Ella Minnow Pea (16 page)

^{Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs}

[The Minnow Pea Residence]

NOLLOPTON

Thursday, November 16

Dear Mr. Rederick Lyttle,

Here is the sentence you require, delivered prior to the deadline imposed by the High Council—indeed, with three whole hours to spare.

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

Please note that this sentence is exactly 32 letters in length. It contains the requisite appearances of each of the 26 letters of the English alphabet. The sentence contains, further, no contractions or arguable proper names. It is, incidentally, neither declarative nor interrogative, but, in fact, is in the imperative mood. It is a command, Mr. Lyttle. An appropriate response to fifteen weeks of High Council orders, mandates, and edictal behests.

I must inform you that I did not come up with the sentence myself. The credit should actually go to my father Amos Minnow Pea. If, indeed, credit is due. I maintain that because the sentence was created unintentionally, in the course of a quickly penned farewell letter to my mother and me, Pop should not own responsibility. Nor should anyone. Or, perhaps, all of us.

And this is why I venture to tell you the truth of its genesis, risking, of course, a strict interpretation of your challenge. I venture so, for this reason, Mr. Lyttle: any one of us could have come up with such a sentence. We are, when it comes right down to it, all of us: mere monkeys at typewriters. Like Nollop. Nollop, low-order primate elevated to high-order ecclesiastical primate, elevated still further in these darkest last days to ultimate prime A grade superior
being. For doing that which my father did without thinking. Think about it.

Truly yours
,

Ella Minnow Pea

Thursday, November 16

(Day One of the New Order)

Dear Miss Minnow Pea:

On behalf of the High Council, I accept your sentence. All relevant statutes have been rescinded. Please join me at your earliest convenience for tea in my office. I trust that your friend Tom, after having been successfully flushed out, will accompany you.

Fondly
,

Rederick Lyttle

NOLLOPTON, NOLLOP

Friday, November 17

(Day Two of the New Order)

Dear Mum, Pop, Mittie, and dear cousin Tassie,

It is over. You may all come home. Mr. Lyttle, on behalf of the High Council, has accepted my sentence—the thirty-two letter sentence which I proffered three hours prior to deadline. The council members assembled to read it, assembled in one great bug-eyed clump to read it aloud—over and over—then proceeded to examine it most carefully, counting each letter, identifying and pronouncing each grapheme in proper alphabetical sequence, and finally proclaiming the sentence an undeniable miracle.

It is not a miracle. It is an accident. Pure happenstance. Perhaps just as happenstantial in its creation as was the fox/dog sentence. I have strong reason to believe this. Let me tell you why.

This morning Mr. Lyttle took Tom (my new friend—I cannot wait for you to meet him; the intense blue of his eyes gives me occasional shudders!) and me down into the vault beneath the national library. Held in climate-controlled perpetuity are several hundred linear feet of government records and historical documents, including the original Island Compact which we have all gazed upon in its infrequent public displays, along with a sizeable collection of Mr. Nevin Nollop’s personal papers and most private effects. I asked Mr. Lyttle why all of this was spared in the wake of the antialphabetical edicts which had rendered to dust and ash virtually everything else found in print upon this island. It seems that efforts were indeed underway to find masons to seal off the vault, entombing it behind a solid brick wall, burying as unintended time capsule, these immurement-destined remnants of a time when discourse came without stricture—without posthumous Nollopian challenges-cum-curses.

Among those papers Tom and I discovered a book—an amply illustrated children’s storybook with Nollop’s name scrawled in childlike letters upon the title page. The book told the tale of a dog who does not wish to participate in a fox hunt. A lazy dog who would go so far as to permit a fleet fox to leap directly overhead rather than lift a single paw to pursue him. In his juvenile hand Nollop had kid-crabbed the following: “Oh you lazy dog! The brown fox is so quick and you are so lazy. Bad dog! Bad dog!”

Of course, there are those who believe that Nollop was too stupid to concoct the national sentence from even these obvious elements. It could very well be that someone else wrote it, and he took full credit. I would not put it past him.

All the Council members save Lyttle have tendered their resignations. Immediately thereafter Harton Mangrove attempted suicide with his necktie. It was a clumsy attempt and quickly foiled. Following our excursion to the vault, Lyttle, Tom and I proceeded to the cenotaph, climbed to the top, and with sledgehammers in hand, initiated, in earnest, an act of destructive revisionism. Others among the few of us still left on the island jubilantly joined in. There followed a celebratory bonfire and weenie roast. We exercised our newly liberated vocabularies until dawn.

As we were all gathering for breakfast, courtesy of an early-morning raid on the amply stocked Willingham family larder, we learned that Harton Mangrove had again tried to take his own life, this time by repeatedly whacking himself in the head with a heavy wooden rolling pin. He was left stunned on his kitchen floor by his wife and three young sons who were late for their seven a.m. slinkoff for Florida where they would soon be taking up permanent residency. Reports are in conflict as to what Mangrove mumbled as he lay dazed upon the floor, painfully clutching his lumpy head. One witness attested to the following: “I am floundering upon the shoals of despair, forsaken by the Great and Powerful Nollop!”
Another heard simply, “Somebody get me a headache powder. I think I juggled my brains!”

There were some among the survivors who wanted to erect a monument to me; others thought Pop, as the actual creator of the sentence that was to serve as vehicle for our emancipation, deserving of all the national approbation. I suggested that neither of us was an appropriate candidate given the fortuity of the sentence’s conception. But this fact does not preclude the erection of some other concrete memorial to those who lost life, property, strips of dorsal epidermis, and/or sanity to the tyranny of the last four months. I suggested, further, that the following might be sculpted: a large box filled with sixty moonshine jugs—piled high, toppling over, corks popping, liquor flowing. Disorder to match the clutter and chaos of our marvelous language. Words upon words, piled high, toppling over, thoughts popping, correspondence and conversation overflowing.

And upon the bandiford beneath the sculpture, writ not on tiles, but chiseled deeply into the marble façade, the following sentence nineteen letters in length, containing a mere ten different graphemes of the English alphabet:

“Dead dogs tell no tails.”

And by deliberately keeping the word “tails” frustratingly mishomonymized—we offer this guarantee: that our descendants will never have reason to exalt this sentence beyond simple sentience.

Finis.

I miss you all, and cannot wait to see you again.

Love
,

Ella Minnow Pea

NOLLOPTON, NOLLOP

Monday, November 20

Dear Doug,

It’s after the fact, obviously, but we’re all still curious to know what you and your fellow cybergeeks might have been able to come up with. Care to give it a shot? By way of reminder, your mission, should you choose to accept it:

Shortest possible sentence containing all twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Words in English, and in current usage, please. I’ll accept proper names in a pinch, if they don’t seem Martian.

Best wishes
,

Nate (“the Scribbler”) Warren

SOUTH CAROLINA STATE U.
ORANGEBURG, S.C.
U.S.A.

Wednesday, November
22

Dear Nate,

We have come up with four sentences for your reading pleasure, each equal to or less than 32 letters in length. Allowing for, thank you, sir, the use of proper names, the computer succeeded in creating a sentence exactly twenty-six letters in length, that is—need I say it—without repetition of a single letter. It follows:

The others we are pleased to list below:

I hope this has been of some help to you. What, by the way, was the sentence that brought the High Council to its senses (or shall we say, to its knees)? We’re all quite curious to know.

Sincerely
,

Doug (Cyberhead) Watts

THE END