Charles Escargot Bustle was a businesslike and no-nonsense man, and accordingly so he married Clarice Abseil Clemency at the time and place most convenient and straightforward for them both, and they immediately set about producing a rightful and correct number of dutiful and hardworking offspring. This they succeeded in six times over before producing a single failure (through no fault of their own), and having thus secured their lineage, the next step of their work was to build a fortune.
“We’re going to the least useful place in the world, my children,” Charles told his family. “The wilderness. It’s wild and savage and above all else – here he shuddered – “useless.”
And all the children shuddered too, except for the seventh and youngest, Louise Mendicant Bustle, who was busy playing with knucklebones.
“Oh Lousy Louise!” cried Charles. “Look here, children – here once again is uselessness in its purest form!” And he thrashed her with great love and sternness and then they all packed up and left with many tools and supplies, made lighthearted by their heavy loads.
***
The first order of business in the wilderness was to clear the land. It was benighted and blighted and burdened with many trees and weeds and other insolently useless vegetation, all of which were set about with sturdy axes carried by willing hands attached to strong backs.
Except for Louise, whose back carried her hands to some twine, and that twine to some leaves, and then spent her time flying kites.
“Lousy Louise!” cried her siblings as they chopped and carved and carried – here for the building of the house, there to be burnt as fuel, there to be burnt immediately for ash, there to be cast into the river, there to be stamped flat and spat upon and ritually desecrated as a Thing Lacking Purpose – “you never do anything useful!”
But there were eight useful bodies and only one useless one, so soon the Bustle’s labours were at an end and they were the proud owners of a wide tract of cleared soil and a mighty log home, all helpfully located right next to a broad river.
“Behold the fruits of our labours!” announced Charles triumphantly. And then, with a sardonic crack, the sky broke upon and spilled water everywhere.
This was a little frustrating at first, for the laundry was out and had to be gathered in a hurry by the Bustles. And while this was happening, the true extent of the problem became visible: the water in the river was rising, thick and muddy and fast – the bare and sun-baked soil, unshaded by leaf or limb and unclutched by root, was simply sluicing directly downslope into it.
This was observed only by Louise, who was not busy. So once her family was done gathering laundry and had begun boarding windows, digging ditches, and battening hatches, she took her kite and gathered up as much cloth as she could and very carefully cut-and-sewed –and-sewed-and-sewed until her kite was as wide as anything and as thin as a soap-bubble. Then she took it out in the rain and the fuss and the wind and threw it into the sky, where it spread itself wide and far like a bat and covered the barren field from the rain, starving the river’s gullet of its watery feast. She flew it all day and all night until the rain stopped the next morning.
“Remarkable work, Louise,” praised Clarice. “For once you’ve nearly pulled your weight, although you did skip out on all the day’s other chores while you did so. But half-praise is far better than none! Tell me, what did you use to make such a large kite?”
“Our laundry,” said Louise.
“Oh lousy Louise!” cried Clarice. “You have rendered your whole family as shiftless as you!” And she thrashed her with great love and sternness.
***
The second order of business was to till the soil. The Bustles plowed and planted and watered and spent much sweat and blood and tears on this with utmost diligence and great pain. Particular care was spent on removing the local pests that might graze upon them – every potential plant-eating bird and beast bigger than a gnat that dared stray from the beaten-back woods was culled with weaponry and cat and dog, cooked into pies and smoked into hams and used to build strong, productive muscles for the whole family except for Louise, who was spending her time sneaking off into the woods and doing bird calls.
“Lousy Louise!” cried her siblings as they went by with braces of blackbirds in their left hands and crow corpses in their right while slinging deer carcasses over their shoulders. “You never help!”
But since Louise was just one small useless body and there were eight busy and productive Bustles they begrudged her little, and did their jobs exceedingly well. Soon the crops were approaching the peak of their growth, and from green shoots came tender niblings, which was probably what attracted the attention of what initially looked like a big grey cloud but which resolved itself into a mass of millions of giant and voracious locusts.
“Get the guns!” shouted Clarice, then cursed as a locust slapped itself into her face like a fat chitinous palm. She examined the carcass, then quickly threw it away and corrected herself: “get the nets! Get the carpet-beaters! Get sticks! We battle for the fruits of our labours!”
While the family warred with the locusts in the center of the field, Louise went on a long, meandering walk in the woods, where she twittered and trilled and cawed and coughed to herself. And as she did this, the trees filled with curious little bright eyes attached to round little feathered bodies with long hungry beaks, until the branches creaked under their weight. Then she turned and walked back to her family’s fields, and when her audience saw the feast of locusts before them they fell on them like hungry dogs on stray lambs until they could eat no more – and by then Louise was coming back with her next flock. She walked into the woods and called for birds twelve times over twelve hours and at the day’s end the locusts were all gone and the crops were bedraggled but still alive.
“Quite unprecedented, Louise!” marvelled Charles. “You may have ignored my wise instructions and abandoned your assigned duties, but you did help out in your own odd way. When will the birds leave?”
“When they’re done eating, I expect,” said Louise with a shrug.
