The Writings of Geoff Micks

The English Oak

A Short Story by Geoff Micks published June 20th, 2021 and substantially edited for entry into the Missouri Review’s 31st Annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize on October 1, 2021.

Acorn

The forest was alive the day Acorn fell, and not just with birdsong and the movement of animals. They hardly mattered at all, as far as Acorn was concerned. Acorn understood without conscious thought that the forest was made up of trees, each more alive than the short-lived nothings that moved amongst them could ever imagine.

Every tree grows every day in an interconnected community with its neighbours. They have wordless discussions by root and branch and leaf and pollen that take months to make their way from slow beginnings to meandering middles to eventual conclusions. Acorn looked forward to being a part of those conversations, but it had patience. Acorn knew all things come in time. How could it not? Acorn was destined to be a mighty oak, and trees by their very nature take the long view.

The birds and beasts who spent their meager lives among the trees were just a blur of sensation to the beings who think in terms of seasons and years, decades and centuries. As far as an oak is concerned, animals are just one more thing to be endured. When they break a branch or scrape at bark or eat a leaf or pluck an acorn, is that not just one more kind of erosion like the wind and the rain and the ice and the snow?

Still, the oaks relied upon the animals to carry their future children out from under the shade of their broad branches, and because a tree cannot trust an animal to do anything right, the oaks worked together to force the animals to behave as the forest wished.

The year before Acorn grew on its branch, all the oaks in the forest had agreed to hold back on acorn production. Every four to ten years they did this after lengthy debate through the root network. The squirrels and jays and other creatures who relied upon the oak forest’s largesse starved, and only the strongest survived the tree-planned famine. This year —Acorn’s year— was what men would one day call a mast year. Every oak was weighed down with a crop ten times heavier than it would produce in a normal year, and perhaps a hundred times more than it had produced the year before.

The wind stirred the topmost branches of Acorn’s parent oak for many days, and all through the woods acorns began to drop like hailstones. The surviving squirrels watched this manna fall from heaven and knew their hard times were behind them. It was more food than they could possibly eat, and yet their survivors’ instinct that had seen them through the year before drove them to take as much of this plenty as they could and cache it away to stave off the gnawing fear of future hunger.

This was what the oak forest wanted. This is why they had denied the squirrels the autumn before and gorged them now. “Take our acorns,” They commanded through their actions. “Take them far away from under our boughs. Bury them where there is sky above them. Do this such that even a few new oaks grow, and all this will have been worth it.”

Just hours before Acorn fell, it felt without feeling the pang of loss as its parent tree allowed the connection between them to die. Until that moment it had been part of its parent tree, an oak old enough to boast that Druids had danced around it in its youth. Now Acorn was truly its own being for the first time, and all it could really sense was which way was up and which way was down. When the wind finally shook Acorn loose from its desiccated stalk, it knew without knowing that it was tumbling end over end; that it bounced off branches and rattled along a bough on its way to the ground; that it rolled to a stop somewhere close to its parent oak’s trunk.

Too close. From here it would never find the sunlit sky it would need to grow strong.

A squirrel came along with big dark eyes on either side of its head, ever alert for predators. It sniffed at Acorn for a long, furtive moment, and then made its decision. It snatched up Acorn and made six bouncing strides. It oriented itself in relation to the tree trunks around it as its front paws frantically dug down, down, down. Somewhere in its little squirrel brain it made a mental note that between these trees at these distances awaited food for later. It buried Acorn in perhaps three inches of dirt before bouncing away again.

Acorn knew without knowing it was still not far enough away from its parent oak or its parent oak’s neighbours. It was in the wrong spot, and it would never be moved again except to be eaten. Either the squirrel would return and devour it, or it would spend a few short years growing to no purpose before dying in the shade of giants.

Acorn despaired.

And far to the south, thousands of Norman invaders in hundreds of vessels made of Norman oak landed on an English shore.

Taproot

Acorn lay in the ground through autumn and winter with only one not-thought in its not-mind: Up is that way, and down is the other way. It could tell by the way water moved through the soil, and which side of it felt warmer during the short days. While waiting for the squirrel to come back and end it all, Acorn focused all its energies on knowing which way was up, and which way was down.

But the squirrel never did come back. The squirrel hibernated through much of the winter, and in early spring when it descended from its nest to visit its food caches, a fox killed it before it returned for Acorn.

