Fiends (9 page)

June, 1906:

Horsfall Farm

1

In middle Tennessee rain fell almost continuously for six days before the sun broke through and the overflow from rivers and streams began to seep away. The house had mildew, the chickens wouldn't lay, and Birka took to her bed with croup.

Late on the night of June 3, a railroad trestle across the Cumberland River seven miles north of Sublimity collapsed under the weight of a Louisville and Nashville freight train carrying mostly pig iron and coal. Three members of the train's crew were swept away by flood waters, and drowned.

When the roads around Sublimity dried up enough for them to make the trip in their Michigan wagon, Arne's father hitched up his team of horses and fixed a well-cushioned pallet in the wagon bed for Birka, who was slowly recuperating and had requested an outing on this warm and pretty spring day. Arne collaborated with his father on a picnic lunch and the three of them, with Hawkshaw the dog, set out for the wreck site.

It was something to see, an event in their lives: for three quarters of a mile downstream from what remained of the trestle (stone pilings close to either shore) there were jumbled and splintered timbers stacked on slowly emerging sandbars, a few hopper and freight cars high and dry along the embankments or nearly buried, upended, in silt. All that could be seen of the locomotive was a pair of driver wheels where the still-swift current flowed muddily through the gap left by the collapsing bridge. The train had also carried livestock, and the higher air was filled with slowly wheeling buzzards, as if over a battlefield. There were human scavengers along the river, breaking into freight cars with sledges and crowbars.

Birka selected a cove that was nearly iridescent from the light of the sun on wild rhododendron blossoms. Arne's father helped her down from the wagon. Birka had "fallen off' badly during her illness. She looked as pale as the clouds, with flag-blue circles beneath her eyes. But she smiled often; the fresh air had done her as much good as the salve balls with kerosene she'd been swallowing for medicine. She even spoke of having her appetite back. Arne nuzzled up under her arm but he itched to go down along the river and see what he could find.

"Stay away from the boxcars," his father told him.

"And those men," his mother said, speaking of the scavengers as if they were criminals. They could hear sledgehammers battering boxcars upriver.

"Can I keep what I find?"

His father looked at his mother, then said with a shrug, "Anything valuable, it's bound to be at the bottom of the river."

"But if I find something—"

"You call me."

"Okay," Arne said, and he left the cove with Hawkshaw, glancing back once to see his father holding his mother against him and kissing her on the forehead, his mother looking as if she were enjoying a vision of heaven; Arne smiled, grateful that she was going to be all right after three terrible nights that had kept him and his father awake, dosing her with Vicks salve, carrying the heavy croup kettle back and forth from the kitchen.

He was wearing knee-high gumboots, but it wasn't easy getting close to the river. The underbrush that had been flooded over was silty and it was a good idea to keep a weather eye out for poisonous snakes flooded from their dens. Hawkshaw wallowed enthusiastically through hock-deep mud, then splashed across pools left by the receding river to clean himself. They came to the remains of a cow bloated and shimmering with flies; Arne held his breath and took another route to a small limestone bluff with a tangle of uprooted trees piled against it.

Looking down into the tangle, a few feet below the level of the bluff, he saw a large packing crate high and dry and apparently intact, the stenciled markings on it still readable. The crate, about six feet long by three and a half feet wide, had metal handles at either end.

Arne, looking at it, thought:
I can get a rope down there, easy.

He looked along the shaded riverbank in both directions, hearing voices and the sounds of crowbars and hammers, but no one was near him. Twenty feet below, the river gurgled and splashed around the flotsam in which the packing crate was lodged.

He whistled up Hawkshaw and went back to the cove where his father and mother were laying out the picnic lunch on a tablecloth. Birka wore a white waist, a blue worsted skirt, and a pink rhododendron blossom in her hair; some of the same color had seeped into her cheeks. Her eyes still had the milky cast of sickness, but she hadn't coughed all morning and was gayer, humming to herself as she spooned potato salad from a brown stone crock onto the china plates they'd brought. She squeezed Arne's hand and scolded Hawkshaw for being so muddy; then she tossed him a biscuit with a slice of salt pork in it.

