"For All Poor Folks at Picketwire" (1975)

But for to speke of vertuous beautee, Thanne was she oon the faireste under sonne; For povreliche yfostred up was she— No likerous lust was thurgh hir herte yronne. Wel ofter of the welle than of the tonne She drank, and for she wolde vertu plese, She knew wel labour, but noon ydel ese. "The Clerk's Tale"

Somehow Griselda had remained one of the really good-lookers. "For All Good Folks at Picketwire"

Picking up from the post on “Dorg,” I want to put together a few thoughts on “For All Poor Folks At Picketwire.” The stories have a connection: the weird idea of eating rocks and how that might hurt or help humanity. But “Picketwire” is the harder of the two.

Its plot goes as follows. Lemuel Windfall could be a great inventor, but he holds back. He knows his inventions will become obsolete, and wants working conditions that will allow for primordial invention, conditions that aren’t available to him. What he wants is to invent outside of time and space. His wife, Griselda, just wants him to make some money for their family and give her a trip to Paris.

The years go on and the number of kids in the family grows. For some service rendered, Jasher Halfhogan gives Lem a land deed to a remote spot on Picketwire Creek, Colorado. Years later, as an old man, Lem strikes a deal with Jasher to make earthy materials that weren’t possible before—things like edible sediment. He then goes away.

When edible earth begins to appear for free, Lem's former financial backers come to see his wife, Griselda. She immediately sees the value in what Lem is doing. She visits a sibyl to learn more about where Lem is, and then goes to see him at Picketwire. At first she does not recognize him. He has become so bent and gnome-like. After they talk, he gives her a patent for a new substance he is teaching the poor folks at Picketwire to make— orichalcum. The story ends with Lem telling Grissie that all she has to do is think of Paris and she will be there. She does, and the story ends happily.

What’s going on in this story? Over a decade ago, MPorcius wrote a response to it that gets at the main hurdle. Here is his take, a useful way in.

“A few days ago I was very pleased to find the anthology Epoch in a Missouri flea market. Edited by Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg and published in 1975, Epoch, which contains 24 original stories, purports to be a sample of 'the state of the art in science fiction' and 'the definitive SF book of this decade.' The front and back covers are full of such charming declarations ('the culmination of centuries of imagination'?!) Anyway, the first story I have read in Epoch is R. A. Lafferty’s ‘For All the Poor Folks at Picketwire.’ This is another folksy downhome tall tale adorned with jokes that didn’t make me laugh. I don’t really care for this sort of thing, but I try to keep an open mind and give writers a chance to grow on me. (I always have in the back of my mind the knowledge that I was unimpressed by the first books I read by Gene Wolfe and Jack Vance, both of whom I now consider among my very favorite writers.) This story is about a backwoods inventor, a super genius who doesn’t care about money. All his life he has dreamed of being able to develop and manufacture items in a perfectly neutral environment, one without gravity, temperature, UV rays, etc. If I am interpreting the clues correctly, the inventor makes a deal with the Devil (or maybe some demon or angel) who allows him to start inventing and manufacturing in Purgatory, with a legion of kobolds and goblins as workmen – these kobolds and goblins are, in fact, the souls of the dead who are working off their sins. The inventor’s big new invention is edible rocks and clay, which is perhaps some Christian symbolism which is escaping me. Before the inventor got to Purgatory the kobolds and goblins were creating coal and petroleum. The story includes allusions to Virgil and Dante; there is a Sibyl, for example, and Purgatory is accessible through caves on the Earth’s surface. Immediately after reading ‘For All the Poor Folks at Picketwire,’ I thought it deserved to be ranked as merely average, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. The story is a sort of puzzle that I am still trying to figure out, which is a good sign that it was a worthwhile read. So I’ll have to give ‘For All the Poor Folks at Picketwire’ a thumbs up and continue scrounging the libraries, used bookstores and flea markets of the Middle West for the stories of R. A. Lafferty.”

I think MPorcius is right to describe “Picketwire” as puzzle-like. I recently wrote about two modes in Lafferty’s work, why it’s useful for readers to notice them, and how each creates a different kind of defamiliarization. One mode is didactic and asks to be decoded. The other is palimphantic and depends on associations the reader has to reconstruct. In laying out that argument, I focused on “Puddles on the Floor” because it is so palimphanic. This contrasts with “Picketwire.” Its mode is primarily didactic, though both modes are, as usual, in play.

In thinking about the puzzle, three pieces seem especially important.

