Chapter 8: Thatching

The house was like any other in the town, despite being on the edge and all by itself. It was constructed of the same sort of rough-cut boards that were put in place and the gaps between them filled in with the chinking. If I had to guess the house was roughly around five hundred or so square feet and consisted of, much like Hrofdaal’s house, a single room. The inside of it was bare, the central hearth still full of ashes from the last fire that had burned there apparently some five years ago. The inside was daubed, but it appeared as though that would need to be repaired as it was cracked and falling off of the walls in most places revealing the wood and chinking on the inside. Aside from that, there would need to be a new door made for the front of the house, and most importantly the roof needed thatching.

Now I say it needed thatching because there was practically none of the straw or hay or what have you that would have made the roof there at all. In fact, I was able to look up and see the sky through the beams high overhead. This had caused a number of problems, problems like the fact that without a roof the weather had gotten into the house and now several of the floor beams were, well, let us say quite springy when you stepped on them.

Apparently the man who had owned this house before me had passed away some five or so years ago. According to Hrofdaal they had come to check on him when he hadn't come to town for some time and found him dead in his bed, having simply passed away in his sleep. He had been a miller and when he passed his loss was sorely felt by the town as he had been the man that they brought their grain to in order to get it crushed and ground down. He did this work with two stones that were large and rather circular each with a hole in the middle of them. Apparently you put the grain on the tip of one stone, then placed the other stone on top of that and placed a wooden rod through both, the top stone had a hook on it and it would be attached to a harness put on a Brvost he would then make the animal walk in circles and the weight and rotation of the stone would grind the grain up into flour. Since his death there hadn't been another miller which meant that everyone was having to either buy flour from traders that came through every so often or they were having to grind their own at home like Hrofdaal’s wife did.

I personally wasn't going to be a miller, so they were going to have to keep doing that themselves but the idea of having a trade to ply was something I was going to have to put some consideration into, after all, I was living here now and if I wanted to keep the place I was going to have to do something my coin wasn't going to last forever. That however was a topic for later though, for now, the task at hand was thatching this roof and getting this house generally in better shape.

I was busy pondering how exactly I was going to go about thatching the roof when I had never done anything even remotely like that when Hrofdaal provided the answer; as he left he called over his shoulder to me that he and some of the other men in town would be out first thing tomorrow to help get the roof up. This apparently wasn't him just being nice, this was how all construction was done in the village, apparently when someone else needed help thatching or something else it was common for a group of men that had less to do that day would come and help. Kind of like in Amish communities where all the men would come together to raise a barn or something. Perhaps this wouldn't have been so surprising if I had considered the lifestyles of the people, but for me, an American this level of community involvement was above and beyond what I had been expecting, and I made note of it, as it meant that when someone else needed help I would be culturally expected to offer a hand, good to know.

True to his word Hrofdaal and seven other men from the village came down to help me with the roof, I made sure to grasp each man by the forearm and made an attempt to learn their names, but in all honesty that was something that was going to have to take more time and effort than just this single introduction. The actual process of thatching was quite interesting, the first thing that needed done was the cutting of the actual thatch. This was done in a nearby field where the grass had grown as tall as a man and the stalks were dried out, we went out there with a scythe, the look of which was almost exactly like the grim reapers but it had two pegs on the side of the shaft, allowing the user to hold it level to the ground with more ease and precision.

Once cut the thatch was gathered and carried up to the roof, where it was laid and the liggers were put over it. Liggers apparently were thin quartered hazel sticks that ran horizontally across the bundles of thatch and were pinned in place with a spar, which was a hazel stick that had been split, sharpened on both ends, and then twisted into a sort of U shape creating a stake. This take was pushed through the thatching and poked out on the inside of the house where twine was used to tightly tie it together and then to the rafters and beams, holding everything in place. Once one row was done it was time to do the next row up, and so on and so forth until both sides of the roof were covered in thatching.

After a quick lunch, the dressing process began, which essentially was hitting the layers of thatching up so that instead of rows stacked on rows there was a nice smooth slope all the way up. It didn't take more than an hour to dress the entire roof and finish off tying everything together. Honestly I was surprised at the speed at which it all came together, I thought this would be a week long project, but with a team of seven guys who had clearly done this multiple times before it hadn't even taken half a day.

