One

The Sheepflatteners

Look backward to find the way forward.

--Sheepflattener Family Lore

Erik's heart hammered in his chest as though Thor himself were tunneling out of his rib cage. His mother sat next to him, reading a romance novel.

      Erik whispered, "Please. Please don't make me go in there."

      "What?" Mrs. Sheepflattener put a finger inside the book to mark her place and turned to Erik. "You'll need to speak up, dear, I can't understand a word you're saying," she said. Loudly. Loudly was the only way Mrs. Sheepflattener said anything.

      The other children and parents glanced over. A dozen eyes focused on Erik. He had opened his mouth to try begging for mercy again when the door marked STUDIO #3 opened. It was too late.

      A blond girl with a neat ponytail walked out. "Very good, Emma. Keep practicing those minor scales, now," said Mrs. Loathcraft, waving goodbye. She saw Erik cowering in his seat, and her face creased into a frown. "Erik," she said, as though his name had a funny taste. "You're next. Come in." She turned and disappeared into the room.

      Erik didn't move. His insides prickled, and the hammering in his heart grew more insistent--ka-thump! Ka-thump! KA-BLAM! KA-BLAM! The veins in his ears throbbed. The arteries in his eyes pulsed. His whole body said NO.

      Erik's mother clucked her tongue. She grabbed his arm and lifted him out of his seat. "Honestly, show your teacher some respect. Hupsy-daisy!" she said. In three steps, she dragged his entire body across the waiting room and propelled him into the studio. "Have fun!" The door shut behind him.

      Forty-five minutes later, Erik's weekly piano lesson was over. It is safe to say that having fun as his mother had commanded was never an option.

After Erik and Mrs. Sheepflattener arrived home, Erik shuffled in from the garage and found his older sister Brunhilde had her battle-axe out and did not look pleased. Her twin, Allyson, was clutching a sweater to her chest and yelling, "I told you, this sweater is MINE. Yours is, like, gray! This one is SLATE!"

      Brunhilde squinted at the sweater for a few seconds and shook her head. She started hefting her axe from hand to hand and growled, "Mine."

      Erik knew better than to get in the middle of this. He stayed near the wall.

      Allyson grabbed a vial of nail polish off the kitchen counter and said, "Don't wave that old axe at ME, sister. You come one step nearer, and I'll totally douse the sweater with this and neither of us can ever wear it again!" She started to untwist the cap, glaring at Brunhilde.

      The axe-wielding twin rocked back on her heels, assessing Allyson with clear blue eyes. "You would ruin it rather than let me claim it?" she asked.

      Allyson snarled and nodded.

      "Well played." Brunhilde put the axe down next to the pantry and tossed a blond braid over her shoulder. Their mother came into the room with bags of groceries from the car. "Mother, by Valhalla's rafters, I am hungry. My victory in the soccer scrimmage will be sung of for centuries to come. What is for dinner tonight?" Brunhilde had been speaking and acting this way ever since the last time Granny Vigdis had come to visit. After Granny announced that the teenager was the spitting image of some Viking-era relative known for her battle-­planning skills, it was if she'd flicked some switch connecting Brunhilde with the Middle Ages. Erik might have been irritated by his sister's obsessive channeling of her ancestral Viking spirit if it hadn't suited her so perfectly well.

      Their mother, ignoring the axe in the corner, started sorting groceries on the countertop. "Fish hunks, fish chunks, fish lumps, and mutton, dear," she said. "Both of you, start setting the table, please. We're eating early so Erik can make it to baseball practice. Erik, go find your uniform."

      Allyson slipped the slate-gray sweater over her head and bounced over to the cupboard. Disagreements between the sisters were easily forgiven and forgotten, especially when Allyson ended up wearing the clothes she wanted to wear. "Your scrimmage actually was pretty songworthy, Bru. Did you hear the cheer I was working on with the squad? I was trying out rhyming leap tackler with Sheepflattener, although you're not, like, technically supposed to tackle anyone in soccer." The girls discussed tricky rhymes and why more sports need tackling while they got out the silverware and dishes.

      Erik plodded upstairs to his small bedroom. He gathered himself on the threshold, took a flying leap, and landed on top of his bed. He jumped up and down three times as hard as he could, huffing, "Out! Out! Out!" He then flopped down flat on his stomach and peered into the dusty space below his quilt. If he saw any hint of a squirrel under there, he was ready to leap back out the door in three-quarters of a second--he'd clocked himself--but he saw nothing more than empty wood floorboards and his stack of comic books. As he saw every day. There had never yet been a squirrel under his bed, or any animal of any kind, for that matter. But every day was a new day, which was why he always came into his room the same way.

      Satisfied it was safe, Erik slid to the floor and crawled under the low-hanging quilt. His bed was shoved up against two walls in the corner, plus he'd layered rocks and bricks to block off most of the rest of the space between the floor and the bed frame. There was only one opening big enough for a skinny nine-year-old to slither through.