1. “Picketwire” is shaped by two medieval threads that must be held in equipoise. Yes, this is a Purgatory story, but it is a purgatory story within a Patient Griselda tale, which makes it a trial of marriage story. Patient Griselda comes from medieval folklore and is best known from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (c. 1353) and Geoffrey Chaucer’s "Clerk’s Tale" in The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400). She is remembered for her arguably inhuman patience and obedience under extreme pressure, including losing her children and being cast out by her husband, the Marquis of Saluzzo, who tests her loyalty through cruelty. She endures it all. Without complaint.

In Lafferty's story, the patience/impatience theme is explicit in lines such as

“Lem, everything that you've ever sold, you've already had it on the shelf for at least fifteen years,” Griselda would say with weary patience.

“She had always been an impatient woman.”

and perhaps more subtly in

“The changes are all made without surgery. They are made, in fact, without the . . . ah . . . patient being touched in any way.”

One thing to note about Griselda stories is that they are slippery. Very slippery. Often, they are made to divide readers. That is part of why they are slippery and part of what makes them appealing. In the 14th century, this took the form of the writer deciding how far to press the allegory because the more Griselda becomes a symbol for the soul, the less Griselda looks like a victim of domestic abuse. Needless cruelty becomes longanimity. Boccaccio (1313–1375) is wry about Griselda's suffering. Petrarch (1304–1374), writing shortly after Boccaccio and dying in 1374, turns her into an allegory about the soul’s steadfastness toward God. Chaucer (c. 1340s–1400) complicates it by placing her tale in The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400), which also has the Wife of Bath. Then he complicates it further by making the teller a scrupulous clerk, slightly impatient but still respectful toward Petrarch’s high-mindedness. The result is a tale that leaves open where allegory ends and literality begins.

This is the first piece of the puzzle. The story can easily wrongfoot the reader. It is tempting to see Lem as the main character because his role is extraordinary, and MPorcius reads the story that way, not mentioning Griselda. This is to focus on Marquis of Saluzzo only.

Lafferty does not hide the Griselda structure, but he does not front-load it either. The story begins with a massive emphasis on Lem and his Gnostic wish to evade the material constraints of nature, but each of the story’s three sections ends with Griselda. By the end, it is her story. She goes to Paris, still affectionate toward Lem but largely free of him. Getting the shape of the story right in one’s mind means taking this into account.

2. The story plays with the idea of being a suffrage for the dead. Its title is a prayer. And Lafferty does a lot with Purgatory in it.

Take the name Picketwire. Lafferty has worked in the real-world Picketwire River, also known as the Purgatoire River, which flows through southeastern Colorado. “Purgatoire” comes from early French explorers who called it Rivière des âmes au Purgatoire—“River of Souls in Purgatory”—a reference to a local legend. Over time, English-speaking settlers adapted the name to “Picketwire,” a phonetic corruption of “Purgatoire.” In Lafferty’s story, Picketwire is one of the gates to Purgatory.

Here, I think it is worth slowing down to point out a few things.

First, in the great Catholic debate over whether Purgatory is a condition or a place, Lafferty splits the difference. He gives the reader just enough to feel that it is a place, continuous with the material world, but also a sense that it is outside of space and time and therefore a condition. This matters because of the Communion of Saints: the living and the dead in Catholicism are connected in a way that is entirely alien to Protestantism.

Unlike MPorcius, I do not see a strong connection to Dante here, beyond one. Lafferty is firmly on Team Dante in imagining Purgatory: he makes it feel intensely physical and continuous with the material world. This mattered to Dante. In The Divine Comedy, Purgatory is on the other side of the world. It is a mountain. A real mountain. Made of rock. That physical sense of Purgatory belongs to a pre-Reformation or Counter-Reformation imagination, and Lafferty, not surprisingly, keeps it alive in his way.

Dante's Purgatory

At least four aspects are significant:

i. Purgatory is the antechamber of heaven because everyone in it will eventually arrive there. Once they do, Purgatory will be no more. That’s why it isn’t one of the final things and why it isn’t eschatological. It's a half-hogan, a half-house. Everyone ends up going the whole hog eschatologically.

