CHAPTER 1 : I

Of course you’ll believe this story. Everybody will. The funny thing is that it could be a lie....

To make that point clearer: A little while ago I happened to be at a gathering of literary amateurs and critics, one of those sprawling aimless affairs where people mill around with drinks in their hands, congealing in little clusters to talk or listen to somebody talk.

I listened. I heard a serious bespectacled, young man discourse not unintelligently on Proust, and I heard a plump gentleman make some safe, sound comments on Faulkner.

Nobody disagreed with them. Nobody argued. Nobody even said, “But—”

I can remember when arguments were the order of the day.

After I’d had a little more of it than I could stand, I spoke up. “Say what you like about those scribblers,” I declared firmly, “none of them can hold a candle to Wolf.”

“Thomas?” someone asked—not with the air of being about to contradict me, but merely as one sincerely, infuriatingly desiring instruction.

“No, Howling,” I retorted with flamboyant irony. “Do you mean to say you never heard of Howling Wolf, the genius of the North Woods, the greatest author of all time? The one writer who grasped the human soul in all its depth, breadth, and angular momentum? Who painted Life in its true colors on a canvas vast as all Nature, with a non-union brush? Who sounded every note of emotional experience, and rang all the bells in belles lettres? Who—”

I ran out of breath, paused, and added, “Of course, unfortunately all of Wolf’s mighty works were written in his native language, which happened to be Chinook Trade Jargon, and they’ve never been translated. So if you don’t know the Jargon....”

At my age I should have known better. Naturally, every word I uttered was gospel but all I got back were earnest requests for more information about the great Wolf. To explain that I’d just been kidding—that I say such things experimentally and to keep in practice as one of the few remaining liars in a truthful world—would have been worse than useless. It would have been cruelty to talking animals.

I mumbled, “Pardon me,” to all the nice, candid, inquisitive, credulous faces. I grabbed my hat and pulled it over my eyes, and ducked out. Not that I imagined I’d get away from the consequences. I could already envisage how the ripples would spread. For a long while to come I’d get inquiries in the mail from literary clubs, collectors, compilers of biographical dictionaries. Probably there’d be a Howling Wolf Commemorative Society organized, and if I told them he was buried at the bottom of the Chicago Drainage Canal, they’d go and strew posies there.

But this is not the story of Howling Wolf. It is the story of Grandma’s lie soap.

When I first remember Grandma, back when I was one of the numerous grandchildren—my brothers, sisters, and assorted cousins who overran the old hill-country farm during vacations—she was already a dried-up little old lady who couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds, with a brown, wrinkled face and intolerant black eyes.

She ruled the farm with an iron hand and my two taciturn uncles, who did the heavy work, moved silently about, tending to chores, crops, and stock in obedience to her orders. The farm thrived, too. Even in bad years, when other people’s corn was stunted and wells ran dry, nothing of the sort befell Grandma.

Sometimes—though I didn’t know this until I was older—the neighbors muttered, and insisted, obviously out of envy, there was something queer about Grandma. Queerness they detected, I suppose, in her fondness for cats—which most of the country people tolerated without affection—and in her long walks in the woods by herself, gathering plants that she dried and kept in unlabeled jars.

Too, a tradition had it that back in England in the seventeenth century one of her female ancestors had been accused of bewitching cattle by the celebrated witchfinder, Mr. Samson Broadforks, who fell ill shortly afterward of an ailment believed to be foot-and-mouth disease. Be that as it may, the ancestor in question emigrated to America around that time.

But we children, of course, saw nothing odd about our Grandma. Childishly, we assumed that everybody had a grandmother who kept a piece of lie soap on the high shelf over the washstand.

This was a chunk of strong brown soap, like all the rest of the boiled-fat products that Grandma made in the old iron wash-kettle after hog-killing. But it wasn’t ordinary soap. It was made separately and privately, from some of the herbs that Grandma had in her jars, from a recipe she kept in her head and nowhere else.

Because, you see, another thing about Grandma was that she couldn’t abide being lied to. Not, I’m sure, out of any abstract devotion to Truth, but simply because the idea of anyone fooling her made her furious. If somebody tried it, and that somebody was one of her own grandchildren, she knew what to do....

For instance, I can still vividly recall the time when my city cousin Richard first came visiting on the farm. This Richard was a pale, supercilious brat who lived in New York City. As soon as he made sure that no one else on the farm had been similarly blessed, he sized us up for yokels and set about overawing us with the marvels of the metropolis.

Grandma, busy round the kitchen range, listened silently for a while. But we who knew her well could see the storm warnings going up—the tightening lips and the dangerous gleam in her eye. Richard didn’t see anything, naturally. He finished describing the George Washington Bridge and went on to the skyscrapers.

That did it. Grandma slammed a skillet down and fastened a harpy grip on Richard’s collar. “Come along, young man,” she said grimly. “You needn’t think you can pull my leg!”

And she wagged him off to the washstand, the rest of us trailing after in delighted horror.

“Oliver—” Grandma addressed me, because I was already a gangling thirteen then—“Reach me down the lie soap!”

I did so, gingerly, and before the bawling Richard knew what was happening he was sputtering through a haze of suds, his mouth thoroughly washed out with the strong soар.

“Now!” said Grandma briskly, releasing him and stepping back. “Take a dipper of water, and then answer me: Were you or weren’t you exaggerating when you said there was buildings there ten miles high?”

Richard opened and closed his mouth. He grew red in the face with effort. He said, “N... N... Yes, ma’am, I was exaggerating.”

You could see that he was thunderstruck to find that he couldn’t do anything but tell the truth. Не had yet to learn what the rest of us knew and took for granted. Once anybody had his mouth washed out with Grandma’s lie soap, he could never again in this life speak a falsehood, however much he might want to.

A quarter of an hour later, Grandma had mollified Richard with bread and jam and encouraged him to talk some more. She listened with keen interest as he described the Holland Tunnel, nodding her head occasionally and exclaiming, “My, my! Who would have thought it?” Now, you see, she knew that every word was true. If I’d been smarter—but maybe I’m still not smart, except in hindsight—I might have seen the shapе of things to come in that incident. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t.