Carrie May and The Teacup Monkey

Carrie May's folks lived up island at the end of a narrow dirt road that wound for a half mile or so through thick trees and ended up just above the cove. The little frame house was always neat as a pin and kept brightly painted, its windows shone in the morning sun and wildflowers grew on either side of the path. Carrie's daddy, an itinerant carpenter, traveled all the over provinces for work, and always returned with pockets full of cash and a box of presents for Carrie and her mother - a brass birdcage, a music box, an entire set of Encyclopedia Britannica - and one June evening, a miniature monkey with scaly, brown and black fur and huge eyes. It was this last gift that made her mother anxious but won Carrie's heart for all time. No one on the island had ever set eyes on a genuine monkey, never mind kept one as a pet, and for a time the little creature with the soulful eyes was a major curiosity. Carrie named him Teacup, just like the monkeys in the ads at the back of comic books, and her daddy built an enormous enclosure and filled it with driftwood and ropes and a several small swings. Teacup thrived on sun and salt air, a diet of dried fish, fruit, nuts and porkchop bones, and come winter, he was moved inside to a smaller cage to accommodate what Carrie's daddy called his tropical soul. He took sick not long after and Rowena had to be called. Cain't say I know much about monkeys, she told Carrie with a heavy heart, but I'll do my best. I'll study on it.

And study she did, discovering more about monkeys than she had ever wanted to know but nothing definitive. She recommended keeping him warm and dry, increasing his fluid intake - by force if need be - a quarter tablet of baby aspirin once a day and powdered milk. Carrie added a nightly prayer and little by slow, Teacup improved Rowena chalked it up to serendipity and old fashioned common sense while Carrie was sure it was intervention from a higher source, some merciful god of monkeys who had looked down and decided to spare the small life. By late spring when the weather finally turned warmer, Teacup was returned to his outside enclosure, happy, healthy and playful as ever. He was to live another thirty years and by the time he died - well fed and chattering quietly to himself as if making his peace with the god of monkeys before curling up in a corner of his summer cage and closing his eyes for the final time - Carrie's children had children.

It was a fine day for a funeral, my friend Ruthie wrote me, Jimmy let all the children out of their lessons so they could be there, Carrie even persuaded James to come and read a prayer and we sang "Let The Circle Be Unbroken" then buried him - the monkey, not James - beneath the wildflower patch by the back door. When the children asked if monkeys go to heaven, James told them that God accepts all good souls. Nice touch, don't you think?

I did think so and still do.