With the roof on I decided to move into the property, despite the rotten floorboards and the lack of a front door. It wasn't a bad night, but it also wasn't the most pleasant seeing as there wasn't even a bed for me to sleep on. That was the first thing I was going to fix, well, that and the door that was. Unlike on earth it wasn't possible to go and just purchase something like that, so I was going to need tools as such the man to go to was the local blacksmith. Or at least that had been my initial thoughts.

“No, I sell all of my wares to Vrills,” the blacksmith was a barrel of a man, smaller than me still by a good four inches, but clearly one of the taller individuals in town, and his arms and shoulders would have made a weight lifter proud. Like a lot of really, really strong men he wasn't all defined muscles either, he had a good amount of fat on him. It manifested itself in his middle section and while I would never actually call him fat he did have a sort of roundness about him, kind of like the professional deadlifts you see in real competitions, after all you need some fat to sustain muscles like that if you don't have things like protein shakes and whatnot. He wore over his clothing a leather apron that was burned in a number of locations and had a good amount of scarring on it, as well as more than a few sweat stains. “I repair things brought to me, do commissions, but I sale other things to Vrills, his place is down the road to the left.”

“Thank you, I may need to come and commission something in the future,” I said to him and made my way out and down the road he had indicated. I was getting a number of stares, this was to be expected, after all I was the foreigner that had just moved into town and most of those stares were curious, but some were of a more hostile variety, untrusting of the outsider among them. Small town and all that. The actual shop was easy enough to find, though it looked exactly like every other building in the area, wood, chinking, thatched roof. The main difference was the small board that hung from a beam that stuck out over the door. The sign didn't have any actual words on it, but it did have a picture on it. It was kind of hard to make out seeing as it was rather weathered but it looked a little like a hay fork or some sort of tool.

The inside of the shop was, well, it was a house. There were no countertops behind which the owner stood, there was no displays on the walls on which the merchandise hung, hell there weren't even any barrels with tools sticking out of them, in fact, I had thought I had entered the wrong home when a woman came up to me and smiled. She looked to be in her early thirties and had her hair tied back with a scarf or handkerchief or something, she was wearing a blue dress with a white apron over it.

“Hello, may I help you?” she asked, and I nodded.

“I was looking for Vrills’s shop-” I started, and before I could even finish the words she smiled and started talking herself.

“And you are in the right spot, this is Vrills’s shop and I am indeed Vrills.” She looked at me expectantly, and it took me a half of a second to understand what she was expecting from me. Obviously in times like this the idea of a woman owning a shop was, well, about as foreign as I was. That was less of an issue for me than with men around here, I was sure, and so just to throw her off I decided to not follow the script she was expecting.

“It is a pleasure to meet you,” I said, laying on my best-disarming smile, it was a smile I had had some success with back in college, and it seemed to work here just a good. She opened and closed her mouth, the prepared response she had ready no longer working for this situation. “I was talking to the blacksmith and he said that he sold most of his items to you and only really did repair and commission, I was wondering, do you have tools for sale?”

“Tools?” she echoed, her brain still turning as she tried to process the different direction this conversation was going, it was really quite fun to watch.

“Yes tools,” I said. “Specifically an axe, a hammer, some nails, and a saw would be handy,” I said ticking them off of my fingers. Yeah, that should get me started, it wouldn't be everything I needed but it would do most of the work, especially seeing as I still had my antler-handled knife that me and dad had made.

“Uh, ye-yes,” she said, blinking her eyes and aligning her thoughts in order, “we have hammers and nails, and an axe, though I have no idea what a saw is, can you describe it for me?” That took me aback, but then again perhaps they had a different name for it.

“It is a piece of metal, normally thin with sharp points running along one side, it's used to cut planks out of lumber,” I said, and she looked at me blankly.

“I have never heard of one, and the description isn't bringing forth any memories.” That made me blink, after all, if they didn't have saws how exactly did they make planks, like the ones that made up literally all of these houses?

“How exactly do you make a plank of wood here?” I asked, deciding that was a question that needed answering.

“You hack a line in the log with an axe and then use wedges to split it along that line,” she said as though I was an idiot. And sure, that would work, it would indeed make a rough plank, but a saw should be so easy to make the idea seemed insane to me. If they didn't have saws then I was going to have to have that blacksmith make me one, but that was for later.

“I will take the axe, hammer and nails then,” I said to her, and she smiled at me before asking me to wait while she retrieved them.