Cape Cod

by William Martin

  What about the Bog People? the pro-Vikings cried.

  The conditions were different, the anti-Vikings answered.

  What about the letters on the axe? the pro-Vikings cried.

  As meaningless as the letters on the Bourne Stone, the anti-Vikings answered. The axe was left by fishermen, they in-sisted, who had come the winter before the Pilgrims and had chosen to live on Jack’s Island.

  Do you have evidence? the pro-Vikings demanded.

  Do you? the anti-Vikings responded.

  In the seemly tradition of scientific discourse, New England towns that had always claimed Viking visitations aligned with the pro-Vikings and sold bumper stickers. Those who had laughed at Viking theories for decades laughed all the louder and said that Leif Ericson and his brother Thorwald had come no farther south than Nova Scotia.

  One of the ballast stones was subjected to lithic thin sectioning and compared with similar kinds of rock from Scandinavia and Europe. The tests were inconclusive but suggested that the stones might have come as easily from France as from a Norse country, from French fishermen wintering over, with nothing to do but dig a foundation. But what about the axe? And the writing?

  In the long run. Nothing was answered. Nothing more was found.

  But Geoff read the sagas and studied the sea each day. It was always there, like a tangible god, giving the land mood and identity, giving the people a sense of limitless possibilities… or overwhelming odds.

  And he imagined a Viking knorr, riding the godlike sea into the bay. Would there have been women aboard? he wondered. Why would men, exploring a new and unknown world, have constructed a dwelling with a root cellar and a doorstep, unless they were planning to bring their women? What men settled without women? Without women, what future was there?

  On the cold Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving, he went to the back of Rake’s barn and stood at the place where the doorstep had been. The archaeologists were gone. It was quiet. He closed his eyes and tried to see what the world might have looked like to someone perched on that doorstep. He had read somewhere about Einstein’s theory of time, that it was like a river, and if one could somehow swim backward, if he could go back a few decades…

  Geoff saw himself walking arm in arm along the beach with the Cape Cod girl he had met in Pilgrim garb….

  He went back half a century or more and saw Rake Hilyard and Mary Muldowney walking up the path…. A century and a half, and he saw Sam Hilyard kiss Hannah…. Three centuries and he saw a young man and an Indian girl, their loins locked, rocking back and forth in the shallow water. They were Christopher Hilyard and Amapoo. And now his mind was spinning back across the centuries, back a thousand years, to the mind of Gudrid, the first white woman on the Narrow Land….

  “Thorwald, the Skraeling comes from the strand.”

  Thorwald sat under a tree and, with a hammer and sharp chisel, tapped letters into the shaft of his second-best axe. “I have not finished my gift for him.”

  “It is not a gift that he comes for. He comes in great excitement. He waves to the sky and the gulls swarm.”

  “Gulls.” Thorwald looked up. “What sign are gulls?”

  “I know not.” She twined her fingers into the single long braid of yellow hair that fell across her shoulder. She was not afraid. She had heard good stories of this Skraeling and his brothers. If he came with excitement, it would be for a good reason.

  Her husband had explored this place the summer before. He had seen the Wonder Stand, had stopped at the place now called Kiarlness to repair his knorr and had found this island the finest place of all.

  The creek was deep and would give good protection to the knorr. There were fish, game, timber, and a wide marsh where they could feed their cows. Everywhere grew the wild grapes that gave this land the name Vinland the Good. And the Skraelings had shown themselves to be gentle and kind and much taken with the ways of the Norsemen. They had traded much for the cloth and metal that Thorwald had brought, and even more for the white drink that came out of his cows.

  So Thorwald had built here a house of timbers. Because he knew that he could fill his knorr with wood and pelt skins to take back to Greenland, he had used his ballast stones to build a root cellar beneath his house, big and wide, for the land was plentiful and they would have much to store there. Then he had taken the largest stone he carried, squared it with a chisel, and dug it into the sand before the door of his house, so that Gudrid would have proper welcome in Vinland the Good.

