Maximilien François Marie

The Dos Hermanas brothers came by way of the elephantine mountain where people wore cassock’s skirts and woolly wool caps winter, summer and fall, leaving their heads tonsure-bare in springtime when the sun shone like a blacksmith’s fire. Then eldest brother, Sachem, wore a cap with a pheasant plume hatband, as he was the sage and learned one, the captain of the Dos Hermanas brothers, of which there were many, 27 brothers, 27 half brothers and 27 half-half brothers. The man in the hat was acquainted with the Dos Hermanas brothers having met them at the church bazaar one chilly autumnal day. He espied the brothers from a distance, picking them out in the queue waiting for the doors to the church to be opened. The brothers came each year to the church bazaar to buy Pop-siècle placemats and toothpick dories. And each year without fail they had a run in with the dogmen, the two, the Dos Hermanas brothers and the dogmen, fighting it out in the church parking lot, to the winner going all the Pop-siècle placemats and toothpick dories the other had purchased. This went on for years until the eldest Dos Hermanas brother decided he’d had enough and called in quits, the dogmen taking this as a sign of their omnipotence, thereby redeeming whatever failings they might have harbored about dogmen being dimwitted and salubrious. The harridan’s sister, not caring a tinker’s cuss whether the dogmen or the Dos Hermanas brothers bought her wares, decamped and moved her table to the farthest nave of the church basement, next to the jug-eared patron Maximilien François Marie who had but one thing for sale, a piece of barn wood with the face of Christ wood burned on one side and a rabbit on the other.