"I found something," Arne told them. "A big box." He described it for them with his hands. "Do you want to see it?" he asked his father.

"After we've et," his father said, pouring buttermilk for them and cold sassafras tea for Birka. She sat on a needlepoint cushion with her back against a wagon wheel, nibbled some potato salad and watched the drifting clouds with a half-formed, contented smile. A strong breeze raked hair across her forehead. The horses ate sweet grass and flashed their brisk tails at flies.

Arne convinced his father to bring with them a hundred-foot length of new rope stored beneath the springseat of the wagon.

"Whatever it is," his father said, as they walked back to the bluff where Arne had seen the crate, "I can't say it's ourn to keep."

"But if we don't pull it up, it'll just fall back in the river someday! Then nobody'll own it!"

"Well, let's have us a look."

From the edge of the bluff his father studied the crate lodged in the branches of the flood-swept trees. Just out of his reach, even when he went down on his stomach with a hand extended.

"I could climb down there," Arne volunteered.

"You could fall in, too." He gave one of the branches a shaking, but the tangled mass didn't budge.

"I'll be careful. Can you make out what that writing says?"

"No. The crate looks to be upside down." Arne was sure that, even if the lettering had been easier to see, his father probably wouldn't have been able to read it. He'd only finished fifth grade, and was often self-conscious about his lack of learning.

Arne took one end of the rope, passed it through his belt, and climbed down slowly, finding the nearly bare limbs scum-slippery and the entire mass suddenly uneasy beneath his modest weight. He realized that if the flotsam shifted and went down quickly into the river, he could be trapped in an underwater maze. But he had a hand on his prize and wasn't about to give it up. He threaded the rope through a handle on the crate. Then came the difficult part: he had to balance himself, feet on a branch, hip against the end of the crate, while he used both hands to tie a good knot.

His father gave him encouragement, then said, "That'll hold. Get back up here now."

He kneeled and held out a hand to give Arne purchase as he climbed up the last three feet through the branches. Arne was flushed with accomplishment.

"Maybe it's tools," he said.

"Might be." His father tightened up on the rope he had belayed around his waist. The crate moved, slipping sideways from its niche.

"Careful it don't fall and pull you in after!" Arne said, admiring the swell of his father's biceps, the arching of his shoulders and heavily muscled back.

"Get a hold of my belt and toe in," his father instructed. His feet were solidly spread. He gripped the rope with both hands. "I'm going to haul it up here now."

They were both prepared for a lot of dead weight, but when the crate slid free of the enclosing branches he staggered slightly backward, Arne dropping to his knees behind him.

"Ain't tools," his father said, taking a new grip on the line and pulling, almost effortlessly, hand over hand. "Don't weigh much more than you do, I'd say not over a hundred pounds." He hauled the crate steadily up over the edge of the bluff and they looked solemnly at it, his father unwinding the rope from around his waist. The water-smooth boards were tightly nailed and caulked with a resinous substance so hard Arne couldn't scrape a bead of it off with the blade of his barlow knife. He put the knife away, brushed dried mud from the black stenciling, and read aloud, slowly.

"Dr. N. C. Ayres, Department of An—Anthro—don't know what that word is—Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee." He looked up in disappointment. "You reckon it's schoolbooks?"

"Hard to say. Filled with books, that crate ought to be a sight heavier. What we need do is, Birka'll write a letter to the university, recommend this Dr. Ayres come up here and claim his property."

"We don't get to keep it?"

"Wouldn't be right, long as we know who belongs to it. You see that, don't you, Arne?"

"Yes, sir." Arne brushed more dried mud away. His lips moved. He smiled incredulously.

"What else does that say there?"

"Only word I can make out for sure is 'Iceland.'"

"That beats all."

"Mama's from Iceland!"

"Born there; but she were raised up in Maine State."

"I'll bet she can read this."

"Maybe so." His father slapped a mosquito that alighted on the side of his neck. "Time for us to get on home. Let's lug this crate back to the wagon."

