by Brian Hodge
His gaze didn’t warm any. “You need help with a term paper? Go read a book.” His hand tightened on the door.
“No, no, it’s nothing like that. I want to talk about someplace you used to live.” Might as well drop the big bomb all at once. “I drove over here from Mt. Vernon. And I know you used to live a few miles north of town.”
Clearly he hadn’t been expecting this. His mouth drooped subtly. His hand fell from the door, tapped against his leg. His gaze had changed; it now looked like something close to shock.
“Can I come in?” I asked.
He swallowed, then nodded, and the loose wattle of flesh at his throat quivered. “Yes. Do.”
He unlatched the screen door and I opened it. He moved back a step or two to allow me room. Inside, I had a better view of him. His head seemed triangular, with a sharp chin. His eyes had reverted to their former sharpness.
“Well. Why does something that happened nearly fifty years ago interest you enough to drive this far?”
And here’s the tricky part. “Mr. Crighton, I don’t know much about what happened then. I know what the paper reported. And if you swear to me it’s the truth, then I’ll clear out of here and never bother you again.”
The furrows in his cheeks and the seams around his eyes and mouth all seemed to tighten at once. “And if I say otherwise?”
“Then I’ll tell you some things that may make me sound crazy.”
His face loosened again, and finally his eyes warmed to me. “Come on in,” he said, stepping back into his living room. For the first time I noticed the way he stiffly favored his left leg. The hollow click accompanying each step gave it away: the leg was artificial. “Sit anywhere you please.”
I chose the dark plaid sofa. The leather easy chair looked as if it might be his favorite.
Crighton disappeared around a corner, but he kept talking. “I’m fixing something to drink. Would you care for anything?”
“No. No, thanks.”
“As you wish.” He muttered to himself a moment or two. “I have the feeling that this may take a while, though.”
I heard water running, the banging of metal and glass.
“Chris, you said?”
“That’s right.”
“You look as if you’ve been through a lot lately. I could see that the moment I opened the door.” He chuckled briefly. “One also sees the same look on the faces of many college students at this point in the semester, but most of them don’t run around in muddy trousers.”
I groaned. I’d forgotten all about changing them.
“I won’t ask about that, regardless.”
I looked around his living room as I waited. He had the usual things you’d find anywhere, but one entire wall had been devoted to books, from floor to ceiling, seven shelves full. And not a paperback in sight.
Crighton joined me in another minute, balancing a china cup and saucer in one hand. Lazy wisps of steam curled from the cup. He looked at me and faintly smiled. “Instant coffee. I like the Swiss Mocha.” He sipped at it, rather noisily.
I simply nodded.
He stared off beyond me for a moment, his eyes so distant he may well have been thinking about another lifetime. “I knew someone like you would show up at my door someday.” He set the cup and saucer on an end table with a rattle. “I believe you have a story to tell me.”
I sighed. “I guess I do.” And so I spilled it. Everything. No secrets, nothing held back, and even more readily than I had for Shelly on Labor Day weekend. Crighton either believed me sincerely, or was as nuts as I sometimes thought I was.
He nodded, and I could see something working behind his eyes, down deep where the most painful things get buried. Crighton sat still for a long moment, leaned back in his chair, pulled at his fingers. He still had some coffee left but didn’t seem interested in it anymore. His triangular head was lowered, exposing a bald spot, like a skullcap.
At last he raised his head to look at me. “I assume by now you’re ready to accept almost any explanation for what you’ve been through?”
“If it makes sense to me, I am.”
He tugged out a big handkerchief and honked his nose, peeked within its folds to see what he’d gotten.
“That will remain to be seen. But I have a story or two of my own to tell you now.” He tipped back his head and put down the rest of his coffee, then burped lightly. “Chris, do you know where our word berserk comes from?”
I shook my head.
Crighton straightened in the chair, slipping into his lecturer’s role as he might slip into a comfortable tweed jacket with elbow patches. “It’s derived from an Icelandic word, bearsark, or literally, ‘bear-shirt.’ This was a common enough garment in the Viking Age, cloaks made from bear hide.”
Vikings again. I felt a cold thrill at being on the same track with him. Like maybe there was hope for my sanity after all.
“A certain number of the Vikings became known through history as ‘berserkers’ for their fury in battle. It’s said they would foam at the mouth, and rave for blood and slaughter, and howl not unlike frenzied animals. Some even fought without armor, because their strength and fury were so great. Keep this in mind, will you?”
I nodded. Not a problem: I’d already read about warriors like this, already knew what borderline humans they were.
“Do you know anything of Icelandic history?” Crighton asked, and from the look in his eyes he didn’t expect me to. I took pride in being able to surprise him.
“Some,” I said. “I’m from a family that’s mostly Scandinavian. They tell me we had Vikings in the woodpile way back. I got hooked on the legends and lore as a kid.”
“You don’t say,” Crighton muttered, tilting his head and regarding me with a renewed, almost scholarly, interest. He fell silent, brooding.
“But go ahead,” I finally said, after waiting for him to continue and instead getting his puzzled stare. “I was a lot more into the mythology and head-chopping than the cut-and-dried history of it all. There’s bound to be gaps in what I know.”
