She was pleased to see that she had finally attracted people’s attention away from Miss Hand’s high-powered zombie. Really, the man was a perfect menace. Between his ear-splitting wails and his gymnastics, he had almost obscured the whole point of the rally. Furthermore, his workers had proved to be an undisciplined band of freeloaders. Even now, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that they were occupying the popcorn stand, eating five bags for every one they sold.
Mrs. Trawley cleared her throat: ahem!
“Ladies and Gentlemen. I do not intend to bore you today with flowery language or extended metaphors on the nature of things. Let me go right to the point and say that the reason I have organized this excellent rally …”
What was that scuffle going on at the back of the audience? Mrs. Trawley glanced up but did not let it distract her.
“… the reason you are all here listening to me attentively …”
From the audience came more stirrings, and muffled voices: “Excuse us. Let us through. Pardon me. We need to get up front.” Mrs. Trawley charged ahead at full volume.
“… the reason I am standing up here singlehandedly giving this great speech is that …”
“Coming through,” said Dexter’s voice.
“Please clear the way for my good friend, the farmer. We older men need breathing space,” said the swami’s voice in its thick Indian accent.
Mrs. Trawley cleared her throat again.
“… is that … is that …”
She got no further in her speech because suddenly people were jumping up and talking at once, and calling and reaching to shake the farmer’s hand as he passed between them in his bathrobe and slippers. Everyone was pleased to see the old man. Now that he was here among them in the flesh, they forgot his crimes against the oak (whatever they were; it had never been entirely clear). They remembered the stories he had told them as children. They remembered his kind, gruff manner. But he was looking so gaunt and wrinkly. Not at all well, no, and spending time in bed. What a shame!
The farmer arrived on the podium with a thud, propelled by eager hands.
“Oh!” said Mrs. Trawley. “It’s you.”
The farmer nodded, and though she tried to back away he grasped her hand and shook it warmly.
“Thank you for everything,” he told her, while she stared at him as if he had lost his mind. “I understand you are the one who has arranged this wonderful party for me. I appreciate it deeply. As it happens, I have an announcement to make to you and everyone here. Do you mind if I step up before the microphone? My voice is not strong and my kind young bodyguards,” he glanced over at Howlie and Dexter, who blushed to be pointed out in public, “are threatening to drag me off to a hospital at any moment.”
The farmer spread his arms wide. The crowd fell instantly silent.
“My dear friends, I have had the most wonderful idea!” he began, and proceeded to announce his plan to leave the Dimpole Oak to the fine people of Dimpole, in hopes that they would care for and protect it, as he had done all his life.
“We will!” shouted several voices in the crowd.
In hopes that the children would play beneath the tree and keep its stories and memories alive with telling and listening, the farmer said.
“They will!” roared the crowd. Some of the softer-hearted members of the audience, recalling their childhood years, took handkerchiefs from their pockets and blotted their eyes.
The farmer waited for the noise and the blotting to die down, then he said, quietly, looking about at the children:
“There is one condition. It’s the rule around here and always has been that anything anybody finds lying on the ground or in the ground near the tree, well, it’s the finder’s property. And the finder can do with it as he wishes. And no one has the right to tell him otherwise. And this,” the farmer said, even more quietly, “includes pirate treasure.”
“Pirate treasure!” screamed all the children, jumping to their feet. “Is that story true?”
They raced for the foot of the tree and began to examine Dexter’s holes and to pry into other likely places, which forced the farmer to remind them sternly not to dig up the great oak’s roots.
Afterwards, he descended from the podium and was given a hero’s welcome by the people of Dimpole. Certainly, he would go down in history as the kindest and most generous man in the town. Everyone wondered how they had ever thought of him in any other way.
And Dexter and Howlie were given heroes’ welcomes by association, because the farmer had pointed them out on the podium. But after they explained, modestly, that they had rescued the farmer from a crazed electric heater, and that they were at any moment going to call the hospital if the doctor didn’t show up, then Dimpolers looked at them with even more respect.
“I hope Bulldog is here somewhere watching us,” Howlie said to Dexter as they walked through the throngs receiving congratulations.
But Dexter didn’t hear him. He had just taken a knife out of his pocket and stabbed himself in the stomach. While the children under the tree watched in horror, he reeled with a cry, grabbed desperately for Howlie’s shoulder, missed, crumpled up, fell to the ground and lay writhing in a pool of fire-engine red blood.
