do I say that?—he is not after all very bright—all of them are inadequate in some way — the only one who was ever able to get to the heart of these great things was Aloys Foulcault-Oeg, who happens to be myself. It is a strange thing that they should honor me, and yet I believe they could not have made a better choice.”

  So pride and fear warred in him, but it was always the pride that lost. For he had only a little bit of pride, undernourished and on quaking ground, and against it were a whole legion of fears, apprehensions, shames, dreads, embarrassments, and nightmarish bashfulnesses.

  He begged a little bit when he found a poor part of town. But even here the people were of the rich poor, not of the poor as he had known them.

  When he had money in his pocket, he had a meal. Then he went to the Jiffy Quick While You Wait Cleaners Open Day and Night to have his clothes cleaned. He wrapped himself in dignity and a blanket while he waited, as many years before he had had to forego the luxury of underclothes. And as the daylight was coming to an end they brought his clothes back to him.

  “We have done all we could do,” they told him. “If we had a day or a week or a month we might do a little more, but not much. We have not done anything at all to the greatcoat. The workers were afraid of it. They said it barked at them.”