19 Misc Laff: The Men Who Knew Everything and In a Green Tree

Some Barnaby thoughts.

During the fall of 1978, Lafferty was looking for someone (anyone) to publish a completed masterpiece, the quasi-autobiographical tetralogy, In a Green Tree. To help the effort along, his agent, Virginia Kidd, brought good news. People were interested in the work, so she gave him a task. Write one-page summaries of each book, Raphael, just like the one-page proposal summaries you had previously done for the Dana Coscuin saga. When Lafferty had earlier in the decade proposed Coscuin via synopsis, he left aspects of the ending open. He said he would discover what happened by writing it:

Lafferty’s last major accomplishment as a writer would be finishing Coscuin right before he retired in an astonishing explosion of energy.

Lafferty’s other great long work, In a Green Tree, differed from Coscuin because when Virginia Kidd asked him to summarize it, the tetralogy was complete, minus his aborted fifth part written after his retirement, and the Austro stories themselves were in the past. This was no proposal. So he set about drafting the requested promotional material, a rethink of what he had made.

It is a fun read and, really, an independent Lafferty work that ought to be published. Synopsis is so effective for Coscuin and Green Tree because they have definite centers. The first has Dana and his infernal rival; the second has the Tulsa neighborhood. Contrast this with Argo. Argo is polycentric, divided between Finnegan and Duffey. It has been Lafferty’s great fortune and his misfortune that his best known large design is Argo, for Argo shows his heaviest themes and ideas, and perhaps his greatest inventiveness, with much of his best prose. It shows his psyche. But it is also far less linear. Argo, on the other hand, nearly requires initiation from readers who already know the territory.

When I first read The Devil is Dead as a teenager, I had no idea what I was looking at. The cover intrigued me, and the title won me over. Coscuin and Green Tree, by contrast, have easy well-lit entrances and exits because their movement is, first, sequentially temporal and, secondly, broadly linear. Unlike most of Lafferty, they could both be filmed and would look great on screen, and one would not do too much violence to their meaning.

They also feel autotelic, fully conceived, architectonic, whereas Duffey, of course, has contingencies, and Argo often feels discovered, cosmic and wild, or perhaps, inextricable from a yeasty making process. It is a work for artists. Both Finnegan and Duffey are artists, so no surprise there. What makes Coscuin and GT so difficult to know is their encyclopedic detail. In the first, one gets Lafferty’s fascinating obsession with history, and in the other, his prodigious memory.

Summarizing In a Green Tree did, however, pose a problem. Believing that a single page would not convey the tone and narrative arc of each part of GT, Lafferty enlarged his assignment from Kidd and wrote substantial synopses of roughly 3,000 words each, creating a 12,000-word supplementary document for the tetralogy. One can therefore read GT as he read it, after taking into account that he was trying market it. You can see the pages Lafferty was summarizing as he sat on his Mexican typewriter and flipped them, summarizing. This, that, and not that. (The Coscuin proposal shows where he changed his mind.) The document is thus immensely useful as a crib for any reader who wants to see the outline of the thousand-page work. And it is perhaps just as useful for showing what Lafferty considered not terribly important, because it also shows what he leaves out, the not that. And what does he leave out? Almost all of the Austro, Roy Mega, Mary Mondo, Australopithecus, Guna-Slopes material. Almost all of what people love about the Austro stories. In the entire summary, Austro is not mentioned. Nonetheless, the whole The Men Who Knew Everything sequence occurs within the less fantastical, parallel plane of In a Green Tree. Austro is there. Our other friend are as well. Barnaby himself is a personal key to the GT history of Flatland, with its appearing after he is cut off from his future by Loretta’s death and saved by the appearance. But a universe of weirdness is sublated within its mostly low mimetic rules. The cumulative effect is to show that In a Green Tree is not exactly adjacent to TMWKE, nor a realist dilution of it, but a parallel recasting in which the earlier cycle’s metaphysical and Fortean machinery is redistributed into genealogy, marriage, paternity, Tulsa history, and Catholic-social memory.

Among the details most telling in the synopsis is one not stated overtly in the novel. Lafferty writes about Loretta Sheen’s paternity. “Peggy Marie meets Loretta Sheen, the three-year-old daughter of Barnaby and Monica MacLish Sheen. But it was really somebody besides Barnaby who fathered the girl on the misbehaving Monica.” As with the Sheen cuckolding, other Lafferty choices in the synopsis can be used to cut through ambiguities in GT and perhaps the synopsis unintentionally gives us Lafferty's deeper intentions.

This morning, I reread Martin Heavisides’s essay “Oklahoma Gothic,” from the second volume of Feast of Laughter. It can be found here. It started me thinking about the synopsis again. Heavisides writes his the essay to argue that the TMWKE stories in Through Elegant Eyes are novel-like in their totality, and he is especially interested in the absence of Barnaby’s wife, puzzling over her absence. It is a symptomatic gap, later filled by the misbehaving Monica of GT.

Heavisides's essay is the first record of reading the TMWKE stories as a larger arc, and it remains useful for anyone who wants to think about them. Heavisides gets a great deal right, I think. I once picked an argument with him and changed mind. His insights, the things a careless reader might miss, are these: he sees that the cycle’s accumulating power is not accidental; that Lafferty was looking forward in the early stories and, in each later story, looking both forward and back, and he points out why; and that the sequence builds what Heavisides calls “a vivid moving mosaic,” rather than filling in a master outline. Again, he notices the important absence of Barnaby’s wife, treating it as an occlusion rather than an oversight, and presses the point hard enough to see that the sequence gives no account of widowhood, abandonment, or Athena-like motherlessness either.

But it isn’t occlusion, really. Barnaby Sheen’s wife, Monica MacLish, had not yet been created. In retrospect, she can now look like a big absence hidden inside the sequence, but that absence belongs to Lafferty’s later enlargement of the material. He introduced her and thereby pulled out one string that holds the short stories together: Barnaby’s batchlerhood. THWKE polyander dissolves when he decides to work the whole Sheen family into the governing metaphor of the oak: his green tree image of human community, Catholic in its heartwood, but larger than Catholicism, with generations being born, living, and dying.

Family, therefore, became very important to the characters of The Men Who Knew Everything stories in a way it had not been when Lafferty was chiefly exploring creation and time, Gnosticism, Fortean damned fact, sexual sin, animality, metaphysical possibility, and formal experimentation. In a Green Tree is pretty close our world. It looks at story sequence through real history. The oddities are often there, with Austro running around the neighborhood as an exchange student and poltergeists, but by 1978, the canvas has widened to include the lives of many people, fictional and historical. Lafferty is no longer writing idea-stories so much as trying to say what it is like to live day after day, year after year, until decades pass. What it is like to be a part of the green tree. He is thinking about the people who filled his own life in Tulsa, or figures standing in for them, and to bring his historical imagination to bear on the politically momentous years of his own lifespan.

I agree with Heavisides that the story sequence is novel-like, and that, as a result, anyone who wants to enjoy it has to track it as one tracks a novel. Watkin best explains why. His ideas give the core stories the structural spine of metaphysical adventure, lending the sequence greater unity—a spine that later becomes part of the generational saga of In a Green Tree. Ironically, it is really the first and second stories that are most important for the GT neighborhood. Thus, what we have in Through Elegent Eyes is one of Lafferty’s large, shaggy novel shapes.

Heavisides’s account of “St. Poleander’s Eve,” with its closing recapitulations of Fourth Mansions and Arrive at Easterwine, strikes me as the best argument for the “novel in stories” thesis, apart from the Watkin structure itself. Additionally, I agree that “Old Halloweens” was revised into a weaker version of itself. Heavisides identifies what was lost: the murdered-boy rescue, the larger forebodings, and the Gothic quality of the original. The really spooky stuff. Moreover, his etymological gloss on Mary Mondo—Italian mondo joined to the Marian Queen of Heaven—is exactly right. I would add only that Mary Mondo as Marian type and Loretta Sheen’s inner sawdust have a symbolic precursor. It is as though Arrive at Easterwine’s Mary Sawdust has divided into two figures, drawn out of Epikt, and given external life in Barnaby’s world. And there are any number of characters who are Snake: FDR, communists, hippies, bad priests and bishops, the liberal managerial class.

What Heavisides's essay misses at the largest level is not, finally, a matter of interpretation but of access. He works from Through Elegant Eyes without the full In a Green Tree manuscript in view. That manuscript would have given him Monica MacLish; Anselm Sheen as a substantial figure rather than a passing reference; more of John Penandrew as David Penandrew’s older brother, with the Orcutt Lake drowning behind him and his personal history; the source of “Barnaby” as Monica’s pet name for the young Bernard; Rita Palacios as the painter of the portrait; and, complicating his instinct about Loretta, the manuscript’s own paternity-doubt subplot, carried through a “subliminal whispering” device.

