The Best of R. A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  As the young lovers in “Funnyfingers” realize to their dismay, our stories will outlive us, and in particular they will outlive their own tellers. The result is a curious (if typically Laffertian) inversion of the Orpheus legend: it’s not the stories who must be left behind to the darkness, but us. When Oread Funnyfingers traipses through the mine, assembling iron dogs or iron boys or iron philosophies, it’s us she’s putting together. And when she disassembles them at the end of play, it’s us she puts back in the spare-part bins. And, in the end, though we too feel heartbreak at the conclusion of our all-too-brief parts, it is Oread and it is Pluto, the stories themselves, who will weep iron tears.

  Funnyfingers

  “—and Pluto, Lord of Hell, wept when Orpheus played to him that lovely phrase from Gluck—but these were iron tears.”

  —H. Belloc, On Tears of the Great

  “Who am I?” Oread Funnyfingers asked her mother one day, “and, for that matter, what am I?”

  “Why, you are our daughter,” the mother Frances Funnyfingers told her, “or have you been talking to someone?”

  “Only to myself and to my uncles in the mountain.”

  “Oh. Now first, dear, I want you to know that we love you very much. There was nothing casual about it. We chose you, and you are to us—”

  “Oh, take it easy, Mother. I know that I’m adopted. And I’m sure that you both love me very much; you tell me so often enough. But what am I really?”

  “You are a little girl, Oread, a somewhat exasperating and precocious little girl.”

  “But I don’t feel precocious. I feel like a rock-head. How can I be a little bit like Papa and not anything like anyone else at all? What was the connection between myself and Papa?”

  “There wasn’t any at first, Oread, not like that. We were looking for a child since we could not have one of our own. I fell in love with you at first sight because you reminded me of Henry. And Henry fell in love with you at first sight because you reminded him of Henry. Henry was always the favorite person of both myself and Henry. That’s a joke, dear. But not entirely; my husband is so delightfully boyish and self-centered. Now run out and play.”

  “No, I think I’ll run in and play.”

  “Oh, but it’s so dark and dirty and smoky in there.”

  “And it’s so light and unsmoky everywhere else, Mama,” Oread said, and she ran inside the mountain to play.

  Well, the house and the shop of Henry Funnyfingers backed onto the mountain. It was really only a low but steep foot-hill to the Osage Hills. This was on the northwest fringe of the city. The shop was the typewriter repair shop of Henry the father of Oread. You wouldn’t know that from the sign out front, though. The sign said “Daktylographs Repaired Here, Henry Funnyfingers.”

  The shop part of the building was half into and under the hill. Behind the shop was a dimly lit parts room that was entirely under the hill. And behind this were other parts rooms, one after the other, rock-walled and dark, rockier and darker as one went on, all deep under the hills. And these continued, on and on, as tunnel and cavern without apparent end.

  In these places of total darkness, if only one knew where to reach in which pot, there was to be found every part for every sort of machine in the world; or so Henry Funnyfingers said.

  Oread ran through room after room, through passage after passage in the blackness. She drew parts from the pots and the furnaces as she ran. She put the parts together, and it barked remindfully. “What have I forgotten?” Oread asked. “Ah, Rusty, I’ve given you only one ear. I’m sorry.” She took the other ear from the Other Ear Pot as she ran past, and she put it on him. Then she had an iron dog complete. It would run and play and bark after her in the tunnels under the mountain.

  “Oh Kelmis, Oh Acmon, Oh Damnae all three!

  Come out of the mountain and play with me.”

  Oread sang that. Sometimes the three Mountain Uncles were busy (they had to make numbers and letters and pieces for the whole world) and couldn’t come to play. But almost always one of them came, and Kelmis came today. Kelmis was the smoky smelly one, but Oread didn’t mind that. He was full of stories, he was full of fun, he was full of the hot darkness-fire from which anything can be made. It was great fun there through all the afternoon and evening, as they are called out in the light. But then Kelmis had to go back to work.

