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

by R. A. Lafferty

  These three young persons have been explained in other places on other days, but they must be explained all over again now and then. They take a lot of explaining.

  Barnaby was gazing at an odd movement in that wooded draw behind his house. We both saw it then, in the middle of those little willow trees and nearly hidden. But if it was what it seemed to be, it was a little too big. “Austro wants to hold a meeting of some different kinds of people, Mr. Sheen,” Chiara Benedetti said suddenly. Chiara had not been the movement in the draw: she had appeared from some other direction, or she had simply materialized there.

  “Certainly, Chiara, certainly,” Barnaby said. “My home is Austro's home. He can have whomever he wants there. But why did he ask you to ask me?”

  “He doesn't know how to ask you some things,” she said. “And some of the people coming to the meeting, well, they aren't quite people.”

  (Chiara was, oh, somewhere between ten and fifteen years old: who can tell how old a girl is? She was somewhat younger than the now permanent stasis age of Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo. She hadn't been old enough to be in that Participation Psychology class taught by Edmond Weakfish, the class that cost Loretta and Mary-Violet and several others their normal lives.)

  “Chiara, we just saw a movement down in the draw,” Barnaby said. “I believe that there is a buck deer down there. It's strange that he should be inside the city, when the woods and meadows are still lush. Chiara, there's something rampant about the breeze.”

  Really, that draw was a bit of woods and meadow inside the city. Barnaby Sheen had two and a half acres. Cris Benedetti, the father of Chiara, had an equal area backing onto it, and the woody draw ran on the land of both of them.

  “Yes, he's a buck deer,” Chiara said. “There's a buffalo in there too, now.”

  “No, Chiara, you're just saying that,” Barnaby admonished her.

  “Partly, yes. But saying it helps to make it so. Saying it and seeing it. How do you think the buck deer got there? They are some of the people who have come to Austro's meeting. It will last for three or four days. You'll have to furnish accommodations for all of them, and that won't be easy.”

  “Why then it will be uneasy, Chiara,” Barnaby said pleasantly, “but I will do as well as I can, and you and others will help me. Oh, Mrs. Bagby says that Austro ruins her grass and trees, makes them shaggy looking.”

  “She used to say that I did the same thing to them, Mr. Sheen. I guess I did, but not as well as Austro does it. She said that I spooked them just by looking at them. She said that I made them look like the grass and trees in paintings by Rosetti, not like real grass and trees. And I do. I have Really Eyes, you know.”

  “Chiara, Rosetti had a better understanding of reality than has Mrs. Bagby,” Barnaby said. “And you, I believe, can actually effect with your seeing and feeling. But you couldn't turn a sewer into a clear stream.”

  The charge was true about the wooded draw, whether it was true about Mrs. Bagby's property or not. The draw was like a Rosetti painting. And this was partly caused by Chiara wandering there and looking at it with her blue-black eyes till it was impossible for anyone to see it differently than she had seen it.

  “If growing plants respond to sympathy and seeing, why not a sewer?” I asked.

  “Ah, Laff, there is not a lot of sympathy to spare for sewers,” Barnaby said, “yet it's true that the, ah, brook is practically a sewer when it enters the draw, and it is a clear Rosetti stream when it leaves. Chiara, see that broken flash skimming through the trees and bushes? He follows the blue shadows, and he breaks behind the trees so deftly that he can hardly be seen. But he's a cardinal bird, and he's as big as a tom turkey.”

  “Yes, he's the King Cardinal,” Chiara said as if she knew all about him. “He's another of the people coming to Austro's meeting. And if you think he's big for a cardinal, then you just haven't had a good look at how big that buck deer is for a buck, or how big that buffalo is for anything.”

  “Have you any idea, girl, just how many people are coming?”

  “Oh, it's only a regional division meeting, so there won't be many. A few dozen or a few hundred.”

  “What is it a regional division of, Chiara?” Barnaby asked, worried a little.

