Garments of Truth

A watercolor-hamlet, dozing under a quilt of apple-orchards and gossip, is jolted awake when Lester Crope—part-jester, part-town crier—cries that the dam has vomited its concrete guts. His alarm is fiction, yet it yanks Catherine Willis, the mayor’s porcelain niece, from the lip of real death; the village, embarrassed by its own gratitude, ships the fabulist to Dr. Mills’s Boston laboratory of decorum. Electro-tonics and brisk counsel cauterize Lester’s imagination, returning him as a walking truth-razor: he labels moldy bacon ‘archaeological’ and torpedoes a land-boom that would have plated the streets with gold. Commerce curdles, matrons swoon, aldermen howl; the physician, sensing a social evisceration, prescribes the oldest anesthesia—romance. Re-lofted as a railway clerk, Lester spies Catherine descending like a Pre-Raphaelite comet, and the old serpent of invention uncoils: tales of Arizona bandits, blazing six-guns, and moonlit posses spill from his tongue. The hamlet exhales; order, stitched with harmless lies, is restored.