Daily Lafferty # 10

"These are bitter grits that we eat from the trains of Appalachia: their own hogs eat finer than we do. Consider the wealths in High Appalachia: the red grapes of Roane and the white grapes of Smokey Mountain Vineyards; the sweet corn centers of fertile Shelby, and the popcorn plantations of Cumberland; the flax, the wool, the cotton, the Jim-pie-weed cloth; the peat and the coal and the pine-knots for fuel; the rock oil from the hills and the catfish oil from the streams; the pumpkin bread, the hickory nut bread, the bean bread every day of the week; fat beef, fat pork, fat mutton; ducks and geese and woodcock and savanna hen; turkey and guinea; the plump rabbits of Ozarkia and the meaty woodchucks of Doniphan; light wheat, dark rye, barley, and rolling fields of oats; sunflower seeds, pecans and peanuts. Would it be robbery if we took our fair share of these things, nor waited for their niggardly food trains?"

-R. A. Lafferty, 'Assault On Fat Mountain' (1975)

I Wish I Could Pray and Wrestle as Wooly and Horny as the Big Ones Do

"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."

-R. A. Lafferty, 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw' (1973)