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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “It's one of the days of grass, Kit-Fox. I just told you that.”

  “But which one, Strange Buffalo? And what, really, are ‘days of grass’?”

  “I believe that it is the second Monday of Indian Summer, Kit-Fox,” Strange Buffalo was saying as he gave the matter his thought and attention. “Or it may be the first Monday of Blue-Goose Autumn. We're not sure, though, that it is a Monday. It sounds and tastes more like a Thursday or an aleikaday.”

  “It sure does,” Christopher — ah, Kit-Fox agreed.

  A laughing, dying man was carried past by four hale men. This fortunate one had been smashed by bear or rolled on by horse or gored by buffalo, and the big red blood in him was all running out. “It works,” the happy dying man cried out. “It works. I got a little too close to him and he ripped me to pieces, but it works. We are really teaching those big bulls to use the spears lashed to their horns. Others will carry on the work and the fun. I bet that I've had it.”

  “A little blood to bless me!” Strange Buffalo cried out, and the dying man splashed him with the rich and rigorous blood.

  “For me also,” Kit-Fox begged, and the dying man smeared him with blood on the brow and breast and shoulders and loins. Two other friends, Conquering Sharp-Leaf and Adoration on the Mountain, came and were blessed with the blood. Then the man died and was dead.

  “There is nothing like the fine rich blood to make a grass day sing in your head and in your body,” Strange Buffalo exulted. “On the straw days they try to hide the blood or they bleed in a dark corner.”

  (What was all this about the grass days and the straw days? There was now a sordid dull-dream quality, a day-of-straw quality that kept trying to push itself in. “For a little while,” it begged, “to reestablish rigor and rule and reason for just a little while.” “Go away,” said the day-of-grass quality, “The wrestle was won this morning, and this is a day out of the count.”)

  Kit-Fox and Strange Buffalo went in, past the booths and work areas of the coin-makers, past the stands of the eagle-wing-bone-whistle makers, and into the shop which had roast dog for sale or give. Strange Buffalo had a shoulder of dog and Kit-Fox had a rack of ribs. There was fried bread also, and hominy and pumpkin. There was choc beer dipped with gourd dippers out of a huge crock. Thousands of people were there. It was crowded and it was supposed to be. The man named Mountain twinkled in the air. Why had they not noticed that about him before?

  Folks rolled up the walls and tied them. Now the strong smoke and savor could visit all the places, and the folks in every shop could see into every other shop. It was full morning and beginning to get warm.

  “But I still want to know the date,” Kit-Fox insisted, not quite converted to the day of grass, not quite clear of the head-fog that accompanies the sullen burning of the straw days. “What newspaper is this that doesn't have a date? I want a date!”

  “Look at it. It tells,” said Strange Buffalo.

  “You want a date, honey?” the top of the newspaper writhed in sudden flickering of day-fire print. “Phone 582-8316 and I give you a real date.” Then the day-fire print was gone.

  “I hope I can remember that number,” Kit-Fox said anxiously. “Strange Buffalo, where is there a telephone exchange?”

  “They are the same and single and right outside past the booths,” Strange Buffalo said. “You were sitting upon it when I came upon you. And you, you old straw-head, you thought it was a bale of rags.”

  Kit-Fox went outside, past the booths of the stone-buffalo-coin makers and the clay-badger-coin makers, past the tents of the porcupine-quill dealers, to what he had thought was a bale of rags, a lively bale of rags as he now remembered it. Well, it was an ample lady in her glad rags and she was the telephone exchange lying there in the grass.

  “I want to call number 582-8316,” Kit-Fox said uneasily.

  “Here are a handful of dice,” the glad-rags lady told him. “Arrange them here in the short grass and make any number you want.”

  “But proper dice have numbers only to six,” Kit-Fox protested, “and some of the numbers are higher.”

  “Those are improper dice, they are crooked dice,” the lady said. “They have numbers more than six and numbers less than one. Number out your telephone number in the short grass with them.”

  “Are you sure this is the way to dial a number?” Kit-Fox asked.

