DAYS OF GRASS, DAYS OF STRAW
Introduction by Gary K. Wolfe
“Days of Grass, Days of Straw” first appeared in New Dimensions 3, the third in a series of rather adventurous anthologies edited by Robert Silverberg throughout the 1970s. Coming close on the heels of science fiction’s controversial New Wave, Silverberg’s series was clearly out to recognize new voices and new literary approaches to science fiction and fantasy, and Lafferty had stories in each of the first four volumes. The volume with “Days of Grass, Days of Straw” also included two stories which would become widely reprinted, Hugo Award–winning classics, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (Tiptree was of course later revealed to be a pseudonym of Alice Sheldon). Each of those would be reprinted dozens of times in the coming decades, but Lafferty’s story—despite now being regarded as one of his best and most strikingly visionary by aficionados—was reprinted only in a few of his own collections. It did, however, get translated into Dutch and inspired the 2004 song Dagen van gras, dagen van stro (a literal translation of the title) by the performer Spinvis (Erik de Jong). Spinvis’s lyrics have only an elliptical connection with Lafferty’s story, but the point is that Lafferty’s best stories, even when not widely familiar, manage to find their way into unexpected corners of the culture and leave traces there.
The story itself is one that some readers find challenging—within the first two lines, a city street morphs into a road, then a trail, then a mere path, and our protagonist Christopher finds himself in a pre-urban, pre-industrial landscape with features resembling Native American legends and Oklahoma tall tales. Even his own name doesn’t ring true, and half-recognized people and places never quite coalesce into a more traditionally realized fantasy landscape. Yet he feels revived and invigorated, as though the world had been “pumped full of new juice.” “Things were mighty odd here,” he notices in an observation that may well sound familiar to anyone reading a Lafferty story for the first time. “There was just a little bit of something wrong about things.”
We eventually learn that Christopher hasn’t crossed into a fantasy world at all, but rather to a different kind of time—a “day of grass,” one of the “overflowing and special days apart from the regular days,” which are called days of straw. Although these special days are “Days out of Count” in terms of history and the calendar, they are earned at great cost by prophets and “prayer-men,” who wrestle with God to gain them. Called by different names in different cultures, these “rich days, full of joy and death, bubbling with ecstasy and blood” may include entire seasons, and although “nobody has direct memory of being in them or living in them,” we give them pallid names like Indian Summer. Lafferty’s stunning vision of a more vital and perhaps more dangerous world just beyond the one we know, but somehow folded into it, is one of his most haunting recurrent themes.
Days of Grass, Days of Straw
1.
Fog in the corner and fog in his head:
Gray day broken and bleeding red.
Christopher Foxx was walking down a city street. No, it was a city road. It was really a city trail or path. He was walking in a fog, but the fog wasn’t in the air or the ambient: it was in his head. Things were mighty odd here. There was just a little bit of something wrong about things.
Oceans of grass for one instance. Should a large and busy city (and this was clearly that) have blue-green grass belly-high in its main street? Things hardly remembered: echoes and shadows, or were they the strong sounds and things themselves? Christopher felt as though his eyeballs had been cleaned with a magic cleaner, as though he were blessed with new sensing in ears and nose, as though he went with a restored body and was breathing a new sort of air. It was very pleasant, but it was puzzling. How had the world been pumped full of new juice?
Christopher couldn’t recall what day it was; he certainly didn’t know what hour it was. It was a gray day, but there was no dullness in that gray. It was shimmering pearl-gray, of a color bounced back by shimmering water and shimmering air. It was a crimson-edged day, like a gray squirrel shot and bleeding redly from the inside and around the edges. Yes, there was the pleasant touch of death on things, gushing death and gushing life.
Christopher’s own name didn’t sound right to him. He didn’t know what town he was in. Indeed he’d never before seen a town with all the storefronts flapping in the wind like that. Ah, they’d curl and bend, but they wouldn’t break. A town made of painted buckskin, and yet it was more real than towns made of stone and concrete.
He saw persons he almost knew. He started to speak and only sputtered. Well, he’d get a newspaper then; they sometimes gave information. He reached in his pocket for a coin, and discovered that he didn’t have regular pockets. He found a little leather pouch stuck in his belt. What’s this? What else was stuck in his belt? It was a breechclout with the ends fore and aft passing under his belt. Instead of pants he had a pair of leggings and a breechclout, three-piece pants. Oh, oh, what else?
Oh, he wore a shirt that seemed to be leather of some sort. He wore soft shoes that were softer than slippers. He was hatless, and his hair came forward over his shoulders in two tight long braids. He had dressed casually before, but he didn’t remember ever dressing like this. How were the rest of the people dressed? No two alike, really, no two alike.
But he did bring a coin out of that leather pouch that was stuck in his belt. A strange coin. It wasn’t metal: it was made of stone, and made roughly. On the face of it was the head and forequarters of a buffalo. On the reverse side was the rump of a buffalo. The words on the obverse of it read WORTH ONE BUFFALO, and on the reverse they read MAYBE A LITTLE BIT LESS.
“And where do I put a coin in this contraption?” Christopher asked himself angrily and loudly. A hand extended itself, and Christopher put the coin in the hand. The hand belonged to an old wrinkled brown man, swathed in robes and folds of blackened leather, and sitting in the dust.
The old man gave Christopher a newspaper, or gave him something anyhow. It was on leather that was almost board-stiff. It was illustrated, it was printed in a variety of hands; and here and there it had a little hair growing out of it as though its leather were imperfectly scraped.
“Wait, your change,” the old brown man said. He gave Christopher seven small coins. These were neither metal nor stone: they were clay baked in the sun. The obverse of each was the head and fore of a badger, puffed and bristled and hissing in high defense. And the reverse was the reared rump of the same badger in embattled clawed stance.
“Price go down a little but not a whole badger,” the old man said. “Take three puffs. It’s close as I can get to even change.” Wondering at himself, Christopher took three strong rich smoky puffs from the old pipe of the old man. He felt that he had received full value then. It was about all that he felt satisfied with. But is it wrong to feel unsatisfied, which is unsated? Christopher thought about it.
He went over and sat on a bale of rags outside the shop with the sign HOT ROAST DOG FOR SALE OR GIVE. The bale of rags seemed somehow lively; it was as if there was no division between the animate and the inanimate this day. He tried to make something out of the strange newspaper or the strange day, or the newly strange man who was apparently himself.
Oh, the newspaper was interesting. It could be read one way or another: by picture, by stylized pictograph, by various writings and printings. Here were anecdotes; wooly, horny, bottomlessly funny anecdotes: and they were about people that Christopher knew, or almost knew. And all the people passing by (Christopher realized it with a chuckling gasp) were also people that he knew or almost knew. Well, what made them so different then? They looked like familiar people, they smelled like familiar people (which the familiar people erstwhile had not done), they had the familiar name that came almost to the edge of the tongue.
“But what town is this? What day is this? What is the context?” Christopher wailed out loud. “Why is everything so strange?”
“Kit-Fox, you call me?” Strange Buffalo boomed at him. Strange Buffalo was a big and boisterous man and he had always been a good friend of Christopher. He had? Then why did he look so different? And why was his real name, or his other name, now unremembered?
“Will the buffalo go to war, do you think, Kit-Fox?” Strange Buffalo asked him. “Do you believe that the two great herds of them will go to war? They come near to each other now and they swear that neither will give way.”
“No, there will be only the pushing and goring of a few thousand bulls, not much else,” Christopher said. “The buffalo simply haven’t the basis for a real war.” He was surprised at his own knowledge of the subject.
“But the buffalo have human advisers now,” Strange Buffalo said. “It began with the betting, of course, but now we can see that there is real cause of conflict on both sides. I dabble in this myself and have some good ideas. We are tying spear-shafts to the horns of some of the big bulls and teaching them to use them. And we’re setting up big bows and teaching them to bend them with their great strength, but they haven’t any accuracy at all.”
“No, I don’t believe they were meant to have a real war. It’s a wonderful dust they raise, though, when they all come together. It makes you glad to be alive. And the thunder of their millions of hoofs!” (There was the distant sound of morning thunder.) “Or is that a thundering in the mountains?” Kit-Fox—ah, Christopher was asking.
“Well, there is quite a clatter in the mountains this morning, Kit,” Strange Buffalo was saying in happy admiration. “The deep days, the grass days like this one aren’t come by easily. It’s a wonder the mountains aren’t knocked to pieces when the big prophets pray so noisily and wrestle so strong. But, as the good skin says, we must work out our salvation in fear and thundering.”
“Is it not ‘In fear and trembling’?” Christopher asked as he lounged on the lively bale of rags.
“No, Kit-Fox, no!” Strange Buffalo pealed at him. “That’s the kind of thing they say during the straw days; not here, not now. In the Cahooche shadow-writing it says ‘In fear and chuckling,’ but the Cahooche words for thunder and chuckling are almost the same. On some of the Kiowa antelope-skin drawings, ‘In scare-shaking and in laughter-shaking.’ I like that. I wish I could pray and wrestle as wooly and horny as the big ones do. Then I’d get to be a prophet on the mountain also, and I’d bring in more days of grass. Yes, and days of mesquite also.”
