"Square and Above Board" (1981/1982)

That’s Blarney Castle in County Cork, which Lafferty likely had in mind when he wrote “Square and Above Board.” The story has a strong 1940s feel. It plays like Lafferty’s version of a supernatural romantic comedy—Blithe Spirit (1945), I Married a Witch (1942), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), Topper (1937), or The Canterville Ghost (1944). Lafferty wrote it in the 1980s, and it appeared, appropriately, in the October 1982 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, with an editor’s note calling it vintage Lafferty. That may have been intended as praise, but the label doesn’t quite fit. It’s not vintage Lafferty; it’s Lafferty doing something vintage, his own way. The following bit of dialogue makes me laugh the way the dialogue in the old supernatural comedies do:

“What are you thinking about, dear?” Bridie asked Cris one sunny day during their engagement. “Oh, of all the ancient terrors,” Cris said, “of the Sea Monster that is the most primordial of the terrors, of the loathsome and murderous disease that will be diverted from its victim only by another victim, of ghosts that return with the sea-wrack of their deaths still on them. And most of all I was thinking of the terror of falling, though in the sunny little daydream reverie I've just been having the fall is only a piddling thousand feet. But the terror of falling is the most overriding terror of them all. Did you know that even bright Lucifer, a winged creature, was so terrified of the depths before him that he forgot to use his wings and so fell like lightning?” “Cris, Cris, maybe you are just terrified of marrying me.”

Now the plot. Two young men are rivals: Midas Muldoon, who is “as straightforward as a crooked man could be” in his drive for “power . . . prestige, and . . . whopping wealth,” and his best friend, Cristopher “Cris” Kearny, an “intricate and convoluted fellow” who builds his fortune by being an “insider in very many ways.” They compete, but their styles are different, and that becomes the heart of the story. Muldoon plays checkers—he’s a tactician. Kearny plays chess—he’s a strategist. Their rivalry includes the “very pretty and devious and intelligent girl” Bridie Caislean. When Cris becomes a millionaire, Bridie is eager to be with him. “Oh, one month from today, the first day of June we’ll get married.” That’s the same day she was supposed to marry Midas, who “doesn’t know any different yet.” Cris knows Midas won’t give up easily. “He’ll stay in the race all the way down to the wire, and he’s especially tricky in the back-stretch.”

The plot takes its first turn when Bridie runs a background check on Cris and learns about his cousin, Colin Kearny. Colin has two million Irish pounds, a castle, and a terminal illness—just the kind of man Bridie is really after. She tells Cris, “He must come to our wedding and he must make his will to us.” Colin arrives and unexpectedly forms a close bond with Midas. It turns out Colin is also a checkers champion. At Cris’s bachelor party, Colin and Midas get drunk, cut their arms to become blood brothers, and play checkers for high stakes. Midas wins Colin’s entire fortune. When Cris tries to intervene, a surprisingly sober Colin whispers, “Don’t spoil it, Cris . . . Oh, I’ve conned this fellow into becoming blood brother of me, and he thinks he’s conned me into it . . . It gives me top pleasure to outsmart people.” Colin has thrown the game—because the castle comes with an entailed curse.

The next morning, Bridie wakes Cris, who is “pleasantly befuddled from the Imperial Irish Brandy,” to break off their engagement. “Midas won the castle and the two million Irish pounds from Cousin Colin,” she says cheerfully, “so of course I’m marrying Midas instead of you this morning.” Cris is left with an empty sort of feeling. A year later, he gets a call. It’s Bridie, calling from Ireland. She says, “We are so happy here that we want to share our happiness with somebody.” Sensing that something isn’t right, Cris goes to a lawyer’s office in County Cork, where he meets Sharon McSorley, a cheerful and well-fed assistant. She fills him in on the castle’s dark draiocht, specifically, the loathsome disease passed down to each new owner.

She tells Cris how to get around it with a bit of folk magic: "Chicken blood is the specific against the loathsome entailment." Cris ends up with three sackfuls of it from a rooster that dies after the blood drawing.

