Modern classics of fanta.., p.11
Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 11
I went to the edge of that long drop down. The wind blew from some place—maybe below, maybe above or behind or before. I reached out my guitar, and Page Jarrett crawled to where she could lay hold, and that way I helped her to the solid standing. She stood beside me, inches taller, and she put a burning mean look on Rafe Enoch. He made out he didn’t notice.
“Paul Bunyan,” he said, after what I’d been saying. “I’ve heard tell his name—champion logger in the northern states, wasn’t he?”
“Champion logger,” I said. “Bigger than you, I reckon—”‘
“Not bigger!” thundered Rafe Enoch.
“Well, as big.”
“Know ary song about him?”
“Can’t say there’s been one made. Rafe, you say you despise to be looked on by folks.”
“Just by little folks, John. Page Jarrett can look on me if she relishes to.” Quick she looked off, and drew herself up proud. Right then she appeared to be taller than what Mr. Oakman Dillon had reckoned her, and a beauty-looking thing she was, you hear what I say, gentlemen. I cut my eyes up to the clouds; they hung down over us, loose and close, like the roof of a tent. I could feel the closeness around me, the way you feel water when you’ve waded up to the line of your mouth.
“How soon does the rain start falling?” I asked Rafe.
“Can fall ary time now,” said Rafe, pulling a grass-stalk to bite in his big teeth. “Page’s safe off that rock point, it don’t differ me a shuck when that rain falls.”
“But when?” I asked again. “You know.”
“Sure I know.” He walked toward the pond, and me with him. I felt Page Jarrett’s grape-green eyes digging our backs. The pond water was shiny tarry black from reflecting the clouds. “Sure,” he said, “I know a right much. You natural human folks, you know so pitiful little I’m sorry for you.”
“Why not teach us?” I wondered him, and he snorted like a big mean horse.
“Ain’t the way it’s reckoned to be, John. Giants are figured stupid. Remember the tales? Your name’s John—do you call to mind a tale about a man named Jack, long back in time?”
“Jack the Giant Killer,” I nodded. “He trapped a giant in a hole—”
“Cormoran,” said Rafe. “Jack dug a pit in front of his door. And Blunderbore he tricked into stabbing himself open wida a knife. But how did them things happen? He blew a trumpet to tole Cormoran out, and he sat and ate at Blunderbore’s table like a friend before tricking him to death.” A louder snort. “More foul fighting, John. Did you come up here to be Jack the Giant Killer? Got some dirty tricks? If that’s how it is, you done drove your ducks to the wrong puddle.”
“More than a puddle here,” I said, looking at the clouds and then across the pond. “See yonder, Rafe, where the water edge comes above that little slanty slope. If it was open, enough water could run off to keep the Notch from flooding.”
“Could be done,” he nodded his big head, “if you had machinery to pull the rocks out. But they’re bigger than them fall rocks, they ain’t half washed away to begin with. And there ain’t no machinery, so just forget it. The Notch washes out, with most of the folks living in it—all of them, if the devil bids high enough. Sing me a song.”
I swept the strings with my thumb. “Thinking about John Henry,” I said, half to myself. “He wouldn’t need a machine to open up a drain-off place yonder.”
“How’d he do it?” asked Rafe.
“He had a hammer twice the size ary other man swung,” I said. “He drove steel when they cut the Big Bend Tunnel through Craze Mountain. Out-drove the steam drill they brought to compete him out of his job.”
“Steam drill,” Rafe repeated me, the way you’d think he was faintly recollecting the tale. “They’d do that—ordinary size folks, trying to work against a giant. How big was John Henry?”
“Heard tell he was the biggest man ever in Virginia.”
“Big as me?”
“Maybe not quite. Maybe just stronger.”
“Stronger!”
I had my work cut out not to run from the anger in Rafe Enoch’s face.
“Well,” I said, “he beat the steam drill…”
John Henry said to his captain,
“A man ain’t nothing but a man,
But before I let that steam drill run me down,
I’ll die with this hammer in my hand…”
“He’d die trying,” said Rafe, and his ears were sort of cocked forward, die way you hear elephants do to listen.
“He’d die winning,” I said, and sang the next verse:
John Henry drove steel that long day through,
The steam drill failed by his side.
The mountain was high, the sun was low,
John he laid down his hammer and he died… .
“Killed himself beating the drill!” and Rafe’s pumpkin fist banged into his other palm. “Reckon I could have beat it and lived!”
I was looking at the place where the pond could have a drain-off.
“No,” said Rafe. “Even if I wanted to, I don’t have no hammer twice the size of other folks’ hammers.”
A drop of rain fell on me. I started around the pond.
“Where you going?” Rafe called, but I didn’t look back. Stopped beside the wigwam-house and put my guitar inside. It was gloomy in there, but I saw his homemade stool as high as a table, his table almost chin high to a natural man, a bed woven of hickory splits and spread with bear and deer skins to be the right bed for Og, King of Bashan, in the Book of Joshua. Next to the door I grabbed up a big pole of hickory, off some stacked firewood.
