Great Dimpole Oak

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “Saturday?”

  “It’s Great Dimpole Oak Day, remember?”

  “Oh, dear. So it is. And I have promised Mrs. Trawley to come up with a Special Entertainment. It’s far too late now to think of anything. What shall I do?” Miss Hand got into her car and slammed the door hard after herself.

  “Don’t worry about that woman,” Mr. Glover called to her over the roar of the motor. “She is a menace to society. But … would you consider marching to the tree with me on Saturday morning?”

  “What? What? Marching to the sea?” Miss Hand shouted back, cupping her ear. Her old sedan was making a terrible racket.

  “To the tree!” yelled Mr. Glover. “Marching … to … the … tree!”

  Miss Hand was still not sure she had heard correctly, but she felt embarrassed to go on shouting. She smiled and waved and accelerated quickly out of the post office parking lot.

  “Marching to the sea?” she murmured to herself. An

  image of lemmings galloping insanely toward

  the edge of a sandy cliff rose before her.

  But that, certainly, was not what

  nice Mr. Glover had

  meant …

  Dexter Drake and Howlie Howlenburg did not have Miss Hand as their teacher. Miss Hand taught the second grade at Dimpole School. Dexter and Howlie were in the fifth grade, and their teacher was not the sort of woman to dazzle the eye of a man like Mr. Glover. She was a powerfully built person named Miss Matterhorn who never wore perfume and was never late to class.

  Even as Mr. Glover slid back (with thumping heart) behind his counter in the post office, Dexter and Howlie were hard at work on a sheet of math problems. By the time Miss Hand arrived to take charge of her second graders, the boys had moved on to the worse misery of vocabulary notebooks.

  From her desk at the back of the room, Miss Matterhorn kept watch, tapping her pencil on the blotter at intervals. She had heard rumors that her students didn’t like her. But why? She was such a nice person. From the back of the room, Miss Matterhorn had been trying to detect the answer for years. Unfortunately, her eyesight was terrible.

  Howlie: Dexter wrote in the note he dropped on Howlie’s desk when he got up to sharpen his pencil—What do you think we should tell Bulldog Calhoun to make him come to the oak tree at dawn this Saturday?

  When Howlie got up to fetch more scratch paper, he dropped an answer. Dexter: Why does it have to be dawn? Bulldog will never come then. He hates getting up in the morning.

  Dexter asked for permission to go to the bathroom. On the way to the door, he pitched a pencil onto Howlie’s desk. There was a note wrapped around it. It said:

  Howlie: Dawn is when the pirates in the farmer’s story fought each other to death. It’s the best time to fight. Everybody always fights at dawn.

  When Dexter came past Howlie’s desk on the way back from the bathroom, Howlie handed him a ballpoint pen. Inside, there was a rolled-up message.

  Dexter: How about telling Bulldog that we’ve found the buried diamonds from the farmer’s story? Bulldog loves money. He might believe it. Anyway, people do find old treasure sometimes.

  This note stirred Dexter to a new level of interest.

  Holy cow! Do you think there really could be a chest of diamonds? he wrote back. Has anyone ever tried digging around the tree? Feeling the press of time, Dexter shot this note to Howlie by glider.

  Not that I know of. (Howlie, also by glider.)

  Maybe the farmer’s story is true!!! (Dexter, glider.)

  Probably not. (Howlie, return flight.)

  But this could be one of the strange ones that …

  Here, Miss Matterhorn suddenly appeared at Dexter’s elbow, dropped a large muscular hand on the note that he was writing and swept it up in front of her nose.

  “This-could-be-one-of-the-strange-ones-that,” read Miss Matterhorn out loud to the class. She peered down at Dexter.

  “What strange ones?” she asked with an air of innocence. “To what strange ones does this note refer?”

  Dexter turned a shade paler than usual. “To no ones,” he answered weakly. “I mean, to no one. It doesn’t refer to people.”

  “Not to people, no. But to teachers?” Miss Matterhorn’s eyes flashed. “You see, I have caught your meaning, Mr. Drake, crafty as you have tried to be. Teachers are not people, are they? They are members of a subhuman animal species that gathers in herds on the school grounds every morning at eight o’clock. Is that correct?”