  It was a handsome house, much finer than the dirt-walled caves where his brethren lived in Greenland, and when he sailed away, he had left it in the care of a Skraeling he much trusted.

  On the doorstep of the house, the vigilant Skraeling had drawn his name:

  Or Wompash, and the warning, “Wetu of white Gods who go on an island of wood. They will come back. Enter not.”

  Now Gudrid stood on the doorstep of her house, in the autumn sunshine, in a place she loved already. Here were trees, as in her Norse country, and here women would wish to settle.

  Thorwald handed her the axe. “Put this in your skirts. Let the Skraeling not see it. We must give it to him with some ceremony.”

  “You are a silly man, to treat a Skraeling like a prince.” She took the axe and slipped it beneath her jacket. “But I do love you for it.”

  “Treat the Skraeling like a prince, and he will treat you like a god. But we should not let him see gods kissing.”

  She grabbed his hand and pressed it against her swelling belly. “What else gods do cannot be hidden.”

  Wompash reached the clearing. He wore only a breechclout and feathers, and the sweat ran in rivers off his face. Now it was clear that his excitement was mingled with fright. He pointed to the sea and said several words.

  Thorwald had learned some of their language, they a little of his, and with gestures as well, they talked. Wompash told them that something was coming that they must fear: “Pootaop.”

  “Pootaop? Whale?”

  The Skraeling nodded many times.

  “Whales!” Thorwald bellowed the word like a great laugh and began to sing the song he sang in Greenland when he told them of this land: “Let us return thither with our countrymen to rejoice while strong heroes live on the Wonder Strand, and there boil whales, which is a wonder to the land.”

  Gudrid laughed to hear this godlike sound, this man-sound.

  The Skraeling nodded, then shook his head, and said many words that her husband could not understand.

  “They’re whales. And no Norseman yet has been afraid of whales. Gudrid, ring the bell and bring the brethren.”

  At the pounding of the bell, the other men came running from their labors in the woods. And the Skraeling went rushing off.

  “Where does he go?” asked Gudrid.

  “To bring his brethren, that they may see how the white gods slaughter whales.” He threw his arm around her. “You are a fine big-boned woman. You’ll bear many children.”

  Nothing could have filled her with more pride.

  “And tonight you feed whale meat to the baby in your belly.”

  Now Gudrid saw a whale burst from the water down on the beach and drive itself forward. The cloud of gulls had come closer and skied high over the clearing.

  Thorwald called for his axe. Bjarni, his friend, said that he had taken it, for he had broken the handle of his own.

  “No matter.” Thorwald took the axe on which he had engraved the marks of Wompash. “I will use this one a final time.”

  And, bellowing, the men ran down to the beach.

  Gudrid and three other women stayed behind. While the others prepared a pit for the trying fire, Gudrid went into the house to sharpen the knives she would use to take meat from the whales.

  The sharpening stone made a scraping sound. The cries and shouts of the men echoed up from the beach. The gulls cried overhead. The baby kicked. All was right.

  Then Wompash appeared in the door. He motioned for her to come o
ut. She would have obeyed, but then she heard one of the other women scream.

  She shook her head and stepped back.

  He came toward her. The fear on his face was reborn in fury. Behind him, she saw many Skraelings running through the clearing. One of the other women staggered toward the door and collapsed, blood spreading across her back.

  But Gudrid would not scream. She would fight for her little baby.

  As the Skraeling lunged for the knife in her right hand, she swept another knife from the table with her left and drove it into his back. He let out a bellow and grabbed for the haft, exposing his belly to the other knife. With it, she gutted him, right there in her house.

  Then she ran to the door and saw a sight too frightening to behold. The Skraelings were everywhere in the woods, and all the women in the clearing were dead. She wanted to fight. Her blood was up and her man was threatened. But were she to venture out, she would be dead in a moment, and her baby never born.

