Ella Minnow Pea (6 page)

Their offense? Each member in deliberate provocation of the High Island Council had marched single file into last Tuesday’s open session wearing cartoon masks and making loud duck sounds—sounds which any sentient Nollopian knows by now are forbidden—while holding aloft large cardboard containers of a certain recently outlawed brand of American oatmeal.

As the Rasmussens were being manacled by members of the L.E.B., Council Member Willingham asked for the reason behind such a flagrant flouting of the “clear and unambiguous” law against use of the seventeenth letter—a flouting made all the more “pernicious” by the enthusiastic abandon with which it was embraced. The head of the Rasmussen household, Charles Rasmussen, Sr., a clothing merchant here in town, (I bought a lovely powder blue lace partete from his store just last month), responded, “It was actually my children’s idea. They are very fond of this letter and felt a protest against its removal from island discourse was very much in order. My wife and I agree. We also wish to be flogged in the presence of as many town residents as choose to be in attendance. And if this produces no outcry—especially the laying of leather tassel upon the youthful backs of my nine-year-old twin daughters Becka and Henrietta—then please trundle us without delay from this
island of cringe and cowardice, for we no longer wish to belong to such a despicable confederacy of spinal-defectives.”

And so Mum and Pop and I stood and watched the harrowing and loathsome sight of children being ritually beaten, and the commensurately disturbing picture of frightened onlookers—“the town baa-baas,” as Pop has taken to calling our dear neighbors—doing what they do oh so very well, and that is: absolutely nothing. Lifting not even the proverbial finger to remove these high council bastinado-benediced buffoons from their pinnacle of abusive power, nor doing anything otherwise to stop or decelerate their efforts. Watched these Nollopimpotents, Mum and Pop and I did, as they stood in willful immotility. And as we absorbed, in full, the lamentable scene being played out before us, we found ourselves entertaining identical thoughts—concretious thoughts of retaliation and the ultimate reclamation of a society so disturbingly transmogrified.

A first meeting to be held in our home a week from tomorrow under the guise of Pop’s twice-monthly poker game. To plot and plan our insurrection—our nascent underground movement to restore a full twenty-six letter alphabet to the people—deserving or not—of this, our presently polluted island home!

Even as this morning—in the early predawn darkness one Creighton O’Looley was discovered attempting to replace a tile newly fallen. He was apprehended and is being held without bond for attempting to circumvent this most recent misconstrual of all-holy decree from the great and omniscient Nollop.

J.—

It could have been worse.

But J!

As you might say: Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!

Love you. Love to your mother.

Ella

SAVANNAH, GEORGIA U.S.A.

Friday, September 8

Dear Ms. Purcy,

My application for visa has been approved and I will be arriving Monday, September 18, at Pier Four in Nollopton on the 4:12 WalMart supply boat. If it isn’t convenient for you or your daughter to meet me, I will find my own way up to your home in Nollopville. (It shouldn’t be difficult. I spent my childhood studying maps of your island.) As I understand the internal mainway is mired this time of year, don’t expect me until late.

I have just received word about the loss of the tile containing the letter “J” and do not wish to wait until I see you to share important news. Chemists here in Georgia who have obtained smuggled chips from the two earlier fallen tiles have just completed an exhaustive battery of chemical analyses on the fixative that has held the tiles in place for the last hundred years. Their assessment is that the glue—a strange compound not familiar to them—glue which also oddly, and we now know impractically served as a substitute for simple, durable cement—has calcified to the point of ineffectual granule and powder. Within months, perhaps even weeks, all of the tiles currently mounted on the cenotaph will become similarly loosened and fall to the ground. The chemists doubt that within a year’s time there will be even a single tile left affixed to the monument. Should your council continue along its present course, the outcome will be too dire even to contemplate. Here I am telling you nothing you don’t already know.

(I am, as you can also imagine, fast losing my academic objectivity; word of the Rasmussens’ ordeal reached us this morning.)

While researching the series of articles I now plan to write on the
Council’s recent actions and the tangible effects those actions are having upon the residents of Nollop, I seek, in addition to your hospitality and safe cover, assistance from you in reaching that one member of the Council you feel most open to reading the chemists’ report, and making a case for a reversal of these apocalyptic directives.

It is, I believe, well worth a try.

