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"Orgs ... For All the Grandchildren"

No so many years ago, orgs were discovered in Maine where they lived in very large oak trees.

Most people have not seen orgs because they are very secretive. They are so gruesome looking and so scary that you would not want to see one anyway. If you happened to see one in an org oak tree it could scare the living moles off of you, your skin would shake and turn very pale – white, white, white with fear, and any little pimple or mole would fall off, scared off your skin! Some people want moles to fall off, but this is not the way. It is so much more terrifying to see an org than to have someone scare you any other way, like the way they do to try to get you stop hiccuping.

But let me tell you what happened to Terry and Jane McCrorey. They are the nine and seven-year old children of Bess and Lee McCrorey, a lobstering family at West Tremont on Mt. Desert Island, Maine.

One evening, when Dad McCrorey had brought the lobster boat into the dock, three miles from their home, Terry and Jane had helped out with the lines and traps, with cleaning up the boat, checking bait … all the things they did to prepare for the next day’s work. Then, chores done, they told Dad they would walk along the carriage road, the long way, to the little house with the large stone fireplace where they lived up from the rock and cliffy shore.

Certainly there was nothing to worry about as they started out. Though night was coming on, the moon was coming on full, and they could see quite well. There are no dangerous animals and no poisonous snakes on Mt. Desert, so they would be safe. Dad said, “O.K.”

So Terry and Jane were walking along, climbing slowly up one side of Sergeant Mountain on the carriage road, singing an old campfire song, when they approached the GRANDPARENT OF ALL OAK TREES on the 23 mile long island. That tree was larger than huge, huger than stupendous! Each branch was the size of a large tree trunk, and the branches extended out all the way over the road. The leaves blocked out sight of the rising moon. It was DARK, and it was quiet there, as quiet as the deeps of the ocean … nothing was stirring, no wind even. The leaves did not even quiver. IT WAS DEAD SILENT – a close and silent night closing in on the children.

Jane and Terry McCrorey remembered having seen that very tree before in full daylight. It looked like a giant sequoia to them. It was the biggest tree they had ever seen in their entire lives. Once they had talked about how great it would be to climb that tree, maybe even to build a tree house in it with a window from which to look out through the leaves down the mountain and out to sea. They had talked that way in the daytime, but now the night was approaching. Still, they thought it would be fun to climb just a little way up into the tree … What harm in that?

There was one enormous thicker than thick branch that swung down from the tree close to the shoulder of the road. They thought they could climb up on that branch – just a little way – give it a try.

So that is what they did. It wasn’t all that easy, mind you. It is true the branch was super big and low but they had to pick their way through the leaves and twigs and acorns and smaller branches and suckers growing straight up – all the spiny hard growing appendages on the great branch, and oak twigs and small branches are tough, sometime even prickly-like. You can cut your fingers on an oak if you are not careful, and receive bad scratches on the face or hurt your eyes if a branch should swing back and strike you in the face.

No wonder the Druids once thought the oak trees were sacred. The kids had read about the Druids, about the magic of the mistletoe in oak trees, about special arrows made of oak, about the green clouds in the sky that the largest oaks appeared to be from a distance, and how mysterious they were tall, dark, hard, and up close.

Still, Terry said, “Come on, Jane, let’s go higher.” So they did that … Terry up above and Jane picking her way along the branch toward him when Terry slipped, lost his footing, grabbed at the branch with both arms, swung with all his weight down, his feet hanging in the air, scraped his neck, and caught himself … hanging there … SCARED THE NIGHTLIGHTS OUT OF HIM!

He was just shimmying around to get his feet safely back on the branch beside Jane WHEN … O MY GOSH! They saw something bigger around than the branch, as big or bigger than what they thought a mountain lion would look like and far more terrible … SOMETHING half sitting, half lying on a branch higher up, looking down at them with its immense yellow eyes, yellow eyes flecked with brown and with hundreds of roadmap-like red lines running all across the white parts of each eye.

WHAT WAS IT? They shivered. They could not run. They were too high up now to jump. They froze. They were scared stiff – literally stiff and could not move, not a toe or a dimple.

This “THING” had a belly like the underside of a shark (so they guessed), but monstrous, bigger around than ten of their stomachs put together would have been. And its underside had barnacle-like hard bumps on it. They could see a little now as the moon rose higher and shone through the leaves. And whiskers – WHISKERS – were growing out of each bump, evil looking whip-like whiskers as thick as heavy black waxed thongs.

