"Ewe Lamb" (1960/1985)
- Jon Nelson
- 24 hours ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 18 hours ago
1 And the LORD sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor. 2 The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds: 3 But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter. 4 And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him; but took the poor man's lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him. 5 And David's anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the LORD liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die: 6 And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity. 7 And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man.
“Ewe Lamb” is another pre-nucleation Lafferty mystery, alive with local color, crowded with quirky characters, and pinned to a witty plot complication. Set in Galveston, it features (like most of Lafferty’s mysteries) a metafictional twist. It draws on the well-known passages in Bible where the prophet Nathan captures the conscience of King David. The murderer in "Ewe Lamb" is caught through her own quotation of scripture, first fictionally and then metafictionally.
Some background. “Ewe Lamb” takes place on a holiday now largely forgotten but once widely known, back when Galveston was the playground of the South: Splash Day, observed from 1920 to 1965. Splash Day opened the swim season in Galveston, Texas, drawing tens of thousands to the island (some even from Oklahoma). Lafferty, this time, moves at a manic clip from his opening lines, which capture the swim crowd’s buzzy, over-caffeinated excitement.
"Than-Q," said the girl in the ticket booth. "Hurry up," said Little Herby. "We have to ride the big wheel." "They won’t start it till they sell a few more tickets." "But we can sit in the seats till they start." "In a minute, Herby, in a minute." A girl in yellow and a girl in white bought tickets. "Than-Q," said the girl in the booth.
Throughout, Lafferty drops Galveston Easter eggs. Beyond Splash Day, the most important things to know are Galveston’s history as the Free State, a haven of gambling and nightlife until the Texas Rangers in the 1950s moved against it and shut it down. Second is the original Pleasure Pier, legendary in its day, which is the site of the murder and its investigation. Lafferty assumes we know about it.
Here is what happens. As I said, it is Splash Day, probably sometime in the 1950s. A young ticket-seller named Peggy Smith is found dead in her booth. The trick of the story is that everyone is moving about her booth, and then she is slap-the-table dead. At first, it appears she is simply selling tickets, thanking people. Herbert J. Brisco notices the red bullet wound on her forehead. He calls over Officer Johnny Olds. Peggy has been murdered. Captain Johns and Lieutenant Withers soon take charge of the investigation, and through their questioning, we meet the large cast of characters, a device Laffery uses in other stories such as "Almost Perfect" (1961).
We next learn that Peggy was shot at close range with a small-caliber pistol. Lafferty this has fun turning the locked-room mystery inside out: the booth is observable from all sides. Lieutenant Withers summarizes the puzzle:
"I don’t see how this will be easy, Captain. There was nothing within ten feet of the little booth, and it was observable from all sides. She was selling tickets every ten or fifteen seconds, and we have established the sequence of buyers. And she was shot from the front, in the forehead, with small caliber pistol, and nobody knew a thing about it."
The police work through the suspects one by one. This includes the Ferris wheel operator, Harold Harroway, and ticket sellers Beth Jenson and Marion Mallow. The latter two work in adjacent booths. Witnesses confirm what we already know from the beginning of the story, since Lafferty starts the narrative there: Smith had been selling tickets every few seconds. That makes the timing of the murder appear impossible.
Then the story takes a turn, with the investigation focusing on a biblical note found in Peggy’s hand and a small pistol discovered in a sink at a nearby food stand. Captain Johns discovers that “Two Kings Twelve Three” isn’t a gambling notation, but refers to the parable of the ewe lamb, which describes a rich man stealing a poor man's only cherished possession. Lafferty’s twist is the difference in naming between Protestant and older Catholic Bibles. The King James Version and modern Catholic Bibles use 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 2 Kings, whereas the older Catholic Bible, the Douay-Rheims, labels those same four books as 1, 2, 3, and 4 Kings. The cops are first thrown off because the Irish captain let his Protestant partner look it up, which meant the partner read a verse about “high places” instead of the ewe lamb. Captain Johns realizes the error while reflecting on the sectarian divide:
“But if it reads that way now, why did it read differently before? I have nearly missed the kernel of the nut because of this. Lieutenant Withers is a fine man within his limits. But, dammit, he is not even Irish! And when you have said that about a man, what worse words could you say about him? The book he used must have been that of our separated brethren. Two Kings they would call Two Samuel. And Four Kings is what they would call Two Kings.”
