Alternate Americas Read online

  “A man of mystery.”

  “Yeah. But I don’t know how to find out anything more about him.”

  The professor’s face was glum in the firelight as he reflected on this. He polished off another cup of cognac. The minister watched him drink, then said kindly, “There is nothing to be done about it, really. That is the nature of the past.”

  “I know.”

  Conclusions. They threw the last big logs on the fire, and flames roared up, yellow licks breaking free among the stars. The professor felt numb all over, his heart was cold, the firelit faces were smeary primitive masks, dancing in the light. The songs were harsh and raucous, he couldn’t understand the words. The wind was chilling, and the hot skin of his arms and neck goosepimpled uncomfortably. He felt sick with alcohol, and knew it would be a while before his body could overmaster it.

  The minister led him away from the fire, then up the rocky ridge. Getting him away from the students and laborers, no doubt, so he wouldn’t embarrass himself. Starlight illuminated the heather and broken granite under their feet. He stumbled. He tried to explain to her what it meant, to be an archeologist whose most important work was the discovery that a bit of their past was a falsehood.

  “It’s like a mosaic,” he said, drunkenly trying to follow the fugitive thought. “A puzzle with most of the pieces gone. A tapestry. And if you pull a thread out … it’s ruined. So little lasts! We need every bit we can find!”

  She seemed to understand. In her student days, she told him, she had waitressed at a cafe in Montreal. Years later she had gone down the street to have a look, just for nostalgia’s sake. The café was gone. The street was completely different. And she couldn’t remember the names of any of the people she had worked with. “This was my own past, not all that many years ago!”

  The professor nodded. Cognac was rushing through his veins, and as he looked at the minister, so beautiful in the starlight, she seemed to him a kind of muse, a spirit sent to comfort him, or frighten him, he couldn’t tell which. Cleo, he thought. The muse of history. Someone he could talk to.

  She laughed softly. “Sometimes it seems our lives are much longer than we usually think. So that we live through incarnations, and looking back later we have nothing but…” She waved a hand.

  “Bronze pins,” the professor said. “Iron rivets.”

  “Yes.” She looked at him. Her eyes were bright in the starlight. “We need an archeology for our own lives.”

  Acknowledgments. Later he walked her back to the fire, now reduced to banked red coals. She put her hand to his upper arm as they walked, steadying herself, and he felt in the touch some kind of portent; but couldn’t understand it. He had drunk so much! Why be so upset about it, why? It was his job to find the truth; having found it, he should be happy! Why had no one told him what he would feel?

  The minister said good-night. She was off to bed; she suggested he do likewise. Her look was compassionate, her voice firm.

  When she was gone he hunted down the bottle of cognac, and drank the rest of it. The fire was dying, the students and workers scattered—in the tents, or out in the night, in couples.

  He walked by himself back down to the site.

  Low mounds, of walls that had never been. Beyond the actual site were rounded buildings, models built by the park service, to show tourists what the “real” buildings had looked like. When Vikings had camped on the edge of the new world. Repairing their boats. Finding food. Fighting among themselves, mad with epic jealousies. Fighting the dangerous Indians. Getting killed, and then driven away from this land, so much lusher than Greenland.

  A creak in the brush and he jumped, startled. It would have been like that: death in the night, creeping up on you—he turned with a jerk, and every starlit shadow bounced with hidden skraelings, their bows drawn taut, their arrows aimed at his heart. He quivered, hunched over.

  But no. It hadn’t been like that. Not at all. Instead, a man with spectacles and a bag full of old junk, directing some unemployed sailors as they dug. Nondescript, taciturn, nameless; one night he would have wandered back there into the forest, perhaps fallen or had a heart attack—become a skeleton wearing leathers and swordbelt, with spectacles over the skull’s eyesockets, the anachronism that gave him away at last…. The professor staggered over the low mounds toward the trees, intent on finding that inadvertent grave….

