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

by R. A. Lafferty

  From a hundred feet down in the shaft you could see the stars in the daytime sky.

  And this moon was the place where the ‘mysterious night lights’ nested in the daytime. Almost every rural neighborhood in Osage County has had its own special ghost light for at least a century. These things draw notice, and they scare people. Sometimes they are written up in the newspapers, and there is no explanation of them. But, as to where they come from, they come from White Cow Moon. ‘Mysterious Night Lights’ look funny in the daytime though. You'd hardly recognize them as lights when you see them nesting and confabbing together in the sunlight.

  And there were the millions of wonderful jumping fleas on White Cow Moon. Fleas can always jump a little bit further on a moon than they can on Earth. It's a question of gravity.

  We played up there till almost dark, and it was one of the finest days of our entire lives. Then we heard Grandmother Bluestem honking the horn of the ranch truck far below and to the south of us. From the top of White Cow Moon when it's high in the sky you can hear a long ways.

  Helen blew ‘Go down, go down!’ on the Moon Whistle. She could really blow that thing! And White Cow Moon settled down over Lost Moon Canyon again. We climbed down through the shaft once more (it was a pretty dark and spooky go of it there), and we finally dropped out of it and onto the top of the cab of the truck. Then we all went back to the Bluestem ranch house.

  “But what is it really?” Hector O'Day asked them when we were back in the ranch house and eating a ranch house supper. “Really, I mean.” That Heck! What did he mean by ‘really’? We had been up into reality, up into blue-sky reality almost all day long. Why the grubby question?

  “Oh, it's just one of the Earth's moons,” Grandfather Bluestem said.

  “How, how?” Hector asked like a gooney. “What one of the Earth's moons?”

  “I don't have the comparative measures of masses,” Grandfather Bluestem smiled, “but I'd say that it was the smaller of the Earth's two moons.”

  “But where did it come from?” Hector still asked.

  “Oh, it used to hang out up in Missouri, about a hundred miles southwest of St. Louis,” Grandfather Bluestem said. “Then, when some of the Osage Indians came down here from Missouri in 1802, that moon just followed along after them and came down here too. It had always got along with the Osage people, but it didn't like most people at all.”

  Grandfather Bluestem was a full-blooded Osage, of course.

  That hardly touched it. Life on a moon has so many things that just aren't to be found on Earth at all. It has a special magic. Oh, there are plenty of magics on Earth, but moon-magic is in a different category completely. Every group of kids should have a moon of their own.

  But there were other activities and delights. There was an endless tumble of delights for us in those years. In such cases, it is good to keep one particular treasure-house-full of delights in reserve. So we went back to White Cow Moon a few more times in that wonderful old decade. We went once the summer we were ten years old; once the summer we were eleven; and once when we were twelve years old (we stayed up there three days that time).

  It was on that last and longest visit that John Palmer and Barry Shibbeen were able to fill up a gunny sack with stones and bones from the cave of the gnomes or trolls who lived right at the center of that moon.

  Barry made a chloroform bomb and he tossed it into that cave and knocked all those strange things out. And John Palmer had made gas masks for himself and Barry. So they put them on and crawled in and loaded up the sack. A study of those stones and bones was to raise questions that aren't all answered yet.

  But, though it was the most magical place on the world, or just off the world, we didn't get back there in those early years, after that long special visit when we were all twelve years old. There were just too many other things to do. We nearly forgot it, the pervading magic of the place, and the strong sharp odor. But it was a buried treasure that the pack of us owned henceforth, a treasure buried a little ways up in the sky.

  2

  In skies unhigh it still is set.

  It's as it's always been… And yet

  There's thinnish magic that does cling,

  Diminishing, diminishing.

  —Barry's Shibbeens

  Into these latter days again where have all been adults for many aeons.

  “Who faked them, who faked them? And how did they do it?” Hector O'Day asked on that latter day evening when Helen had brought the bones and stones and the Moon Whistle over to us. Many years had gone by since we had last gone up onto White Cow Moon.

