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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “The Arkansas Traveler, World's Finest Carnival, Eight Wagons, Wheels, Beasts, Dancing Girls, Baffling Acts, Monsters, Games of Chance. And Featuring the World's Longest Picture, Four Miles of Exquisite Painting. This is from the Original Panorama; it is Not a Cheap-Jack Imitation.”

  “So you see, Charley, there was a distinction: there were the original pictures, and there were the crude imitations.”

  “Possibly some were done a little better than the others, Leo; they could hardly have been done worse. Certainly, collect them if you want to. You've collected lots of less interesting things.”

  “Charley, I have a section of that panoramic picture that once belonged to the Arkansas Traveler Carnival. I'll show it to you. Here's another poster:

  “King Carnival, The King of Them All. Fourteen Wagons. Ten Thousand Wonders. See the Rubber Man. See the Fire Divers. See the Longest Picture in the World, see Elephants on the Mississippi River. This is a Genuine Shore Depictment, not the Botches that Others Show.”

  “You say that you have twenty of the ordinary pictures, Leo, and three that are different?”

  “Yes, I have, Charley. I hope to get more of the genuine. I hope to get the whole river.”

  “Let's go look at one, Leo, and see what the difference is.”

  They went out to one of the hay barns. Leo Nation kept his collections in a row of hay barns. “What would I do?” he had asked once, “call him a carpenter and tell him to build me a museum? He'd say, ‘Leo, I can't build a museum without plans and stuff. Get me some plans.’ And where would I get plans? So I always tell him to build me another hay barn one hundred feet by sixty feet and fifty feet high. Then I always put in four or five decks myself and floor them, and leave open vaults for the tall stuff. Besides, I believe a hay barn won't cost as much as a museum.”

  “This will be a big field, Charley,” Leo Nation said now as they came to one of the hay-barn museums. “It will take all your science in every field to figure it out. Of the three genuine ones I have, each is about a hundred and eighty yards long. I believe this is about the standard length, though some may have been multiples of these. They passed for paintings in the years of their display, Charley, but they are not paintings.”

  “What are they then, Leo?”

  “I hire you to figure this out. You are the man who knows everything.”

  Well, there were two barrel reels there, each the height of a man, and several more were set further back.

  “The old turning mechanism is likely worth a lot more than the picture,” Charles Longbank told Leo Nation. “This was turned by mule on a treadmill, or by a mule taking a mill pole round and round. It might even be eighteenth century.”

  “Yeah, but I use an electric motor on it.” Leo said, “The only mule I have left is a personal friend of mine. I'd no more make him turn that than he'd make me if I were the mule. I line it up like I think it was, Charley, the full reel north and the empty one south. Then we run it. So we travel, we scan, from south to north, going upstream as we face west.”

  “It's funny canvas and funny paint, much better than the one I saw,” said Charles Longbank, “and it doesn't seem worn out by all the years.”

  “It isn't either one, canvas or paint,” said Ginger Nation, Leo's wife, as she appeared from somewhere. “It is picture.”

  Leo Nation started the reeling and ran it. It was the wooded bank of a river. It was a gravel and limestone bank with mud overlay and the mud undercut a little. And it was thick timber to the very edge of the shore.

  “It is certainly well done,” Charles Longbank admitted. “From the one I saw and from what I read about these, I wasn't prepared for this.” The rolling picture was certainly not repetitious, but one had the feeling that the riverbank itself might have been a little so, to lesser eyes than those of the picture.

  “It is virgin forest, mostly deciduous,” said Charles Longbank, “and I do not believe that there is any such temperate forest on any large river in the world today. It would have been logged out. I do not believe that there were many such stretches even in the nineteenth century. Yet I have a feeling that it is a faithful copy of something, and not imaginary.”

  The rolling shores: cottonwood trees, slash pine, sycamore, slippery elm, hackberry, pine again.

  “When I get very many of the pictures, Charley, you will put them on film and analyze them or have some kind of computer do it. You will be able to tell from the sun's angle what order the pictures should have been in, and how big are the gaps in between.”

