Woodland Tavern Name Generator

The story

Hollen's laugh had driven a nesting bird out of the chimney twice. His wife maintained that this was the only useful maintenance he had performed without a ladder. It began as a cough, rose into a wooden rattle and ended with a whistle he could never reproduce on purpose. Guests at the Laughing Fir sometimes came back with imitations. Hollen judged these generously, except when they were better than the original. When the traveling collector offered to buy the sound, he said she had come to the right place. He had a great deal of it and very little money.

The collector corrected him. She did not want a recording or one evening's use. Her bottle would take the audible sound of his own spontaneous laugh, permanently. He would retain speech, pleasure and the ability to recognize a joke. Other people's voices would remain their own. Hollen asked whether it would also remove his tendency to snort when the miller became solemn. It would. This seemed an encouraging detail. He disliked being so loud, he told her. A keeper should sometimes possess the dignity of the people to whom he lent clean cups.

Rain dripped into a bowl between them. The Laughing Fir needed a proper roof, not another patch nailed over the last patch. The carpenter's quote was ninety coins, payable when the new shingles and labor were delivered. Hollen had nowhere near it. The community pot brought a little food every evening: a turnip from one household, a heel of bread from another, herbs when somebody had them. These repeated contributions filled the actual pot, not a hidden chest of repair money. Raising the meal price enough to buy a roof would send several familiar people elsewhere, if they had elsewhere to go.

The collector counted ninety real coins onto the dry end of the table. Hollen touched one, bit it, apologized for biting it and asked why she valued laughter so highly. She said people far away bought sounds they had never heard. He tried to imagine somebody choosing his whistle from a row of rare things. Then he imagined clean winter blankets. He asked her to state the price once more and understood it when she did. The contract was short enough to have no convenient corner in which a different meaning could hide. Asta was buying provisions in another village. Hollen made his own choice.

He told the collector about a visiting magistrate who had mistaken a sleeping goat for an unusually attentive listener. The story reached the part where the goat ate the written judgment. Hollen laughed, a magnificent chimney-clearing effort that filled the little bottle with a golden thread. The collector closed its stopper. His chest kept moving. He could still feel the absurdity of the goat. No rattle or whistle came out. She paid him the counted coins and departed along the old fern track, a route still visible that spring afternoon. He watched until the glass on her pack stopped catching light.

The carpenter arrived a week later. Hollen paid the actual quote and watched the old damaged shingles come down. Four days of work gave the Fir a roof that did exactly what it had been bought to do. Rain ran cleanly into the new gutter instead of the travelers' bedding. Asta returned in time to admire it and hear the explanation. She asked him to tell the magistrate story. He did. At the right moment she laughed and he moved silently beside her. She put down the cloth she was folding. For several seconds the good roof was the only thing either could think of to mention.

He discovered the missing sound in places the bargain had not listed because nobody could have listed them all. A customer made the old imitation and waited for the reply. A child toppled a stack of empty bowls, then looked up to see whether the noise had frightened him. Asta read an unfortunate rhyme from a letter. Hollen enjoyed each small occasion. He could say so, smile or touch a shoulder. Sometimes he did all three with an effort that made the occasion feel overexplained. Once he said “ha” aloud. It sounded like a man trying a door to which he no longer had a key.

Three weeks after the trade he set out along the collector's old approach. Warm weather had brought recent growth across the side track. Ferns and young branches hid the line he remembered beyond the fork. He found a broken twig, followed it to a grazing hollow and had to come back by the known main path. The woodland's regrowth did not care that his errand now felt more urgent than the day he had let her leave. He had no present direction for her. Even finding the track would not undo a trade she had described accurately before he made it.

Summer guests continued bringing contributions to the pot. Asta took a shift telling the louder stories, while Hollen served and argued and retained an extremely serviceable speaking voice. They did not remove the Fir's sign. A laughing tree was still painted there, with one branch shaped like a lifted hand. People laughed under it, sometimes so hard he felt briefly angry with them for possessing something he had sold. The anger passed or did not pass before the next bowl needed filling. He did not announce it to the table as a debt they should repay by becoming quieter.

In autumn another trader came through with a case of little silver reeds. She could give him a different laugh, she said, in exchange for one ordinary treasured memory. Not the facts of his life, only a remembered occasion he would no longer be able to return to. Hollen thought of the afternoon Asta had accepted his ridiculous first invitation by writing a better version on the back. He could tell the trader that story and feel nothing about having lost it afterward. He shut the case himself. The new roof had already shown him that receiving what he paid for did not mean he would like the price forever.

The first long winter rain arrived after supper. Asta had gone upstairs; a few people remained at the common table, contributing onions and gossip for the following evening. Someone described a hen chasing a man who insisted he was rescuing it. Hollen bent over his clean cup, shoulders shaking. No sound came from him. Across the room a young visitor began the chimney-rattle imitation and abandoned it, laughing at his own failure. The others joined in. Hollen listened until the story moved on. Above them rain struck the excellent shingles, steady and loud. Not a drop came through.