THE UNFINISHED JOKE

A Tale of Sogmarsh — in which a parish has spent generations arguing about the end of a joke, and a child asks the one question nobody thought to.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

Long ago, and this part everybody agrees on, the Court Jester of Castle Bastable went to Murkminster to welcome the High Duke, as was his office, and was not welcomed back.

He gave his name, at the gate, as the Dirt Tester — which was the joke, or the start of one, the Duke's seat being built on the finest reclaimed marsh in the realm and everyone knowing it and no one saying it — and the Duke, who had no humour whatsoever and a hat you could park a cart under, did not laugh, and the men in the swamp shoes took the Jester out onto the Duck Muck, which is the soft ground below the Murkminster wall, and left him there.

And the Jester, going down, with the mud at his chest and then his chin, and the whole court watching from the dry, began a joke.

He got out the setup. Witnesses agree on the setup, more or less, allowing for the years. It was long, as his jokes were, and it was building, as his jokes did, toward a turn that everyone on that wall could feel coming the way you feel weather.

And then the mud reached his mouth, and he never got to the turn.

That was generations ago, and the parish has been trying to finish the joke ever since.

It is the great argument of Sogmarsh, larger than the drains, older than most of the feuds. At every Bog Night, when the ale is down and the fire is low, somebody says "well, the way I heard the end—" and the whole room is off, because everyone has heard the end, and no two ends are the same, and each is defended by its holder with a passion that has, on three occasions, ended friendships.

The Rind family hold that the turn was about the Duke's hat. The Dribbles are certain it was about the Duke's mother. The Quills, who are archivists and should know better, maintain a version so elaborate and so structurally perfect that it is almost certainly wrong, because the Jester's jokes were never tidy. There is a Mucklecombe end and a Saltgate end and a scandalous Cold Coast end that the chapel has asked people to stop repeating. Goodwife Pell, before she died, claimed to have had it from her grandmother direct, word for word, and told it once, and it was so filthy and so funny that the parish has spent the years since deciding it could not possibly be true and being unable to prove it.

They will fight about the ending of that joke until the marsh takes them all. It is, without any of them saying so, how they have kept the man alive — a village that will not let a joke die, because letting the joke die is letting the Jester finish sinking, and they have decided, without a meeting, that he is not going to.

The child who broke it open was a small one, of no house in particular, at a Bog Night some years back, during a Rind-versus-Dribble round that had been going, at that point, for about an hour and was generating more heat than the fire.

And the child, in the way of children, who ask the questions that are too simple for grown people to reach, waited for a gap and said:

"But what was the beginning?"

And the room stopped.

Because they had all spent their whole lives arguing about the end — inventing turns, defending punchlines, coming to blows over a joke's last six words — and not one of them, in all the generations, could tell the child how it started. The setup was gone. The witnesses had passed it down as "it was long, and it was building," and somewhere across the years the actual opening — the first line, the thing the whole joke was walking toward — had slipped under, the way the Jester had, quietly, while everyone was looking at the wrong end.

They had been so busy giving him an ending that they had lost his beginning.

There was a long quiet after the child's question, of the kind Sogmarsh does well, and then old Marle — a different old man, an older one, the kind every good hearth has one of — said the thing that ended the round and is now said at that fire whenever the argument threatens to turn nasty, which is often.

He said: "Doesn't matter what the beginning was, nor the end. He was telling a joke. That's the whole of it. A man's up to his chin in the Duck Muck with the Duke's whole court laughing at him from the dry, and he looks at the lot of them, and he decides the last thing he's going to do on this earth is make 'em laugh. You don't need the words for that. The words were never the joke. He was."

And the room was quiet again, differently, and somebody put more peat on, and after a while a Dribble said that all the same it was obviously about the hat, and a Rind said something back, and the argument started up again, warm now instead of hot, the way it is supposed to be.

The child never got an answer. There is no answer. That is the point, and the parish protects it fiercely without ever admitting it protects anything: the joke must stay unfinished, because a finished joke is over, and this one is not allowed to be over, because it is the only thing holding a brave dead man up out of the mud.

They still argue about the ending, every Bog Night, and they will not thank you for supplying one.

But since the child's question there is a new custom at that fire, small and unspoken, that was not there before. Before the argument starts — before the Rinds and the Dribbles square up over the punchline — one of them, whoever is nearest the child, will lift a cup, just slightly, toward the door and the dark and the marsh beyond it, to the man on the wall who never got his turn.

And then, and only then, they begin to fight about how he finished.

A joke's ending is the least of it. What Sogmarsh remembers — what it will brawl to keep — is a man who, with the mud at his chin and the powerful laughing at him from the dry, chose to be the one still making the joke. You do not need to know the words. You only need to know that he was telling it.