Penelope stares at the weird little woolen man. How has he gotten here? She remembers her mother making him — not long before she died it must have been — remembers the savage thrusts of her barbed needle as it tortured the fibres, broke them down so they would melt together. She had never before seen her mother work with actual hatred. Occasionally they both lost heart in their work, even said they hated what they did, but never the wool itself. This creature would have been one of the last things Thora made. She didn’t do much needle felting, just as she didn’t make very many felted pictures — claimed they lay outside their mandat, which was to make useful things that were also beautiful. She would actually quote Horace as she lectured her four-year-old daughter. Penelope only knew it was Horace much later when she encountered his ideas about the dulce and the utile at university. Felted pictures and woolly three-dimensional creatures were merely decorative. They only satisfied the dulce, Thora would say, the beautiful, and not the useful. Penelope used to pretend to confuse dulce with dulse and ask her mother why everything they made had to include seaweed.
The woolen man, like so much of what Thora produced toward the end, was useless, and certainly not very dulce either. They could never have sold him in the shop, unless as an invidious way to frighten children into behaving: a kind of felted Struwwelpeter. She wonders where that old book has gotten to, remembers how Matt used to shiver when she read to him about the scissors man who comes to cut off the thumbs of boys who will not stop sucking them, or about what happens to children who play with matches. Someone has just had a baby. If she could find the book, she could give it as a present. She’ll ask her mother to help her look when she gets home.
Nils. That’s what her mother named this lump of felt. By then he was no longer referred to, on the rare occasions he was mentioned at all, as Uncle Nils. He was just plain Nils, and it was always pronounced with a sneer. There are no photographs to compare the figure with, but Penelope finds it hard to believe that the real Nils so nearly resembled a wolf. Or that his genitals could have been as disproportionately large as Thora has made them appear under the traditional bunad knee pants in which she has dressed the figure. Thora used to scoff at the invention of the bunad, the would-be folk costume of Norway. Penelope is quite sure that Nils or Uncle Nils would never have worn the stuff. Certainly not while he was working at the sardine factory. He did work there for a while — she is sure of that — until something put a stop to it.
Most of the women she works with in the packing room think there is nothing wrong with what Nils has done. He has simply seen an opportunity where others might not have. He didn’t create the circumstances, and it’s not his fault if some people are greedy and stupid, a bad combination that surely begs for comeuppance.
His plan dates back to shortly after the two of them first arrived. They were brother and sister by day, and — when they could find a place — something more at night. Now, only the charade of siblinghood remains. There is no real reason to maintain even that, apart from habit. By day and night nearly from the time they arrived, Nils was intrigued by the widespread obsession developing around the Norse sagas. Several of them had recently been translated into English. Copies were circulating up and down the coast on both sides of the border. At the picnics that were arranged for the newly arrived workers and their families, he would lecture Thora and others about the craze; and in the narrow alleys along Water Street or the loft of an empty barn after they had made the beast with two backs, he would whisper to her how the fabled journeys to Vinland would be the making of him. People were desperate to believe that the place they lived in had a long history, to experience that tingle in the back of the neck that suggested that people from an older world had been there before them. They were mad for Vikings, didn’t care about the Passamaquoddy who were there long, long before. They’d give anything for evidence. He had found a copy of The Saga of Erik the Red. She was quite sure he had stolen it. They used to laugh at the translations of the names, the coupling of a name with an attribute: Thorfinn the Skullcleaver, Eyolf the Foul, and his favourite — Thorbjorg the Ship-breasted (whatever the hell that was).
Thora is glad that Nils abandoned her months before he acted on the plan. His affections had shifted elsewhere. That is what he said, and he made sure everybody could see enough to believe it was true. She wonders, though, whether he left her because he was afraid she might have betrayed him. As she thinks she would have.
Morris McCann was about as plump a pigeon as someone like Nils could hope to snare. He was rich, everyone knew that, and that was crucial. But rich men can be cautious and skeptical. That is often how they get rich and stay that way. McCann’s road to riches, though, was paved with enthusiasms and risks. Discretion was not his long suit. When Nils discovered the factory boss’s passion for the sagas it was like a gift from heaven. You could smell the money. He could hardly refuse.
McCann is by no means alone in his determination to believe that the Vikings travelled as far as Passamaquoddy Bay. There are those who argue that it helps make sense of Champlain’s arrival at Saint Croix Island. A particular combination of winds and currents, they say, must have driven both lost explorers to exactly the same destination, a few hundred years apart. Others point to odd fragments of metal found in shell middens that are thought to predate Champlain by hundreds of years. McCann’s own take on it is, ironically, related to his professional role. He is an enthusiastic proponent of the follow-the-fish theory. Why wouldn’t the Vikings have pursued the herring wherever they ran? Thora is amazed at his ability to overlook the fact that they have certainly not been running well in these waters for the past couple of years.
