The boy lines up his tools. Each one, worn and polished smooth from the wear of other’s hands. He is learning their names. He likes that each has a name, a name that now belongs to him. “Poppy’s spoke shave,” he reports, pointing out his great grandfather’s tool. “Draw Knife, he says next, picking it up and holding it forward. “Poppy’s file,” he identifies as well so as not to leave anything out.
Then he turns his concentration to the task: shaping, carving and smoothing a shaft of wood held tight in the vise. “Vise,” he also repeats to himself, as if to honor vocabulary as well its application. After a few minutes, giving each of his three tools a proper work-out, he carefully replaces the tools on the bench and picks up a near-by broom sweeping his wood shavings into a heap by the front door. “So you don’t slip,” he explains, an act of responsibility with a nod to his grandfather. He is all business, an 8-year-old’s business.
The business of making a bow and arrow with his grandfather. A sort of real one. Not the one he had once fashioned out of the parts of an old erector set–plastic screws attached to oblong, plastic strips. It looked a bit bow-ish with a little imagination, which is not in short supply given his seven almost 8-year-old-self. But that was then. Now, he’s older, taller and starting a new grade in school. He’s full of new possibilities, the one that heads down the stairs, not upstairs with the toys. Downstairs leads to his grandfather’s workshop and to a newly proprietorial partnership. “We’re downstairs in our workshop. So don’t worry,” he informs his grandmother, coming back upstairs for a brief moment. (Grandma notes the possessive pronoun —“our workshop indeed!”.)
Grandpa’s woodshop is a sacred if cramped space, lined with implements, salvaged wood and half-completed projects. It is part museum and part bee hive, with complex machinery and archived tools handed down from a father to his son, cementing their active partnership, one that developed later on in their lives. Together they built the extension on our house. Together they built the stairs inside and the ones that lead to the workshop. Together they constructed a tidy, sailing dingy, that Poppy, a professional ship builder, designed, though in truth, it had only a few and not so successful launches. (Our failure not Poppy’s boat.)
Of course, the invitation for the boy to enter the workshop comes with a few contingencies. A doting grandfather first, but a serious craftsman second, means strict rules. “The only button you can push is the light switch, right?” Grandpa says, with a stern voice. “Right?”
“Got it,” the boy replies. Tools, he instructs the boy, require focus and proper use, assessing the sharp blades of the spoke shave and draw knife and the raspy teeth of the file. There is a hand-hold, a posture, a respect. Grandpa demonstrates. He places his large, calloused hand over the boy’s smaller one and together they proceed with careful measure. Back and forth. Back and forth. The boy performs, not just the successive motions of blades on wood, but the placement of feet, the expressive intake of breath and pursing of lips. The boy takes all this in, no doubt, just as his grandfather once did from his father.
New passages forge generations. Including this grandfather and this grandson, who is already installed and intent on the task of constructing his bow and arrow. No longer the toy version, not exactly the hunter’s version either, but realized out of the collaboration of wood and twine, maybe a final chicken feather and love.
Ruth Charney lives in Greenfield with her husband and two cats.