“Well, we think we’ve found something that might be Viking.”
“Oh, Christ, not that again.” He threw down the paper. “There’s never been a shred of hard evidence—”
“You know more local history than anyone,” said Geoff. “And you’ve heard all the Viking myths.”
“So I’ve read all the sagas, a lot of imprecise oral tradition that somebody set down in the fourteenth century. So what?”
Geoff sat next to him. “And you’ve also been on archaeological digs.”
“But none of them were Viking.” Rains took another bite and talked with his mouth full. “When people read the sagas about the Wonder Strands of Vinland, they want to think it’s the Great Beach of Cape Cod, with the wild grapevines in the woods. They hear about the Norse wall in Provincetown—”
“What’s that?” Jimmy Little carefully peeled the plastic top from a coffee cup and took a few slurps.
“In the nineteenth century an excavator hit a wall in the sand, thirty feet under the original ground level. Supposedly it’s made of ballast stones.”
“Why hasn’t anybody dug it up?” asked Geoff.
“Because all these theories have holes you could sail through in a longboat. They’re bullshit. But fun bullshit.”
Geoff understood the skepticism. It was the right attitude. But when Rains got going on something that interested him, you couldn’t shut him up.
“Take Frederick Pohl.” Rains licked the sugar from his mustache. “An English teacher from Brooklyn. In 1948 he used the sagas to plot Leif Ericson’s voyage from Greenland to Vinland. He said Ericson must have hit Nantucket, turned north to the Cape, and sailed right up the Bass River to Follins Pond. He even found rocks in Follins Pond, with mooring holes like the ones in the fjords of Norway. Ergo, the Vikings had been in Dennis.
Ta-dah
, big article in the
Saturday Evening Post
, then a book. Of course, those holes can be found all over North America. And so can fake rune stones—you know, rocks with Viking inscriptions. There’s even a town in
Oklahoma
that claims they have a runestone. Give me a
break.
”
“Would you give
me
a break if I told you I’d found a Norse ruin that could keep Nance off Jack’s Island?”
Rains ate the rest of his cruller in one gulp. Five minutes later they turned off 6A and drove toward the causeway. Rains was still talking.
“This is like comedy, don’t forget. You buy the premise, you buy the bit. Your premise is that Vinland the Good was Cape Cod. So you buy what people have been selling for a hundred years: Leif Ericson’s brother Thorwald stopped at the tip of the Cape to repair his keel and raised a monument of timbers, naming the place—what else?—Kiarlness. Keel Cape. And the base of the monument was that Norse wall that nobody gives a shit about.”
Jimmy laughed. “Maybe he stopped off in Napi’s for bouillabaisse.”
“C’mon, Jim. One smartass is enough,” said Geoff.
“Yeah, or Ciro’s for pasta,” added Rains. “Then he sailed west. This would have taken him to Boston or even up the coast to Maine. But some benighted souls have argued that he ended up in Yarmouth.”
“Which isn’t too far from Brewster.”
“Have it your way. Thorwald’s bunch wanted to set up light housekeeping someplace near good water, wood, game, shellfish—someplace with a decent anchorage, of course.”
“That would rule out the flats,” said Jimmy.
“The channels through the flats were probably deeper then. Don’t forget, Billingsgate was still an island. The sand hadn’t been spread around.”
“We’re experts on Billingsgate,” said Geoff.
“Now, the Indians—the Vikings called them Skraelings—they were friendly at first, probably traded a bit, until they found out the Vikings were planning to settle. And there goes the neighborhood. The Indians attacked. Thorwald got sent to Valhalla. The Vikings got sent home.”
Up ahead, Jack’s Island now appeared. The tops of the trees looked sharp and shadowed in the fresh morning light. A delicate gray mist rose from the marsh. And a blue heron poked along the edge of a little stream.
In the middle of the causeway, Geoff put on the brake.
“What are you stopping for?” asked Jimmy.
“So we can remember why we’ve gone through all this.”
Rains leaned over the front seat and peered through the windshield. This morning he was wearing a blue flannel shirt. “They call me a tree-hugger because I want to protect sights, and sites, like this. We’ve lost so many. People just don’t understand how valuable this is, just as it is.”
“Just as it is,” repeated Geoff. Then he pulled a postcard from his pocket and offered it to Rains. “I assume you’ve seen this.”
“The Bourne Stone? That old hoax?”