“Where you going?” he called again.
I went to where the slope started. I poked my hickory between two rocks and started to pry. He laughed, and rain sprinkled down.
“Go on, John,” he granted me. “Grub out a sluiceway there. I like to watch little scrabbly men work. Come in the house, Page, we’ll watch him from in there.”
I couldn’t budge the rocks from each other. They were big—like trunks or grain sacks, and must have weighed in the half-tons. They were set in there, one next to the other, four-five of them holding the water back from pouring down that slope. I heaved on my hickory till it bent like a bow.
“Come on,” said Rafe again, and I looked around in time to see him put out his shovel hand and take her by the wrist. Gentlemen, the way she slapped him with her other hand it made me jump with the crack.
I watched, knee-deep in water. He put his hand to his gold-bearded cheek and his eye-whites glittered in the rain.
“If you was a man,” he boomed down at Page, “I’d slap you dead.”
“Do it!” she blazed him back. “I’m a woman, and I don’t fear you or ary overgrown, sorry-for-himself giant ever drew breath!”
With me standing far enough off to forget how little I was by them, they didn’t seem too far apart in size. Page was like a small-made woman facing up to a sizeable man, that was all.
“If you was a man—” he began again.
“I’m no man, nor neither ain’t you a man!” she cut off. “Don’t know if you’re an ape or a bull-brute or what, but you’re no man! John’s the only man here, and I’m helping him! Stop me if you dare!”
She ran to where I was. Rain battered her hair into a brown tumble and soaked her dress snug against her fine proud strong body. Into the water she splashed.
“Let me pry,” and she grabbed the hickory pole. “I’ll pry up and you tug up, and maybe—”
I bent to grab the rock with my hands. Together we tried. Seemed to me the rock stirred a little, like the drowsy sleeper in the old song. Dragging at it, I felt the muscles strain and crackle in my shoulders and arms.
“Look out!” squealed Page. “Here he comes!”
Up on the bank she jumped again, with the hickory ready to club at him. He paid her no mind, she stopped down toward where I was.
“Get on out of there!” he bellowed, the way I’ve always reckoned a buffalo bull might do. “Get out!”
“But—but—” I was wheezing. “Somebody’s got to move this rock—”
“You ain’t budging it ary mite!” he almost deafened me in the ear. “Get out and let somebody there can do something!”
He grabbed my arm and snatched me out of the water, so sudden I almost sprained my fingers letting go the rock. Next second he jumped in, with a splash like a jolt-wagon going off a bridge. His big shovelly hands clamped the sides of the rock, and through the falling rain I saw him heave.
He swole up like a mad toad-frog. His patchy fur shirt split down the middle of his back while those muscles humped under his skin. His teeth flashed out in his beard, set hard together.
Then, just when I thought he’d bust open, that rock came out of its bed, came up in the air, landing on the bank away from where it’d been.
“I swear, Rafe—” I began to say.
“Help him,” Page put in. “Let’s both help.”
We scrabbled for a hold on the rock, but Rafe hollered us away, so loud and sharp we jumped back like scared dogs. I saw that rock quiver, and cracks ran through the rain-soaked dirt around it. Then it came up on end, the way you’d think it had hinges, and Rafe got both arms around it and heaved it clear. He laughed, with the rain wet in his beard.
Standing clear where he’d told her to stand, Page pointed to the falls’ end.
Looked as if the rain hadn’t had to put down but just a little bit. Those loose rocks trembled and shifted in their places. They were ready to go. Then Rafe saw what we saw.
“Run, you two!” he howled about that racketty storm. “Run, run-quick!”
I didn’t tarry to ask the reason. I grabbed Page’s arm and we ran toward the falls. Running, I looked back past my elbow.
Rafe had straightened up, straddling among the rocks by the slope. He looked into the clouds, that were almost resting on his shaggy head, and both his big arms lifted and his hands spread and then their fingers snapped. I could hear the snaps—Whap! Whap! Like two pistol shots.
He got what he called for, a forked stroke of lightning, straight and hard down on him like a fish-gig in the hands of the Lord’s top angel. It slammed down on Rafe and over and around him, and it shook itself all the way from rock to clouds. Rafe Enoch in its grip lit up and glowed, the way you’d think he’d been forge-hammered out of iron and heated red in a furnace to temper him.
I heard the almightiest tearing noise I ever could call for. I felt the rock shelf quiver all the way to where we’d stopped dead to watch. My thought was, the falls had torn open and the Notch was drowning.
But the lightning yanked back to where it had come from. It had opened the sluiceway, and water flooded through and down slope, and Rafe had fallen down while it poured and puddled over him.
“He’s struck dead!” I heard Page say over the rain.
“No,” I said back.
For Rafe Enoch was on his knees, on his feet, and out of that drain-off rush, somehow staggering up from the flat sprawl where the lightning had flung him. His knees wobbled and bucked, but he drew them up straight and mopped a big muddy hand across his big muddy face.
