| General Fiction posted July 7, 2023 | Chapters: |
3 4 -5- 6... 
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Kilean teaches Arie his new game
A chapter in the book Saving Mr. Calvin
Saving Mr. Calvin - Chapter 5A
by Jim Wile
| Background A story about the origin and the future of the game of golf |
See Author Notes for the list of characters and unfamiliar golf terms.
Recap of Part 1: The year is 2032, and young Kevin Parsons, living in Santa Barbara, CA, has invited his two good friends, Paul Putnam and Ernie (Dumbo) Dumbrowski, for breakfast and a round of golf afterwards. Over breakfast, the three engineers lament the sorry state of golf courses in not only California but in the rest of the country, as presumably non-golfing environmentalists are destroying the game, without specifically banning it, by destroying its field of play.
They go to the golf course, which is in terrible shape due to the lack of water and other restrictions, and meet Art Calvin, a retired golf course architect who actually designed the course they are playing. He joins the boys, and they begin their round. When they reach the 7th hole, Kevin hooks his tee shot out-of-bounds. He can see it resting on the other side of an old railroad trestle. The chapter ends as he walks beneath the trestle to go retrieve his ball.
The railroad trestle is a time portal, and all of a sudden, we are in 13th-century Holland. Kilian Pauls, a 14-year-old boy, is running out of the woods and through the fields, being chased by two big boys shouting curses at him. He hears a voice calling to him and makes for it. It is a redheaded young girl who beckons him into the entrance to a cave to hide. It appears as though they have vanished, and the followers cannot find Kilian and give up the hunt. Kilian has just met a cute young girl named Arie Papin, and the two are instantly attracted to each other. She leaves for home soon after, and Kilian starts back to his hill, where he tends sheep.
Kilian devises a plan to get his scroll back from his friend Lard who stole it. He will challenge him to a new game he devised called kolf, named after the club he uses to hit black walnut husks—the green ones that are perfectly round balls. He and Lard and another friend, Rube, have been playing the new game for several weeks, aiming at various targets in the meadows and fields. Kilian proposes that the prize for winning the game will be getting his scroll back if he wins, and getting his scroll back if he loses too, but then he will also have to teach Lard to read and write, as making fun of Lard’s illiteracy the day before is what led to the chase. They play the match, but Kilian lets Lard win because he felt badly about insulting him.
Chapter 5A
This morning, I guided the sheep closer to where I had met Arie Papin the previous day. I wandered down to the wood, but there was no sign of her. I sat down with my back against a tree. Out of a sack that I carried, I pulled the scroll I had gotten back from Lard yesterday, as well as a quill pen and ink, and began composing a poem.
The subject was clear, and the words came easily to me. Before I knew it, I had penned four stanzas and felt it was complete. I had only a title to put on it when, all of a sudden, my quill was snatched from my hand. I turned quickly around to find Arie Papin looking down at me. She was wearing a mischievous grin.
“You were very quiet; I didn’t hear a thing,” I said to her.
“We wood-elves can appear just like that,” she said as she snapped her fingers, “with no one the wiser. What are you writing?”
I quickly rolled up the scroll and tucked it in my sack. “Just a bunch of nothing. You’d think it’s silly.”
“Well, I already saw a little of it, and I don’t think it’s silly. Won’t you read it to me?”
“So, you can read too?”
“My pa taught me. I thought I saw my name,” she said as she sat down next to me.
“I’m embarrassed.”
“I won’t tell anyone about it. Please read it.”
“You won’t laugh?”
“I can’t promise that, but read it anyway. Please?”
She said the last so coyly that it was impossible to refuse her. I removed the scroll from my sack and unrolled it. “It’s a poem. It doesn’t have a name yet.”
“Maybe I can help you think of one.”
“Maybe you can. It’s about you.”
“I gathered that from seeing my name. Now read.”
And so I began:
Like an elf within the woods
Who’s full of merry-making,
There’s a girl with long red hair
Whose name is Arie Papin.
With a smile that radiates,
She laughs with great abandon.
Mysterious she seems to me,
This girl named Arie Papin.
Coming somewhere from the north
Her prior home forsaken,
She lives here now within my realm,
The elfin Arie Papin.
With freckles on her little cheeks
And sparkling eyes, I’m taken.
I hope that I will meet again
The comely Arie Papin.
I looked up at her. She smiled, grasped my hand between her two small ones, and said, “That’s beautiful, Kilian. Are they true words?”
“Yes. I couldn’t stop thinking about you since we met yesterday.”
“Nor I, you.”
We sat looking into each other’s eyes. “So, what shall I call the poem?”
“How about ‘The Elfin Girl’?
“’The Elfin Girl.’ Why, that’s perfect.”
“May I have it?”
