[OOC Note: This adventure was for a version of Fenley, Fenley Brittleleaf, created for an RP situation that never came to pass. I am rebooting the character for a new RP opportunity. Thus, the following writing does not apply to the current Fenley Plumwood. It is preserved for historical purposes only. After all, there could be two people with the name Fenley in Bree-land!]
Assembling trusses and putting them into place takes a lot of hard, sweaty work, the kind that makes a man strip down even in winter. Fenley spent a few days at the sawhorses and the pulleys, ignoring Jake while the dog barked and barreled around looking for attention. The carpenter's focus was a thing to see, especially because how often his current Master, Carver Greenlake, instead saw the boy meander off on whatever shenanigans caught his eye that day. But for this effort, Fenley was as diligent as a bird making a nest in spring. Jake would spend some time play-bowing, then barking, then sulking, then romping in circles around Fenley or the sawhorses, then running off into the field, and about then he'd forget how he started and go back to the beginning, but for once Fenley ignored it all.
Putting the trusses together took up the first day. He had to carefully select the timbers for different parts of the trusses, ensuring the weakest part of their grain was aligned opposite where the greatest stress and torque would be placed. The timber with a horizontal shear plane would be placed as a vertical joist, while one with an angled shear would be rotated to place it obverse to the angle of the miter cuts. It was repetitive work, with a lot of exhausting sawing and lifting, but it was all done on the sawhorses, and safe -- at least as safe as any work involving saws and nails could be.
The second day was when things got fretful. Each assembled truss weighed more than Fenley, and had to be hauled up to the top of the barn's support frame, more than three times his height, on a complex system of pulleys and ropes. This drew out at least as much sweat as assembling the trusses had, but it had the added element of terror. If his glove slipped at a key moment before the pulley lock was in place, or the truss skewed the wrong way in a gust of wind, or he'd looped the harness incorrectly, or if one of his hitch knots wasn't perfect, the whole truss might come crashing down. The best hope is that the truss was lost. The worst was that it did damage to the support frame on the way down, or another truss, or worst of all, to Fenley himself.
While Fenley was hauling the crown beam and purlins up and nailing them into place, Master Greenlake came out to watch. He didn't offer a hand, nor any advice, not even criticism. Carver figured that, if Master Heathstraw said Fenley was a qualified journeyman, he shouldn’t need any of that; and if he did need it, it was his responsibility to ask for it. Mostly, Carver had come to watch because the sight of Fenley focused on his work was a welcome change of pace. It was easy to wonder how Fenley would ever get anything done, on a day he had to hear about the boy using his hard-won timbers as a sled, or meandering off from his work because of a pretty girl with a harp. Carver knew he had to be there for the moments when that question was answered: when he could see that Fenley had the talent, the training, the strength, and (at times) the focus, to do good work. He could be an excellent carpenter one day, if he ever got to the point of thinking of himself as a carpenter, not a boy who happens to pick up a saw now and then.
For Fenley, there was a satisfaction when the job was done, and done well; but what was really carrying his thoughts, as he hammered the last nails into the final purlin, was the thought of going to the Prancing Pony that night. It had been a year almost since his last visit to that merry establishment. It wasn't just the prospect of a tall mug of beer that appealed to him. He knew, perhaps without realizing he knew it, that there was something about the combination of the sweat of hard work, and the satisfaction that the work was done well, that lent a man a certain glow. A glow that seemed to draw smiles out of the girls, and giggles, and perhaps more. He was glad to have made a good impression on Master Greenlake, but he had other good impressions he was looking forward to making even more.
