Рафаэль Лафферти - The Best of R. A. Lafferty

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

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

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

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

“No, I think I’ll run in and play.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Pieces of stories, Oread?”

“Oh yes.”

“Iron stories, girl?”

“Oh, yes, yes, iron stories.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, it’s nice, Mama,” Oread said.