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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Pope Finnegan essayed a bit of humor to the conclave.

  “This has been an Eschatological Comedy,” he said, “and stagewise—(what is that sound, giggling or the agony of a lost soul?)—and stagewise (with the world as stage) it has been a good comedy except for one thing. (Oh what is that tortured giggling?) There were no roles for women in the comedy; that was its lone defect.”

  Then, like a silvery dam breaking, there was the sound of a most extraordinary laughing in high glee after many months of holding her laughter.

  “Terence Cardinal Mercy of Cork, or else Emmet Collins of Boston, whichever it is, thou art a woman,” John Giwa spoke in a stern voice. “Explain this, X, it's an antic of thine. Finnegan himself was never capable of such.”

  Well, if you were X and pressed to get an impersonator for Cardinal Merry, the hardest of all the cardinals to impersonate, why not get the best impersonator in the world? And on stage or on airways, a young lady named Emma Collins was the greatest impersonator in the world, of anything, of anybody. And she was a protégé of X, an old actor and impersonator himself.

  But how in hickory-fired hades was Finnegan a true Cardinal? Oh, the last Pope before Finnegan, Paul the Eleventh, had named Finnegan a Cardinal in petto (secretly, in the breast) the afternoon that Finnegan had painted a quick but absolutely extraordinary portrait of that Pope. That was just one week before the murderous death of Paul the Eleventh.

  “Finnegan, you are either here in ghost-flesh or else you have the gift of bi-location, something that only the greatest Saints have,” the Pope said.

  “You are wrong, Holy Father,” Finnegan told him. “The greatest devils have the gift of bi-location also, but I am neither.”

  Finnegan being named a Cardinal secretly, only three persons knew of the fact: Finnegan himself, Paul the Eleventh who named him, and the Holy Ghost. It was the Holy Ghost (never very good at keeping a secret) who leaked the information to the voters (there were two other real Cardinals among them) at the Conclave at Mooring Rock.

  So the reign of Pope Finnegan the First (a big-nosed clown, a world-wanderer, and a master artist) began on a joyful note. One half of the people in the world, plus one, approved of it all. This confounded and mystified all the pollsters who had predicted an approval of less than one tenth of one percent.

  And Pope Finnegan fit in so perfectly with the prediction of the prophet Nostradamus, made just 430 years before:

  When guiding light seemed ever quenched

  Then Clio's very road he wrenched

  Back to the true and happy way.

  He is the Pope of Bells and Bay.

  His coming is a joy to see.

  Upon his shield a Green Bay Tree,

  A staff, a paint-box, and a rose.

  Outstanding is his holy nose.

  But the people of the Angry League did not approve at all. They raised their furious voices to the skies.

  “Corn, corn, shameful corn! The lack of true style in all of this is a planetary disgrace. A happy ending yet!! The ultimate of abominations!!!”

  And there was heart-rending wailing and the colossal gnashing of teeth.

  Gray Ghost: A Reminiscence

  There are a lot of people who don't even remember the old Electric Park that was south of Tulsa, between the Peoria Road and the Arkansas River. It was the dog-racing track complete with electric rabbit. The palmy days of Electric Park were 1920 to 1928. The grandstands seated eight thousand people until the northern half of the east-side grandstand collapsed in 1925. After that, the grandstands seated only six thousand people.

  It was on Halloween night of 1924 that Anselm Sheen took four of us boys, his son Barnaby Sheen, and Hector O'Day, Grover Whelk and myself, all of us ten years old — and he took us out to Electric Park in his Overland touring car. Halloween night was always the last (and highest-stake) night of the dog-racing season.

  “It's up to you boys,” Anselm Sheen said when we got there. “I'll buy each of you boys a ticket to the dog races, even though the tickets are forty cents each. Or, it being Halloween when the ghosts walk, you can go looking for thrills in the old Holy Ghost Burial Ground just a quarter mile south of here. I'm going to watch the races myself, but if I were twenty-five years younger I'd go to the burial grounds for my fun. Ah, I see that you're already starting south for them! Meet me here in an hour and a half. The races will be over by then, and your grisly fun should be over by then too. Be careful if you try the Devil's Handshake. About nine years ago the devil got a good hold on a little boy and pulled him all the way down to Hell.”

