FanStory.com - Saving Mr. Calvin - Chapter 4by Jim Wile

Chapter 4

Holland in the year 1247

I slowly walked the three furlongs back to the hill where my sheep were grazing. The day was very warm, and there were only a few clouds in the sky to provide occasional shade. We had had much rain in the spring, and the countryside was green and lush with grass—a veritable feast for the sheep. How wonderful to be a sheep and be able to graze all day in a sea of food, where your only responsibility was to eat and crap and eat some more and grow your hair.

After taking a quick inventory and finding nothing amiss, I sat down in the shade of a black walnut tree and thought about Arie Papin. I started laughing to myself as I pictured the two of us trying to keep from laughing down in that hole. My sides had actually begun to hurt, I remember, from trying to hold it in.

Just then I thought of writing a poem about her, but I had no scroll to write on, as Lard had snatched it from me earlier. I decided to go over to the next hill, where I hoped he had returned, and get it back from him. I knew it would take a contest, but I wasn’t worried about that.

I looked around on the ground for a suitable black walnut husk, but all those had started turning brown and mushy, so I shinnied up the tree a ways, grabbed a few green ones, and slipped them into my pocket. They were nice and hard and made a perfect ball that would last a good while before splitting apart. When I got down, I picked up my kolf that I had fashioned from a beech tree branch. I carried it over my shoulder to an open area, pulled one of the round, green walnut balls from my pocket, and set it on a tuft of grass that had been grazed short by my sheep. I took a stance to the side of the walnut ball with my legs spread apart, aimed for the hill where Lard and Rube probably were, and placed the head of the kolf behind my ball. Then I raised it up and back before swinging it down and into the ball, which went sailing off through the air with a solid whack.

I had thought of this idea a couple of weeks ago when the walnut husks first started achieving a suitable size. I had been kolven reluctant sheep in the rump for some time to get them moving when my dog was not around, and out of boredom one day, I decided to try kolven a walnut husk. I found that I could strike the nut more solidly if I gripped the kolf with two hands rather than just one. A sheep’s bottom was a large enough target that a one-handed whack was sufficiently accurate, but the walnut required two hands to be able to hit such a small target squarely. Plus, I found that I could swing the kolf with more power using two arms than just one and thus hit the ball farther.

It was fun to just whack them, but then I decided I needed a target to aim for and made a game out of it—to see how many strikes at the ball it would take to reach and then to hit a boulder 300 paces away. It took five strikes to reach the vicinity, then perhaps another one or two to strike it.

I showed this new game to Lard and Rube and my two younger brothers, and they were eager to try it out themselves. They fashioned their own kolfs, and we began aiming at all kinds of targets spread through the meadows and fields—mostly boulders and tree trunks. It was great fun and passed the time remarkably well. Shepherding can be a boring job, with short spells of frenzied activity as the sheep are moved to the field and moved back again in the evening, with long, idle hours in between. We had decided to call our new game “kolven” then abbreviated it to simply "kolf" after the kolfs we used to strike the balls.

Lard and Rube’s hill was two furlongs away, and it took me six or seven strikes to reach the bottom, then another two or three to reach the crest. I found them just on the other side, with their backs against a sturdy walnut tree trunk. They appeared to be asleep.

I quietly walked up while pulling another nut from my pocket. With that one plus the one I had been using, I stood over the slumbering figures and dropped a nut onto each of their hatless heads.

Lard woke with a start and blurted out, “Hello, hello, what’s this?” He started rubbing his head, and when his eyes focused on me, he said, “Eh, what are you up to, Kilian? And where did you get to earlier?”

“I vanished like a wraith. I was there all the time; you just couldn’t see me.”

“And yer fulla’ sheep shit!”

The nut seems to have had no effect on Rube, who kept snoring away. Lard poked him in the side and said, “Wake up, you big lunk. Look who’s here.”

Rube opened his eyes and began rubbing them. It took him a bit to focus, and when he finally realized who was standing before him, he said, “Me an’ Lard thowt ya disappeared.”

“I did.”

“See, I told ya,” Rube said to Lard.

Rube, whose full name was Ruben Meijer, was 17 years old and not overly bright, but he was huge and very strong. He was Lard’s constant companion. Lard’s real name was Lars Jansen. He was 15 and also quite large for his age, although he tended more towards fat than muscle. He was bright enough—much brighter than Rube—but illiterate. We were all friends, but Lard and Rube were never seen apart.

“I’ve come to get my scroll back from you, Lard.”

“Why should I give it back after you insulted me the way you done?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry now about that, but I really need it back, so how about a competition at kolf? If I win, you give it back, and if you win, you still give it back, but I teach you to read and write.”

He thought it over for a moment. “Alright. Teach Rube too, and you got a deal.”

I looked over at Rube, who wasn’t paying any attention. He was pulling wax from his ears and putting it in his mouth.

“Uh… okay,” I said. “I’ll throw that in too, though I don’t think it’s possible. Go ahead and pick a target.”

Lard pointed to a copse of cottonwood trees about three furlongs away to the south. The day was clear and bright with no hint of haze, so the target was quite visible. “Hit that last one on the right with the least strikes, and that’s the winner. Rube, you keep score on Kilian’s scroll.”

“Ya knows I dunna count sa good, Lard.”

Lard handed him the scroll he had tucked in his breeches and a small charred stick he found in the remains of a fire they had made the previous evening. “Just make a stroke with this stick for each strike we take. At the end, we’ll see who has the least strokes. You think you could manage that?”

“I’ll do me best, Lard.”

Lard retrieved his kolf and pocketed a few walnut balls he found on the ground that hadn’t started to turn brown yet, and we headed over to a clear area away from the trees. He went first and whacked a good one down the field where his sheep were grazing, taking care to aim away from them. I put my walnut ball down on the short grass and hit a similar shot. We had decided to call them “shots” for the way they shot away when well-struck. Rube faithfully recorded each one on the scroll with a stroke of the burned stick.

I normally hit my shots farther than Lard, but because I felt badly for insulting his inability to read earlier, thus provoking the chase with a threat of pounding, I decided to let him win and help him learn to read. My mother had patiently taken the time to teach me and my brothers to read and write, but I guess Lard’s ma or pa never had. There was no other way for him to learn, and I felt sorry for him.

I kept pace with him and did not put any extra effort into my shots to pull ahead. Toward the end, as we neared the goal, I purposely “topped” a shot or two by consciously striking the ball near its top rather than the middle or bottom. They skittered along the ground and lost a lot of distance in the process. It took me an extra shot to make up the distance I had lost, and we knew Lard was the winner when his final shot hit the trunk. We asked Rube to show us the scroll to see the final tally, but the ninnyhammer had made all the strokes in a single line, so there was no way to distinguish whose were whose. It didn’t matter because we both knew that Lard had won by a single stroke.

When Lard saw what Rube had done to the score tally, he said to me, “Forget the second part of the bet. Teaching me to read will be good enough.”

“That’s a relief!”

He snatched the scroll from Rube, handed it to me, and I told him I’d start teaching him on the morrow.