“The mountain is a funny one this morning, Strange Buffalo. It doesn’t reach clear down to the ground,” Christopher said. “There’s a great space between, and there are eagles flying underneath it.”
“Ah, it’ll fall back after a while, Kit-Fox, when they have won or lost the wrestling for the day; after they have generated sufficient juice for this day, for I see that they have already won it and it will be a day of grass. Let’s go have a rack of roast dog and a gourd of choc beer,” Strange Buffalo proposed.
“In a minute, Strange Buffalo. I am in the middle of a puzzle and I have this fog in my head. What day is this?”
“It’s one of the days of grass, Kit-Fox. I just told you that.”
“But which one, Strange Buffalo? And what, really, are ‘days of grass’?”
“I believe that it is the second Monday of Indian Summer, Kit-Fox,” Strange Buffalo was saying as he gave the matter his thought and attention. “Or it may be the first Monday of Blue-Goose Autumn. We’re not sure, though, that it is a Monday. It sounds and tastes more like a Thursday or an aleikaday.”
“It sure does,” Christopher—ah, Kit-Fox agreed.
A laughing, dying man was carried past by four hale men. This fortunate one had been smashed by bear or rolled on by horse or gored by buffalo, and the big red blood in him was all running out. “It works,” the happy dying man cried out. “It works. I got a little too close to him and he ripped me to pieces, but it works. We are really teaching those big bulls to use the spears lashed to their horns. Others will carry on the work and the fun. I bet that I’ve had it.”
“A little blood to bless me!” Strange Buffalo cried out, and the dying man splashed him with the rich and rigorous blood.
“For me also,” Kit-Fox begged, and the dying man smeared him with blood on the brow and breast and shoulders and loins. Two other friends, Conquering Sharp-Leaf and Adoration on the Mountain, came and were blessed with the blood. Then the man died and was dead.
“There is nothing like the fine rich blood to make a grass day sing in your head and in your body,” Strange Buffalo exulted. “On the straw days they try to hide the blood or they bleed in a dark corner.”
(What was all this about the grass days and the straw days? There was now a sordid dull-dream quality, a day-of-straw quality that kept trying to push itself in. “For a little while,” it begged, “to reestablish rigor and rule and reason for just a little while.” “Go away,” said the day-of-grass quality. “The wrestle was won this morning, and this is a day out of the count.”)
Kit-Fox and Strange Buffalo went in, past the booths and work areas of the coin-makers, past the stands of the eaglewing-bone-whistle makers, and into the shop which had roast dog for sale or give. Strange Buffalo had a shoulder of dog and Kit-Fox had a rack of ribs. There was fried bread also, and hominy and pumpkin. There was choc beer dipped with gourd dippers out of a huge crock. Thousands of people were there. It was crowded and it was supposed to be. The man named Mountain twinkled in the air. Why had they not noticed that about him before?
Folks rolled up the walls and tied them. Now the strong smoke and savor could visit all the places, and the folks in every shop could see into every other shop. It was full morning and beginning to get warm.
“But I still want to know the date,” Kit-Fox insisted, not quite converted to the day of grass, not quite clear of the head-fog that accompanies the sullen burning of the straw days. “What newspaper is this that doesn’t have a date? I want a date!”
“Look at it. It tells,” said Strange Buffalo.
“You want a date, honey?” the top of the newspaper writhed in sudden flickering of day-fire print. “Phone 582-8316 and I give you a real date.” Then the day-fire print was gone.
“I hope I can remember that number,” Kit-Fox said anxiously. “Strange Buffalo, where is there a telephone exchange?”
“They are the same and single and right outside past the booths,” Strange Buffalo said. “You were sitting upon it when I came upon you. And you, you old straw-head, you thought it was a bale of rags.”
Kit-Fox went outside, past the booths of the stone-buffalocoin makers and the clay-badger-coin makers, past the tents of the porcupine-quill dealers, to what he had thought was a bale of rags, a lively bale of rags as he now remembered it. Well, it was an ample lady in her glad rags and she was the telephone exchange lying there in the grass.
“I want to call number 582-8316,” Kit-Fox said uneasily.
“Here are a handful of dice,” the glad-rags lady told him. “Arrange them here in the short grass and make any number you want.”
“But proper dice have numbers only to six,” Kit-Fox protested, “and some of the numbers are higher.”
“Those are improper dice, they are crooked dice,” the lady said. “They have numbers more than six and numbers less than one. Number out your telephone number in the short grass with them.”
“Are you sure this is the way to dial a number?” Kit-Fox asked.
“Sure I’m not sure,” the lady said. “If you know a better way, do it that way. Worth a try, kid, worth a try.”
Kit-Fox numbered out his numbers in the short grass.
“Now what do I do?” he asked.
“Oh, talk into the telephone here.”
“That buckskin bag is a telephone?”
“Try it, try it. Drop a badger coin in and try it.”
Kit-Fox dropped the coin into the telephone. “Hello, hello,” he said.
“Hello, hello,” the lady answered. “That’s my number you called. You want a date, I wait for you awhile. Believe me, I get pretty tired of waiting pretty soon.”
“I don’t think this is a telephone exchange at all,” Kit-Fox grumbled.
“How else I can get guys so easy to drop badger-coins in a buckskin bag,” the lady said. “Come along, lover man, we will have a grand time this day.”
The lady was full-bodied and jolly. Kit-Fox remembered her from somewhere.
“Who are you?” he asked her.
“I’m your wife in the straw days,” she said, “but this is a grass day. They’re harder to find, but they’re more fun when you find one. They have something to do with grandfather’s brother and that wrestling of his.”
“Days of grass, days of straw,” Kit-Fox said as he embraced the lady passionately. “How about a hay day?”
“You mean a heyday? Those are special. We hope to make them more often, if only the wrestle is better. They’re fuller of juice than the grass days even. We try to make one now.”
They made a heyday together (together with a whole nation of people); and it went on and on. Day-Torch (that was the lady in the glad rags, the lady who was Kit-Fox’s wife during the straw days) bought an eagle-wing-bone whistle from a dealer, and she whistled happy haunting tunes on it. The people followed Kit-Fox and Day-Torch out of town, out to the oceans of buffalo grass and blue-stem grass. They torched everything that was dry and set the blue-black smoke to rolling. But the fundamental earth was too green to burn.
All mounted horses and took lances. They went out after buffalo. Word was brought to them that some of the newly armed buffalo bulls wanted to schedule battle with them. And the battle was a good one, with gushing blood and broken-open bodies, and many on each side were killed.
Strange Buffalo was killed. That big boisterous man died with a happy whoop.
“Strange Buffalo, indeed,” one of the buffalo bulls said. “He looks like a man to me.”
When the ground there had become too soggy and mired in blood, they adjourned the battle till the next day of grass, or the one after that. Bloody battles are fine, but who wants to spend a whole day on one? There are other things. Kit-Fox and Day-Torch and a number of other folks went to higher ground.
There was a roaring river on the higher ground, the biggest river ever and the loudest.
“Oh be quiet,” Day-Torch said. “You’ve got the tune wrong.” The great river ceased to roar. Day-Torch whistled the right tune on the eagle-wing-bone whistle. Then the river resumed its roaring, but in this right tune now. This mightiest of all rivers was named Cottonwood Creek.
Henry Drumhead added his beat to the tune. Then the folks had a rain dance till the sharp rain came down and drenched them through. They had a sun dance then, till the sun dried up the mud and began to burn the hides of the people. They had a cloud dance then. They had an antelope dance till enough antelope came to provide a slaughter and a feast. They had a pit dance, a fire dance, a snake dance, and an ashes dance: the ashes from pecan wood and hickory wood are a better condiment than salt to go with roast antelope. They had a feast dance. Then (after a while) a shakedown dance. They had a thunder dance and a mountain dance.
Say, it is spooky to come to the foot of the mountain itself and see the great gap between it and the ground! Rocks and boulders fell off of the bottom of the mountain and killed many of the people below. And, from the mountain itself, a broken, bloody, and headless torso fell down to the earth.
Helen Hightower—ah, that is to say the glad-rag lady Day-Torch—set up a rakish screaming, “The head, the head, somebody forgot the head!”
There was a thunderous grumbling, a mountain-shaking irritation, but the bloody head did come down and smash itself like a bursting pumpkin on the earth.
“A lot of times they forget to throw the head down if you don’t remind them,” Day-Torch said.
The meaning of the fallen torso and head was that there was now one less prophet or wrestler on the mountain; that there was now an opportunity for one more man to ascend to glory and death.
Several of the men attempted it by various devices, by piling cairns of stones to climb upon, by leaping into the air to try to grab one of the dangling roots of the mountain, by hurling lances with trailing lianas to fasten quivering in the bottom of the mountain. They played it out in the garish day there where all the colors were so bright that they ached. Many of the men fell to their deaths, but one ascended. There is always one who is able to ascend to the great wrestle when there is an empty place to receive him.
And the one who ascended was—no, no, you’ll not have his name from us yet.
Something was mighty odd here. There was just a little bit of something right about things.
2.