  “We won't be taken in by that, Mr. Sheen,” Hector O'Day said. “We're too smart for that.”

  “So was the little boy who got pulled all the way down to Hell nine years ago,” Anselm Sheen said. “He was a really smart boy. He reminds me of you, Hector.”

  It was all weed-covered hard sand there as we walked south just a little bit after sundown. And the area had a sad scattering of runt apple trees on whose branches no apple had ever grown. As though drawn by some big magnet, all four of us headed for Devil's Handshake Dune. We felt more than heard the giggling of several medium-sized boys coming from a ditch. We even recognized one of them by his giggle. And we heard from the very middle of Devil's Handshake Dune (which was a sinkhole and not a dune at all) the horrified screaming of a little boy in death agony.

  Now, the mechanism by which the Devil grabs a little boy by the hand and pulls him all the way down to Hell is this: Devil's Handshake Dune is only twenty feet from where the riverbank drops suddenly down to the verge of the river. The point of the drop is the face of a cliff about twelve feet high. Into the face of this cliff, boys have been digging tunnels and caves for years. And one of those tunnels, a meander of more than twenty feet through the sandy dark, reaches right to the middle of Devil's Handshake Dune. The Devil's Hole goes down to the tunnel at that point, just big enough a hole for a little boy to put his arm down into Devil's Hole on a dark Halloween Night — it goes like this: “If you're afraid to do it, then let's forget it. If you really believe the Devil will grab your hand and pull you all the way down to Hell, then run away from this place as fast as you can.”

  “I'm not afraid,” the smaller boy says, “I'm not afraid of anything. I know the Devil isn't waiting in that little hole to pull me down to Hell.”

  “Then reach your arm into that hole as far as you can reach it. And whatever you feel there, shake its hand. That's the initiation to join our club. There isn't any other way to get into it.”

  So the little boy who wasn't afraid of anything lay down on the sand and put his hand down that hole as far as he could reach it. And the Devil grabbed his hand and had pulled him part way to Hell already. The little boy's whole shoulder was in the hole now, and his face was in the sand and his mouth was full of sand, and he was screaming in mortal fear.

  Hector O'Day went to the edge of the area, and then went down the cliff that dropped to river level.

  “Dirty Dugan!” he hollered into the tunnel entrance. “Dirty Dugan, let go of the kid! Hey, Dirty, we came past two of the tunnels that had already caved in quite near here. And the sand here is squeaking and shifting as though your tunnel was going to cave in too. Then you'd be trapped in there and you'd die in there.”

  The Devil, or whatever was in the tunnel, gave a loud grunt. The little boy somehow got his hand loose from the Devil, or whatever it was. Then he got on his feet and ran as hard as he could, sobbing all the way, towards the lights and noise at Electric Park a quarter of a mile away. Electric Park would be a friendly haven to him.

  Hector O'Day climbed up the riverbank cliff, and Dirty Dugan followed him up and stood there looking at us. “Where you guys going to now?” he asked us. Dirty Dugan, dripping sand, was a bigger boy, at least twelve years old. He had his nickname because he was dirty. He never wore shoes, and he was rough. But this was the third year he had taken the part of the “Devil in the Tunnel” and he was good in the role.

 
“We're going to Amos Centenary Black's cabin,” Barnaby Sheen said. “It's hairy fun just to listen to his talk on Halloween night.”

  “Amos won't let me in his cabin because I'm too dirty,” Dirty Dugan said, “but maybe he'll let me stand in the doorway and listen.”

  But none of went into Amos Centenary Black's cabin that night, because Amos had just come out of the cabin door and locked it behind him as we got there. He carried a burning railroad lantern and a basket that seemed to have a jumble of things in it; and he started toward the “Monuments”.

  “Come along, boys, if you want to,” he said. “I was just going to wake up Captain John Diehard as I do every Halloween night. He sure does get lonesome down in that grave. ‘If I could only hear a human voice again,’ he moans, ‘or even a half-human voice.’ Hey, I bet he'd even be glad to hear Dirty Dugan there.”

