Great Dimpole Oak

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  Miss Hand sat motionless on her living room couch absorbed in these dreadful thoughts. Even when her own telephone began to ring, she did not at first hear it. And finally, when she did hear—oh horrors! She looked around the room with new fear in her eyes. Could the caller be Mrs. Trawley checking to see that the Special Entertainment was in order? Oh, yes! She was sure it was Mrs. Trawley. She positively knew it.

  “H-h-h-hello?” said Miss Hand cringingly into the receiver.

  “Shirley, this is me, Mrs. Trawley. I’m calling to make sure your Special Entertainment for the rally tomorrow is in order. Perhaps we could meet this evening so that you can go over the details with me?”

  Strange as it may seem, these words were imaginary. No one ever said them. Miss Hand believed she heard Mrs. Trawley saying them, but she was mistaken. Her frantic mind had jumped its track. She heard what she expected to hear or, perhaps, what she thought she deserved to hear. The caller was not Mrs. Trawley. It was Mr. Glover. This is what was really said:

  “Shirley? It’s me, Harvey. I’m calling to make sure you can march with me to the rally tomorrow. But, perhaps we could meet this evening also? Would you care to go for a walk in the country with me?”

  “Shirley? Shirley! It’s Harvey Glover. I am not Mrs. Trawley!” Mr. Glover shouted into the telephone. “Shirley? Are you all right? I am not calling about Special Entertainments. Stop raving and pull yourself together.”

  Several minutes passed before Miss Hand could do this.

  Afterwards, she was delighted to accept Mr. Glover’s

  invitation to walk. Would he mind having

  the cat along, too? she asked.

  It badly needed to get

  out of the house.

  Meanwhile, in a hayfield just outside of town, the figure of a boy digging furiously under a tree was visible to motorists passing in the road.

  What was the kid up to? several drivers asked themselves. Was he looking for arrowheads? Burying his dead dog? Making a swimming hole? There were any number of possibilities.

  Unaware that he was being examined, Dexter Drake spit on the palms of his hands and frowned. He knew the pirates’ diamonds were close by. They lay just beneath the earth at the bottom of the Dimpole Oak, between its big, plunging roots. Some people, it is said, have an extra sense. They don’t have to hear or see or smell a thing to know it is there. Dexter thought he must have an extra sense, not in all cases but in the special case of this treasure. The diamonds were sending him messages:

  “Dig here, immediately!”

  “Over here is where we are!”

  “Look at me! Look at me,” they called in voices that would have sounded bright and sharp if they had been audible through the normal human sense of hearing. Dexter heard them with his extra sense—he couldn’t have explained how—and he attacked the ground fiercely. Though the day was cool and blowy, he began to sweat, partly because the digging was hard work, partly from excitement. He expected with every shovelful of dirt to see the treasure appear.

  Perhaps the diamonds were upset by their approaching rescue. They were sending out garbled messages, it seemed. Dexter dug here and there about the tree, always careful to avoid its tender roots as the farmer had requested. But he found nothing during the first hour.

  Was he digging deep enough? he wondered. He took off his jacket and set about widening and deepening the holes. Still, as the afternoon wore on, he turned up only an old-fashioned jackknife, rusted shut. It was far too small to have been responsible for any of the oak tree murders, Dexter saw with disappointment. There was a word or a few letters etched into the metal on one side. He couldn’t make them out under the grime.

  Howlie would be interested in this knife, Dexter thought. He would know how to soak it and clean it with special fluids. He could probably make it work again. Dexter turned his head and looked down the long field where the oak grew. He looked across the next field and the next to a distant clump of trees which he knew to be the shade trees protecting Howlie’s house. Nothing was moving there.

  After a while, Dexter began to dig again. The farmer came out and hobbled downhill to watch.

  “Good work. Keep it up,” he said, peering cheerfully at the excavation. But he didn’t look well and left soon after.

