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

by R. A. Lafferty

  The draw seemed, at times, much larger than it could possibly have been. That block was only an eighth of a mile long, only half that wide; and the draw or ravine that snaked down the middle of it between the two properties was seldom more than thirty feet wide or eight feet deep. But now it seemed much larger, as though it were superimposed over a greater area: or, more seemly, as though it underlay a large region and was shining through. The draw was occupying space that belonged to something else. There were unaccountably grand vistas of—

  “—vistas, and vastas, and verdi-gris lands,

  made by my Really Eyes, shaped by my hands.”

  Where did those unspoken, dog-eared words come from? Oh, partly they came from a tawny puma that had just finished off a dog, eating the ears last; partly from a wolverine, that fierce devil-animal; partly from a horned bull of uncommon size; partly from a snake in the grass.

  Austro was into the business of seeing and constructing, hand and muzzle; and the seed-man, and a stranger. But mostly it was given its verbal form by Chiara Benedetti. She was alive and vibrant in the darkish glade there, singing silently within, with fox-fire coming from her in waves, and sparks from the tips of her toes and the tips of her ears. Oh, she was alive, and she was spirit-animal! And the cycle of creatures maintained each other in being by their attention and their sensing.

  The most valid of scenes may be created, or maintained in being, by the forming eyes of no more than seven persons, so one of the old Greek philosophs told it. And Charles Harness has implied nearly the same thing.

  But real scenes cannot be so maintained! Can they not now? The most real scenes are those maintained by the most real eyes and minds. It must be confessed, though, that quantity does often preempt quality in this field of the various realities.

  Oh well, the dullest eyes could now see that there were a few stray and strange animals lying around and standing around in the draw. There was, for instance, a glare-eyed ox chewing his cud, and what was it doing there anyhow? There were a couple of skittish horses; there was a buck deer. There were other shapes that might have been animals, or that might have been stumps, or boles of trees.

  A belching buffalo—it must have escaped from the Blue Hills Ranch: they have the only buffaloes around here; they try to cross them with cattle to fix certain traits, but mostly they only get sterile hybrids from the crosses.

  Then a fish leapt in a great arc, ten feet long and thirty-six inches high. How can a fish leap thirty-six inches high from water that is not ten inches deep?

  “You have not got rid of that anarchist yet, Mr. Sheen,” Mrs. Bagby was complaining. And Austro was shambling about, grinning, and drawing cartoons in a large drawing tablet. “I really believe that he brings about these strange scenes and effects by looking at things and drawing them,” said Mrs. Bagby.

  “That is the mark of a great artist, Mrs. Bagby,” Barnaby commented.

  “But he is rude, and he has made a rude picture of me,” she complained.

  “Let me see it,” Barnaby ordered. And Austro brought the tablet and showed the cartoon with a half-sly, half-shamefaced manner. We looked at it. It was a picture of a witch riding on an incredibly worn-out broomstick, and she was just going into a tailspin from broom failure. The witch was saying something, in a cartoon balloon there, but it was printed in Austro notation which was impossible to read.

  “How do you know that it's intended to be you, Mrs. Bagby?” Barnaby asked.

  “Oh, I know it is, I know it is! Just look at that anarchist grin.”

  “If only I could read the words that you've written in the balloon, Austro,” Barnaby wished out loud. “What are the words that the witch is saying when her broom finally gives out and she's left with a bare broomstick?”

  “Oh, the witch says, ‘That's the last straw!’ when her broom finally dies,” Chiara Benedetti said when she came to look. So Chiara could interpret Austro's scribbles.

  “Austro writes or otherwise expresses himself in an intuitive language,” I said. “A few persons can comprehend it, but most cannot. And no one could be instructed to comprehend it.”

  “Oh shut up, Laff!” Barnaby growled. He was too intelligent to believe that, even though it was true.

  “Actually, Austro's cartoon drawings, and the things shown spoken, are the minutes of the Broader House sessions,” the seed-man commented as he came by.