  “That's all stuff about you waking up Captain John Diehard on Halloween nights,” Dirty Dugan said. “Why don't you do it with some witnesses present sometime?”

  “Ah, but I will have five highly intelligent witnesses present this night,” Old Amos said. “I'll have Hector, Barnaby, Grover, Laff, and you Dirty Dugan. If people will not believe you five, as Scripture says, neither will they believe one risen from the dead.”

  The crowd noise at Electric Park had increased to a happy roar.

  “That will be the dog Tom Talley winning the first race,” Old Amos said. Amos Centenary Black was part black-man and part Indian. He was also (we have his own word for this) one-sixteenth Corsican, and he was the great-great-grandson of the Emperor Napoleon the First Himself. Amos was caretaker of the old Holy Ghost Burial Grounds.

  Captain John Diehard was buried in a substantial monument in this burial grounds, and these words were graven on the monument:

  Captain John Diehard, born Jan. 1, 1800, died Dec. 31, 1899. He took his own death hard, and he said that he would be back.

  “Captain John was old even when he was young,” Amos said. “He was sixty-one years old when he first became a soldier and a captain for the Confederacy.” The monument rose only an inch above the ground, and an iron pipe came out only an inch above the monument. It had an iron cap on it. Old Amos turned a key in that cap, and then he screwed the cap off.

  “Captain John Diehard!” old Amos called down into the pipe. “It's Halloween Night, time for your yearly waking-up.” But there was no sound out of the pipe that went down into the grave.

  “I have a Galton whistle with me, Amos,” Hector O'Day said. “Dogs and dead people can hear it, but live people can't. Shall I blow it and try to wake him up?”

  “Brandy is better,” old Amos said. From his basket he took a brandy snifter and a bottle of Royal Hanover Brandy, filled the one from the other, and let it down into the pipe in a little net. And then there was the sound of waking up in the grave below. A voice that sounded like a squeaky gate was heard down in that hole. “There's nothing like Hanover Brandy for waking the dead,” the voice wheezed. “Ah, this is the same stuff that took all the fur off the possum's tail. But to the gist of the matter. Is the south riz again yet, Amos?”

  “Not yet, Captain John, not yet,” Amos said, “but I have some good boys here who'd like to shake your dead-man hand.”

  “Reach me your hands and voices then,” the rusty voice of the dead man said. “I'm avid for company. I always wake up lonesome.”

  “I'm Hector,” said Hector O'Day putting his arm down the pipe, “and I'm pleased to meet you, Captain John. Ah, it's like shaking hands with a pine board full of splinters.”

  “Aye, my bones do feel splintery, I suppose,” Captain John Diehard said from below, “but it's a manly grip you have yourself.”

  “You're next, Barnaby,” old Amos said. “Then Laff and Grover and Dirty Dugan.”

  “It's a good grip you also have, Barnaby,” the dead man in the grave gave his praise. “If we'd had you at Sharpsburg, the South might not have lost. One man could have made the difference it was that close.”

  But I myself didn't do very well at shaking hands with the dead man. I trembled, and I sure didn't have a strong grip. The touch of his bare rat-gnawed bones almost made the hair rise off my head.

  “There is something amiss here, Laff,” the wheezy, squeaky voice uttered. “I am a prophet as well as a captain of the Confederacy. And in my role as prophet I know that your father came from the north.”

  “So did yours,” I said in a jittery voice, and I never did know who put such words in my mouth.

  “It's true, it's true,” the rusty voice admitted. “My father was born in Pennypack, Pennsylvania in 1750, but he was still a suckling when he went south. But our cases are the same. You are no more under suspicion than I am, and I myself am above suspicion.”

  Grover Whelk put his arm down the pipe.

  “Yours is the hand of a surgeon,” said the rusty voice below. “And we'll need good surgeons when the combat is joined again.”

  And when the dead man shook the hand of Dirty Dugan he said, “ 'Tis the hand of a seaman. Am I not right, lad?”

  “Almost, Captain John, almost,” Dirty Dugan said. Well, Dirty Dugan lived on a houseboat. Yes, there were houseboats on the Arkansas River at Tulsa in 1924.

