Paul Enns Wiebe
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Slack's Humble Background II, #23

7/17/2020

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​Slack the Second worked himself up from cave life to a sod hut, which in bygone days was considered the American equivalent of a castle. His calling was to further develop the art form he had learned from his father, the art that came to be called “begging off”—a set of techniques the candidate himself was later to perfect. After a down-on-his-luck builder had mounted a sod dwelling atop a sequestered cave strewn with ancient jawless fish (the first vertebrates, according to the venerable S. J. Gould) from the mid-Ordovician period, Slack the Second refused payment. In fact, he threatened a lawsuit on the grounds that there were several discernible bits of cactus admixed with the sod. The builder, caught in his evil ways, folded and was run out of town, leaving Slack II to live mortgage-free for the remainder of his many years. Not much is known of his first wife, Marie Antoinette du Ojibway, of the Quebec Ojibways, except that she excelled in archery and had one helluva temper. She was rumored to be profligate in her spending, which would explain the tale, now questioned by micro-historians, that Slack Junior was in no small way responsible for her hanging.

At age 18, Slack II then took up with a woman of Amerind descent. It is said that Sacajawea II was to bow-and-arrow hunting as her mother-in-law Margarita had been to bank borrowing. Her other notorious skill was the ability to guide U.S. Cavalry units through rattlesnake country—a skill, they say, that she had learned from her own great-grandmother. On one of her scouting expeditions, Sacajawea the Second came across a large band of Mormon women who had answered a Brigham Young ad and were en route to the Promised Land. From this troop of lustful, lonely ladies she bought, in exchange for a foal of the mare she was astride and as a gift for her husband, a black Frenchwoman who had inadvertently joined that jubilant posse of nubiles. At the suggestion of this woman, Matty II la Mort du Slack II, Slack IV’s grand-père (grandfather, Fr.) added another bedroom to the hut, though there is no record of how this appurtenance was financed. [Not much is known of Slack II’s second wife, Grandma Maria del Ojibway, of the Ontario Ojibways, except that she excelled in pistol-shooting and had a helluva temper to beat all.]
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    Paul Enns Wiebe perpetually asks himself, "What do I want to write when I grow up?"

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