Sincerely
,

Nate Warren

NOLLOPVILLE

Sunday, September 10

Dear Ella,

Most wonderful news. Mr. Warren, who will be arriving on the 18th, is coming to our rescue! I know it’s foolish to put stock in any promises of assistance (and while I hope that your underground meetings prove independently fruitful, I cannot count on them—forgive my blunt honesty here—and must parcel my optimism in such a way as to best contribute to the state of my emotional health) but I am nonetheless encouraged by the following: Warren arrives bearing more than simply suitcase and notebook. He brings, as well, the results of chemical analyses performed on slivers of the errant tiles—analyses which prove beyond doubt and wanton denial that the tiles are falling for the simple reason that they can no longer hold themselves to the bandiford. It is as elementary as that. Nollop is not God. Nollop is silent. We must respect that silence and make our decisions and judgments based upon science and fact and simple old-fashioned common sense—a commodity absent for too long from those in governmental elevatia, where its employ would do us all much good.

I seek your assistance, dearest cousin, in determining which of the pious five would be most open to reading Mr. Warren’s report. I think, perhaps, it should be Mr. Lyttle. He has always seemed to me the least moronic of the bunch. Indeed, if I am not mistaken, Mother voted for the man many years ago for this very reason.

Rush me in tomorrow morning’s post, dear Cousin, your much anticipated opinion in the matter. And good luck with tonight’s meeting. Please don’t interpret my lack of active endorsement as a dismissal of your family’s admirable efforts. I’m afraid I am becoming more and more the selective cynic. Thankfully, now and then I do
see glimmers of hope. And Mr. Warren has just unveiled such a glimmer.

I am looking forward to my upcoming visit with you and Aunt Gwenette and Uncle Amos. Let me know when it would be most convenient for me to come down.

Mother sends her love.

Tassie

NOLLOPTON

Monday, September 11

Greetings, Nollopians,

It has come time for the Council to make its position clear and direct with regard to the issue of the fallen tiles. Indeed, our last three executive sessions were devoted exclusively to this task. The product of those sessions is this letter which we now post to every family on the island in an effort to bring us to common mind on this, the most pressing matter ever brought before our people. It is a matter with which each member of this body has tuss-and-tangled. Late into the night have we searched our souls, into the wee smalls have we plumbed our hearts with profound and intensured moral rectilitude. Because a formidable duty has been charged to us, an overtitious ask-me-now posed, yea posited, which we cannot in good conscience ignore. And in the answer, in the noble venture of compliance, our mission now comes to encompass the putting forth to all of you, the good people of this proud and independent island nation, the reasons behind what at times must seem a harsh and unwavering capitulation to the wishes of Almighty Nollop. This we do. We do willingly; we do dutifully.

Some, including those malcontents and apostates who have since departed our shores, might wish to modify the word “wishes” in the previous paragraph by the term “perceived.” As if everything passed down to you from Council Assembly has been based upon supposition—upon meandering hypothesis and amorphous conjecture.

It is none of these things.

The signs have been presented to us, and while it took us a while to ascertain the desired course rising from their assignment, we now, we are happy to say, and with only temporary delay, securely
grasp and freely endorse without temperage these pathfinders dropped, literally, at our feet.

For those of you who desire explication, we offer the following ten salients:

Those of you who see undue cruelty in the penalties meted out for speaking or writing the forbidden letters should make note of the following three points:

Returning to the saucy secretary: she was given fair warning by Nollop that her insubordinate speech would not be tolerated. That one of such intellectual inferiority could ever in a lifetime duplicate the work of Nollop was unfathomable, her claim hypercomical. Nollop said as much, even challenged the pert stenographer to come up with a sentence of her own measuring thirty-five letters or less and containing all of the letters of the alphabet.

She tried.

She failed.

In fact, the best that she could muster was a short anecdote about an imaginary animal park in which the occupants revolted by exchanging their stripes and spots. It ran precisely 289 letters.

She used the word
yak
three times.

The secretary, we might further add, was never able to come up with a sentence matching Nollop’s because it simply cannot be done. This is what has given Nollop his preeminence. Omnipotent. Omniscient. Omniglorious.

Praise Nollop.

And honor his wishes by removing “J” with jubilation.

Sincerely
,

Your High Council

Gordon Willingham

La Greer Houston

Harton Mangrove

Rederick Lyttle

A. Plastman

^The
*
^{uick brown fox}
*
^{umps over the la}
*
^{y dog}