“Very well,” he said, and the lecturer came out of him again. “Iceland was colonized in the year A.D. 874 by tribal clans that immigrated mostly from Norway. There were roughly four hundred of these clans, and each one governed itself. They had no central government. But in 930 a commonwealth was established, and a national assembly of sorts was formed, made up of tribal rulers.”
“The Althing,” I said, plucking out a genuine fact.
“The Althing, yes.” He smiled. “It amazes me, the number of people today who think the Vikings were nothing but barbarians who gave no thought to tomorrow. But the Althing was one of world history’s first parliamentary organizations. True, they could and did behave horrendously on the battlefield, but given the conditions of the day, they built a damned sophisticated society.”
This much I knew, and as a kid, it had disappointed me a little. It sort of spoiled my rather romantic and naïve image of a Viking as being this big guy with a bloody axe in one hand and a screaming virgin in the other.
“They only met once or twice a year, didn’t they?” I asked.
“Right. Two weeks annually at a place called Thingvellir, a black lava cliff. They would make judgments and gossip, and marry off their daughters. They’d settle old feuds and then start up new ones to keep from getting too bored. And so it went for a good seventy years, with nothing major to set genuine conflict between the factions. Until…” He paused, a smile on his lips and a question in his voice as he waited for me to finish his sentence.
I shook my head. “You got me there.”
“Until Christianity,” he said. “It was brought by missionaries from Norway very late in the tenth century. This seemed to be the only issue powerful enough to divide the people. Surely you know of the Viking gods.”
“Thor and Odin, I know they were biggies.”
“Biggies. Yes.” He rolled his eyes. “The heathen Viking religion centered around three gods: Odin, the
god of war and the occult; Thor, the patron god of seamen and farmers, who was also associated with thunder; and, to a lesser extent, Frey, the god of fertility and prosperity. You can imagine the reluctance to abandon them.”
“Sure.”
“By the year 1000, at a time when the Althing was in session, the Christians and the heathens were at the brink of war. Had they actually fought, it may well have wiped out a good portion of the population. War was narrowly averted when an old lawgiver decided they should adhere to Christianity. However, the provision was made that pagan practices could continue, if done in secret, so as to offend no one. Something like having your cake and eating it, too.”
“Very diplomatic,” I said.
“Diplomatic as hell!” he said and chuckled, then shrugged. “But it was by no means a happily-ever-after solution. And I told you that story merely as a background for the next one. The previous information is all common historical knowledge. You can find it in any good book on the subject. Mine included. But what I’m about to tell you next is a good deal more obscure.” He smiled grimly. “And its authenticity could be debated.”
So much for the history lesson, I thought. Here come the legends.
“Actually, now we’re getting to the realm that fascinated you as a boy. The head-chopping, you called it? You no doubt know what the sagas were.”
I did. After the Vikings themselves passed into history, Scandinavian scholars in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries revered them. They wrote down the legends and tales to create one of the greatest bodies of ancient literature ever known: the Icelandic sagas.
“Each one dealt with the history of a family or a clan or the life of a great man. As literature, they were brilliant. As iron-clad historical fact, well…” Crighton seesawed his hand. “Many were inaccurate. At times the chroniclers got carried away. Even so, some of the sagas have become quite well known, although the one in question for our purposes isn’t one of them. It’s an obscure little piece called Thorfinn’s Saga. Ever hear of it?”
I shook my head.
“Then sit back and prepare to be entertained,” he said, but such an odd heaviness enveloped his voice that I knew it would be no pleasant diversion. “As you might guess, it deals with the life of a man named Thorfinn. Thorfinn Snow-Beard, he was called, because his beard had been pure white since he was a young man.”
He gave me a refresher course in Icelandic surnames, how they were formed either from a father’s name, or from a descriptive phrase. I didn’t need it, but kept quiet.
“Thorfinn Snow-Beard took over as the patriarch of his clan in 992. He was roughly thirty-five years old. They lived near the town of Reykjavik, along the southwestern edge of Iceland. It’s the national capital now. The saga says Thorfinn was an early convert to Christianity, baptized by a Norwegian missionary in 998. And of course, being a tribal chieftain, he was present at the Althing when the Christian proclamation was made. From then on, he was quite intolerant of anyone who retained any allegiance to the heathen gods. He disagreed about heathen practices being conducted in secret, but he abided by the law.
“As much as the saga is about Thorfinn, it’s about another man as well … a Viking called Olaf the Dark. He was much younger than Thorfinn, around eighteen in the year 1000. He adamantly refused to convert to Christianity, and became the leader and high priest of a group of men who felt much the same way. They all refused to participate in the mass baptisms that followed the commonwealth’s conversion. In essence, they became renegades. According to the saga, they indulged themselves in behavior that was socially quite unacceptable even in those days … incest, necrophilia, bestiality. And they were quite violent, even by the standards of the time. Olaf became known as a berserker for his furies. One of his favored ways of disposing of captured enemies was nearly identical to the death of the first boy you mentioned. The ribs would be hacked away from the spine, the lungs strewn out through the back and across the shoulders like wings. This was called a blood eagle. And regardless of how he killed someone, Olaf took great pleasure in stringing the body from a tree. Like a trophy, if you will.”