  “Oh, no,” whimpered Dexter, for he could see that Miss Matterhorn was going into one of her famous wild fits.

  “From there, they gallop to the teachers’ lounge, bury their snouts in troughs of coffee and crow insanely at each other,” Miss Matterhorn went on, mixing her animals up so badly that the picture in Dexter’s mind was of some horrible intergalactic creature.

  Miss Matterhorn tapped her pencil three times on Dexter’s desk while the whole class swallowed hard.

  “And then!” she cried. “And then, the herd separates and trots off, each to its appointed stall—or classroom, so called—where it spends the day bleating and bahing and making a fuss. Am I right, Mr. Drake? Are these the sort of strange ones you had in mind?”

  Miss Matterhorn seemed now to have settled on goats. Actually, she did look a little like a drawing of the biggest Billy Goat Gruff which Dexter remembered from a book in his childhood. He glanced up at her anxiously and then over at his friend. Howlie had slumped far down under his desk and was obviously in no position to send aid.

  “Mr. Drake, you are in disgrace!”

  “But Miss Matterhorn …”

  “You will now go to the hall and stand there for ten minutes while you think over the nature of your disgrace.”

  “But Miss Matterhorn …”

  “And you will think also about the true nature of teachers, who are human after all …” Miss Matterhorn took a tissue from the sleeve of her sweater. “Very human, indeed, and have feelings which are easily hurt,” she concluded in a quivery voice.

  She walked back to her desk while Dexter went red-faced to the hall. Meanwhile, the class examined its fingernails.

  Everyone was rather shocked by Miss Matterhorn’s confession about being human. It took something away from her that no one had expected ever to be taken away. Certain braver students looked cautiously over their shoulders toward the back of the room. They were afraid Miss Matterhorn might be weeping.

  Luckily, she had put her tissue back up her sleeve and seemed to have control of herself.

  Of course, there was no question in anyone’s mind after this that Miss Matterhorn really was one of the “strange ones.” Dexter’s note had described her perfectly, even if it had been about something else. In fact, Miss M. was not only strange but positively unhealthy and she should be taken to a hospital as soon as possible before it was too late. Everyone said so.

  Everyone, that is, but Dexter. He did not say these things or hear them said. He was brooding, as if on some great disaster. Gone were his swagger and his theatrical air. The incident with Miss Matterhorn throbbed in his head, not only that day but on through the night. And when, the following morning, Howlie took him off to a corner of the schoolyard to talk, he saw his friend slink across the dirt like a beaten dog. Dexter looked exhausted. He seemed on the verge of tears.

  “This is terrible. Terrible,” he muttered. “To be caught passing notes by a blind woman. And then to get sent to the hall!” He glanced at Howlie in agony. “I almost died out there, do you know that? Whenever anyone walked by, I almost died.”

  “Don’t take it so hard,” said Howlie. “It happens to everyone at least once. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Yes it does. It means something,” Dexter said. “It means I’ve sunk lower than ever. I’m not only a mouse, I’m a stupid mouse. And every person in this school knows it.”

  “No they don’t,” Howlie said. “They aren’t talking about you. Miss Matterhorn’s the one they’re talkin
g about.”

  Dexter paid no attention. He was caught up in his own view of things.

  “I’ve been thinking of what to do,” he told Howlie. “Our plan for getting Bulldog Calhoun looks pretty dumb all of a sudden.”

  “Dumb!” exclaimed Howlie. “But I’ve got everything ready—the blood, the knives. Besides, I talked to Bulldog after school yesterday. He said he might come. He said: See you on Saturday you little creep. It sounded as if he’d be there.”

  “Well, tell him to forget it,” Dexter said. “We aren’t doing that plan anymore.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve decided not to do it. I’ve got a better idea.”

  “You’ve decided!” said Howlie. “What about me? Dexter, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Listen, we’ve got to improve our image, right? So relax and let me handle this,” Dexter said in a queer, tight voice. “I’m the idea man around here and the idea I have is this: We’ll go for the diamonds. We’ll con the farmer into letting us dig under the tree. We might even be able to squeeze him for some clues to where the chest is hidden.”

