Otherworldly Maine

by Noreen Doyle

  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.

  Student directories might be indexed for place of origin, but he knew that their contents would not be available online, nor (he was sure) in the university library or public information office. Jay could call a student—the only one who came to mind was Chris—and ask if he could flip through his copy, but that probably sounded a bit creepy.

  Alicia came home tired and went to bed right after her shower. Jay sat on the edge of the mattress while she set the clock radio, but she didn’t want to talk, and ten minutes later he was back at his computer. It was after midnight when he discovered that the University of Maine had a second magazine, UMaine Today, that offered the contents of its back issues online. He clicked through the categories patiently and without particular hope until he came to an article, published four years ago, on the Native American Studies program. It came up, complete with photos, and sprinkled with quotations from various undergraduates. Two thirds of the way down he found one by Lucie Paguanquois, identified as belonging to the Nation Waban-Aki in Odanak, Centre-du-Québec.

  He searched on the name and came up with four hits, two of them photo captions. Group shots on a student’s blog and someone’s photo page showed a woman in her early twenties, evidently uncomfortable in front of cameras, or rather (judging by the photos’ quality) cell phones. One showed her as pretty plainly Native American. Jay then checked the text files, which turned out to be in French.

  He went to bed thoughtful, and the next evening he wrote to her, care of Conseil de bande d’Odanak de la Nation Waban-Aki. He explained his interest in pre-Columbian contacts between Europe and the First Nations, and told her how he had heard about her test results. Though he did not wish to obtrude upon her privacy (Jay could imagine Alicia’s disapproval as he typed), he wanted to ask her about this, whether the details he had heard were accurate, and if so, if she knew of any Wabanaki traditions involving very early contact wit
h seafaring strangers.

  He sent the file to work and printed it out on company letterhead, so it would not seem to have come from some solitary crank. Thinking it over as he drove from one building site to the next, he wondered what she might possibly have. It had been a couple years since he had found that old book on Wabanaki legends—an oversized Cambridge tome from the 1880s, with plates and a fussy title page—that suggested they had derived from Norse influence, and he knew enough to distrust any evidence that relied upon oral transmission over a millennium. What was she likely to produce—an unrecognized Viking brooch that had been in her family for centuries?

  Jay didn’t have an answer to this, one reason not to discuss it with Alicia. Daylight Saving Time expired, he began leaving the house even earlier to snatch at the dwindling sunlight, and Janice’s soccer schedule sent him ranging across Penobscot County every Saturday. Standing afternoons in shafts of wan sunlight that had been balked a fortnight earlier by leaves, Jay looked from the excavations at his feet to the spongy crust of soil that bespoke night frost and thought: What would they have done that first autumn? The ferocity of winter would have been anticipated, but to gird for it in a still-strange land, with large animals and hostile natives such as Greenland signally lacked . . . They would have wondered when the first snow would fall, and looked uncertainly to the skies even as Jay checked www.weather.com.

  When Alicia told him that she wanted to take her mother to Old Town the following weekend for an afternoon at the casino, he grimaced and shrugged, but later recalled the Penobscot museum there. He called and asked Janice’s mother to take her to her game, then left Alicia a message saying he would be able to drive. Leaving them at the front curb where the charter buses disgorged their contents, Jay found a parking space among the avenues of packed vehicles and began the long walk to the museum.

  The building was small, and its collection unsurprisingly emphasized the nation’s post-colonial history—nineteenth-century photographs, weapons, head dresses, and ceremonial carvings. Jay was used to the paucity of ancient holdings in tribal museums, and studied the exhibits thoughtfully, wondering how greatly customs and tools would have changed over a thousand years. After more than an hour of careful reading while other visitors came and went, a young man behind the counter asked him whether he was a teacher, and Jay confessed himself interested in the first contact with European settlers.

  “You mean English and French, or are we talking earlier?”

  They chatted pleasantly about the ancient trading center excavated on Penobscot Bay, which the young man, an assistant curator, did not care to call “the Goddard site.” He agreed that the Norwegian penny found there constituted insufficient evidence of Viking settlement, and nodded at Jay’s explanation of why the Norsemen in Newfoundland would nonetheless have likely come this far. Ten centuries is a lot of time for a perhaps small body of artifacts to be scattered, and even the silver penny was badly corroded.

  Emboldened, Jay told him what he had heard about the Quebec Abenaki who showed DNA evidence of Norse ancestry. The curator raised his eyebrows at that, though he added after a minute that even a full-blood might have a mixed ancestor centuries ago, and one would be enough. “The Odanak, though, they’ve been up there a long time. If there weren’t any white ancestors in the last two hundred years—and they would know—then she’s probably full.”

  “I’d like to confirm the story, since I heard it second hand,” Jay admitted. “But I don’t have her address. I sent a letter to the Nation, but it may never have reached her.”

  The young man frowned. “This is not necessarily something that would interest her, you know. And some Down Easter wanting to talk about the Viking in her heritage . . .” He looked at Jay closely. “What was her name again?”

  Jay gave it, and the man went back to the front desk and set up a laptop next to the cash register. He worked on it for a few minutes, then looked up and said, “Okay.”