  “Sure I'm not sure,” the lady said. “If you know a better way, do it that way. Worth a try kid, worth a try.”

  Kit-Fox numbered out his numbers in the short grass.

  “Now what do I do?” he asked.

  “Oh, talk into the telephone here.”

  “That buckskin bag is a telephone?”

  “Try it, try it. Drop a badger coin in and try it.”

  Kit-Fox dropped the coin into the telephone. “Hello, hello,” he said.

  “Hello, hello,” the lady answered. “That's my number you called. You want a date, I wait for you awhile. Believe me, I get pretty tired of waiting pretty soon.”

  “I don't think this is a telephone exchange at all,” Kit-Fox grumbled.

  “How else I can get guys so easy to drop badger-coins in a buckskin bag,” the lady said. “Come along, lover man, we will have a grand time this day.”

  The lady was full-bodied and jolly. Kit-Fox remembered her from somewhere.

  “Who are you?” he asked her.

  “I'm your wife in the straw days,” she said, “but this is a grass day. They're harder to find, but they're more fun when you find one. They have something to do with grandfather's brother and that wrestling of his.”

  “Days of grass, days of straw,” Kit-Fox said as he embraced the lady passionately. “How about a hay day?”

  “You mean a heyday? Those are special. We hope to make them more often, if only the wrestle is better. They're fuller of juice than the grass days even. We try to make one now.”

  They made a heyday together (together with a whole nation of people); and it went on and on. Day-Torch (that was the lady in the glad rags, the lady who was Kit-Fox's wife during the straw days) bought an eagle-wing-bone whistle from a dealer, and she whistled happy haunting tunes on it. The people followed Kit-Fox and Day-Torch out of town, out to the oceans of buffalo grass and blue-stem grass. They torched everything that was dry and set the blue-black smoke to rolling. But the fundamental earth was too green to burn.

  All mounted horses and took lances. They went out after buffalo. Word was brought to them that some of the newly armed buffalo bulls wanted to schedule battle with them. And the battle was a good one, with gushing blood and broken-open bodies, and many on each side were killed.

  Strange Buffalo was killed. That big boisterous man died with a happy whoop.

  “Strange Buffalo, indeed,” one of the buffalo bulls said. “He looks like a man to me.”

  When the ground there had become too soggy and mired in blood, they adjourned the battle till the next day of grass, or the one after that. Bloody battles are fine, but who wants to spend a whole day on one? There are other things. Kit-Fox and Day-Torch and a number of other folks went to higher ground.

  There was a roaring river on the higher ground, the biggest river ever and the loudest.

  “Oh be quiet,” Day-Torch said. “You've got the tune wrong.” The great river ceased to roar. Day-Torch whistled the right tune on the eagle-wing-bone whistle. Then the river resumed its roaring, but in this right tune now. This mightiest of all rivers was named Cottonwood Creek.

  Henry Drumhead added his beat to the tune. Then the folks had a rain dance till the sharp rain came down and drenched them through. They had a sun dance then, till the sun dried up the mud and began to burn the hides of the people. They had a cloud dance then. They had an antelope dance till enough antelope came to provide a slaughter and a feast. They had a pit dance, a fire dance, a snake dance, and an ashes dance: the ashes from pecan wood and hickory wood are a better condiment than salt to go with roast antelope. They had a feast dan
ce. Then (after a while) a shakedown dance. They had a thunder dance and a mountain dance.

  Say, it is spooky to come to the foot of the mountain itself and see the great gap between it and the ground! Rocks and boulders fell off of the bottom of the mountain and killed many of the people below. And, from the mountain itself, a broken, bloody, and headless torso fell down to the earth.

  Helen Hightower — ah, that is to say the glad-rag lady Day-Torch — set up a rakish screaming, “The head, the head, somebody forgot the head!”

  There was a thunderous grumbling, a mountain-shaking irritation, but the bloody head did come down and smash itself like a bursting pumpkin on the earth.

  “A lot of times they forget to throw the head down if you don't remind them,” Day-Torch said.