  But no. It wouldn’t be there. The taciturn figure hadn’t been like that. He would have been far away when he died, nothing to show what he had spent years of his life doing. A man in a hospital for the poor, the bronze pin in his pocket overlooked by the doctor, stolen by an undertaker’s assistant. An anonymous figure, to the grave and beyond. The creator of Vinland. Never to be found.

  The professor looked around, confused and sick. There was a waist-high rock, a glacial erratic. He sat on it. Put his head in his hands. Really quite unprofessional. All those books he had read as a child. What would the minister think! Grant money. No reason to feel so bad!

  At that latitude midsummer nights are short, and the party had lasted late. The sky to the east was already gray. He could see down onto the site, and its long sod roofs. On the beach, a trio of long narrow high-ended ships. Small figures in furs emerged from the longhouses and went down to the water, and he walked among them and heard their speech, a sort of dialect of Norwegian that he could mostly understand. They would leave that day, it was time to load the ships. They were going to take everything with them, they didn’t plan to return. Too many skraelings in the forest, too many quick arrow deaths. He walked among them, helping them load stores. Then a little man in a black coat scurried behind the forge, and he roared and took off after him, scooping up a rock on the way, ready to deal out a skraeling death to that black intruder.

  The minister woke him with a touch of her hand. He almost fell off the rock. He shook his head; he was still drunk. The hangover wouldn’t begin for a couple more hours, though the sun was already up.

  “I should have known all along,” he said to her angrily. “They were stretched to the limit in Greenland, and the climate was worsening. It was amazing they got that far. Vinland….” He waved a hand at the site—“was just some dreamer’s story.”

  Regarding him calmly, the minister said, “I am not sure it matters.”

  He looked up at her. “What do you mean?”

  “History is made of stories people tell. And fictions, dreams, hoaxes—they also are made of stories people tell. True or false, it’s the stories that matter to us. Certain qualities in the stories themselves make them true or false.”

  He shook his head. “Some things really happened in the past. And some things didn’t.”

  “But how can you know for sure which is which? You can’t go back and see for yourself. Maybe Vinland was the invention of this mysterious stranger of yours; maybe the Vikings came here after all, and landed somewhere else. Either way it can never be anything more than a story to us.”

  “But…” He swallowed. “Surely it matters whether it is a true story or not!”

  She paced before him. “A friend of mine once told me something he had read in a book,” she said. “It was by a man who sailed the Red Sea, long ago. He told of a servant boy on one of the dhows, who could not remember ever having been cared for. The boy had become a sailor at age three—before that, he had been a beach-comber.” She stopped pacing and looked at the beach below them. “Often I imagined that little boy’s life. Surviving alone on a beach, at that age—it astonished me. It made me … happy.”

  She turned to look at him. “But later I told this story to an expert in child development, and he just shook his head. ‘It probably wasn’t true,’ he said. Not a lie, exactly, but a…”

  “A stretcher,” the professor suggested.

  “A stretcher, exactly. He supposed that the boy had been somewhat older, or had had some help. You know.”

  The professor nodded.

  “But in the end,” the minister said, “I fou
nd this judgment did not matter to me. In my mind I still saw that toddler, searching the tidepools for his daily food. And so for me the story lives. And that is all that matters. We judge all the stories from history like that—we value them according to how much they spur our imaginations.”

  The professor stared at her. He rubbed his jaw, looked around. Things had the sharp-edged clarity they sometimes get after a sleepless night, as if glowing with internal light. He said, “Someone with opinions like yours probably shouldn’t have the job that you do.”

  “I didn’t know I had them,” the minister said. “I only just came upon them in the last couple of hours, thinking about it.”

  The professor was surprised. “You didn’t sleep?”

  She shook her head. “Who could sleep on a night like this?”

  “My feeling exactly!” He almost smiled. “So. A nuit blanche, you call it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A nuit blanche for two.” And she looked down at him with that amused glance of hers, as if … as if she understood him.