      His mom had been annoyed when he'd blocked it off, since she couldn't fit a broom under it, and insisted that Erik keep it clean himself. He didn't. He lay among the dust bunnies and Scooby-Doo comics with barely enough energy left to dread his upcoming baseball practice, falling into an uneasy doze until Brunhilde knocked on his door to announce dinner was on the table. He glumly changed into his uniform and went downstairs.

      Thorfast Sheepflattener towered over the head of the table. His wife passed him a slab of bread, and he got busy slathering it with butter and honey. His father, Granddad Golveg, visiting for a month from Norway, sat to Thorfast's right with a bowl of mashed turnips. (Granny Vigdis had stayed home, saying she needed a month without her husband underfoot to do a really good spring cleaning.) Granddad was smiling to himself and sneaking bits of turnip to Spjut, the family's tiny terrier, whose name meant "spear."

      "Spee-yoot, Spee-yoot, Spee-yoo-hoo-hoo-hoot," he murmured in a creaky singsong voice. "Even the littlest spear can slash." Spjut thumped his stubby black and white tail on the floor, clearly enjoying this acknowledgment of his spearlike doggy toughness as much as he enjoyed the turnip morsels.

      Erik sat down and pushed his mutton around his plate. He nibbled a bite of bread. His stomach swayed like a hammock in anticipation of baseball practice. Maybe if he ate less than normal, he wouldn't throw up quite so much this time when he went up to bat.

      "How was work today, Dad? Any good corporate raiding going on?" asked Allyson, heaping her plate with meat and fish.

      Their father chewed, honey leaving a glistening trail on his beard. He grunted twice, wiped his chin with the back of his hand, and gestured for the fish platter.

      Allyson waited a moment to see if her father had anything to add. "Cool," she said. Thorfast Sheepflattener's children knew he was a man of few words, and even fewer grunts.

      Erik's mother took hold of the conversation and announced, "Fafner looks ready to be brought to auction." She raised draft horses on their large property and sold them to farms around New England. "That colt is almost as big as his sire now. You girls have really helped me with him, so I've decided that you'll each get a portion of his sale price for your own use." Allyson's smile dimpled her cheeks. Brunhilde nodded gravely. "Erik, now that you're nine, you can start helping with the horses too."

      "Do I have to?" he said.

      The rest of the family looked at him, mild puzzlement on every face. Even Spjut stopped gnawing on a mutton bone and looked up. Erik dropped his eyes. He wasn't sure why so many meals with his family ended up with him getting these kinds of looks.

      "Well, no, dear," his mother said, "you don't have to. I thought you'd want to. Working with horses is such a joy, and what child doesn't want some money of their own?"

      He stared down at his plate. "Can I be excused?"

      Erik's mom shrugged, and the rest of the family went back to eating. "Fine. Clear your place and get your gear. We leave in fifteen minutes," she said.

      After setting his plate in the sink, Erik went to the coat closet to find his baseball mitt. It wasn't there, so he checked the weapons closet. He finally found it buried underneath his mother's daggers, his father's club, Spjut's armor, and Allyson's pompoms. He dug it out and sat back, woozy. If only he could be preparing to stay home and read comic books in his room instead of this. That one bread nibble was turning his stomach from a swaying hammock into a rocking swing set. He wondered if he'd be seeing the bread again soon, maybe next to home plate.

      Trying to let his innards settle down, he leaned against the wall and looked up at the family portraits hanging across from him. Anyone could see the family resemblance between his muscular, corn-blond twin sisters and the relatives glaring down from the photos above. Erik, not so much. He sometimes doubted any muscles grew between his skin and bones, and his shaggy hair was so much blonder than anyone else's in the family, it was almost white. He thought he more closely resembled the frantically burrowing albino mice at the pet store than anyone in the Sheepflattener clan.

      His eyes slid to the honored photo of the family artifacts: a spear, a ladle, a fragment of a drinking horn, a fish-shaped iron rivet in a bit of boat timber, and an axe inscribed with the Sheepflattener name and a rune loosely translated as "Not to Be Trifled With." Every Sheepflattener kid knew the story. The artifacts had been discovered on the Sheepflattener family farm in Norway near the turn of the twentieth century. They'd been verified by university scholars as genuine Viking relics, so the family had gone gaga over collecting all possible evidence and stories directly linking them to those ferocious seagoing warriors of old. It turned out there were records of the Sheepflatteners having lived and adventured all over Scandinavia, from Norway to Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland.

      The family had amassed quite a hoard of interesting historical information about the Sheepflattener clan when tragedy struck: everyone got hit with the rare but deadly lung-tooth plague. They were too sick to work, so they lost the farm. However, instead of giving up and dying dreadfully as one might have expected, they'd decided to try using some of their ancestors' old habits in order to stand up to the disease invading their bodies and turn their luck around. After all, the Sheepflattener Vikings had evidently survived and shown the world they were Not to Be Trifled With for more than a thousand years. Perhaps by looking backward, the family might find a path forward through their current misfortunes.