  “Sometimes regular people who know about it call it the Lower House. But the delegates say that it should be called the Broader House.”

  “Do these rather mixed delegates understand what they are doing, Chiara?”

  “Yes, mostly they do, Mr. Sheen. Do you?”

  II

  Looking at evolution from below we see

  emergence—from above, Creation.

  —E. I. Watkin, The Bow in the Clouds

  First came the answers far ahead,

  Then tumbling question-hordes.

  “I may not stay,” the seed-man said,

  “Nor take my ease with lords.”

  —Eco-Log

  People couldn't help but notice the strong noise of the strange animals in the neighborhood. The bull moose made a lot of trumpeting racket, and the birds set up quite a chatter. But what was that really offensive croaking and clattering? No, it was not the bullfrog; the bullfrog was heard separately. Was there any truth at all to the legend of the Laughing Catfish?

  “Now, arche means the beginning, the origin,” Dr. George Drakos was saying. “Then it means the principle which is the same as the origin. It means the right, the rule, and as a derivative it means the authority or the office.” “And anarchy?” Barnaby asked too innocently.

  “You know its meaning. It is the exact opposite of arche. It is not from the beginning; it is never original in anything; it is without principle; it cannot be of real authority; and it cannot ever be official.”

  “But what if anarchy came first?”

  “Then all words are meaningless and everything is backwards. But it isn't so. The beginning, and not its opposite, came in the beginning.”

  “Not anarchy at world dawn? Not primitive chaos? And principle and order and purpose and authority later appearing and developing?”

  “Never, Barney, never. Anarchy cannot pertain to anything old or primordial. Anarchy is always modern, which is to say ‘of the mode’, that most narrow and fleeting of states.”

  “I heard a rather primordial person, though young in years, called an anarchist today,” Barnaby mused.

  “Then someone was mistaken,” Drakos insisted. “There is a wide misconception as to what happened in the beginning and as to what unfolding or evolution means. There is nothing new under the sun, and the sun itself was never so new as some have said. Too many persons have looked at the world as if it were indeed the product of natural-selection evolution, as if it were the result of purposeless chaos rather than purposive order. Enough persons have seen it so as to make it to be so for all impractical purposes. But every thesis, if acted upon widely enough, comes to its own in-built conclusion. The only possible conclusion to the natural-selection thesis is total pollution unto suffocation and death: the effluvia of organized and widespread idiocy always brings about this suffocation. And the last choking voice of the chaos-origin believers will croak, ‘It is the fault of the others, of those who said that it began in order; they caused the whole breakdown.’ ”

  “But we must see the whole thing with more valid eyes, and enough of us must see it as it is to reestablish its validity. Seeing it and feeling it as it should be are creative acts; they will restore it as it should be. Too long we have been flawed lords. Now—”

  A seedy little professor, known as an eccentric, came into the room where we were met. Someone had to have let him in. He couldn't have found that internal, private bar-study room otherwise. It was Austro, playing the butler but with many bewildering gestures, who had brought the seedy one in. Then Austro vanished, scooted, scatted.

  “Austro wants to host a bash for some of his friends and associates,” the seedy man said. (I forget his name: everyone always did forget his name.) “Ah, and they
aren't all of them human,” the little man finished lamely.

  “I know a little about it,” said Barnaby, “but I seem to know less and less about it as I go on. Ah, Mary Mondo, just what sort of hotel or guest accommodations would you offer a badger or a beaver or a prairie dog or vulture or sexton beetle?”

  “Manure. I think we need lots of manure,” Mary Mondo conveyed. “You know the riddle about the woman standing on the corner and one man went by walking and one on horseback and one on a bicycle. Which of them knew the lady?”

  None of us knew.

  “The horseman knew her,” Mary Mondo conveyed. “Oh, there are so many things that can be done with manure! The tumble bugs love it, and the beetles. Whole life cycles can be built on it, and it will make all sorts of creatures feel at home. It's the old and unanswerable question, you know: which came first, the horse or the horse manure? But manure is very necessary.”