Nils has never said where he got the coin. It must have come over with him from Norway, although he did not mention its existence until several weeks after their arrival in St. Andrews — once he had learned quite a bit about saga fever. She supposes he was afraid she might wheedle him to sell it for food or clothing or any of the dozens of things that might have made their emigration more comfortable. He has shown it to her only once and she didn’t pay much attention. She remembers thinking it didn’t look like a coin at all. It was far from round, thanks to a large bite out of one quadrant, and dark grey in colour, not at all shiny. On one side there was a cross, while the other was a mass of wavy lines that, if you looked hard enough, suggested some kind of monster. Morris McCann had apparently had no difficulty recognizing it as a Norse coin, though he failed to see that the actual monster in this case was the man presenting it to him.
The set-up was painstaking. It was a side of Nils she had not often seen: patience, subtlety, finesse. He and a collaborator whose name was Eyolf — the actually Foul — staged a number of cryptic conversations about a surprising find they had made while walking the rocky coastline. They arranged to be overheard in the men’s dining hall, at the saloon in the Kennedy Hotel, in the canning room, and, finally, when they judged the time was just right, on the gravel walkway directly below McCann’s office window. Meanwhile, a young woman named Hedvig, whom everyone knew to be Nils’s current lady friend, gossiped freely about the promises her lover was making to her about a future of fame and fortune.
By the time McCann made contact with Nils, half the packing room — and the whole canning room — knew what it was about, although she thinks only she and Hedvig and Eyolf knew the whole truth. It is not hard to imagine how things unfolded from there. Nils would have shown the coin to the boss and, after some demurral, admitted to conducting explorations along the shore. Fifty dollars (pocket change for McCann) would have bought a description of the rough location of his dig. Then they would have talked him out of a further hundred for them to do some further explorations, strictly on the quiet. The problem, Nils would have said, was the man who currently owned the property. They didn’t exactly have his permission to be there. He might be willing to sell the land, of course, but he would be suspicious if someone well-to-do and established like McCann approached him. He might inflate the price. And so McCann had handed over another three hundred dollars. Nils would purchase the piece of shoreline in question under the pretext of starting a small sardine cannery. Even Thora had to admire that touch. What McCann needn’t know was that Nils had no idea who actually owned the piece of shoreline in question, and had no intention of finding out.
She does not know whether Hedvig or Eyolf was the one to betray Nils. Perhaps both. In Hedvig’s case it would have been jealousy. Nils had no concept of fidelity. She doesn’t know what Eyolf’s cut of the proceeds was meant to be, but suspects he may have seen an opportunity for even more money from McCann for the information that he was being swindled. The boss’s pride was well known at the factory.
They are finishing canning a batch of clams when McCann storms onto the third floor. She doesn’t remember ever seeing him up here. Nils knocks over a stack of empty cans at the sound of the boss’s voice. Sardine cans — the kind McCann made his money on — wouldn’t roll, but these cans are for clams, so they do, right to the door. She imagines Nils wishes he were in one of them. The regular thump of the foot pedal on the machine that Eyolf uses to cut the lids continues for five more beats and then stops. There is silence in the packing room too. It would be hard to say whether out of respect or anticipation.
“Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
Thora shivers. It is the same phrase she used with Nils months ago about the girl he had bedded two women before Hedvig. She watches Nils’s hand reach for the soldering iron that is heating at the little forge on the canning table, wonders whether McCann has any idea of the man’s temper. Don’t back a bear into a corner, she wants to tell the boss. Nils has two choices. He can pretend not to know what McCann is talking about or he can brazen it out. Neither is ideal in front of witnesses.
“Is there something wrong, sir?”
“You know bloody well what’s wrong.”
“The herring are not running?” Thora can’t tell whether Nils is intentionally poking at McCann’s theories about the Vikings following the fish.
“I’ll have my money back.”
Nils lifts the soldering iron as McCann takes a step toward him. “You paid me for services rendered. You wanted to know the place that Eyolf here and I were talking about, and I told you. You wanted us to look for Viking relics there, and we did.” He is obviously banking on McCann’s not wanting to admit to the subterfuge of the land-purchase scheme.
“You said you’d found that penny along the shore.”
“I showed you a Norse coin. I told you we had found some interesting things along the shore. You made the connection. You wanted to make the connection.”
“You conniving Norwegian bastard.”
Everyone has been trying to become wall tile since McCann’s arrival, but at this insult to their country, several of the men in the canning room and the women in the packing room take a step in. It is the only time she ever sees McCann hesitate. Then he picks up one of the can lids that Eyolf has stamped out and passes it over to Nils.
Nils places the lid on the can of clams standing on the table in front of him. His hand shakes a little and the metal makes a little percussive tune. Then he solders around the top and plunges the tin in the boiling water bath that they use to kill the germs. Everyone watches the tin — aware that it means something, but not sure what.
“You have sealed your fate, my friend, as surely as you just sealed that can,” says McCann, and he turns on his heel and heads for the stairs.
The next day, Nils’s station in the canning room is empty. The rumours fly. McCann has fired him (almost certainly true). McCann has had him killed (frighteningly plausible). He has taken his money and run (predictable if you really know Nils). At the moment, she doesn’t care which is true.
Penelope tosses the strange, felted man across the room. Her mother had a different story about the disappearance of Uncle Nils, she thinks. But she likes this one just as well.