For those who want the nuts and bolts, some notes:

"The All-At-Once Man" (23 January 1970)

"The All-At-Once Man" introduces five-man company (Sheen, Drakos, O'Donovan, Benedetti, Penandrew) plus the narrator "Laff," the Harrow Street setting, the Augustinian formation at Monica Hall, and John Penandrew's project to become all-at-once-man by acquiring from Prester John in Ethiopia the secret of simultaneous existence in all his ages. In a Green Tree (GT) keeps the doctrine and big idea, with Penandrew saying to Pat O'Trassy, "I am the all-at-once-man, and as the all-at-once-man I will live forever in all my ages at the same time"; the term aeon survives without the Gnostic plenoma. Monica Hall is named throughout GT with its Augustinian identity; the four-man company (Sheen, Drakos, O'Donovan, Benedetti) carries forward. The novel reimagines Penandrew biographically: born in Crucifixion Parish with a brother David, he is already something of a young occultist in the grade-school chapters and is shot dead by Robert Bucket with seven silver bullets in the spring of 1960. The three external nephews are transposed into four internal faces: Carsun Bogle, Master Hyde, Catedratico Jekyl, Sinear; Zoe Archikos is dropped (or more accurately grafted onto) Helen Anastasis Penandrew as her middle name; Drakos drifts from "George" to predominantly "Basil"; Sheen appears as "Bernard" through the grade-school chapters before settling to "Barnaby." The Ethiopian journey survives stripped of its Prester-John-of-Mogadore framing, with Penandrew bringing back a missing datum from Ethiopia for his live-forever work; the Guna-Slopes recruitment likewise survives as the exchange-person Austro, though the term Aethiopia Cerebralis is dropped. Absent from GT: the Gnostic plenoma, Tanquerey's integrity, F. J. Sheed's aevum, Barnaby's sphere-and-speck cosmic thesis, the post-mortem Harrow Street haunted-house sequence (though Helen's silent/magic horn becomes a major motif in its own right), and the closing "Five Little Wise Men" couplet. The novel adds the Robert Bucket murder, the four-faces internalization, the Welsh "changeling or monster or morphic clans" (with Penandrew glossed as a Latin-Greek bastard formation meaning "barely man" or "almost man"), and a retrospective gloss naming James Tyrone, Old Pat O'Trassy, Basil Drakos, Cris Benedict, and their spouses as approaching the all-at-once state more nearly than Penandrew himself.

"Mud Violet" (2 January 1971)

"Mud Violet" opens the Watkin-inflected stories, with Lafferty’s metaphysical color cosmology, the nine basic colors, three authorities (God, Iris, E. I. Watkin), hylicon as the ultra-violet wave-band, and the doubled term "mud-violet" naming both the finest and the crudest seeing of one color—and tells, through Laff's "crude sensibilities," of Edmund Weakfish's classroom assignment, Weakfish asking the students to die in order to carry it out, of Loretta Sheen's compliance and the six dispatch deaths that follow, the supernatural rappings, Father John's exorcisms, the Symphony of the Seven Spooks in the barn, and the narrator's closing resolve to turn the knife on Mary Mondo over the supper table. In GT relocates the sequence into the "When the Music Breaks" chapter, opening with Weakfish's identical speech but attributing it to Roy Mega's total recall rather than to Laff, and carrying through all seven named victims, the rappings, and the exorcisms. The novel reimagines the central image, which is Loretta’s dead body: the body in Barnaby's study in the novel has  sawdust insides because Doll—given to Loretta in infancy by Helen Penandrew, long an inhabited member of the household ("'doll' is inhabited by a fragment of a splinter of myself")—has displaced the buried Loretta in Barnaby's perception, with Peggy Marie and BeeBee maintaining and repairing the figure (cedar and redwood sawdust from Pat O'Trassy's mill) even as they recognize among themselves "how can so wise a man as Barnaby not see that 'doll' is never 'doll'?" Drakos drifts from "George" to predominantly "Basil"; "Benedetti" appears as "Benedict" (novel: "the family name had been Benedetti until just one year before this"). The nine basic colors, hylicon, the mud-violet split, the three authorities, the ultra-violet camera apparatus, the primordial-versus-recycled dust doctrine, Topashi the Inferior Devil, the Symphony of the Seven Spooks, and the narrator's closing turn against Mary Mondo are absent from GT. The novel adds Doll's pre-history and Barnaby's perceptual displacement, the cardboard-man arc with the Royal Order of the Holy Wild Onions verse "Oh spare us, Lord, and spare our place, From flannel-mouth with cardboard face" and the November 1960 election that fulfills it, Pat O'Trassy's juice-sucker speech at the Builders Meeting, the mechanical-monkey conversation in which John Penandrew lays out his four faces, and the chapter's close at the December 1960 Quinquennial National Convention of Itinerant Piano-Tuners in Galveston announcing that "true tone has disappeared from the world"; the related Pitchblende-murder subplot in which Weakfish is named among the seven who drew lots.

"Barnaby's Clock" (11 June 1972)

"Barnaby's Clock" opens with two disclaimed beginnings—an uncle-and-nephew dialogue and a cosmologist-and-wife scene on faulty radiometric clocks, each followed by the narrator's self-cancellation—before settling, in §III, on Sheen's moveable-walls study, and tells of Barnaby's magic clock that reads any object's age by shape, texture, and essence, of Mary Mondo's wooly-wonder/sunshine-kid prophecy of a demiurge coming with his message "drawn and written on stone," of the clock's identification of an Australopithecus tooth as coming "from Ethiopia, about seventy miles northwest of Magdala, on the Guna Slopes," and of Austro's emergence from behind a partition in a bartender's jacket before Sheen's eminent-scientist visitors Velikov Vonk, Ergodic Eimer, and August Angstrom. GT absorbs Austro directly—the Guna Slopes survive, "Carrock" has really become his signature, the connection to Sheen's seismographic work is identified—and fulfills Mary Mondo's prophecy in incident without quoting it: "drawn and written on stone" becomes the Rocky McCrocky comic strip hand-carved on slate-rock and circulated weekly. The novel reimagines Austro's biography in a few ways: no longer a prophesied figure but "the very bright son of a leading native family of the slopes," member of the crocodile clan with the croc as his totem animal, dresser in Eton jackets and pearl-gray derby hats, inventor of the sound neutralizer, and offhand copout-speaker ("Carrock! I'm only a twelve year old kid"). The Australopithecus timeline is rewritten: where the magic clock keeps the species ancient with one tiny surviving colony, the novel compresses the whole flourishing to "nearer to three thousand years ago" and adds that "they hadn't stopped flourishing." Drakos drifts from "George" to predominantly "Basil"; Doll, already inhabited from infancy, is de-animated by Austro on the morning of his departure for Africa, told to "go to sleep now, 'doll', and continue to sleep" for a thousand years. The two disclaimed openings, the Shakespearean epigraphs, the magic clock itself and its unveiling, the shape-texture-essence cosmology, the catalogue of failed radiometric clocks, Mary Mondo's wooly-wonder prophecy in any quoted form, the eminent scientists Vonk, Eimer, and Angstrom, Willy McGilly and Arpad Arkarbaranan, the partitioned side-room, the taboo sofa, and Magdala itself are absent from GT. The novel adds the crocodile-clan totem-identification, the full Australopithecus society (farmers, poets, mathematicians, philosophers, quick-line comics), the Eton-jacket dudery, the slate-rock Rocky McCrocky comic strip, the sound neutralizer, and the Doll-sleep bookend that closes the talking-doll arc begun in "Mud Violet."

"And Read the Flesh Between the Lines" (19 August 1972)

"And Read the Flesh Between the Lines" opens with a rumbling in the unused room over the garages at Sheen's place; the four men plus Laff, reunited after eighteen months, climb up and find their old boyhood clubroom with its layered specialties and trunks of comic books, and across four scribbled epigraphs attributed wholly to cycle figures (Penandrew on the wall, Rocky McCrocky in cartoon balloon, Mary Mondo medium unknown, Loretta's motto from rubble and dust) the story develops two doctrines. “Flesh Between” (§2) names Austro col carraig, exadelphus, rock cousin—a kindred whose name has been expunged from Irish, Greek, and Dutch, with the Two Magdalas and the Hebrew Migdal Watch-Tower etymology levered in as the adjacent toponym thread. The compressed-history thesis (§3) reads consensus history as a coiled spring of suppressed events: Velikovsky's six hundred years must be added rather than subtracted (and added six times over), Atrox Fabulinus the Roman Rabelais reconstructs three Roman Kingdoms/Republics/Empires, the Lower Middle Ages contain a thousand-year gap with the Devil bound, John Braintree Adams and Cow-Moose Party President Parkinson have been excised, and libraries (as magazines in both senses) periodically explode. In §4 the room kablooms, Austro's eye is permanently blasted askew, his wink goes crooked, and he speaks his first complete English sentence ("Carrock, carrock, we bust the crock")—with the closing revelation that Rocky McCrocky was John Penandrew's boyhood comic-strip creation that took flesh in Austro. GT absorbs Austro at his already-fluent stage, inherits the comic strip but reassigns its authorship wholly to Austro himself (with the spelling drift to "Rockey"), and keeps "Carrock" as his offhand copout. Drakos drifts from "George" to "Basil"; "Benedetti" appears as "Benedict." The Flesh Between, the kindred-etymology canvas, the Two Magdalas with the Migdal Watch-Tower etymology, the compressed-history thesis entire, Velikovsky, Atrox Fabulinus and his suppressed Romans (Humerus Maximus, Nothus Nobilis, Anserem Captator, Capripex Ferox), the Lower Middle Ages with their bound Devil, the libraries-as-magazines pun, John Braintree Adams, Cow-Moose Parkinson, the mutually-exclusive-boyhoods doctrine, the four cycle-character epigraphs, the rumbling room, the boyhood clubroom over the garages, the kabloom, Pluto Water, Sullivan Seven-Passenger Family Balloons, Austro's first complete English sentence, his crooked wink, and his permanently askew eye are absent from GT. The novel's within-territory addition is the reassignment of Rocky McCrocky to Austro's single authorship, lifting the character out of the Penandrew-boyhood origin that FBL §4 revealed.