  “No, Leo, they would all have to reflect the same hour of the same day to do that.”

  “But it was all the same hour of the same day,” Ginger Nation cut in. “How could you take one picture at two hours of two days?”

  “She's right, Charley,” Leo Nation said. “All the pictures of the genuine sort are pieces of one original authentic picture. I've known that all along.”

  Rolling shore of pine, laurel oak, butternut, persimmon, pine again.

  “It is a striking reproduction, whatever it is,” Charles Longbank said, “but I'm afraid that after a while even this would become as monotonous as repeating wallpaper.”

  “Hah,” said Leo. “For a smart man you have dumb eyes, Charley. Every tree is different, every leaf is different. All the trees are in young leaf too. It's about a last-week-of-March picture. What it hangs on, though, is what part of the river it is. It might be a third-week-in-March picture, or a first-week-in-April. The birds, old Charley who know everything, why don't we pick up more birds in this section? And what birds are those there?”

  “Passenger pigeons, Leo, and they've been gone for quite a few decades. Why don't we see more birds there? I've a humorous answer to that, but it implies that this thing is early and authentic. We don't see more birds because they are too well camouflaged. North America is today a bird watchers' paradise because very many of its bright birds are later European intrusions that have replaced native varieties. They have not yet adjusted to the native backgrounds, so they stand out against them visually. Really, Leo, that is a fact. A bird can't adapt in a short four or five hundred years. And there are birds, birds, birds in that, Leo, if you look sharp enough.”

  “I look sharp to begin with, Charley; I just wanted you to look sharp.”

  “This rolling ribbon of canvas or whatever is about six feet high, Leo, and I believe the scale is about one to ten, going by the height of mature trees and other things.”

  “Yeah, I think so, Charley. I believe there's about a mile of river shore in each of my good pictures. There's things about these pictures though, Charley, that I'm almost afraid to tell you. I've never been quite sure of your nerves. But you'll see them for yourself when you come to examine the pictures closely.”

  “Tell me those things now, Leo, so I'll know what to look for.”

  “It's all there, Charley, every leaf, every knob of bark, every spread of moss. I've put parts of it under a microscope, ten power, fifty power, four hundred power. There's detail that you couldn't see with your bare eyes if you had your nose right in the middle of it. You can even see cells of leaf and moss. You put a regular painting under that magnification and all you see is details of pigment, and canyons and mountains of brush strokes. Charley, you can't find a brush stroke in that whole picture! Not in any of the real ones.”

  It was rather pleasant to travel up that river at the leisurely equivalent rate of maybe four miles an hour. Actually the picture rolled past them at about half a mile an hour. Rolling bank and rolling trees, pin oak, American elm, pine, black willow, staining willow. “How come there is shining willow, Charley, and no white willow, you tell me that?” Leo asked.

  “If this is the Mississippi, Leo, and if it is authentic, then this must be a far northern sector of it.”

  “Naw. It's Arkansas, Charley. I can tell Arkansas anywhere. How come there was shining willow in Arkansas?”

  “If that is Arkansas, and if the picture is authentic, it was colde
r then.”

  “The white willow is a European introduction, though a very early one, and it spread rapidly. There are things in this picture that check too well. The three good pictures that you have, they are pretty much alike?”

  “Yeah, but they are not quite the same stretch of river. The sun's angle is a little different in each of them, and the sod and the low plants are a little different.”

  “You think you will be able to get more of the pictures?”

  “Yeah, I think more than a thousand miles of river was in the picture. I think I get more than a thousand sections if I know where to look.”

  “Probably most have been destroyed long ago, Leo, if there were ever more than the dozen or so that were advertised by the carnivals. And probably there were duplications in that dozen or so. Carnivals changed their features often, and your three pictures may be all that there ever were. Each could have been exhibited by several carnivals and in several hippodromes at different times.”

  “Nah, there were more, Charley. I don't have the one with the elephants in it yet. I think there are more than a thousand of them somewhere. I advertise for them (for originals, not the cheap-jack imitations), and I will begin to get answers.”

