The Trial at Jove's Oak
When first we moved here, the only instrument available for cutting the grass was an old mower my mother and her boyfriend had nursed back to partial health. He, a machinist, had provided an Allen key that kept the engine running once ignited. And so periodically during the summer and early autumn—each week if I was diligent, but more often every two—I would wheel out this wheezing automaton and enlist its help in trimming the grass, usually balancing it on its hind wheels to avoid having to start and stop the rotary blades when they were clogged by too-long or even wet grass.
Through late June and early July, I found myself slow on the uptake of the lawn. Working in another county had me coming home to the House at Jove’s Oak quite tired, and on days where I was off I felt relatively useless during all my waking hours. And that summer it rained furiously and often, inundating the grass, but also, thankfully, keeping the garden well-watered.
So one day, I wheeled out the mower, filled it from the dust-covered gas can sitting on the work bench surrounded by scattered tools and hoarded trash, and pushed it to the gate of the backyard. I pulled up the latch, pushed open the door, primed the mower, squeezed the handle, and was ready to pull the rope start.
“Halt!”
I am not an easily startled person; and living in the House at Jove’s Oak had made me normally aware that most places I thought I was alone, I was in fact surrounded by the fay. But at these voices I dropped the mower and turned suddenly, summoned to face my commander.
Upon the gate there stood perched a line of grey squirrels, with a single red in the middle of their company. I cannot stress enough the seeming absurdism of their perfect composure and alignment; but there they were, watching me intently, and upon their backs the plated armor of the knights glimmered in the late summer sun. Upon the red squirrel sat what I took to be their captain, a fay who wore a plume upon his helm and brandished the longest lance among them.
The first thing that came to my mind to say to these creatures was always less impressive than I wanted it to be.
“Come again?”
“Halt,” they said, “in Jove’s name!”
“Alright,” I surrendered.
“We have been sent to arrest you, and stave off this unlawful act you plan to do.”
I was silent for a moment. “Do you mean mowing?” I asked, incredulous.
“Halt!” the captain repeated, rearing his steed. I had learned by now that fairies are fabulously unhelpful when you want to know something, and often enough hilariously bad at communicating when they want you to know something. Such are the incommensurate and irreducible experiences, so I supposed, of sprites and humans, who despite their commonality as rational beings, sharing one and the same noetic nature (as Origen proved long ago), speak across and at one another at least as often as humans do with their parochial allegiances.
“Alright,” I said. “Are you taking me somewhere?”
The squirrel-back knights looked at one another, realizing that they had not planned this far; I suspected that like many warriors, they had planned for battle and not for peace. The captain looked at me shrewdly, suspecting trickery. “You will follow us,” he said at once, “to Jove’s Oak, and there be tried!”
I looked back at the mower, regretting that I would need to prime it again when this was over, and dutifully exited the gate, following behind the captain and flanked on either side by the squirrel-knights. I noticed for the first time that there rode among them a handful of small fay-pages, riding upon chipmunks easily hidden by the bushy tails of their superiors’ steeds. Now, fairies are a relatively aristocratic society; they as much as we are given to the vanity that stands behind the equivocation between wealth and importance, or between power and goodness, and so it was not unreasonably that they were called devils as often as they were suspected to be angels or fellow worshipers by the medievals. They are capable of all the same spiritual vices we are, though the differences between their bodies and ours make for a different sensory apprehension of the world and therefore a different set of distractions of the mind from God. There is something more intense for them, I was beginning to realize, about those goods and evils of which we are capable, something which we begin to experience only at our most raw and electric encounters with the fundamentals of being.
Anyway, I thought all this over as I was escorted across my driveway and to the Oak. If I have never told you, it was a really magnificent tree. It seemed to have been there probably since the House’s construction, and to have grown from sapling to the mightiest in our small neighborhood. It shed constantly, but gleaning from it we had secured the necessary kindling for many a fire on the hearth the previous winter, and I looked forward to doing so again this year. I knew that its height and solidity meant that, should it ever be felled, the House would surely be crushed beneath its weight, and prayed during each thunderstorm that the romping angels might see fit to spare us.
Anyway, it was here that I saw, enthroned upon a small throne of woven twigs, an oaken corona upon their heads, the lord and lady of the tree, waiting upon me. Around them were what I took to be the nobility of their court, and further afield I could see small clusters of fay peasantry poking up to watch the drama unfold. The captain of the squirrel-knights dismounted and genuflected before them, before introducing me and reading my charge.
“My lord and lady,” he said, “I bring before you the accused, the human who has lately usurped the regency of the House, and who stands before you to plead for his life on the charge of blasphemy against these lands by the surreptitious cutting of grass and other misdemeanors.”
