And that simple explanation is herewith given, more or less as it was written in thick blood in the log book.
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.
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 metaclass="underline" 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.