And as the snow melted, water trickled down through the soil to Acorn, who had spent months concentrating on the difference between up and down. With the promise of spring and no squirrel, Acorn used the energy stored within its shell to send its taproot down and its shoot up hungrily looking for sunlight, even the thin brightness that trickled down between his parent oak’s boughs. That grand old tree had shed its dead brown leaves at the beginning of spring, blanketing the ground below in a thick layer of duff, but Acorn’s slowly spinning green shoot nudged them aside one by one as it went up, up, up. Meanwhile its root went down, down, down, looking for where the water went as the snow melted away. The root also touched ever so gently other roots of other oaks.

“Hello, I’m Acorn,” Acorn said wordlessly through its taproot.

“No, you are Taproot,” the forest corrected, also without words. “Can you feel the sun yet?”

What had once been Acorn and was now Taproot felt its slowly spiralling shoot nudge aside the last of the duff above it, and it rejoiced to feel energy from somewhere other than from within its emptying shell. “Yes!” Taproot exclaimed without sound, sharing its excitement underground loud enough for half the forest to hear.

“Then you are not Taproot,” the forest said. “You are Seedling.”

And far to the south, William the Conqueror —who had been William the Bastard on the day Acorn fell, but who had won the Battle of Hastings shortly after the squirrel had cached Acorn, and who had been crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day as Acorn focused on up and down— boarded a vessel made of Norman oak and returned to Normandy. Behind him he left thousands of Normans, many with new English territory to rule, territories that would need to be fortified quickly.

“I am Seedling,” the former Acorn rejoiced in the feeble sunlight filtering through from its parent oak above. Seedling knew its life would be short in the shade, but some life was better than the no-life so many thousands of other mast-year acorns had received.

Seedling

Seedling grew unusually tall in its first year. Its few leaves looked ever upward, for that was where the most energy was to be found. Other oak seedlings in sunnier places might throw out branches to the sides to increase canopy size and drink in more light, but Seedling focused on growing tall, knowing the parent oak above and the neighbours around could make little room for it, even as they sent support through their roots to Seedling’s roots.

At one point a deer nibbled at some of Seedling’s foliage, and a panicked message went out through the root network, “What do I do?”

“Trust in the tannins,” the forest replied without words.

And the deer did stop eating the bitter leaves that had looked so fresh and tender at first.

After that adventure Seedling doubled down on growing tall, hoping to get above the grazing level of passing deer, and it also doubled down on making its leaves bitter with tannins. The root network helped it. The woods felt bad for Seedling, who was growing in the wrong place, but what could be done about it? Nothing. During the long days of summer when Seedling was strong enough that its survival through the next winter seemed likely, the oaks around it expressed their pride. “You are Sapling now.”

“I am Sapling!” The tall and skinny Oak sapling shouted soundlessly.

And not too far away a Norman on a horse was giving orders to Saxons on foot. He was describing ditches to be dug, a mound that he called a motte to be made out of the moved earth, palisades that would need to go up, first a small inner ring around the top of the motte, then a larger ring inside the outer ditch that he called a bailey. Then he wanted a fortified tower —a keep— atop the motte inside the inner palisade. Also within the bailey he wanted stables, a great hall, a smithy, barracks, storehouses, and a chapel. He wanted all of them as soon as possible, and he wanted them made of oak.

The forest was oblivious to these plans.

“I am Sapling,” the Sapling congratulated itself throughout each late summer and early autumn day, stretching its small limbs ever upward, imagining next spring they might tickle the lowest boughs of its parent oak.

Sapling

The Saxons waited until after Michaelmas at the end of September. Their pigs had spent the weeks before Michaelmas gorging themselves on acorns, and then they were slaughtered. Some were eaten immediately, and far more were smoked or salted to last through the long winter to come.

Once the pigs were dead, the Saxons came for the oaks.

This was nothing new, or at least it was nothing new to the forest. Saxon foresters had harvested oaks before on the order of Saxon lords, so what did the oaks care if they died for a Norman lord this time?

The foresters walked through the trees just as farmers moved through their fields and gardens. They judged which plants were doing well, and which were doing poorly. They judged which plants were ready for harvesting, and which needed more time.

The foresters spotted Sapling, unusually tall and straight, standing in the shade of a massive oak approaching the end of its long life.

“Roof beams for the Great Hall,” one of the foresters said, pointing at the trunk and lowest boughs of the great oak.

“Palisade stakes,” another said, gesturing higher up Sapling’s parent tree.

“We take this one down, and that one over there, and that one over there, and this little one can grow up into the hole they make,” the third said, pointing at Sapling.