Draftsman, draftsman, what do you draw?
Dog days, draggy days, days of straw.
3.
Indian Summer. A period of warm or mild weather late in autumn or in early winter.
So Webster’s Collegiate defines it, but Webster’s hasn’t the humility ever to admit that it doesn’t know the meaning of a word or phrase. And it doesn’t know the meaning of this one.
There are intervals, days, hours, minutes that are not remembered directly by anyone. They do not count in the totality of passing time. It is only by the most sophisticated methods that even the existence of these intervals may be shown.
There are whole seasons, in addition to the four regular seasons that are supposed to constitute the year. Nobody knows where they fit in, there being no room for them anywhere in the year; nobody has direct memory of being in them or living in them. Yet, somehow, they have names that have escaped these obliterations. The name of one of the misfit seasons is Indian Summer.
(“Why can’t the Indians have their summer in the summertime like the rest of us?” comes a high voice with a trace of annoyance. Not a high-pitched voice: a high voice.)
But all that is neither here nor there. It is yonder, and we will come to it.
Christopher Foxx was walking down a city street. Things were mighty even here, mighty neat. There was just a little bit of something wrong about their rightness.
The world was rubbed, scrubbed, and tubbed; it was shaved, paved, and saved; it was neat, sweet, and effete. Ah, the latter was possibly what was wrong with it, if anything could be wrong with perfection. The colors were all flat (flat colors had been deemed best for nerves and such), and the sounds were all muted. Christopher, for a moment, wished for a color that shrieked and for a sound that blazed. He put the thought resolutely out of his head. After all, he had for wife Helen Hightower, and he suffered much criticism because of her gaudiness and exuberance.
Christopher took a paper from the slot on the corner, noted that it was a day in May (he had a queer feeling that he had been uneasy about the date, and yet all that registered with him was that it fell within a familiar month). He entered the North Paragon Breakfast Club. It was there that the Symposium would begin (it would last the whole day and into the night, and be held at various sites) on the multiplex subject “Spatial and Temporal Underlays to the Integrated World, with Insights as to Their Possible Reality and Their Relationship to the World Unconscious and to the Therapeutic Amnesia; with Consideration of the Necessity of Belief in Stratified Worlds, and Explorations of the Orological Motif in Connection with the Apparent Occurrence of Simultaneous Days.” It would have been an exciting subject if Excitement had not become another of the muted things.
Buford Strange was already at the North Paragon, and with him were Adrian Montaigne and Vincent Rue.
“I have already ordered for ourselves and for yourself, Christopher,” Buford said. “It is sheldrake, and I hope that you like it. They will not prepare it for fewer than four persons. ‘We can’t go around killing quarter ducks,’ they say.”
“That is all right,” Christopher said meekly. He glanced at the other three nervously. There was surely something familiar about them all.
Great blue mountain thunder! Why shouldn’t there be! He had worked with these men daily for several years. But, no, no, his edgy mind told him that they were familiar in some other and more subtle way. He glanced at the paper which he had taken from the corner slot outside. Something like quick flame ran across the top of it and was gone too quickly to verify. But was it possible that the flame had said “You want a date, honey? You phone—” Of course it was not possible. Clearly, at the top of the paper it was printed A DAY IN MAY. Clearly? Was that clear enough for a date?
“What date is this?” Christopher asked the three of them.
“May the eighth, of course,” Adrian answered him. “You’ve got today’s Journal in your hand and still you ask?”
Well now it was printed clearly there, May 8, and there was no nonsense about “a day in May”; still less was there anything like “You want a date, honey?”
Some wild-looking children burst into the North Paragon Breakfast Club.
“Straw-Men! Straw-Men!” they cried at the four gentlemen there. “Straw-Men! Straw-Men!” The children buffeted the four men a bit, did other extravagant things that are since forgotten, and then they went out of the Breakfast Club again: or at least they disappeared; they were no longer there.
“Why should they have done that?” Adrian asked, puzzled. “Why should they have called us that, and done the other things?”
“Why should who have called us what?” Vincent asked, even more puzzled.
“I don’t know,” Adrian said dryly. “It seemed that someone was here and said or did something.”
“You’re witless, Adrian,” Vincent chided. “Nobody was here.”
“Straw-Man,” Christopher Foxx said softly. “I remember the word now and I couldn’t remember it before. I woke up this morning trying to remember it. It seemed to be the key to a dream that was slipping away in spite of my trying to hang on to it. I have the key word now, but it fits nothing. The dream is gone forever.”
“We will come back to this subject later in our discussions,” Buford Strange said. “I believe that your word ‘Straw-Man,’ Christopher, is a part of the underlay, or perhaps of the overlay, that pertains to our world and our study. There is a good chance that certain children, or perhaps dwarfs or gnomes, entered here several moments ago. Did any of you notice them?”
“No,” said Vincent Rue.
“No one entered,” said Adrian Montaigne.
“No. I didn’t see anyone,” said Christopher Foxx.
“Yet I believe that a group did come in,” Buford Strange continued suavely. “It was a group unusual enough to be noticed. Then why didn’t we notice it? Or why did we forget, within a short moment, that we had seen it at all? I believe it was because the group was in a different sort of day. I am nearly sure that it is a group that lives in either St. Martin’s Summer or in the Kingfisher Days. Ah, here is the sheldrake ready with all the trimmings! Drool and be happy. We shall never know such moment again.”
It was a momentous fowl, no question of that. It was good, it was rich, it was overflowing with juice. It was peer of the fowl that are found in the land named St. Succulentus’s Springtime. (What? What? There is a land named that?)
The four noble men (they were ennobled by the circumstance) fell to eating with what, in days of another sort, might almost be called gusto. It was a royal bird and was basted with that concoction of burst fruits and crushed nuts and peppers and ciders and holy oils and reindeer butter that is called—(wait a bit)—
“Do you know that the sheldrake is really a mysterious creature?” Buford Strange asked as he ate noisily (nobody eats such royal fare in quiet). Buford acted as if he knew a secret.
“It is not a mysterious creature at all,” Adrian countered (he knew it was, though). “It is only the common European duck.”
“It is not only the common European duck,” Buford said strongly. “In other days it may be quite uncommon.”
“What are you saying, Buford?” Vincent Rue asked him. “In what other days?”
“Oh, I believe, possibly, in what the Dutch call Kraanzomer, Crane-Summer. Are we agreed that the other days, the days out of count, are topic rather than temporal?”
“We are not even agreed that there are days out of count,” Christopher objected.
“Drakes’ teeth, by the way, while rare, are not unknown,” Adrian Montaigne popped the statement out of his mouth as if in someone else’s voice. He seemed startled at his own words.
“Drake is really the same word as Drakos, a dragon,” Christopher Foxx mumbled. “Ah, I was going to say something else but it is gone now.”
“Waiter, what is the name of the excellent stuff with which the drake is basted and to which it is wedded?” Vincent Rue asked in happy wonder.
“Dragons’ sauce,” said the waiter.
“Well, just what is the mystery, the uncommonness of the sheldrake, Buford?” Christopher asked him.
“I don’t seem to remember,” that man said. “Ah, let us start our discussion with my, our, failure to remember such things. Vincent, did you not have a short paper prepared on ‘Amnesia, the Holes in the Pockets of the Seamless Garment’?”
“I forget. Did I have such a paper prepared? I will look in my own pockets.”
Meanwhile, back on the mountain, back on the thundering mountain there were certain daring and comic persons rushing in and out and counting coup on the Wrath of God. It is a dangerous game. These were the big prophets who prayed so violently and sweated so bloodily and wrestled so strongly. It was they who fought for the salving or the salvation of the days, in fear and in chuckling, in scare-shaking and in laughter-shaking. The thundering mountain was a funny one this morning. It didn’t reach clear to the ground. There was a great space between, and there were eagles flying under it. And the day, the day, was it really the first Monday of Blue-Goose Autumn? Was it really a Monday at all? Or was it a Thursday or an aleikaday?
It was like another morning of not long before. The eagles remember it; the clouds remember it; the mountain wrestlers remember it dimly, though some of the memory has been taken away from them.
Remember how it is written on the holy skins: “If you have faith you shall say to the mountain ‘Remove from here and cast thyself into the sea’ and it will do it.” Well, on that morning they had tried it. Several of the big prophets and wrestlers tried it, for they did have faith. They groaned with travail and joy, they strove mightily, and they did move the mountain and make it cast itself into the sea.
But the thunders made the waters back off. The waters refused to accept or to submerge the mountain. The prayer-men and wrestlers had sufficient faith, but the ocean did not. Whoever had the last laugh on that holy morning?
The strivers were timeless, of the prime age, but they were often called the “grandfathers” brothers’ by the people. They were up there now, the great prophets and prayer-men and wrestlers. One of these intrepid men was an Indian and he was attempting to put the Indian Sign on God himself. God, however, was like a mist and would not be signed.
“We will wrestle,” the Indian said to God in the mist, “we will wrestle to see which of us shall be Lord for this day. I tell you it is not thick enough if only the regular days flow. I hesitate to instruct you in your own business, and yet someone must instruct you. There must be overflowing and special days apart from the regular days. You have such days, I am sure of that, but you keep them prisoned in a bag. It is necessary now that I wrest one of them from you.”