"Animal Fair" (3 December 1972)

"Animal Fair" opens with Mrs. Bagby's complaint that Austro the "anarchist" makes her grass and trees shaggy in the wooded draw between the Sheen and Benedetti properties (the §I Eco-Log epigraph furnishes the phrase "an anarchist of shaggy trees"), and across four sections framed by paired epigraphs — three pairings of external authority plus Eco-Log quatrain (Eisely §I, Watkin §II, Orthcutt §IV) flanking an internal "Song of the Shaper" plus Eco-Log pairing at §III—tells of Chiara Benedetti, between ten and fifteen, blue-black-eyed, possessed of "Really Eyes" that change what she looks at, who summons a magical Animal Fair in the wooded draw, a parliamentary Congress of Creatures seated as the Broader House facing the four men's Upper House, with Austro scribing for the animals and Laff for the lords. The story develops Drakos's arche/Logos/anarchy etymology lecture, Seminator the seed-man (one of the sons of Tellus, carrying leatherly leaf pouches of seeds and fish roe), Cris's retelling of Chiara's reading of Chesterton's truth-from-the-beginning plant, and a closing §IV in which Mary Mondo pours Lethe over the lords, the animals, and the brook so that no one is left remembering that the Fair happened. In a Green Tree preserves the property—"two and a half acres" verbatim—but transposes the magical Fair into Rita's 1958 portrait of Chiara at fourteen "in a sort of deer park or zoological garden without cages," reduces the parliamentary animals to Pat O'Trassy's carved stone bench at a bus-stop fountain rampant with shouting bears, bellowing buffalo bulls, buck deers, and coons, and softens the Really-Eyed reality-shaper to "Nature Girl" with "rapport with the beasts." Chiara's biography is preserved and extended: five days old in Peggy Marie's introduction, fully named "Chiara Margarita Marie Benedict" (Italian for Clara, after Cris's grandmother, with "Margarita Marie" a disguised tribute to Peggy Marie Pitchblende), shown with her cub bear and monkey at the bus-stop fountain, and courted by sixteen-year-old Roy Mega when she is ten—"the real thing between them." "Benedetti" appears as "Benedict" throughout the family; Drakos drifts from "George" to "Basil"; the one-off "Edmond Weakfish" of AF §I reverts to "Edmund" in the novel. The dual-epigraph structural innovation, the in-cycle epigraph voices (Eco-Log and Song of the Shaper), Eiseley and Watkin and Orthcutt as named authorities, the Upper House / Broader House parliamentary frame, the magical Animal Fair itself, Mrs. Bagby and her anarchist-of-shaggy-trees complaint, the arche/Logos etymology lecture, Seminator and the sons of Tellus, the seven forming eyes, the Really Eyes, Chiara's reality-shaping power, the Lethe-pouring resolution, the Chestertonian truth-from-the-beginning plant, the Mary-Violet compound name, and the Augustinian and Stevensonian tag-quotations are absent from in GT. The novel adds Patricia Rowley Benedict, Chiara's mother—a major character preserved from the grade-school chapters through to near the close of the novel—and Roy Mega's courtship of ten-year-old Chiara.

"The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos" (19 December 1972)

"The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos” opens with Doctor George Drakos displaying the home-made mice he has manufactured in his laboratory and, across eight unnumbered scenes prefaced by a single Eco-Log quatrain ("There was a crooked man / And he made some crooked mice: / And crooked fire and plasma ran / By thunderous device"), tells how Drakos's demiurgic claim "I have created animal life" is corrected by Barnaby ("You've not created life, man . . . you have projected life, your own, a little"): the mice have no DNA, they eat wind and electricity, they nibble the toes of the Acroceraunian Mountains, and they mock the cohort one by one. The storm climax in §8 brings ball lightning into Sheen's cluttered study through the chimney, windows, and registers; the lightning balls—Mary Mondo's familiars—devour every plasma mouse, Drakos suffers a pectoral pang of life returning to its source, Mary Mondo poses the Pilate question "What is life?", Austro turns the room's last drawing into "next week's Adventures of Rocky McCrocky," and the closing line drops the cycle's setting for the first time: "You have to expect such violent storms when you live in Oklahoma." GT develops the same ball-lightning-as-carrier-of-spectral-presence doctrine in a separate scene at Pitchblende Manor — ball lightning carrying the distorted image of a man beheaded at Tyburn Prison in the reign of Bloody Queen Bess, generating thirty thousand volts and croaking "Oh bloody planks of Tyburn Prison, tell me where my head reposes"—and supplies the in-text rationale for the cycle's Drakos name-drift: "Drakos would be called 'George' rather than 'Basil' in the army," after which the novel uses "George" in military and military-adjacent contexts (Fort Sill, the Pitchblende benefactor, the Loretta-doll consultations) and "Basil" elsewhere. The weekly Rocky McCrocky comic strip—UMD §8's "next week's"—is confirmed in the novel as "circulated every week," with the spelling drift to "Rockey." The plasma-mouse experiment itself, the demiurge/projection exchange between Drakos and Barnaby, the DNA-less mice eating wind and electricity, the Acroceraunian Mountains, the Rat King, Brookhaven, the Lady of Salette reference, Austro's eschatological cartoons, Drakos's pectoral pang, the Pilate "What is life?" in this form, the Eco-Log "crooked man" quatrain, and Oliver Benedetti the family dog are absent from GT. The novel adds the Tyburn / Bloody-Queen-Bess provenance of the ball-lightning ghost and the army-nickname rationale that the cycle stories left unexplained.

"The Two-Headed Lion of Cris Benedetti" (24 December 1972)

"The Two-Headed Lion of Cris Benedetti" opens with two front-matter epigraphs—a Psalmic prayer ("Save me from the lion's mouth, / And my lowness from the horns of the unicorns") paired with a Cantos Llantos quatrain attributed to the in-story Clement Goldbeater ("The Lion had two heads on him; / The Unicorn was polled")—and across the unfolding narrative tells, beginning "Professor Cristoforo Benedetti made a lion. He made it a little better than he had intended. He hadn't meant to make a literal lion; only a literary lion," of Cris's "Hanging Judas, No!" outburst, of his Athens-of-mid-America lecture placing Goldbeater in a genealogy of eleven Irish writers (Boucicault, Standish O'Grady, Carleton, Le Fanu, Banim, and others) with Joyce dismissed, of Roy Mega's introduction of the non-person doctrine ("The Putty Dwarf showed us how easily a non-person can operate. I believe that the great Clement is another non-person"), of Goldbeater's airport arrival and the tay at Barnaby's, of Goldbeater's theologically pointed retort to his maker ("God made me up. You're in His image, but weakly so. You did not make me up, man."), of the second Goldbeater (Clement T. of Howth) bursting through the door with a Jacob/Esau allusion against the first (Clement S. of Clontarf), and of the closing blackthorn fight in which both cousins beat each other and Cris with their sticks while Mary Mondo asks "What is life?" like jesting Pilate. In a Green Tree develops the Putty Dwarf substantially across eight pages as the ectoplasmic-mask non-person of the dirty comic strip that circulates among the teenagers, barred from the Grasshopper Bar and Grill alongside Edmund Weakfish and Cloud McKay ("only a man wearing an ectoplasmic mask and mantle . . . not a true ghost"); extends the non-person doctrine to twentieth-century literary culture ("Camus and Sartre and non-persons like that . . . Neither was Joyce . . . those two fakirs were invented by a tableful of drunk French-African soldiers"); confirms Roy Mega's biography—electronics genius, projector of the dead Alfred Pitchblende as an electronic ghost, knew Loretta and Violet Lonsdale at Cains Ballroom, has total recall; literalizes the Cantos Llantos quatrain in Alice Pitchblende's actual Polled Unicorns in Tulsa ("Show me a City of Tulsa ordinance against keeping Polled Unicorns"); anchors the jesting-Pilate formula in the Week-End Library 1930 anthology containing Aldous Huxley's Jesting Pilate; and places the blackthorn walking stick in a Catholic-patient annual-equipment list ("a new fur hat, a new blackthorn walking stick, and a new prayer-book"). "Benedetti" remains "Benedict" throughout; the titular "Professor" attached to his name is story-only, though the novel describes Cris as "a college professor"; the full Italian "Cristoforo" first name is story-only, with the novel using "Cristofer." The Cantos Llantos, the two-headed-lion / literary-lion / literal-lion distinction, the two Goldbeater cousins of Clontarf and Howth, the eleven named Irish writers, the "God made me up" retort, the blackthorn fight itself, the Jacob/Esau allusion, the taibhsiuil and deamhan Irish-ghost vocabulary, Cead mile failte and Ta failte romhat (Austro's sudden Irish), the "Hanging Judas, No!" outburst, the Athens-of-mid-America joke, the Unicorn student magazine, and the cycle's first cross-story callback ("Drakos himself had been a little bit sour for several months") are absent from GT. The novel adds the ectoplasmic-mask-and-mantle specifics for the Putty Dwarf, the Grasshopper Bar exclusion, Alice Pitchblende's literal Polled Unicorns in Tulsa, and Roy Mega's Pitchblende-ghost electronics projection.

