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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Are they ever curious enough to get the paper themselves for that day and see what it says there? The Camptown Daily Delineator, you say?”

  “That's the hitch, Major,” Boudreau said. “The atlas doesn't even show any Camptown, Louisiana. And the dates on the paper that rash out of her are always quite a few years in the future.”

  “That would be interesting to read.”

  “Come down to our place and see us after the war then. It's Roanoke, Louisiana in Jeff Davis Parish. We had hopes for a while that my wife was cured of her rash. A new doctor thought he had her well from it. Then she broke out all over again. She's got to quit eating those ramps or there's no cure for her in this world. She promises to quit, and then she backslides again and breaks out even worse than before. I think she's clear out of control now that I'm overseas. Come see us sometime, though. The chances are that she'll really be backslid when you get there, and you can read all the futuristic news you want to, and read the best comic strips in the world, and read that novel too.”

  “What novel?” I asked him.

  “WAR AND PEACE, the longest novel in the world, unless there's a Japanese novel somewhere that's longer. People have begun to grumble that she should be prosecuted for plagiarism. But she's got a lawyer now, and he says not to worry, that nobody can do a thing to her for it, that the copyright ran out decades ago. Besides that, the version that breaks out on her is a little bit different. She's syndicated now and making good money, so she'll probably divorce me. The big money I make as a PFC in the army isn't nothing to her now. She'd got the running futuristic news working for her, and those comics which are at the same time the funniest and the raunchiest in the world, and the novel WAR AND PEACE that nobody knows how it's going to end. She's rich from the syndication.”

  “Isn't WAR AND PEACE going to end the same way Tolstoy made it end?”

  “I don't think so, Major. The way she's rashing out with it, it looks like Napoleon is going to win in her version.”

  The forty-five year old child began to look as though he had eaten too many road-apples. “How many soldiers were there in your company?” he asked me.

  “Two hundred and forty-six,” I said, “and they were all masters of that double-jointed talk. Except me. I never could do it. But let me give you a couple hundred more examples of their talk.”

  “Ah, thank you. I have enough material now,” the forty-five year old child said. He put his notebook in his briefcase and walked away.

  But it's nice that the children of today still take an interest in things like that.

  Promontory Goats

  You with shelly horns, rams!

  And promontory goats!

  — Meredith

  I am surely the unlikely choice to write the introduction and correlation of this assessment-collection of the surviving works and personalities of Kasmir Szymansky. Well, who wouldn't be an unlikely choice for it?

  But I never liked Casey.

  Well, who did?

  This brings us up against a cliff right at the start. Casey Szymansky had a lot of assets that would seem to compel his being liked. He was handsome. He was talented. He was friendly, in a sometimes stumbling sort of way; and real friendliness often has this stumbling quality. He was not arrogant. He was not mean. He did not steal. He did not slander. He did not lie. He often offered a helping hand, most especially to those who needed it the most. He was rich in a pleasantly moderate way. He was iceberg-generous, as they say, meaning that he managed to conceal at least seven eighths of his generosities. He was entertaining. He was hard-working. He had taste. He had kindness. He had intelligence of a high grade. He was neither drunken nor profligate. He was presentable. He was well-connected, and he kept no skeletons. No real scandal ever touched him. He had a good sense of the grotesque and a good sense of humor. He was his own worst enemy. But he was not, except on rare and short occasions, the enemy of anyone else. He was never jealous of the success of others. He was the master of many subjects, and he could match the interests of almost anyone. He gave some of the finest small parties in town. He had a fine fund of unoffending and undirty jokes and stories. He went out of his way to do favors that no one else would think to do at all.

  How did we manage not to like him?

  Well, it wasn't easy, but we all managed it. There wasn't any collusion among his acquaintances on this. Each of us refused to like him by an individual effort.

  There is very little of his work left in any field, and this is all the more amazing because he produced such mountains of work. In drawing and painting, in music, in verse and in prose, he cranked out a very lot of it. He destroyed most of it. The chimney of his house was called the Black Chimney of Hubbard Street because he burned so much of his stuff in the fireplace of his old house there. He sometimes recited his pieces to small groups, said that he would publish the things in the next issue of the Crock, and then destroyed the material. It is for this reason that even the scanty amount printed here is at least half reconstructed from the memories of those who heard it from him. Others of his things have been found in single surviving copies of some issues of the Crock. He often tried to corner and destroy entire issues, and my own collection has several holes in it. In each case, he said that he had no copy, that he wanted to run the sheets through a copy machine, and that he would return them the next day. And in each case he later confessed that he had burned them.

  We all wish that we had more of his work today, but we don't particularly wish we had more of him today.