A break in the case comes when Chester Barnweller realizes that the girl who sold him tickets was not Smith but Beth Jenson. Jenson confesses to the crime, saying she killed Smith for taking her boyfriend, Ori Land. She details a macabre method of concealment that allowed her to finish the ticket transactions while hiding the evidence of the struggle:
"I was sitting on her lap. That was the only way to hide her. Then, still before I could leave, the man with the little boy came to the ticket window. But I couldn’t get in front of her again. It was too late. He saw her dead, but he didn’t see me crunched down behind. When he turned to give the eye to the beach policeman Johnny Olds, I dropped the little pistol into Beth’s coffee cup and went back to my own booth."
Jenson then asked Officer Olds to return the cup to the food stand, using him to get rid of the weapon. Both Officer Olds and Lieutenant Withers make a poor showing, with the Catholic Captain Johns cracking the case. This is a light Lafferty story with a fun gimmick, and it would belong to the large fantasy volume of Galveston materials that should be published in a collector's edition of Dotty. The ewe lamb passage is one of the best-known events in scripture, so it would have been more pleasurable to readers of Lafferty’s time, who were far more biblically literate than the average American now.
The biblical story goes like this: David sleeps with Bathsheba after seeing her bathing on a housetop and has her husband Uriah killed. God sends the prophet Nathan to confront David. Nathan tells David a story about a rich man who steals a poor man’s only beloved lamb to feed a guest. David gets angry and says the rich man deserves punishment, and Nathan replies, “Thou art the man,” showing David the story is really about David. David repents. Nathan says God forgives him, but there will still be serious consequences for what he did.
In the Bible, Nathan’s ewe-lamb story is a brilliant trap: it gets David to judge a clear injustice, then forces him to recognize that he has done the same kind of thing with real people. Allegory indicts act. David learns an important lesson about power and its abuse. Nathan’s ewe-lamb story disarms his defenses.
The short story perverts all this. Beth uses the parable the wrong way: she casts herself as the poor man and says Ori is the lamb that has been lost to her. Peggy, in Beth’s telling, is the rich man with a flock who did not even need the ewe lamb. Beth (likely a pun on Bathsheba) takes a story meant to convert the sinner and turns it into a story that licenses punishment. Beth justifies her actions by describing Ori’s helplessness and her own role as his protector:
"He is my lamb that has been lost to me . . . To Peggy Smith. She didn’t even need him. She had a flock of full-horned rams. She had all the boyfriends she could manage. And I had only one, a less-than-one, and him a brainless lamb without enough sense to come in out of a high wind. Nobody else ever had a care for him. He needed me, he could never make it by himself, and I always looked out for him."
Consider what the ewe-lamb symbol is doing. In Nathan’s parable, the lamb is loved and is vulnerable, and the act is a moral violation that transcends theft. Beth justifies her murder of Peggy by claiming that Ori was helpless and dependent, and that she had always looked out for him. She owns Ori. But she misreads Nathan’s allegory in seeing ownership; she does not see love: “He was my lamb . . . and she stole him.” When the captain points out the mismatch, she shrugs and says it does not matter. There is nothing righteous here. She does not even know how the allegory works. It is not about theft but about envy, and she has murdered out of envy.
The current catechism puts what has long been the Catholic reading this way:
Lafferty drives the interpretive point home by closing the story with Isaias 6:9. Isaias. He uses the Douay–Rheims form of Isaiah to underscore the effect. ‘And seeing you will see but not perceive,” says the Douay. The King James Version is "and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive." Lafferty often quotes the KJV but not here. The quotation reminds the reader that Beth is herself a Catholic and Johns is Catholic, and Lafferty turns this Catholic Johns/Nathan against Beth. She fails to perceive that she is not the poor man who lost his lamb, but the sinful King David, before Nathan’s rebuke. The Biblical story is about sin and self-recognition. But Beth does not care. “Ewe Lamb” is straightforward Lafferty and basic catechesis.