  “Dirty Dugan,” the squeaky, dead-man voice went on, “rotten as you are, there will likely be a role for you to play. Did you know that I used to be called Dirty Diehard? When I went on decoy I'd go upwind of a company of Unionists, and they'd cry out: ‘There they are! No, there! There must be a thousand of them from the smell of them! Let's get them!’ Then they'd all come after me and my smell. And then is when my men would take them from behind of them and slaughter them. But to business! Amos Centenary Black, did you place bets for me at the dog track?”

  “I sure did, Captain John,” old Amos said. “I bet six dogs to win: Tom Talley in the first, Muscadine in the second, My Gal Sal in the third, Mule Whiskey in the fourth, Gray Ghost in the fifth, and Calaboose in the sixth.”

  “But Gray Ghost is here in the grave with me right now keeping me company,” the dead-man voice protested. “He's a patronymic dog which means that he's named after me his human father. I was called ‘The Gray Ghost’ in my combat days, when I wasn't called ‘Dirty Diehard’. The dog Gray Ghost is here with me.”

  “So he is, Captain John,” old Amos agreed, “but he will leave you when it is time for him to run in the fifth race. He will appear in the midst of them then, the doors and windows being closed as it says in Scripture, in the ready room just behind the starting gates. He will appear there just when they are about to scratch him, and this will astonish most of the dog handlers. But not all of them, for several of them have already caught on that he is a ghost dog.”

  “This is the fifth year that we'll win big on the last night of the dog season,” the dead-man voice wheezed. “It should be a tidy sum that you have banked for me now, Amos. Enough to clothe and equip a company, maybe even a regiment.”

  “It's a tidy sum, yes, Captain John,” old Amos said.

  “Listen, you five boys,” the dead man rambled on. “There is a lot you can do while waiting for the news that the South has riz again. You can provide yourselves with guns and ammunition. The gun to get is the Mannings 1855 Territory Rifle. 1855 was a good vintage year for both Mannings and Territory Rifles and for Royal Hanover Brandy. Just fill my brandy snifter for me one more time, Amos.”

  “Maybe there aren't any more Mannings 1855 Territory Rifles left, Captain John,” Barnaby Sheen voiced a doubt.

  “There are as many left as there ever were, Barnaby,” the dead man argued, “since those premier rifles never wear out. More than three hundred of them were made, so more than three hundred of them still exist. As to gunpowder, use white powder only. Black powder will leave a smoke to give a way your position. Get your copper sleeves from Coopertown Coppersleeve Company; they're the best. And pour your lead into molds made by Leadbelly's Lead Mold Company Limited.

  “Do not use straight
lead. It lacks elegance. Let your shot mixture be ninety-five percent lead and five percent pewter. If you do not have pewter, use tin for the five percent in the mixture. Nothing else has quite the shine of a bullet made from this mix. It is the fact behind the legend of the silver bullet. But a silver bullet will not kill either ghost or devil, and this bullet will kill both. Amos, why don't you give each of these fine boys a drink of graveyard cider. Then we'll roll the bones a bit before I return to my death for another year.”

  “All right, Captain John,” old Amos said, and he pulled five paper picnic cups and a jug of graveyard cider out of his basket. He poured our cups full. “The graveyard apple trees never have any apples growing on their branches at all,” old Amos said. “The apples grow on the tree roots underground. And they are the best cider apples in the world.”

  Ah, they were. That graveyard cider was the best cider ever.

  “Now we will roll the bones,” said the dead man in his grave. “They buried me without my dice but with my bowie knife. So after I'd been dead about fifteen years and time was hanging heavy on my hands, I whittled me a pair of dice out of my own ankle bones. And they are the luckiest dice I ever had. Amos, take that pair of dice out of your basket and I'll play each of you in turn Prime Seven for a dollar. First seven wins.”

  Amos rolled his dice on the top of the monument by the light of his railroad lantern. “Four, is it not?” cried the dead man from his grave below. Well, if you're dead and eyeless, you aren't bound by the regular rules of line-of-sight. Anyhow, we saw that Amos had rolled a four.

  “Now I roll,” the dead man said, and his ankle-bone dice made a nice rattle in his bony hand. “I have a seven,” the dead man said. “You owe me a dollar, Amos.”