The Great Dimpole Oak
Janet Taylor Lisle
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A Biography of Janet Taylor Lisle
1
IT WAS A VERY old tree. How old exactly? Well, that was one of its intriguing points—no one in Dimpole knew. There were theories. People had their stories. According to one, the tree was nearly a thousand years old and grew out of the place where a Viking raider once spat.
Some folks snorted at this. They said Dimpole was located fifty miles from the coast. They said Vikings had flat feet, which is why they took up sailing to begin with, and they never could have walked so far. These doubters believed in other stories about the oak’s origins: It was planted by an Indian queen in 1492; it was planted by a groundhog in 1526; it was planted by a lightning bolt out of the blue. Or by wind. Or by flood. The infuriating thing about the oak was that with not much known for sure, all sorts of ideas came floating up around it. There was no way to tell what the real truth was.
Infuriating, yes, but what a magnificent tree! However the oak had started, it had grown up well. It was hundreds of feet tall, tens of feet thick, with roots as big as fire hoses coiled around its base. Everyone liked to sit on these roots and look out across the valley around Dimpole. Or they leaned back and gazed up, imagining shapes and faces in the ancient tangle of limbs overhead.
One root rose up and arched clear of the ground before plunging back into the soil. This the children rode, bucking and shrieking in the afternoons. But if a certain old farmer appeared, as he often did, they would stop riding for a while and listen to certain peculiar tales.
The Dimpole Oak was not located in the town of Dimpole but just outside, in the country. It grew in a hayfield that belonged to the farmer. He claimed ownership of the tree as well and he had his own ideas about it.
“This oak is a family tree,” he explained to whoever would listen. “It was here when my great, great granddaddy came on the land. It’ll still be here when my great, great grandchildren set foot in the world—which they haven’t done yet by a long shot,” he’d add, squinting up at the tree with a satisfied smile.
According to the farmer, many strange events had occurred under his tree during the hundreds of years it had stood in the family field. His granddaddies had kept a record. They had passed the record down to each other, and then down to him, which was a good thing because otherwise the stories might have been lost, he said.
“Murder has been committed here,” the farmer told the children of Dimpole in his gravelly voice. “And the blood of the victims has seeped down between these roots,” he’d whisper, tapping his foot.
He told how thieves had plotted there, crouched together in winter moonlight. He described the criminals who had been hanged there and left to dry for days in the sun.
He recounted details of the famous Black Witches’ Congress of 1685, when neighborhood cats were killed in cold blood and a young girl had disappeared. Sometimes, late at night, an eerie scream can be heard echoing across the fields, the farmer said. It might be a nighthawk or a cat on the prowl. It might be someone’s nervous imagination. But it might be …
The old farmer would wink. “There’s human blood in these branches and human sweat and human tears. It all came up the trunk, it did, from things that happened right here where I’m standing.
“And look here, look!” The farmer was always beckoning and whispering. “See all these carved hearts and lovers’ initials? Some of them were cut more than three hundred years ago. It’s peculiar when you think about it, isn’t it? The carving’s still here long after the real hearts were buried and rotted in the ground.”
There were neighbors living nearby who did not like the farmer’s stories. The way they saw it, the great oak was too noble and historic to be bogged down in a lot of grisly nonsense.
“Watch out for that farmer,” they warned visitors who stopped to ask the way to the tree. “He’s a crazy old fellow. He’s got blood on the brain and half of what he says is a boldfaced lie.”
Many of the farmer’s neighbors had grown up with the oak. They believed it was just as much their tree as his. All the farmer’s talk about his great granddaddy and grandchildren made them cross. Hadn’t they ridden the tree’s root when they were children? Hadn’t they camped out under it and tried to climb up it and lived around it all their lives?
Moreover, they noted, the oak was history. And no one person can own history.
“That tree saw the British Red Coats march by on their way to a battle with the American colonists in 1775,” said Mr. Harvey Glover one October day, down at the Dimpole Post Office. He was the town postmaster, a bird-like young man with darting eyes.
“That’s right. A battle in which the Red Coats were defeated!” exclaimed plump Mrs. George Trawley, who came daily to pick up her mail. She smoothed down her bulges proudly at the thought of her country’s victory.
“Did you know that our great President, Abraham Lincoln, stopped to sleep under our tree on a journey through these parts during the Civil War?” asked Miss Shirley Hand, an unusually pretty schoolteacher who lived in Dimpole. She handed the package she was carrying through the mail window to Mr. Glover and lowered her eyes sweetly.
“Is that true?” asked Mr. Glover. “I thought it was George Washington during the Revolution.” Miss Hand had extremely long lashes, he noticed, as he reached for the rubber stamps.
“I’m glad to hear you say ‘our tree,’” Mrs. Trawley told Miss Hand, “as there’s some that would take every leaf and twig for themselves, never thinking of the rights of others.”
Mr. Glover nodded. He leaned over the counter and spoke with hushed voice.
“The farmer is a sick man who ought to be in a hospital somewhere instead of wandering around scaring children with silly stories.”