  I suppose that his faults and his failures lay in his Elective Affinities. He didn't elect the same affinities that most of us did. I speak of his surviving works and his surviving personalities, but it is the most shoddy of each category that has survived. He was, I suppose, slightly insane. He certainly saw some things as exterior and material objects that the rest of us did not see at all. His ideas of ransom and compensation and soul-trading were hardly orthodox. But he did not preach these ideas. They had to be dragged out of him, often by very unfair badgering.

  Casey was not an extremist in politics or philosophy or theology or common outlook. The only thing he was extreme in, besides his pursuit of excellence, was his compassion. Is it then a sin to be compassionate in the extreme? In Casey's case, yes; I suspect that it was a serious sin. The special case by which Casey was so pursued and ridden was the old scholastic question of the Final Redemption of the Devil.

  I was at boarding school with him in our high school days, and he was ridden by this obsession even then. We told him that it was, after all, a private matter between God and the Devil. He said that the put down had not been a private matter, and that the redemption should not be either. Our head-master, an old Benedictine priest, asked him why he made it his business.

  “I have appointed myself advocate,” Casey said (he was about thirteen years old then) “and that is what advocates are for.”

  “Kasmir, we do not have any revelation on this point,” the old priest said. “You are free to believe what you will on it.”

  “I insist on revelation on this point,” Casey said. “If anyone is denied a second chance, then we are all entitled to know about it.”

  As Melchisedech Duffey once said, a person should select his monomania early in life and stick with it. Casey surely stuck with his.

  The form of this attempt to find and assemble the essence of some fifty years of Casey's works and days, from the time he was about fourteen years old, will be shaped by the container that was Casey himself. The surviving essence, which should obey the laws of all gasses, ought to conform to the shape of the empty container that Casey left by his going. I suppose that it does, but there are anomalies here and there. The container even now, is not as empty as it looks. There are still invisible configurations and promontories in that emptied crock, and the essence will shape itself to them even when we are not aware of them. So it is a very peculiar shape that this assessment-collection takes.

  Casey was unique
, and it may be that a person who is really unique is not required to be anything else. He was, however, several other things. As to that state in which he presently finds himself, may he rest in peace (except for that one hour out of every twenty-four which he held to be special).

  Demetrio Glauch

  All Souls Day, Chicago

  1984

  RED SKY IN THE MORNING

  And now a posse's up and got

  And ‘nobly losts’ are found.

  I think he should be rescued not.

  I think he should be drowned.

  So long as there's a sordid lot

  That writhes unseemly low,

  I think that God sometimes forgot

  The things he used to know.

  I fear the blade that skinked and shined,

  I fear the lopped-off head.

  I think that God is colour-blind

  To certain shades of red.

  There is nothing so ineffective as half-way denigration. It just makes nothing worthwhile. What is the fun of running a needle into a balloon with all the air already let out of it? How will you get a noise from an empty balloon?

  Where is the worth in confronting a ‘Great Ethical Teacher’? What is so misfired as ‘Jesus the Incendiary’? What is so revolting as ‘Jesus the Revolutionary’? What could be duller than ‘A Hippie named Jesus’? What could be wronger than ‘Teacher of Righteousness’? Judas Priest, how would the ‘Christ of the Essenes’ be worth blaspheming? How could any of these emptinesses be held responsible for anything? And I do want to hold someone responsible.

  I believe there is a time for absolute stubbornness against either the prevailing order or disorder, but anyhow against whatever prevails. There is an absolute wrong that has the duty to contradict the absolute right. Absolutes must be pierced and deflated. If everything goes well in the universe, then I have the duty to see that something goes ill with me. There cannot ever be one absolute statement anywhere, if even one person contradicts it. Only the bottom of the well knows just how deep the well is. I will be the bottom of the world. If I suspect that there is something lower, then I will go lower. There is no one so vile that he should not have an advocate. If anyone ever is placed below salvation, then salvation should be rejected by all.

  There is always the question of whether I am vile enough to do my chosen task successfully. It is necessary that, if I am to fill the role rightly, I must be the most vile person in the world. I work at it often, but I am not able to be as vile as I would wish. In everything that I do for others, I must do the best that I possibly can. In everything that I do for myself, I must do the worst that I can. If I am not vile enough to do this, then I fail to establish a rule. I have to be refused in everything but the last thing, or it's all lost. Oh pray that I may do badly enough to come to the bottom of all this!

  OH LET THE DEVIL GO

  Across the bloody rivers and

  The smoking rocks, a road that still leads down

  Even further

  In a blood red glow,

  'Tis the Devil burns, incontinent

  His stool a sharpened goad that eviscerates and fissurates

  With woe, woe, woe!

  It's no matter that he knowed this,

  When he planted this and growed this.

  Oh God Almighty, burn me there,

  And let the Devil go.

  (Chorus: Oh God Almighty, burn me there,

  and let the Devil go!)

