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.
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