“Who’s he been scaring?” asked Miss Hand. She smelled delightfully of lavender scent, Mr. Glover noticed. It happened to be his favorite perfume.
“Why, everybody!” he replied, more loudly than he had intended. “A child can’t go up there to ride the root anymore without the old fellow scooting out from some bush and grabbing him.”
“Grabbing him!” said Miss Hand with a horrified look.
“Well, ahem.” Mr. Glover coughed. “Not grabbing exactly, but cornering. Then he tells his crazy stories about murder and hanging and branches full of blood. None of them are true, you know. He only does it to get attention.”
“Not nice,” murmured Mrs. Trawley. “Not nice at all. The little ones come home with their eyes popping out and the older ones get bad ideas.”
“The poor things!” exclaimed Miss Hand. “I hadn’t a notion this was going on.”
“Not to mention …” Mr. Glover continued. (He shot an admiring glance toward Miss Hand’s flushed cheeks.) “Not to mention the damage done to our tree’s reputation. Why, left to the farmer, our great oak would become a lurid sideshow attracting the worst sort of people. Even now, there is no control over who comes to see the tree. He lets everybody in, for whatever reason.”
“Something must be done,” cried Miss Hand. “For the sake of the children!”
“A national treasure is in grave danger,” agreed Mrs. Trawley.
“I will organize a meeting,” Mr. Glover announced masterfully. “Before it is too late.”
So, with a happy feeling that he had made a great impression on Miss Hand, Mr. Glover set to work compiling lists of names. He tracked down telephone numbers, bought note pads and sharpened pencils.
“None of which will do the least bit of good,” Mrs. Trawley confided to Miss Hand later, in private. “Poor skinny Mr. Glover. H
e is not and never will be a leader of men.”
Miss Hand was surprised to hear this. Mr. Glover had seemed perfectly nice to her. She was especially impressed by his concern for the children. But if Mrs. Trawley knew better …
Mrs. Trawley did know better. She happened to know the very person to organize a meeting of this sort. It was a person who had already made a name for herself by organizing everybody and everything in town.
“Why, who?” asked Miss Hand.
“Why, me,” said Mrs. Trawley, fluffing herself up like a Thanksgiving turkey. “No one need worry about the farmer anymore. The Dimpole Oak is as good as saved. Mrs. George Trawley will arrange everything, and you will help her.”
“I will?” said Miss Hand.
“Of course!”
At this, the women bent their heads together
and began a long, serious
conversation.
Miss Hand’s concern for the children (“the poor things”) might have changed to alarm if she could have eavesdropped on a conversation taking place across town at that moment between two young Dimpolers.
Dexter Drake and Howlie Howlenburg were friends, next door neighbors and, more importantly, neighbors of the great oak as well. The boys were often among the farmer’s visitors. They had heard the farmer’s stories many times and they couldn’t help feeling inspired by them.
Life certainly had been exciting back then in the past. By comparison, life in Dimpole these days had gotten so plain and ordinary that any normal adventurous person could go crazy sitting around and waiting for something to happen.
“And worse than crazy,” Dexter was saying in an outraged voice to Howlie as the two walked home from school that October afternoon. “A person could get dumb and boring living around here. He could turn into a mouse.”
“Well, not exactly,” answered literal-minded Howlie.
“Listen,” said Dexter. “When I grow up, I’m going to do things. I’m going to fight and plot and stab and rob and burn and ambush people if I have to, just like in the farmer’s stories.” He looked over at Howlie to see how he would take this. “And spit like a Viking,” Dexter added, using a phrase well known in Dimpole and associated with strength and standing up for your rights. He cleared his throat and launched a huge glob of spit at a nearby bush.
Howlie cleared his throat and spat too.
“Sounds okay to me,” he replied. “Too bad we have to wait till we’re grown up.” He hoisted his heavy book bag over his shoulder to keep it out of the dirt. Dexter, never one to bother about such things, was dragging his bag on the ground behind him.
“I’ve got five pages of fractions to do, eight vocabulary words to look up and a report due Friday on the herding habits of the wild Tibetan mountain goat,” Howlie said. “What have you got?”
Instead of answering, Dexter staggered forward like a man on his last legs. He clutched his neck, wheezed, almost collapsed, caught himself at the last moment, nearly collapsed a second time and finally grabbed hold of Howlie for support. From this position, he cleared his throat again and shot a truly horrible glob in the direction of a fence post. Howlie stepped back to give him room.
“That was pretty good,” he told Dexter. “It really looked as if you were about to die.”
“Thanks,” said Dexter. He let go of Howlie and straightened up with a pleased expression on his face.
“The trouble is,” he said, continuing the original conversation, “you can do terrible things better and get away with them easier when you’re old.”
Howlie glanced at him. “Maybe you can,” he said thoughtfully, “and then again, maybe not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” said Howlie. “Who would ever suspect us, for instance, two ten-year-old kids who go to school every day …”
“And brush our teeth every night …” Dexter put in disgustedly.
“And have to clean out the garage …”
“And don’t even get paid for it …”
“Who,” said Howlie, “would ever suspect us of doing anything wild. I mean really wild.”