  By sunset, Dexter was tired and growing impatient. The area around the oak tree was pockmarked with holes, and large, untidy piles of dirt lay everywhere. Besides this, the voices of the diamonds had become thin and pale as whispers. Dexter’s extra sense could not always tell from which direction they came. It was not the fault of his extra sense.

  “The diamonds are playing with me,” he murmured.

  He began to suspect them of trickery, of calling out to him like frightened children and then hiding mischievously when he came to find them. In the most maddening way, the diamonds seemed to move right out from under his shovel. He was always left a little behind, running from one hole to the next, with an idea that the diamonds were there just ahead of him, just ahead.

  Then evening fell and the voices of the diamonds disappeared altogether. A wind blew through the branches of the Dimpole Oak. It caused the remaining leaves to flutter mournfully. A few leaves chose this dark moment to drop off. They swirled down and surprised Dexter. He had never thought about leaves dropping off trees at night. And yet, they must do it all the time, he knew. Leaves must fall in the dark every night, sailing down to the black ground by themselves, with no one to see them go.

  Dexter shivered. He began to feel abandoned. He continued to dig for a while, but he knew the diamonds had gone away. He would never find them now.

  Oh, those diamonds! When Dexter thought about them he grew hot. His chest ached. He wanted to dig them up. He wished to hold them in his hands.

  Suddenly, with the same ache, Dexter wanted Howlie. He missed him terribly. Howlie always made him feel so pleased with himself. He cheered him up in gloomy times and toned him down when his ideas got too wild. And he was reliable. He was always there, keeping Dexter going.

  Not anymore. Dexter had driven him away.

  “I’ve been acting like a creep. What will I do now?” Dexter said, muttering to himself, as he looked off into the darkness.

  He was becoming a little frightened. Why had he stayed so late? The wind was coming up and the oak tree was making eerie noises. It moaned and whined in a way that Dexter had never heard before. It flailed its branches and twisted itself around like an enormous octopus, as if it were angry at Dexter for some reason. And, in between the gusts of wind … what was that? Dexter thought he heard voices. Not diamond voices, human ones.

  “Who is it? Who’s there?” Dexter shouted into the dark. The angry tree was thrashing overhead.

  “I can hear you!” cried Dexter. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  There was no answer: only a great creak came from the oak’s trunk. Then out of the blackness two long shapes rose up.

  Dexter stood still, frozen with terror.

  But when the shapes approached, they turned out to be nothing more than Miss Hand from the Dimpole School second grade and Mr. Glover from the post office. Dexter knew them both and they knew him.

  “Oh!” gasped Miss Hand. “It’s only Dexter Drake. Thank goodness!” She was holding on tightly to Mr. Glover. Her face appeared pale in the darkness.

  “We thought you were a ghost,” she said, laughing.

  “We thought you were a murderer disposing of the body,” Mr. Glover chimed in. He put his arm around Miss Hand, then looked at it with a frown, as if it had gotten away from him and done something unexpected.

  “We thought all sorts of things,” said Miss Hand, snuggling against the arm, “but what we really thought was that you were the farmer.”

  “The farmer!” Dexter said in surprise. Now that he was over his first fright, the scene seemed unreal to him: the unlikely pair erupting out of the dark, the wind whipping the tree overhead, the talk of ghosts and murderers. He felt as if he had come into the
middle of one of the farmer’s stories.

  “We thought,” said Miss Hand, moving closer to Dexter and lowering her voice secretively, “we thought you were the evil farmer up to no good. We heard the shovel scraping in the dirt and we were afraid he would rush out and grab us.”

  “And bury us alive!” giggled Mr. Glover. He was acting a little strangely, leaning first forward, then backwards, as if he were thinking of kissing Miss Hand but at the last moment changed his mind.

  “Which farmer?” Dexter asked in amazement. “Do you mean that farmer?” He pointed up the hill to the farmer’s house. “But … he’s not evil at all. He would never jump out and grab anyone. Even if he could jump,” Dexter added, “which he can’t anymore because of his knees.”

