Seamus Tripp & the North Star Witch

by Jon Garett

Seamus Tripp & the North Star Witch

  By:

  Jon Garett & Richard Walsh

  Copyright 2013 Jon Garett & Richard Walsh

  Cover art by H Elizabeth Killmer

  Cover design by Tom Vogel

  Part One

  Elie Doolittle was well aware of Seamus Tripp’s primary directive: always eat whatever the natives place before you. Whatever! Always! And all of it! In her adventures with Seamus and his nephew, Gordon, she had eaten traditional Malian roasted spider eggs, sipped on anahuasca-infused tea in Belen, and had even choked down a slice of haggis over turnips and mashed at a Burns Supper, but she could not believe that his directive could include this.

  She saw the famous adventurer, Seamus Tripp, following his own rule and tucking into his plate like an old trencherman, and so she poked at the salty, fishy, gelatinous blob on her plate and sniffed at the pile of green mush next to it, hoping to entice her appetite. It did not work. The dinner looked as unappetizing as ever.

  Whatever Elie’s reservations, the locals of Nininger, Minnesota, seemed quite satisfied with the meal. Up and down the three long rows of tables in the church hall they talked to one another in hushed voices and murmured appreciatively between bites.

  She looked up and saw Gordon poking at his own untouched dish. He was twelve years old, just two years younger than she was, and they had shared many adventures. This made them excellent traveling companions but rivals as well, so when their eyes met Elie realized the boy’s own reluctance to eat, giving her a boost of will. She speared a quivering, pale piece of the fish, held it up so he could see, and swallowed it before the taste could linger. Gordon took the challenge and quickly did the same. Their eyes met again.

  Under normal circumstances she would have then smiled wickedly at his attempt – to show that she was the more adventurous of the two – but now she could only look down, gulp down another bite of the vinegary, slimy fish, and then take a bite of the mushed peas, and then another bite of the fish, hoping the whole time to not spit the food back onto the plate. She was relieved to see the look on Gordon’s face: he apparently felt the same way, for he was likewise struggling to continue now that he had started.

  She had turned down the coffee offered earlier and now had to be content with washing everything down with plain water. The buttered bread, though thin and slightly pasty, was a welcome break when the basket was passed around.

  “Don’t look so forlorn,” said Seamus. He had finished his plate and was passing her the basket of toast. “Lutefisk is a rich cultural tradition these Minnesotans have received from their Nordic ancestors.” He gestured out at the quiet crowd of diners, who were mostly looking down stoically at their plates and muttering to one another. “Vikings. Every one.”

  “Who? The ancestors?” asked Elie.

  “No, these folks.”

  “They look like farmers to me,” said Elie quietly. “And I don’t know what this terrible fish has to do with Vikings, anyway.”

  “A preservative,” offered Gordon, who always had an answer when Elie had a question.

  “Right,” said Seamus. “Longboats, sacking England, burning villages. With all that pillaging they needed their food to last.”

  “I’d prefer starvation,” said Elie, scooping up a bit of the quivering jelly, “to this.”

  All at once a figure loomed up behind Seamus: Pastor Hansen, his old Army friend. “You’ll learn,” the pastor said, “that many folks don’t get that choice. You can ask your Irish uncle about that.”

  “Aye,” said Seamus, “hunger is yet more powerful than nostalgia.”

  “Though they’re both important.”

  “Indeed.”

  The children had already met Pastor Erik Hansen, who had served in North Africa with Seamus when they were both young. “Gordon’s age,” was what the pastor had said, but Elie was certain that was impossible: he either did not know how old Gordon was or in his old age he had forgotten how many years had since passed. She estimated him to be at least thirty.

  There was some shuffling and movement of chairs. One of the congregants had stood up and was taking his place at a lectern in the front of the hall. He was a willowy man with black hair and sunken eyes. He began a halting, stilted speech about Nininger and his commitment to public service.

  Seamus winced and whispered something to Pastor Hansen, who nodded.

  “Why’s he talking that way?” asked Elie, hoping she had noticed the same thing Seamus had.

  “How’s that?” said Pastor Hansen.