2

They put the crate in the barn and, two days later, Birka dispatched a letter to Dr. Ayres at Vanderbilt University. Until the letter went out Arne had been able to tolerate his curiosity, going into the barn only three or four times a day to look at the crate and run his hands over it, trying to imagine what might be inside.

Then he began to dream about the crate. In one dream he was caught in a fast current of the Cumberland River, swimming hard, lunging for a handhold, the crate floating always just out of his reach.

In his spare time, of which he had little now that the rains had stopped and there were a dozen chores to do every day, he hung around the kitchen. His mother, still not fully recovered from her sickness, rested often; but even when she was sitting down her hands were busy, rolling out dough for dumplings, peeling Irish potatoes, knitting the beautiful sweaters that were highly prized in their community. They talked, most often, about Iceland, a country in which Arne had shown almost no interest before the crate.

"We left when I was eight years old," his mother told him. "I know the language well, because, although we were never to return to Iceland, my father had us read from the old books—
Njáls
Saga,
the Book of Settlements —every night. But I don't remember so much about the village where I was born."

"Thjórsá?"

Birka smiled and corrected Arne's tortured pronunciation. "That was also the name of the river. It was green along our river, good farming there. But not so far away were deserts of lava, and the Mýrdalsjökull glacier."

"What's a glacier?"

"Like a mountain of ice, but growing, changing, moving very slowly."

Arne tried to imagine this phenomenon. Something huge, alive, threatening. "Why did you come to America, because you were afraid of the glacier?"

Birka handed him a slice of raw potato, and shook her head.

"No. We left Iceland because my father had a terrible fight with a neighbor. There was always bad blood between them; a feud, you might call it. They would quarrel over a piece of land, sheep, over nothing. For the love of quarreling, I think. This is what my mother used to say, in her bitterness. Let me tell you, we had hard winters there, cold and dark—three months of darkness."

Arne loved the sun, the long days that left time for play after work. He looked bleakly at her. Birka smiled.

"Then in summer, the sun almost never stopped shining. Summer in Iceland is a time of being—reborn, released from that terrible darkness. There are weddings, games, festivals, and always drinking, drinking—so many men, and women, have the weakness for drinking. I know you don't understand, here drinking is a serious sin, so there is no such problem."

"You mean whiskey drinking? Eugene Collum's pa makes whiskey. Drinks it, too."

"He is an exception in this community. My father Steinn and his rival, whose name, I think, was Sigurdur, fell to quarreling during
réttir,
the gathering of the sheep. Because of drink they had no restraint. They had fought before, but this time my father crippled Sigur."

"Was he as strong as—"

"As your father, yes." Birka smiled fondly. "But Enoch has no violence in him, thanks be to God. Well, it was decided by the village council that Steinn Vilhjálm must pay for the crippling with a nine-tenths share of our farm, and accept banishment. Or else go to jail. With what little money my father had left from the sale of the farm he took us to this country. But he was never successful here, as farmer or fisherman, and finally his drinking wore him down—just wore him down."

She looked as if she were going to cry from the pain of recalling her father's humiliation and gradual decline. Arne shifted restlessly in his chair and reached for another potato slice.

"Don't you want to know what's in the crate?" he asked Birka.

"The professor will tell us when he comes for it—if he wants us to know. Otherwise, what business is it of ours?"

"But you know where it came from, and you said—"

"I said I have heard of the Ásatrú region. Once upon a time—" Arne grinned contentedly at this storybook beginning—"a time as old as Noah's flood—there was a great forest, covering many square miles, in Ásatrú. But after the Norsemen, our ancestors came, then little by little the trees were all cut down, sheep ate the grass and destroyed the roots, the winds carried away the soil, so today there are only poor farms left, bare, windswept hills —nothing there."

"Something
was there—and now it's in the crate."

"Yes. I have wondered—"

"Don't you want to know for sure?" Arne said quickly. "We could open the crate, then nail the lid back so tight nobody—"

"We will wait for the professor," Birka said, lowering her head and rubbing a little color into one cheek. The crate was mysterious. It was something from home. Birka's eyes were sharp from the speculation she tried to hide from him. But she was firm in her scruples.