Great Dimpole Oak

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  The swami was a failure—oh yes! He saw it very clearly. He had meditated too long and done too little in his life. He had thought himself powerful, had prided himself on his intelligence and self-discipline. Alas! The great oak had shown him. Measured beside the tree, the swami now saw how pitiful and insignificant he was. His holiness was a drop in the bucket beside the tree’s immense lake. How brief was his life compared to the oak’s, how thin his skin, how short his root.

  “This is terrible!” the swami cried out to himself as he wound down the treacherous mountain path. “I must improve. I must change.”

  By the time he had reached the Bombay city limits he was gritting his teeth and pounding his turban in anguish. Just then he caught sight of his loyal followers, a dirty band loping behind him in dogged silence. The swami shook his fist at them. Why were they always at his heels?

  “Away! Go away!” he cried. “I cannot be your leader anymore.”

  The band would not be driven off. With maddening stillness it kept pace.

  “Be gone!” called the swami. “I am no longer what I was. I must begin again. I must work. You must all return to your homes.”

  But the followers did not go. If they had once had homes, they seemed now to have forgotten the way back. When the swami turned and glared at them, they shuffled their feet and pretended to examine their long, ragged fingernails.

  What a sight they made, slouching about in smoky rabbit hides, moss dangling from their eyebrows, vegetable juice on their chins. The swami was disgusted by them. He felt ashamed to be seen with such a band. The swami looked back at the hills down which they had walked and wondered how he had managed not to notice it before. His loyal followers were a wreck. All their outdoor living had taken a toll. While the swami’s spirit had soared and purified itself on high, his followers had starved, frozen, thirsted and broiled down below. Their skins had dried up, their stomachs had caved in, and now—look at them!

  The swami shook his head slowly at the thirty ravaged faces that watched him with uncomplaining misery. Uncomplaining, yes. The swami’s expression softened.

  “Come,” he murmured to them. He opened his arms and gestured for them to come near him. The followers cowered like whipped dogs.

  “Come closer,” the swami said, kindly. “I have good news. We are all going to a shop to buy new clothes.”

  The whipped dogs eyed him unbelievingly.

  “Then we will all go to my apartment in Bombay, to take showers and cut our nails and snip the moss from our hair.”

  Apartment in Bombay? The dogs had never heard of such a thing. They glanced in alarm at their hands.

  “After that,” the swami went on, patting the shoulder of the nearest follower, “we are all going out to dinner at a very expensive restaurant to fortify ourselves for the trip ahead. We will order anything on the menu that we want: mango ice cream, tandoori shrimp, even chicken livers with red-hot spices.”

  At the mention of this last, the swami’s loyal followers surged a bit and licked their lips hungrily. They could not quite remember what an expensive restaurant was, but were prepared as usual to follow the swami’s lead.

  “And after that we will get in an airplane!” cried the swami, leaping down the street, completely carried away by his own generosity. Clearly, he was beginning to change and improve already. “And we will fly first class, nonstop, to the United States, to find this most wonderful tree. My oak tree, the one I discovered.”

  The loyal followers nodded eagerly.

  “It is a tree of the most amazing power,” the swami explained, dabbing at his eyes with a banyan leaf. Suddenly, he was overcome by emotion. “Greater than my power by a thousand times, oh yes.”

  He blew his nose loudly into the leaf. His followers hung their heads.

  “And why,” the swami went on, sniffling, “why this tree should have chosen to grow so far away from us, in a foreign country, among strangers who cannot see its meaning, I do not know. Life is mysterious indeed. Do you suppose it was to test us?”

  The followers muttered a group answer that could have been either yes or no.

  “Come along then,” the swami said, for he had spied a

  handsome-looking clothing store just opening for the day’s

  business across the street. The followers crossed

  behind him and entered the shop in a

  shy cluster that reeked of

  goats and outdoor

  cooking.

  It was 9:15 in the morning when the swami approached a salesman and began to order new sandals and clothing for himself and his followers.