“Nobody,” muttered Dexter. “You’re right. We’re so wimpy we didn’t even punch Bulldog Calhoun in the nose when he dropped that rock on my little sister’s toe.”
“We should have.”
“I know it.”
“He did it on purpose.”
“He does things like that all the time.”
“While we sit around and do nothing. Well, I’m tired of it,” said Dexter. He jabbed his fist in the air. He wound up and did some complicated karate chops and leaps. Then without a pause he turned himself into Bulldog Calhoun getting punched and chopped to pieces. His head flew back. His stomach smashed in. His knees crumpled and he spat teeth.
Howlie stood back and watched in silence. When Dexter had finished, he said: “You could probably be a stuntman in Hollywood with that stuff. It’s starting to look realer and realer.”
“Hollywood! Do you really think so?” exclaimed Dexter.
They were making their way down the long field that was home to the great oak. Up ahead, the tree loomed fiery-leaved against the cold, blue sky. The boys were in the habit of stopping by after school. There, if the farmer came out, they could listen to a story. And if he didn’t come, that was all right too. They practiced riding the root or made up stories of their own. The Dimpole Oak had so many adventures connected to it that the air around it seemed like special air to Dexter and Howlie. It was exciting just to be there breathing.
But today, as they came up to it, the boys felt the old tree putting them to shame.
“We’re in bad shape,” Dexter told Howlie. “Are we mice or are we rats? It’s time we did something. Something mean and tough. We’ve got to prove ourselves. We’ve got to show we’re the kind of people other people don’t fool around with.”
“Especially Bulldog Calhoun.”
“That oversized rat,” Dexter growled. “Is it true that he chased you up a tree one time and said he would kill you with a stick if you came down and kept you there all day until you started crying?”
Howlie shot a horrified glance at his friend.
“Who told you that?”
Dexter shrugged. “Just heard it somewhere, I guess.”
“Well, it’s a lie,” Howlie said, fiercely. “Nothing like that ever happened. How could anything like that happen? It’s a dirty, rotten lie.”
“Thought so,” murmured Dexter, with his eyes turned away. “I never thought it was true.”
“It isn’t!” cried Howlie, “and that reminds me. Was that you I saw last Friday afternoon carrying a big bag of groceries out of the supermarket?”
Dexter’s whole body jerked.
“Nah,” he said. “It wasn’t me.”
Howlie shook his head. “I could’ve sworn it was you though I didn’t see why you’d be carrying groceries out to Bulldog Calhoun’s mother’s car in the parking lot …”
“I wasn’t!” Dexter broke in.
“… while Bulldog walked ahead …”
“It wasn’t me! Didn’t I just say it wasn’t?”
“… with his hands in his pockets, kind of laughing to himself.”
“He wasn’t! He was not laughing!”
“Just thought I’d check,” Howlie said. “It didn’t look that much like you anyway.”
The two fell silent again. They had reached the tree by now. They both looked up at it. Dexter sighed.
“We have got to do something fast,” he said.
Howlie nodded. The boys dropped to their knees and put their heads close together. They each picked up a twig and cleared some grass out from between the tree’s roots to make a dirt drawing board. There they plotted until dusk, glancing over their shoulders at times and straightening up to shoot defiant wads of spit at the tree’s trunk.
The farmer spied them from his window, but he didn’t go out that day to join them. Despite his blustery manner with visitors, the farmer wasn’t
a strong man anymore. He was prone, from the years of hard work he’d put into his farm, to creaks and aches, especially about the knees. That day, he sat on his living room couch with his legs propped up on the coffee table and looked out the window.
What are those boys up to? the farmer thought to himself. He might have asked the question out loud if there had been somebody in the house to answer him. Unfortunately, he lived alone. His wife had died, and his children were grown and lived with their children in distant cities.
What was it the boys reminded him of, the farmer wondered, crouched down that way, two little shadows under the monumental shadow of the Dimpole Oak, and evening coming on and the bats beginning to flicker?
They reminded him of a story. It was a story about two pirates, who buried a chest of diamonds at the foot of the tree and then murdered each other in a bloody fit of greed.
This was the kind of story two boys ought to hear, the lonely farmer thought. They ought to learn about greed. They should know about the buried diamonds. He half rose from his couch to go outside and tell them.
Just then, a red moon crested the darkening horizon. Far away, a hawk screamed. The wind outside the house seemed suddenly full of whispers. Or was this only the imagination of the old man?
It is true that his head had drooped back against
the sofa cushions and that the spurt
of a snore could be heard
from deep down in
his throat.
While the farmer slept and dreamt about old stories, another vivid imagination was homing in on the great oak from an entirely different direction.
In a cave somewhere north of Bombay, India, a wise and learned swami was just completing a series of difficult calculations.
These calculations, which had already taken two years of work, concerned holiness. In particular, the swami wanted to find out which places on earth were holiest, which places were next holy, which came next and so on down the line to the most low-down and spiritless areas. The swami planned to use this information to map out his upcoming world tour, avoiding the spiritless areas, where he never looked his best.
Great Dimpole Oak Page 1
