"Rainbird" (1961)

“I have watched the wheels go round in case I might see the living creatures like the appearance of lamps, in case I might see the Living God projected from the Machine. I have said to the perfected steel, be my sister and for the glassy towers I thought I felt some beginnings of his creature, But A, a, a, Domine Deus, my hands found the glazed work unrefined and the terrible crystal a stage-paste . . . Eia, Domine Deus.” — David Jones, “A, a, a, Domine Deus”

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king–     dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,     As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding     Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! — Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Windhover”

. . . there will never be a perfect apple corer.

I first read “Rainbird” as a teenager. It was my first encounter with Lafferty’s style. I still feel so much affection for it that I know my judgment is probably skewed—because I think it’s just great. Other Lafferty fans don’t seem to rate it nearly as highly, and to be fair, the innovation of science fiction content isn’t the source of its excellence. It is one of Lafferty’s stories about amnesia, but for once the forgetting is not a disaster. That is part of its excellence.

The story follows Higgston Rainbird, a late-18th- to early-19th-century Yankee inventor. Lafferty tells us that if scientific firsts were properly recorded, Rainbird’s name would be famous. But they aren’t, and he isn’t. He’s remembered only by a few specialists, and only for a handful of minor inventions: “an improved blacksmith’s bellows in the year 1785,” a “better (but not good) method of reefing the lateen sail,” a “chestnut roaster,” and a “nutmeg grater embodying a new safety feature.” But that’s just the tip. In a past that no longer exists, Rainbird also pioneered “the dynamo, the steam automobile, the steel industry . . . fissionable power, space travel, group telepathy,” and even built a retrogressor while working toward corporal immortality and the apotheosis of mankind.

The story explains this discrepancy. In an original, now-erased timeline, a young Rainbird on Devil's Head Mountain chooses a life of invention. He follows this path for sixty-five years, becoming a great but flawed inventor. At the end of his life, he is full of regrets, looking at the blind alleys and wasted decades, and he rages at his missed opportunities: "Oh, the waste, the wilderness that a talent can wander in! If I had only had a mentor!" He invents the retrogressor, a time machine, and travels back sixty-five years and up two thousand feet to become that mentor for his younger self. And he does it twice, the second time when he's in his eighties, after he has invented even more brilliantly.

The story’s climax is the second encounter on Devil's Head Mountain. The old Second Rainbird has used a retrogressor and desperately tries to convince his younger self of the urgency of his mission, intending to set him on a perfect, meteoric path to immortality. He tells him to "Forget the bird . . . This is your moment of decision. That is a boyishness that you must give up." He offers a vision of total instrumental power, promising to give the boy the knowledge to skip the mistakes and master the ages. But the young Rainbird enjoys his hawk's flights; the two versions of himself are now different men, separated by the life of the original Rainbird who invented the retrogressor.

The scene reaches a critical point when the hawk returns with a rainbird. Overcome with decades of pent-up nostalgia, the old Rainbird thaws. "Nobody ever gives up pleasure willingly," he says. "I haven't hawked for sixty-five years. Let me fly him this time, Higgston."

After the old Rainbird flies the hawk, he vanishes. The Young Rainbird is left alone on the mountain, thinking about the intense, unhappy old man he just met. He dismisses the advice, thinking he “poured it on a little thick" and "I'd have gone along with him on it if only he'd have found a good stopping place a little sooner, and hadn't been so insistent on giving up hawking."

With that, he makes his final choice, not for a Baconian future, but for the present: "Well, I'll just hawk here till dark . . . And Sunday, if I have a little time, I may work on my sparker or my chestnut roaster." This choice is the source of the tragicomedy. By rejecting his future self’s obsessive drive, he abandons the path of invention altogether, ensuring that the story’s opening is the only version of Higgston Rainbird who will ever exist. Niven's law of time travel in action: "If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe."

This is a mutable-history time travel tale, an overwrite paradox that closes in on itself—a bootstrap loop in the tradition of mid-century paradox fiction that followed late 1940s genre innovations and 1950s experiments with the time game.

O = old Rainbird Y = young Rainbird R = retrogressor

K = knowledge of future inventions

1. O → teaches Y: gives K, R

2. Y + K → becomes O

3. O → builds R, repeats Step 1

   → Climax, no origin of K or R.

More interesting is how Lafferty loops together two patterns. First, Rainbird becomes a microcosm of some of our technological history. He begins as a humble tinkerer who discovers power in the form of steam, tools, and machines. He moves on to master nearly every major area of science, including electricity, flight, fission, space travel, and thought. Finally, his inventions turn inward and move toward questions of immortality.

Second, Lafferty plays with spiritual ascent. Rainbird's progression is a mastery of the classical elements. He rules over earth and matter through tools, the plow, smelting, and the wedge. He gains control over water, motion, and flow, as seen in steamships and hydraulic dams. He takes on air, distance, and communication with inventions like wireless systems, the televox, and flight. He commands fire, energy, and time through the retrogressor, fission power, and even early steps toward immortality. He rises through each phase as the ideal Edison in the ultimate Edisonade.