  So she fell back to her root cellar, and there she spent an eternity praying to the new Christian God she had been told of, all the while with one hand around her belly and the other around her knife.

  And some of her prayers were answered. She was saved. But when the men came back for her, Thorwald was not among them.

  It was Bjarni who opened the trapdoor and looked into the little cellar. “Gudrid, thank the gods.”

  “Thank the God Christ,” she said. “Where is Thorwald?”

  Bjarni did not answer but grabbed her by the elbow. “We must flee.”

  “Thorwald?”

  “On the beach. You will see him on the beach.” He dragged her past the body of Wompash. “Look straight ahead. Do not see the other women.”

  “Why has this happened?”

  “The Skraeling Wompash, he was afraid. Perhaps their whales are gods. Perhaps their whales are gifts from their gods. Perhaps their whales are sacred to them. I know not. But they will be back.”

  “And Thorwald?”

  “He will meet the gods in Valhalla this day.”

  And Gudrid cried out from the bottom of her soul.

  Bjarni tried to keep her from seeing her man. He was afraid, she knew, of how she would keen, but she could not leave Thorwald on the beach. She found him, face down in the marsh mud, an arrow through his throat.

  She knelt by his side and began to rock back and forth and sing her saddest song. Then she felt Bjarni’s hands under her arms. He was urging her to leave, for the Skraelings would be back.

  “No! We must bury him.”

  “No time. The tide will turn and we may ground.”

  “He was your leader. I am his wife. I will not allow him to rot here. He will go into the earth, like a Christian. He will be rooted to the place he loved.” And her resolve was so great that it conquered his fear.

  They buried Thorwald on the little hillside, not far from the house, and erected a Christian cross over his head. The grave was shallow, for they did not have the time or bravery to dig a six-foot hole. If the Skraelings did not dig him up, the wolves most surely would. But he had been buried and prayed over, and now Gudrid could grieve in peace. She thought to stay there and grieve forever, beside the grave of her mate. But she would go, if only to protect what she carried in her belly, which was the future.

  As they ran back down the beach, she stopped by the old bull whale. Her husband’s blood stained the mud around him. His axe was buried beneath the beast.

  “Hurry,” said Bjarni. “No more time.”

  The old bull made a great sigh, like a death rattle.

  “You said that whales were Skraeling gods.”

  “I know not.”

  She picked up a rock that lay in the sand and went toward the whale. “If they are, I smite their god.”

  The old bull saw the rock raised above its head…

  … and felt cool water pour down.

  Then a television helicopter came clattering low over the beach, capturing the scene for the six o’clock news.

  But not even that noise was enough to rouse the whale that Geoff Hilyard had been tending half the day.

  “Geoff, I’m sorry, we’re going to have to destroy that one,” said the team veterinarian.

  “No,” said Geoff. “This is one of the youngest. You can’t do it!”

  The whales had come in on a northeaster.

  Three hundred pilot whales, one of the biggest herds to beach since the nineteenth century, covered the flats and the marshes all around Jack’s Island. So did police, newspeople, scientists from the New England Aquarium, and volunteers from the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown.

  The volunteers put on survival suits and went into the water to try to help the scientists save the whales. Geoff and three others—a teacher, a lawyer, and the town clerk—had stood for hours in frigid water and blowing wind, wetting down the whale, and trying to turn him back. But each time they pointed him toward the sea, he came back to land.

  Now the tide was ebbing, and this whale faced the same fate as the rest. Death by injection. A few would be turned back, only to beach farther down Cape, a few would be taken to the New England Aquarium, a few would find their bearings once more.

  And that, in a way, was what Geoff was trying to do in the bitter water.

  “We’ll give you another ten minutes with him, but he’s getting weak.” The hood of the vet’s dry suit had squashed his face so that he looked like some sort of tube creature. “Their weight crushes them.”

