The Birthday Ball by Lois Lowry

Author:Lois Lowry [Lowry, Lois]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2010-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

11

The Conjoint Counts

When the conjoint counts were born and were revealed to be joined at the middle, which was quite astonishing to their parents, a royal decree was issued almost immediately. It seemed fairly simple, not designed to cause hardship.

Everything in the domain was to become plural in name. The word cow, a word commonly used in the area because there were many farms, was now to be cows.

It was sometimes difficult for the peasants. They were accustomed to saying “Do your lessons,” or “Pull up your trousers,” but they had a hard time remembering to say, “Go milk the cows” when the family owned only one. Now, instead of weeding the garden, they had to weed the gardens, even though they were tending only a small patch of carrots and potatoes. And when a peasant mother told her little ones, “Go and kiss your granny,” she was required to say, “Go and kiss your grannies,” which confused the tots and made them cry, often, and refuse their supper.

Even now, though years had passed since the decree, and though the parents of the conjoint counts were long dead, the language of the domain continued to make use of the superfluous plural. No one was ever quite certain what verb to employ. In speaking of a single tree, for example, should one say “The trees is large” or “The trees are large”? Small children had trouble learning to talk. It was a nuisance and a bother—sometimes worse—but it was the Law of the Domain.

Count Colin and Count Cuthbert were adults now, and ruled the domain in which they lived. But although they were joined at the middle, always had been, always would be, it did not make them the best of friends. They agreed on only one thing, and that was jokes. They both laughed uproariously at bathroom jokes, or jokes involving underwear, though as soon as they finished laughing, they argued about who could tell a joke better, and sometimes made rude noises at each other with their lips, and said “Nyah nyah” and “I’m rubber, you’re glue, everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you” in a singsong, whiny voice.

They had a particular annoying prank that they played on each other. One would wait until his brother’s face was turned toward his own, and then belch loudly at it and cry, “Gotcha!”

The belched-at one would invariably respond with a full-scale wedgie.

They bickered constantly. If Colin wanted to walk to the left, Cuthbert insisted that right was the way to go, so that they pulled at each other and argued.

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