  Oread and the iron dog Rusty ran back up the passages toward the house. She took the dog apart as they went back and put each piece into its proper pot. Last of all she put its bark in the bark pot, and she came up through the shop and into the inside of the house for supper.

  “Oh, Oread, however do you get so smoky and smelly?” mother Frances Funnyfingers asked her. “Why don’t you play out in the sunshine like other girls do? Why don’t you play with other girls and boys?”

  “I made an iron boy to play with once, Mama,” Oread said. “You wouldn’t believe how he carried on or the things he wanted to do. I had the devil’s own time taking him apart again. That’s the last boy I ever make, I tell you. They’re tricky.”

  “Yes, as I remember it, they are,” Frances conceded. “Whatever do you make your stories out of, Oread?”

  “Oh, I make them out of iron,” Oread told her seriously. “Iron is what everything is made out of first. The pieces are all there in the pots and the furnaces. You just put them together.”

  “Pieces of stories, Oread?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Iron stories, girl?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, iron stories.”

  “You are funny-fingers and funny-face and funny-brains,” the mother told her. “I think I’ll have you eat your supper off an iron plate with iron spoon and knife.”

  “Oh, may I? I’ll go make them,” Oread cried.

  “Make me a set while you’re at it,” father Henry Funnyfingers said.

  “No, Oread. Sit down and eat your supper from what we have, both of you.” Frances Funnyfingers loved her husband and her daughter, but sometimes they puzzled her.

  * * *

  We cannot honestly say that Oread grew up; we can hardly say that she grew older. She finally started school when she was nine years old, and she looked as though she were four or five. Going to school was only for seemliness anyhow. Oread already knew everything. She got on well. She was a peculiar little girl, but she didn’t know it. She gave disconcerting answers in class, but nobody could say that they were wrong answers. What difference does it make which end you start and answer at? She was a strange, smiling little girl, and she was liked by most of her schoolmates. Those who didn’t like her, feared her; and why should anyone fear so small a creature as Oread Funnyfingers? They feared her because she said, “Be good to me or I’ll make an iron wolf to eat you up.” She would have done it, and they knew she would have done it.

  And she always got her homework and got it right. She had, what seemed to her mother, an unscholarly way of doing it, though. She would take her books or her printed assignments. She would walk singing through the shop, through the parts room, through the other parts rooms behind that, and down into the passages in the toes of the hills.

  “Oh Kelmis, Oh Acmon, Oh Damnae all three,

  Make ready all pots where the answers may be.”

  Oread would sing so. Then she would pick the iron answers out of the answer pots. She’d put them together by subjects. She would stamp them onto her papers, and they would mark all the answers correct in her handwriting. So she would have the Catechism, the Composition, the questions on the Reading, the Arithmetic all perfect. Then she’d drop all the iron answers back into the answer pots where they would melt themselves down to iron slag again.

  “Don’t you think that’s cheating?” her mother would ask her. “What if all the other children got their homework that way?”

  “They couldn’t unless they were funnyfingers,” Oread said. “The hot iron answers would burn their hands clear off unless they were funnyfingers. No, it isn’t cheating. It’s just knowing
your subject.”

  “I guess so then,” mother Frances said. There were so many things she didn’t understand about her husband Henry (“He’s boyish, like a boy, like an iron boy,” she’d say), and about her daughter (“She’s like an owl, like a little owl, a little iron owl”). Neither Henry nor Oread liked the daylight very much, but they always faced it as bravely as they could.

  One day Oread found her mother in tears, yet there was happy salt in them. “Look,” the mother Frances said. She had a valentine, an iron valentine that Henry had given her. There was an iron heart on it and an iron verse:

  “When you are dead five hundred years

  Who once were full of life,

  I’ll think of you with salty tears,

  And take another wife.”

  “Oh, it’s nice, Mama,” Oread said.

  “But of iron?” Frances asked.

  “Oh yes, the very first rimes were made out of iron, you know.”