  At the same moment in Dimpole, it was quite late at night, and people who were still awake were switching on the 11 o’clock news or whistling their dogs in from outside. This is because ten hours always separate Dimpole and Bombay on the clock, with Bombay coming in front.

  In Dimpole, those bloodthirsty schemers Dexter Drake and Howlie Howlenburg had long since gone to sleep in their beds. (“How angelic! How dear!” murmured their mothers, looking in on them with gentle smiles.)

  Seated at her dressing table, Mrs. Trawley was rolling her hair onto foam rubber curlers and eating jelly beans out of her bathrobe pocket.

  “Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,” Mrs. Trawley recited to herself between munches. “Conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that (munch, munch).”

  Mrs. Trawley was nervous about the speech she was scheduled to give on Great Dimpole Oak Day. What should she say? There is nothing like a quick run-through of the Gettysburg Address to start the juices flowing, she thought, as she reached for another jelly bean.

  Mr. Glover and Miss Hand were in bed reading mystery stories. (Not in the same bed, or in the same house.) They both loved mystery stories, and always read them before going to sleep. Neither knew of the other’s habit, however. Reading in bed is not usually a subject you can discuss with someone until you know him a little better than over a post office counter.

  The farmer stood stiffly at his living room window, which was open a crack. Away in the field, the oak waved its branches in an evening breeze. The farmer could not actually see the tree because it was engulfed by night. But he knew it was there, waving at him.

  The farmer had lived on the farm for so long that he no longer needed to see its parts. He could just as easily cross one of his fields in his mind as on foot. He could open the barn door, go inside, look around, smell the fresh hay, listen to the swallows nesting under the eaves, all as if it were really happenings—only it would be happening in the barn of his head instead of out in the real barn.

  The farmer gazed out the dark window with an amused look on his face. How convenient it was to walk around this way, he thought. For a person with bad knees, it was the best way to travel. Darkness could not stop him. Neither could bad weather. He could go wherever he wanted, leaving whenever he wished.

  Tromp, tromp, tromp. The farmer walked out under the oak tree and stood there listening. What did he hear?

  Memories, of course. The farmer heard flocks of memories rustling overhead, just as if they were real birds stopping by on their trip south for the winter. Like the real birds, the memories flashed bright and cocky before his eyes, then flew back to perches above him in the oak.

  Flash: There was his wife, Ellen, working in the garden up the hill. He saw the familiar blue of the kerchief she always wore over her hair.

  “Hello!” she cried down to him, and waved. “These flowers are in a terrible state. All weeds and vines!”

  Flash: He saw himself as a strong, hardworking young farmer in overalls, coming out the back door early in the morning, rolling up his sleeves. He closed the back door softly because the children were still asleep inside. There was a whole list of things he had to do but he took time to close the door, quiet as a mouse.

  Flash: The farmer saw himself again, as a boy this time, blond, skinny, with a fancy new birthday jackknife s
lung from his belt. He walked around the old oak with it, tough and grown-up. He took the knife off his belt and carved his name in the tree. Just three letters, “Bob,” but he managed to give his hand a good slice. He ran back to the house spouting blood.

  “He’s too young for that knife,” his mother said. “See what happened?”

  His father said: “Yes, but he’ll learn.”

  Well, he certainly had learned. At the living room window, the farmer drew a wrinkled, white handkerchief from his back pocket. He blew his nose and wiped his eyes. The knife was long lost, but the memory of himself on his tenth birthday all those years ago touched his deepest feelings. He was too young then: now he was too old.

  In the darkness outside the window, the oak moved its branches in a breeze. When the farmer heard the familiar rustling sound his eyes filled with tears a second time—he could not think why—and he had to blow his nose all over again and dab at himself like a sentimental old lady.

  To pull himself together—Who would have thought that a man nearly eighty years old could be swept by such currents?—the farmer did a small mathematical calculation on his fingers. He counted, and reckoned that there were five days left before his birthday.

