"Bequest of Wings" (1979)

He ate and drank the precious words, His spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, Nor that his frame was dust. He danced along the dingy days, And this bequest of wings Was but a book. What liberty A loosened spirit brings! - Emily Dickinson

Lafferty’s “Bequest of Wings” first appeared in the 1979 anthology Rooms of Paradise, though notes in the Tulsa archive show he completed it on January 23, 1975. The story is thematically elusive, and that elusiveness makes me wonder when he began it. Like Lafferty’s other stories about generational conflict, it challenges the appeal of false transcendence. But it is carefully measured, and also remarkably generous. It treats the young (“the lightest and brightest”) with real sympathy.

More specifically, it handles Angela Firmholder, who becomes entangled in a commercial version of that transcendence, with genuine pathos. In the anthology’s foreword, Roger Zelazny offers a few lines on each story. But when he reaches Lafferty’s, he breaks the pattern. “No matter what I say about a R. A. Lafferty story I will somehow be wrong,” he writes, “because he puts so much into one. So I'll back off and play it safe to the extent of observing that his stories are always entertaining, provoking and impossible to anticipate. No exception here, either.” Given how carefully balanced this story is, it’s easy to see what Zelazny means. Still, this post is an attempt to work out some of that.

Because “Bequest of Wings” is, on one level, about the cultural-war aspect of intergenerational conflict, it loosely belongs with stories like “Horns on Their Heads,” where Lafferty explores what that conflict means. But here, years after writing “Horns,” his view is more complicated.

In the story, a family grapples with a biological change affecting the “lightest and brightest” adolescents, who sprout wing-like bones. Readers learn that this is an incomplete mutation, and that a second and third mutation will finish the process. But none of those with the first mutation will be the ancestors of those with the second.

Angela Firmholder, the daughter, has this early form of the mutation. Over the course of the story, she spends time at Cloudy Joe’s Drug Store, which is suspended in the air by a Fortean Vector. Her parents, Potter and Peggy, watch with growing worry as she joins other young people in a sky-bound cult, flying by attaching struts and feathers to the new pinion bones.

At the same time, adults like Ace Whizz-Bang view these changes with a mix of curiosity and disdain, and speak grimly of the inevitable “clipping” that follows. Angela undergoes a cult ritual in which her pinions are clipped, and the story ends with her body returned to her parents.

The pinion clipping aspect of the story is one of the most violent things in all of Lafferty, though we do not see Angela experience it directly. Instead, Lafferty inserts a paratext written by a character named Doctor Hexbird, who describes what happens to the young people with the mutation:

“The fingers and hands become so elongated and splayed that they can no longer be used for human hands. They cannot grasp, they cannot manipulate. It would almost be better if the hands were chopped off completely. What must be chopped off, however, are two outlaw growths on each side, two very long bone spurs called the greater and the lesser pinion bones. These new spur-bones change the whole deportment of the victim; this is the reason that they must be removed after they have become hard bone. They can be cut with bone-saws, but in unapproved and cultic operations they are cut with bolt-cutters. Then these bones must be pulled out of the flesh for their entire length. This bloody laying-open of breast and shoulders and neck and arms and back to get the long bones out is a traumatic horror. The thirty per cent mortality in these cultic operations is outrageous.”

The entire story draws on the physical horror of pinioning, a procedure that involves surgically removing part of the wing, usually the distal joint, to permanently prevent flight. It is often done to young waterfowl or ornamental birds to keep them confined without the need for an enclosure. Because it is painful and irreversible, the practice is controversial. In many countries, it is regulated or restricted, and alternatives such as temporary wing clipping or secure housing are encouraged for ethical reasons.

The detailed description of the wing structure and the violence add considerably to the intellectual horror. And I think it matters to picture clearly what Lafferty wants us to see: where the clipping takes place, how the hands are elongated, and the other details. In other words, to really think through the biological homology.

