Otherworldly Maine (22 page)

She opened the book again, to the middle pages where the photo section was. A ring on each finger, but neither a diamond: he noted these things automatically, realizing it only when a voice reminded him that he was two hundred miles from home. She looked perhaps thirty-five, and he liked her intelligent, inquiring expression as she scanned a photograph, then looked down to read the caption. The captions, he knew, oversold every point.

“Hm,” she said. “Too bad.” And she put back the book in a manner that did not particularly invite further discussion. Jay saw two more copies on the shelf, but nothing better. He returned to his perusal of the Indian section, which contained (like last fall) no new information on the island's prehistoric inhabitants.

The afternoon was spent south of town, where he would pull off the road every few miles to compare a site that had looked good on the topo map with the real thing. He knew enough not to bother tramping over the grounds, let alone trying to dig, but the experience of standing off the turnout and looking down on a coastal flatland or an especially hospitable cove and imagining how it might have looked a millennium earlier held its own complex pleasures, which he had long since given up trying to analyze.

He was on Route 3 heading north when his cell phone trilled, evidence that he was back within range of the watchtowers that stood at the borders of empire. He glanced down to see two messages waiting, blinks between pauses on a unit he knew better than to open here. One of the messages would be work, maybe both. Jay wasn't about to answer questions on the road, and let the phone content itself with having announced their arrival.

The Vikings showed no desire to “colonize” the new land, evidently seeing it simply as a source of lumber and other resources for its Greenland settlements. Jay pondered the logistics of sailing a thousand miles in order to collect as many planks as a longship would carry. Total costs are hard to calculate, a reflection that brought him back to work, where questions of drainage, soil mechanics, thin drift, and winter transport danced like arcade Whac-a-Moles.

He was pondering coffee in Ellsworth, a bad town for foundations but notable for the Agassiz Outcrop, which he remembered from college geology. Jay wondered what the Indians had made of its striations, like the claw marks (he remembered then thinking) of a giant bear. The Norsemen had no mythology of giant animals, though Fenrir would eventually grow large enough to touch the sky and berserks, of course, became bears. If they noticed the signs of ice carving and wondered at their cause, it didn't show up in the
Eddas
.

The cell phone rang again, a third summons that, as in folk tales, must this time be answered. Without taking his eyes from the road, Jay found the unit and one-handedly flipped it open. Holding it up, he said, “I'm driving; can't really talk.”

“I'll send you e-mail,” the device replied in a fair approximation of Lynn's voice.

“Fine.” Jay dropped it beside him and looked out at the businesses on High Street, brooding over base flood elevation and the growing popularity of manufactured homes. He ate at a diner that advertised homemade pie, persuaded the waitress to put on a fresh pot, and read a trade paperback about the Vinland map while he waited. A thatch of business cards covered a bulletin board next to the cash register, though he didn't see any for foundation contractors.

Continuing north, he passed the street of a house he had tested for radon two winters back, when the seasonal slowdown was straining his cash flow. He remembered the basement, whose owner had to be told how the collector worked, and who then stood on the stairs, squeezing her hands in distress at what the world was coming to. Jay had explained how radon accumulation had nothing to do with pollution or any human activity: that the Passamaquoddy would have suffered increased rates of lung cancer had they built underground chambers like the Pueblos or Plains Indians. The memory usually triggered an annoyed reflection on people who don't understand their business, but this time he found himself thinking about Nidavellr, the subterranean realm of mines and dwarves. Was the stone they dug somehow deadly, or was that a detail from
Age of Mythology
or some other game? Once matters left the tangible world of artifacts that could be excavated and handled, it was difficult for him to keep their categories apart.

It would be too late to call Janice when he got home, but he imagined telling her about his day, looking down from Overlook onto wheeling gulls and wading in shallows uncovered only certain days of the year. Didn't some Indiana Jones film use that device? Real archeologists, even amateurs, had nothing but disdain for the treasure-hunting celebrated in such movies, as he remembered telling her once and reminded himself not to say again.