Howlie folded his arms across his chest and rolled his eyes away from this tragic scene in embarrassment.
Up on the podium, Mrs. Trawley tucked the Abraham Lincoln memorial plaque under one arm and shook hands with the other.
“Thank you. Thank you. Yes, we have won our first victory,” she told well-wishers. “But this is only the beginning. We have years more of organizing ahead of us. Years of hard work and herding—ahem!—I mean hosting fund-raiser dinners. The Dimpole Oak has a blazing future before it. And just wait until I mount this handsome plaque. I am sorry it can’t be done today. You see, the screws are missing.”
In a romantic scene behind the oak, another kind of memorial was being created, however. Bent over, with their heads close together, Miss Hand and Mr. Glover were putting the finishing touches on a large heart they had carved into the tree’s trunk with Miss Hand’s monogrammed jackknife. (“What else do you carry in your purse?” Mr. Glover had asked her in all seriousness.) Inside the heart, they had carved their initials: HG & SH.
“Now this day will go down in history, and so will we,” sighed Miss Hand, while Mr. Glover pocketed the jack-knife. “And, if we can just find my dear cat Loopy, all will be right with the world.”
“That cat is a nuisance,” said Mr. Glover through his teeth. “We have spent the entire day looking for it. I’m beginning to believe that you think more of it than you do of me.” He walked off in the direction of his car.
“Harvey, what an idiotic thing to say!” exclaimed Miss Hand, running after him. They disappeared down the farmer’s driveway, arguing with each other.
By now, the sun had begun to set and the Great Dimpole Oak was casting long, black shadows across the field. People hastened to gather their belongings, to pack up the popcorn stand and dismantle the bass drum. They dragged their children out of the treasure holes (as they were ever after called) and went away down the hill, tired and hungry.
“Goodbye!” cried the children to the swami’s loyal followers, who were the only ones left under the tree. They looked a little like children themselves, with lost expressions on their faces.
“Holy Master!” the followers called into the gathering gloom. “Where are you? Everyone else has gone and they have taken our popcorn stand and it’s getting dark. You wouldn’t leave us out here with this monster of a tree, would you?”
Unfortunately, the swami was in the farmer’s kitchen, where he had been invited, along with Howlie and Dexter, to cook dinner for the farmer and keep him company after the doctor’s visit. They were telling stories.
The loyal followers stamped their feet angrily. They invoked the ghost of Napoleon. After a while, they went away to the campgrounds that Mrs. Trawley had given them and lit fires, over which they huddled and spo
ke of dumping the swami permanently.
So Great Dimpole Oak Day came to an end, with varying degrees of success. But the great oak itself went on standing in the field, as it did at the end of every day. It took on the colors of the sunset, which were fiery, fall ones. When the sun had gone down, it absorbed the fading purples of the hills. Just then, a red moon crested the darkening horizon. Far away, a cat screamed. The wind around the oak seemed suddenly full of whispers.
Or was this only in someone’s imagination?
A Personal History by Janet Taylor Lisle
I was born in 1947 to young parents starting a life together in a tiny New York City apartment, just after the Second World War. My father had been a bomber pilot flying out of England during the war, a shattering experience for him. Returning from Europe, he took a job at the New York Herald Tribune. City living worsened his anxieties, however, and so my family and I moved to a rented house on a quiet road near the Rhode Island seacoast.
My first memories are of this place: the woods and fields around my home and the rocky shore nearby, where my father fished and gradually regained his emotional balance. By the 1950s, he had found a job at an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. I was the first of five children, and my four brothers and I grew up in outlying Farmington, walking to local schools and later attending private school in West Hartford. But every summer, my family returned to Little Compton on the Rhode Island coast. The place, a natural haven for sea birds and wildlife, was more home to us than any other. It would become the imaginative setting for many of the stories I later wrote, including Forest, The Lampfish of Twill, and The Great Dimpole Oak.
My father revered fiction. At one time, he had contemplated becoming a fiction writer himself. From our earliest school years, my brothers and I internalized this aspiration. We were a reading and writing family, familiar with overflowing bookshelves and tables stacked with books. We were accustomed to seeing our parents reading in the evenings, and to being read to ourselves. By third grade, I was writing stories and feeling magical about it. My pencil was a wand. I waved it and my imagination fell open onto the page. It was all so easy.