  “It had to be you and John Palmer, Barry,” Hector said. “Both of you were smart as well as book-learned, but how did you fake the bones and stones from that rock, from that rock that you conned us into thinking was a moon?”

  “I didn't fake them, and I don't believe that John did,” Barry said. “Well yes, they were an odd lot of things. The gnawed bones that we took from that cave were those of human children, of bear cubs, of crested eagles, and of certain extinct dog-sized rhinos. They were just the sort of bones, Heck, that you are likely to find in any trolls' cave on any moon. And the fossil stones, they are somewhat stranger. They record a life on that little moon that was quite different and somewhat older than anything on Earth.”

  “Exquisite fakeries, that's what some of the savants have called the things, Barry. But they haven't been able to explain how the fakeries were done. Why have they not, exquisite faker, Barry?”

  “Because they're not fakes. At least I don't think that they are.”

  “Just what is the ‘core of facts’ in the whole business?” Caesar Ducato asked the bunch of us. “Just what was the thing that we psyched our young selves into believing was a moon? Well, I guess that there was a large and nearly spherical rock in the Lost Moon Canyon area of the Bluestem Ranches. And it did have a fissure in it by which we climbed up onto the top of the rock. And it did have a dangerous wobble to it, or at least some kind of motion. And so we were hypnotized into believing that it was a little moon hanging in low sky. We believed that easily when we were nine years old. What puzzles me is that we still believed it when we were twelve years old and were capable of conceptual thinking. What hypnotism!”

  “Who could have hypnotized us and turned our wits moony?” Barry asked. “Several of us were types almost impossible to hypnotize. Who could have conned us into believing that it was a moon, if it wasn't? But it was.”

  “Helen could have hypnotized us into it, Barry. John Palmer could have done it. You could have done it a little bit yourself. The three of you together could certainly have done it—”

  “What, what, what? Did you just say ‘But it was’, Barry? But it wasn't, man. It couldn't have been.”

  “It could have been, yes,” Barry Shibbeen maintained. “The best argument that it was is that it still is. I fly over it sometimes in my helicopter. And I still fly under it sometimes, which is more to the proof. How about all of you flying there with me in the copter in the morning and landing on the little moon? Will that be proof that it's still there, Hector?”

  “Man, it can't be! It's physically and psychologically impossible. None of us has even thought that he saw it since we were twelve years old.”

  “Wrong, Hector. Tom Bluestem and Julia Flaxfield spent their honeymoon on White Cow Moon ten years after that.”

  “But they're both Indian. And they hadn't really grown up then, however old they were. They were high on each other then, and it would have seemed to them that they were on a moon wherever they were. Dammit, Barry, there is just no way that a thinking person can accept that there's a little moon there.”

  “Oh, Caesar, and you too, Hector O'Day, I say that if you can accept the Earth's regular or big moon, it's a million times as easy to accept that little moon in the low sky in Osage County. Do you fellows accept the regular or big moon of the Earth? That so-called moon is an anomaly and the father of anomalies. It's irrational and it's impossi
ble. The only reason we have for believing in its existence is that we've seen it, and that several persons have attested to have been on it. And there is plenty of instrumental evidence for it. But we have better reason to believe in the existence of the little moon. We have seen it at much closer range. Several persons that we know much better (ourselves) have been on it. We have even traversed its dark inner tract. And if electronic waves have been bounced off the larger moon, we have bounced baseballs off the smaller moon. And baseballs are more tangible. Yes, that little moon is real.”

  “In its psychological involvement with our childhoods it was real, I suppose,” Grover Whelk said, “but it wasn't real in any other sense. I'm not sure whether its psychological effect on us was good or bad.”

  “Somebody should be smart enough to settle this matter,” Hector said, “especially to settle your pig-headedness in still believing in it, Barry.”

