Wesley’s Blue Tick

Morton Salt came by way of Cambridgeshire which came by way of Rollin’s Creek. He knew a man, a very stout angry man, named Paul Bearer who lived in a cabin without a floor. Morton and Paul saw one another on Thursdays, sharing a wax-paper sandwich and a jar of Wesley’s Blue Tick wine. Neither man liked the other but put up with the other as a favor to the other’s parents, who had abandoned them, one and the other, at birth. Morton Salt’s great-great grandfather was the inventor of the italic, having been the proprietor of a stamp and lexicon shop with two windows and a shim-by-two-shim roof. The great-great grandfather of Paul Bearer, a wire and brush man with a strict Episcopalian upbringing and a hair-lip (which he hid beneath a butterfly-wing moustache) died from the whooping, leaving his wire and brush territory to his great-great grandson, who upon hearing that he had been left a territory with little to no value, sold his territorial share to a tinker with a wife as fat as a lowing cow. His great-great grandmother, who never saw the light of day, having been born blind of sight, composed a poem that she recited, without a fail or tail, each and every Christmas morning,

anise
sweetened lips
Christmas morning
the tooth fairy
and you

She lived well into the next century, and a smidgen beyond. As she had no teeth of her own to speak of, she had little faith in the tooth fairy.