"What Big Tears the Dinosaur's" (1983)

My heart leaps up when I behold     A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old,     Or let me die! — William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up”

“After him! After him!” Bernard Sheen cried out. — My Heart Leaps Up, Chapter 1

Skeleton of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, in the American Museum of Natural History, from The Outline of History by H.G. Wells, Volume I, published in 1920

“What Big Tears the Dinosaur’s” is one of the quietest stories about the Men Who Knew Everything, which makes its ending all the more ironic: it nearly concludes with a house being shaken apart by the energy shocks of a T-Rex. I’ve mentioned before that Gene Wolfe once said Lafferty cared too much about being original, but here Lafferty does something rare. He plays with the reader’s expectation and then delivers exactly what he telegraphs. He signals so plainly that the T-Rex is Austro’s pet that the reader begins to ask—how could it not be? What twist is coming? Isn’t this Lafferty? But there is no trick on that level of the story. The dinosaur in Arkansas is Austro’s dog. It is Tyrannosaurus rex gunaslopesienu. If the story holds a trick, it isn’t about the identity of the dinosaur.

Whether the ending of this story works for the reader will probably depend on a number of things. First, is the reader a sentimentalist? Sentimentalism is not something Lafferty usually hangs an entire story on, so I’ll show my cards: this story works for me. But it probably wouldn’t if I didn’t already know something about Lafferty’s mythos, and especially the connection between the Austro stories and his semi-autobiographical work In a Green Tree. The character Barnaby was based on the American historian Daniel Boorstin, a childhood acquaintance of Lafferty’s and, in Lafferty’s words, the smartest man he ever met. That link ties the story to the larger and more serious themes of In a Green Tree, which was Lafferty’s most direct attempt to think through the meaning of his own time, with all its joys and disappointments.

Daniel Boorstin

If you have read My Heart Leaps Up, you might remember the young Barnaby asserting that the doomed David Penandrew must be cut down from a tree—after David, the younger brother of John Penandrew from “The All-At-Once Man” and other mentions in the Austro stories, tries to hang himself, something he has attempted before. That moment, along with others scattered across Lafferty’s unfortunately rare material, shapes how the ending of “What Big Tears the Dinosaur’s” lands. The plot of the short story is simplicity itself.

The Men Who Knew Everything become intrigued by reports of a massive “tyrant saurus” sighted in Arkansas and seemingly making its way toward them. Barnaby Sheen, Doctor George Drakos, Cris Benedetti, Harry O’Donovan, and Austro consider joining the pursuit, marveling at the creature’s reported size and destructive force. Throughout their conversations, Austro repeatedly mentions his dog, insisting that it will help them catch the dinosaur. In a conclusion that feels less like a twist than an inevitability, so clearly and faux ham-fistedly has Lafferty signaled it, the rampaging beast turns out to be Austro’s pet. The animal, having lost its hair while crossing the ocean, is now mistaken for a dinosaur. The story concludes with the quiet revelation that the fearsome monster is, in fact, a lonely pet.

Lafferty gambles a lot at the end of the story on a single portmanteau: “ow-wow-wow,” the mingled sound of barking and weeping. It’s a typographical symbol of pain and wonder, as T-Rex, Austro, and Barnaby all find themselves in tears. Austro cries because there will be no hunt, and he had wanted to show off his pet. The pet cries because Austro cries. And Barnaby cries because he finally understands something about life and grieves that the world is not as vast and full of adventure as he once believed.

So it turns out there are two dinosaurs in this story. The other one is Barnaby Sheen.

And, again, I think it probably matters in assessing whether the ending lands if one has met Barnaby in his youth. “What Big Tears the Dinosaur’s” is supposed to be a hunt, with the T-Rex moving fifty miles a day to reach Austro. The first time we really meet Barnaby in My Heart Leaps Up (we meet him briefly during a role call before this), he is champing for a hunt, when David Penandrew has wet himself and fled the classroom in shame: “I will not sit down. Sister, when they passed out brains you got left!” Bernard howled. He was the youngest and funniest looking of all them in the class, but somebody had to take charge. “I said that I knew what he would do. You all saw that he had a rope. He will think that there is no way that he can go on living after this. Catch him! After him! Don’t let it be too late! He runs awful fast.”

“What Big Tears the Dinosaur’s” ends with an image of the disappointed but still empathetic Barnaby, the child still the father of the man:

“Kids, I wish there was a big one,” Barnaby was begging .“I wish there was a really big animal to hunt. Oh, how I've wished it all my life! I thought this would be it—and this is busted. Oh, it's so desolate to grow up and look around and see that there aren't any big ones. It's to be cheated. Dog could have been it to others; but dog is only dog to himself, and to you, and to me.” I had never realized how much boy there was left in Barnaby, for real tears were running down his face. “Ow-wow-wow!” those three kids wept together.