And this “THING” had four legs – like it might have evolved from a spider into a bloody beast – and each leg had a foot-hand on the end of it as gorillas have, each foot-hand grasping a branch. Furthermore, it had two multi-muscled arms, each one as big around as a telegraph pole, each with seven fingered hands at the extremes of its long reach, and each finger with retractable slicing knife nails protruding out of the very ends. The colossal creature sat there above the children drawing its nails in and out of the ends of its fingers like so many sharp saws. The kids were terrified.

This BEING had a tail, too, an octopus appendage attached to its rear, with suction cups all over it, each one sucking and sticking and letting go with little “pops” as it felt and moved about the branches and trunk of the tree – each gooey suction cup sounding like a suction rubber pulled from a piece of glass.

BUT THE WORST LOOKING THING OF ALL WAS THE HEAD! HOLY-MOLEY-BEELZEBUB’S-UNDERWEAR!!!!! The head looked like a whopping bulky shapeless mass of dried blood that had somehow oozed down the sides of once pink flesh and covered it nearly all over in frozen rivulets of hardened scabs, and from each scab there was white stuff coming slowly out forming dozens of pustules all over the head with those enormous eyes planted in the middle of it all. Then there were green long pointed dripping fangs sticking out of its cavernous mouth, and a bumpy spike bilious orangish tongue spilling out of the great hole of a mouth between the fangs and hanging down drooling yellow saliva, and a blistering swelling massive nose that was all warts except for the nostrils, each as big as dark quarters and disappearing up into that meaty mass but with dribbling light green slime, bubbles and dried lumps of mucous running out of them down over gargantuan lips over the chin of this monster.

The children were frozen in fright. The giant’s ears were massive, too, they noticed. They were afraid to look at it, but somehow could not take their eyes off of this unbelievably horrible looking THING-OUT-OF-ANOTHER-AGE. Here were hulking flappers, elephantine, with clumps of hair growing out of them and ear wax coming down in waxen secretions and sluffs. It looked as though someone had melted candles inside the creature’s head and poured out the sickening infectious wax from its ears, GRUESOME!

What in the world was this thing? Would it eat them – squash their heads and gnaw their bones, and suck the blood clean out of them like sucking a milkshake up a straw? They were much too frightened to move, or to speak, Terry and Jane. They just clung to the oak branch and shook like tinsel on a thrown out Christmas tree in the winds; sad, forlorn, chilled, down and out.

Then, all of a sudden, the creature spoke … REALLY, IT DID! It actually had a voice. What do you know! It spoke English! It was a large voice, not so much loud as deep and full, but strangely, kind and gentle. Strange, indeed. And it said, “I AM OSCAR, THE ORG. DO NOT BE AFRAID. I will not hurt you.”

The kids were still too scared to speak. They started to cry. Oscar said, “Aw, don’t cry, kids. I’ll be your friend. I do not make friends with adult humans because they do not believe in orgs … and they sometimes carry guns, and they go hunting, and if they saw me or any of org friends they would shoot us. But, truly, we orgs would not hurt a bug much less a human being. We only eat acorns, like the squirrels do, which is why we live in oak trees.”

The children still were afraid and could not say anything, so Oscar continued, “You think we are scary looking, but humans are just as scary looking to orgs. Suppose you were an org kid and you saw your first human. That would scare you as much as you kids were frightened when you saw me. And we have more reason to be afraid. Human people each meat!

We are made of meat just like you are but we do not eat it. We do not even eat lobsters which you do. We dine on acorns; raw, roasted, peeled, shredded, sliced, casseroled, baked, in spreads, minced, fried, broiled … why, did you know there are 113 ways of preparing acorns? Ummmm – delicious, but we would never NEVER eat meat. So we just drink rain water and eat our acorns and mind our own business and hide in big oak trees from human beings.”

“I – I – I th – th – thi – think wuh – we have to g – g – g go home,” stammered Terry. “Come on Janey, luh – le – le – let’s go.”

With that Terry rediscovered his strength and his muscles, he swung around swiftly … AND FELL OUT OF THE TREE –– OR HE WOULD HAVE, but Oscar, drawing his knife-like nails back into his fingers, sheathing them like lightening, flung himself down while holding to the trees by his octopus-like tail, grabbed Terry by the shirt and plucked him out of the air to sit him down gently on the branch. You would have thought Terry was a much loved iddy-biddy baby, Oscar was so caring and careful with him.

