The Unbirthday Present
by Sevenstars & Jya
This fic started when Jya—who, as you know if you've read her "Trick of Fate," is something of an admirer of my Laramie stories—shared Part One below with an informal group we both belong to. I was delighted and asked if I could take it a little farther. Jya consented, I did, and not till I'd sent her "Meeting Miss Alice" did she tell me that she'd actually written the first part for me. But I didn't think it was fair to deprive the rest of the fandom of such a great idea. So here it is; I've put my name first in the byline because three-quarters or so of it was in fact written by me, but Jya gets the credit (or blame) for the original concept and some of the research.
Please note that this fic doesn't take place in my regular Laramie Universe, but in a sort of hybrid of Jya's and mine.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Part One: Merry Unbirthday
August, 1871
"When's your birthday, Jess?" Andy asked, as he happily watched (through the kitchen window) Jonesy mixing cake batter. He was thirteen today, and he couldn't wait to sink his teeth into the delicious treat.
Jess shrugged, continued untangling the mess Traveller had made of his tail. "Dunno."
"Aw, c'mon, when is it?" Andy laughed, thinking he was being kidded.
"Don't know," Jess repeated, giving up on one knot and reaching for his knife. "Wasn't important enough to ask about or remember if I ever did."
As Jess cut away the unsightly mess of hair and thistles he'd been working on, he missed the Sherman brothers—Slim from the doorway of the barn—trading looks.
"Best guess?" Andy wanted to know.
Another shrug. "Older sister gave me a pocketknife one time. Said it was for bein' twelve and grown. It was hot out during the day and there was a full moon that night. But in the Panhandle, that could've been anytime between April and October."
"Oh."
The conversation ended when Slim spotted the stage on the crest of the hill.
**SR**
"That's real pretty there, Jonesy. You sellin' it?" Jess asked, getting himself a cup of coffee as he watched the older man spread icing over a two-tiered, half-chocolate confection.
"Yep. Little gal named Alice wants one. Poor thing can't bake worth spit, needs it for a real special occasion."
In the parlor, Slim bit the inside of his cheek hard to keep from grinning like an idiot.
"Alice? Hunh. Must be new." Jess swallowed some coffee. "She married?"
Andy snorted when Jonesy answered. "Nope. But she's Andy's age, too young for you."
"You ain't kidding," Jess shuddered. "Filly like that don't know which end is up."
Slim shook his head at Andy's confused, then comprehending, expression and regretted talking to his younger brother about the birds and bees during the run up to Andy's birthday a month ago.
Andy's curiosity had been a powerful thing, and though he'd originally banned Jess from the conversation, he'd allowed Andy to drag their friend into it kicking and screaming.
It might've been "misery loves company." It might've been "in for a penny, in for a pound."
Or it might've been a little too much mischief mixed with a few shots of Dutch courage, but watching Jess squirm and tapdance his way around Andy's numerous questions had been worth the itty bitty hangover Slim had the next morning.
It still brought a smirk to his lips, one he carried right through dinner and cleanup to about a half an hour before bed.
If Jess had noticed Andy's fidgeting, he hadn't said anything, absorbed as he was in stitching up a busted bridle. So when the boy got up again and went outside, he barely earned a glance from the ex-gunfighter.
The jubilant "It's up, it's time!" got attention though, especially since Andy raced into the bedroom immediately after and scurried out again clutching a small package.
Jonesy and Slim both got up, Slim going for the fresh coffee, Jonesy for the cake.
Jess watched the trio of lunatics he lived with as the Sherman brothers stood shoulder to shoulder with Jonesy over the cake—which had 'old enough to know better' spelled out on top in crushed candy—and sang:
"A very merry unbirthday to you, to you..."
Part Two: Meeting Miss Alice
November, 1871
Jess finally got to meet Miss Alice and her Looking Glass three months later, when November blew up a good snowstorm a week before Thanksgiving.
It was late, past nine, but with the weather, there was little urgency for either of the men to go to bed as early as usual, though Andy and Jonesy had turned in at their usual hour; growing young boys and older gents with sacroiliacs needed their sleep.
"Still snowin', is it?"
Slim turned from the window, letting the curtain fall across the glass behind him. "Settling in like a stubborn homesteader," he said. "Looks like we're in for a good one."