  “His knees?” Miss Hand murmured. She was gazing into Mr. Glover’s eyes and he was gazing back at her with the same surprised frown on his face as when his arm had escaped. Neither of them paid any more attention to Dexter, and his words about the farmer passed over their heads.

  “Oh, Harvey, what a romantic place,” sighed Miss Hand. She stepped up to the windblown oak and leaned lazily against its trunk, as if she were leaning back on the feather cushions of a great sofa.

  “Oh, Shirley,” said Mr. Glover, following her to the tree and stepping in several of Dexter’s holes. “I knew you would like it here.”

  He leaned against the tree beside her. They both gazed heavenward through the thrashing branches, as if they expected to see stars up there. Actually, a storm had arrived. The wind had blown layers of clouds into the area. Drops of rain were already splashing down. Dexter put on his jacket and turned up the collar. He looked around for the pickax.

  “I could stay here forever,” Mr. Glover was telling Miss Hand, as the wind shrieked and tore at his clothes. “This has always been my favorite place. Ever since I was a boy. I used to come here to ride on that big root over there. I’d make up the most exciting stories about masked bandits and the pony express.”

  “You must tell me one,” said Miss Hand, while from overhead came the sound of wood splintering and a good-sized branch was hurled by the wind at their feet.

  Dexter found the pickax, grabbed the shovel and fled. He ran uphill to the barn where he stowed the tools, then he ran downhill past the tree. The fallen branch had made no impression on Miss Hand and Mr. Glover. They were off in another world whispering to each other and holding hands. Their hair whipped about their faces.

  “Watch out! Be careful!” Dexter tried to shout as he went by, but the rain had begun to fall harder and his voice was drowned out. He put his head down and raced blindly across the fields. He was going to Howlie’s house. He was going even though it was late and stormy, though he was wet and dirty. He had to see Howlie immediately.

  “I don’t know what got into me,” Dexter practiced saying to Howlie as he ran with the rain streaming down his face. “You were right and I was wrong.”

  Was it too late now to go back to the first plan? Dexter wondered. Howlie probably hated him by now. Overhead, lightning flashed. A terrifying roll of thunder echoed from one end of the valley to the other.

  “I went sort of crazy over the diamonds,” Dexter went on, practicing between pants. “I must’ve dug a hundred holes. I thought the diamonds were talking to me. Then Miss Hand came out of nowhere with Mr. Glover from the post office. I could swear I saw a black cat, too.”

  It sounded crazy, all right. What would Howlie say?

  Dexter ran faster. He felt as if something were

  chasing him, something big and wild and

  leafy like the oak tree. But when he

  looked over his shoulder, nothing

  was there. He turned and

  ran on through

  the dark.

  In Paris, it was four o’clock in the morning. (Seven hours always separate Paris and Dimpole on the clock, with Paris coming in front.)

  From his fancy bedroom at the Ritz Hotel, the swami was trying to tune in to the Dimpole Oak. He had been trying for several hours with no success. There was some sort of interference on the line, apparently at the oak tree end. The swami suspected this because whichever way he routed his meditations—up through South America, down through Canada, across the Bermuda Triangle and so on, at a certain point he would run into the same wildly thrashing currents. They were such powerful currents that if the swami had not known better, he would have thought the tree in the midst of a violent storm.

  But the swami did know better.

  “This is all my fault,” he moaned, as he slumped on his canopied bed. “I have angered the tree. It’s no use blaming my loyal followers, much as I would like to. I am the one who has done it. Such silly behavior. Such poor self-control.”

  The swami buried his face in a pillow when he recalled the scene in the café earlier that evening.

  “Now the oak has cut communications and left me to stew in my own soup,” the swami went on bitterly. “I can’t get through to it. It won’t receive me. But perhaps if I navigated up the Mississippi River and came eastward across the Great Lakes begging for forgiveness? I will give it one more shot.”

  It was no use. The swami’s inner eye was foiled again. Red flashes and electric zig-zags filled its screen. All sounds, smells and views of the holy tree were eclipsed.