I remembered White Trash Joe telling me about the construction worker who’d hung himself at Tri-Lakes for no apparent reason.
“It was also rumored that he could pray to Thor to send down lightning and fire to consume his enemies. I’m not about to say whether or not this is complete fancy on the saga writer’s part, or if there was some grain of truth to it. But I’m considerably more broad-minded about all this than I once was.”
Crighton searched his cup for more coffee, found it still empty. “So now we have a passionately intolerant Christian chieftain and a man who is becoming increasingly defiant of all that Christianity holds sacred. The saga says that Olaf and his followers erected a shrine to Odin in 1027 and performed sacrifices there. And this proved to be the final straw. Thorfinn brought the matter up at that year’s Althing and obtained everyone’s sanction to expel the offending group. And expel them he did. He led an armed group and confronted them at their shrine. Olaf and his men were vastly outnumbered and couldn’t have survived a battle, so Olaf proclaimed that they would seek out their own land.”
It was starting to come to me, slowly but surely.
“Soon Olaf and his followers and their women loaded up in a pair of longships and set sail for the west, and that’s the last the Icelanders knew of them. Apparently they didn’t settle in Greenland, because there surely would’ve been a mention of this in the Groenlendinga Saga. Most scholars familiar with Thorfinn ‘s Saga agree that despite the sailing expertise of the Vikings, Olaf and the rest were lost at sea.”
“But you don’t,” I said.
He looked directly at me. “I know they weren’t. By this time, there were stories of a great unexplored land to the west of Greenland.”
“I’ve read the Vikings found North America long before Columbus,” I said.
“Right you are. Sometime between 1000 and 1025, Leif Eriksson himself found it. He established a small settlement there, and since he found grapes growing wild, he named it Vínland, or Wineland. It’s generally agreed that their settlement was on the far northern tip of Newfoundland. But they had problems with the climate, and were in steady conflict with the Eskimo aboriginals. So the Eriksson settlement was disbanded and they returned to Scandinavia.
“And here’s where most of my guesswork begins, because there’s no written or physical evidence to back it up all the way. But suppose that Olaf and company made it to North America. Say they continued on through the inland waterways. The Strait of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The St. Lawrence River into the Great Lakes … Ontario to Erie to Huron to Superior. From here they might have picked up the St. Croix River, or some other river that eventually led them to the Mississippi. They continued south, stopping here and there, and it’s my guess that when they stopped in the area of what would one day become St. Louis, they explored inland to the east and encountered the Cahokia Indians. The mound builders.
“You see, the Cahokia Mounds are quite similar to Scandinavian burial mounds. And Vikings were obsessively concerned about the afterlife. They had no concept of Heaven and Hell as the Christians did. They believed in a place called…” He waited for me to finish.
“Valhalla,” I said. Aced it.
“Got you there. Valhalla is an incorrect translation. The place was actually called Valhöll, the Hall of the Slain. Here they would spend their days in battle, and at night the dead would be restored to life and the wounded be healed, and they would feast until the next day, when the battles would rage anew.
“So perhaps these exiles finally felt they had found a people with whom they had something in common. Certainly the Indians couldn’t have disputed this verbally. But I feel they moved farther inland for some reason. Perhaps their boats were lost on the river, or they had trouble with the Indians. I don’t know. Still, I believe they may have spent some time there, because excavations of the mounds have in
deed unearthed trinkets that seem to have no connection with the Cahokia culture. But that’s beside the point. The point is they moved east. And finally came to a spot we both know too well.”
So far I was following everything he said and was steadily approaching a state of awe. The puzzle was locking in piece by piece.
“I can’t say with any degree of certainty whether they settled there, or simply stopped while passing through. Regardless, their numbers had surely dwindled since leaving Iceland, and perhaps by this time they realized they were a doomed expedition. One would think even the most bloodthirsty heathens would turn to religion in the face of such hopelessness. And would establish a focal point for their rituals. Can you guess where?”
“The tree?”
“Or, more likely, one that was growing on the same spot. Even the hardiest oaks don’t live a thousand years. Regardless, trees were all-important to the Vikings. They were their source of wood for longships. And there’s another significance as well, going back to the beginnings of Viking folklore. It was believed that Odin sacrificed himself to himself, then hung himself on a tree.” Crighton toyed with his china cup as he spoke. “All that is educated guessing … what Olaf’s Vikings did on that spot, I mean. But one thing I’m quite sure about is that Olaf died there. Died or was killed.
“I’m sure his comrades wanted to send him off to Valhöll the best they could. Possibly built a miniature boat to cremate him in, buried him, possibly killed a woman to accompany him in the afterlife. And carved a runestone as a memorial to him.” He allowed himself a knowing smile.
So that’s how he pieced all this together.
“In 1940, I dug up a stone with some writing I couldn’t understand. Found it quite by accident, but I kept it, and continued to dig a good deal more carefully. I found some very old wood, and what I thought were bone fragments. This happened just before the fire and so on.”
He pushed himself up and motioned that I follow. “Come with me. I’ll show you the stone.”