"Three Men in the Morning" (1962)

The greatest loss of life from a "natural disaster" in the United States occurred on September 9, 1900, when a category 4 hurricane struck the boom town of Galveston, Texas killing at least 8,000 people, destroying about 7,000 buildings and leaving more than 10,000 people homeless. In comparison, Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 which struck the New Orleans area in 2005, killed about 1,800 and displaced about one million people. The city of Galveston as it was, never really recovered from the storm as Houston gradually took her place as the major metropolitan area of South Texas. — Landmark Events, “Galveston Hurricane, 1900”

Yes, quite a few of the Texans are really Okies, but I wouldn't say a word against them or anything else of Texas. It is my favorite state after Oklahoma. I love Dallas and San Antonio and Austin and Laredo (and especially Nuevo Laredo Mexico across the International bridge from it, and Galveston. Galveston especially. — Letter, November 24, 1989

Galveston, like New Orleans and Chicago, is a special city in the Ghost Story. When Lafferty was young, his family took vacations to Galveston, and it looms large in his imagination. It is off Galveston beach that Finnegan kills Saxon X. Seaworthy, and it is, of course, the location in which most of his early novel Dotty is set. In Dotty, especially, one can see how rowdy and fun Lafferty’s Galveston was—a sinful place with its bastion of Catholic culture. Like New Orleans, it is a place with a complicated history, bound up with the exploitation of race and sex, and often racialized through sex work. Over the city, in Lafferty, hovers the memory of the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the most deadly American natural disaster, which hit the city like a Biblical judgment. “Three Men in the Morning” is an unpublished Lafferty story that shows the time in which it was written, but it’s one of the strongest and most interesting of the unpublished stories.

It is a story about what is nowadays called “the less dead,” the victims of marginalized groups. Dotty meets figures like this in her novel, and in “Three Men in the Morning,” the historical context is really an early 20th-century Galveston where the deaths of marginalized women are treated as inconsequential. This is understood by the figure around whom the mystery (which goes unsolved for now) revolves: Rosa. She outright says that murder would not "matter to someone" in power. As she tells Bishop:

"Mr. Bishop," she said, "almost every morning there's at least one girl turns up dead. What will one more matter?" "It might matter to someone," I told her. "No. No, I don't think so," she said.

The keeper of her memory, the old Black man, Mr. Bishop, uses his perceived social insignificance to keep a sixty-year psychological vigil. He is waiting for a physical slip that will allow him to bypass a failed judiciary and execute his own form of justice.

While there is a story in it, "Three Men in the Morning" is also a local color piece where Lafferty captures the mood of a location. Most of what happens is a story within a story being told by an older man to a younger man in a shanty row in Galveston, Texas. There, Lafferty writes, eleven elderly Black men live whose combined ages total one thousand years. As the narrator describes the row:

There is an entire block of these old gaffs, eleven of them in one shanty row, each in his own two-room narrow house; and the total of their ages is one thousand years. The eleven old men are named Mr. Elgin, Mr. LaRue, Mr. Bishop, Mr. Jackson, Mr. Copeland, Mr. Randy, Mr. Gill, Mr. Franklin, Mr. Tote, Mr. Cobb, and Mr. Martin . . . . They are long and lean; they are lined of face like eleven brothers.

All have outlived their wives. The old Mr. Bishop has a daily routine that differs from his neighbors'; every morning, he walks to three locations to exchange greetings with three wealthy old white men: Mr. Luce, Mr. Rutledge, and Mr. Madison. Bishop says all white men come in three archetypes—the rooster, the fox, and the bear—and these three have "fossilized" their appearance over the decades. Many years ago, a 1909 newspaper article created their trademark by describing their high-buttoned collars and gloves. They have kept it ever since. Bishop describes the impact of this publicity:

I cursed a certain reporter for it, in the year, I believe, of 1909 . . . . He gave them their trademark in the piece: their always full-dressed appearance, the high-buttoned collars and the eternal gloves. . . . The three men were proud of the note and accepted their trademark. They continued in their style, and will continue it all their lives. And how to spot a mole and a birthmark on a man who is so covered?

This seems parallel to Dotty’s time in Galveston. Mr. Bishop explains that his walking ritual is part of a sixty-year quest for justice over the murder of Rosa Hart (“sad heart”), a young woman of color who worked at a local supper club in the early 1900s. Rosa passed as Spanish. Playing with fire, she had tried to run a blackmail scheme against the three wealthy white men, claiming to be pregnant and threatening to reveal evidence of their illegal business dealings, for Rosa had kept up with the johns’ pillow talk. Before she was killed, she said a few things that could help Bishop determine her killer. The most dangerous of the three has a mole on the throat, a birthmark on the left hand, and a nervous flutter in the left eyelid. One trick of the story is that the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 happens days after Rosa’s murder, and it provides the killer with cover. There are thousands of bodies all over the island and the beaches. Miraculously, Mr. Bishop found Rosa’s body, but the question of burial was out of the question because of the number of dead. They had to be taken out into the Gulf of Mexico and buried at sea.

The dilemma should now be clear. All three suspects wear gloves and high collars, which hide the mole and birthmark. And Mr. Bishop has spent 60 years waiting for the guilty man to reveal the nervous eyelid flutter, but whichever man had it has grown more controlled as his years of crimes piled up. So Mr. Bishop keeps his vigil. He believes he is 10 to 12 years older than the three men, but he will outlive them. His strategy relies on elimination: if two of the men die of natural causes, the survivor will be confirmed as the murderer. God would not rob Bishop of vengeance. It’s vengeance that keeps Mr. Bishop alive. He is the only person alive who cares about Rosa Hart's memory.

I have little to say about this story, except that it, like several others by Lafferty—such as “The Ugly Sea”—moves in Dotty’s orbit and enriches it. They all imagine Galveston around the same time and create a historical mythography. Had Esteban been published, it too would have entered Lafferty’s late 1950s and early 1960s regional history. Even so, these unpublished works leave a phantom imprint on the path Lafferty followed, especially in The Devil Is Dead.

Rosa Hart and Dotty are both archetypes of the feminine that Lafferty associates with Galveston. Each is a Dolores with what Lafferty calls a "sea urchin" nature. Bishop reflects on the nature of women like her:

There is also an old legend about girls of her sort, that they have all of them hearts of gold. Those who hold to the legend know little of metallurgy and less of hearts. Rosa (Dolores) had a rough-shaped stone for a heart, but it was speckled lightly with mica, sometimes called fool's gold. Few of them, or those of any sort, have even that much. She was better than most.

Each has great intelligence and is not above using some tactical deception. Both characters live in worlds dominated by predatory men: Rosa uses Lafferty’s "badger game" of extorted pregnancy and blackmail against the elites, while Dotty herself at one point orchestrates a psychological game of forged letters to manipulate the marital expectations of an elderly suitor. Where they differ is in victimization. Both women have rough-shaped hearts in their worlds of "pigs," "roosters," and "foxes." Finally, both Dotty and “Three Men in the Morning” are works about fighting amnesia. As Mr. Bishop says, “It will matter to someone.”

Three Men in the Morning Notes.pdf

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