By high school, though, I had lost this wild and fearless sense of writing. In my classes, I began to read the novels of the great writers, Henry James, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf, among many others. I compared my work with theirs and saw my own ineptitude.
At fourteen, I left my family to attend a girl’s boarding school. It was a completely different world. I missed my brothers and parents, but among my teachers was Miss Arthur, who taught me how to write a tight, well-constructed sentence. Three years later, I entered Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. I majored in English and learned the art of writing a pleasing term paper. But I kept my head down when it came to more imaginative forms of writing. I was self-conscious, thin-skinned, and mortally afraid of criticism. In a way, my education had silenced me.
The war in Vietnam was raging when I graduated in 1969. Like many young people at that time I opposed American intervention there, including the killing of civilians and the US draft that threatened to put my friends in harm’s way. My new husband was among those at risk. Together, we joined VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) to shield him from service. For the next two years I lived in Atlanta, Georgia, organizing food-buying cooperatives in the city’s public housing projects and teaching in an early childcare center. The work opened my eyes to a world of poverty I’d barely glimpsed before. My old yearning to write flared up. I went back to school—journalism classes this time—at Georgia State University. It was the beginning of a reporting career that extended over the next ten years.
Journalism, with its deadlines and demand for clear, straightforward text, has often been a precedent profession for authors. So it was for me. I learned to write all over again, and lost some of the self-consciousness that had dragged me down before. A decade later, when my daughter’s birth kept me at home, I was ready to test a voice of my own, through fiction. “Voice,” in fact, was suddenly my greatest strength. After years of newspaper interviewing, my ear was attuned to catching intonations that can underlie an ordinary remark and reveal unspoken meaning. I could write these kinds of sentences in my stories to bring my characters to life.
In 1984, my first book, The Dancing Cats of Applesap, was accepted for publication by Richard Jackson, editor of Bradbury Press. “I love your cats! Call me!” he wrote in a letter I’ve kept to remind myself of the moment when I “became a writer.” I had lucked into a talented editor. Jackson’s belief in the power of voice in fiction, and his uncanny sense of narrative timing would soon make him famous in the children’s book world. We worked together over the next fifteen years, publishing some of my strongest titles, including Sirens and Spies, Afternoon of the Elves, Forest, and The Lampfish of Twill.
Today, I live full-time in Little Compton, Rhode Island, in a gray shingled house near the same rocky beaches I tramped as a child. The area’s storms and tangled woodlands, open pastures and salt water ponds, still make an appearance in almost everything I write. Like my father, I’ve found my balance there.
Lisle and her mother in Rhode Island in 1948.
Lisle’s mother reading to her children at their Farmington, Connecticut, house. From left to right: Geoff, age six; Crane, age two; Lisle’s mother; Lisle, age eight; and Hugh, age six. All the cards in the background indicate that this photo was taken around Christmastime, and they are “probably reading ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”
Lisle at age eleven, in Farmington.
Lisle with her husband, Richard, and her daughter, Elizabeth, at their Little Compton house in 1978.
In 1983, Lisle received her first acceptance letter for fiction when Richard Jackson, editor of Bradbury Press, made an offer for The Dancing Cats of Applesap.
Lisle’s first book signing (for The Dancing Cats of Applesap), at Davoll’s General Store in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in 1984.
This photo was taken in Petworth, England in 1986. The tree behind Lisle was her inspiration for The Great Dimpole Oak, published in 1987.
Lisle and her brothers in a photo taken in the early 1990s at their Warren’s Point house, in Little Compton.
An elf village built by third graders at East School in New Canaan, Connecticut. The village, which the kids named “Elf Canaan,” was a school project connected to Afternoon of the Elves, inspired by Lisle’s visit to the school.
Lisle circa 2001 at Warren’s Point in Little Compton, Rhode Island—the setting for the coast of Twill in her novel The Lampfish of Twill.
Kayla, Lisle’s Siamese cat, at seventeen years old. She often sleeps on Lisle’s writing desk when Lisle works, and she is the model for Juliette in Lisle’s Investigators of the Unknown series. When Lisle does school presentations, she tells children that Kayla is her muse. Perhaps she is.
Lisle hard at work in her writing room, in 2001.
Lisle with her husband, Richard, and her daughter, Elizabeth, in Little Compton in 2005.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 1987 by Janet Taylor Lisle
cover design by Connie Gabbert
978-1-4532-7182-7
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road In
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Great Dimpole Oak Page 9