"The Hellaceous Rocket of Harry O'Donovan" (30 December 1972)

"The Hellaceous Rocket of Harry O'Donovan" (Story 8, 30 December 1972) opens with "Harry O'Donovan had made an apparatus. Being political, he had made a political apparatus: and the essential of this was that it should look and walk and talk like a man"—under a single Eco-Log quatrain ("Four pieces needed in this plan / To make the flaming rocket man: / A mask, a pitch, a brain to whiz it; / The fourth—well, what the Devil is it?")—and across the unfolding narrative tells of Harry's serial selection of David Concourse the Mask, Ennis Hardhandle the Pitch, and Baxter Hungerman the Brain (recruited on Twelfth Street and Coyote Trail out west of Sand Springs, the cycle's first Tulsa-by-name geography), of Hardhandle's dissection of the JFK Inaugural Address as written by "an open-minded idiot who must here be nameless out of common decency" and delivered by "that near-perfect mask, Kennedy," of the Mysterious Stranger's arrival via a painting-disguised door to ratify the Faustine deal with the visible signature of black lightning, of the campaign-rocketing in which the three principals merge into one flaming creature, of the closing dual exorcism (Cris's Vulgate Latin "Ego praecipio tibi, exi ab eo" from Mark 9:25 joined with Austro's polyglot older rite combining Carrock with Greek kalos, coined exitexto, Yiddish or Anglo-Irish kabosh, and the particle ghim) expelling an eight-inch homunculus, and of Mary Mondo's unqualified "What is life?" completing the UMD / CRB / HRH three-iteration arc. GT supplies the cycle's Harry with two GT-side biographical anchors in Henry O'Donovan's school Catechism—the Latin family motto Vir Semper Hostem (with his father's flattering "The Man over his Enemies" reading) and "Politics is the art of the impossible" (Bismarck-inverted, glossed by the Tulsa Klan reality that prevents his father from running for mayor)—preserves "black lightning" as the Devil's Unconscious-signature ("Oh, it's like black lightning, going from the east to the west; it proclaims itself in all its deliriums"), instantiates the Faust legend in Gounod's opera at the Paris Opera House, treats Kennedy variously across four passages (the Tulsa Kennedy Building, the 1968 candidates in Strategos's pockets, RFK on Juneteenth, the Kennedys as "a weaker variation of the Gracci"), and carries Sand Springs across thirteen mentions spanning the first half of the novel. The novel uses "Henry O'Donovan" in childhood and "Harry O'Donovan" in adult contexts—the cycle's fourth documented name-drift after Sheen, Drakos, and Benedetti, with the same developmental rationale. The "Hellaceous Rocket" itself, the four-piece political-apparatus scheme, David Concourse, Ennis Hardhandle, Baxter Hungerman, the Mysterious Stranger, the Faustine vocabulary, the quaternity doctrine, the eight-inch homunculus, the dual exorcism with its Vulgate Latin and polyglot older rite, the JFK Inaugural Address dissection, the painting-disguised door, the campaign-rocket merger, and Austro's comic flight as Harry tries to recruit him for the marsh-gas Guna-Slopes rocket are absent from In a Green Tree. The novel adds the Catechism-classroom origin for the Vir Semper Hostem motto and the "art of the impossible" doctrine, the Gounod-operatic instantiation of the Faust legend, and the four-passage Kennedy iconography that HRH §3 reaches retroactively to include.

"The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen" (31 December 1972)

"The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen" opens "Barnaby Sheen made a world"—completing the cycle's made-paradigm four-man arc—under a single Beddoes epigraph from Death's Jest Book ("I have a lot of Fiat in my soul / and can myself create my little world") and across four editorially imposed scenes corresponding to the four card-playing nights (pitch, Michigan, high five, no cards) tells how Barnaby's rocky model of the world is taken over by Mary Mondo's nine successive Latin Fiat-utterances—anima, imber, nubes, fulmen, tonitrus, pluvia, terrae motus, eruptio, and finally the macaronic Fiat volcano—each of which produces the named phenomenon, so that Phantasmopolis (the ghost-city, founded by Mondinus in Year Four Anno Mary Mondo) rises within the dome; how the partnership extends to Austro, who confesses he has carved real-tiny mammoth skeletons in the Dawson Limestone and Pulex fleas which Mary's ghost-hands transport into the model (his first cycle blush registered: "the leather-colored kid was capable of a blush"); and how the §4 volcano blows the dome, the fleas escape to bite Barnaby, and sulphur-and-brimstone close out the story. GT supplies the cycle's deepest biographical anchor for Barnaby across seven pages of seismograph material, including the Rosetta-stone line "Barnaby Sheen had met him [Austro] and his people while doing seismographic exploration work on the Guna Slopes in East Africa"; grounds the creator-class doctrine in the Catechism scene's "God is the Creator of Heaven and Earth and of all things"; gives the Fiat-by-speech an English counterpart in John Penandrew's "the same grand gesture of his right hand as God used when he said 'Let there be light!'"; extends the HRH sulphur-and-brimstone Faustine signature across further pages (including the Pitchblende specter's "odor of either sulphur or brimstone"); and lists the cycle's card-game culture in a roster that covers pitch and high five (Michigan is unnamed). The "Wooly World" itself, the Beddoes epigraph, the nine Latin Fiat-utterances, Phantasmopolis, Mondinus, the Anno Mary Mondo dating system, Pulex the fleas, Dawson Limestone, "Let's fake it, kid" (Barnaby's whisper to Austro), the real-tiny carving partnership with Mary's ghost-hands, the volcano-blows-the-dome climax, the Austro blush, the coarse / uncircumcised / gamey-eared hearing-trifecta, and Michigan as evening-card-game are absent from GT. The novel adds John Penandrew's "Let there be light!" gesture at the cycle's territory and the Catechism classroom scene that grounds the creator-doctrine.

"St. Poleander's Eve" (10 February 1973)

"St. Poleander's Eve" breaks the late-1972 burst with a 41-day gap and opens the cycle's 1973 expansion in three numbered authorial sections (the cycle's first since AAOM) under three epigraphs (the cycle's first three-epigraph configuration): a Lafferty pastiche of Inferno III.9 attributed to "Cristofero Dante Benedetti" ("Lasciate ogni donna, voi ch'entrate!"), a Chesterton couplet supplying the title (the speaker from Castlepatrick losing his sleeve-heart on St. Poleander's Eve), and an eight-line stanza from Kipling's "Conundrum of the Workshops" ending "It's pretty, but is it Art?" §I opens with Daisy Flavus already on Barnaby's payroll as self-appointed "artistic secretary," against whose pressure to expand the cohort Barnaby offers the cycle's first naming of its cohort structure ("a group of men who have become one and will remain so . . . unchangeable and unsunderable") and stages the cycle's most extensive art-theory debate—Roy Mega's idealist-selective "Garden of What Ought to Be," Barnaby's pneumatological Holy-Spirit-outpouring, Cris's dialectical-Manichean struggle, the Putty Dwarf's (via Mary Mondo) anti-incarnational "art was smoke without fire . . . all flesh should be of cardboard," and Kipling's skeptical refrain — over the distribution of needle implants. §II stages April 30 St. Poleander's Eve—a Walpurgisnacht-coded date in the cycle's chronology—when the Rushlight Theatre play opens, three of the four men's wives appear (Helen Drakos cabinet-maker, Judy Benedetti pianist-wineshop, Catherine O'Donovan redhead potter-weaver), the thousand-year era ends, the Devil is released, "hairy goat songs from langue d'oc eight hundred years ago" intrude on the polyander, the three wives merge with Daisy, Mary, and Loretta into a succubus, Chiara Benedetti is sacrificed to Moloch by her own mother Judy, and the Putty Dwarf throws Catherine through the high window. §III brings three shoes dropping (Helen, Judy, walking-dead Catherine), effector-picture revenge from Catherine that splits Harry's head, and the cycle's first Australopithecine moral refusal—Austro completing the effector pictures of Daisy and Roy with Laff's parenthetical protest unheeded, then refusing Catherine's escalation when she asks to enhance the pictures further ("No, no, Catherine, don't do that! . . . That's a little too much"). GT preserves Roy Mega across more than a dozen pages (Resurrection grade-school student; total recall Cains Ballroom on North Main Street with Violet Lonsdale and Loretta; next-generation cohort children list); develops the Putty Dwarf as ectoplasmic-mask non-person paired with Edmund Weakfish and the dissident priest Cloud McKay; supplies a Cardboard Man category culminating in "In November of 1960, a cardboard man was elected President of the United States"; develops Violet Lonsdale including her hacksaw suicide with Barry Limus and the seven-tin-eyed-people death cluster; rewrites Helen Drakos as Edith O'Melody Drakos with full Troubadour-cultist biography (Languedoc Love Court, Maxfield Parrish portrait at age ten, "perversions of Languedoc"); rewrites Judy Benedetti as Patricia Rowley Benedict across more than forty mentions; develops Father Cloud McKay's Holy Spirit heresy ("Father McKay is both the Holy Spirit and the Christ of the Second Coming") as the doctrinal backdrop for §I's art debate; and places Austro's Rockey McCrocky comic strip ("nine or ten copies . . . each carefully hand carved . . . circulated every week"). Catherine O'Donovan has no exact novel counterpart—the novel's Catherine Drakos is George Basil Drakos's daughter married to Tony Benedict—the cycle's most explicit cross-generational name-reassignment. The three numbered sections, the three epigraphs (Cristofero Dante, Chesterton, Kipling), Daisy Flavus, the polyander naming, the Rushlight Theatre, the Mustel Celesta, "Garden of What Ought to Be," "Conundrum of the Workshops," Castlepatrick, the needle implants, April 30 / Walpurgisnacht, Moloch and the child sacrifice, the succubus formation, the thousand-year era's ending, the high-window death of Catherine, the effector-picture revenge mechanic, Harry's splitting headache, the five-art-doctrine debate as such, the Symphony of Seven Spooks post-death phenomenon, Austro's Australopithecine moral refusal, the explicit Laff naming, the mud-violet title-callback to Story II, and the Watkin-spectrum integration are absent from GT. The novel adds Edith O'Melody Drakos's Troubadour-cultist biography, the Cains Ballroom Tulsa landmark for the next-generation cohort, the November 1960 cardboard-man-elected-President line, Father Cloud McKay's Holy Spirit heresy, the next-generation cohort children list, and Violet Lonsdale's hacksaw-suicide death cluster.