  “Let us push him off once more! You have to.” Through the long, icy morning, Geoff had formed a bond with this beast. He had touched something elemental in the flesh. The whale looked up at him with a knowing eye and an upturned mouth that seemed almost human in its sad smile. By lunchtime Geoff thought he could understand the clicks and whistles and sad cries. By afternoon he knew he would cry if this one died.

  And he knew it was crazy. The damn whale was bent on destroying itself for reasons that only the sea understood, but if he could try once more…

  The vet threw his hands in the air. “I’ve got plenty more to do. If you can save him, good luck.”

  “Okay,” Geoff said to the others. “The tide’s starting to run fast. Let’s douse him with water a few more times, let him know we love him, then try to persuade him to change his mind. Where’s the bucket?” He reached behind him, and someone put the bucket into his hand.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Janice. He turned.

  “I thought I’d find you here. Can I help?”

  “Sure. I don’t know how much chance there is, but—”

  “Winter’s here, and I need a little of that silver summer fog.”

  He liked that. It said a lot that only they would understand. “Where are the kids?”

  “At my father’s.”

  She took the bucket and poured the water onto the whale. The creature thrashed and almost lifted its body out of the water.

  “Whoa!” shouted one of the others.

  “He hasn’t done that in a couple of hours.”

  “It’s either the death throes or new life,” said Geoff.

  A bitter cold wind had come up, and a depressing gray drizzle was coming down, but for the next half hour, they worked to turn the whale toward the sea.

  At one point, the creature swung its tail and knocked Janice right on her rear. She wasn’t dressed for the water, but she did not quit, even as the cold turned her seams and stitches to ice. She would not quit, because this time, it seemed that they might succeed. And they did.

  The whale turned back toward the ocean. It went out and swam in a wide circle, half in and half out of the water, as though it were dizzy, or trying to shake something out of its ears. Then, for a time, it swam parallel to the beach, and they ran along, shouting and waving their arms to keep it off. It was their whale now, and they couldn’t let it come back.

  Then suddenly the whale righted itself and turned north, away from the beach, away
from the volunteers, away from Jack’s Island.

  While the others cheered, Geoff whispered to Janice, “We’d better get you out of those wet clothes.”

  The marine biologists were using Rake’s house as a base of operations. When Geoff and Janice went inside, one of the biologists was on the telephone, giving an interview to an all-news radio station.

  “No one knows why they do it,” he was saying. “Some scientists blame it on parasites in the whales’ inner ears, others on the turbulence in shallow waters during a storm. And recently we have found a magnetic anomaly in the earth beneath the elbow of the Cape, which may cause the whales’ navigational system to malfunction. Whether it is one of these factors or a combination of several, we just don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

  “Like a lot of things,” said Janice.

  “But we’ll solve it,” said the scientist.

  “We’ll try,” whispered Geoff.

  They went through the living room, past the fireplace where Sam Hilyard had made love to Hannah so long ago, to the room where the crazy old Come-Outer Will Hilyard had coupled with iron-spined Mary Burr. And while Janice shivered, Geoff stripped off her clothes and his suit and they got into the bed where Rake Hilyard had made love to Mary Muldowney.

  And they warmed each other. It did not take long, yet it said more than all the words between them since they crossed that bridge on the Fourth of July.

  And when they were done, they wrapped themselves in a blanket and went to the window. The beach beyond the pine grove was littered with dead and dying whales, but out in the water, there were seven swimming north, and one of them was theirs. They knew.

  They stood in the window, their arms around each other, the blanket around their shoulders, and they watched the whales until they disappeared into the gray mist. Then they got back into bed and made love again.

  And the whales swam north, past the point that might once have been called Kiarlness, the sandspit that sheltered the Mayflower for six miserable weeks, north from the bay that brimmed with life, north along coastlines of rock, past rivers and inlets, north to the seas where the ice never melted, to the place where the glaciers shimmered, the great white mountains of ice, the shaping hands of God.