  “Let this be a lesson to us all,” the distraught swami could not help calling out to his troops. “From now on, we will always travel non-stop.”

  “Non-stop,” droned the sleepy followers, who lay in limp heaps about the room. They had never been so tired in their lives. The evening at the café had worn them out. They hoped and prayed that the swami would go to sleep soon. Really, he was becoming impossible, they whispered among themselves, first dragging them halfway around the world on the pretext of visiting a tree, then changing his mind and leaping into the thick of Paris, then plying them with wine, then keeping them up all night worrying about himself. Napoleon would never have acted so irrationally.

  “Oh, Napoleon. Give us a sign,” the followers prayed. “We know you are there. Don’t fool around with us anymore.”

  The swami, however, was not about to go to sleep. How could he sleep at a time like this? The more he thought about the oak the more frantic he became. He was drowning and help was out of reach. He was falling with no one below to catch him.

  “Holy Master, you must not work yourself into such a lather,” the yawning followers counseled. “Lie down and rest. You will feel better in the morning.”

  “Rest?” the swami repeated in amazement. “Rest indeed!” he cried. “We have no time to rest. We must leave for America at once.”

  “Leave!” shrieked the followers.

  “Immediately. There is not a moment to lose if we are going to save ourselves. Get up. Up!” shouted the swami, poking the followers with his toes. “We will have to fly stand-by and we will probably be separated,” he predicted, pushing the grumpy peacocks to their feet.

  Since the goats were in a sound sleep, buckets of cold water were needed to rouse them. They turned their wet snouts pleadingly toward the loyal followers, but what could anyone do? The swami was in a crazed and maddened state. He babbled on about holy currents and stewed soup. There was nothing to do but allow oneself to be herded rudely into the elevator, and to pass with as much grace as possible through the lobby, under the incredulous eyes of the night desk clerk. What must he have thought with all of them in their underwear and trying to comb their beards with their fingers?

  As it turned out, the night desk clerk was an angel in disguise. He rose magnificently to the occasion. In a short time he had corralled a fleet of taxis to carry the swami’s troops to the airport. In addition, he wrote down long lists of things the loyal followers told him they had forgotten in their room: goat brushes, toothbrushes, lucky stones, prayer wheels, travel clocks, cotton socks and so on.

  “We’re sorry, but it’s not our fault,” the followers said to the night desk clerk. “Our master gave us only s
ixty seconds to pack. We didn’t even have time to get dressed properly.”

  “Pas de tout. Pas de tout.” The night desk clerk waved their apologies aside. He said he would mail everything to the States. Then he made himself useful hunting for lost shoes, smoothing the peacock’s ruffled feathers and doing a hundred other things to ease the tension of departure. Never had there been such a night desk clerk.

  “He is only what to expect from the Ritz,” the swami said smugly.

  Everyone else agreed that the man was something special. When the swami charged the night clerk’s tip on his American Express card, instead of paying him up front with hard cash, the followers hissed among themselves.

  What a small-minded and miserly thing to do after the night desk clerk’s great kindness! The loyal followers were terribly embarrassed. They gathered in a group apart from the swami and took up a collection. It didn’t amount to much, but the night desk clerk appeared genuinely pleased when they poured the change into his cupped hands.

  And then they were off, riding through the night streets of Paris, which were cold, empty, and grimly lit. These streets looked the very opposite of the gay avenues down which the group had recently walked. The swami sank low into his seat, as does a man who sees his own folly.

  The airport, when they reached it, appeared just as drab and unappetizing. Only a few hours ago it had seemed to blaze with lights, with unusual gifts and romantic activity. Now, all the restaurants and shops were closed, except for a seedy 24-hour duty-free boutique. The swami slunk past without looking.

  With their stand-by tickets in hand, the loyal followers could not resist swarming inside the boutique to examine its wares: a boar-bristle shaving brush, a battery-powered, push-button dog, magazines with unsuitable women posed on the covers.