  “Ah, is the belching of the buffalo, as shown in the balloon over the animal-drawing there, a part of the speaking at the session?” Barnaby wanted to know.

  “Oh yes, of course it is,” the seed-man said. “The buffalo is one of the most respected spokesmen here and one of the finest orators.”

  Barnaby gave the big drawing tablet back to Austro: and that person began to draw furiously and well the minutes of the session, the snortings, gruntings, roarings. All was not amity with the people of the Broader House, but the rabbit did lie down with the wildcat for a while, and there was certainly an attempt at meaningful discussion. The wildcat made a statement, and Austro could be seen recording it. Then the rabbit made a statement; it was the antithesis to the statement made by the wildcat. Then the wildcat ate the rabbit: that was the synthesis.

  Well, what sort of procedures do you have in your own Congress? And Austro was recording it all faithfully.

  “Reality,” said Harry O'Donovan with an unreal look in his eyes, “must remain a subjective thing to each individual person, though we have it on Faith and also from the Schoolmen that there is an objective reality. Cris, your daughter Chiara was playing Animal Crackers this afternoon, and for a while I shared a subjective reality that she had created. We used to play Animal Crackers when I was a little boy.” “I don't remember playing any such game as Animal Crackers, Harry,” George Drakos said, “and I was a little boy with you.”

  “I was a sissy,” Harry O'Donovan said. “Sometimes I played it with my sisters. When we played Animal Crackers we did literally create animals, by mind over animality. But they were a fast-fading bunch of beasts that we evoked or shaped-up; except one dog, Crackerjack, that I made and had for years.”

  This was probably the second evening after a certain Congress of Creatures had assembled; or after the game of Animal Crackers had begun to be played seriously, should one see it from that viewpoint. We were met in Barnaby Sheen's study again for a pleasant evening's libations and talk, or perhaps we were met for a session of the Upper House, should one see it from that viewpoint.

  “Animal Crackers is a very sophisticated game for children to play,” Harry O'Donovan was saying. “But it is, paradoxically, almost impossible for adults to play, and absolutely impossible for sophisticated adults. It is based on self-hypnotism and group-hypnotism. One sees a shape of rock or tree or bush; no matter what shape it really is, it will somewhat resemble the shape of some animal or group of animals. It will resemble the shape of something anyhow; there is no shape so poor that it does not own two or more viewpoints. Your boy Austro, Barney, can draw these things on paper or on stones so that you look at them, and then look at them again and see the animated or animal pictures in them. It's enough to make the hair raise up on your head to see wild, fierce, ravening beasts not five feet from you, to feel their body-heat wafted to you on the rampant breeze, to smell—”

  “—their manure,” Barnaby interrupted. “There's so many things that can be done with manure and it is so very necessary, as Mary Mondo pointed out. And, as I myself pointed out, it is too often forgotten or swept into the sewer, so much so as to imperil the world. It isn't the waste that causes pollution. It's the attempt to take the waste out of the cycle that pollutes. Go on, Harry.”

  “—to smell their hair-smell and their fur-smell, and the green breath of the foliage-eaters and the red breath of the meat-eaters. Who said anything about smelling manure, Barney? It really hasn't much smell when the animals are unpenned and uncrowded. To hear the gurgling in the gullets of the beasts and the growling in their stomachs! Austro can evoke all
this with his interpretive and creative drawings. And your girl Chiara, Cris, abets this game with her wonderful imagination. She made one mistake this afternoon though—”

  “I don't think so, Harry,” Cris Benedetti said. “What was it?”

  “The lynx, she got it a little wrong when she created the impression of it. She forgot the enormous paws that go with the comparatively small body. She forgot the tufted ears, and she gave it a tail too long and too bushy.”

  “There are no native lynx around here,” Drakos said. “You may have observed the lynx out at Mohawk Zoo, but hers was a simple bobcat or wildcat of our own region. There's many of them around if you've the sharp eyes to see them. You haven't, Harry. And she got it right. So did Austro.”