They wrestled, inasmuch as a man slick with his own sweat and blood may wrestle with a mist: and it seemed that the Indian won the lordship of a day from God. “It will be a day of grass,” the Indian said. “It will be none of your dry and juiceless days.” The Indian lay exhausted with his fingers entwined in the won day: and the strength came back to him. “You make a great thing about marking every sparrow’s fall,” the Indian said then. “See that you forget not to mark this day.”
The thing that happened then was this: God marked the day for which they had wrestled, but he marked it on a different holy skin in a different place, not on the regular skin that lists the regular days. This act caused the wrested day to be one of the Days out of Count.
Prophets, wrestlers, praying-men of other sorts were on the mountain also. There were black men who sometimes strove for kaffir-corn days or ivory-tree days. There were brown island men who wrestled for sailfish days or wild-pig days. There were pinkish north-wood men who walked on pine needles and balsam; there were gnarled men out of the swampy lands; there were town men from the great towns. All of these strove with the Lord in fear and in chuckling.
Some of these were beheaded and quartered, and the pieces of them were flung down violently to earth: it is believed that there were certain qualities lacking in these, or that their strength had finally come to an end. But the others, the most of them, won great days from the Lord, Heydays, Halcyon or Kingfisher Days, Maedchensommer Days, St. Garvais Days, Indian Summer Days. These were all rich days, full of joy and death, bubbling with ecstasy and blood. And yet all were marked on different of the holy skins and so they became the Days out of Count.
“Days out of the Count,” Buford Strange was saying. “It’s an entrancing idea, and we have almost proved it. Seasons out of the count! It’s striking that the word for putting a condiment on should be the same word as a division of the year. Well, the seasons out of the count are all well seasoned and spiced. There are whole multiplex layered eras out of the count. The ice ages are such. I do not say ‘were such’; I say ‘are such.’”
“But the ice ages are real, real, real,” Helen Hightower insisted. (Quite a few long hours had passed in the discussions, and now Helen Hightower, the wife of Christopher Foxx, was off her work at the telephone exchange and had put on her glad rags and joined the scholars.)
“Certainly they are real, Helen,” Buford Strange said. “If only I were so real! I believe that you remember them, or know them, more than most of us do. You have a dangerously incomplete amnesia on so many things that I wonder the thunder doesn’t come and take you. But in the days and years and centuries and eras of the straight count there are no ice ages.”
“Well then, how, for instance, would local dwellers account for terminal moraines and glacial till generally?” asked Conquering Sharp-Leaf—ah, Vincent Rue.
(They were at the University, in that cozy room in the psychology department where Buford Strange usually held forth, the room that was just below the special effects room of Professor Timacheff.)
“How did they account for such before the time of modern geology?” Buford asked. “They didn’t. There would be a new boulder one morning that had not been there the day before. The sheep-herder of the place would say that the moon had drawn it out of the ground, or that it had fallen from the sky.”
“You’re crazy, Buford,” Adrian Montaigne said with a certain affection. “Why the ice ages then? Why should they have happened, even in times out of count? Why should they have left their footprints in the times within the count?” Adrian had very huge and powerful hands. Why had they not noticed this before?
“I believe there was a dynasty of great and muscular prophets and ghost-wrestlers who wanted to call out the terrible days of Fimbul Winter,” Buford said in a hushed voice. “I don’t know why they wanted such things, or why they sweated blood and wrestled prodigies to obtain them. They were men, but they are remembered as the frost giants.”
“Oh my grand, grand uncles!” Day-Torch—Helen Hightower, rather, cried out. “Days of snow! Days of ice! Millions of them!”
“You are saying that certain archetypes—” Kit-Fox began.
“Shook the pillars of Heaven till the snow and ice fell down for a million days, for a million days out of the count,” Buford Strange finished.
“Strange Buffalo, ah, Buford, you are crazy,” Christopher Foxx chided much as Adrian had. Christopher was talking, but the queerly smiling Adrian had now become the presence in the room. Adrian had the curious under-rutile of the skin of one who has sweated blood in prayer and buffoonery and passion. Why had they not noticed that of him before?
“I could almost believe that you were one of the great challengers yourself, Strange,” Christopher said to Buford, but he was looking at Adrian.
“You strike me as with a lance, Kit,” Buford said sadly. “You uncover my mortification. For I failed. I don’t know when it was. It was on a day out of the count. I failed a year ago or ten thousand years ago. I could not make it among the great ones. I was not cast out to my death: I was never in. There was room for me, and an opportunity for the ascent, but I failed in nerve. And one who has aspired to be a champion or prophet cannot fall back to be an ordinary man. So I am less than that: I am short of manhood. But, sadly, I do remember and live in other sorts of days.”
“I believe that the aberrant days are simultaneous with the prosaic days,” Adrian Montaigne mused. Adrian was quite a large man. Why had they not noticed that before?
“No, no, they are not simultaneous,” Buford was correcting him. “There are the days out of the count and there are the days in the count. Those out of count are outside of time so they cannot be simultaneous with anything. You have to see it that way.”
“You see it your way and I’ll see it mine.” Adrian was stubborn. “Consider some of the aberrant times or countries: St. Garvais’ Springtime, St. Martin’s Summer (the saints in these names were mountain prophets and wrestlers, but some of them were not at all saintly in their violence), Midas March (the very rich need their special season also: it is said that, in their special month, they are superiorly endowed in all ways), Dog Days, Halcyon Days, Dragon Days, Harvest May (what in the world is harvested in May?), All-Hallow Summer, Days of Ivory, Days of Horn, Indian Summer, Wicklow Week, Apricot Autumn, Goose Summer, Giant-Stone Days, Day of the Crooked Mile, the season called Alcedonia by the Latins. I tell you that all these days are happening at the same time!” This man named Adoration on the Mountain, or rather Adrian Montaigne, had a reckless sort of transcendence about him now.
“No, they do not all happen at the same time,” Strange Buffalo was saying, “for the aberrant days of them are not in time. They are places and not times.”
“Are there no nighttime hours in the times out of time?” Vincent Rue asked.
“No. Not in the same sense. They are in another province entirely,” Buford said.
There was thunder in the special effects room of Professor Timacheff on the floor just above them, cheerful, almost vulgar thunder. Timacheff taught some sensational (sense response and also melodramatic) courses up there. But how did he get such special effects anyhow?
“They do happen at the same time,” Adrian Mountain insisted, and he was laughing like boulders coming together. Quite a few things seemed to be happening to Adrian all at the same time. “They are all happening right now. I am sitting with you here this minute, but I am also on the mountain this minute. The thunder in the room above, it is real thunder, you know. And there is a deeper, more distant, more raffish thunder behind it which primitives call God’s-Laughter Thunder.”
“This gets out of hand now,” Vincent Rue protested. “It is supposed to be a serious symposium on spatial and temporal underlays. Several of you have turned it into a silly place and a silly time. You are taking too anthropomorphic a view of all these things, including God. One does not really wrestle with God in a bush or a mist, or ride in wildly on a pony and count coup on God. Even as an atheist I find these ideas distasteful.”
“But we are anthropoi, men,” Adrian proclaimed. “What other view than an anthropomorphic view could we take? That we should play the God-game, that we should wrestle with a God-form and try to wrest lordship of days from him, that we should essay to count coup on God, I as a theist do not find at all distasteful.
“Why! One of them is failing now! It happens so seldom. I wonder if I have a chance.”
“Adrian, what are you talking about?” Vincent demanded.
“How could you do it, Adrian, when I could not?” Buford Strange asked.
“Remember me when you come to your place, Adrian,” Day-Torch cried. “Send me a day. Oh, send me a day-fire day.”
“And me also, Adrian,” Kit-Fox begged. “I would love to do it myself, but it isn’t given to everyone.”
There was a strong shouting in the room above. There was the concussion of bodies, and the roaring of mountain winds.
“What in all the crooked days is Professor Timacheff doing up there this evening?” Vincent Sharp-Leaf asked angrily. “And what things are you doing here, Adrian? You look like a man set afire.”
“Make room for me! Oh, make room for me!” Adrian of the Mountain cried out in a voice that had its own crackling thunder. He was in the very transport of passion and he glistened red with his own bloody sweat. “One is failing, one is falling, why doesn’t he fall then?”
“Help with it, Kit-Fox! And I help also,” Day-Torch yowled.
“I help!” Kit-Fox yelped. The room shuddered, the building shuddered, the whole afternoon shuddered. There was a rending of boulders, either on the prophet’s mountain or in the special effects room of Professor Timacheff above them. There was a great breaking and entering, a place turning into a time.
There came a roaring like horses in the sky. Then was the multiplex crash (God save his soul, his body is done for) of bloody torso and severed limbs falling into the room from a great height, splintering the table at which the five of them sat, breaking the room, splattering them all with blood. But the ceiling above was unbreached and unharmed and there was no point of entry.
“I am not man enough even to watch it,” Buford Strange gurgled, and he slumped sideways unconscious.
