Part Thirty Eight

When I finished the interviews in Florida I flew to Dulles and made the mandatory pilgrimage to Dare College.

I went more out of a sense of duty than anything. There was no first-person witness for me to interview (although I tried), no tangible documents. It just seemed like something I was supposed to do – go see Preacher’s Tree.

You know what? It’s just a goddamn tree. In front of a college library. If you didn’t know better, you’d never know there was anything special about it… except that every so often someone, usually some hippy wannabe, shows up and stands there and stares at the fucking thing. Oh, and periodically the campus police arrest couples for fornicating beneath its spreading boughs.

Castanea dentata, the American chestnut. It was supposed to be little more than a shrub, an object lesson, if you will – the American chestnut was once one of the most common and economically useful hardwood trees in North America, but in 1904 an Asian fungus was introduced with some imported trees and by the 1920s the species was essentially wiped out in North America. Instead of a tree five or six feet in diameter and over a hundred feet tall, your average American Chestnut gets to be no more than 10 or 20 feet tall and less than a foot in diameter before the fungus eats through the bark and kills it.

Originally this chestnut was no different from the rest. Botany professors and environmental studies students at Dare College would occasionally look at the tree and get all nostalgic for something they never knew.

Haywood showed up at Dare just as the spring semester was letting out, and for whatever reason – maybe he was just bored – took a job on campus helping to computerize the school library’s card catalog system. It was a pretty big project, because rather than relying upon the existing card catalog, Preacher and a fistful of other temporary workers were supposed to actually enter the data directly from the books themselves, thus (hopefully) correcting any mistakes that might have already crept into the system. There was a program that would then check their entries against the old cards, and where there were discrepancies, the errors could be corrected.

The temps were housed in a dorm on campus that would otherwise have been closed for the summer. They worked long shifts and made decent money, because they didn’t have any place to spend it.

Dare College was a fairly typical small East Coast liberal arts school, although being in Virginia they tried to come up with euphemisms to keep the word “liberal” out of their description – a “complete learning environment” was one good one I saw in a catalog from that era, as well as “classical curriculum.”

Preacher and I both would have told them: No. You don’t have a classical curriculum. St. John’s had a classical curriculum. You have a liberal arts program.

At any rate, if you’ve ever seen an East Coast liberal arts school, you can picture the place. The gently rolling tree-lined campus, the mixture of old and new buildings, the fights over parking, the paved walkways and the occasional worn dirt path where students found a particular shortcut to be useful. There is a fountain. An old stone building. An ugly concrete administration building.

And the chestnut in front of the library, doomed to grow for a few years, die for a few years, and then sprout again. Never to achieve sexual maturity.

Preacher worked with five other temps and he was assigned, fortuitously, to entering data from the philosophy and theology sections, among others. In typical Preacher fashion I am sure he was an excellent employee, at least at first, setting the pace for entering data. And in fact initially he worked so far ahead of the others that he found himself stopping to actually read passages from the books. As he told the story years later, he would set aside particularly interesting titles, or books he’d heard of but hadn’t read, and after meeting (or, knowing him, slightly exceeding) his quota for the day he would sit and read.

There he was, then, all that summer, with his ars memoria and the fast reading that he’d perfected a few years earlier, and virtually unlimited access to a decent-sized library. Able to take in the French and a fair amount of the Greek and Latin texts, as well as the English (and this was Dare College, not the Sorbonne – the collection was overwhelmingly written in English).

He would fall behind in his quota. He would spend sometimes two or three days straight in the library. He absorbed information like a sponge.

He overdid it.

And one fine summer day he left the library, unsure how long he’d been in there, unsure of the time of day (it was early afternoon) or what day of the week it was (it was August 2nd) and his head was swimming with Thomas Aquinas and Rene Descartes and Lao Tzu and everything else, and he walked out of the library blinking and rubbing his tired eyes, and he caught sight of the chestnut tree, towards the end of its life cycle, standing about 15 feet high but pockmarked all along its trunk by the blight.

And then… even Preacher was incapable of putting it coherently later.