“You kids go along now. You can see that I would never hurt you. In fact, I’ll make you a promise. If you are ever in the woods and you should ever need help, just call out, “Oscar, help me!" and I will come.

Young Jane’s eyes had just about returned to their normal size by now as she got over her wide-eyed fright. She could begin to move now, and, with her brother, made her way branch by branch slowly out of the giant oak and back to the carriage road. They called “goodbye” to Oscar, and started home.

“One more thing,” said Oscar from high in the tree now but in his low mellifluous flowing bass voice, “PLEASE DO NOT TELL ANYONE THAT YOU MET ME, EITHER THEY WILL NOT BELIEVE YOU, OR THEY WILL ORGANIZE AN ORG HUNTING GROUP TO COME AFTER ME. Please.”

“We promise,” said the children.

They walked a little while talking about the unbelievable experience they had had, and Jane said, “I think he was really nice … when you forget what he looks like.”

“Yeah,” murmured Terry, “but I never felt anything as strong as his hands … still, he did not hurt me. He kept me from falling.”

They walked on. It was getting quite a bit later now. "Let’s take the deer run path down to Jordan Pond,” said Terry. “It’s a short cut. We have to get home lickiddy-split!”

So they did that. It had grown pretty dark despite the full moon with the clouds in the sky and all the spruce and fir boughs that came together high over the path. Sometimes the rocks were slippery and wet, and there was danger of slipping on fallen needles, too. The deer run path is not so easy to take even on a dry hot day and here the children were trying to hurry down it at night with mountain mist rolling in.

They turned where the trail angled off between the house-sized boulders, through the ferns that grow from the cracks along the narrowing way. Then – just then – Jane lost her balance. She started to slide – down – down – down a slippery and slanting rock toward the stream, then into it, and down some more, splashing through the water and plunging out over the waterfall – OVER THE CLIFF. They had forgotten about the waterfall and the cliff as they hurried through the night. This spot was so beautiful in the daytime – the cliff, the dramatic waterfall so lovely and so near the trail. They had been that way before but had never been in danger of falling.

“OSCAR!” Jane screamed!

Like a flash of the swiftest darkness a PRESENCE hurtled through the night just as Jane fell and just as Terry was shouting, “Help! Help!” Then, like a bolt of power from another world, something immense hit the water far below the cliff, righted itself on the slimy green boulders, attached itself to one of them with the immovable strength of a hundred powerful suction grippers, braced itself, lifted up its arms, AND CAUGHT JANE – “PURRLUMP!!!” before she would have been dashed to smithereens on the rocks at the bottom.

It was OSCAR! How could they have known they would need him so soon? They had only just met him.

“Oscar, oh Oscar, you saved me,” said Jane, and she gave him a kiss – she really did, right on his scabrous cheek, and, if you could have seen Oscar at that moment in full light you would have seen that he turned bright red. He was blushing. He said, “AW, SHUCKS, AW GEE WHIZ – WELL, IT WAS NOTHING … NOTHING …”

How did he get there so fast when they needed him? Terry might have said Oscar was “smitten” by Jane. He was in love, and Jane was still a child. Whatever the reason, Oscar, having made his new friends, had decided to follow them home this one time to see where they lived, hoping they could visit again some safe time. So, he wasn’t far away from when the kids took deer run trail … “Uh, oh,” Oscar had said to himself. He could see what might happen in the dark … so he was there ready to fling himself into action when it did.

Jane and Terry were really “beat” when they go home – wet, tired, scratched, clothes torn.

“What in the world happened to you two?” asked mom.

“We fell down in the dark.”

Well that was true. They would not tell a lie. They just left some of the details … like about Oscar, for example. They remembered their promise. And they might need him again some day. “Please do not tell adults,” they remembered, “they will not understand or believe.”

One supposes that you, too, may not think this is true story, but let me tell you this. You just go to Maine to Mt. Desert Island, and take the Rockefeller Carriage Road up to Jordan Pond around Sergeant Mountain sometime, especially at dusk, and if you see the biggest oak tree you have ever seen in your life (AND YOU ARE A KID, AND ALONE) just step up on that low swung branch of the tree and call out, “Oscar … Oscar the Org,” and see what happens. It will make a believer of you. Really!

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jamoore wrote

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