  The pain it was a screaming that

  The eye could only wonder it.

  The burning flesh was noisome and

  The guilt an over-flow.

  The justice and the judgment it

  Was boggle it and blunder it.

  Oh something cries upon the crags

  and something cries below.

  Oh let the mountain thunder it

  And hide the howler under it.

  Oh someone, someone, burn me there,

  And let the Devil go!

  (Chorus: Oh someone, someone, burn me there,

  And let the Devil go!)

  The Devil's reprehensible

  and that's the gut and guff of it.

  He chose it all with open eyes and set himself to crow.

  He wasted flesh of innocents

  and that's the stinking stuff of it,

  He poisoned every spring, and he defiled, but even so

  That side is sure the rough of it,

  Enough of it, enough of it!

  Oh put me in the fiery pit!

  Oh let the Devil go!

  (Chorus: Oh put me in the fiery pit!

  Oh let the Devil go!)

  Six lines are stricken out here as too vile to be read.

  And then:

  Oh let the Devil loose at last

  Let Casey go to Hell!

  (Chorus: Oh let the Devil loose at last!

  Let Casey go to Hell!)

  FROM THE COMMENTARY OF CLARENCE SCHRADE:

  “Casey's verses are all doggerel… His musical compositions hide a greatness, but they hide it well. His drawings are all comic, but only a few of them are meant to be. Let us consider the drawings on the opposite page:”

  (For technical reasons, there is no drawing on the opposite page, but Schrade's description will suffice.)

  “This supposed itself to be a drawing of hell, but it is a second-hand drawing of a second-hand hell. We believe that, in most respects, it is authentic. Well then, that means that hell is a second-hand or second-rate place.

  “Casey has always wanted to draw, and he has always drawn badly. He tried many times to get his drawings into the ‘Crock’, using false names on them. But I always told him, as long as I was art editor, he was out. He would have to fire me from the ‘Crock’ to get any of his things into it. And then he slipped half a dozen of them in once when I was in the hospital. I was glad they had appeared, for certainly no one else had ever had anything like them.

  “Spend a little time on the picture. It will haunt you as a better picture would not. The deforming element that is in all of Casey's art rings true here. He is rendering objectively deformed things. The four men he burlesques in this, Dali, Dore, Bosch, Finnegan, all knew hell. All portrayed it authentically, but with a light touch. This gives a queer contrast between the hellscapes done authentically but lightly and the burlesques of them done with clumsy humour and heaviness.

  “In mystical writings we come on the phrase ‘The Iron Meadows of Hell’ so frequently as to lead us to believe that there is objective validity to this idea. The iron meadows are in this picture by Casey, and they have the characteristic of being everywhere blurred and doublelined.”

  TO FRANCIS THOMPSON

  If yet one field remains beflooden,

  One unforgiving not set right,

  For all you say to dawn ‘Be Sudden!’

  More sudden yet will be the night.

  About those pinions, friend, my Francis,

  That beat at these clay-shuttered doors

  With sparkles yet, with light, with dances,

  Aye, beat those wings at mine, or yours?

  For lost compassion, sold or bought her,

  Or traded her for broken midge, —

  And lo, Christ walking on the water

  Forgets the troll beneath the bridge.

  Now the troll beneath the bridge, the subject of my sermon of this day, is the Devil. The bridge-keeper, the Pontiff, the Vicar, has the care of only the top side of the bridge. What goes on under the bridge is out of sight and out of mind, and yet it's an interesting life under the bridge. Sometimes a body will float by, and it may have some slight money in the pocket or gold in the teeth. And then the sub-pontine people have always been overly interested in bodies.

  THE LIFE OF CASEY

  The morning isn't ever neat,

  Prae-prandium is seldom stately.

  The dawn, they say, has golden feet:

  But have you looked at them quite lately?

  The spirit sags,
the clock is fleet:

  Oh what a world in which to waken!

  Oh why should I stale crusties eat

  When Casey has both eggs and bacon?

  There is an evil in the land

  That lurks, and cheats at easy-acey.

  Oh why can all not upright stand

  And live the life of Goodman Casey?

  It is always a pleasure to be envied and to be looked up to.

  I have always had an affection for witches. I met or conjured my first one when I was five years old, the summer before I started school. I read a story about a witch (I was precocious and I read early), and it contained the formula for conjuring a witch. At midnight you stand on the darkest corner in town, really a wide stretch of heath (but I didn't have any heath), and you say—

  “I stand beside a blood filled ditch

  Where dead men hang in trees to guide me.

  I conjure you, Oh Wonder Witch,

  Come from the moon and stand beside me!”

  She did. It worked, and it will work every time. That particular witch still drops in to see me sometimes when she comes to Chicago. Her name is Tshowax.