“Timacheff, you fool!” Vincent Rue bawled to the space above them. “Watch your damned special effects! You’re wrecking the place!”
Unquestionably, that Timacheff was good. He used his special effects in classes on phenomenology that he taught up there.
“The head, the head! Don’t let them forget the head!” Day-Torch cried in a flaming voice.
“I just remembered that Timacheff is out of town and is holding no classes today,” Kit-Fox muttered in vulpine wonder.
“Make room for me! Oh, make room for me!” Adrian Mountain boomed. Then he was gone from the midst of them. He would be a factor, though, “in days to come.”
“The head, the head!” Day-Torch flamed and scorched.
Christopher and Vincent tried to straighten up the unconscious Buford Strange. They shook him, but he came apart and one arm came off him. He was revealed as a straw-man filled with bloody straw, and no more.
“Why, he’s naught but a poorly made scarecrow,” Christopher Foxx said in wonder. “He was right that one who falls back from it cannot become an ordinary man again. He will be less than man.”
“That’s funny. He always looked like a man to me,” Vincent Rue said.
“The head, the head! You forget the head. Let the head fall down!” Day-Torch cried.
And the head fell down.
It smashed itself like a bursting pumpkin on the broken floor.
4.
Under the town is a woolier town,
And the blood splashed up and the head fell down.
1.
Fog in the corner and fog in his head:
Gray day broken and bleeding red.
Christopher Foxx was walking down a city street. No, it was a city road. It was really a city trail or path. He was walking in a fog, but the fog wasn’t in the air or the ambient: it was in his head. Things were mighty odd here. There was just a little bit of something wrong about things.
Oceans of grass for one instance. Should a large and busy city (and this was clearly that) have blue-green grass belly-high in its main street? Things hardly remembered: echoes and shadows, or were they the strong sounds and things themselves? Christopher felt as though his eyeballs had been cleaned with a magic cleaner, as though he were blessed with new sensing in ears and nose, as though he went with a restored body and was breathing a new sort of air. It was very pleasant, but it was puzzling. How had the world been pumped full of new juice?
Christopher couldn’t recall what day it was; he certainly didn’t know what hour it was. It was a gray day, but there was no dullness in that gray. It was shimmering pearl-gray, of a color bounced back by shimmering water and shimmering air. It was a crimson-edged day, like a gray squirrel shot and bleeding redly from the inside and around the edges. Yes, there was the pleasant touch of death on things, gushing death and gushing life.
Christopher’s own name didn’t sound right to him. He didn’t know what town he was in. Indeed he’d never before seen a town with all the storefronts flapping in the wind like that. Ah, they’d curl and bend, but they wouldn’t break. A town made of painted buckskin, and yet it was more real than towns made of stone and concrete.
He saw persons he almost knew. He started to speak and only sputtered. Well, he’d get a newspaper then; they sometimes gave information. He reached in his pocket for a coin, and discovered that he didn’t have regular pockets. He found a little leather pouch stuck in his belt. What’s this? What else was stuck in his belt? It was a breechclout with the ends fore and aft passing under his belt. Instead of pants he had a pair of leggings and a breechclout, three-piece pants. Oh, oh, what else?
Oh, he wore a shirt that seemed to be leather of some sort. He wore soft shoes that were softer than slippers. He was hatless, and his hair came forward over his shoulders in two tight long braids. He had dressed casually before, but he didn’t remember ever dressing like this. How were the rest of the people dressed? No two alike, really, no two alike.
But he did bring a coin out of that leather pouch that was stuck in his belt. A strange coin. It wasn’t metal: it was made of stone, and made roughly. On the face of it was the head and forequarters of a buffalo. On the reverse side was the rump of a buffalo. The words on the obverse of it read WORTH ONE BUFFALO, and on the reverse they read MAYBE A LITTLE BIT LESS.
“And where do I put a coin in this contraption?” Christopher asked himself angrily and loudly. A hand extended itself, and Christopher put the coin in the hand. The hand belonged to an old wrinkled brown man, swathed in robes and folds of blackened leather, and sitting in the dust.
The old man gave Christopher a newspaper, or gave him something anyhow. It was on leather that was almost board-stiff. It was illustrated, it was printed in a variety of hands; and here and there it had a little hair growing out of it as though its leather were imperfectly scraped.
“Wait, your change,” the old brown man said. He gave Christopher seven small coins. These were neither metal nor stone: they were clay baked in the sun. The obverse of each was the head and fore of a badger, puffed and bristled and hissing in high defense. And the reverse was the reared rump of the same badger in embattled clawed stance.
“Price go down a little but not a whole badger,” the old man said. “Take three puffs. It’s close as I can get to even change.” Wondering at himself, Christopher took three strong rich smoky puffs from the old pipe of the old man. He felt that he had received full value then. It was about all that he felt satisfied with. But is it wrong to feel unsatisfied, which is unsated? Christopher thought about it.
He went over and sat on a bale of rags outside the shop with the sign HOT ROAST DOG FOR SALE OR GIVE. The bale of rags seemed somehow lively; it was as if there was no division between the animate and the inanimate this day. He tried to make something out of the strange newspaper or the strange day, or the newly strange man who was apparently himself.
Oh, the newspaper was interesting. It could be read one way or another: by picture, by stylized pictograph, by various writings and printings. Here were anecdotes; wooly, horny, bottomlessly funny anecdotes: and they were about people that Christopher knew, or almost knew. And all the people passing by (Christopher realized it with a chuckling gasp) were also people that he knew or almost knew. Well, what made them so different then? They looked like familiar people, they smelled like familiar people (which the familiar people erstwhile had not done), they had the familiar name that came almost to the edge of the tongue.
“But what town is this? What day is this? What is the context?” Christopher wailed out loud. “Why is everything so strange?”
“Kit-Fox, you call me?” Strange Buffalo boomed at him. Strange Buffalo was a big and boisterous man and he had always been a good friend of Christopher. He had? Then why did he look so different? And why was his real name, or his other name, now unremembered?
“Will the buffalo go to war, do you think, Kit-Fox?” Strange Buffalo asked him. “Do you believe that the two great herds of them will go to war? They come near to each other now and they swear that neither will give way.”
“No, there will be only the pushing and goring of a few thousand bulls, not much else,” Christopher said. “The buffalo simply haven’t the basis for a real war.” He was surprised at his own knowledge of the subject.
“But the buffalo have human advisers now,” Strange Buffalo said. “It began with the betting, of course, but now we can see that there is real cause of conflict on both sides. I dabble in this myself and have some good ideas. We are tying spear-shafts to the horns of some of the big bulls and teaching them to use them. And we’re setting up big bows and teaching them to bend them with their great strength, but they haven’t any accuracy at all.”
“No, I don’t believe they were meant to have a real war. It’s a wonderful dust they raise, though, when they all come together. It makes you glad to be alive. And the thunder of their millions of hoofs!” (There was the distant sound of morning thunder.) “Or is that a thundering in the mountains?” Kit-Fox—ah, Christopher was asking.
“Well, there is quite a clatter in the mountains this morning, Kit,” Strange Buffalo was saying in happy admiration. “The deep days, the grass days like this one aren’t come by easily. It’s a wonder the mountains aren’t knocked to pieces when the big prophets pray so noisily and wrestle so strong. But, as the good skin says, we must work out our salvation in fear and thundering.”
“Is it not ‘In fear and trembling’?” Christopher asked as he lounged on the lively bale of rags.
“No, Kit-Fox, no!” Strange Buffalo pealed at him. “That’s the kind of thing they say during the straw days; not here, not now. In the Cahooche shadow-writing it says ‘In fear and chuckling,’ but the Cahooche words for thunder and chuckling are almost the same. On some of the Kiowa antelope-skin drawings, ‘In scare-shaking and in laughter-shaking.’ I like that. I wish I could pray and wrestle as wooly and horny as the big ones do. Then I’d get to be a prophet on the mountain also, and I’d bring in more days of grass. Yes, and days of mesquite also.”
“The mountain is a funny one this morning, Strange Buffalo. It doesn’t reach clear down to the ground,” Christopher said. “There’s a great space between, and there are eagles flying underneath it.”
“Ah, it’ll fall back after a while, Kit-Fox, when they have won or lost the wrestling for the day; after they have generated sufficient juice for this day, for I see that they have already won it and it will be a day of grass. Let’s go have a rack of roast dog and a gourd of choc beer,” Strange Buffalo proposed.
“In a minute, Strange Buffalo. I am in the middle of a puzzle and I have this fog in my head. What day is this?”
“It’s one of the days of grass, Kit-Fox. I just told you that.”
“But which one, Strange Buffalo? And what, really, are ‘days of grass’?”
“I believe that it is the second Monday of Indian Summer, Kit-Fox,” Strange Buffalo was saying as he gave the matter his thought and attention. “Or it may be the first Monday of Blue-Goose Autumn. We’re not sure, though, that it is a Monday. It sounds and tastes more like a Thursday or an aleikaday.”
“It sure does,” Christopher—ah, Kit-Fox agreed.