The three men set to work with their axes, and the sound of it drew other men from their timber-cutting party. “Don’t step on that little one there!” The order went out as the Saxon work crew grew larger. Everyone was careful to avoid crushing Sapling.

Through the root network, Sapling heard its parent oak scream. This was no ice storm or windstorm that might take a limb. This was no forest fire that might scar a trunk. This was no late spring frost that might kill a whole season’s flowers. This was something else, and there was no ‘might’ about the wounds inflicted upon the forest giant. Each axe bit into parent oak in a way totally outside the tree’s understanding. “Damage! Damage! Danger! Danger!” The parent tree’s roots roared. If it were spring or summer, its canopy would be shouting out warning chemicals too, but it was autumn, and the leaves on its branches were already dead.

The forest mourned the fall of an ancient legend, and also for two of its closest neighbours, each centuries old in their own right. Over the coming days and weeks and months, a hundred other trees and more throughout the forest would follow, but always with purpose and careful thought. The foresters knew their business. They did not start at the edge of the forest and clear cut everything down one after the other until there was nothing. They walked through the woods and harvested just what they needed, leaving the rest intact to replace it.

Sapling now found itself uncrowded with an open sky. It had no green foliage to drink in all that sunlight yet, but it was sure that come spring it could grow as tall as it wanted and as wide as it wanted without disturbing another oak.

The root network agreed. Even its parent tree and the other two dead oaks still lived on for a time in their roots, which were full of energy that had been stored away against a new year they would now never see. “Grow,” they told Sapling. “Grow tall like we were.” And along with that blessing, they offered whatever from their roots Sapling could take in the spring.

“I will take your place, and I will make you proud,” Sapling promised.

Young Oak

Years passed. Soon Sapling was a proper Young Oak, unlikely to die from anything except an axe, lightning, or caterpillars. With that said, Young Oak was not appealing yet to the Saxon foresters; there were taller trees for lightning to strike, and the birds and tannins kept the caterpillars to a reasonable level.

Animals and birds and men moved around and through Young Oak, but Young Oak did not mind. Young Oak just grew up into the hole in the canopy once occupied by three mature oaks whose roots were now also in many ways Young Oak’s roots. Young Oak owned their piece of the sky, and the other oaks at the edges of the open space only took what was reasonable from what the forest agreed would be Young Oak’s inheritance.

After fifty winters had come and gone, Young Oak produced flowers in late spring. Pollinators came and went. For the first time, Young Oak experienced the strange sensation of new life coming into being as genetic material from other oaks near and far mingled with its own, inspiring acorn production all summer long. The release of the acorns in autumn was a bitter sweet experience. So much energy and care had gone into that first crop, and Young Oak knew how long the odds would be that any of them would ever become an oak themselves one day. That first year all of Young Oak’s fears came true. The squirrels and jays and other animals were merciless. None of Young Oak’s first acorns ever became even so much as a sapling, but that was alright. Young Oak was now a fertile, mature Oak. There would be other years. Many other years.

Trees take the long view. Oak had known that since its own time as an acorn half a century before.

Oak

Oak took its place as one of the great trees of the forest. What it said through the air and through the ground was taken seriously. What it asked from and gave to other trees was important. It was in its prime, and year after year it shrugged off frost and wind and rain and bugs. It joined the rest of the forest in debating when to hold a mast year. It watched old trees come down, sometimes at the hand of men, sometimes by bad weather, sometimes through disease, and once in a while even from extreme old age. It watched new acorns become taproots and seedlings and saplings and young oaks and oaks in their own right, and Oak made still more acorns with the trees that made it that far.

Years came and went, each the same in pattern if not detail. Days grew longer then shorter. Weather was bad, then good, then bad. What needed to be endured was endured. Flowers bloomed. Acorns fell. Time marched on.

Men hunted deer through the forest. There were nobles and their privileged retinue who rode on horseback, speaking the slippery-sounding Norman tongue. There were also Saxons —more often walking than mounted— speaking their own harsher Germanic language. As the decades went on, the two began to muddle together. Whether on horse or on foot, the hunters often had packs of baying dogs working with them to chase down the stags and does, the harts and hinds. Oak was in the background and sometimes even the foreground of many adventures made into song and story by men who never spared a word in any language for the tree.

That was okay. Oak outlived all those men, and their stories and their songs too.