The lord and lady looked up at me gravely, but it was obvious upon their faces that the fantasy of putting me on trial was somewhat undermined by my advantage of height over them, so I crouched, then leaned upon the grass, the squirrel-knights all the time keeping their spears at the ready and aimed at what they took to be my vitals. This seemed to earn a modicum of respect from them before they resumed the proceedings.
“Human,” said the fairy lord, “have you anything to say concerning the charges laid against you?”
I thought a moment. There was a temptation to snark, but I had come to love the fay, even at their most ludicrous, and to respect even their most pompous and arrogant displays. I did not want to hurt their pride.
“Fay lord of the Oak, forgive me,” I began, “for as a human, I am ignorant of the ways of the fairies, though I know now many of your kind. I knew not that I had broken any law of human or fay in mowing the gr—er, tending to my field.”
You want to sound official, of course, if you end up in this kind of situation, but once I said this, there were not a few gasps in the court, and it took me a second to recognize my mistake: I had named the house and its yard as “mine.” It is not that the fay have no concept of ownership, still less that they have no concept of human ownership, but it had become clear to me that for the fairies, context is everything. Here I was in the court of the fairy princeling of this small territory I had come to live in, and I was pronouncing these lands “mine,” when the setting dictated that I should have called them “his,” just as he may well have done had he come to my doorstep or appeared in my study.
The fay lord kept his composure through my foible, though, and admonished: “Ignorance of the law of the fay is no excuse for its breaking. If you wished to know the law of the fay, listen to the voice of the winds and the grass, of the water and of the trees, or ask them directly.”
An idea occurred to me. “Fay lord and lady,” I remarked, “is it permissible under the law of the fay that I may be represented?”
Murmurs overtook the crowd of nobles, at which the fay lady lifted her right hand to silence them, and nodded her assent, a smile upon her face. It occurred to me now that she had been smiling softly since my arrival, perhaps bemused by the occasion; emboldened by her good cheer, I smiled a bit myself, and said:
“Then I would like very much for the gnome of the house to represent me.”
Outrage emerged from the fairy nobles. It had become clear to me by now that among fairies, the little people of wood and garden and the gnomes are not, strictly speaking, ordinary companions. The former look upon the latter as rough and uncultured, while the latter resent the former for their pretentious occupations. The former have a strictly stratified society, while the latter have what I can only describe as a kind of socialist comradery, where hard work in the digging and tending of the mushrooms is where respect comes from. Sure, they have chieftains: great warriors proven by their exploits of heroism against the moles or, in their myths, the wild boars who once roamed freely across this land; but in general, the gnome chiefs are caretakers, not taskmasters. Of course the alfs whom I had met, of human stature, regard all such little people as vaguely ridiculous, and chuckle amongst themselves about their sense of self-importance; to the wild fay and the gnomes, these latter are as though gods, and the gods of the alfs as though titans.
The fay lord nodded his begrudging assent to the captain, who at once commanded some portion of his regiment to come with him, a free squirrel on hand, up to the door of the house. The captain then slipped off to the side, through a brick in the wall I did not realize was loose, and came up through the vent to where, I now saw, Daisy and the gnome had been watching all these events unfold. I saw them speak through the window, and the gnome, after a fair bit of gruff distaste for his circumstances, reluctantly nodded his assent, hopped down off the ledge, and followed the captain of the squirrel-knights down through the vent and out through the brick again. Unnecessarily, but humorously, the two rode on squirrel-back the few yards it took to return to where the court was being held, and the gnome at once strode over and stood at my side.
The lady of the Oak looked upon the gnome with more bemusement than she had had before. “Do you, Shroomman, agree to represent in this trial?”
“With Jove as witness, and heaven and earth who obey him,” said the gnome, in what I took to be an official formula of oathtaking. I wondered privately what I was getting him into, and what penalty quasi-immortal sprites could have for breaking an oath, but I did not inquire.
“And what do you have to say,” said the lord of the Oak, “on behalf of the accused?”
The gnome took a few more drags upon his pipe, and then looked up at me (I guess; I could never see beneath his bushel of hair) before turning back to the lord and lady of the court. “Lord and lady of the fay,” he said, “we gnomes do not live by the laws that govern the fiefdom of this tree, and yet we, too, are subjects under heaven of Jove and all his court. We tend our toadstools, and we sit beneath them, each man under his own stalk in peace, seeking liberation through the silence that follows upon spending our bodies in work for the livelihood and defense of our people. When one of our stalks has become great enough to serve as a home, we take to ourselves the Shroomwomen and live the lives of householders, and once our children have grown and gone to their own coves, we renounce the world and seek freedom from suffering. And so on and on it has gone, since the beginning of the world, or at least of our kind; and there is one kind, though we live as many.