Jess shook his head. "Was afraid of that. Well, I reckon we got enough food in the place for us and the stock…"
"Don't worry about it," Slim told him. "Jonesy's been through eleven winters out here. He knows how much to lay in ahead of time. So do I, and so does the Overland." He noticed suddenly that there was a book lying in Jess's lap where he sat in the rocker that had become "his" by common consent. "What are you reading there?"
Jess held up the spine of the book so he could see. "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," Slim murmured. Then: "Why?"
"Andy said it was where Jonesy got the notion of tellin' me my birthday cake was for Alice, and of writin' that song you all sang me. Reckon I was curious."
Slim's face bore a look Jess wasn't sure he could decipher, and he'd thought he was pretty familiar with the rancher's tells by now. "Somethin' wrong?" the Texan asked. "You don't want me readin' Andy's books?"
"You're welcome to read any book in this house that you take a notion to. You ought to know that," Slim replied. "And since it's Andy's book, he has a perfect right to lend it to you if he wants to. It's just…" He sighed. "That was the last Christmas present Ma gave him before she died. Season of '67. It had been published in England two years earlier, and in this country the year after that." Then, with returning good nature, "I think you'll like it. It should suit that thing you call your sense of humor. Just remember Alice is an English girl, not an American one—some of what you come across may not be familiar to you."
He didn't know just how right he was.
**SR**
"Seems like this here's kind of a fairy story," Jess said a few minutes later. "What with white rabbits that talk and carry pocket watches, and rabbit holes a body can fall into."
"I'm not sure you'd call it exactly that," said Slim. "No fairies in it. Fantasy, maybe." He shook out the latest Gazette and began reading.
Presently Jess chuckled softly, and Slim looked up. "What?"
The Texan grinned at him over the top of the book. "All this where she's eatin' and drinkin' things and changin' size. That's good. But—say, what's this poem she's tryin' to say? She's thinkin' as how the words don't come out like they used to—"
"The way she says it, that's what they call a parody, of an old Isaac Watts poem called 'Against Idleness and Mischief.' I remember I had to learn it when I was in school. It starts out—
How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!
How skilfully she builds her cell!
How neat she spreads the wax!
And labors hard to store it well
With the sweet food she makes."
Jess nodded. "Yeah, I can hear how they sound the same, kind of. Now what's a—a dodo?" He pronounced it 'doo-doo.'
Slim had to think, just a second. "That's dodo," he corrected his friend gently. "It's a kind of bird that's extinct now—which means there aren't any more of them. I think there's a picture in Andy's natural history—remind me tomorrow and we'll look."
"And a lory?"
"That's another bird, sort of like a little parrot. You've seen parrots, haven't you?"
"Uh-huh. Thanks, Slim. Sorry, didn't mean to take you from your paper." Jess dived back into the Adventures again.
**SR**
Slim looked up at another chuckle from the rocker. "What now?" he asked, smiling. It always made him happy when Jess seemed to throw off his difficult past and revert to the very young man he still was.
Jess grinned again. "She's in the Rabbit's house and just kicked that lizard Bill plumb out the chimney. That's good. He deserved it. But what's these critters that's givin' him a shot of somethin'? Guinea-pigs?"
"Not real pigs, like you're thinking," Slim told him. "They're a kind of rodent—like a fat little mouse. They come from South America originally. I guess they're called pigs because they like to eat vegetable scraps, and the Indians down there use them for food; when the first Spaniards saw that, they naturally thought 'pig.' We'll look them up in the natural history tomorrow."
"'Kay," Jess agreed readily, and went back to the book.
**SR**
About two minutes later he cleared his throat tentatively. "Slim?"
The rancher smothered a sigh and lowered his paper. "What now?"
"Sorry," said Jess, "but he keeps on throwin' out words I don't know. What's a—a hookah?"
"It's a kind of pipe that they smoke in places like India—a water pipe, it's called. The tobacco's flavored, and the smoke passes through a glass basin full of water."
Jess wrinkled his nose. "Don't sound like nothin' I'd care for," he said. And lowered his face to the book.
**SR**
Two minutes later.
"Now what?" Slim asked.