"Rivers of Damascus" (23 June 1973)

"Rivers of Damascus" opens after a 133-day gap from SPE as the cycle's longest story (9,391 words) in three numbered authorial sections (the cycle's first back-to-back three-section pair after SPE) with zero front-matter epigraphs replaced by six attributed quoted passages in §II, and tells how the polyander cohort is dissolved (only Cris Benedetti carries over) and replaced by the Landwitch Covenant team—John Dragon dean of soft sciences, Joseph Waterwitch the Shawnee Indian dowser, Abel Landgood the eidolon man, and Cris—who from Sheen's electronics works on Six-Shooter Road (the cycle's first named Tulsa street) launch the first para-archeological probe and observe the Damascus 635 AD events. §I stages the caravan clowns coming to "the oldest town in the world" in March of "Restored Salvation 635," leaving their rickety scaling-ladders on the sand, walking sideways through the east gate along the street named Straight (Via Recta / Souk-el-Taouil), the basket-wall where St. Paul was once let down, and the council-room rafters in the Byzantine commandant's chamber. §II reorganizes epigraphic apparatus as in-narrative material—Arpad Arutinov's essay from The Back Door of History on the impossibility of the Islamic conquest ("there is no way that those events could have happened"), four signed Landwitch Papers statements from the team (Dragon, Waterwitch, Landgood, Benedetti), and Ignace Wolff's passage from The River Inside—supplying Arutinov's subjective-religious-rapture diagnosis, the Pharpar / Abana / Baroda inner-river doctrine, the patina-as-living-precipitate-of-time doctrine, the heterodyning two-thousand-year-reverberation theory, Cris's recreated-secondary-world doctrine ("we are the anomalous ghosts"), Pauline blindness as recurring historical type ("Paul was not the first nor the millionth man to go blind on the dazzling road to Damascus"), Khalid ibn-al-Walid called up from 635 AD as the cycle's first coeval-agent resurrected ghost, and the mind-worm doctrine. §III brings the team's discrediting and the closing TV-spectacular hijack of "The End Of The Crackpots." GT gives a different passage from The Back Door of History on a treasure-cave with painted bulls, hens with multicolored eggs, and foxes that wash in fire; supplies the cycle's deepest single-page doctrinal anchor with the same plum-color patina analogy ("the same color, the color of plums . . . That is the patina . . . a very thin staining that forms on the stones and clays"), spoken by Nils Handelamand the project director; supplies the eidolon's sympathetic-magic anchor in "reacting-clay effigies" and in the Cyclops-decoy effigy with nine rifle bullets in it; transposes Pauline blindness to Tulsa, where the GT next-generation cohort member John Barry Colmo (from the parent-cohort children list that develops SPE's polyander structure to the next generation) is "driving west on East Eleventh Street, coming back into town from a weekend on Lake Tenkiller" when "hit in the face by a ball of light" and blinded for three days; develops religious rapture across four pages (Tyrone / O'Bogue "Rapture for Two," Helen's night raptures, the absolute rapture in the sewers, Major Brass's "rifleman in a rapture"); cites Belloc across three pages (Belloc's History of England (5 vol.), "Chesterton and Belloc and Maurice Baring and David Goldstein," the "great massif of Bellocian Europe"); develops Austro across eight pages including the Rockey McCrocky slate-rock comic strip and the "anomalous Irish face" that supplies the lexical anchor for Cris's "we are the anomalous ghosts" doctrine; and develops Roy Mega across thirteen pages, with ROD itself the cycle's fifth named Roy Mega appearance after MV, BC, TLCB, and SPE and the first to develop his ambivalent allegiance. The three numbered sections, the two fabricated authorities (Arutinov's Back Door of History passage in this register, Wolff's River Inside), the Landwitch Covenant compact, John Dragon, Joseph Waterwitch (the cycle's first Native American character), Abel Landgood, Khalid ibn-al-Walid and his resurrection, Six-Shooter Road, the caravan clowns and the east gate, the Anti-Lebanon mountains, the basket-wall ladder-assault and the council-room rafters, Souk-el-Taouil and "Restored Salvation 635," the Damascus Seven, the Pharpar / Abana / Baroda inner-river doctrine, the patina-as-living-precipitate framing, the heterodyning theory, the eidolon-as-dowser-inside-out doctrine, the mind-worm doctrine, the recreated-secondary-world doctrine, the §III TV-spectacular hijack of "The End Of The Crackpots," and the ilm (Holy Arabic Science) vocabulary are absent from GT. The novel adds Nils Handelamand as patina-doctrine spokesman, the Tulsa transposition of Pauline blindness onto East Eleventh Street, John Barry Colmo's three-day blindness and conversion, the four-page rapture vocabulary, and the Bellocian Europe / Church Militant Catholic literary milieu.

"Old Halloweens On The Guna Slopes" (12 March 1974)

"Old Halloweens On The Guna Slopes" opens the cycle's 1974 expansion, finished after a 262 gap from RoD. The cycle's epigraphic apparatus is suspended in favor of Mary Mondo's opening "Yah, yah!" and the refrain "they don't make them like they used to" recurring six times to introduce each new Halloween story; the polyander cohort is fully restored after RoD's reduction; Mary Mondo becomes the cycle's heaviest single-story ghost presence and operates for the first time as a standalone cycle ghost no longer requiring Violet Lonsdale as host; and Austro warns of the doublepeople—the cycle's first explicit demon-class—who come on the year-night to twist the inner monkey sideways with their air-not-iron monkey-wrench. The climactic three-visitor reveal brings Roy Mega as the white-bearded Paracelsus (with the genuinely real, thong-attached beard he has grown for the night), Chiara Benedetti as the evil consort Morgana (her first cycle appearance outside a theatrical frame after SPE's within-play Chiara), and Heavenly Days McGee the wino friend as the Unnameable One who pours a bowl of Kiboko (Swahili hippopotamus) blood over Austro's head—revealed at last as Ike's Chili Parlour chili—at Austro's twelfth-birthday golden-anniversary party, twelve calculated by Egyptian astronomy from the Dog Star's rising (called "helical" in the story, properly "heliacal") and the Sothic period. In a Green Tree preserves Mary Mondo across nine pages as Violet Lonsdale's invisible-friend split-off (a "little ghost-girl" portrayed in the Pitchblende Gallery, always passive curiosity-phenomenon attached to a living host); preserves Chiara Benedict across seven pages with the cycle's name-drift now extending hereditarily across two generations (cycle Cris / Chiara Benedetti versus novel Cris / Chiara Benedict, with the implication that Cris's grandmother was also Chiara); supplies Austro's species anchor in "Austro belonged to the race of mankind called Australopithecus . . . The Australos . . . had actually flourished nearer to three thousand years ago, and they hadn't stopped flourishing"; supplies Austro's age in "Austro, a twelve year old person from the Guna slopes of Africa" and the verbatim "Carrock! I'm only a twelve year old kid" cop-out; supplies the Roy + Chiara coupling in the casual-romantic register "Roy was also running around a little bit with Chiara Benedict (Nature Girl herself)" which the cycle mythologizes into Paracelsus + Morgana; develops John Penandrew's talking monkey, ghost-monkey, and mechanical monkey across three pages as the cycle's function-reassignment of the story's O'Brien-family monkey to the Penandrews (with the O'Briens absent from the novel entirely); anchors Ike's Chili Parlor among the original Tulsa restaurants (with the British / American Parlour / Parlor drift); supplies the Orpheum vaudeville-circuit setting that grounds Bittle McLittle's biography; carries Sand Springs across eight pages as the Dumbarton-refinery anchor (the family itself wholly cycle-side); shows the place-name drift on Orcutt (cycle Orcutt Park on the Dumbarton-streetcar terminus / novel Orcutt Lake where David Penandrew drowns); and supplies the sole novel-side Halloween anchor in a Monica Hall gymnasium horse-and-buggy "Halloween Dance"—recreational-romantic, not species-ritual. The single-section narrative break, the suspended epigraphic apparatus, the "Yah, yah!" opening and the "they don't make them like they used to" refrain, the three embedded retrospective sub-stories, the doublepeople demon-class, the monkey-wrench compound, Kiboko blood substitution, the Sothic-period age-calculation with the Dog Star's rising, Australopithecine Halloween priority, Australopithecine doorbells with lead-sulphuric-acid batteries, the three-visitor year-night framework with Paracelsus / Morgana / the Unnameable One, white-beard-on-demand, the sander-effect ghost-trap, Heavenly Days McGee, Bittle McLittle, Zoe Archikos, the Kalbfleish / Paldeen / Dumbarton families, the pit-pumpkin disaster, the paternity-suit prank, and the streetcar derailment are absent from In a Green Tree. The novel adds the multi-generational hereditary implication for the Benedetti / Benedict name-drift, the recreational-romantic Halloween Dance at Monica Hall, McGee Funeral Home as the surname's novel-side referent (against the cycle's wino McGee), and the Orcutt-Lake-and-Penandrew-drowning context that grounds the cycle's Orcutt Park terminus.

