Jon Ericson looked up at me --- dressed exactly the same as last time, except for no knee-length boots --- and said, "Things so tough as a columnist, you're looking for free food?"
"Nope," I said. "And you know what? Those spotting towers, in addition to looking for warships, also kept an eye out for U-boats during the big one back in the forties. So I wasn't totally wrong."
He handed out another cup of lemonade. "That's the problem with history nowadays. There are no longer facts. It's always interpretation, looking at things from one point of view or another. There's gay history, feminist history, oppressed people's history. Bah. History is history. It shouldn't be used as a tool to advance somebody or some group's agenda."
"And what's your agenda today? Enjoying the sight of the youth of Tyler?"
"Sure," he said, smiling. "And I get to pick up and clean up when it's done. Want to help?"
And I think I surprised both of us when I said yes. An hour later, the kite-flying competition, sponsored by the Tyler Recreation Department, ended and Paula give me back my camera, sans film, and left me with Jon and some fold-up chairs and about six or seven garbage bags full of cups, napkins, and half-chewed cookies. We brought everything into the rear of a one-story wood building that was the Tyler Town Museum, and I was embarrassed to note that this was the first time I had ever set foot into the place. Jon gave me a look and said, "Want the grand tour?" and I said sure.
It wasn't grand, and wasn't much of a tour. The museum was small, and as Jon explained, existed on the charity of the few visitors, a trust fund set up a half century ago, and the generosity each year of those Tyler citizens who went to town meeting every March and approved a small appropriation. There were two rows of locked glass cases on wooden legs, and some framed certificates and old prints up on the cracked plaster walls, along with a couple of Civil War-era swords. The artifacts in the glass cases ranged from the Native American bits of broken pottery and stone fishhooks and arrowheads --- to the first settlers ----an old musket and a stitched sampler --- all the way up to memories of the Greatest Generation --- ration books and captured Japanese flags --- who had marched out of Tyler more than a half century ago.
Jon said, "Not much, but it's treasure, still the same, and should be guarded as such."
I followed him out the rear door and said, "Do you run the museum?"
That brought a laugh. "Sort of. Just a volunteer and sometime tour guide and curator, when I don't piss off the board of directors."
"Anything you find out on the shoreline end up here yet?"
His mood then suddenly changed, and his voice was quieter. "No, not yet. But it will. One of these days. Look, can I trust you?"
"In what way?"
Jon said, "Trust that whatever I tell you won't end up in your column. And I don't mean that I think you'll make something off what I have to say in some big scoop or something. I just don't want to be embarrassed by some snide and snotty column down the road about the local lunatic in Tyler. Okay?"
"Fine," I said. "You can trust me then."
We walked around to the other side of the museum, where a large stone was set up with a dark plaque commemorating the Tyler men who had fought and died in the Civil War. Farther away from this stone was a round structure of bricks, about knee-high, that looked to be the top of a well. We reached it and I looked down, past a grillwork of metal bars. In the dirt below the bars was a boulder, flat on top, with grooves or scratches on top. A plaque nearby identified it as THORVALD'S ROCK.
"Who was Thorvald?" I asked.
"Ah, there you go," he said. "My chance to be the tour guide for one more time. Thorvald was supposedly the younger brother of Leif Eriksson, who left Iceland to raise a settlement at Greenland around the year 1000 A.D. or thereabouts. From Greenland, Leif and his brethren went further west, and eventually met up with the Canadian coastline, where they discovered a land covered with vines and grapes that they called Vinland."
"Newfoundland," I said, recalling a newspaper article I had read years ago. "Someplace in Newfoundland, they formed a settlement. Something meadows, am I right?"
"Very good," he said. "It's nice to run into someone who actually reads and retains knowledge, Lewis. For a number of years they had a settlement at a remote village in Newfoundland that's now called L'Anse aux Meadows. In this town there were old mounds near the coastline that no one quite knew where they came from, until they were excavated in the 1960s through the work of a Norwegian writer named Helge Ingstad. At first nobody believed that this was a Viking site, but excavation proved it. There were artifacts --- tools, wool spinner, a blacksmith's anvil --- that weren't Indian and were dated back to the tenth century."
"Eriksson," I said. "Your family name, perhaps?"
A smile. "Guilty as charged. I've always been proud of what my ancestors did back then, sailing out from Norway and Sweden on these wooden boats. Vikings sailed and traveled and traded with Rome and Moscow and Baghdad. They were great explorers, and I'm proud to have been descended from them."
"Including Thorvald?" I asked. "Who knows?"
I looked down again at the rock with the scratches on it. "So why does this rock belong to Thorvald?"
"Another little history lesson, I'm afraid. You see, all the great Viking sagas mentioned Leif Eriksson discovering a new world, the place he called Vinland, where he established a settlement. But there's a problem with that site up in Newfoundland, even though it is a legitimate Viking settlement. You see, wild grapes never grew that far north. Vinland has to be farther south. Not Newfoundland."
Again, I looked at the rock. Some of the scratches looked like letters. "A Viking rock? This?"
"In a way, that's what the old histories of the town state. Supposedly this was found near Weymouth's Point, south of where you live. Thorvald was supposedly killed while exploring Vinland, and his body was buried where he fell."
'Who killed him? The Indians?"
"The same. Though the Vikings called them
skraelings,
an insulting term meaning wretch or something. So about a hundred years ago, this rock was found near Weymouth's Point, and those scratches on top of the rock are supposedly Viking runes, marking the burial spot of Thorvald, here, at Tyler Beach."
Out on the fields, some kids were still playing with their kites.
"Some story," I said.
He laughed. "Yeah. Some story. And it's all crap. If those are runes, then I'm the pope. Best I can figure it, some land developer in the late 1800s came up with the tale, to help move some beachfront property. That's the story of the rock, though the town museum is too polite to say anything about it."