  “I agree that it is,” Barnaby said. “It's a fact too often forgotten, and the world forgets it to its peril. Thank you, Mary, we'll lay in a store of horse manure, and several horses.”

  “You already have several horses, Sheen,” the seedy professor said. “They are rather large and rough-looking horses. I don't believe that they belong to anyone around here. Say, where is this Mary you're talking to, and why can't I see her?”

  “You can't see her because you have incomplete eyes, man,” Barnaby said. “And for that reason you are, as I had suspected, an incomplete delegate to whatever that meeting is.”

  “I can see her a little bit now,” the professor said, and he said it honestly.

  We were met that night in Barnaby Sheen's bar-study; Harry O'Donovan, Dr. George Drakos, Cris Benedetti, Barnaby himself, those four men who knew everything; and myself, who didn't. And now the seedy professor had joined us. And there was Austro who came and went; and Loretta and Mary Mondo who were and weren't. “I'm here in a second capacity tonight, Barney,” Drakos said, “as a doctor and observer, as well as a friend. The Board of Health is worried about certain strange and perhaps unsanitary animals which have been appearing around your property today. The board is having a meeting tomorrow morning on you, and I'm to sit in on it. And this evening, I'm to pick up what information I can here.”

  “You're certainly welcome to try, George,” Barnaby said. “Myself, I don't understand it at all. There are animals in that back draw tonight that aren't often found in the city: porcupines, beavers, chipmunks, prairie dogs, badgers, skunks, rabbits, foxes and kit-foxes, wildcats, weasels, fishers, martens.”

  “And martins,” said Harry O'Donovan, who was a bird-fancier. “They aren't a night bird, but they are out back tonight. And catbirds, scissortails, roadrunners, jaybirds. I have seen as many birds in a small area before, but not as many species of birds. Plovers, herons, ducks, mergansers, geese. There is even a swan: it must have flown from Swan Lake.”

  “It flew from further than that, so my daughter Chiara says,” Cris Benedetti whispered softly. He seemed to be in awe of something. And the little interloper professor, he rolled in his hands some of those seed-filled sacks that were made of brown-green leaf that always remained as flexible as leather. Seedy he was called, for he always carried and scattered seeds. Oh, he wasn't seedy in the other way: he was neat enough, in an inconspicuous manner.

  “Insects, worms, snakes, snails, frogs, I don't know where they're all coming from,” O'Donovan said. “And fish! There couldn't be such big fish in that little creek or sewer ordinarily: it just wasn't deep enough before. Now it is, or it looks as though it is.”

  “Does anyone know the answer?” Barnaby Sheen asked.

  “Certainly,” said Drakos. “I was expounding on just that when the little professor came in. ‘En Arche en ho Logos,’ as John writes in scripture: ‘In the Beginning was the Word.’ I have already told you that Arche means the beginning, the origin or the original, the principle, the order and the balance, the rule, the authority, the office. And Logos not only means the word; it also means the account, the discussion, the study, the reason; and it means the answer. So the phrase really says, ‘In the Beginning was the Answer.’ ”

  “Ah, a great point has just been made in this Upper House session,” said the seed-man.

  “But the opposite of logos, alogos, means the unreasonable, the babble, and the absurdity,” Drakos finished it.

  “Logos also means the logic,” Barnaby said. “But come off it, George, talk is cheap.”

  “No, real talk, discussion, logic, solution, is the logos, the pearl beyond price. It is not cheap. And I am correct when I say that all the answers were given in the beginning. That beginning is hard to attain, though, especially in a world that says it is impossible to turn back or even to look back.”

  “You are lords,” the seedy professor said. “I'm not at my ease with you. I will go now, to attend the night session of the Broader House, and Austro will go with me. I assume that you lords will also remain in continuous session for the several days and nights of it. You have your own parts to play.”

  “I doubt if we'll remain in any such continuous session as that,” Barnaby said. “Why should we? How have we a part to play in this Animal Fair?”