As strong as all of that is, it’s not what makes the story so exceptional. What makes it so exceptional is just the magically controlled, unpretentious language. This is always a Lafferty strength, but “Rainbird” is a perfectly executed instance of it, the ideal place to start for someone new to his work.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Shakespeare’s plots aren’t his greatest gift. What Virginia Woolf once wrote a diary entry about his verbal power comes close to how I feel about Lafferty’s language in this story—though I’m not suggesting that Lafferty is like Shakespeare. I want to be careful here, because what seems true to me is the sense of being in the presence of a highly unusual verbal gift: the speed with which Lafferty lays down language, and what Sheryl Smith called his combination of wit and dexterity. Just as we set relative weights on plot and expression in Shakespeare, for all of Lafferty’s genre-based inventiveness elsewhere—this one really is a boilerplate time-travel paradox—a similar weighing seems called for. Its accomplishment is not on the axis of innovation but on the axis of significance of theme and expressive power.

Woolf wrote in that diary entry, “I never yet knew how amazing [Shakespeare’s] stretch and speed and word coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace and outrace my own, seeming to start equal and then I see him draw ahead and do things I could not in my wildest tumult and utmost press of mind imagine. Even the less known plays are written at a speed that is quicker than anybody else's quickest; and the words drop so fast one can't pick them up.” I feel that when reading “Rainbird.”

Lafferty’s line-by-line language is never much faster or better than it is in here. One could closely read the story sentence-by-sentence and be richly rewarded from beginning to end.  

Consider when Second Rainbird is really getting going and Lafferty gives the reader punchy, piston-like syntactic symbolism: short, busy sentences and a final line with the pragmatic marker But + a talky cliche to reel it in, the second But a callback to the first But. This is the old Lafferty orality trick.

But the main thing was steam, iron, and tools. He made the finest lathes. He revolutionized smelting and mining. He brought new things to power, and started the smoke to rolling. He made mistakes, he ran into dead ends, he wasted whole decades. But one man can only do so much.

This is what H. L. Mencken meant by living American language—a language as American as Washington Irving or Irvin S. Cobb. Mencken wrote, “When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably ten million words in English, but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.” Rainbird’s inventive mania is musical.

And Rainbird gets that beautiful language throughout. He would fit right in alongside Rip Van Winkle or Judge Priest, though unlike the passive Van Winkle, Rainbird does it to himself. Like Van Winkle, his encounter comes at the high point of a mountain—a threshold onto time. But unlike the lazy Van Winkle, Rainbird has a monstrous work ethic. Both stories are quintessentially American takes on old age and experience.

Of Rainbird, Lafferty writes, “For better or worse he brought the country up a long road, so there was hardly a custom of his boyhood that still continued.” And then there are all the Americanisms that feel just right—half like Old Judge Priest but really Laffertyisms: dog-eared damnation, hill-hopping, bejammed, ewer-eared galoot, hellpepper, burr-tailed.

Then there are the adage-like drops scattered throughout, the kind of thing that made Will Rogers such a fit for Cobb's Old Judge Priest. A few of them from "Rainbird": “A man cannot achieve without a goad as well as a goal.” “The Waste, the wilderness that a talent can wander in!” “Every man doesn’t hang, but every man does come to the end of his rope.” “None of the doors required keys, only a resolute man to turn the knob and push them open.” “Gamier prey than you ever dreamed of.” Once again, as American as it gets, something like the Yankee Irving and the southern Cobb being pulled towards one another by an eccentric Okie.

It is also wise.

One of Lafferty’s favorite sets was the five-volume A History of Technology (1954), edited by Charles Singer. “Rainbird” might well be about both the marvels and the limits of what those volumes contain. I have often wondered if the set inspired Lafferty to write the story, because, like “Eurema’s Dam” and several others, it is a meditation on the nature of invention.

The Welsh Catholic poet and painter David Jones (1895-1974) made a distinction relevant to Lafferty’s worldview: the difference between civilization and culture. Civilization refers to the external structures of human life, the machinery, systems, bureaucracies, and technical organization that make society run but tend to become impersonal and utilitarian. Culture, by contrast, is the inner life made visible. It is expressed in art, language, myth, and ritual, in all that gives symbolic, spiritual, and sacramental meaning to life.

For Jones, the sacramental imagination binds the visible and the invisible, the material and the transcendent. A work of art is a sign that reveals and participates in a deeper reality, which is very Lafferty. In this sense, the kind of industrial society that Rainbird builds is the sort enframement that allows civilization to eclipse culture. The mechanical at the expense of the symbolic; utility at the expense of presence. Efficacy coring out meaning. Better to have culture and be remembered for the moldboard plow, the Nutmeg Grater with the safety feature, a bellows, a sparker, and the Devil's Claw Wedge for splitting logs.

Against that backdrop is the most important moment in the story. For the reasons Jones understood, it is a cultural rather than merely personal recovery, about Rainbird and more than Rainbird, hawking having reached its peak in the West during Lafferty's beloved Catholic Middle Ages: “And old Higgston flew the tercel hawk down through the gleaming clouds, and he and young Higgston watched from the top of the world. And then young Higgston Rainbird was standing alone on the top of Devil’s Head Mountain, and the old man was gone.” By the end, the Rainbirds are unhooded—like the hawk.