Ella Minnow Pea (4 page)

NOLLOPTON

Tuesday, August 15

Dear Goodhusband Amos,

I write this on the chance that I may still be gone when you return. I will be at the market buying Cornish game hens for dinner tonight. I know how much you and Ella like them.

You think you are so smart! Now just whom do you think you’re fooling? In all the years we’ve been married you have not forgotten a single anniversary, and I do not think you intend to start with this one. I am thus quite aware, sir, that you are not in any form, shape, or manner having a work-related conversation with Anselm Taylor (who knows to call on you if he needs you) but are, instead, even as I write this, selecting for me some appropriately commemorative gift which you have absolutely no business buying, given the precariousness of our present financial situation.

You are too, too much, Amos Minnow Pea!

With love
,

Your wife of twenty-three
years to the day,
Gwenette Minnow Pea

PS. Perhaps if I chose to take another bath later this evening (while our dear daughter is working her evening shift at the launderette), you might reconsider your earlier decision about “barging right in.” (Tee hee.)

NOLLOPVILLE

Thursday, August 17

Ellakins,

Young Master Creevy was sent away today. When the flogging had ended, he allegedly (I was not there.) raised his head and let spew forth a long and repetitive illicit-letter-peppered tirade against the L.E.B. officers who had administered his punishment. He was not even granted time to pack a suitcase. I will hear more of his story when his mother addresses a meeting of the Parents and Teachers Association at the Village school tomorrow night. Within an hour of this act of civil disobedience, Master Creevy was tossed upon an outbound commercial trawler, with the summary warning that to return to Nollop would mean immediate execution.

Dear Ella, what have those fools on the Council wrought? The meeting tomorrow will allow us to vent our anger and frustration. I truly look forward to it.

Your cousin
,

Tassie

NOLLOPTON

Friday, August 18

Dear Tassie,

I’m eager to know how the meeting went. I wish we could speak on the phone—that phone service between town and village were reinstated; the Council continues to refer to the outage as a temporary “hurricane-related disruption” (the hurricane in question having occurred thirteen months ago). I don’t believe them. I think it represents, instead, the persistent degeneration of all means by which this island may someday enter the Twentieth Century, let alone the Twenty-first. Until I can procure cups and a massive coil of string, these letters that pass between us will comprise our sole means of communication, and we should try to make the best of them. Please write as soon (and as often) as you are able.

I have some news. It is too early to know what to make of it. Or how the Council will proceed. But the possibility does exist that scales may soon fall from the eyes of the esteemed H.I.C., and they might see their way to rescinding this horrible law.

I base this belief, dear cousin, on something that has just occurred: another tile has dropped from the cenotaph: The tile upon which was etched the letter “q” (from the word “quick”). A shopkeeper witnessed the event, and made the report. The Council went into emergency closed-door session. They may emerge in minutes, or it could be several hours. They have requested a large platter of crullers and Danish.

Love
,

Ella

NOLLOPVILLE

Saturday, August 19

Dear Ella,

We had heard about the second fallen tile. We hope and pray that the Council will come to its senses on the matter.

Last night Mother and I attended a very emotional meeting of our Village’s Parents and Teachers Association. Through bitter tears Babette Creevy related the details of the banishment of her son. Initially, the boy refused to go. While his father pleaded to the L.E.B. thug-uglies to ignore young William’s boldly insolent hurlatory, to Willy’s mother fell the difficult task of propelling her son with every ounce of maternal passion onto the boat that would serve both as his transport to permanent exile, and, paradoxically, the very instrument of his survival.

Those who witnessed the incident agreed with Babette’s account of parental paralysis in the face of naked martial tyranny.

A rage burns deep within me, dear Ella, the likes of which I have never felt before. Yet collaterally a terrible fear has taken hold, robbing me of any thought of recourse. While I want to believe that the self-destruction of the second tile will bring the Exalted Quintet to its collective senses, the very real possibility exists that they could—these self-proclaimed High and Almighties—find in its demise true validation for their earlier decree and convenient justification for its subsequentia. And we sit powerless to convince them otherwise.