A laughing, dying man was carried past by four hale men. This fortunate one had been smashed by bear or rolled on by horse or gored by buffalo, and the big red blood in him was all running out. “It works,” the happy dying man cried out. “It works. I got a little too close to him and he ripped me to pieces, but it works. We are really teaching those big bulls to use the spears lashed to their horns. Others will carry on the work and the fun. I bet that I’ve had it.”
“A little blood to bless me!” Strange Buffalo cried out, and the dying man splashed him with the rich and rigorous blood.
“For me also,” Kit-Fox begged, and the dying man smeared him with blood on the brow and breast and shoulders and loins. Two other friends, Conquering Sharp-Leaf and Adoration on the Mountain, came and were blessed with the blood. Then the man died and was dead.
“There is nothing like the fine rich blood to make a grass day sing in your head and in your body,” Strange Buffalo exulted. “On the straw days they try to hide the blood or they bleed in a dark corner.”
(What was all this about the grass days and the straw days? There was now a sordid dull-dream quality, a day-of-straw quality that kept trying to push itself in. “For a little while,” it begged, “to reestablish rigor and rule and reason for just a little while.” “Go away,” said the day-of-grass quality. “The wrestle was won this morning, and this is a day out of the count.”)
Kit-Fox and Strange Buffalo went in, past the booths and work areas of the coin-makers, past the stands of the eaglewing-bone-whistle makers, and into the shop which had roast dog for sale or give. Strange Buffalo had a shoulder of dog and Kit-Fox had a rack of ribs. There was fried bread also, and hominy and pumpkin. There was choc beer dipped with gourd dippers out of a huge crock. Thousands of people were there. It was crowded and it was supposed to be. The man named Mountain twinkled in the air. Why had they not noticed that about him before?
Folks rolled up the walls and tied them. Now the strong smoke and savor could visit all the places, and the folks in every shop could see into every other shop. It was full morning and beginning to get warm.
“But I still want to know the date,” Kit-Fox insisted, not quite converted to the day of grass, not quite clear of the head-fog that accompanies the sullen burning of the straw days. “What newspaper is this that doesn’t have a date? I want a date!”
“Look at it. It tells,” said Strange Buffalo.
“You want a date, honey?” the top of the newspaper writhed in sudden flickering of day-fire print. “Phone 582-8316 and I give you a real date.” Then the day-fire print was gone.
“I hope I can remember that number,” Kit-Fox said anxiously. “Strange Buffalo, where is there a telephone exchange?”
“They are the same and single and right outside past the booths,” Strange Buffalo said. “You were sitting upon it when I came upon you. And you, you old straw-head, you thought it was a bale of rags.”
Kit-Fox went outside, past the booths of the stone-buffalocoin makers and the clay-badger-coin makers, past the tents of the porcupine-quill dealers, to what he had thought was a bale of rags, a lively bale of rags as he now remembered it. Well, it was an ample lady in her glad rags and she was the telephone exchange lying there in the grass.
“I want to call number 582-8316,” Kit-Fox said uneasily.
“Here are a handful of dice,” the glad-rags lady told him. “Arrange them here in the short grass and make any number you want.”
“But proper dice have numbers only to six,” Kit-Fox protested, “and some of the numbers are higher.”
“Those are improper dice, they are crooked dice,” the lady said. “They have numbers more than six and numbers less than one. Number out your telephone number in the short grass with them.”
“Are you sure this is the way to dial a number?” Kit-Fox asked.
“Sure I’m not sure,” the lady said. “If you know a better way, do it that way. Worth a try, kid, worth a try.”
Kit-Fox numbered out his numbers in the short grass.
“Now what do I do?” he asked.
“Oh, talk into the telephone here.”
“That buckskin bag is a telephone?”
“Try it, try it. Drop a badger coin in and try it.”
Kit-Fox dropped the coin into the telephone. “Hello, hello,” he said.
“Hello, hello,” the lady answered. “That’s my number you called. You want a date, I wait for you awhile. Believe me, I get pretty tired of waiting pretty soon.”
“I don’t think this is a telephone exchange at all,” Kit-Fox grumbled.
“How else I can get guys so easy to drop badger-coins in a buckskin bag,” the lady said. “Come along, lover man, we will have a grand time this day.”
The lady was full-bodied and jolly. Kit-Fox remembered her from somewhere.
“Who are you?” he asked her.
“I’m your wife in the straw days,” she said, “but this is a grass day. They’re harder to find, but they’re more fun when you find one. They have something to do with grandfather’s brother and that wrestling of his.”
“Days of grass, days of straw,” Kit-Fox said as he embraced the lady passionately. “How about a hay day?”
“You mean a heyday? Those are special. We hope to make them more often, if only the wrestle is better. They’re fuller of juice than the grass days even. We try to make one now.”
They made a heyday together (together with a whole nation of people); and it went on and on. Day-Torch (that was the lady in the glad rags, the lady who was Kit-Fox’s wife during the straw days) bought an eagle-wing-bone whistle from a dealer, and she whistled happy haunting tunes on it. The people followed Kit-Fox and Day-Torch out of town, out to the oceans of buffalo grass and blue-stem grass. They torched everything that was dry and set the blue-black smoke to rolling. But the fundamental earth was too green to burn.
All mounted horses and took lances. They went out after buffalo. Word was brought to them that some of the newly armed buffalo bulls wanted to schedule battle with them. And the battle was a good one, with gushing blood and broken-open bodies, and many on each side were killed.
Strange Buffalo was killed. That big boisterous man died with a happy whoop.
“Strange Buffalo, indeed,” one of the buffalo bulls said. “He looks like a man to me.”
When the ground there had become too soggy and mired in blood, they adjourned the battle till the next day of grass, or the one after that. Bloody battles are fine, but who wants to spend a whole day on one? There are other things. Kit-Fox and Day-Torch and a number of other folks went to higher ground.
There was a roaring river on the higher ground, the biggest river ever and the loudest.
“Oh be quiet,” Day-Torch said. “You’ve got the tune wrong.” The great river ceased to roar. Day-Torch whistled the right tune on the eagle-wing-bone whistle. Then the river resumed its roaring, but in this right tune now. This mightiest of all rivers was named Cottonwood Creek.
Henry Drumhead added his beat to the tune. Then the folks had a rain dance till the sharp rain came down and drenched them through. They had a sun dance then, till the sun dried up the mud and began to burn the hides of the people. They had a cloud dance then. They had an antelope dance till enough antelope came to provide a slaughter and a feast. They had a pit dance, a fire dance, a snake dance, and an ashes dance: the ashes from pecan wood and hickory wood are a better condiment than salt to go with roast antelope. They had a feast dance. Then (after a while) a shakedown dance. They had a thunder dance and a mountain dance.
Say, it is spooky to come to the foot of the mountain itself and see the great gap between it and the ground! Rocks and boulders fell off of the bottom of the mountain and killed many of the people below. And, from the mountain itself, a broken, bloody, and headless torso fell down to the earth.
Helen Hightower—ah, that is to say the glad-rag lady Day-Torch—set up a rakish screaming, “The head, the head, somebody forgot the head!”
There was a thunderous grumbling, a mountain-shaking irritation, but the bloody head did come down and smash itself like a bursting pumpkin on the earth.
“A lot of times they forget to throw the head down if you don’t remind them,” Day-Torch said.
The meaning of the fallen torso and head was that there was now one less prophet or wrestler on the mountain; that there was now an opportunity for one more man to ascend to glory and death.
Several of the men attempted it by various devices, by piling cairns of stones to climb upon, by leaping into the air to try to grab one of the dangling roots of the mountain, by hurling lances with trailing lianas to fasten quivering in the bottom of the mountain. They played it out in the garish day there where all the colors were so bright that they ached. Many of the men fell to their deaths, but one ascended. There is always one who is able to ascend to the great wrestle when there is an empty place to receive him.
And the one who ascended was—no, no, you’ll not have his name from us yet.
Something was mighty odd here. There was just a little bit of something right about things.
2.
Draftsman, draftsman, what do you draw?
Dog days, draggy days, days of straw.
3.
Indian Summer. A period of warm or mild weather late in autumn or in early winter.
So Webster’s Collegiate defines it, but Webster’s hasn’t the humility ever to admit that it doesn’t know the meaning of a word or phrase. And it doesn’t know the meaning of this one.
There are intervals, days, hours, minutes that are not remembered directly by anyone. They do not count in the totality of passing time. It is only by the most sophisticated methods that even the existence of these intervals may be shown.
There are whole seasons, in addition to the four regular seasons that are supposed to constitute the year. Nobody knows where they fit in, there being no room for them anywhere in the year; nobody has direct memory of being in them or living in them. Yet, somehow, they have names that have escaped these obliterations. The name of one of the misfit seasons is Indian Summer.
(“Why can’t the Indians have their summer in the summertime like the rest of us?” comes a high voice with a trace of annoyance. Not a high-pitched voice: a high voice.)
But all that is neither here nor there. It is yonder, and we will come to it.
Christopher Foxx was walking down a city street. Things were mighty even here, mighty neat. There was just a little bit of something wrong about their rightness.
