Ma Cat and Pa dog My cousin Drusilla LaPerle, resident of Jericho quarter in old Victoria and undisputed belle of the same town for seventy miles in any direction, was a cat, and like all beautiful knowledgeable cats, she never made any small mistakes. The mistakes she made, when she came round to them, were never the run-of-the-mill pedestrian ones. She made big amorphous ones, which took genius to unravel, and even when unravelled, she and all those who surrounded her, did not recognise as mistakes. They put it down to things that happen. So it was considered that she never made mistakes, but she did make biggish sort of hindsight only-could-tell mistakes. Her one big amorphous mistake was to marry a dog. Now even the mad man called Ekwakou who hung around the fish smelling fishing boats down at eh fishing village at down beach knew that it was accepted wisdom, and also an experimental fact in all of Jericho quarters in Victoria, that cats and dogs never eat from the same plate. In fact, if anybody ever thought of making cats and dogs eat from the same plate, he or she will need long knives and forks of such extraordinary length that all the scrap iron in Jericho quarters Victoria will have to be commissioned to make the knives and the forks, and even with that, there is no guarantee of success. And this fact relating to the length of the knives and forks is no way hearsay, as one man, a man of God and a man of science, father Dr Adeeboloja, did conduct such an experiment, and he can now vouch with his one left eye, that forks, especially long ones made of scrap metal, do have a certain tendency to go for the right eye. There is however, one, and only one situation or condition that would exist sufficiently to make a cat and a dog eat in the same room, and even from the same pot, right down to the same plate with short knives and forks. That situational condition is a full blown-cannot sleep-choking-heart fluttering love Drusilla la Perle was a waif of a heart shape faced girl, with big almond eyes, the pupils of which were shouting brown. One day whilst out fish shopping for her mother, she took one look into the eyes and the whole of Arnold DelaSoul with her eyes glinting and liking the V-shaped youthfulness of him, and there was no turning back for either of them He was exactly like all good dogs, and did what all good dogs do including cocking his leg up at any lamp post that offered its inviting smooth surface, but this did not put her off. The courted with sighs and aahs and sea breezed evenings by the shore the Atlantic sea made with the land on which the town of Victoria stood proud, tall, and beautiful. The preist, who married them, as this was inevitable, was none other than Doctor Father Adeeboloja who had conducted the long spoon experiment. He was so taken aback by their cat-dog union that, after he asked the question, --Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded blah? He broke with tradition and uttered a question phrase, for which he was later heavily reprimanded, and nearly got excommunicated by the Pope, had it not been for the intercession of Paulus Biryanis, the renowned roman catholic president of the country. The phrase question so sinful to attract such eminent interest and disapprobation was his addition to the marriage vows as decreed by the Roman Catholic Church and copied ad verbatim by all other churches like a slow schoolboy copying from the exam paper of his smarter classmate, was innocent in itself, and would have passed unnoticed had he not accompanied it with the raising of not one, but two eyebrows. After Drusilla answered in the affirmative that she did want to take Arnold to be her lawful loveful wedded blah blah blah, Father Adeeboloja added to the written text, -Are you sure? Drusilla LaPerle shook her beautiful head three times and looked deep Into Arnolds big black eyes. The good priest repeated -Are you sure? And he nearly lost his place in the church as shepherd of souls. Love, as even Ekwakou also knew, is a rather fickle thing and it evaporates soonest after cat and dog are wedded in holy matrimony, as it is right and proper. It evaporated so fast that their ever-loving harmony soon degenerated into a bee’s nest with a lot of angry bees Arnold DelaSoul was gainfully employed down at the fishing village at Downtown Victoria, and even though salaries in that line of work were notoriously as low as the hours were long, the job guaranteed him no end of fresh firm fish flesh which was something his new bride, and the cat in her, loved more than anything in the world. So they went swimmingly fightingly for a year and several months until it came to the time for her to have her first baby. And what an ordeal it was to Drusilla, the mid wives, Drusilla’s mother and the priest. The baby took all week and a bit of the following week and Drusilla’s mother was so alarmed that she summoned Father Dr Adeeboloja to offer both Drusiila and her unborn baby the last rites and sacraments. The priest prayed and prayed and peered intently for a sign of the baby dead or alive so that he could administer either a baptism or the last rites But Drusiila and the baby defied all ministrations of the priest and neither of them died and when the baby came, the priest had fallen asleep and could neither deliver either of the sacraments Arnold DelaSoul was absent for all of that week, and rumours had it he had been dogging all over town. And that fact, the dogging, and not the absence at the birth was the unravelling of the cat dog harmony and the first warnings to Drusilla that she might have made a mistake and a mighty big one at that. As soon as she and the baby were strong enough, she packed the baby off to her mother for the morning, so she said, and went looking for Arnold DelaSoul with her fingernails sharpened to cat sharpness Nobody is entirely sure of what happened next or the exact sequence of events. Some say when she found him, living on a fish diet with Namondo; she hissed into his eyes and blinded them in an instant, whilst others suspected a claw or a fingernail was involved. Following Arnold the god’s blindness father Dr Adeeboloja dispatched a letter to the pope asking him to rescind his pardon, as his addition to the sacred text of the –are you sure phrase-has now been vindicated, but the truth of what exactly happened when the cat met the dog is somewhere in between the stories recounted and this is the version of exactly what happened
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 22:59:04 +0000
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