“When do we start to pick oranges?” I asked the man who had loaned me his book.
“It’s not long now,” he told me. “We like to get everyone warmed up first. Besides, we want to make the oranges feel at home.” I thought he was joking – but his face was serious.
After a while a rather fat man took over from the song leader and, after reading two sentences from his well-thumbed copy of the Orange Picker’s Manual, began to make a speech. I wasn’t clear whether he was addressing the people or the oranges.
I glanced beyond me and saw a number of groups of people similar to our own group gathering around an occasional tree and being addressed by other fat men. Some of the trees had no one around them.
“Which trees do we pick from?” I asked the man beside me. He did not seem to understand, so I pointed to the trees round about.
“This is our tree,” he said, pointing to the one we were gathered around.
“But there are too many of us to pick from just one tree,” I protested. “Why, there are more people than oranges?”
“But we don’t pick oranges,” the man explained. “We haven’t been called. That’s the Pastor Orange Picker’s job. We’re here to support him. Besides we haven’t been to college. You need to know how an orange thinks before you can pick it successfully – orange psychology, you know. Most of these folk here,” he went on, pointing to the congregation, “have never been to Manual School.”
“Manual School,” I whispered. “What’s that?”
“It’s where they go to study the Orange Picker’s Manual,” my informant went on. “It’s very hard to understand. You need years of study before it makes sense.”
“I see,” I murmured. “I had no idea that picking oranges was so difficult.”
The fat man at the front was still making his speech. His face was red, and he appeared to be indignant about something. So far as I could see there was rivalry with some of the other “orange-picking” groups. But a moment later a glow came on his face.
“But we are not forsaken,” he said. “We have much to be thankful for. Last week we saw THREE ORANGES BROUGHT INTO OUR BASKETS, and we are now completely debt-free from the money we owed on the new cushion covers that grace the seats you now sit on.”
“Isn’t it wonderful?” the man next to me murmured. I made no reply. I felt that something must be profoundly wrong somewhere. All this seemed to be a very roundabout way of picking oranges.
The fat man was reaching a climax in his speech. The atmosphere seemed tense. Then with a very dramatic gesture he reached two of the oranges, plucked them from the branch, and placed them in the basket at his feet. The applause was deafening