  “Five days!” he muttered. “Until October 25th … Next Saturday,” he added, to clear it up in his mind.

  By now it was midnight, but the farmer suddenly decided that he must write a letter to his grandchildren. He sat at his desk, took a sheet of paper from a drawer, and began. His handwriting had become so shaky lately that he hardly recognized it himself.

  In the letter, the farmer did not mention his upcoming birthday. He wrote about the birds migrating south for the winter, about the brilliant red of the oak’s leaves. (Like a setting sun, he said.)

  He wrote to his grandchildren about the two small boys he had seen under the oak, and how they reminded him of himself when he was a boy. Then he signed off abruptly: Love from your Grandpa, with a rather worse scrawl than usual.

  The farmer put the letter in an envelope and, in spite of the late hour, he carried it out to the mailbox at the end of his driveway. Afterwards, he walked slowly back to the house and went upstairs to bed.

  Would his grandchildren remember a birthday they had often forgotten in the past, a birthday that the farmer was too shy to remind them of? Would they come from the city to give him a party? Would they jump suddenly through the front door with balloons and presents and an eighty-candle birthday cake?

  A surprise party! The farmer’s eyes lit up when he thought of it. Of course! he thought, as he brushed his old yellow teeth. That was why his grandchildren had not called or written to him recently. They were pretending to ignore him. They were pretending to forget all about him so that he would be doubly surprised on his birthday.

  “How clever. A surprise party,” the farmer murmured happily. He sat on the bed in his pajamas and pulled his stiff legs one by one off the floor.

  When he had laid them straight, he covered them with blankets and lay back himself.’

  3

  THE FARMER WAS NOT the only one counting on his fingers during the week before Saturday, October 25th. Down at the post office, Mrs. Trawley counted up to three on the little sausages of her left hand. She shook the hand under Mr. Glover’s nose.

  “Have you bought the paper cups yet?” she demanded. “Have you ordered the hot dogs? Where are the balloons? Do you realize that Great Dimpole Oak Day will be here in three days? Three days!” Mrs. Trawley cried. “And where are the screws for the brass plaque?”

  Mr. Glover glared at her. He had the screws in his pocket but decided not to tell. He did not appreciate being spoken to like a whipped dog.

  Mrs. Trawley hardly noticed. She did not expect answers to any of the questions she had just asked. Mr. Glover was a spindly sparrow of a person. He had no sense of how to order people around and get things done. Why, if it had been left to him, the Dimpole Oak would most likely have been sold as a hamburger stand by now, while the farmer cruised the Mediterranean on his ill-gotten gains.

  Luckily, Mrs. Trawley had stepped in to save the day. She had organized everyone in town, as usual. It was no use hiding from her, as Mr. Higgins, owner and manager of H. Higgins’ Dimpole Grocery, had discovered.

  “Harold Higgins! You come up out of that apple cellar this minute!” Mrs. Trawley had called from the top of the store’s cellar stairs. Below her, all was dark and silent.

  “I know you’re down there. I know you don’t want to see me. But here I am and I need free napkins and free soda for my rally at the oak tree on Saturday. If you can’t come up and hand them over like a man, I’m sure your wife would like to know where you were instead of fishing a week ago last Wednesday night …”

  “Harry Higgins has kindly offered us twenty cases of cola, twenty cases of orange soda, and ice,” Mrs. Trawley told Mr. Glover now, in the post office. “He has said he will deliver them personally to the tree on Saturday morning. Now there is a man of action.”

  “Hah!” said Mr. Glover.

  “Hah yourself.”

  Mrs. Trawley certainly did not have time to stand around talking to useless post office clerks. She had a hundred details to attend to. For one thing, the bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln asleep had proved too difficult to arrange on such short notice. She had been forced back upon the memorial plaque, and there were all sorts of problems with it, as there always are with plaques.

