The Bois d’arc shibboleth

 The Bois d’Arc Shibboleth

By Bobby Neal Winters

A shibboleth is a test of whether you are part of an in-group or not. It comes from a story in the Bible where people were asked to pronounce it.  There were two groups: One pronounced it with an shi at the beginning and the other with an si.  This difference separated the two groups from one another.

I have a shibboleth for identifying Okies--at least my brand of Okies.  The question is what is the name of the thorny tree that produces a large, yellow-green fruit with lots of seeds in it and has a hard wood.

Folks around here say hedge; some, many of them of a more refined sort, say Osage Orange. My people--my kind of Okie--says bois d’arc.

I spelled it correctly, as it is French, but that is not how it’s pronounced.  As I said it’s French, it almost goes without saying that it’s not pronounced the way it is spelled, but we don’t even pronounce it the way the French would. 

The French would say “Bwah dark.”  You see, bois (the bwah part) is French for wood.  And d’arc means “of the bow” as in a bow and arrow.  They named it that because the indigenous peoples of North America made bows from the wood of this tree.

We pronounce it by way of what is called a folk etymology. That is we let what the word means direct the way we pronounce it even though our pronunciation is off the mark.  We say “Bow-dark.”  We know that bows were made from it; hell, it’s right there in the word.

Bois d’arc is almost mythical for me.  The elders held it with great respect.  You could make a fence post out of it and it would last and last.  You might laugh, but fencing was important.  

Fences separated my land from your land, my cattle from your crops, my chickens from your dogs.  Fences built the Old West; fences ended the Old West.

It came into my mind that I needed some bois d’arc for my woodworking.  It is a long story, but I’ll tell you anyway.

There is a man named Paul Sellers who teaches woodworking with hand tools on YouTube.  He’s either an Englishman or a Welshman. I apologize to both for not knowing.  They have some way of telling that I don’t understand.

Anyway, he’s been around a bit in his day and lived in Texas for a while.  In one of his videos he showed how to make a woodworker’s mallet out of, you guessed it, bois d’arc.

Having seen this, I put in on my list of things to do: I had to make myself a woodworker's mallet with a bois d’arc head.

There are those of you who are reading this who--even if the idea were to appeal to them--don’t see it as a big deal. You’d go out your back door and cut a largish limb off a hedge tree or Osage Orange tree and proceed from there.  I’m not in the same position. I don’t have any growing in my yard, and, in a certain sense, it wouldn’t be the same: I needed something from my native soil.

I put out word to my brother: Keep your eyes peeled for some bois d’arc for me.

My brother lives in the country, in the same house where we both grew up.  We went to visit him the weekend before Thanksgiving and had lunch with him on Sunday at the Catfish Roundup which is about 7 miles north of Seminole, Oklahoma just south of I-40, which separates Oklahoma into north and south.

To work up an appetite for that, my brother’d found some bois d’arc in a little patch of woods in his backyard. He had a nice pruning saw that he loaned me.  He pointed me at the tree, handed me the saw, and said to have at it. He stood on his mown lawn and watched me in the woods that are almost too dense to walk in as I sawed through the bois d’arc tree.

It took me three cuts: one through the trunk and two through limbs that were holding it in the canopy of the woods.  Like I said, my brother has woods in his backyard.

Somewhere in the process, I scratched my arm on some thorns and started to bleed.  My old skin is so thin a barrier anymore that it breaks if I walk within twenty feet of a rose bush, so bois d’arc thorns don’t have any bragging rights here.

I got about 4 feet of straight trunk that was between three and four inches thick and branches into a Y on the end.

So far I’ve made two mallets.  It turns out that making the heads is easy because the wood is green.  Making the handles is harder.  They keep breaking as I hammer them into the heads. Really. Bois d’arc is hard and dense.

I plan to continue to make heads as long as I have the wood and as long as it’s green enough to cut a mortise in, but I need to figure out a better way to do my handles.

So I have a bois d’arc mallet that I made myself now. It separates me from most of the rest of humanity.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.