  “Oh, I'm smart enough to settle it,” Barry proposed. “I've already offered the way to do it, and I offer it again. Let's all get into my copter in the morning and go find that little moon. We'll fly under it and we'll fly over it and we'll land upon it. If we can do these things, then it's real. If we can't do them, then it isn't real. Let's all be ready to take off at a reasonable time of eight-thirty in the morning. Agreed, Cease, Grove, Heck, Al?”

  “Agreed,” we all said. And that is where we made our mistake.

  We called Helen the next morning, but she said that she didn't want to go. “It'd spoil it for me,” she said. But her daughter Catherine Palmer (“the child of my old age,” Helen always called Catherine) told her mother that she wanted to go, and Helen conveyed the message over the phone. “It will be all right with Catherine,” Helen said. “She was born an adult, so it won't do her any harm to know that the moon is a crumby place. But I'm eternally a child and it would shatter me. ‘You can't go back’, you know.” So Catherine Palmer, a seventeen year old mature adult and a major in psychological anthropology came with us. She was a cheerful kid.

  “Oh yeah, I've been up on the little moon before,” she said. “I went up there with some of the Bluestem kids the summer before last, but it didn't do much for me. I hadn't yet become psychologically oriented the summer before last. Now I'll have to discover why that little moon did something for you old fogies, and why some of you think about it and mumble ‘magic!’ ”

  If Catherine hadn't been so pretty and so seventeenish, she couldn't have gotten away with that psychological patter.

  We took off from the Jenks airport which is closer to T-Town than the T-Town airport is. It also has better facilities for stabling private planes and copters, not being obsessed with all those scheduled commercial flights. It was no more than thirty miles to our destination. Oh, it is pleasant to rattle in a copter over the Green Country on a fine morning in late spring!

  “Catherine, I want you to realize that White Cow Moon is a magic place,” Barry almost sang. “I don't believe that young people have nearly enough magic in their lives now-a-years. Drink deep of it when we get there, Cat.”

  “All right.”

  “Catherine, yes, it was enchanting,” Hector O'Day said. “I only wish that it was real, that it had been real, that it could be real again. I wish that you could experience the enchantment of it, but I don't even know how we were able to experience it once. We'd like to offer it to you, but I'm afraid that we don't have it to offer.”

  “Thanks anyhow,” young Catherine said.

  “Ah, it was wonder, it was sortilège, it was delight,” Caesar Ducato murmured. “It was a special place. It was the elegance and the charm. And at the same time it was tall magic with all the hair on it. It was the ‘world of our own’, the ‘moon of our own’. It was the place that only the secret masters knew about. So we belonged to the secret masters. It's a pity that the little moon didn't exist except in our imaginations.”

  “Mr. Ducato, your wattles wobble when you get intense about something,” Catherine said.

  “It was the thirst and the slaking at the same time,” Grover Whelk declaimed. “It was the ‘promise fulfilled’. It's too bad that it never was. But even thinking that we remember it is wonderful.”

  “Why not let it stand on its own two abscissae?” Catherine said. She sounded like her mother Helen when she made cracks like that.

  “See, it isn't there!” Hector O'Day cried out, half sad, half gloating, when we had come to the region. “See, it is there!” Barry Shibbeen countered. “It's there, with its little bit different color green, snuggled down almost to Earth over Lost Moon Canyon, nearly invisible among other rocks almost as big and almost the same color. Blow the Moon Whistle, Catherine. Blow the ‘Rise up, rise up!’ sequence and let's get it up into the sky a ways.”

  Catherine Palmer blew the Moon Whistle. She had almost as big a mouth as her mother Helen had, and she had an equal talent for blowing all horns and whistles. She blew the sequence, and White Cow Moon wobbled a few hundred feet up into the sky.

  “It isn't as big as it used to be,” Grover Whelk said sadly.

  “Yes it is, Grove,” Caesar said with sudden animation. “And it does have that peculiar green color in its topping boscage. It has it yet. I don't quite know the name of that color of green.”