  The meaning of the fallen torso and head was that there was now one less prophet or wrestler on the mountain; that there was now an opportunity for one more man to ascend to glory and death.

  Several of the men attempted it by various devices, by piling cairns of stones to climb upon, by leaping into the air to try to grab one of the dangling roots of the mountain, by hurling lances with trailing lianas to fasten quivering in the bottom of the mountain. They played it out in the garish day there where all the colors were so bright that they ached. Many of the men fell to their deaths, but one ascended. There is always one who is able to ascend to the great wrestle when there is an empty place to receive him.

  And the one who ascended was — no, no, you'll not have his name from us yet.

  Something was mighty odd here. There was just a little bit of something right about things.

  2

  Draftsman, draftsman, what do you draw? Dog days, draggy days, days of straw.

  —Ballads, Henry Drumhead

  3

  Indian Summer. A period of warm or mild weather late in autumn or in early winter.

  —Webster's Collegiate

  So Webster's Collegiate defines it, but Webster's hasn't the humility ever to admit that it doesn't know the meaning of a word or phrase. And it doesn't know the meaning of this one.

  There are intervals, days, hours, minutes that are not remembered directly by anyone. They do not count in the totality of passing time. It is only by the most sophisticated methods that even the existence of these intervals may be shown.

  There are whole seasons, in addition to the four regular seasons that are supposed to constitute the year. Nobody knows where they fit in, there being no room for them anywhere in the year; nobody has direct memory of being in them or living in them. Yet, somehow, they have names that have escaped these obliterations. The name of one of the misfit seasons is Indian Summer.

  (“Why can't the Indians have their summer in the summertime like the rest of us?” comes a high voice with a trace of annoyance. Not a high-pitched voice: a high voice.)

  But all that is neither here nor there. It is yonder, and we will come to it.

  Christopher Foxx was walking down a city street. Things were mighty even here, mighty neat. There was just a little bit of something wrong about their rightness. The world was rubbed, scrubbed, and tubbed; it was shaved, paved and saved; it was neat, sweet, and effete. Ah, the latter was possibly what was wrong with it, if anything could be wrong with perfection. The colors were all flat (flat colors had been deemed best for nerves and such), and the sounds were all muted. Christopher, for a moment, wished for a color that shrieked and for a sound that blazed. He put the thought resolutely out of his head. After all, he had for wife Helen Hightower, and he suffered much criticism because of her gaudiness and exuberance.

  Christopher took a paper from the slot on the corner, noted that it was a day in May (he had a queer feeling that he had been uneasy about the date, and yet all that registered with him was that it fell within a familiar month). He entered the North Paragon Breakfast Club. It was there that the Symposium would begin (it would last the whole day and into the night, and be held at various sites) on the multiplex subject “Spatial and Temporal Underlays to the Integrated World, with Insights as to Their Possible Reality and Their Relationship to the World Unconscious and to the Therapeutic Amnesia; with Consideration of the Necessity of Belief in Stratified Worlds, and Explorations of the Orological Motif in Connection with the Apparent Occurrence of Simultaneous Days.” It would have been an exciting subject if Excitement had not become another of the muted things.

  Buford Strange was already at the North Paragon, and with him were Adrian Montaigne and Vincent Rue.

  “I have already ordered for ourselves and for yourself, Christopher,” Buford said. “It is sheldrake, and I hope that you like it. They will not prepare it for fewer than four persons. ‘We can't go around killing quarter ducks,’ they say.”

  “That is all right,” Christopher said meekly. He glanced at the other three nervously. There was surely something familiar about them all.

  Great blue mountain thunder! Why shouldn't there be! He had worked with these men daily for several years. But, no, no, his edgy mind told him that they were familiar in some other and more subtle way. He glanced at the paper which he had taken from the corner slot outside. Something like quick flame ran across the top of it and was gone too quickly to verify. But was it possible that the flame had said “You want a date, honey? You phone—” Of course it was not possible. Clearly, at the top of the paper it was printed A DAY IN MAY. Clearly? Was that clear enough for a date?

  “What date is this?” Christopher asked the three of them.