  “You also were caught up in the Animal Cracker game, George?” Harry asked.

  “No. I don't know the game. But Austro showed me a drawing he had made of a wildcat, not of a lynx. And once today, when I watched Chiara, she had wildcat eyes and not lynx eyes.”

  “Imaginary animals or group-hypnosis animals must eat a lot of hay,” Barnaby Sheen said. “I received a couple of delivery-slip copies in the mail today. I don't understand them at all, but they are from several different firms and it is clearly my signature on each bill. What am I doing making purchases from a grain and feed company, from a wholesale grocery firm, from Uncle Dan's Country Store and Farm Supply, and from a pet shop? What am I doing buying fishfood in quantity? I'm not in the habit of that. There is something particularly fishy about the fish-food.”

  Loretta Sheen sat up, winked (and a little sawdust trickled out of her eye when she did this), and lay back down again. Animal Crackers indeed! People Crackers rather. One was always in danger of self-hypnotism when in the same room with that life-sized doll.

  “I have the feeling of invisible empires these last several days,” Cris Benedetti said. “And they seem to interlock as if they had common roots in a common ground. I'm reminded of a parable somewhere in Chesterton. It's about a sad-looking weed in a desert, but it happens to connect with the roots of the world. A boy tries to pull this weed up, but it is very strong for a small weed. He cannot pull it out of the ground, but he pulls many other things down into the ground in the attempt. Distant orchards are pulled down into the earth by his attempts, for they all connect to his weed. Vineyards are drawn down into the soil and olive groves. Meadows and vegetable gardens go down, and wheat fields, all leaving bare desolation where they have grown. Then sections of dams are pulled down, and levees; leaving swamps that are neither sweet nor saline, but rotten. Canals and rivers are unbottomed and fall into chasms, and their places are taken by noisome sewers. Buildings totter and topple and crash. The earth quakes, the mountains melt, and scorching fires break out everywhere.

  “Then the boy notices that what he is pulling on is not a weed at all. It's a noble plant, and the name of it is truth-from-the-beginning plant. After the boy stops pulling on the plant, the world begins to mend itself. But from time to time someone else tries to pull up the plant, believing (on account of perverse vision) that it's a weed. So the world becomes clogged and poisoned and awry again. I believe that someone is trying to pull up the little plant at the present time, and with the same sad consequence all over again.”

  “I believe that I read something in Chesterton that might serve as the germ of that parable,” Drakos said. “But he did not write it as you give it.”

  “Actually, I didn't read it at all. My daughter Chiara read it, and she told it to me; she was quite excited about it. She doesn't falsify things when she changes them while filtering them through her mind. She makes them more true: I would say that she verifies them, if verify hadn't taken on a different meaning. Barnaby, why don't we do something about that damnable sewer that runs between our properties?”

  “Yes, why don't you?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “Pollution begins at home: at your home here, Barney, and at Benedetti's, not at mine. The water is foul and rotten, and the banks are trashy. I can smell it strongly right now.”

  “I am doing something about it,” Barnaby said. “I'm thinking about it.”

  “And thinking about it will make it less of a sewer?” O'Donovan asked with irony in his high voice.

  “I don't know,” Barnaby confessed dismally. “I believe that thinking about it is the first step in making it less of a sewer, yes. It's possibly something else to other eyes. And a beaver I talked to today said that he had some good ideas about righting it. He showed me, or someone showed me, what it could be made into: quite a pleasant little brook flowing into a clear-water grassy pond, and going out again in a small waterfall over a dam that had a beaver warren inside it. The banks were lush, and the trees and bushes were clean and rich. The beaver also told me (which I had somehow forgotten) that every brook, pond, dam, waterfall, tree, and bush has its own spirit and that these in the personification age were called nymphs.