“No, not consciously I didn't invent him, Grissie. And yet I did invent him a little bit, I suppose. And he me. We are all formed by feedback and interaction. We see more than there is in other people, and we ourselves are seen for more than we are. And we grow to match our seeming. Don't you like Jasher [Halfhogan]?” “I've never met him, Lem. Every time I've seen him he was scurrying away like some night ghost that was afraid of being shone on by sunlight. Well, if he's a Halfhogan, what would a Wholehogan be?” “You really don't know, Griselda? Sometimes you astonish me,” Lemuel said.

ii. Thomas Aquinas and others argued that Purgatory is in the earth and that its purifying fire is continuous with the torturing flames of hell below it. In Lafferty's story, this matters for what he draws from Plato: the red light of orichalcum.

iii. Many of the story’s obscure jokes turn on the history of how Purgatory developed in sacred doctrine, from debates over whether one could earn merit while there (think of the value of Lem’s work) to the whole mini-history of Purgatory Lafferty gives the reader twice, doubling down on its significance for understanding the story.

“Jews, close your ears!” a prairie dog barked. “Greeks, harden your hearing!” a rattlesnake voiced. “Covenanters, avert your senses lest you be affronted by it!” a bull-bat spoke in a series of little booms.

Here are the three major historical strands in the development of the doctrine of Purgatory. The prairie dog points the reader back to the patrological tradition of Purgatory. The rattlesnake points to the Greeks at the Council of Florence (1431 to 1449), where the Eastern and Western Churches formally split over the issue, especially over how the Roman Church had begun elaborating the doctrine. Most of the Greeks were not entirely against the idea of a post-life purgation, but they resisted its formalization. The bull-bat points to the Convanters (whose belief in double predestination eliminated the basis of Purgatory) and the Council of Trent (1545 to 1563), which issued the decree that would shape the Church’s approach from that point on: do not elaborate. Purgatory exists. That is enough. Little booms. Or as the Tridentine Decree on Purgatory put it:

But let the more difficult and subtle questions which do not make for edification and, for the most part, are not conducive to an increase of piety (cf. I Tim. 1:4), be excluded from the popular sermons to uneducated people. Likewise they should not permit opinions that are doubtful and tainted with error to be spread and exposed. As for those things that belong to the realm of curiosity or superstition, or smack of dishonorable gain, they should forbid them as scandalous and injurious to the faithful.

It’s this dialing down on Purgatory that came with the Counter-Reformation that, ironically, gives Lafferty license to let his imagination run wild with the details. Could Purgatory be an engine of matter-creation?

4. Lafferty spins medieval folklore by way of Gnosticism and quantum physics. What Lem wants (his gnostic pride) for a workshop is a quantum vacuum, which brings him as close as possible to conditions of creation ex nihilo. I suspect the story also draws on ideas from quantum theory, such as quantum entanglement, seen in the connection between Jasher and Lem, and bilocation, as when we get the double location of the Picketwire. Lafferty maps it onto real rivers named for Purgatory. It is a classic Lafferty move.

Finally, I see a strong connection to Einstein’s "spooky action at a distance," not just in the idea of Lem’s quantum lab, but also in the way he and Grissie shrink:

It was a queer, refractory sort of place, but Griselda had adjusted to it in everything except her eyes and her mind. Her dinner date had been getting smaller, and the cafe-restaurant had been getting stranger and more intimate.

and in Grissie's line

"I hardly know how to say this, but there is something very spooky about the place."

Those are the main puzzle pieces, as far as I can see, although a few smaller things stand out. For instance, the sibyl in the story comes straight out of Virgil’s Aeneid, but Lafferty probably also knew that the much less familiar Sibylline Oracles were once used in arguments for the existence of Purgatory. He would have found that if he looked up “Sibyl” in his beloved Catholic Encyclopedia. The names Jasher and Lemuel are drawn from the more mysterious parts of the Old Testament for the same reason: no one knows who King Lemuel was, and no one knows much about the lost Book of Jasher. And the red sweater that Grissie says she will send to Lem is a variation on the red cap worn by kobolds in the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen, as well as a twist on the fires of hell that once flamed up into Purgatory being turned down a little after the Council of Trent.

So, where does this leave the reader? With permanent, and seemingly author-intended, options that remain provocatively irreconcilable. As a cultural symbol, Patient Griselda is overdetermined. She is many things: moral exemplar and moral ambiguity; the good wife and the ridiculous wife; victim of cruelty and paragon of second-order virtue; political allegory and spiritual allegory.

Some of that applies here. Allegorically, Lafferty’s Impatient Griselda may have died, moving from Purgatory into heaven, journeying after death from Lem’s quantum cave to her long-dreamed, heavenly Paris. Or she may still be alive, having left Purgatory to walk the Haussmann-planned streets of real Paris, now filthy rich, like the exploitative sharks who begged her to find Lem.

Lafferty keeps it wide open:

“I'll send it, Lem, I'll send it!” Griselda cried. She kissed him, or perhaps she missed him. She thought Paris.