The only artifact he owned was an iron trivet with a leg missing, which he had bought in Norway. He had been able to afford it (and take it out of the country) because it could not be confidently dated to the Viking era, meaning that it did have the look. Its homeliness had bemused his wife, but Jay merely shifted it from the coffee table to his study, hefting it lightly in his palm during phone conversations, its mottled surface ugly and reassuringly real.

An empty toolbox sat on a bench near the service shed door, where employees tossed odd bits that had come up during ground excavations. Every few weeks Lynn asked Jay to go through them, and he would line up the potsherds, rusted hinges, and glass beads and gauge their provenance for whoever was interested.

“This is ceramic,” he said as he rolled an item between his fingers. “What does it look like?”

“A spool for thread?” asked a secretary.

“It's part of an old fuse, probably from the 1920s.” It was dispiriting how much of the crap buried several feet underground dated from the early twentieth century, even in areas that had been sparsely settled. Jay had found a few century-old implements over the years, but only one of plausibly Indian origin and nothing truly old. “Does your sister still have that old green bottle?”

“She keeps flowers in it.” Handmade nails were uncommon, but when you found one there would be more: the site where a building once stood.

Contractors work long days through early autumn, so the late Saturday afternoons after the end of mosquito season are prized, a last chance for swim parties and cookouts. Jay was holding a beer and watching patties sizzle when he heard his host's wife mention his interest in Vinland.

“Really?” exclaimed her next-door neighbor, a young bank executive with a Black Bears logo on his polo shirt. “I thought they had proved that Leif Ericson reached America.”

“North America,” said Jay, “but nobody knows where. The only settlement anyone has found is in Canada.”

“Wasn't there a map?” someone asked.

“A map that included the New World, but with no settlements marked.” By now Jay knew all the usual questions.

“Have
you
found anything?”

“Jay was in Bar Harbor for the July low tides, looking for artifacts along the shore,” Stacy said helpfully. That sounded faintly inane, and to stave off questions about metal detectors, he shrugged and made a deprecating remark about the lowest tides being in January, when he had too much sense to go out.

The subject came up again a few hours later, when most of the guests had retreated indoors and were sitting with their drinks in the TV room. Jay, who had a fifty-minute drive ahead, was restricting himself to coffee and feeling pleasantly tired, and was only half listening to the conversation when it swerved his way. Some women had been talking about antiques and collectibles, the Maine topic that interested him least, and one mentioned the recent case of a rare map dealer who had been arrested stealing from the Yale Library. A man asked, with woozy irrelevance, whether Yale was where they had the map showing that Norsemen had discovered America, and another replied he thought that map had been proven a forgery. Then someone said, “Jay knows about this.”

Jay, who had just begun to register the “Norsemen” that had bobbed past, looked up. “What do I know about?”

“Vikings in America. They were here before Columbus or the Irish, weren't they?”

The question always put him on his guard. “If by ‘here' you mean North America, there was a definite Viking settlement in Newfoundland. It seems likely that they would have explored further, but no one knows.” He added with caffeinated exactitude, “I don't really
know
about it; I'm
interested
in it.”

“What about those beehive stone huts?” someone asked.

Jay made quick work of stone huts. “Yeah, there are lots of those things in northern New England, and some people say they were built by Irish monks around the twelfth century. Archeologists date them the colonial era.”

“What was his name, Saint Brendan . . . ?”

“Oh, he was even earlier. There's an account of him traveling across the ocean and reaching an island covered with vegetation. Of course, also says that he encountered a sea monster.” Alicia looked at him warningly, and Jay, who had been about to expound upon this, caught himself. “Lots of things are possible—Muslim explorers were supposed to be superb navigators—but unless you find some evidence, it's all just theories.”