  “And what of the five hundred years?”

  “I think it’s considerate that he would wait five hundred years after you die to take another wife.”

  “Yes, I suppose so, Oread.” But Frances wasn’t completely at ease with her family.

  * * *

  Henry always made a good living from his typewriter repair shop, or rather he made a good living from his parts stocks in the rooms behind. Other dealers and repairmen, not just of typewriters but of everything, came to him for parts. His prices were reasonable, and there was never a part that he didn’t have. A dealer would rattle off the catalog number of something for a tractor or a hay-baler or a dishwasher. “Just a minute,” Henry Funnyfingers would say, and he would plunge into his mysterious back rooms. He had a comical little song he would croon to himself as he went:

  “Oh Kelmis, Oh Acmon, Oh Damnae all three,

  Now this is the number, Oh make it for me!”

  And in a second, with the last word of the song just out of his mouth, he’d be back with the required part still hot in his hand. He never missed. Parts of combines, parts of electric motors, parts for Fords, he could come up with all of them instantly with only a catalog number or the broken piece itself or even a vague description to go on. And he did repair typewriters quicker and better than anyone in town. He wasn’t rich, he was fearful of becoming rich; but he did well, and nobody in the Funnyfinger family wanted for anything.

  * * *

  When they were in the sixth grade, Oread had a boyfriend. He was a Syrian boy named Selim Elia. He was dark and he was handsome. He looked the veriest little bit as though he were made of iron; that was the main reason that Oread liked him. And he seemed to suspect entirely too much about the funnyfingers; she thought that was a reason that she’d better like him.

  “When you grow up (Oh, Oread, will you ever grow up?) I’m going to marry you,” Selim said boldly.

  “Of course I’ll grow up. Doesn’t everyone?” Oread said. “But you won’t be able to marry me.”

  “Why not, little horned owl?”

  “I don’t know. I just feel that we won’t be grown up at the same time.”

  “Hurry up then, little iron-eyes, little basilisk-eyes,” Selim said. “I will marry you.”

  They got along well. Selim was very protective of little Oread. They liked each other. What is wrong with people liking each other?

  * * *

  When in the eighth grade, Oread made a discovery about Sister Mary Dactyl, the art teacher for all the grades. Sister Mary D seemed to be very young. “But she can’t be that young,” Oread told Selim. “Some of the mythological things she draws, they’ve been gone a long time. She has to be old to have seen them.”

  “Oh, she draws them from old stories and old descriptions,” Selim said, “or she just draws them out of her imagination.”

  “A couple of them she didn’t draw out of her imagination,” Oread insisted. “She had to have seen them.” That, however, wasn’t the discovery.

  Sister was drawing something very rapidly one day, and she forgot that someone with very rapid eyes might be watching her hands. Oread saw, and she waited around after class.

  “You are a funnyfingers,” she said to Sister. “All your fingers are triple-jointed like mine. They can move fast as light like mine. I bet you can pick up iron parts out of the hot pots without getting burned.”

  “Sure I can,” said Sister M.D.

  “But are you a funnyfingers all the way?” Oread asked. “Papa says that, in the old language, our name Funnyfingers meant both funny-fingers and funny-toes. Are you?”

  “Sure I am,” said the very young-looking Sister Mary Dactyl. She took off her shoes and stockings. Sisters didn’t do that very often in the classroom then. Now, of course they go everywhere barefooted and in nothing but a transparent short shift, but that wasn’t so when Oread Funnyfingers was still in the eighth grade.

  Yes, Sister was a funny-toes also. She had the triple-jointed fast-as-vision toes. She could do more things with her toes than other people could do with their fingers.

  “Did you have a little hill or mountain when you were young, I mean when you were a girl?” Oread asked her.

  “Oh, yes, yes, I have it still, an interior mountain.”

  “How old are you, sister who always looks so young and pretty?”

  “Very old, Oread, very old.”

  “How old?”

  “Ask me again in eight years, Oread, if you still want to know.”

