The Great Oak

In the final chapter of Gloucesterbook, Caleb Karcist and Gloria Keith discuss history, literature, and ornithology. Bayliss's imagination takes flight as he describes the oak tree in the Keiths' backyard. Amid familiar symbols such as bridges and ships, as well as references to Greek mythology and Roman history, Bayliss shows Caleb pondering the unknown (his paternity, the network of Parity Corporation, the future of the Cold War's precarious peace) by imagining the roots of this great oak plumbing the hidden depths of Dogtown.

She was speaking of the great oak that Caleb so often gazed upon from his garret chair, where he had grown accustomed to the backyard view unavailable to its owners. As they now stood together looking up at the long arm of the tree suspending the wistful swing forever awaiting a return of the Keith family's childhood, the dryads' wash to their left hardly stirred under its wooden pins - most of it bleached pure white, but some striped with lavender or lightly printed with thornless roses - screening the buckled whitened fenceboards along the cemetery side of the houselot, which had been intended to discourage at least the short people of funeral corteges or drum-and-bugle corps assembling in the 20C forepart of the public grounds from prying into the householders' private court. The foreground was homely with details of disused implements and abandoned playscapes - constructed mostly by Dexter Keith during his early years of enthusiasm for house and family, before the kids outgrew his own lifelong interests - notably an Ozymandian sandbox (now used by cats and dead leaves) once fitted with pole and awning like the afterdeck of a steam yacht, and, imbedded in amaranthine concrete, the weathered two-by-four towers of a suspension bridge two feet high and eight feet long, with deck now missing but rusty dog-leash catenaries still suspended. From here at ground level the cracked and lichened boulders behind the dilapidated wall, exactly unmoved since the glacier had dropped them, loomed like shapeless mastodons, by contrast rendering all regular curves and angles oversimplified, even the headstones of carved dog-marble. But it was the far-reaching muscular oak that framed this stage at its rear. Caleb saw in it an effluence of conflicting desires from the same stem, none of which had yet been amputated. The few limbs that had withered were minor and lost to sight, or lofty unimportant twigs indistinguishable within the ribbed canopy greening and thickening almost before his eyes in the Maytime air. The budding leaves seemed impervious to the fluctuations of temperature that made a deceived human hug his shirtsleeves and complain to his fellows. Three or four stately evergreens in the stage right background, which might have been destined for the king's masts, were tall and straight, well balanced with topgallant spars, but the deciduous oak, in the prime of its age, was asymmetrical and gnarling, more suitable for ships' ribs and knees; its main branches stemmed from the beautifully agonized bifurcations and trinary crotches of a tortuous striated trunk, establishing themes for all the ramifications that crowned them, whether arrayed with fresh green fans or still naked to the very digits: altogether preferring experience to eminence. The great level yardarm, nearest branch to the roots of the tree, was as useful and nakedly vulnerable to mutilation by the edged tools of power as the trunk of a Carthaginian elephant to Roman swords. Without brace or counterweight, without guy or stay, yet somehow cantilevered underground, it faithfully suspended the outgrown swing of billet and hemp a foot or two above the dirt-worn grass. Who knew the span and depth at which this live post of sinew was grasped and stabilized by the earth? Was the visible complex of twisted torques and stresses exactly compensated by the chthonic anchor of knotted roots - outrigged to sanitary drains and sodden graves, extending downward like a keel of filaments deeper than sunless rocks subterraneously afloat, reaching for Lady Gloucester's abyssal bed, as its main truck reached for Olympus? Under daily contemplation from his window the mighty pachydermic bough, so serviceable and protective, had made itself the main branch of his conflict tree - equivocal tree of will, tangled tree of desire, triadic tree of choice, forking tree of pleasure: no sprig as simple as a binary decision. Perhaps from that angle it best represented his longing for the Anglo-Goidelic Isles of his language. But now from below it loomed above his eyebrows like the main boom of a highline schooner, more impressive to a groundling than the bole no thicker than itself (the European Continent) from which it separated with the xylemic strength of a thumb spread from the forefinger.