“Among them are these humans,” he continued, “many of whom you have known to come and go from this House. I have conversed with the spirits who live in the House, and all are agreed that among them this man and his wife are the most agreeable to the community of fay who dwell here. They are not, mind you, wholly aware of us at all times. This one,” he jerked at me with his thumb, “did not know that I myself was alive until just recently, when I awoke from the meditative state we call the Deep Sleep. But he is more willing than any other human I have known, or that my people have heard tell of, to learn the ways of the fay and to treat them as neighbors.
“I know not,” he continued, “of human ways, and many of them seem strange to me. But this man, and the Lady of the House, and their animal companion, have seemed to me to seek to live by the laws of land and sky, and not to offend against heaven’s ways. You have all seen how they provide places for the fay to live, how this one dug the garden beds himself and tends the great zucchini plants that give it shade. He does no harm to the fay-folk, and does not seek to expel them from the home. He gave milk to the kitchen-sprite and speaks with the daughter of Hestia on the hearth. He is friend to our folk, and whatever he stands accused of, I believe he has done guilelessly.”
I inaudibly admired the gnome for his rhetorical brilliance and thanked him in my heart for his Socratic defense of my character, which seemed to me more than I deserved. And I could tell that while the lady of the Oak seemed to find this a good, if not wholly sufficient answer, the lord of the Oak was annoyed to have such virtues to contend with.
“Then why,” asked the lord of the Oak, “has he so brazenly take it upon himself to whirl that machine of his across these lands, and to cut down the plains in which our people who dwell in the poplar on the other side of the House walk, hunting spiders and communing with the fireflies at eventide?”
At this, the gnome looked back at me, exasperated that I had put him in so hard a position as to have to defend my mowing the lawn. I looked down at him, thankful for the job he had done, then lifted my eyes back up to the lord and lady of the Oak.
“Fay master,” I said, “know first that I meant no harm to your people, nor to the lives they lead upon these lands. It is customary among my kind to keep the grass around our homes quite short. I know not why, since in this time it is unusual for my people to do very much with such open space, other than to look at it blankly and stupidly. It is my hope, as time passes, that much more of the yard should be made into garden space, that your people will be able to inhabit and use freely, and to mutual benefit. But my wife and I are not people such as yourselves. Our skin is weak, our flesh weaker; the spiders that your people do not catch bite us, and the snakes that slither on the ground which your fay-children fear poison us. And the other humans have their opinions, as does my wife, who wishes to be able to spend more time in these lands and not just in the House.”
The gnome piped up at this as well. “Fay lord, think on this as well. These lands may well fall to invaders if they deem that there are no humans here. It is because of the lord and lady of the House that those marauders I have heard tell of have not returned: they see and smell the humans, and they fear the dog, though they need not. If the grass grows too tall, they may suspect a time to strike is at hand.”
The lord and lady of the Oak paused and looked at each other, the lady still smiling. The lord grimaced, knowing that he would not get the conviction he had hoped for. He turned back to me and to the gnome, and nodded to the knights, who stood down. “I acquit you,” he said at last, raising his hand pontifically, “and henceforth permit this cutting—but the captain will have to observe you each time, to ensure that your destruction is not wanton, and that no fay children are left in the yard as you do it.”
I looked down at the captain, whose staid lance was pointed upward at attention, and whose glance yielded no further trust than it had since the trial began. I then looked back to the lord and lady of the Oak.
“Very well,” I said, and then oaths were taken, as is the custom of the fay, before the Oak which they call Grandfather Dodonus, but which I had nicknamed Quercus, and calling upon all the famous fay of legend, and the great alf king Oberon and his queen Titania, and of course the fay gods and goddesses, though I simply called upon their God, to the astonishment of some present. And so we parted: the gnome returned inside to his stalk, and I returned to cut the grass, the squirrel-knight captain at my flank, annoyed to have to prime the mower again again. And an hour or so later, upon finishing and wheeling the aged machine back to the garage, I realized that all evidence of the fay court had, as with so many of the miscellanea of my encounters with the fairies, been swept away without trace, the squirrels upon whom those glittering knights had ridden gossiping upon the oaken branches like any others of their kind. Not for the first time, mind you, I began to wonder what reality there was to these encounters, until I saw the dirt upon my knees, and remembered the feel of the cool earth as I stood trial before the little people in all their glamor. So I walked up to the door, quietly regarding the loose brick, and cooled off with a nap upon the couch.