If that’s part of what’s happening, another part of the horror is emotional. The title, drawn from Emily Dickinson, suggests that Lafferty’s imagination meets hers, and both are wonderfully weird imaginations. Dickinson often writes of angels, feathers, wings, and of pain exactingly rendered. One of her stanzas could even be a commentary on Lafferty’s story:

Essential Oils — are wrung — The Attar from the Rose Be not expressed by Suns — alone — It is the gift of Screws —

Here, Dickinson makes it impossible to separate the fragrance from the violence. She seems to say that this could not be so beautiful if it were not also so violent. It is Flannery O’Connor territory, the place of violent grace. The final image of Angela captures this blood and beauty:

The young ‘flight’ people brought Angela down and laid her on the cloud-moss bed. She was white with fright and pain, and red with blood. But she smiled.

Another reason to see Dickinson as more than just the source of the story’s title is that Lafferty would have recognized her poem for being more than a tribute to books and reading. It is an apocalyptic poem, shaped by the Book of Revelation, one of the texts Dickinson herself named as most dear to her. When the speaker in her poem eats and drinks the precious words and feels the spirit grow strong, we are in eschatological world of the New Testament, where St. John of Patmos eats the book in Revelation 10:7–10:

But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as he hath declared to his servants the prophets. And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth. And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me,Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey. And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.

Read with these lines in mind, and with the bitterness and sweetness, the story’s attar-and-screw-like shape becomes more distinct. The harp music played by Angela and the other “lightest and brightest,” which descends like honey, recalls the harping of angels in Revelation. One possibility is the six-week period of the mutation (“They’re just allowed six weeks of it after full sprout, and the time’s nearly up.”) alludes to the 42 months of suffering in Revelation. After all, there are 42 days in six weeks. I have hard time believing this to be just a coincidence.

Two ideas from Thinking With Lafferty help open this up further.

The first is theotropic dissonance. This is most visible in the wings. Lafferty draws on Dickinson and the Book of Revelation, but the wings can also be bat-like. The teenagers make their own from struts and canvas coated with tar. Ace Whizz-Bang, one of the older figures, says to Potter Famealyous, “Do you know, Mealyous, bat wings used to be cited against the old Natural Selection theory?” Their names are playful. Ace suggests a pilot who needs machines to fly. Potter, as pater familias, carries a faded authority.

The passage itself refers to St. George Jackson Mivart, a Catholic thinker who opposed Darwin and whose critiques led to revisions in On the Origin of Species. Darwin said of him, “Though he means to be honorable, he is so bigoted that he cannot act fairly.” But the bat-wing reference does more. It calls up older Christian imagery, where such wings mark devils. What Lafferty does with horns in “Horns on Their Heads,” he does with wings in “Bequest.”

The theotropic element takes its strongest form in the story’s final image: “There was the musical tone of distal feathers ruffling in the wind of a long swoop downwards. They sounded ever so much like wind-harps.” But Lafferty does not leave the moment in a purely spiritual register. He complicates it by giving Angela’s mother, Peggy, the line, “Oh, how cult!”

The other concept is iconographic insetting. We see this in the music: “And the wind-harps that they played upon had a full and gusty sound. The cult songs that they sang had trivial words and tunes, but their renditions were superb. It was like honey from Heaven when those sounds drifted down. They were airy songs, sky songs, soaring songs, pinnacle songs. There was a complexity to their music that wasn’t to be found in even the worst of the Rocks and Grocks.” The divide between the quality of the music and the poverty of the lyrics is the story's icon.

And against all of this is still the relentless critique of Cloudy Joe’s Drugstore, which sells the cheapjack materials of false transcendence to the lightest and brightest. My current conclusion about the story is that it is deeply interesting, because Lafferty condemns the falseness in the false transcendence but sees that something has been transcended nonetheless. In this way, Lafferty draws on biblical typology, the pattern of type and antitype.

The incomplete first stage of the mutation of the lightest and brightest serves as a type, awaiting its antitype in the full mutation. The story even poses the question (“Why do the ‘lightest and the brightest’ of these mutated flyers accept the cropping of their wings and their frequent deaths?”) and supplies its own answer (“They accept it because it is necessary for the mutation.”). Biologically, its mechanism is opaque, which is why the narrative nudges me toward a typological reading: the mutilated wings act as prefiguration, not as evolutionary explanation.

For that reason, what happens cannot be captured by false transcendence. It is partial transcendence, baffling only while the pattern remains unfinished. Fulfillment would mean moving from Potter Firmholder’s complaint to his little angel Angela (“Do you have to play that damned wind-harp every evening?”) to Revelation (“And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps”).

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