  “Squeeze him!” cried Howlie. “Come on. The farmer isn’t somebody you should squeeze.”

  “Because diamonds are big business,” Dexter went on. “When we find them, everybody in town will be impressed, not just Bulldog Calhoun. Also, we’ll be rich.”

  “Wait a minute. The farmer will be rich, not us. If the diamonds are there, they’re on his land.”

  “Howlie, don’t be such a wimp. Think what Bulldog would do if he found the treasure. He’d keep some of the diamonds for himself, right? The farmer would never know.”

  “But that’s stealing!”

  “So what?”

  Howlie stared at his friend. Dexter had played a lot of parts over the years, but he’d never acted like this before. “Are you feeling okay?” Howlie asked him. “I don’t get it. Why are you being such a rat all of a sudden?”

  Dexter narrowed his eyes in a way that made him appear even more rat-like.

  “Because I am one,” he said. “It’s about time, too. And now that I think about it, I don’t need you along on this. So I guess we might as well split up.”

  “I guess so,” Howlie said angrily.

  “And don’t tell anyone what I’m doing,” Dexter said.

  “You think I’d tell?”

  “And don’t come around asking me for a share in the treasure after I’ve found it.”

  “Dexter! What happened to you out in the hall? You’ve gone crazy.”

  Dexter turned his back and walked

  away across the playground.

  The swami appeared calm and reasonable as he ordered new clothes for his troops. He was neither. Beneath his cool facade he was a boiling cauldron. Close observers might have noticed the beads of sweat steaming on his forehead, the rattling of his bony hands. While his loyal followers galloped into the shop’s fitting room and harassed the salesman for correct sizes, the swami edged out a back door to stand on his head in an alley. Despite the swami’s great intelligence, he was a human being like any other and not always in control of himself.

  The truth was, the swami was obsessed by the magnificent oak tree. He could think of nothing else. Like a fiery beacon on a black night it drew him. Or rather, it gripped his imagination like a large, leafy hand and dragged it, twitching, across oceans and continents.

  The swami was not pleased to find himself in the position of being dragged. He had believed himself above and beyond such things. What a mistake! Before the oak he had become as helpless as a child in the grip of a powerful mother.

  “Non-stop. Non-stop. We must fly non-stop,” his followers heard him murmuring under his breath. Some mistook his words for a new prayer or mantra, and began to mumble along with him.

  “Non-stop. Non-stop. We must fly non-stop,” hummed the swami’s troops as they followed their leader on board the airplane at Bombay airport. The followers settled their small, wiry bodies in the plane’s seats and tried to sit still. A stewardess came by to help them with their seat belts.

  “Stop wiggling!” she ordered. “How can I connect your belts when you are slithering around and humming that way.”

  As it turned out, the flight was not non-stop. The airplane was forced to land in Paris to correct a small malfunction. It was nothing to worry about, the passengers were informed: only a few hours’ wait at most. Anyone who wished to disembark should do so quickly.

  Paris? Memories rustled in the swami’s head. How many years had passed since he had last been in that city? He recalled a rainy spring during his student days. Or was it a rainy autumn? He remembered a stroll along the banks of the Seine with a certain person. Fi Fi was her name. Or was that a French poodle he’d known? The swami sighed. The past is such a slippery animal. One can never quite get one’s hands around it.

  Of course, the swami had no intention of visiting Paris again. He was fixed on his tree. Besides, there were the goats and peacocks to consider. The loyal followers had insisted on bringing every last one of them. They had been packed into the plane’s pressurized baggage compartment and could not be easily moved.

  Nevertheless, Paris! There is a certain charm, a certain air about it, no? Glamorous shops, glittering women, perfume adrift on the Champs-Élysées, enfin. Who can resist such a tempting place?

  Suddenly, the swami could not. He rose from his seat and herded his followers, now dressed to the teeth in high Indian fashion, off the plane, through the airline terminal, toward “les taxis.”