I thought about the first time I had met him. "So if the Vikings never came here, why are you out searching? Looking for something else?"
He looked at me and there was something in his eyes, something haunting, like a man seeing a dream from a very great distance, a distance he wasn't sure he'd be able to cross. "I never said the Vikings didn't come here, Lewis. I'm sure they did. And I'm going to find the evidence. Just you wait and see."
Back in my spot in the pew, I folded my arms as the priest continued the funeral mass. Rain continued to spatter against the stained glass. I found that my eyes kept on turning to the casket, not more than a handful of feet away. In that box and on the cushions were the remains of a man who had traveled the world, and loved and laughed and had lost, and through all of his days, had always fought to reach his dream.
Always.
An inadvertent encounter at the center of town one day, after I picked up at my mail at the post office, led to lunch at the Common Grill & Grill. After lobster rolls and chips for the both of us, I said, "Okay. Vikings. Why do you think they came here?"
He took a swallow from a Diet Coke. "They had to come somewhere south, didn't they?"
"Sure. But why New England? And why New Hampshire? We've got the shortest coastline in America. It seems the odds would be against it."
"I agree," he said. "Lewis, look. When I joined the army, they found out I had an aptitude for numbers. So I crunched numbers for the army, all thirty years that I was in their service. And when I came out of the service, I came back home to Tyler, crunched numbers again as an accountant. Had my own little firm. Me and the wife. More numbers, more crunching. Pretty dull, don't you think?"
"Seeing how terrified I am every April 15, I can see how it wouldn't be that dull."
He smiled, reached back, and pulled out his wallet. "But all those times, I had a dream I was following, a dream I had when I was a little kid. Look." From his wallet he retrieved a folded-over piece of white paper, which he handed over. I pulled it apart and saw a blurred photocopy of what looked to be a coin.
"All right," I said. "A coin. What about it?"
He put a finger on the paper. "That's a coin that was found up in Brooklin, Maine, in an excavation of an Indian camp near Blue Hill Bay. It's a Viking coin, minted between 1067 and 1093 A.D. Get that? About sixty-five years after the Viking settlement up in Newfoundland, a Viking coin found its way down to Maine."
"Maybe it got there through trade," I said. "Doesn't mean that it fell out of a Viking pouch on the Maine coastline."
"True," Jon admitted. "Except for one other thing. You see, I've seen another coin, just like that."
"Where?"
"On Tyler Beach. Right after a storm."
I looked in his eyes, to see if he was joking, but there was nothing humorous in that gaze. "All right. When?"
'When I was kid. Thirteen years old. Even back then I was interested in history, and I did a lot of beachcombing, especially after big storms. This one was some unnamed nor'easter that came through, and I dug around and looked around, and found this same kind of coin. Right here in Tyler Beach."
I folded up the piece of paper, handed it back to him. "Where is it now?"
He shook his head. "Blame it on greed, blame it on stupidity, blame it on a younger brother. I brought it home and my parents didn't think anything about it, but my younger brother, Ray, he said I should sell it. To a coin collector, down in Newburyport. And whatever money I got, I could buy some model airplanes or some damn silly thing. You see, Lewis, money was always tight when I was growing up. And maybe that's why I was good at numbers, keeping track of every spare penny or nickel. But we didn't have an allowance, didn't have much of anything. So we rode our bikes down to Newburyport and got a whopping ten dollars for that coin. I thought it was wonderful, and even back then, Ray was a sharp one. Demanded two bucks for a finder's fee or something."
"Did you know it was a Viking coin when you sold it?"
"Hell, no," he said, his voice loud enough to cause the other patrons to look around at us. "It was only years later, when I saw a story about the Maine coin, that I realized what I had found. But by then it was too late. The coin dealer had died, his store closed up, his records gone who knows where. Still blame Ray, years later." A furtive smile. "Even now, he's a wheeler-dealer. Runs an antique store up in Porter, manages to sell some things from me that I do find in my searches, old English and American coins, mostly. But I had that evidence, right in my hand, Lewis. Right in my little hands, and I know that they came here."
"You're going to need more than just a coin," I said.
He nodded slyly. "Oh, I've got a couple of leads. Just you wait. A couple of things I'm checking out."
"But where ---"
He interrupted me, saying, "And speaking of checking things out, I think you should spring for the check. Don't you have an expense account or something?"
I picked up the check. "I certainly do."
Now the service was winding down, and I looked again at the sparse congregation, searching for that particular face of Ray Ericson, whom I had met exactly once, and who was the sole surviving relative of Jon Ericson.
And who wasn't here. At his brother's funeral.
'I turned around, faced the front, where the priest was making the sign of the cross over the mortal remains of one Jon Ericson.
Perhaps feeling guilt over having stuck me with the check, or just feeling lonely, Jon invited me to a bachelor's dinner at his small home in Tyler. It was a traditional Cape Cod, set off one of the side streets that came out of High Street, one of the main avenues from the small downtown to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Inside it was neater than I expected for a bachelor ---- my own home sometimes has piles of newspapers, magazines, and books on the floor that involve a lot of tricky footwork, going from one room to a next --- but when I pointed that out, Jon just laughed and said, "Army training. Always have to be neat."
Dinner was steaks on an outdoor grill, mashed potatoes ---"my own secret recipe," he said, "sprinkle some grated Parmesan cheese through it" --- and a salad, and for dessert he took me into his office.
There the neatness was cluttered up by homemade shelves along the walls, the shelves clustered with bits of stone, old coins, and barnacle-encrusted brasswork. "My collection," he said, motioning to it before sitting behind a wide oak desk "Such as it is. Stuff that either I didn't want to give to my brother for sale, or stuff he thought wouldn't move."