  “How many there were, there still are,” said Ginger Nation. “They will not destroy. One of ours has the reel burned by fire, but the picture did not burn. And they won't burn.”

  “You might spend a lot of money on a lot of old canvas, Leo,” said Charles Longbank. “But I will analyze them for you: now, or when you think you have enough of them for it.”

  “Wait till I get more, Charley,” said Leo Nation. “I will make a clever advertisement. ‘I take those things off your hands,’ I will say, and I believe that people will be glad to get rid of the old things that won't burn and won't destroy, and weigh a ton each with reels. It's the real ones that won't destroy. Look at that big catfish just under the surface there, Charley! Look at the mean eyes of that catfish! The river wasn't as muddy then even if was springtime and the water was high.”

  Rolling shore and trees: pine, dogwood, red cedar, bur oak, pecan, pine again, shagbark hickory. Then the rolling picture came to an end.

  “A little over twenty minutes I timed it,” said Charles Longbank. “Yes, a yokel of the past century might have believed that the picture was a mile long, or even five or nine miles long.”

  “Nah,” said Leo. “They were smarter then, Charley; they were smarter then. Most likely that yokel would have believed that it was a little less than a furlong long, as it is. He'd have liked it, though. And there may be pieces that are five miles long or nine miles long. Why else would they have advertised them? I think I can hit the road and smell out where a lot of those pictures are. And I will call in sometimes and Ginger can tell me who have answered the advertisements. Come here again in six months, Charley, and I will have enough sections of the river for you to analyze. You won't get lonesome in six months, will you, Ginger?”

  “No. There will be the hay cutters, and the men from the cattle auctions, and the oil gaugers, and Charley Longbank here when he comes out, and the men in town and the men in the Hill-Top Tavern. I won't get lonesome.”

  “She jokes, Charley,” said Leo. “She doesn't really fool around with the fellows.”

  “I do not joke,” said Ginger. “Stay gone seven months, I don't care.”

  Leo Nation did a lot of traveling for about five months. He acquired fifty genuine sections of the river and he spent quite a few thousands of dollars on them. He went a couple of years into hock for them. It would have been much worse had not many people given him the things and many others had sold them to him for very small amounts. But there were certain stubborn men and women who insisted on a good price. This is always the hazard of collecting, the thing that takes most of the fun out of it. All these expensively acquired sections were really prime pieces and Leo could not let himself pass them by. How he had located so many pieces is his own mystery, but Leo Nation did really have a nose for these things. He smelt them out; and all collectors of all things must have such long noses.

  There was a professor man in Rolla, Missouri, who had rugged his whole house with pieces of a genuine section.

  “That sure is tough stuff, Nation,” the man said. “I've been using it for rugs for forty years and it isn't worn at all. See how fresh the trees still are! I had to cut it up with a chain saw, and I tell you that it's tougher than any wood in the world for all that it's nice and flexible.”

  “How much for all the rugs, for all the pieces of pieces that you have?” Leo asked uneasily. There seemed something wrong with using the pieces for rugs, and yet this didn't seem like a wrong man.

  “Oh, I won't sell you any of my rugs, but I will give you pieces of it, since you're interested, and I'll give you the big piece I have left. I never could get anyone much interested in it. We analyzed the material out at the college. It is a very sophisticated plastic material. We could reproduce it, or something very like it, but it would be impossibly expensive, and plastics two-thirds as tough are quite cheap. The funny thing, though, I can trace the history of the thing back to quite a few decades before any plastic was first manufactured in the world. There is a big puzzle there, for some man with enough curiosity to latch onto it.”

  “I have enough curiosity; I have already latched onto it,” Leo Nation said. “That piece you have on the wall — it looks like — if only I could see it under magnification —”

  “Certainly, certainly, Nation. It looks like a swarm of bees there, and it is. I've a slide prepared from a fringe of it. Come and study it. I've shown it to lots of intelligent people and they all say ‘So what?’ It's an attitude that I can't understand.”