  “Of course you don’t know anything about plaques,” Mrs. Trawley told Mr. Glover crossly. She sailed out of the post office, calling back over her shoulder:

  “Did you hear? We are planning a march. We will march on the tree carrying signs and flags at 9 a.m. on Saturday. That will show the old farmer how the town of Dimpole feels. Everybody is coming!”

  A march! Mr. Glover snorted. In the back room, he gave the broken xerox machine a nasty kick and watched with satisfaction as its second green eye quivered and went dead.

  What was it about the xerox machine that reminded Mr. Glover of Mrs. Trawley? There was a resemblance, no doubt about it. The gaping mouth, perhaps? A few shreds of red leaflet still hung from the machine’s slot, looking rather like strands of spaghetti. Was Mrs. Trawley fond of eating spaghetti? Somehow, Mr. Glover suspected she was. Now that he thought about it, he could imagine her gobbling huge plates of spaghetti and dangling the noodles messily down her chin.

  Mr. Glover gave the xerox machine another kick.

  “A monster of a woman,” he was muttering, “a perfect gobbler of a …”—when he heard the front door of the post office open. He peeked around the corner to see who had come in.

  “Miss Hand!”

  “Mr. Glover. Hello.”

  “Well … Well … I … this is a surprise,” stammered Mr. Glover.

  “I’ve come to buy stamps,” Miss Hand replied with lowered eyes. “I found I was all out of stamps last night and I thought …”

  She began to rummage in her purse. She was wearing a dress of the most delicious pink. Mr. Glover moved up behind the counter and looked on.

  “And I thought,” Miss Hand continued, groping more frantically, “I thought to myself: ‘I simply must buy stamps. Bright and early tomorrow morning. Before school! Stamps cannot wait.’”

  A noise that sounded like a large pile of gravel shifting position came from inside the purse. Mr. Glover leaned forward over the counter. What did women carry in their purses? he wondered. It was an ongoing mystery, for he had always been too shy to ask.

  “Stamps will not wait!” said Miss Hand, burrowing deeper, “but must be bought without delay as soon as can be. One cannot go on long without stamps.”

  With a final lunge into the purse she came up with a brown leather wallet.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Mr. Glover, stepping back.

  Miss Hand looked up at him from under her long lashes.

  “I always know it’s hiding in there somewhere,” she said.

  Mr. Glover did not know what to say to th
is. He looked away in confusion and began to take out sheets of stamps from a drawer.

  “Do you have the stamps with the seashells on them?” Miss Hand asked, leaning over the counter to look for herself. A rush of lavender scent came with her. Mr. Glover felt thoroughly light-headed.

  “Oh! You have a new one,” Miss Hand said. “Calico Scallop. I already have the New England Neptune and the Lightning Whelk at home: I have heard there is a beauty called ‘Reticulated Helmet.’ Have you heard of it by any chance?”

  Mr. Glover had not only heard of it, he happened to have this very stamp not two feet away in a drawer. Miss Hand was very impressed. She had been a little afraid of Mr. Glover in the past, and had decided to visit the post office this morning only after much soul-searching. He had seemed so snappish at times. But today—Miss Hand smiled in his direction—today he was positively charming. And despite Mrs. Trawley’s warning, he appeared extremely well-organized, even if he wasn’t a leader of men. Miss Hand was not sure she would have gotten on very well with a full-fledged leader of men anyway. She disliked being told to do things.

  “I read a mystery story once about a woman who collected seashells and kept them in a special room on long racks of sand,” she told Mr. Glover to keep the conversation going. “But it was a cover-up, of course. Buried under the shells were the bodies of all her dead husbands. The police found them at the end in a most gruesome chapter.”

  Mr. Glover did not seem at all disturbed by this scenario.

  “Oh! Do you read mysteries?” he asked. “They’re my favorite kind of book.”

  From here, the conversation might have taken off with lightning speed but for Miss Hand’s discovery that she was already five minutes late for her class. The children would be standing on their heads in the hall by the time she arrived. She hurried out of the post office to her car.

  “See you on Saturday,” Mr. Glover called after her.