  “What am I talking about?” Barnaby raised his head suddenly in alarm. “Am I mad? I never talked to a beaver in my life. My mind must have blown. Say, does anyone know why I signed a delivery ticket for two hundred bales of hay? Whatever would I do with hay? What in the world did I think I was signing when I signed that? And where would the hay be now, if there ever was any hay involved?” Barnaby took another sip from his drink. Mary Mondo, that kook spook, had just poured something into that drink and Barnaby hadn't noticed. Now Barnaby yawned and then he nodded. He was getting sleepy.

  The seed-man came into the room. Then Austro came in. Austro had come in by the door, but the seed-man hadn't.

  IV

  Three objects, bright as burning brand,

  Are fixed beyond recall:

  The starting word; the Shaper's hands;

  The writing on the wall.

  —Orthcutt

  The weighing vane swings very far,

  And how the time does go!

  Oh sharply, sharply! for you are

  Replaceable, you know.

  —Eco-Log

  It had become a pantheronium of noise, an all-animal clamor, and the lonesome wildcat contributed a lot of caterwauling to it. But mostly it was the trumpeting of the bull-moose and the bugling of the bull-elk; that, and the neighing of the stallion of the other kind of horse. And the complaints of the cow, and the belching of the buffalo. The sessions of the Broader House continued noisy.

  “The children of the world (and it is written that in their generation they are wiser than the children of light) say that a surplus of people is the cause of the suffocation and pollution. They are wrong, and yet they sound as if they were right,” Harry O'Donovan said, and then Mary Mondo poured something into his drink. He didn't seem to notice it at all. This was probably the following evening. Something had largely wiped out one evening and night and the next day, and Mary Mondo had been pouring something into the drinks for several evenings. The seed-man and Austro had just entered again.

  “The children of the world are wrong,” Drakos said. “Augustine used the phrase ‘the number of saints fit to complete this most blessed city’; and that number has not been reached yet. When the peopling of the world reaches a certain stage, then the world will transcend itself. It hasn't yet.” And Mary Mondo poured something into Drakos' drink.

  Loretta Sheen sat up. She put a finger to her lips and made a hushing sound. A bit of sawdust dribbled from the corner of her mouth. Then she lay back down again.

  “I always have a lot of prodigies about me,” Barnaby said sleepily. “My ‘family’ consists entirely of such. But these last several days there have been prodigies out of the ordinary. I seem to see animals where there cannot be any such animals. I get the impression of a Congress of Creatures or of an Animal Fair. I see and talk with a seed-man. Then I watch him come through a wall, so I know that he's no ordinary seed-man. But I feel that all these things are trying to tell me something.”

  “These things are like the ouija board or the Olduvai Gorge, Barney,” Cris Benedetti said (and Mary Mo
ndo poured something into his drink). “They tell you what you want to believe. They tailor their evidence to your wishes. They give you back your own thoughts and beliefs. But there wasn't any Animal Fair. There was only O'Donovan's game of Animal Crackers that got out of hand because of the forming imagination of several children, my daughter Chiara, and your stepson Austro, perhaps others. And the seed-man is pure wraith: I don't know who it was who made him up.”

  “You know more about me than I do about myself?” the seed-man asked, but Benedetti hardly heard him. The seed-man had various sorts of seeds in those leatherly leaf pouches. He even had fish roe.

  Mary Mondo poured something into my own drink. I tasted. It was a strong and not quite bitter additive. It tasted a little licorice. It comes in very small black-label bottles, and many bars do not have it at all. It's named Lethe. I didn't drink much more of my drink.

  “The creatures of the Broader House are putting you on notice,” the seed-man said. “You must do much, much better with your sessions.” But we didn't pay much attention to him.

  “Stevenson said it right,” Barnaby mumbled. “ ‘There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.’ ” And on that profound note, Barnaby fell into deep sleep. Mary Mondo had been needling his drink again tonight.

  “You lords do not seem to understand all the alternatives,” the seed-man said, “though you are on friendly and not too patronizing terms with a member of one of the races involved. You see, one or more early human races, as human as ourselves, may have been set aside and held in reserve. Perhaps they'll be called into the game soon now, as a second team is called in when the first team is unable to move the ball.”