"Suzette Haden Elgin - Lo how an Oak e'er Blooming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elgin Suzette Haden)

LO, HOW AN OAK E'ER BLOOMING
Suzette Haden Elgin

[24 nov 2001—scanned and proofed by #bookz]

The power of faith is not to be underestimated. Science is often confronted with thi
s—with recovery from incurable diseases, with events that run counter to
prediction, with such items as Charles Fort or Immanual Velikovsky drag out into
the light that confound conservative scientists. Here's a story of a miracle that may
or may not be scientifically explained.

The day that she caused the miracle, Willow Severty was just plain tired. The women in the
audience had been thrashing her a good half hour, and she'd been patiently bearing that, working away
one word at a time toward somehow making them understand. But they were angry, at her and at the
world, and they would not let Willow be. And when words failed her, Willow turned in utter weariness to
deeds. One deed, to be precise.
She stood there sagging under the lash of their tongues, looking more and more battered and useless
every minute. And then she gave herself a sort of shake, the way a tired animal will shake off water, and
she raised her two hands before her to ward the other women off.
"That's enough," she said, standing there at the front of the room before the rows of chairs, beside
the speaker's lectern. "That's more than enough. I'm sorry you're so dissatisfied with me, but I can't do
any better. And I tell you you're wrong, with that laundry list of yours. I tell you there've been laws
written down since first men could record their wickedness and their pride—and there has always been a
way to make those laws no more than chicken scratches. Laws are like wars—of their making there is no
end, and they're not worth warm spit. I tell you, what we need is a miracle.''
They would have interrupted her if she'd paused, and she knew that, so she went right on.
"A miracle!" Willow said again. "Something that money and power and law and science and war
cannot do. I've had enough of words—they ignore words anyway—it's time now for signs. Signs and
portents. We need a miracle to show them. . . ." And she had smiled an exhausted smile and added, "Just
a very small miracle will do. It doesn't have to be the levitation of the Pentagon. It will be sufficient if—W
illow looked around her, and out over their heads toward the windows at the back of the conference
room, and she saw something that would serve her purpose. "It would be sufficient for that bare oak tree,
standing out there naked in the snow, to burst all at once into glorious bloom. That would be miracle
enough."
And she had drawn a deep breath, and it was so.

Well. It isn't every day that a big oak flowers in the middle of deep winter, or any other time. This
flowering was preposterous; it offended all the sensibilities. The experts came in twos and threes —the
botanists and the biologists and the linear and nonlinear dynamicists and the horticulturists and even the
physicists. When the careful dissection of one of the perfect yellow blooms, as big as a teacup, proved
beyond any question that it was indeed a real flower, a genuine plant form growing, and not—as they had
first assumed—a creation of plastic or silk or some other man-made substance, there were cautious
articles in the scholarly journals about the matter. With photographs of cross sections of the blossom and
its parts under the microscope, from a variety of angles and points of view. The botanists, who'd been
rather out of it the past decade or so, preened themselves in the center circle of scientific attention and
faced the difficult questions.
"What is it, exactly?"
"An anomaly," they said solemnly.
 "What are those flowers?"
"We don't know. Sorry."