Other men came through the forest as well, but not to hunt. These men were commoners. Their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had been Saxons, but these men were becoming something different. If they thought about themselves as being from anywhere beyond their village, they were Englishmen, and they knew their rights. While the forest belonged to their lord of Norman descent, they were entitled to gather any wood that fell to the ground or that they could pull down ‘by hook or by crook.’ So these men —these English peasants be they villein or yeoman, serf or free— came into the forest with bill hooks and shepherds’ crooks, and they would try to tear off Oak’s limbs and the limbs of Oak’s neighbours.

Oak did not begrudge the men their pruning much. What they could remove was not healthy anyway. In many ways the wood gatherers were doing the trees a favour, and when that was not the case, it was just one more form of erosion to add to the long list of what must be endured. Oak was just grateful the men did not bring axes, although it had no way of knowing that would have been a hanging offense for commoners. Only specially appointed foresters working on their lord’s express orders could cut timber in those woods.

The decades and centuries rolled on, and Oak endured it all.

At some point during the long period when Oak was in its full glory, a road was made through the forest. The motte and bailey castle of Oak’s youth had evolved into a stone castle with a town around it, and the town was connected to other towns and villages and manors, and people moved between those places with their chattel and their animals. It just made sense to create a network of dedicated paths between those fixed points to make the journeys easier.

Oak watched without watching as an old deer trail became a beaten track which became unmistakably a road, and as the years passed, the road straightened. It no longer went around trees. Instead, the trees that survived were to either side of the road.

If it had been up to Oak, it would have been better not to have the road. Acorns that fell on it had no future, and trees that grew beside it risked the axe more often than those in the deeper woods. Oak itself was close enough to the road that its limbs threw shade across it, but Oak’s trunk was so tall that its lower boughs never threatened the heads of even a mounted man, and so no one thought to trim Oak back.

Oak watched without watching as men used the road: Peasants, nobles, monks, travelling merchants selling everything from tools —tools with oak-wood handles— to books —books written with ink made from oak gall— to pieces of the True Cross that was surely just a scrap of wood pulled down from some other oak tree somewhere else.

Sometimes the people would stop and have lunch in Oak’s shade. Oak did not mind that, provided they did not light a fire.

Sometimes the people relieved themselves against Oak’s trunk. Oak noticed animals avoided it for a time afterwards. Animals and trees both agreed men were to be avoided if possible.

One time a pair of lovers carved their initials into Oak’s trunk. It took longer than the rest of their short lives for Oak to grow fresh bark over the scar. Oak missed the scar when it was gone.

In a vague way Oak eventually came to be amused by the road. It was something different. Something other trees did not get to experience at close hand.

What Oak understood, Oak shared through its root network, and through the canopy.

Oak grew old watching the road as the seasons and years drifted by from the far future into the distant past.

Old Oak

The day Old Oak experienced gunpowder was a day the ancient tree would never understand.

The road was now what men called a highway, for it connected high streets in different towns. Old Oak towered over a stretch of cleared track that royal officials were charged with maintaining in peace and good working order. Between their visits and patrols, sometimes there were what came to be called highwaymen, people who robbed travellers at pistol-point.

“Stand and deliver, your money or your life!” Would become the playwright’s cliché for a highwayman demanding valuables that did not belong to him. It was based on some truth. Under Old Oak’s boughs, a bandit on a horse stopped a cart and demanded the driver pay up. The bandit had not counted on the cart driver having a pistol of his own. Shots were exchanged, and the Old Oak smelled without possessing a nose that strange combination of sulphur, saltpeter, and charcoal.

It smelled of danger.

Old Oak also experienced a stab of pain as the highwayman’s shot went wide; the ball smashed into Old Oak’s bole near where the lovers had left their marks many decades before.

Old Oak never learned the rest of that highwayman’s story, but it was there for the conclusion. The would-be robber was injured in the exchange of gunfire, and though he rode his horse away faster than the cart driver could follow him, he was eventually turned into the nearby town council when he sought help for his wound. The town did not bother with the expense of erecting a gibbet. Everyone interested in taking a walk followed the cart driver and the town luminaries out to the very site of the attempted robbery. A good hemp rope was thrown over one of Old Oak’s sturdiest boughs, and the highwayman was strung up kicking and left to dangle there as a warning to others that this stretch of highway was not a place for an ambush.

All Old Oak knew was the hemp rope rubbed at its bark for many days and nights until the weight finally dropped off: The highwayman’s head separated from his body at last, and the next passing person with both a strong enough stomach and a sense of decency scraped out a shallow grave well off the road back in the undergrowth.