The world was rubbed, scrubbed, and tubbed; it was shaved, paved, and saved; it was neat, sweet, and effete. Ah, the latter was possibly what was wrong with it, if anything could be wrong with perfection. The colors were all flat (flat colors had been deemed best for nerves and such), and the sounds were all muted. Christopher, for a moment, wished for a color that shrieked and for a sound that blazed. He put the thought resolutely out of his head. After all, he had for wife Helen Hightower, and he suffered much criticism because of her gaudiness and exuberance.
Christopher took a paper from the slot on the corner, noted that it was a day in May (he had a queer feeling that he had been uneasy about the date, and yet all that registered with him was that it fell within a familiar month). He entered the North Paragon Breakfast Club. It was there that the Symposium would begin (it would last the whole day and into the night, and be held at various sites) on the multiplex subject “Spatial and Temporal Underlays to the Integrated World, with Insights as to Their Possible Reality and Their Relationship to the World Unconscious and to the Therapeutic Amnesia; with Consideration of the Necessity of Belief in Stratified Worlds, and Explorations of the Orological Motif in Connection with the Apparent Occurrence of Simultaneous Days.” It would have been an exciting subject if Excitement had not become another of the muted things.
Buford Strange was already at the North Paragon, and with him were Adrian Montaigne and Vincent Rue.
“I have already ordered for ourselves and for yourself, Christopher,” Buford said. “It is sheldrake, and I hope that you like it. They will not prepare it for fewer than four persons. ‘We can’t go around killing quarter ducks,’ they say.”
“That is all right,” Christopher said meekly. He glanced at the other three nervously. There was surely something familiar about them all.
Great blue mountain thunder! Why shouldn’t there be! He had worked with these men daily for several years. But, no, no, his edgy mind told him that they were familiar in some other and more subtle way. He glanced at the paper which he had taken from the corner slot outside. Something like quick flame ran across the top of it and was gone too quickly to verify. But was it possible that the flame had said “You want a date, honey? You phone—” Of course it was not possible. Clearly, at the top of the paper it was printed A DAY IN MAY. Clearly? Was that clear enough for a date?
“What date is this?” Christopher asked the three of them.
“May the eighth, of course,” Adrian answered him. “You’ve got today’s Journal in your hand and still you ask?”
Well now it was printed clearly there, May 8, and there was no nonsense about “a day in May”; still less was there anything like “You want a date, honey?”
Some wild-looking children burst into the North Paragon Breakfast Club.
“Straw-Men! Straw-Men!” they cried at the four gentlemen there. “Straw-Men! Straw-Men!” The children buffeted the four men a bit, did other extravagant things that are since forgotten, and then they went out of the Breakfast Club again: or at least they disappeared; they were no longer there.
“Why should they have done that?” Adrian asked, puzzled. “Why should they have called us that, and done the other things?”
“Why should who have called us what?” Vincent asked, even more puzzled.
“I don’t know,” Adrian said dryly. “It seemed that someone was here and said or did something.”
“You’re witless, Adrian,” Vincent chided. “Nobody was here.”
“Straw-Man,” Christopher Foxx said softly. “I remember the word now and I couldn’t remember it before. I woke up this morning trying to remember it. It seemed to be the key to a dream that was slipping away in spite of my trying to hang on to it. I have the key word now, but it fits nothing. The dream is gone forever.”
“We will come back to this subject later in our discussions,” Buford Strange said. “I believe that your word ‘Straw-Man,’ Christopher, is a part of the underlay, or perhaps of the overlay, that pertains to our world and our study. There is a good chance that certain children, or perhaps dwarfs or gnomes, entered here several moments ago. Did any of you notice them?”
“No,” said Vincent Rue.
“No one entered,” said Adrian Montaigne.
“No. I didn’t see anyone,” said Christopher Foxx.
“Yet I believe that a group did come in,” Buford Strange continued suavely. “It was a group unusual enough to be noticed. Then why didn’t we notice it? Or why did we forget, within a short moment, that we had seen it at all? I believe it was because the group was in a different sort of day. I am nearly sure that it is a group that lives in either St. Martin’s Summer or in the Kingfisher Days. Ah, here is the sheldrake ready with all the trimmings! Drool and be happy. We shall never know such moment again.”
It was a momentous fowl, no question of that. It was good, it was rich, it was overflowing with juice. It was peer of the fowl that are found in the land named St. Succulentus’s Springtime. (What? What? There is a land named that?)
The four noble men (they were ennobled by the circumstance) fell to eating with what, in days of another sort, might almost be called gusto. It was a royal bird and was basted with that concoction of burst fruits and crushed nuts and peppers and ciders and holy oils and reindeer butter that is called—(wait a bit)—
“Do you know that the sheldrake is really a mysterious creature?” Buford Strange asked as he ate noisily (nobody eats such royal fare in quiet). Buford acted as if he knew a secret.
“It is not a mysterious creature at all,” Adrian countered (he knew it was, though). “It is only the common European duck.”
“It is not only the common European duck,” Buford said strongly. “In other days it may be quite uncommon.”
“What are you saying, Buford?” Vincent Rue asked him. “In what other days?”
“Oh, I believe, possibly, in what the Dutch call Kraanzomer, Crane-Summer. Are we agreed that the other days, the days out of count, are topic rather than temporal?”
“We are not even agreed that there are days out of count,” Christopher objected.
“Drakes’ teeth, by the way, while rare, are not unknown,” Adrian Montaigne popped the statement out of his mouth as if in someone else’s voice. He seemed startled at his own words.
“Drake is really the same word as Drakos, a dragon,” Christopher Foxx mumbled. “Ah, I was going to say something else but it is gone now.”
“Waiter, what is the name of the excellent stuff with which the drake is basted and to which it is wedded?” Vincent Rue asked in happy wonder.
“Dragons’ sauce,” said the waiter.
“Well, just what is the mystery, the uncommonness of the sheldrake, Buford?” Christopher asked him.
“I don’t seem to remember,” that man said. “Ah, let us start our discussion with my, our, failure to remember such things. Vincent, did you not have a short paper prepared on ‘Amnesia, the Holes in the Pockets of the Seamless Garment’?”
“I forget. Did I have such a paper prepared? I will look in my own pockets.”
Meanwhile, back on the mountain, back on the thundering mountain there were certain daring and comic persons rushing in and out and counting coup on the Wrath of God. It is a dangerous game. These were the big prophets who prayed so violently and sweated so bloodily and wrestled so strongly. It was they who fought for the salving or the salvation of the days, in fear and in chuckling, in scare-shaking and in laughter-shaking. The thundering mountain was a funny one this morning. It didn’t reach clear to the ground. There was a great space between, and there were eagles flying under it. And the day, the day, was it really the first Monday of Blue-Goose Autumn? Was it really a Monday at all? Or was it a Thursday or an aleikaday?
It was like another morning of not long before. The eagles remember it; the clouds remember it; the mountain wrestlers remember it dimly, though some of the memory has been taken away from them.
Remember how it is written on the holy skins: “If you have faith you shall say to the mountain ‘Remove from here and cast thyself into the sea’ and it will do it.” Well, on that morning they had tried it. Several of the big prophets and wrestlers tried it, for they did have faith. They groaned with travail and joy, they strove mightily, and they did move the mountain and make it cast itself into the sea.
But the thunders made the waters back off. The waters refused to accept or to submerge the mountain. The prayer-men and wrestlers had sufficient faith, but the ocean did not. Whoever had the last laugh on that holy morning?
The strivers were timeless, of the prime age, but they were often called the “grandfathers” brothers’ by the people. They were up there now, the great prophets and prayer-men and wrestlers. One of these intrepid men was an Indian and he was attempting to put the Indian Sign on God himself. God, however, was like a mist and would not be signed.
“We will wrestle,” the Indian said to God in the mist, “we will wrestle to see which of us shall be Lord for this day. I tell you it is not thick enough if only the regular days flow. I hesitate to instruct you in your own business, and yet someone must instruct you. There must be overflowing and special days apart from the regular days. You have such days, I am sure of that, but you keep them prisoned in a bag. It is necessary now that I wrest one of them from you.”
They wrestled, inasmuch as a man slick with his own sweat and blood may wrestle with a mist: and it seemed that the Indian won the lordship of a day from God. “It will be a day of grass,” the Indian said. “It will be none of your dry and juiceless days.” The Indian lay exhausted with his fingers entwined in the won day: and the strength came back to him. “You make a great thing about marking every sparrow’s fall,” the Indian said then. “See that you forget not to mark this day.”
The thing that happened then was this: God marked the day for which they had wrestled, but he marked it on a different holy skin in a different place, not on the regular skin that lists the regular days. This act caused the wrested day to be one of the Days out of Count.
Prophets, wrestlers, praying-men of other sorts were on the mountain also. There were black men who sometimes strove for kaffir-corn days or ivory-tree days. There were brown island men who wrestled for sailfish days or wild-pig days. There were pinkish north-wood men who walked on pine needles and balsam; there were gnarled men out of the swampy lands; there were town men from the great towns. All of these strove with the Lord in fear and in chuckling.