"What Big Tears The Dinosaur's" (5 October 1974)

"What Big Tears The Dinosaur's" was finished after a 68-day gap from BFS—the cycle accelerating into late 1974—as a single continuous narrative (cycle's shortest since AAOM at 3,397 words, resetting from BFS's three-section configuration) with zero front-matter epigraphs and zero internal quoted passages, and tells how Doctor George Drakos's opening announcement of a dinosaur hunt in Arkansas (with horse races at Hot Springs as side-attraction) draws Cris Benedetti's "Arkansas, mother of monsters and myths" and Barnaby bellowing for Austro—the dinosaur (a tyrannosaurus rex sighted by two hundred witnesses, moving across Arkansas at fifty miles a day with a one-hour twenty-five-mile burst from Fort Smith to Sallisaw OK after eating the bridge across the Arkansas River at Fort Smith) drives the cohort to Sheen's house, where Drakos develops the atrichos doctrine (museum-hairless dinosaurs as scientifically unjustified), retrofitted at story's close by Austro's salt-water explanation; Cris says the Valley of the Dinosaurs by modal-realist necessity against Drakos's geographic skepticism, Austro laconically affirms "I know a rich hidden valley," and Drakos classifies the creature in passing as Tyrannosaurus Rex Gunaslopesienus. The reveal: the dinosaur is Austro's dog, telepathically bonded across the ocean, peeled bald by salt water during the swim, drawn by Austro at two-thirds his own height under the Guna-Slopes drawing convention where canvas size encodes importance rather than physical magnitude. The dawn arrival wedges the dog's head into the room below Austro's floor; the dog whoops "Carrock" and the inarticulate "Aw-aw" and "Ow-wow-wow"; and the closing three kids—Barnaby with the boy left in him, Austro, and the dog itself—weep together, the cycle's first sustained pathos register and first weeping-Barnaby on the big-animal-yearning / cosmic-disappointment doctrine that no truly-biggest-animal exists in the modern world. In a Green Tree supplies the rare dinosaur anchor in only two passages—Patrick O'Trassy's drawn "bears with dinosaur's necks and devils' heads" from the blue brick-clay, and the burial-clay-figurine transformation into "elephants, three-mouthed tigers, dinosaurs, ocean whales walking on their hind legs" (both drawn or transformed, never alive); supplies Hot Springs as horse-race destination (Pitchblende's racing trips with handicapping theories); supplies Fort Smith as the seat of Federal Marshals and the gateway to Lost City "where children were lost and never found again . . . You could hear the cries of the lost children ringing"; carries Arkansas across fifteen mentions, primarily as the Arkansas River that defines Tulsa's geography; preserves Roy Mega across thirteen pages with the in-absentia equipment-provider configuration anchored at his electronic-mantle and "Brains for Rent" passages; preserves Austro across nine pages (same set as OHGS and BFS); supplies the Penandrew talking-monkey framework that WBTD extends to the cycle's first talking dog; and supplies the drawing-doctrine corpus in two pre-WBTD modes (Patrick's direct-transcription; Austro's slate-rock cultural-tradition) that the Guna-Slopes importance-encoding mode is added to. Carrock continues as the standing Austro register, here non-deflectively deployed as general-purpose vocalization (and at one moment uttered by the dog itself). The dinosaur hunt premise, the living tyrannosaurus rex, Tyrannosaurus Rex Gunaslopesienus as species name, the atrichos doctrine and salt-induced hairlessness, "Arkansas, mother of monsters and myths," the Valley of the Dinosaurs and its three-layer modal-realist / geographic-skeptic / laconic-affirmation dialogue, Roy Mega's truck-mounted explosive-shell gun in absentia, the two hundred witnesses with photographs and footprints, the fifty-miles-a-day bridge-eating cross-Arkansas motion, Sallisaw, the telepathic boy-dog cross-ocean communication, the Guna-Slopes importance-encoding drawing convention, the dog's dawn arrival with head wedged into the room below Austro's floor, the dog's "Aw-aw" and "Ow-wow-wow" inarticulate vocalizations, the cycle's first speaking dog, Barnaby's big-animal-yearning grief, and the three-kids-weeping closing pathos are absent from In a Green Tree. The novel adds the drawn and transformed status of all novel-side dinosaurs, Patrick O'Trassy as direct-transcription anchor figure, and Lost City at Fort Smith with the ringing cries of the lost children—the frontier-justice menace-aura that the cycle's bridge-eating dinosaur visits.

"And All The Skies Are Full Of Fish" (1 December 1974)

"And All The Skies Are Full Of Fish" was finished 57 days after WBTD—the cycle's fastest inter-story tempo since the late-1972 burst—in two numbered authorial sections each headed by a four-line epigraph from the cycle-fictional Rocky McCrocky comic strip (the cycle's first internal epigraph source: §I's "by our fathers' busted bones / We'll fight with dint and doggy" supplying Austro's later oath; §II's "all the skies are full of fish, / And all the fish are smelly" supplying the title and previewing the fish-fall climax), and tells how a club reorganization—Austro is still twelve but Chiara Benedetti has just turned thirteen and must resign (the cycle's first character-aging-out), nominating Austro to take her place; Ivan Kalisky has also turned thirteen and nominates his little, fat, freckled, glasses-wearing sister Susie Kalisky, whom the narrator immediately notes resembles "Susie Kalusy" in the Rocky McCrocky comic strip (the cycle's first cycle-fictional / cycle-character fractured-plane doubling)—produces the Local Anaesthetics, the cycle's first organized children's gang, at war with the aesthetic willow-dance children (seven psychokinetic pure-hearted antagonists, all wearing glasses). Across §I the polyander cohort gives doctrinal speeches on prayers-for-rain, cities-vs-countryside, fish-from-heaven / showers of proteid matter, weather-broadcaster Dean / Keen ritual-prayer, and children's special powers; Amelia Corngrinder gives the pure-rain demonstration at the Donners' frontyard birdbath; and the willow-dancers stage their "Sunshine and Showers" demonstration at the Civic Center Open-air People's Area before Mayor Topmann and three Commissioners. §II brings the overnight sarcodic skyfall, the Civic Center showdown where Susie cracks the willow-dancers' glasses (and through them their psychic carapaces and their science itself), the Local Anaesthetics' counter-sorcery of Tertiary-sky paleobotanical fall (180-foot crinoid stems, macrotaenopteris fronds, wielandiella ferns, monstrous ichthyoids), the narrator's gloss "Ancient sorceries will whip modern fetishes every time," the Pauline-reveal of "scales from the eyes," Austro's Australopithecine alien-species defense against Commissioner Kalisky's anti-poster ordinance, and the closing Sheen's Ravine fish-fry where Sheen concedes the fractured-plane equations he supposes he will have to accept (and on which he can have Roy Mega review him). In a Green Tree supplies the cycle's largest single first-name doubling across twenty-nine pages of Susie Peterson—the nominally twenty-one-year-old flapper (actually about eighteen) / "dumb-blonde sort who was affairs-smart" / private secretary of seven of the twelve persons for whom Pitchblende set up decoy companies / perfect-secretary essential whom Prince Dmitri the dog loves (against the cycle's twelve-year-old fat-freckled spectacle-cracker); supplies the literal source of the spectacle wordplay in Jan Dooper's saying that "two glasses and she makes a spectacle of herself" (the oculist's daughter Blanche) which the cycle extends to literal spectacle-cracking power; preserves Chiara Benedict across seven pages with the standing cycle/novel name-drift now extending to the daughter, with AATSF's just-turned-thirteen falling between the novel's five-day-old and fourteen-year-old waypoints; develops Rocky McCrocky as Austro's slate-rock activity at the Guna Slopes that the cycle now elevates to authorial-frame epigraph status; supplies the comic-strip framework across six pages (Spanish strips, Anagram Girl Detective, Alpha-Person / Beta-Shadow duality, Putty Dwarf, Rocky McCrocky) within which the cycle's fractured-plane doubling operates; preserves Roy Mega across thirteen pages (returning to personal appearance after WBTD's in-absentia); preserves Austro across nine pages with the standing Australopithecine framework (here legal-civic-shielded) but with Carrock at 0× — the cycle's first Austro-without-Carrock story; develops prayer across eight pages and drought across two pages; and carries Tulsa as setting throughout. Mary Mondo and Loretta Sheen both remain at 0×. The title, the two-section binary structure and its two Rocky McCrocky epigraphs, Susie Kalisky and her Susie Kalusy comic-strip alter-ego, the Local Anaesthetics gang, the seven named willow-dance children (Amelia Corngrinder, Aldous McKeever, Horace Wickiup, Margaret Grainger, Adrien Chastel, Alice Whitetoken, Rolland Clatchby), the Civic Center Open-air People's Area, Sheen's Ravine, the Donners' frontyard birdbath, Mayor Topmann and Commissioners McPhillips, Corngrinder, and Kalisky, the "Sunshine and Showers" demonstration, the overnight sarcodic skyfall, the spectacle-cracking power, the fractured plane of reality doctrine and Sheen's concession, "Ancient sorceries will whip modern fetishes every time," the inhabited-rain-vs-empty-water doctrine, the Tertiary-sky paleobotanical fall, the monstrous ichthyoids, the Ka-whoosh and Ka-whish onomatopoeia, Austro's alien-species defense against the anti-poster ordinance, the anklebone non-correspondence skepticism toward WBTD's Tyrannosaurus Rex Gunaslopesienus, and Chiara Benedetti's status as the cycle's first character-aging-out are absent from In a Green Tree. The novel adds the dense Susie Peterson novel-side biography, the Jan Dooper / Blanche oculist-daughter source for the spectacle wordplay, and the Alpha-Person / Beta-Shadow duality that the cycle's fractured-plane concession formalizes.