Old Oak thought without thinking that the bullet in its trunk and the hemp over its bough and the decaying corpse of the highwayman out towards the edge of its roots would be the most exciting thing to happen to it for decades to come, but it was very wrong.

Old Oak had now become one of the greatest trees in several days’ ride, and  being by the road made it famous too. There were two pubs in nearby towns named for it —The Royal Oak, and the Hangman’s Oak— and that often led to people talking about the highway landmark.

Word of it even made its way to Chatham on the River Thames, where the shipyards were always hungry for oak. England was now the beating heart of Great Britain, and Great Britain had a global empire held together by the Royal Navy and the largest merchant marine fleet the world had ever known.

Men came. Foresters and royal officials both. Old Oak was measured and documented. Every branch and bough was debated by men who knew their business. For a being who had seen more than a quarter of a million days, Old Oak’s fate was decided in less than an hour. A work party was hired and issued axes, and the grandfather of the forest was broken down into moveable parts right there by the side of the road even as its roots screamed out through the woods, “Damage! Damage! Danger! Danger!”

The forest could do nothing but mourn the death of their greatest living elder. There was no hope that a sapling might take Old Oak’s place. Old Oak was too close to the road for a new tree to prosper. What was worse, the foresters and royal officials worked their way from one end of the woods to the other, and they took out more trees than had ever been taken before at one time. Every oak in the forest old enough to make acorns would be taken down over the next two years. There were not enough oak trees in all of England to build the ships that were needed. Old Oak’s timbers were taken to the Chatham shipyards and cured alongside timber from as far away as the Baltic and North America before being put to use.

Timber

Old Oak’s story, in the truest sense, ends here. Its dying roots died after sharing what they could with what was left of a dying forest. By the time the highway was paved, even Old Oak’s stump had rotted away to nothing.

Old Oak’s timbers travelled the world. They were not all kept together, but instead put to whatever suited their shape and size best. After a time drying in the shipyard, some of Old Oak became a keel and framing inside an East Indiaman that sailed around Africa and back dozens of times. Some became decking on a frigate posted to the Caribbean. Some formed the strakes and gunwales of a number of the small boats General Wolfe used in the conquest of Quebec. Parts of Old Oak sailed in arctic waters. Parts of Old Oak sweltered in tropical heat. Parts of Old Oak smelled gunpowder and felt the impact of shot again many times over.

But there was no awareness any longer.

Whatever not-consciousness Old Oak had possessed was gone, even as portions of its deceased being lived on and had more adventures than could fill a dozen books —books that would no longer be written with ink made of oak gall.

 

Beam

The man took a sip of his red wine. As so often happened in quiet moments in his quiet home, his eyes drifted upwards.

His guest tilted her own head back, as if expecting to see a problem. The house was old and weathered, and the possibility of water damage or termites was very much on her mind as her gaze passed over the ceiling without finding a flaw. “What?” She asked at last, looking for guidance as her eyes wandered.

“I was just looking at the oak beams,” he said.

“What about them?” She asked, focusing her attention now on what she thought must be a looming crisis. Were the ancient wooden supports beginning to give out? What does it cost to replace oak that thick in a historically listed building? Who do you even call to find answers to those sorts of questions?

“Do you see how big that beam is? There probably isn’t a tree left like that in all of England. They were all cut down hundreds of years ago. I’m told this house is made up of wood purchased from a ship-breaker,” the man said dreamily, not taking his eyes from the ceiling.

She lowered her gaze to look at him with polite boredom. She was confident this was about to become one of what she often referred to as, ‘those stories.’

“How interesting,” she lied politely.

“And it’s not just that,” he went on. “It takes hundreds of years —hundreds and hundreds of years— for an oak to get to that size and quality. Let’s say this tree was cut down three hundred years ago. That means when it was an acorn, William the Conqueror was still alive.”

“Battle of Hastings, 1066,” she said, rattling off the only thing she remembered about William the Conqueror. It had been on a test in school once when she was young, and she had never gotten around to forgetting it.

“That’s right,” the man lowered his gaze at last and raised his glass to her in tribute. “And if that’s true, there’s every possibility the oak that produced that acorn was worshipped by Druids and saw Romans march past when it was a young oak.”

“Trees live a very long time,” she said, hoping to close the subject.

“Yes, they do,” the man agreed. “At least English Oaks do.”

—

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of short stories I will publish on this blog as I get back into the habit of writing regularly. Stay tuned for more!