Buried Dreams Read Free

suddenly changed, and his voice was quieter. "No, not yet. But it will. One of these days. Look, can I trust you?"
    "In what way?"
    Jon said, "Trust that whatever I tell you won't end up in your column. And I don't mean that I think you'll make something off what I have to say in some big scoop or something. I just don't want to be embarrassed by some snide and snotty column down the road about the local lunatic in Tyler. Okay?"
    "Fine," I said. "You can trust me then."
    We walked around to the other side of the museum, where a large stone was set up with a dark plaque commemorating the Tyler men who had fought and died in the Civil War. Farther away from this stone was a round structure of bricks, about knee-high, that looked to be the top of a well. We reached it and I looked down, past a grillwork of metal bars. In the dirt below the bars was a boulder, flat on top, with grooves or scratches on top. A plaque nearby identified it as THORVALD'S ROCK.
    "Who was Thorvald?" I asked.
    "Ah, there you go," he said. "My chance to be the tour guide for one more time. Thorvald was supposedly the younger brother of Leif Eriksson, who left Iceland to raise a settlement at Greenland around the year 1000 A.D. or thereabouts. From Greenland, Leif and his brethren went further west, and eventually met up with the Canadian coastline, where they discovered a land covered with vines and grapes that they called Vinland."
    "Newfoundland," I said, recalling a newspaper article I had read years ago. "Someplace in Newfoundland, they formed a settlement. Something meadows, am I right?"
    "Very good," he said. "It's nice to run into someone who actually reads and retains knowledge, Lewis. For a number of years they had a settlement at a remote village in Newfoundland that's now called L'Anse aux Meadows. In this town there were old mounds near the coastline that no one quite knew where they came from, until they were excavated in the 1960s through the work of a Norwegian writer named Helge Ingstad. At first nobody believed that this was a Viking site, but excavation proved it. There were artifacts --- tools, wool spinner, a blacksmith's anvil --- that weren't Indian and were dated back to the tenth century."
    "Eriksson," I said. "Your family name, perhaps?"
    A smile. "Guilty as charged. I've always been proud of what my ancestors did back then, sailing out from Norway and Sweden on these wooden boats. Vikings sailed and traveled and traded with Rome and Moscow and Baghdad. They were great explorers, and I'm proud to have been descended from them."
    "Including Thorvald?" I asked. "Who knows?"
    I looked down again at the rock with the scratches on it. "So why does this rock belong to Thorvald?"
    "Another little history lesson, I'm afraid. You see, all the great Viking sagas mentioned Leif Eriksson discovering a new world, the place he called Vinland, where he established a settlement. But there's a problem with that site up in Newfoundland, even though it is a legitimate Viking settlement. You see, wild grapes never grew that far north. Vinland has to be farther south. Not Newfoundland."
    Again, I looked at the rock. Some of the scratches looked like letters. "A Viking rock? This?"
    "In a way, that's what the old histories of the town state. Supposedly this was found near Weymouth's Point, south of where you live. Thorvald was supposedly killed while exploring Vinland, and his body was buried where he fell."
    'Who killed him? The Indians?"
    "The same. Though the Vikings called them skraelings, an insulting term meaning wretch or something. So about a hundred years ago, this rock was found near Weymouth's Point, and those scratches on top of the rock are supposedly Viking runes, marking the burial spot of Thorvald, here, at Tyler Beach."
    Out on the fields, some kids were still playing with their kites.
    "Some story," I said.
    He laughed. "Yeah. Some story. And it's all crap. If those are runes, then I'm the pope. Best I can figure it, some land