"Two For Four Ninety-Nine" (17 February 1975)

"Two For Four Ninety-Nine" opens cycle's 1975 expansion, 78 says after AATSF was finished. It is a as a single continuous narrative restoring the cycle's single-section default (between AATSF's binary and FFM's three-section), with the standing twelve-year-old anchor affirmed for the last time before FFM breaks it and Carrock at 0× again after AATSF—confirming the AATSF break is becoming a new pattern—and tells how Selene O'Keene arrives at the new Big Star Detective Agency (Austro and Roy Mega's first business entity, "more properly the Astro Mega Detective Agency," affiliated with Rocky McCrocky Publications, with stone-slab advertisements Austro distributes himself and the rate "Mysteries and crimes solved as cheap as one penny") and submits as opening-day first customer to the preternatural reading protocol—Austro reading her at height, weight, Osage County, blood type, military service ("Afghanistan, but not, I believe, with the Ninth Mounted Fusiliers"), breakfast, and grandfather; Roy Mega refining to three-ounce granularity with the fuzzy-outline-from-Bang-Crystals diagnosis. The opening-day pricing of "two cases for four ninety-nine" forces Selene to recruit second customer George Artless (sly jewel dealer arriving with the strong-room amethyst-for-gravel 99-to-100-to-99 theft case) into the combination, and the two cases prove tied—John U. Daw is Artless's missing amethyst-buyer and Selene's Party Without Walls corpse; Rusty, the male grackle who arrives via chimney as Austro's third client with red-ruby earnest, is the cross-case actor working with female-grackle Dusty as window-distraction decoy. Mary Mondo (matching OHGS's heavy ghost presence as the agency's oracle) supplies the backstory paragraph naming herself as the split-off personality of dead Violet Lonsdale who "refused to die" and "became an unclassified ghost," and delivers a five-question oracle session under amplified-trumpet-blast prescription that resolves both cases as no-malice accidental Bang Crystals (dexahexakrex) overdose plus jewel-thief-on-jewel-thief grackle-accomplice theft (the 94% Precept that jewel-thieves steal from other jewel-thieves). Rat Rattigan (Ratsel Rattigan, the police detective, full name disclosed, Mary-Mondo-audible) issues a five-citizen klinker imprisonment as comic reversal, and the closing eight rhetorical loose-ends questions are deferred to the upcoming Rocky McCrocky comic strip's "Full Disclosure Issue." Barnaby Sheen is at 0×—the cycle's first Sheen full-absence—and the polyander cohort is fully absent except for Mary Mondo, anticipating FFM's complete-absence configuration. GT has the cycle's first ungated SHARED-backstory delivery (Mary Mondo's prior cycle appearances supplied the backstory in parenthetical asides) at ten pages of Mary Mondo—"the little ghost-girl who says she's a split-off personality of Violet Lonsdale," "Mary Mondo was a split-off of the girl Violet Lonsdale," "the Mary Mondo ghost-spinoff of dead Violet Lonsdale"—alongside the source-personality at sixteen pages of Violet Lonsdale (living-then-deceased novel-side, deceased throughout cycle-side); supplies the largest novel-side conceptual framework at eighty-one pages of ghost; develops party across forty-nine pages as the social-narrative mechanism that the cycle's Party Without Walls extends as continuing-venue institution; resists at thirty-two pages of monkey, against which the cycle's "not a monkey in any way" doctrine asserts that Austro is "a twelve-year-old person of the Australopithecus Race" sometimes called ape-men but never monkeys; develops the detective framework across fifteen pages (Helen Anastasis / Helen Anagram Girl Detective and the scattered investigation scenes) that the cycle's first business-entity establishment leverages; preserves Roy Mega across thirteen pages and Austro across nine (the standing anchor sets); supplies the Australopithecus anchor at the Guna Slopes; and provides single-page anchors for Kendall (Artless's mother's teaching post at the Old Kendall School), soot, and license (the unlicensed-employment-agency framework). The "Two For Four Ninety-Nine" title, the Big Star / Astro Mega Detective Agency and its Two-for-$4.99 pricing, Selene O'Keene, George Artless, John U. Daw / Jack Daw, Rat Rattigan / Ratsel Rattigan, Rusty and Dusty (the grackle accomplices), Bang Crystals (dexahexakrex), the Party Without Walls, the Without-X idiom cluster, Pax-Max as cycle-fictional peace organization, the Stone-Dealer's Hundred 100-which-is-107 arithmetic, the Beta-Phase Furnace, the stone-slab advertisements and stone-age shorthand, the preternatural reading protocol, the Astro / Austro name-pun, the fuzzy-outline dexahexakrex diagnostic marker, the amethyst-for-gravel 99-to-100-to-99 exchange, Rex Soul's auger field autopsy, the Owl-Face gnomic register, Mary Mondo's amplified five-question oracle session, the 94% Precept, the no-malice Bang Crystals ruling, the five-citizen klinker imprisonment, the eight rhetorical loose-ends questions deferred to the Rocky McCrocky "Full Disclosure Issue," and Sheen's complete absence are absent from In a Green Tree. The novel adds the dense ten-page Mary Mondo biography and sixteen-page Violet Lonsdale source-genealogy that the cycle now treats as the shared canonical backstory.

"The Funny Face Murders" (29 May 1975)

"The Funny Face Murders" opens after a 101-day gap from TFNN as the cycle's longest single story in three numbered authorial sections with Austro at cycle peak (83×) and Roy Mega at cycle peak (32×) and the polyander cohort at complete absence—the cycle's first full polyander absence since the cohort was named, with Cris, Drakos, Harry, and Mary Mondo all 0× and Barnaby Sheen at 1× offstage as the cycle's lowest Sheen ever ("had made the two young geniuses move their agency out of his electronics laboratory"); the twelve-year-old anchor is broken at 0× for the first time since OHGS framed the register, and Carrock returns at 1× in lowercase exclamative form—and tells how Judy Kingfixit fills a paper sack with bundles of paper money and goes down to Broken Bench Lane on the outskirts of T Town (the cycle's first Tulsa-suburb setting, visible to "Beautiful Downtown Broken Arrow" through verdant haze) for the Lane's "new face every morning"—a Diversified Investment Procedure According to Educated Whim—buys $100 of Clay-Eaters Enterprises stock, drinks a Trouble-Dissolver, and meets the Lane's inventiveness ecosystem: Great Heart Harkte's Discovery grass (sprouting from the buried inventor's posthumous root system), Quentan Whitebird's Forgotten Lanes and Byways of Tulsa, the Mokka-Chokka post-coffee stand, the Big Star Weed Rider hovering six inches above grass-top, and Roy Mega and Austro's Big Star Detective Agency at its new standalone Broken Bench Lane office ("Interesting murders solicited. Tedious murders solved grudgingly. Skip tracing done. Husbands found cheap"), where Austro hands out cards for seven cases. §1 climaxes with the Wax Museum first murder under Madame Gussaud's proprietorship; §2 brings the Murder-Will-Out multi-voiced siren chaos and the gift-shop Second Sight helmet; §3 stages three wives' confession (Judy, Ophelia Izobret, Edith Thornbush, under Confession Compulsion Machine influence), the dismantling of False Face Flaherty and Cornelia Falselove as composite corporate persons (revealing the Three Engineering Companies cluster: Plant Engineering's Zombie Plants and walking-talking plants, Animal Engineering's Basic Ape with rubber blood, Human Engineering's Basic Person coordinated humans with denatured personality and brains), the Anthropino Haima vs. Kaoutsouk Haima Greek-Language Blood Doctrine, the Four Wine Cups / Monkey Wine paradigm, Austro's Owl-Face gnomic register and rabbit-front-feet grift, the Mexican Standoff resolution, the closing media frenzy, and Professor Austro. In a Green Tree supplies the cycle's largest single first-name overlap at sixty-eight pages of Edith O'Melody (the novel's prettiest little girl alongside Monica MacLish, five-going-on-six with Bernard Sheen—against the cycle's Edith Thornbush at fourteen occurrences); supplies the cycle's first surname-doubling at the preacher "Hiram John Kratest Fundamental Hardtack" (a tobacco-chewing preacher at the Tulsa Coliseum) against the cycle's police detective Otis Hardtack; supplies the standing novel-side detective-fiction framework in Helen Anastasis's "Helen Anagram Girl Detective" (later "Ellen Anagram, a startling precursor of Wonder Woman") at fifteen pages, against which the cycle's Big Star Detective Agency operates as cycle-real commercial enterprise; develops clay across forty pages with the wax-museum-clay integration anchored verbatim at "it is wax and clay mixed, not merely wax, that the best wax museum figures are made of" that grounds the Lane's adjacent Clay-Eaters Enterprises and Wax Museum; develops invent / inventor across thirty-six pages (Cleopatra Quirke, John Penandrew's invented voice) against the cycle's civic-economic Lane-inventiveness; develops zombie across five pages that the cycle extends to Plant Engineering's Zombie Plant component; preserves Roy Mega across fourteen pages and Austro across nine (standing anchors), the Australopithecus single-page anchor at the Guna Slopes, and Carrock at the standing exclamative; develops horse across eighty-four pages, corporation across five, rabbit across nine, Professor across seven, and comic strip across six (the Rocky McCrocky framework, now extended in the cycle to Rocky McCrocky Rock Soup commercial product); and provides a single-page adulation anchor at the Teilhard de Chardin progressive-priest confrontation. The "Funny Face Murders" title, Broken Bench Lane and the nine-street suburban cluster, "Beautiful Downtown Broken Arrow," Judy Kingfixit and Harry Kingfixit (the cycle's first cycle/cycle name overlap with Harry O'Donovan), False Face Flaherty and Cornelia Falselove, the Izobrets, Edith and Edgar Thornbush, Otis Hardtack, Madame Gussaud, Hedwiga Pompey / Seraph Wideditch / Lavinia Firstlight, Great Heart Harkte and the Discovery grass posthumous root system, Quentan Whitebird and Forgotten Lanes and Byways of Tulsa, Dirky Dave and the Dirky Dave Roulette six-rubber-five-steel game, Honest Goof Gomez and Junky Joe, the Stringer of the International Universal World Press, Funny Faces Incorporated, the Corporate Person Doctrine and Three Engineering Companies cluster, Basic Ape and Basic Person and Zombie Plant and walking-talking plants, Anthropino Haima vs. Kaoutsouk Haima, the Four Wine Cups / Monkey Wine paradigm, the Confession Compulsion and Murder-Will-Out Machines, the Two-Guys-in-a-Garage Invention Kit, the Mokka-Chokka Post-Coffee Paradigm, the Trouble-Dissolver, Rocky McCrocky Rock Soup, the Mexican Standoff resolution doctrine, the Big Star Weed Rider, the rabbit-front-feet grift, the gift-shop Second Sight helmet, the body-switch sleight-of-body, the Wax Museum first murder, the three wives' confession, Professor Austro, the polyander full absence, and Sheen's lowest-ever 1× offstage status are absent from GT. The novel adds the dense Edith O'Melody childhood-prettiness register that grounds the cycle's largest first-name overlap, the Hiram John Kratest Fundamental Hardtack preacher figure that anchors the cycle's first surname doubling, the Helen / Ellen Anagram detective-fiction framework that the cycle's commercial agency leverages, and the wax-and-clay-mixed wax-museum doctrine that the Lane's adjacent Clay-Eaters and Wax Museum extend.