"I'm about ready to give up, and if it wasn't for Andy I would," Jess confessed. "Here's another poem—she says 'some of the words've got altered.' You are old, Father William…"
Slim nodded. "That's a parody again. The original's by Robert Southey—the fellow who wrote the Life of Nelson and 'The Battle of Blenheim.' His starts out the same way, except that in that one, Father William talks about how he's hale and hearty and cheerful because of the habits he got into 'in the days of his youth.' We've got his Poetical Works somewhere—"
"No need," said Jess. Somewhat grimly, he bent his attention to Alice once more.
**SR**
A snort from the rocking chair.
"Jess?"
"Nothin'," the Texan told him. "Only this Duchess is about the ugliest woman I reckon I ever did see, if the artist's got her right."
Slim grinned. "I'd have to agree with you there," he allowed. "Wait till you get a couple of pages on, though."
Jess looked suspiciously at him. "Meanin' what?"
"Go to the next illustration and you'll see," Slim suggested.
Looking as if he expected a rattlesnake to pop out of the binding at him, Jess carefully turned a page or two, looked, and gave a little bark that was half amusement and half surprise. "Dad-gum! That baby of hers done turned into a shoat!" He shook his head. "This here country Alice's got into sure is full of surprises."
**SR**
"Slim? What's a hatter?"
"It can be two things," Slim replied— "someone who sells hats, and someone who makes them." He grinned briefly. "I see you've gotten to the Mad Tea Party."
Jess looked puzzled. "I don't savvy," he admitted. "Why'd a hatter be mad? He don't seem to be."
Slim needed a moment or two to make sense of that. "It doesn't mean angry. That's our usage, here in America. In England it means crazy, insane."
"Oh," said Jess. Then: "But why'd a hatter be… like that?"
"Some say it's because of the mercury compounds they use in making hats, though it may not be as common now that less of them are made from fur, like beaver," Slim explained. "Mercury affects the nervous system, and when people get too much of it in them, the way they would by working with it all the time, they can start trembling and appearing to be insane."
Jess considered that. "Well, then," he said presently, "why'd this March Hare be mad too? He ain't a hatter. And what's a hare anyhow? The picture looks like a jackrabbit."
"Jackrabbits are hares," Slim told him. "A hare is related to rabbits—you can tell by the ears and feet—but it doesn't make a burrow, the way a rabbit does, so its young are born with their full fur coats, and their eyes open. Baby rabbits are blind and naked."
"So he's kind of a March jackrabbit," Jess decided, "but why'd a jackrabbit be crazy in March?"
"I don't know if they are," Slim admitted, "but the kind of hare Carroll's writing about is European, and around March, when their mating season starts, they jump and box and generally act pretty demented."
Again a silence. Slim had about decided he was going to be left in peace when Jess said: "Slim? What's a dormouse? There ain't no doors at this party."
"It's a kind of rodent that lives in Europe—some species in Asia or Africa," the rancher explained patiently. "And the 'dor' in its name isn't like a door to a house. It comes from a Latin word, dormire, that means 'to sleep.' Dormice sleep a lot. They can hibernate for six months out of the year, or even longer if the weather doesn't get warm enough for them to come out of their burrows."
"Huh," said Jess. "I always reckoned bears was the champions that way."
"And you," Slim teased.
"You hush," Jess growled back.
**SR**
"Well, now," said Jess. "How 'bout that."
"What?"
"That Duchess again. 'Way boy, she may be ugly, but she sure ain't yella. She boxed the Queen's ears and got sentenced to have her head off." He shot Slim a questioning look. "Do queens do that kinda thing often?"
"Not so much any more," Slim told him. "Who are you thinking about, Queen Victoria?"
"Reckon so," Jess agreed. "Reckon she's about th'only queen I rightly know the name of. Glad she don't. What I hear of her, she's a lady."
He read on for a minute or two. "Well, Alice ain't scared of her exactly—the Red Queen, I mean. Just smart enough not to let her opinion get heard. And this croquet game sure beats everything, don't it?"
Noticing that the Texan pronounced the word correctly, Slim asked, "You've seen it done the right way?"
"Yeah, one time at Fort Lincoln. The officers' wives was all crazy for it." He snorted a brief laugh. "They'd been crazy for real if they'd had to play it like the Queen and her folks does, wouldn't they?"
**SR**
"That King ain't a bad feller," said Jess.
"How so?"
"Well, like Carroll says, the Queen don't have but one way of settlin' any difficulty, no matter the size of it," Jess replied, "but he don't let it go that far. He pardoned everybody." He looked briefly as if he were remembering something. "Now, that's my kind of king."