“If I could tie the Bourne Stone to John Nance’s iron axe and a root cellar on Jack’s Island, what would you say?”
“I’d say what the archaeologists say: if no hard evidence has been found, don’t assume it doesn’t exist.”
iii.
When they got to Rake’s house, they found George, sitting at the dining room table, holding a shotgun over the box and shaking like a frightened dog.
The barricades of newspapers around the room had been pushed in front of the windows so that no one could see in. And two of Massy’s friends guarded the doors.
George said, “We went out to the barn and heard noises.”
There was the pop of a pistol, answered by the blast of a shotgun, and Jimmy and Geoff went rushing out the back door.
“Son of a bitch!” Massy Ritter was shouting at the barn floor. “Son of a bitch shot me in the foot!”
“He just took off the toe of your sneaker!” Ma Little was standing at the open door of the barn, holding a pump-action shotgun at her side.
Pop!
“Shoot again!” cried Ma.
Boom!
Massy’s shotgun sent another blast into the open trapdoor.
The gunshots sounded like firecrackers going off or trucks backfiring. From a distance, at the sailing camp, that’s what they
would
sound like.
As Geoff and Jimmy scrambled toward the barn, Ma whirled and leveled her Remington at them.
“Easy, Ma!” cried Jimmy. “We’re not ducks.”
“There’s two guys diggin’ around down there. Told ’em to come out but they—Who’s this?” Now Ma pointed the gun at the big black limousine rolling into the yard.
Carolyn Hallissey climbed out first, hands up. “Sorry, Geoff. I forgot to warn you.” And she moved toward the barn.
“Hey!” said Ma. “Don’t go in there. There’s two guys in the cellar, with guns.”
Geoff followed Carolyn into the barn. It smelled of gun-smoke and chewing gum.
“Did you bring the axe?” Geoff asked.
“Nance, too.” Then she called into the hole. “Guys, you can come up now.”
“Nance said to tear this cellar apart until we found it,” came a voice from below.
“It’s
been
found. Come out.”
“Tell them to put up their shotguns,” said the voice.
“Tell them to throw out their pistols,” said Massy.
“Tell him to go and fuck himself.”
“Tell them to send up the guns or we’ll lock them down there and call the cops,” said Geoff.
“Lambeth.” John M. Nance appeared in the doorway of the barn. He was wearing a blue blazer with red tie, white shirt, white ducks. New York Yacht Club–cool, about as far from his ancestry as he could get.
Ma, just as cool, placed her shotgun against Nance’s neck. “We was plannin’ a big demonstration, but I thought maybe just a few shotguns, blow off a few heads.”
As if it were no more than an annoying branch he had brushed against, Nance pushed the gun away from his neck. “Excuse me.”
“Been excusin’ you since ’77,” answered Ma. “Just watch your step around here.”
A hand appeared in the hole and a .22 came skittering across the floor.
“And the other one,” said Carolyn calmly.
After the second gun came her bodyguard, followed by the face that Geoff had seen at the auction, at the town meeting, on the stern of the boat—John Lambeth in his running suit. The new-look detective.
“Never sail away from a bluefish blitz,” Geoff told him. “It makes people suspicious.”
Lambeth ignored him and went over to Nance. “My contract is fulfilled.”
“Not so fast,” said Geoff. “Trespassing, breaking and entering, and somebody beat up a friend of mine, tried to make it look like gay-bashing.”
Nance turned toward his car. “The Conservation Commission is due at Douglas Bigelow’s house.”
“It’s been canceled, but Bill Rains is inside—reading the log,” said Geoff.
“It’s here?”
“I’ve won, Nance.” Geoff shoved his hands into his back pockets and leaned against the doorjamb. Doing business in jeans and T-shirt while his opposition wore suit and tie—one of Geoff’s Cape Cod dreams fulfilled. “Now you have to talk to me.”
iv.
Janice drove the Voyager onto the island and pulled up at her brother’s house. She felt as if she had come on an outing with her father, her two kids, and her grandmother in the back.
The kids piled out and went scampering toward the dunes. Dickerson went into the house muttering about an old bladder that made him so twitchy he couldn’t sit in a car for a few minutes without needing to take a leak. Janice and Agnes went up onto the veranda and watched the kids.