  “So…” she could not come up with the word. “He is saying all the words the same. It hardly sounds like he’s talking in sentences.”

  "'Monotone' is the word," said Gordon.

  Pastor Hansen appeared to be choosing his words carefully when he answered. “Peter Sogaard, or State Senator Sogaard, as we’re supposed to call him now, is a sensitive man. It’s probably his nerves, as well as the reticence of any Scandinavian to talk about himself.” Elie listened closer to see what he meant.

  “And he’s probably temporarily slow-witted,” he continued, “being rather satisfied with dinner. I saw him take two second helpings.” Pastor Hansen winked at Elie and looked meaningfully at her plate.

  “She was just finishing,” said Seamus. He gave Elie an irritated look.

  “It takes some getting used to,” said Pastor Hansen. “Folks here prefer the stability of a dish served the way it’s been made for a thousand years.”

  “Look,” said Elie, motioning for Pastor Hansen and Seamus to look at Gordon, “Sogaard’s speech is interesting to at least one of us…” Gordon sat in his chair, staring forward quietly, apparently in rapt attention.

  “If only he paid that much attention to his chores,” said Seamus.

  After Sogaard had finished his speech, such as it was, the plates were cleared, and Pastor Hansen showed them to their small rooms at the front of the rectory. The children met in Gordon's room before bed to chat about the day. They discussed the trip from St. Paul and the terrible food. Elie then asked Gordon about the speech, but he turned the question on her.

  "What did you think of the speech?" he asked her.

  "I dunno. Monotone."

  Gordon had taken out the little notebook he always carried in his wool jacket's front pocket. He started scribbling notes.

  "Anything else? Didn't he seem uncharismatic, especially for a politician?"

  "Pastor Hansen said it was nerves."

  "Maybe..." He continued to scribble. Elie sat waiting, for a full ten minutes for him to finish, or at least pause, for she was curious what he was writing. Gordon kept the most extraordinary journals during their adventures, combining his observations of people and places with fantastical plot elements and extraordinarily inaccurate dialogue.

  And now that he was going he just wrote and wrote, not taking a single break the rest of the time, filling up more than five pages with his sharp cursive. Eventually she gave up waiting, shrugged to herself, and went to bed.

  It was completely dark in her room when she heard the floorboards in the hall outside creaking. She pulled the sheets back to peek out and was shocked by the cold air in the room. It felt like an icehouse. She was certain the window was not open – she would have noticed the draft – but it was hard to imagine that it was any warmer inside than it was outside. She gasped at the chill in her throat.

  It was this cold weather that had shut down their rail trip in St. Paul to begin with, giving Seamus the time to concoct this side trip to visit his old mercenary/pastor friend Erik Hansen. She supposed that a warm-up was due in the next days, in which case they would travel back up-river and continue their trip
westward through the Dakota Territory. But what if the few days stretched to a week? Or a month? What if this tundra never thawed? Why did anyone ever settle in such a place?

  A light shone under her door and then passed on, down the hall away from Gordon’s and her rooms and toward Seamus’s. Elie forgot, momentarily, the frigid air, and she slid from beneath the covers, padding across the floor in her slippers. She listened at the door. Whoever, or whatever, it was had stopped outside Seamus’s door.

  Seamus Tripp, her grandmum’s boss, the world-famous adventurer, the intrepid explorer and treasure hunter, was also a notoriously heavy sleeper, no matter the situation. Whether in a teepee on the Great Plains, or a watchtower in an abandoned Scottish barnekin, or a Tibetan monastery, Seamus was prone to oversleep and nearly impossible to wake up. It would be simple for some burglar to slip through his door and rob him blind. Seamus would suffer unawares until it too late.

  Elie owed him a warning, despite the frost-bitten feeling in her fingers and toes; for she was certain at this point that the cold must be causing frostbite. She quietly opened her door and peeked down the hall. All was quiet and dark. Gordon’s room was still closed up, as was Seamus’s, but now she could see the light under the door inside his room. She padded forward fifteen feet and stood outside his door, listening. There was murmuring and shifting inside.

  Now, Elie thought, before it is too late.

  And she