He was half-expecting someone to bring up tales of strange-looking petroglyphs or modern-day voyages in leather rafts, but the only response was a round of thoughtful nods. An archeology professor had once chided him for fancifulness, so he knew he could be provoked from either side. Smiling at Alicia, he raised his cup. The conversation, snagging briefly on a favorite subject, was beginning to loosen and drift when someone said, “I heard something about this.”

“Yes?”

It was Chris, a gangly student who had been doing construction work over the summer. They had been introduced, but all Jay remembered was that he wasn't studying archeology.

“A friend of mine at UMaine,” he said, a bit uncertain with people's attention now upon him, “he told me about a study he worked on, testing students for their DNA. He mentioned this one woman, a Native American, whose genetic background showed that she had a tiny bit of Scandinavian ancestry. She was surprised, and I guess kind of indignant, because she was from a reservation—she insisted that all of her ancestors were full-blooded Indian, I mean Native American, going back for centuries.”

“So she has a tiny bit of Viking ancestry,” Stacy said wonderingly.

“Well, yeah. I mean, they didn't tell her, but that's what everyone thought.”

Jay thought: Is this how it happens? You look in the places that logic suggests, you watch for new articles by experts and remind yourself that the logic holds up, and one day the evidence comes out of the blue, from a direction no one had thought to look.

“The thing is,” Chris added, as though apologetically, “she isn't from Maine at all. She's from a reservation across the border in Quebec, and was only taking classes because her boyfriend was a university employee. So I guess she was descended from the settlement in Newfoundland, not one in Maine.”

Jay shook his head. “Most of the Wabanaki fled to Canada after English settlers threatened to annihilate them. Was she Wabanaki?”

Chris pantomimed ignorance. “No idea.”

“They were testing women?” someone asked. “So this would be mitochondrial DNA?”

“I think so. That was part of the point—the ancestor with Scandinavian genes had to be a woman, so it wasn't some Viking marauder.”

There was an interested murmur at this, but Jay wasn't listening. His gathering sense of excitement seemed more calming than agitating, a settling into alignment. Before they left he asked Chris for his friend's name, which the young man gave without demur. Alicia, however, wondered about it on the ride home. “What is he going to
give
you?”

“I want to know more about the test—what exactly it showed, and what it means. How reliable their conclusions are.”

“No, I mean what is this going to give you? Sites to explore? You said that these Indians had been driven from their homes by early settlers; they won't know more about where their ancestors lived a thousand years ago than you do.”

Jay sighed and wondered what to say. “It's a hit, you know? I dig in the sand, and get no hits.” He was finding it hard to explain. “This is something scientists found.”

“If scientists are studying this, you can Google it. But I don't think you should call up this kid and ask him about someone's test results.” Alicia worked in physical therapy. “Are you looking for validation?”

Jay scowled. “I don't even know what that means.” He pushed slightly harder on the accelerator, a signal that he was concentrating on the road.

They didn't speak of the matter again, although Jay spent an evening reading online articles about genetic testing for ancestral DNA. Two nights later Alicia worked late, and he called the number Chris had given him. The young man who answered was very guarded, and a bit unhappy to hear that a friend had repeated something about an ongoing research project. Jay explained the source of his interest, and the student confirmed that one of the test subjects, a Native American, had had a match for haplogroup U5ala, which was associated with Scandinavian ancestry. He declined to speculate on the reasons for this, and refused to confirm Chris's recollection that she had been Canadian.

Jay thanked him and hung up, then looked at the
U5ala
scribbled on his note pad. A half-hour's browsing confirmed that it was recognized as a marker for Nordic ancestry. He poured himself a drink and returned to his study, where he began looking through websites for the University of Maine. There was an alumni locator service, but it promised little help if you didn't know someone's name.
The Maine Alumni Magazine
would keep mailing lists searchable by state and province, but he could think of no reason why anyone would give him the names of recent students with Quebec addresses. The Office of Multicultural Programs had links to a number of Native American resources, including (he was startled to see) a Wabanaki Center; but nothing he followed gave any hint of information about individuals.