  Jay approached, uncertain. The assistant curator wrote something on a scrap of paper and pushed it toward him. It was an e-mail address, from an Abenaki domain in .ca, which he knew meant Canada. “I’m assuming you’re not going to hassle her, since doing that across international borders brings real trouble. But take care how you ask. People aren’t digs, you know.”

  He never told Alicia what had happened, though his plan had begun to set, like poured concrete, as it became apparent that the letter would go unanswered. By the time they set out, however, she had a fairly good idea what was going on, and sat without speaking as snowflakes beat against the windshield. Dawn was more than an hour away, and Jay’s driving skills would be called upon for most of the trip—perhaps all of it, since his unadmitted intentions seemed to figure heavily in her mood.

  He had resolved almost immediately to seek out Lucie Paguanquois, guessing that no e-mail exchange would really satisfy him. Very likely there was nothing she could tell him, but he didn’t want to hear as much, not with the remote finality of a letter. He had e-mailed her in mid-December, explaining his fascination and apologizing for writing again. He would, he said, be visiting the Musée des Abénakis with his family the first weekend in January, and hoped to be able to speak with her over a cup of coffee. He promised no further contact should she not reply.

  It was several days later before the answer appeared. In a single sentence, she said that if he was intent on coming, he could call her that Saturday. And she appended, by way of closing, a telephone number.

  Alicia likely had no illusions concerning his interest in the Abenaki tribal museum, and her unspoken disapproval hung in the air, undispersed by the noisy heater. Only the first half hour would be highway, then they would be pushing northwest, through a succession of country roads and stop lights, for three hundred miles. The museum was in fact closed weekends this time of year—“Can you wonder why?” she asked—but he decided not to poke at what plans there were. He made good time on I-95, which gave a sense of impetus to their subsequent ascent into the Appalachians. Jay let Alicia choose the radio station, found a nice pancake house outside Eustis, and finally, as they were descending a pass, he said: “She wouldn’t have agreed to meet if she didn’t want to.”

  “Lord knows what she wanted, except not to be bothered.”

  Jay suspected that Alicia was angrier at being manipulated than she was on behalf of the student, but knew better than to say so. “Perhaps she’s a bit curious herself. Or maybe she’s just being nice.”

  It was after lunch when they crossed into Canada, and more than two hours—a light snow dusted the unfamiliar roads, slowing the hard-to-pass traffic on the provincial secondary routes—before Alicia announced that they were approaching Saint-François-du-Lac, and would soon cross a river.

  “Not the Saint Lawrence,” protested Jay, who knew they stopped short of that.

  “Nothing so grand,” she said.

  From mid-span they could see the buildings of the Réserve, although Alicia had to point them out. These disappeared from sight as they neared the shore, and it was another half mile before they turned into the slushy parking lot of the Musée. A handsome building, larger than any tribal museum Jay had seen in Maine, it looked like the kind of place he would like to have taken Janice to. Other buildings, including the Fromagerie Odanak—a native cheese-making enterprise—still had lights on inside, but they had to drive into the village to find a coffee shop. Alicia looked meaningfully at him as he turned off the ignition, and with a sigh he took out his cell phone and called the number.

  “Allo?” The voice was crackly, as though routed through a distant transmission tower.

  “I would like to speak to Lucie Paguanquois, please,” said Jay carefully.

  “Speaking.”

  “Hi, this is Jay Furnivell.” She said nothing, and he plunged ahead. “We are in front of . . .” He paused uncertainly, and Alicia gave the name of the restaurant, which he repeated. “Would you like us to—”

  “I will meet you there.” She adde
d something in French, and the connection ended.

  They went inside and sat at a booth, where Alicia ordered them coffee. Snowflakes nestled in her hair, more than he would have guessed from the scant seconds they had spent crossing the parking lot. Alicia was looking at the collar of his parka, which he realized was thick with them. “Still plan on driving home tonight?” she asked.

  “Perhaps not.” He could register reproach implicit in everything she said, but all he felt was a fluttering excitement. The restaurant was about half full, and he could see that several of the patrons were Native American, if that (he suddenly thought) was what they were called here. He made a mental note not to use the term.

  The coffee was hot, and the cream came out of a pitcher and might be local. They sat drinking thankfully, a moment of fellow-feeling that did not require (and would perhaps not bear) comment. Alicia told the waitress in careful French that they would not order yet, as they were waiting for a third person; Jay wondered how he could understand her.

  “Do you know what it is you want? Because she’s not going to tell you.” Alicia was looking at him seriously. “This isn’t her history, and she’s not going to be interested in it.”

  “Well . . .” Jay thought of the respects in which he might argue the point, and decided not to. Did she think he was going to whip out his cell phone and take the woman’s picture? He had a notebook in his pocket, but made no move to bring it out.

  The door banged behind him, and he saw a change in Alicia’s expression. Standing in the doorway, pulling off a knitted cap that was lopsided with snow, Lucie Paguanquois looked across the room and found their eyes.

  Her boots clumped on the linoleum, and she was standing in front of them, looking at the third cup, empty, that Alicia had asked be set for them. “Thanks,” she said. Snow slid off her parka as she shrugged out of it, and she walked away to hang it up. Jeans and a heavy knit sweater, jet black hair down her back. He wondered what she looked like under the layers.