Some of these were beheaded and quartered, and the pieces of them were flung down violently to earth: it is believed that there were certain qualities lacking in these, or that their strength had finally come to an end. But the others, the most of them, won great days from the Lord, Heydays, Halcyon or Kingfisher Days, Maedchensommer Days, St. Garvais Days, Indian Summer Days. These were all rich days, full of joy and death, bubbling with ecstasy and blood. And yet all were marked on different of the holy skins and so they became the Days out of Count.
“Days out of the Count,” Buford Strange was saying. “It’s an entrancing idea, and we have almost proved it. Seasons out of the count! It’s striking that the word for putting a condiment on should be the same word as a division of the year. Well, the seasons out of the count are all well seasoned and spiced. There are whole multiplex layered eras out of the count. The ice ages are such. I do not say ‘were such’; I say ‘are such.’”
“But the ice ages are real, real, real,” Helen Hightower insisted. (Quite a few long hours had passed in the discussions, and now Helen Hightower, the wife of Christopher Foxx, was off her work at the telephone exchange and had put on her glad rags and joined the scholars.)
“Certainly they are real, Helen,” Buford Strange said. “If only I were so real! I believe that you remember them, or know them, more than most of us do. You have a dangerously incomplete amnesia on so many things that I wonder the thunder doesn’t come and take you. But in the days and years and centuries and eras of the straight count there are no ice ages.”
“Well then, how, for instance, would local dwellers account for terminal moraines and glacial till generally?” asked Conquering Sharp-Leaf—ah, Vincent Rue.
(They were at the University, in that cozy room in the psychology department where Buford Strange usually held forth, the room that was just below the special effects room of Professor Timacheff.)
“How did they account for such before the time of modern geology?” Buford asked. “They didn’t. There would be a new boulder one morning that had not been there the day before. The sheep-herder of the place would say that the moon had drawn it out of the ground, or that it had fallen from the sky.”
“You’re crazy, Buford,” Adrian Montaigne said with a certain affection. “Why the ice ages then? Why should they have happened, even in times out of count? Why should they have left their footprints in the times within the count?” Adrian had very huge and powerful hands. Why had they not noticed this before?
“I believe there was a dynasty of great and muscular prophets and ghost-wrestlers who wanted to call out the terrible days of Fimbul Winter,” Buford said in a hushed voice. “I don’t know why they wanted such things, or why they sweated blood and wrestled prodigies to obtain them. They were men, but they are remembered as the frost giants.”
“Oh my grand, grand uncles!” Day-Torch—Helen Hightower, rather, cried out. “Days of snow! Days of ice! Millions of them!”
“You are saying that certain archetypes—” Kit-Fox began.
“Shook the pillars of Heaven till the snow and ice fell down for a million days, for a million days out of the count,” Buford Strange finished.
“Strange Buffalo, ah, Buford, you are crazy,” Christopher Foxx chided much as Adrian had. Christopher was talking, but the queerly smiling Adrian had now become the presence in the room. Adrian had the curious under-rutile of the skin of one who has sweated blood in prayer and buffoonery and passion. Why had they not noticed that of him before?
“I could almost believe that you were one of the great challengers yourself, Strange,” Christopher said to Buford, but he was looking at Adrian.
“You strike me as with a lance, Kit,” Buford said sadly. “You uncover my mortification. For I failed. I don’t know when it was. It was on a day out of the count. I failed a year ago or ten thousand years ago. I could not make it among the great ones. I was not cast out to my death: I was never in. There was room for me, and an opportunity for the ascent, but I failed in nerve. And one who has aspired to be a champion or prophet cannot fall back to be an ordinary man. So I am less than that: I am short of manhood. But, sadly, I do remember and live in other sorts of days.”
“I believe that the aberrant days are simultaneous with the prosaic days,” Adrian Montaigne mused. Adrian was quite a large man. Why had they not noticed that before?
“No, no, they are not simultaneous,” Buford was correcting him. “There are the days out of the count and there are the days in the count. Those out of count are outside of time so they cannot be simultaneous with anything. You have to see it that way.”
“You see it your way and I’ll see it mine.” Adrian was stubborn. “Consider some of the aberrant times or countries: St. Garvais’ Springtime, St. Martin’s Summer (the saints in these names were mountain prophets and wrestlers, but some of them were not at all saintly in their violence), Midas March (the very rich need their special season also: it is said that, in their special month, they are superiorly endowed in all ways), Dog Days, Halcyon Days, Dragon Days, Harvest May (what in the world is harvested in May?), All-Hallow Summer, Days of Ivory, Days of Horn, Indian Summer, Wicklow Week, Apricot Autumn, Goose Summer, Giant-Stone Days, Day of the Crooked Mile, the season called Alcedonia by the Latins. I tell you that all these days are happening at the same time!” This man named Adoration on the Mountain, or rather Adrian Montaigne, had a reckless sort of transcendence about him now.
“No, they do not all happen at the same time,” Strange Buffalo was saying, “for the aberrant days of them are not in time. They are places and not times.”
“Are there no nighttime hours in the times out of time?” Vincent Rue asked.
“No. Not in the same sense. They are in another province entirely,” Buford said.
There was thunder in the special effects room of Professor Timacheff on the floor just above them, cheerful, almost vulgar thunder. Timacheff taught some sensational (sense response and also melodramatic) courses up there. But how did he get such special effects anyhow?
“They do happen at the same time,” Adrian Mountain insisted, and he was laughing like boulders coming together. Quite a few things seemed to be happening to Adrian all at the same time. “They are all happening right now. I am sitting with you here this minute, but I am also on the mountain this minute. The thunder in the room above, it is real thunder, you know. And there is a deeper, more distant, more raffish thunder behind it which primitives call God’s-Laughter Thunder.”
“This gets out of hand now,” Vincent Rue protested. “It is supposed to be a serious symposium on spatial and temporal underlays. Several of you have turned it into a silly place and a silly time. You are taking too anthropomorphic a view of all these things, including God. One does not really wrestle with God in a bush or a mist, or ride in wildly on a pony and count coup on God. Even as an atheist I find these ideas distasteful.”
“But we are anthropoi, men,” Adrian proclaimed. “What other view than an anthropomorphic view could we take? That we should play the God-game, that we should wrestle with a God-form and try to wrest lordship of days from him, that we should essay to count coup on God, I as a theist do not find at all distasteful.
“Why! One of them is failing now! It happens so seldom. I wonder if I have a chance.”
“Adrian, what are you talking about?” Vincent demanded.
“How could you do it, Adrian, when I could not?” Buford Strange asked.
“Remember me when you come to your place, Adrian,” Day-Torch cried. “Send me a day. Oh, send me a day-fire day.”
“And me also, Adrian,” Kit-Fox begged. “I would love to do it myself, but it isn’t given to everyone.”
There was a strong shouting in the room above. There was the concussion of bodies, and the roaring of mountain winds.
“What in all the crooked days is Professor Timacheff doing up there this evening?” Vincent Sharp-Leaf asked angrily. “And what things are you doing here, Adrian? You look like a man set afire.”
“Make room for me! Oh, make room for me!” Adrian of the Mountain cried out in a voice that had its own crackling thunder. He was in the very transport of passion and he glistened red with his own bloody sweat. “One is failing, one is falling, why doesn’t he fall then?”
“Help with it, Kit-Fox! And I help also,” Day-Torch yowled.
“I help!” Kit-Fox yelped. The room shuddered, the building shuddered, the whole afternoon shuddered. There was a rending of boulders, either on the prophet’s mountain or in the special effects room of Professor Timacheff above them. There was a great breaking and entering, a place turning into a time.
There came a roaring like horses in the sky. Then was the multiplex crash (God save his soul, his body is done for) of bloody torso and severed limbs falling into the room from a great height, splintering the table at which the five of them sat, breaking the room, splattering them all with blood. But the ceiling above was unbreached and unharmed and there was no point of entry.
“I am not man enough even to watch it,” Buford Strange gurgled, and he slumped sideways unconscious.
“Timacheff, you fool!” Vincent Rue bawled to the space above them. “Watch your damned special effects! You’re wrecking the place!”
Unquestionably, that Timacheff was good. He used his special effects in classes on phenomenology that he taught up there.
“The head, the head! Don’t let them forget the head!” Day-Torch cried in a flaming voice.
“I just remembered that Timacheff is out of town and is holding no classes today,” Kit-Fox muttered in vulpine wonder.
“Make room for me! Oh, make room for me!” Adrian Mountain boomed. Then he was gone from the midst of them. He would be a factor, though, “in days to come.”
“The head, the head!” Day-Torch flamed and scorched.
Christopher and Vincent tried to straighten up the unconscious Buford Strange. They shook him, but he came apart and one arm came off him. He was revealed as a straw-man filled with bloody straw, and no more.
“Why, he’s naught but a poorly made scarecrow,” Christopher Foxx said in wonder. “He was right that one who falls back from it cannot become an ordinary man again. He will be less than man.”
“That’s funny. He always looked like a man to me,” Vincent Rue said.
“The head, the head! You forget the head. Let the head fall down!” Day-Torch cried.
And the head fell down.
It smashed itself like a bursting pumpkin on the broken floor.
4.
Under the town is a woolier town,
And the blood splashed up and the head fell down.
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