Poem: "Stones and Woods"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This poem was written outside the regular prompt calls. It is posted here in thanks for nsfwords helping with website updates. It belongs to the series Hart's Farm.


"Stones and Woods"


Hrafn's father Steinar was not pleased
to learn that Hrafn had taken in
the little stowaway named Sture.
Hrafn introduced Sture to his relatives
out of a sense of familial duty
rather than any real hope of acceptance --
it had been a long time since any action of Hrafn's
had pleased Steinar, and this reaction went as expected.

"Pleased to meet you, sir,"
Sture said with a cheeky grin.
"He's a nuisance," Steinar grumbled,
glowering at the boy as he chewed on his pipe.
"Well, he's mine now," Hrafn said firmly.

"It was very kind of you to take him in,"
Eirny said as she came out of the kitchen.
She set down a plate of bread and cheese.
"It's good to see you, and to meet Sture."

Lunch proved tense and awkward,
and Hrafn felt glad that he had sent
Gróa and Borga shopping instead.
At the end of the hour,
he himself was grateful to escape.
Hrafn and Sture strolled through town
heading for the general store.

"I like your father,"
Sture said suddenly.
Hrafn stared at him.
"What in the world for?"
he asked the boy.

"He's an arse," Sture said,
"and he doesn't try to hide it."
"I suppose I can't argue with that,"
Hrafn said with a wry laugh.

Another time when they went to the village,
Arnvid and Frida came along
with Gróa and Borga for the family visit.
People kept trying to reach out to Steinar,
which never worked,
but the farm folk were persistent.

Steinar drove off most of them in fifteen minutes.
Eventually even Sture retreated to the porch,
leaving Hrafn to ask his father yet again
to try being slightly less horrible.
Hrafn turned to go,
but something snagged his attention.

There on the old man's desk
sat a perfect carving of the Viking Stone
that stood on Hart's Farm,
with its horse and rider above
serpentine lines marked with runes.
The fine-grained birch
had been carefully weathered
to the same gray as the stone.

Steinar glanced at it, then snorted.
"You can tell that Arnvid to stop leaving things,"
he said. "Boy's not half as good as he thinks he is."

"Arnvid didn't make that for you,"
Hrafn said quietly. "Sture did.
I saw him whittling it some time ago."
Steinar's white eyebrows flew up.
"At his age?" he said. "Well, now."

Hrafn nodded. "He's quite good with a knife,"
he said. "Frighteningly good, if you think
about what a hard life he's led and
what else he might have cut besides wood."

"No wonder you've all but apprenticed him
to that lawyer friend of yours," Steinar said.
"Well, my work bores him," Hrafn said.

Steinar traced a careful fingertip over
the smooth silvered wood of the carving.
"This is not as clumsy as Arnvid's work," he said.
"You might say that to Sture," Hrafn said.

"Why would I bother?" Steinar said.
Hrafn sighed. "God knows why,
but the boy likes you," he said.

"Did you ask him why?" Steinar said.
"Oh yes," Hrafn said with a chuckle.
"I couldn't believe it at first.
He said that you're an arse
and you don't try to hide it.
Perhaps the honesty appeals to him.
I get the impression that he hasn't seen much of it."

With that, Hrafn slipped out the door
and collected Sture from the porch.
"Did Farfar say anything about the carving?"
Sture asked as they walked.
"I'm sure you have a grandfather of your own,"
Hrafn said, half-pleased and half-worried
by Sture's growing attachment to someone
that Hrafn loved but did not really like.

Sture just shrugged.
"Never knew my father's father," he said.
"So what did Farfar think?"

"He said it was less clumsy than Arnvid's work,"
Hrafn said, though it still annoyed him
that Steinar didn't respect the young carpenter.
"High praise, coming from him," Sture said.
Well. That was true.
Hrafn envied Sture his quick grasp of that.
He had taken quite a bit longer, himself.

Weeks later, when they visited again,
Steiner waved everyone into the house
except for Sture, whom he pulled into a chair
there on the front porch.
"Eirny set lunch on the table,"
Steinar said as he shooed them away.

Hrafn lingered near the door,
keeping a wary eye on his father,
but Steinar simply produced two cubes of wood
and handed one to Sture, saying,
"This is basswood. It's good for carving."
Hrafn tiptoed away before Steinar could catch him lurking.

Lunch without Steinar was more pleasant than usual,
or would have been, if Hrafn could have quit worrying
about what was going on just outside on the porch.
When they left, though, Sture was grinning
and Steinar gave them all a silent nod of farewell
instead of flinging insults at anyone.

Hrafn handed the boy a sandwich,
fresh bread piled with meat and cheese
all slathered with apple butter.
"Eirny sent that out for you," he said.

"Congratulations, Sture," said Arnvid.
"You've managed something nobody else ever has,
getting old Steinar to sweeten up a bit."
"I didn't really do anything," Sture said
around a mouthful of sandwich.

"Maybe you see something in him,"
said Arnvid, "that other people don't."
"Not really," said Sture.
"Some fields have a lot of stones,
others have hardly any.
Some woods are easy to carve,
others fight the knife all the way.
People are like that too.
You just have to work with what you get."

Then he fingered the block of basswood
from whose sleek mass a few links of chain
were just beginning to take shape.
"Sometimes, though," said Sture,
"you get to try something new."