  “Bilious green, sour bilious green,” young Catherine said. She was right of course. White Cow Moon had risen about five hundred feet into the air. Barry Shibbeen flew the copter under several times, and then he hovered it at standstill under it so we could look up through the old fissure that ran through it from top to bottom. Yes, it sure did look as though White Cow Moon was real and present.

  “Well, are you fellows convinced that it's real?” Barry jibed.

  “Not entirely convinced,” Hector O'Day mumbled thoughtfully. “You have to admit, Barry, that it doesn't look very convincing.”

  “No, it doesn't,” Barry admitted. “I wonder why it doesn't. But it is as big as it used to be. It's still about a hundred yards in diameter,”

  “Yes, but the yards aren't as long as they used to be,” Whelk complained.

  We climbed around and above White Cow Moon. Then we landed in the middle of the top of it. Yes, that strong and sharp odor was still as permeating a presence on White Cow Moon as it had been when we were children. We hadn't realized that it was an unpleasant odor, but we realized it now.

  “It smells like a badly-kept zoo,” Catherine said. “I think it's the smell of the Greater Yeti or Stinking Yeti. I'll interview him in the interests of science.”

  There were only four houses left on White Cow Moon, and only one outhouse.

  “When the last outhouse falls off White Cow Moon, I just don't know what will happen to us,” an old citizen said. “Extinction, I guess. People without outhouses just would not be people any longer.”

  “I discern the true and unmemorable quality of White Cow Moon now,” Barry Shibbeen said, “but I just can't set my tongue to the name of it.”

  “ ‘Dingy’ is the word for it,” Catherine said. She was right, of course. I felt a sort of constriction in my throat and chest, and I believe that the rest of them felt it too.

  “This moon is full of swamp gas or worse,” Caesar said. “Is Magic itself made of nothing better than swamp gas?”

  Catherine took the drinking gourd that was hanging on the town pump and milked it full from one of the she-goats there. The goats all had the mange. The chickens had the mange. Even the ducks on White Cow Moon had the mange now.

  “Mother and I both drink a lot of goat milk for our health,” Catherine said. “Oh, it's sour!”

  “Maybe it's the gourd that's sour and gives a sour taste to the milk,” Barry said hopefully.

  “Nah, it's the goat herself who's sour and gives a sour taste to the milk,” Catherine said. “I suppose that the Greater Yeti or Stinking Yeti lives down in that hole that runs through this moon. I'd better go see.” And Catherine Palmer disappeared down the shaft that ran clear through White Cow Moon.

  �
��Well, how does it go on this moon?” Barry asked one of the citizens.

  “Badly,” that person said. “The main thing wrong is our shrinking population. There's only seven people left. A century ago there were a hundred of us here.”

  “What's the next main thing wrong here?” Grover Whelk asked.

  “The corruption,” the citizen said. “The trolls or yeti in the middle of our moon have corrupted our children, both of them. They've taught them immorality and disobedience and smart talk. It's those befuddling mushrooms that they grow down there and give our kids to eat that do the damage. Yeah, there goes the future of White Cow Moon blown, completely blown. And the third main thing wrong on this moon is the fleas.”

  Fleas! Yes, there were lots of fleas on that moon, and they got all over you and set you to scratching. Well, there had always been lots of fleas there, but they hadn't seemed so demeaning in the old days.

  “If you have trolls or yetis, you're going to have fleas,” a citizen said. “There's no way you can miss it.”

  Catherine came up out of the shaft then, and a Yeti followed her out. He was eight feet tall, shaggy, quite stringy and spare (there were no fat Yetis on White Cow Moon), and smelly. He was roughly thirty-three and one-third percent of the strong, sharp odor of that moon.

  “He's a genuine Homo Yeti Putens or Stinking Yeti,” Catherine said, “and there's two more of them, another gentleman one, and a lady one. Even in the interest of science there's nothing to be got from the Yetis. Nothing, nothing. This one is the least interesting creature I ever saw. I guess he's harmless though.”

  “I'm not so sure of that,” Hector O'Day growled. “How about all those gnawed bones down in your hole, tall fellow? Some of them were bones of human children.”