  “Just a quick trip to town,” he assured his followers. “You must see the Eiffel Tower. Can’t we leave those goats behind? Just a fast trot through the Arch of Triumph. It has been years since I was last in Paris! Must we have those peacocks bunching and scratching up the floor?”

  The swami did not expect to spend more than an hour or two in Paris. He expected to be back in his seat aboard the airplane, sipping Indian tea, long before take-off.

  However, the Arch of Triumph proved to be an enormous success among the followers. Looking up at it, their eyes bulged slightly, then flattened with wonder and fear. The arch seemed as big as a mountain to them, and was carved all over with terrible scenes of war and death.

  “Napoleon,” the followers whispered among themselves. “Who is this great swami Napoleon, builder of such a mountain?”

  They ran their eyes hungrily over the names, carved in stone, of the battles he had won. They knelt at the tomb of the unknown soldier. They wandered under the arch in twos and threes, feeling deliciously small and insignificant. The swami could not drag them away. He seemed to have lost his power to control them.

  “We want Napoleon! We want Napoleon!” the followers chanted in quiet but insistent voices.

  “But he has been dead for over one hundred and fifty years!” cried the swami. “It is only his arch that remains. Come. We must leave now if we are to make our plane.”

  Dead! And for so long! The followers were crestfallen. They peered around corners of the arch, as if they expected the great general to appear anyway. They wept together in small, damp knots of arms. It is not often one comes across a leader of such immense power and charm as Napoleon the First of France. Oh, to be the follower of such a leader! By comparison, the swami—well, ahem. The followers glanced at him over their shoulders and remarked to each other how the long trip had certainly worn him down. He seemed smaller, suddenly, and grayer, and—dare they mention it?—he had been acting oddly over an oak tree in recent days. Should they call in a doctor to examine him?

  “Oh, Napoleon. Give us a sign,” prayed the loyal followers.

  At last, only the promise of ice cream and pastries persuaded them to leave the arch. They allowed themselves to be taken to a sidewalk café where they ordered glacé chocolate and éclairs and large cups of ice water. These they shared, when the waiter wasn’t looking, with the goats and peacocks, whom they kept hidden beneath the starched white cloths on the tables.

&
nbsp; By now, it was nearing sundown and the swami, hearing the church bells of Paris begin to chime, realized that they had missed their plane. Ah, well. It happens to the best of us. “C’est la vie,” the swami mused philosophically.

  “And,” he added under his breath, “what a relief to be rid of that tyrant oak tree.”

  There is no doubt that he had already drifted under the spell of Paris. Even as he watched, the gay lights of the city began to come on up and down the Champs-Elysées. The flying buttresses of Notre Dame were illuminated.

  The swami leaned back carelessly in his chair at the café. Though he was not a smoker, he lit the end of a thin cigar and blew a series of elegant smoke rings. He bought a newspaper, though his French was poor, and tried to read the headlines. He ogled passing women. He ordered wine. And more wine.

  The swami was enjoying himself more than he had in years, toasting the health of French poodles and cracking jokes. Soon he had his followers in stitches of laughter. Helplessly, they rolled on the floor under the starched white table cloths, where they became entangled with the goats and peacocks.

  Feathers clogged the air. Fleece flew. The followers could not stop laughing, especially after the swami did an ingenious imitation of the airline stewardess who had attended them on their flight from Bombay. Ha, ha, ha! Admittedly, her skirt had been a trifle tight. Hee, hee, hee!

  “Pardon, Monsieur.”

  Oh, dear. It was the manager of the café.

  “Monsieur, je regret …”

  Oh my. They had made quite a mess, they saw, when they looked about. How had all those wine glasses smashed on the floor?

  The followers stumbled to their feet. They were escorted to the sidewalk while the swami was forced to settle the bill, which seemed ridiculously high. The manager was speaking French like a machine gun. The waiter was yelling and pointing under the tables where the goats had left an unsightly sprinkling of pellets. The swami’s face burned with embarrassment. How could he have made such a fool of himself?

  “We must find a good hotel for the night,” he told his loyal followers crossly when he joined them on the sidewalk. “No more trouble.”