Oak Galls (Fiction)

“Jana, what the heck are these things?” Gowain asked his wife of 45 years.

Gowain was holding several round, purple-green marbles in his hand. The marbles were spotted with dull-purple with greenish-gold dots.

Jana picked one up and rolled it around in her hand. It barely weighed anything and the surface dimpled when she pressed it lightly.

“I am not really sure, but I think it might be a gall” Jana said. She pulled out her smartphone and took a picture. “Aloysius, what is this a picture of?” she asked her personal, digital assistant.

“That, madam is a Rosie Acorn Gall formed by a female Amphibolips quercusjuglans” Aloysius said in his plummy, upper-crust, British accent with its rounded, fully enunciated vowels. Jana liked customizing her digital assistant. Not for her the ubiquitous Alexa or Siri.

Gowain asked “Aloysius, are those galls good for anything?”

Jana had given Gowain permission to ask Aloysius questions. It may have been Jana’s imagination, but sometimes she thought Aloysius was irritated by having to answer to two humans.

“Oak galls have been used since prehistory to make an indelible ink that soaks into the parchment or papyrus and cannot be erased.” Aloysius sniffed.

That got Gowain’s attention. Gowain had been a Deacon in his church for decades and had only recently retired. “So ink from oak galls was used in Biblical times?” Gowain asked.

“One might assume so. It was before my time” Aloysius tartly rejoined.

Gowain had been praying for a sign from God. He was at loose ends and really didn’t know what to do with himself.

Maybe this was the sign he was looking for.

“What else can you tell me about oak-gall ink?” Gowain pressed.

Aloysius sighed. “It was used by monks when they copied religious manuscripts. It required the most diligent of penmanship because the ink undergoes a chemical change when it soaks into the fibers and is exposed to oxygen. Mistakes cannot be undone.”

“Is it still used?” Gowain wanted to know.

“It is still the preferred ink for the writing of birth records in some places” Aloysius admitted. “But the ink is of little economic value in case you were thinking of making your fortune selling it.”

That night, Gowain asked God to talk to him in his dreams to confirm if the galls were somehow a message from Him. To his dismay, he slept a solid nine, dreamless hours. It was the most refreshing night’s sleep he had in more than half a year.

The next morning, Gowain walked outside shortly before sunrise. Perhaps God had written something on the sidewalk?

Nothing.

Holding his cup of coffee and taking a sip, he felt himself surrounded by a rosy, red mist. Raising his eyes, he saw that the first beams of the sunrise that were lancing in from the east were illuminating the underside of the two-hundred year-old Northern Red Oak that shaded their Thomas Kinkadesque cottage.

The tree was filled with galls. When viewed from the bottom, there were more plum-colored galls than there were leaves.

The very next night Jana had The Dream. “Gowain is to be my tool. He is to grind all of the galls that fall from the tree and make the ink that will carry my message. His job on earth will not be completed until he has used all of the ink”.

Jana was a very intelligent woman. She realized that God made no mention of her longevity in His plan. She was tempted to not share the dream with Gowain but she had a deep respect for the trials God gave to His prophets who did not relay His messages with speed and fidelity.

Jana walked out with Gowain the next morning for their walk under the now miraculous oak tree. She shared exactly what she remembered God telling her, adding nothing and leaving nothing out. Gowain did not pick up on the fact that God had been silent regarding Jana’s fate.

***

Six months later, Gowain sat down at his vintage writing desk. It seemed that he had no sooner touched the tip of his fountain pen to the paper than he leaned back in the chair, exhausted and his ink-well depleted.

Not remembering what he wrote, he reread the first line….

“...fully aware that the Father had put everything into His power and that He had come from God and was returning to God, He rose from supper and took off his outer garments. He took a towel and tied it around his waist.

Then He poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and dry them with the towel around His waist…” John 13: 3-5

...followed by an essay that explored the nature of the uncleanliness deposited on roads shared with livestock and why the feet and lower legs would be filthy even though the rest of the body was clean. The essay spoke to the Biblical directive to minister to the most unclean of the unclean, to roll up one’s sleeves, literally, and to serve those who the world thought were beneath them.

The prose was NOTHING like his normal writing. Gowain was the most elegant and graceful of writers. His usual prose usually vaulted across the firmament like vast arching crystals of spun-sugar and meringue.

The prose in front of him was filled with short, simple, squaty sentences that clanged like horseshoes on cobblestones and the blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil. The text was devoid of all descriptive language except for the simplest and most elemental of adjectives. Not only were the sentences entirely different than how Gowain thought, but there was not a single crossed-off word or blot on the six, closely written pages.

The last line of the essay was the quote “I take delight in your direction, I will never forget your word” which Gowain recognized as being from Psalm 119.

Gowain could not recall writing a single one of those sentences. Re-reading, he didn't know if he had been channeling Michael the Archangel or the Dark Lord of Mordor.

That night, Gowain had The Dream. An angel came to him and said “Jana is filled with anxiety but she need not fear. God gave Aaron and Hur to hold up Moses’ arms when he grew tired. He gave Timothy and Silas to Paul to grow the church. God has given you Jana for the same purpose. She will not pass on to eternal life before you do.”

The next morning Gowain went into the pantry to look at the bottles of ink he and Jana had laboriously produced from every single gall that had fallen from their tree, including the very first handful that Gowain had picked up. There were ten, 2-liter bottles of ink carefully placed in a cool spot in the back of the pantry.

Looking at the bottles, he instinctively knew that there were 3 se'ah or 432 eggs* of ink in the bottles. Enough for at least 400 essays. At two-essays-per-month, the angel had promised that both he and Jana would live until Gowain reached the age of 98. A mere stripling by Biblical standards, but more than the normal, human lifespan.

*Hebrew and Babylonian measures of volume were based on "eggs" which were the volume of a medium sized egg or about 1-1/2 ounce.

Note from the author:

I took on the challenge because I thought it would stretch my abilities as an author. Being inherently lazy, I asked some people for "thought starters".

One very nice lady who goes to my church offered this list:

• The first gall leave of the season that you see
• Burnt toast
• Bird songs at night and in the morning
• An empty mail box - no mail three days in a row
• The color of cars - when they all are white or the same color in a parking lot
• Where can we go for a good bookstore experience and what does that mean
• Have you seen the price of ________________ these days?
• Should I be riding a bike at 55 ? Especially since the last time I did so was 30 years ago
• Fear of rollercoasters

 I looked at that list and thought "No way. Just no way I can wring a decent story out of any of those." She had given me nouns when I thought I needed verbs or phrases expressing an inherent conflict.

 

But, a challenge is a challenge. At least it will be interesting to see how far I can get before the wheel start spinning.