  “In eight years? Oh, all right, I will.”

  * * *

  High school went by, four years just like a day. Selim had made a big twisted hammered iron thing that said “Selim Loves Oread.” He suspected something very strongly about the iron. But he wasn’t a funny-fingers, so it took him three weeks instead of three seconds to make the thing. Many other things happened in those four years, but they were all happy things so there is no use mentioning them.

  When they were in and almost through college (Oread still looked like a nine- or ten-year-old, and this was maddening) they were into some very intricate courses. Selim was a veritable genius, and Oread always knew in which pots the answers might be found, so the two of them qualified for the profound fields. It is good to have a piece of the deep raw knowledge as it births, it is good to see the future lifted out of the future pots.

  “We have come to the point where we must invent a whole new system of concepts and symbols,” said the instructor of one powerful course one day. “Little girl, what are you doing in this room,” he added to Oread. “This is a college building and a college course.”

  “I know it. We’ve been through this every day for a year,” she said.

  “We are as much at a crossroads as was mankind when the concept of a crossroads was first invented,” the instructor continued. “If that concept (excluding choice pictured graphically with simple diverging lines) had not been invented, mankind would have remained at that situation, unchoosing and merely accepting. There are dozens of cases where mankind has remained in a particular situation for thousands of years for failure to invent a particular concept. I suspect that is the situation here; we have not moved in a certain area because we have not entertained the possibility of movement in that area. A whole new concept is needed, but I cannot even conceive what that concept should be.”

  “Oh, I’ll make it for you tonight,” Oread said.

  “Has that little girl wandered into the class again today?” the instructor asked with new irritation. “Oh yes, I remember now, you always come up with some sort of proof that you’re an enrolled member of the class and that you’re twenty-one years old. You’re not, though. You’re just a little girl with little-girl brains.”

  “Oh, I know it,” Oread said sadly, “but I’ll still make the thing for you tonight.”

  “Make what thing, little girl?”

  “The new concept, and the symbol set that goes with it.”

  “And just what does one make a concept out of?” that man asked her with near
exasperation.

  “I’ll make it mostly out of iron, I think,” Oread said. “I’ll use whatever is in the pots, but I guess it will be mostly iron.”

  “Oh God help us!” the man cried out.

  “Such a nice expression,” Oread told him, “and somebody had told me that you were an unbeliever.”

  * * *

  “Actually,” said the instructor, controlling himself and talking to the rest of the class and not to Oread Funnyfingers. “Actually, these things often appear simple in retrospect. So may this be if ever we are able to make it retro. The ABCs, the alphabet isn’t very hard, is it? Yes, Mr. Levkovitch, I know all about those hard letters after C. A little humor, it is said, is a tedious thing. But the alphabet was a hard thing when mankind stood at the foothills—”

  “En daktulos, at the toes of, that’s what the original form of the expression was,” Oread told him.

  “Be quiet, little girl,” the instructor muttered darkly. “—when mankind stood at the foothills of the alphabetical concept and looked up at the mountain, it was hard then.”

  “Yes, the first alphabets were all made out of hammered iron,” Oread told the world, “and they were quite hard.”

  “The same was the case with simple arithmetic,” said the instructor, disregarding Oread with a deep sigh. “It is easy as we look back on it in its ordered simplicity. But when it was only a crying need and not yet a real concept, then it was hard, very hard.”

  “Sure, it was made out of iron too,” Oread whispered to Selim. “Why does he get so mad when I tell him about things being made out of iron?”

  “It’s just a weakness of the man, Oread,” Selim whispered. “We’ll have to accept it.”

  “And so we are probably at an end,” the instructor was ending his class for the day. “If we cannot come up with a new dimension, with a new symbolism, with a new thought and a new concept (having no idea at all what they should be) then we might as well end this class forever. We might as well, as a matter of likely fact, end the world forever. And on that somber note I leave you till tomorrow, if there should be a tomorrow.”