“Oh lousy Louise!” cried Charles. “They may have eaten the locusts, but they’re already eyeing our crops as dessert! You’ve sent our field to the birds!” And he thrashed her with great love and sternness.
***
After some years of great industry and hard work by the Bustles, their lands were prosperous. There was a field with sheep in it. There were fields with crops in them. The house was bigger and less made of logs. And Charles Bustle was on death’s door, dying of Cubes.
“My dutiful children and wife,” he wheezed between breaths, “how I shall miss all your tender, hard-working faces. How I appreciate that you have spared five minutes from your chores to come and laboriously tend to my sickness by punching large holes in my arms for bloodletting, so the foulness shall rush away from my body. Except for Louise. Where is she, anyways?”
“Playing with garbage or something, goodness knows,” said Clarice, hefting a sixteen-pound hand-drill with a grunt. “Shall we try trepanning again, my dear? Your brain-pan still seems quite inflamed.”
“Crack away, my good wife,” said Charles. “I would assist, but I lack the strength to raise my hands high enough – curse this enforced idleness, the true sickness!”
Louise walked in the door with a big mouldy fruit in her hands.
“Eat this,” she said. “You’ll get better.”
“That’s disgusting,” said Clarice. “But waste not want not, I suppose.”
So Charles ate the mouldy fruit, and began to feel a little better, and after three days of Louise bringing him mouldy fruit he was upright and out and about again.
“Thank you, Louise, for sparing our father from a slothful and unproductive death, if in a gross way,” praised her siblings. “But tell us, how did you find this miracle cure?”
“I looked around the garbage for mould that killed other growths near it, then rubbed fruit on it ‘till it spread to them,” said Louise.
“Oh lousy Louise!” cried the other six Bustle children. “That fruit was purchased from the market with hard-earned coin; you took that which was not yours and spoiled it!” And they thrashed her with great love and sternness.
***
The seasons came and went, and the Bustles laboured mightily. They built the house higher; they spread the fields farther; they hauled bigger buckets of water longer distances from the river; they herded more sheep and worked longer and longer and longer days.
The one thing they had less of were crops.
“The fields are dying, my good toilbugs,” mourned Charles to his attentive family as they spent their evening polishing the floorboards and performing the weekly repainting of the walls. “They are weak and lackadaisical, shiftless things that earn their keep no more. Our crops grow feebly and with unstout stems and limp and listless leaves, starved of nutrients by the sulky, wretched soil. They have failed us! Our fortunes diminish, our money is low, our good work has been betrayed and as matters stand soon we shall be destitute.”
“What shall we do, what shall we do?!” wailed six of the seven Bustle children as they dusted the corners, swept the ceiling, and renovated the kitchen.
“What we always do,” said Clarice, raising her chin like a war banner. “We will try HARDER. Plowing the fields twice as deep should do it.”
Charles scratched his head with one hand as he hammered nails with the other and ran a saw using his armpit. “No,” he decided. “THRICE as deep, and with three times the force. A Bustle never doubles down when they can triple down. Our prosperity shall be assured!”
“Hurrah!” cheered six of the seven Bustle children, as the back door swung open and the seventh stepped inside.
“Hey,” she said. “I-”
“Louise!” scolded her mother. “We’ve almost finished cleaning and rebuilding and refurbishing the house for the evening; we already tilled the fields and weeded the fields and harvested the fields and planted the fields in the afternoon; and goodness knows we long ago milked the sheep and slaughtered the sheep and butchered the sheep and cured the mutton in the morning. Ten more minutes and you’d be late for sitting up all night carding and spinning! Where have you BEEN all day?”
“Looking at rocks,” said Louise. “Listen, I-”
“I AM listening,” said her father, the gravest grief settling over his face like a mask. “I am listening and for once I am comprehending. Louise Mendicant Bustle, the youngest daughter of my family, has shirked every act of productivity and work all day from dawn to dusk and beyond, in order to amuse herself with frippery and childishness. And this is not the first day thus spent, nor the last! Oh lousy Louise, what have you DONE with yourself? What have you earned?”
“I found this by the west outcrop, and if you look at it in the light, it-”
Overcome with grief and horror, Candice snatched the stone from her daughter’s hand and cast it through the nearest window, which she immediately began to mend with glue.
“You are no daughter of mine,” she said with love and sternness, “and never will darken this place’s door again. We will crush that outcrop to little bitty pieces and cast it into the river, and through that dusty and tiring labour we will free ourselves from it and from our memories of all the worthlessness you have brought us. Now leave, Lousy Louise, for that is your only name now and this is no pace for anyone not yclept Bustle.”
“Listen-” attempted Louise, but she was confronted with six angered siblings armed with construction, cleaning, farming, and butchering tools and acquiesced with no more word than a sigh. So she left the house, picked up her stone, and walked down the long, winding way to the nearest road to town, examining it with a weary eye.
“S’pose it’s no big difference in the end,” she said, watching the sunset glisten on the rich yellow freckles that studded the rock. “It looks like it’s only a half-ounce-per-ton or so.”