      The stricken Sheepflatteners learned to read runes and called upon the Norse gods to look upon them with favor. They scoured their historical documents for the foods and recipes that had sustained their ancestors. (This turned out to be mostly fish and turnip stew.) They gave each other tattoos and stopped cutting their hair, believing this might imbue them with extra strength. To make money, they began handcrafting axes, spears, ladles, drinking horns, and fish-shaped iron rivets. And, by Fricka's socks, their plan worked. The plague fizzled out. They sold their handmade goods for tidy sums to tourists and reclaimed the farm, plus extra land. The young adult Sheepflatteners looked so great with their new beards and long braids that members of well-to-do families came to beg for their hands in marriage.

      Those lucky Sheepflatteners vowed to never forget the power of their heritage and began organizing advice on how to live for all future Sheepflattener generations. Originally labeled Hvordan Vi Gjør Ting (How We Do Things), the family now called this collection of wisdom the Lore.

      Each generation continued to add modern stories of how leaning on the Lore had gotten them out of tough spots: illness, poverty, hair loss--you name it, some branch of the family had a story about how getting their Viking on had helped them. An enterprising cousin had scanned all the old parchment and notebooks and uploaded the Lore, along with the English translation, to his website so any family member could easily access it.

      Erik's family had downloaded and printed multiple copies. Brunhilde enthusiastically studied the Lore's instructions about weapons handling, and both sisters swore the Lore's proverbs helped them get through algebra class. Their mom said she'd added notes about how the Lore had eased her and Thorfast's adjustment to life in Connecticut after moving from Norway, plus how it had been the cure for everything after the twin girls were born prematurely. As far as Erik could tell, this family wisdom focused mostly on fishing and fighting. He liked the Lore's advice about calling upon the old gods when in peril, even though it rarely seemed to work.

      Eyeing the clock ticking ever closer to baseball time, Erik decided it couldn't hurt to give the gods a try. He murmured, "Hail, Odin, Fricka, Thor, Loki, and everyone else. Erik Sheepflattener here. If any of you aren't too busy, please do something to cancel my baseball game. Maybe a thunderstorm? Or turn all the baseballs and bats into, I don't know, worms or something? Thanks in advance."

      No Norse deity he knew of was likely to approve of such a pathetic request from a supposed Viking descendant. Erik knew that with his DNA, he ought to be a snarling, furry beast of a boy. He was, most assuredly, not. Even though no one else in his family seemed to know the meaning of the word fear, Erik knew all about it. Fear shook his insides when he got on the bus, at school, during sports practices and piano lessons, and the one time his mother dragged him to a sew-your-own-stuffed-animal day at the local craft shop, he had begun sobbing and sweating so hard she took him to the doctor's office, believing him to have the flu.

      He sat up a little straighter, scanning the photos for any family members who weren't scowling at the camera as though they would overpower anything that came their way. He examined a photo of his Miami cousins flaunting skimpy swimwear. Nope. Even his bikinied cousins looked like they could defend Miami Beach from sea monsters with a warship they'd constructed themselves out of palm trees.

      His gaze landed on a recent photo of Granny Vigdis, and his stomach lurched. She proudly displayed her wrinkled rune tattoo, TROUNCE. Part of the Lore stated that adults in the Sheepflattener family each had an Old Norse rune, an ancient symbol, tattooed on their inner arms. Choosing your rune was part of a coming-of-age ceremony, and it served as your motto for life. His father's was PRIDE. Erik thought his mother's rune tattoo should have been HORSE, or maybe LOUD, but it was the symbol for FAMILY.

      The rune-tattoo tradition seemed pretty iffy to Erik, since no historical proof confirmed it, but he guessed if you did something long enough and insisted that it was part of your family heritage long enough, it became so. He rubbed his bony arms, thinking about his own tattoo, which he would never get because even the idea of having ink pounded into his skin made him grit his teeth so hard he thought his upper and lower molars might fuse together. But if his family tied him down and insisted he pick something, he'd probably choose a rune that said AVOID STUFF. Or maybe just the word NO.

      "Erik!" his mother yelled. "Time to g--" Mrs. Sheepflattener was drowned out by a thunderous BOOM, followed by the wet whoosh of a sudden downpour.

      Just in case this was no coincidence, he bobbed his head to thank Thor. A lot of Ridgewell nine-year-olds would be disappointed this evening, but not Erik Sheepflattener. He stopped contemplating his family's heritage and tossed his mitt back in the closet. He let go of his dread over heaving his guts out at baseball and headed upstairs to spend some time with his dread over going to school tomorrow.

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Excerpted from Erik vs. Everything by Christina Uss
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.