Please write me as soon as you know something. Mother and I feel so isolated here in the Village. While we still receive the weak signal of the limited island radio broadcasts, music is almost all that is sent up to us these days. Music without words. The station management, I assume, does not wish to examine song lyrics for words
containing the outlawed letter. Besides making us all fearful, this edict has turned some among us into shameful indolents.

And if I hear “Tijuana Taxi” one more time, I am going to scream!

Your cousin
,

Tassie

PS. Thanks bunches for the birthday card. And thank you for adhering to my wishes and not sending a present. One small, mischievous joy during these otherwise joyless times is finding myself a year older than you for five whole months, although nineteen feels little different from eighteen if you want the truth of it.

NOLLOPTON

Monday, August 21

Dear Tassie,

No doubt, the latest edict has reached the village by post or has been tacked to the proclamata board on your village commons. At the cusp of midnight on August 27/28, as you surely know by now, the letter “Q” will be stricken from our vocabulary as utterly and thoroughly as was its hapless predecessor.

I am incapable of any reaction beyond that which I have previously registered with you. Life, no doubt, will change little from what we now know; as luck would have it, there are simply not all that many words in the English language which claim this letter among its constituents. I am in agreement with you that as our anger against the Council grows, it has yet to exceed in potency the abject fear which invades all aspects of our readjusted lives.

There have been whispers of a Council recall; yet few, if any, among us know how to effect such a thing. Legal recall was, even prior to the incineration of the relevant statutes, a complicated process, and now, in the absence of written guidelines, remains a virtual impossibility. Others have whispered of a military coup. Yet the Island L.E.B. is handsomely paid and well provided for. I can see little to entice these officers to overthrow a government that has for the most part been both friend and ample provider, let alone an exemplar of political stability for most of its one-hundred-and-thirty-year history in the hemisphere.

We have at present no recourse but to mind our p’s and bury our q’s, and try our best to eke out some crumbs of normalcy from our turvied lives.

Without, I am sad to report, an island newspaper. The editor and publisher of
The Tribune
, Mr. Kleeman, has, in one grand and
glorious protest, put out his final issue, and ignoring his family’s rich island heritage, voluntarily departed this cursed sandbar. But not before publishing and leafletting this town with hundreds of copies of a most special swan song edition, carrying the apt title, “The Bees’ Lament”—being a delightful four-page conversation between two bees marooned upon a keeperless farm. The paper—I wish I could have sent you a copy, but destroyed it quickly after Mum and Pop and I shared a tearful laugh—contains, below the masthead and the aforementioned title, the frenetic repetition of a certain letter—four thousand, perhaps five thousand glorious times!

I do respect Mr. Kleeman for his protest, yet am disappointed by the cowardly exit. He has left this town with a yawning communicational chasm—a great lacuna which I see no one stepping forward to fill.

I wish you could come for a visit. We have room for you here at the house, should you desire to stay for a while to seek employment, or perhaps find volunteer work at our library. Happily, its doors are still open. Most of the books are gone, though—the periodicals as well. But many of the musical albums remain (without their jackets or labels). And the picture books that still reside here are quite colorful and not all that unpleasant to look at.

Give my love to your mother. (Perhaps I will see you soon?)

Your cousin
,

Ella

NOLLOPVILLE

Tuesday, August 22

Dear Ella,

I just may take you up on that invitation! You know how I feel living up here—so removed from things.

I look forward to visiting with Aunt Gwenette and Uncle Amos as well. I cannot wait to see your father’s burgeoning collection of petite vases and jugs!