  Leo Nation studied the magnification with delight. “Yeah,” he said. “I can even see the hairs on the bees' legs. In one flaking-off piece there I can even make out the cells of a hair.” He fiddled with low and high magnifications for a long while. “But the bees sure are funny ones,” he said. “My father told me about bees like that once and I thought he lied.”

  “Our present honeybees are of late European origin, Nation,” the man said. “The native American bees were funny and inefficient from a human viewpoint. They are not quite extinct even yet, though. There are older-seeming creatures in some of the scenes.”

  “What are the clown animals in the piece on your kitchen floor?” Leo asked. “Say, those clowns are big!”

  “Ground Sloths, Nation. They set things as pretty old. If they are a hoax, they are the grandest hoax I ever ran into. A man would have to have a pretty good imagination to give a peculiar hair form to an extinct animal — a hair form that living sloths in the tropics just do not have. But how many lifetimes would it have taken to paint even a square foot of this in such microscopic detail? There is no letdown anywhere, Nation; there is prodigious detail in every square centimeter of it.”

  “Why are the horses so small and the buffaloes so big?”

  “I don't know, Nation. It would take a man with a hundred sciences to figure it out, unless a man with a hundred sciences had hoaxed it. And where was such a man two hundred and fifty years ago?”

  “You trace your piece that far back?”

  “Yes. And the scene itself might well be fifteen thousand years old. I tell you that this is a mystery. Yes, you can carry those scraps with you if you wish, and I'll have the bale that's the remaining big piece freighted up to your place.”

  There was a man in Arkansas who had a section of the picture stored in a cave. It was a tourist-attraction cave, but the river shore picture had proved a sour attraction. “The people all think it is some sort of movie projection I have set up in my cave here,” he said. “ ‘Who wants to come down in a cave to see movies,’ they say. ‘If we want to see a river shore we will go see a river shore,’ they say, ‘we won't come down in a cave to see it.’ Well, I thought it would be a good attraction, but it wasn't.”

  “How did you get it in here, man?” Leo Nat
ion asked him. “That passage just isn't big enough to bring it in.”

  “Oh, it was already here, rock rollers and all, fifteen years ago when I broke out that little section to crawl through.”

  “Then it had to be here a very long time. That wall has formed since.”

  “Nah, not very long,” the man said. “These limestone curtains form fast, what with all the moisture trickling down here. The thing could have been brought in here as recent as five hundred years ago. Sure, I'll sell it. I'll even break out a section so we can get it out. I have to make the passage big enough to walk in anyhow. Tourists don't like to crawl on their bellies in caves. I don't know why. I always liked to crawl on my belly in caves.”

  This was one of the most expensive sections of the picture that Nation bought. It would have been even more expensive if he had shown any interest in certain things seen through trees in one sequence of the picture. Leo's heart had come up into his mouth when he had noticed those things, and he'd had to swallow it again and maintain his wooden look. This was a section that had elephants on the Mississippi River.

  The elephant (Mammut americanum) was really a mastodon, Leo had learned that much from Charles Longbank. Ah, but now he owned the elephants; now he had one of the key pieces of the puzzle.

  You find a lot of them in Mexico. Everything drifts down to Mexico when it gets a little age on it. Leo Nation was talking with a rich Mexican man who was as Indian as himself. “No, I don't know where the Long Picture first came from,” the man said, “but it did come from the North, somewhere in the region of the River itself. In the time of De Soto (a little less than five hundred years ago) there was still Indian legend of the Long Picture, which he didn't understand. Yourselves of the North, of course, are like children. Even the remembering tribes of you like the Caddos have memories no longer than five hundred years.

  “We ourselves remember much longer than that. But as to this, all that we remember is that each great family of us took a section of the Long Picture along when we came to Mexico. That was, perhaps, eight hundred years ago that we came south as conquerors. These pictures are now like treasures to the old great Indian families, like hidden treasures, memories of one of our former homes. Others of the old families will not talk to you about them. They will even deny that they have them. I talk to you about it, I show it to you, I even give it to you because I am a dissident, a sour man, not like the others.”