  “Oh, you are the four men who know everything,” the seed-man said. “This makes you the natural aristocracy. This scribbling scribe here will keep the log on you, and Austro will do the same thing for the regional division meeting of the Broader House. You four are the lords, the uppers.”

  “That we know everything is only a literary convention of this same scribbling scribe here,” Barnaby said. “But he's right, Laff, you are a little bit like Austro. But we don't know everything, man, we don't.”

  “Nevertheless, those of the Broader House have heard that you do and they believe it. They need a counterpart. They find no other manageable center to look across to. They look to you lords to be that center, and several of us couriers between the two houses have pointed you out for the role. There might be violence, animal violence, if the delegates of the Broader House should labor and discuss and then discover that the lords will not bother about it.”

  The seed-man professor went out then, and young Austro went with him.

  We were silent for a while.

  “Well, are we lords?” Cris Benedetti asked the room.

  “Aye, lord, we are,” said Harry O'Donovan, “lords of creation.”

  And we were silent again.

  “We're not going to need that manure after all,” Mary Mondo conveyed, coming in like smoke from outside as persons in her state often do. “I should have known the answer: the horse came first. The cycle is operating nicely and we already have a fine name for our hospitality.” “Thank you, Mary,” said Barnaby Sheen.

  III

  If ever I shape the World again,

  I'll liven the laughter and liven the pain.

  —Song of the Shaper

  An Animal Fair that grunted and yelped

  Confronted its Upper Brother.

  It's part of the doings that can't be helped

  That the delegates ate each other.

  —Eco-Log

  People were more sensitive to the cacophony of the neighborhood now that the papers had published humorous little pieces about the din of the ghost animals. But the noise of them wasn't the only noteworthy thing; there were (there is no easier word for it: this is the easier word) stenches also.

  The skunk is not the only stenchy animal, although the skunk was prominent there; the badger can also put out a lot of muskiness, as can the beaver, and the porcupine, and the ground hog, and the wolverine. It was a pretty bleak orchestration of smells that they put together there when the wind was wrong. Animals in the wild do not stink, it is often said. Maybe not, but animals in the wild do express themselves.

  There were several most interesting days and nights then. Most of the interesting things centered around that wooded draw or ravine that ran behind Barnaby Sheen's place, between his land and the property of Cris Be
nedetti.

  Quite a few people came there. Some of them were official and some of them were quasi-official; others were of no office at all. But they did not always find the same things there; some people saw things in a way different from others. Some of the folks saw the draw full of animals. Others saw nothing unusual there at all, just a cluttered ravine that should be cleaned out or filled up. I could see most of the creatures, but I had had previous practice with Austro and Chiara Benedetti, and with Mary Mondo.

  Barnaby had had two hundred bales of hay hauled in there; then a couple of fifty-five pound blocks of rock salt, a great quantity of supplementary mineral pellets, a hundred pounds of bird seed, and a thousand pounds of dog and cat food.

  “That should give something for everyone,” he said, but he sounded doubtful. “It should give food for the herbivorous and for the carnivorous beasts as well, for the cattle of the earth and for the birds of the air, for the—ulp—I forgot—” He sent for a hundred pounds of fish food then; and that stuff is expensive, especially when you pour it right into the water that seems sometimes clear and shining and sometimes cloudy and putrid.

  There was sniggering, there were guffaws just off the edge of the ear, there was animal laughter; slashing, fanged laughter.

  “I try to be a good host, at great personal expense, to guests I do not know and did not invite,” Barnaby intoned sadly. “And I'm laughed at for it. Bedamned to you beasts! Growl at me, will you? I'll show you what real growling is like.”

  But we all knew that the dog and cat food was not acceptable, that it was a mistake. Nothing was likely to eat it except domestic dogs and cats, and the domestic dogs and cats of the neighborhood had been disappearing down the maws of larger and fiercer animals. And the fish food was not acceptable. Did you ever hear a fish snigger?