02AD: "John Salt"

ALEX Yes, I've known him a long time, Mary. I knew him when he was a boy named John Salt. And before he was a Faith Man he was a Pitch Man. He brought the pentecostal touch even to peddling potato peelers. He came very near to calling down the fire of Heaven on those who would not buy. He left a lot of house-wives shaken up, with that little peeler in their hand, and the dazed look in the eye. Before that I knew him as a boy. There are legends about him even from his boyhood, and mostly I know how they started. MARY Does that make them any easier to disbelieve? ALEX No. There was a bull terrior that he killed in the presence of his cronies, and he dismembered it. For the effect of this you must know that he was already the master of atmosphere. He was eleven then, and the rest of us were ten. He was always a little older than anyone else. Sometimes I believe that he is a year or two older than God. Naturally it was at night and in our cave, and it was done by candle light. He must have practiced something in secret. Even he wouldn't have known how to let the blood with such a flourish otherwise. I tell you, Mary, it was a sight to remember, the way he slew that dog and cut it up in pieces. MARY O, I knew a boy who killed dogs. Everyone knew a boy who killed animals. ALEX Not everyone knew a boy who brought them back to life. He announced that he would pray all night over the members of the dog. He desired that if we had the strength we should stay and watch and pray with him. But he knew that the rest of us would have to go home quite soon. And he said that in the morning he would put the dog back together and breathe life into it.

"John Salt" is one of Lafferty’s most interesting works. It is the only play or script he ever wrote, though he later reworked its material as a short story. The radio play may have aired, but if it did, the recording seems lost. If you want early, pre-genrified, pre-nucleation Lafferty, this is it. The things that would occupy him for the rest of his career are here: religion, con men, grotesquerie, performance, and the line between fraud and revelation.

Since the original performance is gone, I wanted a version I could listen to. This is the best I could put together. Everything in it comes from Lafferty’s script, even if the finished thing has more than a little community-theater flavor. I rather like that. John Salt himself reformed and later reappeared in Lafferty’s “Faith Sufficient.”