Green River Cave (late 1950s?)

HILOBROW is an internet treasure, with its smart group of contributors and good taste. Two of my favorite features on the site are the lists of adventure fiction and adventures for young readers. The latter are adventures that preceded the YA marketing category's transformation of the publishing space into what it is now, impoverished. Of course, Lafferty didn’t write straight adventure fiction, and he didn’t write juveniles, but among his fragments and unfinished stories is one boys' serial, Green River Cave. It’s fun. It could have been his entry into the genre of boys’ fiction.

There is a section of Lafferty’s ghost story that focuses on the cave and the pit as heterotopia and paracosm, special social spaces for child characters. You see this from the caves in Doolen’s Mountain to the dozens of square miles of strip where the Dulanty children wage war in The Reefs of Earth (1968). In the first part of In a Green Tree, My Heart Leaps Up, Lafferty wrote his great set piece on children and caves, but Green River Cave was an early hint of that. My Heart Leaps Up gives readers a guide to thinking about what the cave, as a secret place, can mean for a child, both literally and metaphorically. There are “trivial and shallow and sunshiny caves” in the banks of Cedar Crest Creek. There are simple hideouts used for everyday play. Then there is the old, haunted maze of Lost City, an adventure space before playsets were mass-marketed and colonized the imaginations of children of my generation. It is filled with dangerous stories of outlaws and human bones. The cave gives the child room to create myths, even if that means painting fake prehistoric murals or carving made-up ones. For Lafferty, caves occur and reoccur, and the truest cave is the “grandiose secret cave” of the inner world, the private paracosm of the self. Each child enters that by a secret ladder.

Yes, in the first part of In a Green Tree, caves are everywhere. A movie theater is a “cavern locked away from the daylight,” a dream space. Sexuality is a “mysterious and magnetic red-dark cave.” The hold of an immigrant ship is a “purgatorial cave” full of monsters. A boy’s clubhouse, dug beneath a house, is a gateway to the supernatural when a ghost moves in. As far as I know, the unfinished Green River Cave may be Lafferty’s first attempt to show the child–cave connection. The material is undated, but it is handwritten in a small, ten-cent, top-bound spiral notebook that appears to be from the 1950s. I think it’s a Westab (Western Tablet Co.) product.

Green River Cave is set within the fictional Green River Cave system, a massive network of limestone caverns. This creates an interpretative problem because if read literally, the story seems to be set in a coastal region, but I suspect that we are dealing with Lafferty’s per-nuclear ion form of free-indirect discourse; the children have thirteen miles of nylon to help them track their caving. This is a fictional, adventrous wrap being laid over plausible karst topography but with an A-B objective (mountains to the sea) thrilling in boys fiction but implausible in life.

What Lafferty does depict is a labyrinth where a river (Kentucky's Green River or not) vanishes into the high country and reemerges thirty miles away at the ocean, a "sponge of three hundred square miles" filled with passages, hidden chambers, and underground streams. There are caves with dry upper passages, and there are lower sections, which are flooded. This navigation is dangerous.

Into this, Lafferty tosses his four adventurous boys: Tommy Keyes, Bob King, Charles Harper, and Bill Hoe. They plan a very boyish expedition: to find an underground route from the mountains all the way to the sea caves on the coast. Before they set out, Sheriff Townsend, who knows the caves, warns them of the danger and promises to launch a search if they don’t return within a week. The kids, though, are confident. Tommy grew up near the caves, and he knows them intimately; Bob is a talented climber and risk-taker; Charles has experience with coastal caves; and Bill, though small, is fearless, a specialist in tight passages. Lastly, there is Monster, their small spaniel, who is supposed to help them navigate and backtrack in the darkness.

The boys begin at Crow Castle, a deep vertical shaft. The plan is sound enough: they are going to lay a nylon finder cord to trace their path. Lafferty establishes the situation in fine boys' fiction fashion. From the start, it’s treacherous, with water-filled tunnels, thick mud, and claustrophobic squeezes. Strange echoes and noises follow the boys. Tommy starts hearing what sounds like footsteps that stop whenever they do. Are the boys not alone?

Deeper inside the cave system, the boys discover black lignite deposits and the remains of a recent campfire. Tommy remembers local legends of an old man living deep underground, while Charles recalls his grandfather's stories of coastal wreckers who once lured ships to their doom. The boys now feel as if they are being watched.

One night, they discover that their thirteen-mile finder cord has been carefully rolled up, leaving them lost. And things get worse. Monster is missing. Panic and arguments break out, but the boys decide to keep moving toward the coast. They now see it as their only hope for finding a way out. At the same time, Bob King becomes sure they are being followed. He sets a trap and catches their stalker: a frail, blind old man named Crazy Carl. Carl is a hermit who has lived in the caves for years. He rambles about being chased by the old wreckers. He is more than half-mad, but he knows the cave system and agrees to help guide the boys toward an exit.

As they near the ocean passages, the hopeful mood is shattered by gunfire. Armed men guard the exit. Bob King receives a bullet injury in the ambush. The attack triggers Carl’s memory: the wreckers are not figures of legend but modern-day criminals using the caves to hide their activities. Trapped between the gunmen and impassable tunnels, the boys barricade themselves and tend to Bob's wound. In a desperate move, Bill Hoe, Crazy Carl, and Monster slip away into the darkness on a mission to find another way out or confront their enemies. And that is it. Lafferty abandoned it. But he did not stop thinking about caves.

To me, this reaches its fullest expression in the Penandrew brothers, and in John Penandrew’s compelling arc in In a Green Tree. Little David can be overwhelmed by cave-like spaces. His psychological weakness is revealed most clearly in his breakdown at the deep Brick Pit. John, by contrast, is perhaps a little too at home in the underworld. He creates his own secret club-cave and even places David’s ghost inside it. All of this foreshadows the later strangeness of John and the eerie events at Harrow Street, a place readers know from “The All-At-Once Man,” but which also figures in the In a Green Tree material. Harrow House is itself a mysterious cave, with strange specifications. Whereas early in In a Green Tree David looks to be the Penandrew brother who is willingly contained by the cave, with John appearing completely in control, this changes. By the end of the series, things are far more complicated. Long before any of that came about there were happier days. Let’s end with them:

And John's cave was the only one in the neighborhood that had a genuine ghost in it. This was the ghost of David Penandrew, John's dead brother. David's ghost was said to be quite at his ease in that cave, though quite nervous on his rare appearances in other places. John had telephones in the cave, and a telephone in the attic of the house, and one deep in the walls somewhere. One calling those phones would get some strange and spooky answers. It seemed to be an old crazy man who answered the phone in the attic. He said that he had been a prisoner up there for many years. And it was some species of animal that always answered the phone that was within the walls of the house.

Green River Cave Notes.pdf

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