**SR**
Jess laughed out loud, and caught himself as Slim looked up. "What?" the rancher asked, pleased to see that his friend had found something in the tangle of Wonderland that he actually considered funny.
"Had to read over it a time or two to get it," Jess admitted, "but this here, it's right clever. The Mock Turtle's talkin' all the things he studied in school. I got 'reelin' and writhin'' okay, and the branches of arithmetic, though that took goin' back over and sayin' it to myself. 'Mystery and seaography' wasn't so hard. But this 'drawlin', stretchin', and faintin' in coils,' that just about had me."
"You figured it out, though?"
"Uh-huh. It's drawin' and sketchin' and paintin' in oils. Them officers' wives I mentioned before, they all wanted their girls to learn them things."
Slim grinned. "Look a little farther down the page."
Jess did. "'Laughin' and grief'?" he muttered, and then: "Oh! It's Latin and Greek, ain't it?" He pondered briefly. "Is there a word for a word that sounds kinda like another word only not quite?"
Slim took a moment to puzzle the question out. "Well, there's 'homophones,'" he said. "That's words that sound the same but mean something else, and words that sound the same but are spelled differently. But I'm not sure it applies here."
"No, I don't reckon," Jess agreed. "Say—what's a mock turtle anyhow? The Queen said it was the thing mock turtle soup's made out of."
"Except that there's no such thing," said Slim. "Mock turtle soup is—well, a substitute. Have you ever had prairie oysters?"
"Sure, when I was a kid workin' gathers, down in Texas. Why?"
"Well, they're called oysters, but that doesn't mean they are," Slim pointed out. "Mock turtle soup's kind of like that. It's something the English came up with, a hundred years ago or so, as a substitute for real green-turtle soup, which cost too much for most people. It uses brains or organ meats to duplicate the taste and texture of the original."
Jess made a face and went back to his book.
**SR**
"Reckon this here's another of them parodies, ain't it?"
"Which?" Slim asked.
"Tis the voice of the lobster…" Jess began.
Slim nodded. "You've got it. It's from another Isaac Watts poem, 'The Sluggard.'"
"That another one you had to learn?"
"Afraid so," Slim agreed, and began:
"'Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain,
'You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again.'
As the door on its hinges, so he on his bed—"
"Never mind," Jess interrupted.
**SR**
Sigh.
"What?"
"'Nother of them parodies, I reckon," said Jess resignedly. "'They told me you had been to her…'"
"No, it's not," Slim told him.
"For real?" the Texan asked hopefully.
"Skip down past the poem to what Alice says about it."
Slowly Jess read out: "'If any one of them can explain it, I'll give him sixpence. I don't believe there's an atom of meaning in it.'" Then, looking up: "That's almost the first plumb sensible thing I've come acrost here yet."
**SR**
"It was all just a dream?" Jess asked. He sounded almost disappointed.
"Were you expecting something else?" Slim asked.
"I dunno," the Texan admitted. Then, under his breath: "And I thought I had some… But, hey, I only just now realized—there wasn't no 'unbirthday' in this whole book. So why'd Andy tell me there was?"
Slim laid his paper aside, went to the bookcase, and after a few moments' search pulled a second volume out of the shelf where his brother's personal collection of reading matter was kept. "Here you go," he said, dropping it in Jess's lap. "He'd only bought this about a month before we had your party. New this year."
Jess peered at the spine of the second volume. "'Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There,'" he murmured, and looked up. "Another one?"
"'Fraid so," Slim agreed. And waited.
"What's a lookin' glass?" asked Jess, his brows drawing together in confusion.
"You should be able to figure that out. Think about it."
Jess did, then: "Oh! It's a mirror. She goes through a mirror? How's she do that? Only mirrors I ever seen went through was them that fellers got thrown into in saloons."
"Read it and find out," Slim said.
"Reckon I got to," Jess agreed. And, resolutely, he turned to the first page and began.
Slim settled back into his own chair and waited for the next question.
**SR**
Jess's granddaughter proudly sold the rights to "Merry Unbirthday" to Walt Disney eighty years after that, and used the money to expand the Sherman/Harper Ranch another thousand acres.
To this day, there's always a horse named Hatter grazing that ground.
-30-