Did I mention—I have become a volunteer teaching assistant, and am helping Mother at the school. I miss the library, though, and the opportunity to read whatever I wish—whenever I so desire. I compensate for this loss by reading your letters over and over again; and Mother and I have taken to writing one another—if you can believe it—from one room to the next! She tells wonderful stories of our mothers’ childhoods—all their little adventures—beachcombing for shells and driftwood, chasing sand crabs about (How cruel the two of them were as children!) and building majestic sand palaces at low tide.

I know it was necessary when I was a toddler and Father had gone away, for Mother to move us to the Village to take the teaching job, but I have never warmed to this dismal and dreary place, and I will be happy (Do not tell Mother.) to leave it and never return.

Ellakins, I must tell you: I have taken to sitting in a favorite spot on a secret hillside outside the Village to think. And dream. And watch the shapings of the clouds and feel the caress of our soft, late-summer wind wisps. Some evenings I do not return home until long after dark. Yesterday I was even naughtier than usual: I carved the dreaded letter in the bark of a lonely mimosa, carved it with a kitchen knife in great broad slashes of impertinence and had myself a delicious clandestine laugh. And I must say, it did me a world of good.

Perhaps I will take a page from your book and recite poetry.

I think sometimes of departing the island for good. But I’m not so sure I could leave Mother who seems to need me so much now. I had such lovely visits with Father’s family in Savannah and Charleston, and while I felt somewhat the foreigner (My cousins say that I speak in a “funny,” overly formal way, whatever this means.), I think sometimes how lovely it would be to live across the channel—like my paternal cousins. With telephones that actually work, and television and computers and books—all the books one could ever hope to read. But I wonder, as well, how much of my present disagreeableness and languor (even prior to this lexical crisis) is due to the simple fact that I have no one with whom to share my life—no companion, romantic affiliation or otherwise, save my mother. I am, I will admit, a tragic village lonely-heart at the advanced age of nineteen!

Cousin Ella, I must relate something that has happened which Mother has made me vow not to divulge. Yet I cannot honor her wishes on the matter, for I can no longer bear my concerns for her alone. Please share the following with your mother, but do share it in careful confidence. Perhaps Aunt Gwenette may advise me as to how I might be of sufficient succor to her.

You see, Mother has spoken the letter.

She has spoken the letter in the presence of her class—there, before her young pupils—and it did not go without report. One student, I am sorry to relate, took it upon himself to inform his parents, and they in turn, took it upon
themselves
to inform a representative of the villagers’ volunteer auxiliary of the L.E.B. Yesterday morning Mother was brought before the faculty assembly and publicly issued citation and harsh reprimand. Before every teacher in the school was she called forth and cited with first offense, then mortifyingly reminded by captain of the auxiliary of the penalty for
second offense. Mother was humiliated before colleagues whose respect she had earned and maintained for many years, word, no doubt, trickling down to her young charges whose respect, as well, is critical to the performance of her duties as their instructor.

She spoke hardly a word to me last night, and retired early. She is equally subdued this morning. I wish there were something I could do to help her. But the incident has brought her so low that I know of absolutely nothing that might elevate her spirits. I want to come to town and stay with you and Aunt Gwenette and Uncle Amos, but now must wait until Mother’s emotional state has improved.

I believe that I will write a letter to the boy’s parents to find out exactly what purpose was served in reporting Mother, given the enormous difficulty island teachers face in their efforts to avoid just such a slip as the one my mother experienced. A different law should be passed for teachers, if you ask me. There should be a special waiver or accommodation extended not only to seven-year-olds but also to those who are asked to instruct them.

I will write again soon. Please do not mention in your next letter to Mother what I have just told you. She will discuss it with you, I am certain, when she is ready. When the shame of it has sufficiently ebbed.

Love
,

Your cousin Tassie

PS. I did not tell you how the slip occurred. She was teaching arithmetic and made mention of a sum of eggs. Twelve eggs to be exact. And described them using a word no longer at our disposal. A right and proper word in times gone by. How DOES, IN any fair and logical way, the Council expect us—all of us—not to make such a simple and innocent slip every now and then!