"Slippery" (6 June 1976)

"Slippery" opens after a 374-day gap from FFM—the cycle's longest story-to-story gap, pausing through the rest of 1975 before the 1976 resumption—as a 3,519-word single continuous narrative across three implicit movements (workshop demonstration, town-wide chaos with Sheen's midnight arrival and the General's breakfast interrogation, and the Africa cutaway with empathic-web revelation and closing three-cartwheel cascade), with the Big Star Detective Agency dropped, the polyander cohort and Mary Mondo absent, Barnaby Sheen RESTORED to active in-person presence after two-story attenuation (TFNN's 0× and FFM's 1× offstage), Austro at cycle-second-highest 69×, the twelve-year-old anchor restored across a line break with the cycle's first aging-extension ("going on thirteen"), Australopithecines deployed in plural-form for the first time, and Carrock at 0× again after FFM's 1× return, restoring the AATSF–TFNN 0× pattern, and tells how Austro announces in his workshop the invention of a super-glycerine mist combined with species-juice—"the slickest thing in the world"—and demonstrates the friction-abolishing effect on Roy Mega, whose own patented no-slip shoes fly out from under him as he turns three complete cartwheels with "Damn your monkey-face, Austro!" The slippery-gip mist spreads town-wide; Barnaby Sheen arrives at the midnight workshop claiming the Sheen Immunity ("Because I'm Smarter Than You Are"); General Gamaliel and Doctor Halefellow interrogate over breakfast and the locator tracks backwards; the Africa cutaway brings the plane-mounted lab racing nine thousand miles in less than an hour to the Guna Slopes (cycle's first explicit identification of the Australopithecine homeland and cycle's first African-action setting), the empathic-web revelation that all ninety-nine Australopithecines are connected (the ninety-eight on the slopes physically pratfalling from the targeted spray while Austro in T Town feels their distress as visions), Austro's cosmic-threat doctrines (cortex-cerebellum friction, mantle-of-the-world strata-sliding), the laying-on-of-hands "Bishop" protocol for species-juice immunity transfer, the cycle-fictional Rocky McCrocky comic-strip character Monkey-Face Muldoon, Oliver Clatter, Austro's pivot to Super-Slick Industries (the blackmail-to-blue-sky-promotion commercial vehicle for slippery-gip stock), and the closing three-cartwheel cascade in ascending odd-number sequence (11 from the Major's deliberate spray after Austro learns his lesson / 15 attributed by Gamaliel to a "carry-over effect" after the Super-Slick stock pitch / 17 attributed by Sheen deadpan to "a little bit of the stuff left in the sprayer" after Austro's get-rich-quick extension). GT has the cycle's largest novel-side character anchor across one hundred seventy-four pages of Sheen (Barnaby Sheen at ninety-four of those pages as the novel's eponymous central figure); concentrates the cycle's most condensed cycle/novel character-cluster in a ten-page band where Austro's entire novel-side identity overlaps—species (Australopithecus), age (twelve-year-old), homeland (Guna Slopes), nickname (monkey-face), and standing exclamative (Carrock)—with one five-element master page and one five-element Carrock-anchor page; supplies the slip / slid / slick combined pattern across forty-four pages that the cycle's slippery-gip extends; develops General across forty pages and Doctor across twenty-nine; supplies Bishop across fourteen pages (Bishop Kelly back in Oklahoma, Bishop's Kansas City Waffle House) that the cycle's "The Bishop" laying-on-of-hands ecclesiastical naming extends as performative-functional rather than ordained; develops Africa across twenty pages of historical-mission context that the cycle activates as action-locus; anchors friction in the relational-tension sense ("invisible frictions between Francis and herself") that the cycle extends to physical-scientific; anchors glycerine at the crocodile "crying glycerine, not tears"; anchors patent at the Cork gentleman drawing up patents of nobility and gentry; and anchors "world is coming" at "our world is coming to an end, or at least to a great diminishing." The "Slippery" title, slippery-gip and its super-glycerine + species-juice composition, the empathic web and the ninety-eight slope pratfalls plus Austro's visionary participation, the cortex-cerebellum friction and mantle-of-the-world strata-sliding cosmic-threat doctrines, Austro's Super-Slick Industries blackmail-to-blue-sky pivot, Monkey-Face Muldoon, Oliver Clatter (cycle-internal only, with no novel-side overlap—the GT Clatter matches all belong to the unrelated Clatterback family), General Gamaliel and Doctor Halefellow, the plane-mounted lab racing to the Guna Slopes, the locator-tracking-backwards revelation, the Sheen Immunity, the "going on thirteen" aging-extension, the Australopithecines plural-form deployment, the laying-on-of-hands "Bishop" protocol, and the three-cartwheel sprayer-residue cascade are absent from GT. The novel adds the pervasive eponymous Sheen biography, the relational-tension friction register, the crocodile-tears glycerine joke, the Cork patents-of-nobility framework, the Bishop Kelly/Bishop's Kansas City Waffle House historical-clerical Bishop register, and the "great diminishing" world-ending doctrine.

"Gray Ghost: A Reminiscence"

"Gray Ghost: A Reminiscence" is narrated by Laff, and tells how on Halloween night 1924 Anselm Sheen—the cycle's first father-Sheen character—takes his son Barnaby plus three other ten-year-olds (Hector O'Day, Grover Whelk, and Laff) out to Electric Park in his Overland touring car for the last and highest-stake night of the dog-racing season at the old track south of Tulsa between the Peoria Road and the Arkansas River (palmy days 1920 to 1928, grandstands seating eight thousand until the 1925 east-side collapse). The boys encounter Captain John Diehard (the cycle's title figure under triple naming, with patronymic dog, ghost-dog scriptural appearance, mantic bones, the Resurrection Reveille bugle, Royal Hanover Brandy, ankle-bone dice, Confederate dollar-bill chromatic-decay, the ten-thousand-skeleton resurrection vision, and the Roan Rex horse resurrection), Amos Centenary Black, Dirty Dugan and his unfulfilled future-trick promise (the cycle's first unfulfilled-future-debt structure, deferred at one week, one year, or five years), the Mannings 1855 Territory Rifle armament tradition (Coopertown Coppersleeve, Leadbelly's Lead Mold, 95-percent-lead silver-bullet, white-powder injunction), Yves Denis Montalba's 1850 steam-rabbit history, the Devil's Handshake Dune, the dead-man initiation and dice game, the lightning sign and the Gray Ghost's appearance, and the singing ride home—the closing four-mile-distant Resurrection Reveille bugle still audible after the boys return to the Sheen residence. 1924 established as the cycle's temporal floor. GT supplies the cycle's deepest cycle/novel SHARED character integration to date in Anselm Sheen at twenty-seven pages (twenty full-name + seven partial-Anselm forms, exceeding TFNN's Mary Mondo at ten and Violet Lonsdale at sixteen)—anchoring Anselm Bernard Sheen as the father of "young Berny Sheen (whom Monica MacLish was sweet on and liked to call Barnaby)" who started an electronics factory, his marriage to Adriana Tyrone, his romantic-suitor competition with Joe O'Bogue who "built 'Electric Park' which was the name of the old dog track in Tulsa," his well-invested status via daughter-in-law Monica MacLish's Pitchblende-distribution channeling, his "funniest looking man" identification, the Old Sheen House / Young Sheen House residential configuration, and his terminal-disease late life—and supplies the cycle's largest thematic anchor at father across one hundred eighty pages of dual biological / priestly substrate; develops the Sheen biography across one hundred seventy-four pages, Tulsa across one hundred ten, Barnaby across ninety-four, remember across one hundred four (the cycle's reminiscence-frame substrate), ghost across eighty-one, Indian across fifty-seven (the Amos Centenary Black heritage substrate), and South across forty-seven (the Confederate substrate); and supplies single-page anchors for Electric Park and dog race (overlapping at one page), Halloween (the Monica Hall gymnasium dance), 1924 (the Crucifixion School schoolyard context), 1925, and reminiscence. The "Gray Ghost: A Reminiscence" title, Captain John Diehard and his entire cluster, Amos Centenary Black, Dirty Dugan (cycle-internal only, with no novel-side overlap—the novel's "Dugan" matches all belong to Brother Clarence Dugan, matching SLIP's Clatter / Clatterbach configuration), Hector O'Day, Grover Whelk, the Mannings 1855 Territory Rifle and its silver-bullet apparatus, Yves Denis Montalba's 1850 steam-rabbit history, the Devil's Handshake Dune, Dirty Dugan's deferred future-trick promise, Anselm's tickets-or-burial-grounds choice, the Overland touring car, the dead-man initiation and dice game, the closing four-mile-distant Resurrection Reveille bugle, the named narrator "Laff" first-person reminiscence frame, and the cycle's late-cohort total absence by 1924-anachronism are absent from GT. The novel adds the dense twenty-seven-page Anselm Sheen biography, Joe O'Bogue as Adriana's rival suitor (with Anselm Sheen) who built Electric Park, the cycle's largest thematic anchor at father in dual biological-and-priestly register, and Monica MacLish's "called Barnaby" naming that explains the cycle's standing Barnaby nickname for Bernard Sheen.