  She extended her arms toward him, grasped his hands, helped pull him to his feet. They began to walk back toward the tents, across the site of L’Anse aux Meadows. The grass was wet with dew, and very green. “I still think,” he said as they walked together, “that we want more than stories from the past. We want something not easily found—something, in fact, that the past doesn’t have. Something secret, some secret meaning … something that will give our lives a kind of sense.”

  She slipped a hand under his arm. “We want the Atlantis of childhood. But, failing that…” She laughed and kicked at a clump of grass; a spray of dew flashed ahead of them, containing, for just one moment, a bright little rainbow.

  IF THERE BE CAUSE

  Sheila Finch

  “Consider what a great voyage we are like to make, the like was never made out of England, for by the same the worst in this fleet shall become a gentleman.”

  —SIR FRANCIS DRAKE, 1578

  The Inland Sea, 1776

  Little Gull saw the men before I did.

  A fine, early summer day, I remember, two days after we returned from the shores of Great Sea. We had just celebrated the coming of First Captain in the Big Canoes, swooping out of the setting sun.

  I was gathering duck eggs when my brother came running to me, panting hard with excitement, abalone beads bouncing around his neck, berry basket bouncing on his back, spilling its purple fruit along the path. Five summers is not so many that a boy should remember berries and forget exciting news.

  My pulse raced and I was filled with sudden hope. In spring I had met a young man here, not Miwok but yet one of The People. His name was White Cloud. We walked together beside the irrigation ditch, and he was full of questions. Why did our canoes have sails? Why did we bother to plant crops? Why were our fields so square and neat, each with its own hedge separating it from its neighbor? How did the windmills fill the ditch with water? I laughed at his childlike ignorance. The tribes farther south on the shores of Great Sea were not as rich and wise as we, but he did not even know a well when he saw one! Yet I thought him the most beautiful man I had ever seen. My heart shivered when he touched my hand. Someday, he promised, he would come back to claim me. I believed him utterly, as only those who love believe. In that blustery spring weather, I knew White Cloud was my destiny.

  “Red Deer! Red Deer!” Little Gull called out breathlessly as he ran headlong into my arms. “There’re men coming! Lots of men. Strange-looking men! Wearing very odd clothes!”

  Hope that a moment before had made me light as thistledown vanished.

  “Don’t you want to see them, Red Deer? Come with me! Please? You can see them from the top of the hill.”

  I held Little Gull firmly by the arms. He had the light skin that often runs in our family, speckled all over with dark patches like the wings of a pheasant, and eyes the color of misty sky. But his hair was brown, the color of pine bark. My own hair had red light in it, as if a field of poppies grew there.

  “Don’t talk nonsense, Little Gull!” I said.

  “A lot of hunters coming up the long valley,” he insisted. “Some of them were—riding, it looked like. I couldn’t tell what the beast was. And there were women with them. And children!”

  I still did not want to give up my fantasy of White Cloud’s return. “What kind of hunting party travels with its children?”

  “I did see them, Red Deer,” he said stubbornly. “I did!”

  “Then we’d better tell Bear-With-One-Ear,” I said.

  My heart was heavy. White Cloud had vowed he would return, but the weeks went by, and my loneliness grew.

  Holding hands, we ran down the hillside to the town, then up a street of very fine houses until we came to my uncle’s house.

  John Bear-With-One-Ear was sitting outside, where the overhanging thatch roof offered a shady spot to sit and enjoy the flower gardens. A sweet sound of music drifted on the fragrant air. My uncle’s house was the largest and finest in the town, just as Nova Albion was the largest and most powerful of all the towns around the Inland Sea, which the old people called Lesser Sea. He was sharing a cane pipe of tobacco with his three brothers. Little Gull and I and our older brother, Francis Hawk Wing, were raised in his house, for our uncle had no children of his own.

  (I tell you this at such length so that you should understand all things at last.)