“Of course.” I wrote the name of the poem at the top and handed the scroll to her, and as I did so, she lifted her head up and gave me a quick kiss upon the lips. I was so startled by this that I let out a laugh. She smiled and laughed too. We stood, then she placed the scroll in a pocket of her tunic, and we started walking together.
“Where do you live?” she asked me.
“I live in a small hut by that house you see off there in the distance,” I said, as I pointed to the west. It was a long structure with several porticos and gables. “We are tenants of the owner of the land surrounding that house for many hectares in each direction. We mostly manage the sheep and other animals, and we have a small plot that we farm for our own food. I spend much of my day tending to the sheep.”
“What do you have to do?”
“Well, in the early spring, we help with the birthing of the lambs. It’s quite exciting. Then, when that’s all done, we shear the sheep for the wool. In the summer months, we mostly just take them out to graze and bring them in again in the evening. We have time aplenty to ourselves then, as there isn’t much to do except guide the occasional stray back to the flock. That’s when I get together with me mates, Lard and Rube.”
“They are your friends? Why exactly were they chasing you yesterday?”
“Oh, that was nothing. I had just thrown an ill-advised insult Lard’s way, and he took great offense to it and vowed to pound me. We are often up to such shenanigans.”
“I guess he can’t read, and he didn’t like being teased?”
“You gathered that from my joke about the fish, eh? You’re very clever, Arie Papin.”
“That’s what Pa says. Too clever for my own good sometimes, and with too much sass.”
We walked for a bit more, then I turned to her and said, “Do you like to run?”
“Yes, and I’m very fast. Faster than you, it would seem from yesterday’s chase.”
“Do you see that large walnut tree about 200 paces ahead? I’ll race you.”
“Just try and catch me,” she said as she took off like a shot.
She had a good five-pace start on me before I took off too. Indeed, she was very fast, and it was all I could do to catch her up by the end as we raced by the tree together. We stood there panting and laughing.
When we’d caught our breaths, I said, “Would you like to play a game I invented a few weeks ago? It’s really fun. I call it kolven, or just kolf for short. You play it with one of these walnut husks you see here on the ground and a kolf that you can whittle from a branch. A beech tree seems to provide a sturdy enough branch for whittling. Here’s the one I made.” I reached behind the tree and grabbed my kolf, which had been leaning up against it, and showed it to her. Then I picked up the greenest nut I could find on the ground, walked over from beneath the tree, and set it on a tuft of grass.
“What you do is strike the ball with the kolf, aiming it at a tree or a rock in the distance, and try to hit it in as few strokes as you can. The person with the least number of strokes is the winner.”
“Shouldn’t they be called ‘strikes’ instead of ‘strokes?’” she asked.
“You’re right, but we started calling them strokes because we sometimes keep score by making a stroke with a bit of charcoal on a piece of birch bark or a scroll for each strike we make.”
“A stroke for a strike. That’s clever. Can I try it?”
“Shouldn’t I show you how to do it first?”
“How hard can it be? The nut is right there on the ground, not moving. Let me try it.”
“Okay, but I’m warning you. It isn’t that easy to strike it well.” I handed her the kolf then, and she held it in her right hand as she stepped up near the ball.
“Hold it in two hands. You’ll hit it much farther.”
She put her left hand on the kolf next to and above her right hand, and started by hoisting the club as high as she could without first having set it on the ground behind the ball. Stepping into it, she took a mighty downswing at the ball… and missed it completely. The momentum of the swing was so forceful, though, that the kolf came right around and smacked her on the back. She lost her balance and fell down on her butt. Rather than being embarrassed, she burst out laughing, looked up at me, and said, “I missed!”
She was so cute there on the ground, laughing, that I laughed too as I extended a hand to help her back up. With an attitude like that, this was going to be fun teaching her to play!
To be continued...
 Recognized |
kolf: a club in ancient Dutch, although today it is translated as "flask"
kolven: the verb form of the word, i.e., clubbing
CHARACTERS
Kilian Pauls: A 14-year-old shepherd boy in 1247 Holland.
Arie Papin: A 13-year-old farmgirl in 1247 Holland.
Lars (Lard) Jansen: A fellow shepherd boy and friend of Kilian.
Ruben (Rube) Meijer: Another shepherd boy and friend of Kilian.
Pays
one point
and 2 member cents. kolven: the verb form of the word, i.e., clubbing
CHARACTERS
Kilian Pauls: A 14-year-old shepherd boy in 1247 Holland.
Arie Papin: A 13-year-old farmgirl in 1247 Holland.
Lars (Lard) Jansen: A fellow shepherd boy and friend of Kilian.
Ruben (Rube) Meijer: Another shepherd boy and friend of Kilian.
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