Solomon's Oak: A Novel - By Jo-Ann Mapson Page 0,1

had been teenagers when he died. Next Glory called Halle and interrupted her appletini party because she could never get Halle’s schedule right.

This year Glory was roasting three twenty-five-pound turkeys, mashing thirty pounds of potatoes, baking a dozen loaves of baguette bread, and heaping local apples and oranges in bushel baskets borrowed from her friend Lorna, who ran the Butterfly Creek General Store. Not a yam in sight. If Dan were still alive, Glory would gladly have made yams the main course, paid attention to his grace, put her wineglass down, and waited for him to say “Amen.”

This Thanksgiving, she made gallons of mead (honey wine), lemon bumble (vodka, heavy on the lemons, to prevent scurvy), and grog, which is basically a bucket of rum with fruit thrown in. These three beverages are what pirates drink, and drink is what pirates do, on any occasion, and who can blame them, the high seas being filled with mortal danger every single second?

The dinner she was cooking was for the Thanksgiving “handfasting” ceremony of Captain General Angus McMahan and his wench-to-be, Admiral Karen Brown. Those two and their fifty-eight guests were weekend reenactment pirates who’d been turned away by every church they tried to book for their ceremony. Angus had come to Glory seeking permission to hold the wedding in the chapel Dan had built on their land last September. What would Dan have thought of her holding a wedding there? What was Glory thinking that she could cater and pull off a wedding on a national holiday?

Money.

Angus had spotted the chapel while visiting the tree known as Solomon’s Oak. It wasn’t in the AAA guidebook, but word gets around when a white oak that isn’t supposed to exist in the Central Coast Valley climate grows to be more than a hundred feet tall. The tree had stood there for three generations of the Solomon family, and who knew how long before that?

The oak set the Solomons’ property apart from that of the other ranchers, who grew strawberries, grapes, pecan trees, distilled flavored vinegar, raised hens, or ran a few head of cattle, made gourmet goat cheese to sell at the farmers’ market—whatever they could do to squeak by and keep hold of their land. Arborists bused field trippers to the tree. Horticulture professors from U.C. Santa Cruz gave lectures beneath its branches. Young men seeking a romantic setting to propose to their girlfriends could not go wrong under the shady oak. In sunny weather, plein air painters descended with field easels. If the moon was full or there was some pagan holiday, say Bridgid or Beltane, a flock of druids would show up, sometimes in clothing, other times without. The Solomons tolerated people on their property because they recognized the tree was special. Most oak trees die before they hit a hundred years of age, but Solomon’s Oak had a healthy bole, and from its circumference, the University of California, Santa Cruz, boys estimated its age at approximately 240 years.

“No one else will host our wedding,” Captain Angus said as he pleaded his case to Glory a month earlier over the fancy coffee and almond croissants he’d brought to win her over. October, once Glory’s favorite month, had been filled with golden leaves and a pile of unpaid bills. “We’ve tried the Unitarian church, the Transcendentalists, the nondenominational; I’ve even been turned down by the Masonic Temple, and those guys have a reputation for being somewhat piratical, at least in how they dress for parades.”

Glory studied him as he sat across from her at her kitchen table. “How old are you?” she asked.

“Thirty. It’s a turning point. How old are you?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“How long were you married?”

“Nearly twenty years.”

“Wow,” Angus said. “That’s a long time.”

“You’d be surprised how fast it goes by,” Glory said, brushing crumbs from her fingers.

“I’m in love, Mrs. Solomon.”

“I can see that.”

Angus had a red beard and strawberry blond hair that fell to the middle of his back. His eyes reminded her of a kid’s, sky blue and hopeful. “And I want our wedding to not just be a legal contract, but wicked, good fun.”

Glory hadn’t set foot in the chapel since Dan died. As far as she was concerned, the building could fall to rubble. Every time she went out to feed the horses she turned her back on it. Where someone else might have seen beauty in Dan’s carpentry and the river rock, all she saw was precious time wasted on faith that failed to save him.