“Suddenly,” he wrote, years later, “I was intensely aware of the web that connected me to the tree – to the point where there was no separation between Tree and Haywood. I felt roots in the soil and sun overhead and the blight gnawing at the bark. I was not the Tree – I still had my conscious mind – but it was as if I had suddenly expanded, like a balloon suddenly blowing up, so that I enveloped and encompassed the tree, and from the tree everything else, and there was this horrible, wrenching understanding of my own insignificance and at the same time my own fundamental one-ness with everything else. The experience lasted no more than 30 seconds but I stood there, dumbstruck, paralyzed, in front of that tree for over an hour. I was incapable of any kind of conscious thought as my mind struggle to make sense of what I had just experienced, of what had just been thrust upon me. The first sensible thought that I had was that I had to reduce the experience down to a pale meaningless shadow in my mind, if I was to have any hope of regaining my sanity. And I played it over in my mind until I was able to reduce it. The act of putting it into language ripped the guts out of the experience, truth be told. It was so… ineffable that any attempt at description – such as, for example, everything I’ve just said above – could only obscure and reduce the reality of it. I should say, Reality with a capital R, real in a way that nothing had been before, fundamentally real, an overcoming of… samsara, I suppose, is one way to put it, one that is no more or less wrong than any other word.”

Pardon me if I roll my eyes and say, right.

Eventually he found himself hanging onto the tree for dear life, trying to convince himself that he’d just had some sort of epileptic seizure.

Frankly, I think there’s still a lot of merit to that seizure theory. He never got it checked out. A brain scan of some sort would have proven, or disproven, that. Too late now. How convenient for him.

But what the hell – a religion based on one over-educated guy’s grand mal seizure wouldn’t be so bad. I mean I’m sure religions have been founded over worse than that.

The thing is – and this is one of those stupid ass coincidences that keep Worshipers in line – that American Chestnut is still there. It’s about 50 feet tall now, and about three feet in diameter, and is now threatening to crack the walkway with its roots. And to make matters worse, Worshipers have started showing up there like it’s the fucking bodhi tree.

It’s just a tree, people.

Look in the archives – the campus botany department had inoculated that tree with a hypovirulent strain of the blight to try to protect it against the fungus. It must have worked, because the fungus is gone and the tree is still standing. And Preacher himself laughed at the notion that he had become some sort of divine tree surgeon.

But if you’re looking for metaphor, there’s also this – it’s the only mature American chestnut. Which means while it’s achieved sexual maturity, there aren’t any other trees for cross-pollenization.

Preacher proceeded to go back to the dorm and get absolutely shitfaced on vodka. His co-workers came home and found him drunk to the point of incoherence.

He went back to the library the next day and didn’t read any more books. Just keyed in his data and kept his head down. When he wasn’t working he was drinking, and soon he found it easier to just lose himself in the mindless repetition of the data entry. He worked for days straight and left after finishing his last section. On time, having made up for all the hours he wasted reading.

And he left without collecting his final paycheck.

So I tried to talk to someone at the temp agency, and they hid behind “employee confidentiality.”

Dare College had a spokesperson, a thin, slightly nervous woman with stiff blonde hair.

“We don’t,” she said to me, off the record, “comment about Worship, or the tree, or Preacher Haywood.”

Why not?

“We don’t,” she said, in the same stilted way, “want to encourage those people.”

I was down with that.

“You have no idea what it’s like,” she said conspiratorially, it being obvious to her that I was not one of “those people.” She leaned forward a little. “They just show up and stare at it. For hours. And sometimes they start… doing it, right there. It’s disgusting.”

Doing what? I asked, just to make her face turn red. It did.

“It,” she said, in a near whisper.

Of course. It.

“Ever consider a plaque?” I said. “Turning it into a tourist attraction? Charging admission?”

“The less attention paid to it,” she said, “the better. This will all fade away soon enough.” She didn’t sound too sure of that last part.

“What about chopping it down?” I said.

She looked horrified. “That tree put our forestry department on the map,” she said. “We have one of the only mature American chestnuts anywhere. The only one in Virginia, so far as anyone knows.”

“Did they ever replicate their results with any of the other American chestnuts around here?”

She launched into a very long and convoluted answer which I will summarize as:

“No.”

Of course not.

I went back to the library and there was this intense, good-looking couple standing a few feet apart and staring at the tree. Jesus. I stood under the tree and stared back at them, arms crossed, until they blinked.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

They looked peeved, very briefly, and then smiled politely. Sure. I was God, just like them. Have to be polite to an avatar of the Divine.

“How do you ward off a vampire?”

They looked at each other. “Holy water,” the girl said. She had long red hair in a ponytail. Pale, freckled legs.

“Hold up a crucifix,” the boy said. He was darker, Latino maybe, with short hair.

They looked at each other and smiled warily. Either I was nuts, or this was just the set-up for some sort of joke.

“Ever wonder how that got started?” I said.

They shrugged. “Not really,” the girl said.

“It got started because people confused a symbol for the actual thing it was supposed to represent,” I said.

They looked at me, a little bewildered. I looked at the tree meaningfully, and then back at them. Realization slowly dawned on their faces.

“Plus,” I said, “Haywood was full of shit.”