Fritz Leiber - Gonna Roll the Bones

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Professor Stythe Thompson spent considerable time and ef-

fort in the exploration of myth, legend and folk-motif. After

having read something of his works, I thought that I could

put my finger on a particular piece and say -what it was.

Myth, as I understand it, involves the gods, deals with the

open end of the human condition. Legend may involve the

supernatural, but not in so distinct or religious a fashion as

myth. Folklore, basically, is just that: the lore of the folk,

passed down, generation to generation, without supernatural

overtones.

I'll be damned if I know how to categorize the following

Story.

Maybe that's why it won a Nebula, however. ". . . The sky

was dark, the moon was yellow, the leaves came tumbling

down." I am reminded of Stagalee and Red Hanrahan, and

of all the people half of light and half of darkness who pass

in the night, fight with the Devil on the banks of the Brazos,

crash in their U-2's and cling to coffins while white whales

destroy their ships.

Here is a piece of future myth/legend/folkloremaybe.

It is timeless, though, and like all such things, timely.

GONNA ROLL THE BONES

Fritz Leiber

Suddenly Joe Slattermill knew for sure he'd have to get out

quick or else blow his top and knock out with the shrapnel

of his skull the props and patches holding up his decaying

home, that was like a house of big wooden and plaster and

wallpaper cards except for the huge fireplace and ovens and

chimney across the kitchen from him.

Those were stone-solid enough, though. The fireplace was

chin-high at least twice that long, and filled from end to

end with roaring flames. Above were the square doors of the

ovens in a rowhis Wife baked for part of their living.

Above the ovens was the wall-long mantelpiece, too high for

his Mother to reach or Mr. Guts to jump any more, set with

all sorts of ancestral curios, but any of them that weren't

stone or glass or china had been so dried and darkened by

decades of heat that they looked like nothing but shrunken

human heads and black golf balls. At one end were clustered

his Wife's square gin bottles. Above the mantelpiece hung

one old chromo, so high and so darkened by soot and grease

that you couldn't tell whether the swirls and fat cigar shape

were a whaleback steamer plowing through a hurricane or a

spaceship plunging through a storm of light-driven dust

motes.

As soon. as Joe curled his toes inside his boots, his Mother

knew what he was up to. "Going bumming," she mumbled

with conviction. "Pants pockets full of cartwheels of house

money, too, to spend on sin." And she went back to munch-

ing the long shreds she stripped fumblingly with her right

hand off the turkey carcass set close to the terrible heat, her

left hand ready to fend off Mr. Guts, who stared at her

yellow-eyed, gaunt-flanked, with long mangy tail a-twitch. In

her dirty dress, streaky as the turkey's sides, Joe's Mother

looked like a bent brown bag and her fingers were lumpy

twigs.

Joe's Wife knew as soon or sooner, for she smiled thin-

eyed at him over her shoulder from where she towered at the

centermost oven. Before she closed its door, Joe glimpsed

that she was baking two long, flat, narrow, fluted loaves and

one Iligh, round-domed one. She was thin as death and

disease in her violet wrapper. Without looking, she reached

out a yard-long, skinny arm for the nearest gin bottle and

downed a warm slug and smiled again. And without word

spoken, Joe knew she'd said, "You're going out and gamble

and get drunk and lay a floozy and come home and beat me

and go to jail for it," and he had a flash of the last time he'd

been in the dark gritty cell and she'd come by moonlight,

which showed the green and yellow lumps on her narrow

skull where he'd hit he)", to whisper to him through the tiny

window in back and slip him a half pint through the bars.

And Joe knew for certain that this time it would be that

bad and worse, but just the same he heaved up himself and

his heavy, muffledly clanking pockets and shuffled straight

to the door, muttering, "Guess I'll roll the bones, up the pike

a stretch and back," swinging his bent, knobby-elbowed arms

like paddlewheels to make a little joke about his words.

When he'd stepped outside, he held the door open a hand's

breadth behind him for several seconds. When be finally

closed it, a feeling of deep misery struck him. Earlier years,

Mr. Guts would have come streaking along to seek fights and

females on the roofs and fences, but now the big torn was

content to stay home and hiss by the fire and snatch for

turkey and dodge a broom, quarreling and comforting with

two housebound women. Nothing had followed Joe to the

door but his Mother's ohomping and her gasping breaths

and the clink of the gin bottle going back on the mantel and

the creaking of the floor boards under his feet.

The night was up-side-down deep among the frosty stars.

A few of them seemed to move, like the white-hot jets of

spaceships. Down below it looked as if the whole town of

Ironmine had blown or buttoned out the light and gone to

sleep, leaving the streets and spaces to the equally unseen

breezes and ghosts. But Joe was still in the hemisphere of

the musty dry odor of the worm-eaten carpentry behind him,

and as he felt and heard the dry grass of the lawn brush his

calves, it occurred to him that something deep down inside

him had for years been planning things so that he and the

house and his Wife and Mother and Mr. Guts would all

come to an end together. Why the kitchen heat hadn't

touched off the tindery place ages ago was a physical miracle.

Hunching his shoulders, Joe stepped out, not up the pike,

but down the dirt road that led past Cypress Hollow Ceme-

tery to Night Town.

The breezes were gentle, but unusually restless and vari-

able tonight, like leprechaun squalls. Beyond the drunken,

whitewashed cemetery fence dim in the starlight, they rustled

the scraggly trees of Cypress Hollow and made it seem they

were stroking their beards of Spanish moss. Joe sensed that

the ghosts were just as restless as the breezes, uncertain

where and whom to haunt, or whether to take the night off,

drifting together in sorrowfully lecherous companionship.

While among the trees the red-green vampire lights pulsed

faintly and irregularly, like sick fireflies or a plague-stricken

space fleet. The feeling of deep misery stuck with Joe and

deepened and he was tempted to tarn aside and curl up in

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