  We stood in front of the men, waiting for them to speak first, and I gripped Little Gull’s arm to remind him to be polite, for he was shaking with excitement and would have blurted everything out before they asked him.

  At last Bear-With-One-Ear laid down his pipe. He was an old man by then, but still handsome. The bright hair was only now fading to gray, but the locks that curled over the gray lace collar were just as thick as ever.

  “Well, Little Gull,” he said, “have you brought berries for our supper?”

  Little Gull looked down at the basket and was much surprised to find it empty.

  “My brother brings something better, Uncle,” I said hastily, before Little Gull could cry. “He brings news. A large group of men approaching from the south.”

  Bear-With-One-Ear gazed at me. “And how is this unusual?”

  “They’re not Porno or Miyakma or Yokuts. And they travel with their women and children!”

  Bear-With-One-Ear frowned, and Edward Gray Seal, the youngest uncle, who had been playing the lute, said, “Not much to fear in that, I think.”

  “Still,” one of the other uncles said (Walter Black Otter, I think it was, but my memory is not so clear now), “it is unusual.”

  Bear-With-One-Ear looked troubled. He was a strong leader, a peacemaker. Yet it was said of him that he was sometimes slower to anger than was good.

  “We’ve heard of a gathering of strangers,” he said. “Lookouts to the south sent word by the smoke towers. They seek land to grow food and raise children. The land is big enough to share a little with those who need it.”

  Black Otter set down his cup of fermented juice from apples I had helped harvest last autumn. “Where’s my nephew, Hawk Wing?”

  “My brother’s hunting,” Little Gull said proudly. “He’s going to bring me an eagle feather for my cap!”

  Bear-With-One-Ear smiled. “Your brother’s skilled with a crossbow. But I doubt he hunts eagles with it!”

  Little Gull pouted. “Someday I’m going to be Big Gull! And I’m going to kill enemies too.”

  Bear-With-One-Ear stopped smiling. “We have no enemies.”

  “Don’t delude yourself, Brother,” Black Otter said. “These strangers may be the very wolves of whom First Captain warned.”

  There was one uncle who had said nothing. I knew he was a shaman, although among the men it is done differently, and they did not seem to have the sight. I remember that his name was Henry Fog-On-Water.

  Now Fog-On-Water said, “First Captain warned us of evil men who come from a land of abomination. They seek treasure a
nd they kill all who oppose them.”

  “Then we must do something!” I said.

  Black Otter smiled at me. “First Captain also gave us a strategy. Let the enemy advance into a fortified place until you have them surrounded!”

  “These aren’t matters a girl just turned woman should hear!” Fog-OnWater said sharply.

  I started to protest, but Bear-With-One-Ear held up his hand.

  “We won’t begin by fighting in the family. Red Deer, take Little Gull to your grandmother. Little Gull, stay with your sister until I send for you. We’ll need Lark Singing’s wise counsel in this matter.”

  “There is now a very great gap opened very little to the liking of the King of Spain. God work it all to his glory.”

  “First Captain warned us to beware the coming of men who worshiped images, for they are wolves who would devour us,” Elizabeth Lark Singing said. “He told us the leader of the wolf pack is called the papa. We must be vigilant against this man.”

  My grandmother had a fine house in town, next to the one of my uncle, Bear-With-One-Ear. But in spring she had built a hut of willow branches at the top of a little hill; it had three sides, the fourth open, facing away from the town to Lesser Sea. She said young men and girls might face the storms of Great Sea even as First Captain had, but Lesser Sea was kinder to the old. She liked to watch the fog creep in along the water, then slide up the hills till its cold fingers reached into her hut. She said she would not die inside four walls, or her spirit would not find its way out. Fog-On-Water scoffed at that, but Lark Singing quelled him with a glance, a hard look from eyes so blue I thought as a child a piece of the sky had fallen into them. My grandmother was a powerful medicine woman, and none of her sons could ever withstand that flinty look.