He came walking toward us, slow and dreamy-moving, and by now the rain rushed down instead of fell down. It was like what my old folks used to call raining tomcats and hoe handles. I bowed my head to it, and made to pull Page toward Rafe’s wigwam; but she wouldn’t pull, she held where she was, till Rafe came up with us. Then, all three, we went together and got into the tight, dark shelter of the wigwam-house, with the rain and wind battering the outside of it.
Rafe and I sat on the big bed, and Page on a stool, looking small there. She wrung the water out of her hair.
“You all right?” she inquired Rafe.
I looked at him. Between the drain-off and the wigwam, rain had washed off that mud that gaumed all over him. He was wet and clean, with his patch-pelt shirt hanging away from his big chest and shoulders in soggy rags.
The lightning had singed off part of his beard. He lifted big fingers to wipe off the wet fluffy ash, and I saw the stripe on his naked arm, on the broad back of his hand, and I made out another stripe just like it on the other. Lightning had slammed down both hands and arms, and clear down his flanks and legs—I saw the burnt lines on his fringed leggings. It was like a double lash of God’s whip.
Page got off the stool and came close to him. Just then he didn’t look so out-and-out much bigger than she was. She put a long gentle finger on that lightning lash where it ran along his shoulder.
“Does it hurt?” she asked. “You got some grease I could put on it?”
He lifted his head, heavy, but didn’t look at her. He looked at me. “I lied to you all,” he said.
“Lied to us?” I asked him.
“I did call for the rain. Called for the biggest rain I ever thought of. Didn’t pure down want to kill off the folks in the Notch, but to my reckoning, if I made it rain, and saved Page up here—”
At last he looked at her, with a shamed face.
“The others would be gone and forgotten. There’d be Page and me.” His dark eyes grabbed her green ones. “But I didn’t rightly know how she disgusts the sight of me.” His head dropped again. “I feel the nearest to nothing I ever did.”
“You opened the drain-off and saved the Notch from your rain,” put in Page, her voice so gentle you’d never think it. “Called down the lightning to help you.”
“Called down the lightning to kill me,” said Rafe. “I never reckoned it wouldn’t. I wanted to die. I want to die now.”
“Live,” she bade him.
He got up at that, standing tall over her.
“Don’t worry when folks look on you,” she said, her voice still ever so gentle. “They’re just wondered at you, Rafe. Folks were wondered that same way at Saint Christopher, the giant who carried Lord Jesus across the river.”
“I was too proud,” he mumbled in his big bull throat. “Proud of my Genesis giant blood, of being one of the sons of God—”
“Shoo, Rafe,” and her voice was gentler still, “the least man in size you’d call for, when he speaks to God, he says, ‘Our Father.’“
Rafe turned from her.
“You said I could look on you if I wanted,” said Page Jarrett. “And I want.”
Back he turned, and bent down, and she rose on her toe tips so their faces came together.
The rain stopped, the way you’d think that stopped it. But they never seemed to know it, and I picked up my guitar and went out toward the lip of the cliff.
The falls were going strong, but the drain-off handled enough water so there’d be no washout to drown the folks below. I reckoned the rocks would be the outdoingist slippery rocks ever climbed down by mortal man, and it would take me a long time. Long enough, maybe so, for me to think out the right way to tell Mr. Lane Jarrett he was just before having himself a son-in-law of the Genesis giant blood, and pretty soon after while, grandchildren of the same strain.
The sun came stabbing through the clouds and flung them away in chunks to right and left, across the bright blue sky.
* * * *
DAMON KNIGHT
Extempore
A multitalented professional whose career as writer, editor, critic, and anthologist spans more than fifty years, Damon Knight has long been a major shaping force in die development of modern science fiction. He wrote the first important book of SF criticism, In Search of Wonder, and won a Hugo Award for it. He was the founder of the Science Fiction Writers of America, co-founder of the prestigious Milford Writer’s Conference, and, with his wife, writer Kate Wilhelm, was deeply involved for many years in the operation of the Clarion workshop for new writers, which was modeled after the Milford Conference. He was the editor of Orbit, the longest running original anthology series in the history of American science fiction, and has also produced important works of genre history such as The Fulurians and Turning Points, as well as dozens of influential reprint anthologies. Knight has also been highly influential as a writer, and may well be one of the finest short story writers ever to work in the genre. His books include the novels A for Anything, The Other Foot, Hell’s Pavement, The Man in the Tee, CV, and A Reasonable World, and the collections Rule Golden and Other Statics, Turning On, Far Out, and The Best of Damon Knight. His most recent books are the collection One Side Laughing and the novel Why Do Birds. Humpty Dumpty: An Oval was published in September of 1996. Knight lives with his family in Eugene, Oregon.
Knight hasn’t written much overt fantasy, but several of his stories blur the borderlines between fantasy and SF. As does the mordant and elegant story that follows, which shows that you can make Magic work, even in the most mundane of circumstances, if you just want it to work badly enough. Once it does work, though, you’d better be prepared to accept the consequences …