When Cris arrives at the castle, he begins his counter-scheme. Midas wants them to become blood brothers to seal their friendship—a ritual meant to pass the curse to Cris. But Cris fakes the rite, using chicken blood instead. Midas becomes “blood-brother of a cock that was two-and-a-half hours dead.” Later, when Midas wants to play checkers, Cris agrees. Before the game, he sprinkles blood on the board and on the castle’s trap square, saying it’s some of their brotherhood blood. Midas, pleased, says, “‘Twill make the rite all the more binding.” Cris wins. He reclaims the castle, the money, and the curse. Thinking Cris is now doomed to die within two years, Bridie makes him sign codicils delaying ownership of the fortune, so it will pass back to her and Midas when he dies. Cris signs them, laughing, and says, “All Square and Above Board.”

As he leaves, Cris notices that Bridie, though she claimed to have gained twenty-eight pounds for him, somehow looks thinner. The real ending comes as Cris drives away with Sharon McSorley. After she gives him a generous kiss, he understands something new—the value of amplitude. What makes life good, he realizes, includes the space, warmth, and joy that Bridie never had. The villains are left with an empty victory in a cursed castle. Sharon ends their story with a practical promise: “I’m going to fix that tricky square in Checkerboard Dining Hall so that nobody will ever exit that way again.”

There are many small touches to enjoy here, and even more appear as handwritten notes on the typed manuscript that didn’t make it into the final version. These details wouldn’t have changed the plot, but they add charm. There’s more eccentric food listed as being served at the castle. Lafferty includes a good joke: one item not stolen was the royal rooster, which ties back to the very funny scene where the rooster is bled and crows more weakly each time. There’s also a bit more drama built around the castle’s trick square. Details like these would have made the story a little better, but they don’t change it in any major way.

To the best of my knowledge, there is only one online write-up of the story that offers any real substance. It makes a few points I’d like to push back on. Here’s what I see being said: Cris Kearny is presented as a simple good guy. Bridie Caislean is treated as a passive prize. Cousin Colin isn’t mentioned. The ending is called forced and hurried, and the events are described as too convenient. The story is said to follow a fairly standard plot arc.

To those points, I’d say the pacing isn’t rushed: it’s deliberate. This is a caper story, and the quick ending is the rapid execution of a counter-scheme. The events aren’t convenient. They come from stacked levels of planning: first by Colin, then by the Muldoons, then by Sharon, and finally by Cris. What the write-up calls an explanation is foreshadowed at the start of the story through iconographic setup: Cris always has an inside, sure thing—and that’s what allows him to win. The ending isn’t standard. A typical version would have Cris win back Bridie or end up with someone prettier. Instead, the story turns that on its head. Cris ends up with something much better: amplitude, spaciousness, and joy. The villains are hoisted by their own petard, which is conventional, but the path to that moment is pure Lafferty. Ultimately, the write-up suggests that this is a story about greed and betrayal. That’s not quite right. It’s also not really a love triangle. Like many of Lafferty’s works, this is a parable about amplitude.

As Lafferty kept writing, amplitude became a larger and more important theme for him. In this story, he plays with the word, using it partly to joke about his fondness for bigger women. But amplitude, as a state of being, shows up surprisingly often in his work. He explores it most deeply in Aurelia and in his private letters. At its core, it connects to Aquinas’s idea that we have a duty to be happy. On one hand, emotions aren’t fully under the control of the will (Summa Theologiae I–II, q.24, a.1). But Aquinas also argues that all human beings naturally desire happiness (I–II, q.5, a.8). Bridie and Midas are clearly off course, distorted by greed. As Cris puts it, even though Bridie has gained weight, she somehow looks thinner—a spiritual judgment, not a physical one.

One of the best places to explore this side of Lafferty’s thinking is not in his fiction, but in My Way of Life (1952) by Walter Farrell and Martin J. Heally. Lafferty used to give this book to younger friends he thought were smart. He said he didn’t give it to the ones who weren’t. Farrell and Heally write, “Happiness is the goal of all human activity, precisely as it is human, that is, free and deliberate,” and, “The tragedy of man is not that he cannot find happiness, but that he looks for it in the wrong places.” Bridie and Midas are examples of that. It makes for good comedy, but it’s bad news for them. That is, of course, the point of the title and its two very different interpretations of the motto Cearnog Agus Cionn Mhord: "Och, That Square in the Board Above!"

Square and Above Board Notes.pdf

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