  “May the eighth, of course,” Adrian answered him. “You've got today's Journal in your hand and still you ask?”

  Well now it was printed clearly there, May 8, and there was no nonsense about “a day in May”; still less was there anything like “You want a date, honey?”

  Some wild-looking children burst into the North Paragon Breakfast Club.

  “Straw-Men! Straw-Men!” they cried at the four gentlemen there. “Straw-Men! Straw-Men!” The children buffeted the four men a bit, did other extravagant things that are since forgotten, and then they went out of the Breakfast Club again: or at least they disappeared; they were no longer there.

  “Why should they have done that?” Adrian asked, puzzled. “Why should they have called us that, and done the other things?”

  “Why should who have called us what?” Vincent asked, even more puzzled.

  “I don't know,” Adrian said dryly. “It seemed that someone was here and said or did something.”

  “You're witless, Adrian,” Vincent chided. “Nobody was here.”

  “Straw-Man,” Christopher Foxx said softly. “I remember the word now and I couldn't remember it before. I woke up this morning trying to remember it. It seemed to be the key to a dream that was slipping away in spite of my trying to hang onto it. I have the key word now, but it fits nothing. The dream is gone forever.”

  “We will come back to this subject later in our discussions,” Buford Strange said. “I believe that your word ‘Straw-Man,’ Christopher, is a part of the underlay, or perhaps of the overlay, that pertains to our world and our study. There is a good chance that certain children, or perhaps dwarfs or gnomes, entered here several moments ago. Did any of you notice them?”

  “No,” said Vincent Rue.

  “No one entered,” said Adrian Montaigne.

  “No. I didn't see anyone,” said Christopher Foxx.

  “Yet I believe that a group did come in,” Buford Strange continued suavely. “It was a group unusual enough to be noticed. Then why didn't we notice it? Or why did we forget, within a short moment, that we had seen it at all? I believe it was because the group was in a different sort of day. I am nearly sure that it is a group that lives in either St. Martin's Summer or in the Kingfisher Days. Ah, here is the sheldrake ready with all the trimmings! Drool and be happy. We shall never know such moment again.”

  It was a momentous fowl, no question of that. It was good, it was rich, it was overflowing with juice. It was peer of the fowl that are
found in the land named St. Succulentus's Springtime. (What? What? There is a land named that?)

  The four noble men (they were ennobled by the circumstance) fell to eating with what, in days of another sort, might almost be called gusto. It was a royal bird and was basted with that concoction of burst fruits and crushed nuts and peppers and ciders and holy oils and reindeer butter that is called — (wait a bit) —

  “Do you know that the sheldrake is really a mysterious creature?” Buford Strange asked as he ate noisily (nobody eats such royal fare in quiet). Buford acted as if he knew a secret.

  “It is not a mysterious creature at all,” Adrian countered (he knew it was, though). “It is only the common European duck.”

  “It is not only the common European duck,” Buford said strongly. “In other days it may be quite uncommon.”

  “What are you saying, Buford?” Vincent Rue asked him. “In what other days?”

  “Oh, I believe, possibly, in what the Dutch call Kraanzomer, Crane-Summer. Are we agreed that the other days, the days out of count, are topic rather than temporal?”

  “We are not even agreed that there are days out of count,” Christopher objected.

  “Drakes' teeth, by the way, while rare, are not unknown,” Adrian Montaigne popped the statement out of his mouth as if in someone else's voice. He seemed startled at his own words.

  “Drake is really the same word as Drakos, a dragon,” Christopher Foxx mumbled. “Ah, I was going to say something else but it is gone now.”

  “Waiter, what is the name of the excellent stuff with which the drake is basted and to which it is wedded?” Vincent Rue asked in happy wonder.

  “Dragons' sauce,” said the waiter.

  “Well, just what is the mystery, the uncommonness of the sheldrake, Buford?” Christopher asked him. “I don't seem to remember,” that man said. “Ah, let us start our discussion with my, our, failure to remember such things. Vincent, did you not have a short paper prepared on ‘Amnesia, the Holes in the Pockets of the Seamless Garment’?”