Sarah’s long coltish legs sprayed sand down the path while Keith shouted, tripped, stumbled, and fell into the dune grass. They were squabbling, as always. But there was life in it, thought Janice, something pure and elemental in the morning sun… her kids.
“Not a parent yet who ever looked at two kids on a beach but didn’t think of her own, no matter how old she’d gotten.” Agnes stood at the railing.
Dickerson reappeared, zipping his fly. “Doug just got off the phone. The CC isn’t coming, considerin’ what happened last night.”
Doug came out now, dressed all in black and his hair fresh-slicked. “Let’s get down to Rake’s house and see what Geoff has cooked up this time.”
But Agnes kept talking, as though wherever her mind was going was a lot more important than wherever Doug wanted the rest of them to go. “You know, I never look at that path through the dunes, but I don’t think of the night Grampa Charlie tried to chase off the whales.”
“Maybe we can get to this later.” Douglas looked at his watch. “And maybe you could stay here and watch the kids, Grandma? My wife’s gone shopping.”
“What a surprise,” said Janice.
“We ought to get this over with,” said Doug.
“Wait a minute, son,” said Dickerson. “Listen to your grandma.”
“Grampa Charlie was old then,” Agnes went on, “older than you, Dicker. He fired his shotgun and made you boys cry.”
“I remember.” Dickerson leaned against the house. He looked big enough to hold it up all by himself, though it was holding him. “Sometimes, I wonder what I was so scared of, the shotgun or the darkness.”
The children appeared on the crest of the dune again, then dropped from sight in a whirl of arms and legs.
“It takes just that long,” said Agnes, “and they’re grown up and gone. Sometimes for good. I guess old Blue regrets all the names he called his son now.”
“We struggle to screw each other, win and lose, destroy and build,” added Dickerson, “and all the while, we don’t see how fast time’s goin’ by. Then it’s over, just like that.”
It seemed to Janice that her father could sense defeat. His lobster antennae were working. So she laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t go getting philosophical on us, Dad. We’re going to need you.”
“No, you won’t. You’re the generation who gets to make the mistakes now.”
“We’re just trying to survive.” Doug stepped off the veranda and headed for the van.
“Whatever mistakes you’ve made, son, I’m behind you.” Dickerson turned to his daughter. “But maybe it’s the ones who ask the questions who survive the best.”
“Maybe.” Janice told her grandmother to watch the kids.
“I’ll watch them run on the beach. There’s no happier sight.”
v.
It was growing into a hot day, but the rocks in the root cellar were as cool as night. Geoff Hilyard and Bill Rains were bumping around down there while the shells crunched under their feet. The strange markings and the words “God bless the good Bigelows, God damn the bad, and God bless our baby” were barely visible on the floorboards of the barn above them. The yellow work light threw wild dancing shadows. And the eyes peered down.
“Well?” said Geoff.
Bill Rains measured several of the rocks with a small tape. “Uniform size, to stack neatly.”
“What’s he saying?” called George.
“It looks good.” Geoff glanced up and saw Nance, Carolyn, George, still clutching the metal box to his chest, and Jimmy Little and Massy Ritter holding shotguns.
Ma was sitting under a tree outside the barn, having a smoke with Emily Burr. A fresh-made widow had taken her daily walk to soothe her grief and found a two-time widow to comfort her.
“Looks good.” Nance shook his head. “That’s too bad.”
“Or good,” said George.
Then Janice’s face appeared, then Dickerson’s and Douglas’s. A drop of somebody’s perspiration hit Geoff on the cheek. He thought it came from Dickerson, but it was Douglas who was sweating, and shooting nervous glances at Nance.
Geoff boosted himself up and sat so that his legs were swinging in the hole, like a kid perched on the edge of a pier. He didn’t even bother to say hello. “According to the log of the
Mayflower
, which some of you said did not exist, this root cellar was here when Jack Hilyard arrived in 1620.”
Then he extended his hand to Nance, who offered his axe, as though surrendering to whatever fate the island held. Geoff was glad that the only shotguns in sight were on his side, because he didn’t trust Nance, no matter how docile he seemed.
“The log also says that Jack Hilyard found this axe in the marsh mud near the mouth of Nauseiput Creek.” Geoff de livered every word as though squeezing off a bullet at Janice.
He had the right, she supposed. He had gotten what he went after.
“Metal, wood, and leather don’t last in the acidic New England soil,” he went on. “But in a bog in England, the remains of a whole society were found.”