In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  He thought he’d get a chair and sit with the body, and Sarah offered to go get him one. A guy in bright yellow swim trunks came to take a video. Tom chased him away by saying that if he took a video, the Mounties would want it as evidence.

  Sarah reappeared trailed by a tall thin elderly man with a long white beard. He was carrying a metal chair he had taken from the veranda of White’s Emporium in one hand and a Bible with a black cover in the other. Sarah had a piece of scrap plywood that she put down so the legs of the chair wouldn’t sink into the soft ground.

  “This is Joseph,” she said. “He can watch that no one bothers the body.” She paused to look at the tarp. She clenched her hand in anger and frustration. “She was fifteen. Her sixteenth birthday would have been in two weeks.”

  “Have you been saved?” Joseph asked.

  Tom was caught by surprise, had to think for a moment, then said, “Probably not.”

  “We never know from one day to the next what our fate will be,” Joseph said with the flat certainty of someone who has found the truth. “The wages of sin is death. Repent and you will be saved.”

  Tom glanced at Sarah, who had looked away. She wanted no part of the conversation.

  “Thank you for watching over—” Tom paused.

  “Angel,” Sarah interjected.

  “Angel,” Tom repeated. “For looking after Angel.”

  He needed to leave. The wide awake nightmares were coming back, the flood of dead and injured that forced their way out of cellars where he tried to keep them locked up. Tom took his rucksack and fishing equipment back to the house.

  His strategy was to keep busy, to keep focused, to not let his mind wander, to stay in the moment, to give the memories no place. So he cleaned up debris, old stovepipes, a disintegrating rain barrel, pieces of tin. He worked for nearly two hours, then got cleaned up.

  On the way over to Sarah’s he stopped to ask Joseph if there’d been any problems. Joseph was reading the Bible he’d been carrying. He stood and with his long white hair and beard he might have been an Old Testament prophet. He raised his Bible in front of him. “Be gone, I’ve said, and they fled before my wrath.”

  Tom would have been more impressed if he hadn’t noticed that inside the Bible cover, Joseph had a paperback of some sort.

  When she answered the door, Sarah was wearing a loose pair of jeans and a clean checked shirt.

  “You know this will cause some gossip? They’ll be saying that Sarah doesn’t waste any time. She’s making a move on that new bachelor. Are you a bachelor?”

  “Separated. Heading that way. It takes two years.”

  They sat at a kitchen table Sarah said was made from local birch. She said that her husband had logged the trees, sawed them up, built the table and the chairs. He could, she said, do anything.

  “Widow?” he asked.

  “That’s what they say.” In spite of her age, she was square-shouldered and strong-looking, though her fingers were swollen with arthritis. “I heard about you. Moving into Jessie’s place. You’ve got cheek, snapping it up under the noses of people who’ve been waiting years for her to die so they could get it.”

  “She didn’t give me much choice,” he said. “I came to look and the next thing I knew I owned a house.”

  “A poor helpless male,” she replied. “Taken advantage of by an old woman. Outfoxed. You want to sell it, there are buyers. Here, I’ll just wet the tea.”

  Sarah was prepared for his visit. She had a kettle on the stove and a plate of bannock, a dish of butter and a jar of mossberry jam on the table. As Sarah got the tea ready, he looked around the kitchen. The walls were made of squared timbers. The floors were unpainted planks, grey with age.

  At one time this house had been filled with people. He could imagine the boisterous family, the constant visitors, travellers making their way north and south, stopping here for shelter and warm food. Everything in the kitchen was homemade. Tabletop and countertops made of thick slabs of wood, cut locally, run through a local sawmill, planed by hand—a kitchen meant to be used, one that wouldn’t wear out or collapse. Yet everything was well finished; Sarah’s husband had indeed been a good carpenter.

  The shelves were of birch, deep, meant to hold large plates and mugs. He put his foot across one of the oiled floor planks. It was around six inches wide and probably six feet long; you didn’t see planks like that anymore. In a smaller room, the planks would have looked out of place, but here they were the right size. Along one wall were shelves that held framed photographs and items collected over the years: birch bark and woven baskets, rocks with labels, including some that were encrusted with garnets.

  Sarah put a Brown Betty on the table. She put out two china cups and saucers and dessert plates. He was surprised. He’d expected mugs and heavy crockery.

  From where he sat, he could look down a long hallway. The house was sturdy, meant to hold back forty below and raging winds. In the kitchen there was an electric stove and, beside it, a wood-burning stove.

  Seeing Tom’s interest, Sarah patted the top of the wood stove. “Power goes out for three or four days in the winter, you can shut the doors and live in the kitchen. But I’m okay anyway because I’ve got an oil burner in the living room.”

  She had the soft lilt of Bungee, the local mix of Scots and Cree, except it wasn’t Scots that softened the edges of her words.

  “You’re not from here,” he said.

  “Sixty years here, but you’re never from here unless you’re born here. I’m still from away. Sarah O’Hara, married to a McAra. As he said, our names rhymed, so we were fated for each other. He’d been posted with the air force to Metz and come to see Ireland. I was eighteen, working in my father’s pub and McAra came in big as a bull, half Orkney and half Cree. None of that meant anything to me. I couldn’t have found Canada on a map. He hung around the bar, telling me stories about the Great White North.”

  She shook her head at the memory, then added, “I left plumbing and paved streets, art galleries and candy shops. I never dreamt I was going to learn to catch fish, skin muskrats, have six kids without a doctor.”

  “You could have gone back after your husband died,” he said, trying to imagine what Ireland would have been like for kids who’d grown up in northern Manitoba.

  “To what?” she asked. “My parents were dead. My relatives good for a weekend before I would have begun to stink like three-day-old fish. And who would want six kids?”

  “And that’s it. Disowned.”

  “Not disowned. There are letters, and every Christmas there’s plum pudding and Christmas cake and boxes of sweets and knitted sweaters and socks. It’s part of the bargain, I expect. We’ll keep giving you things if you’ll just stay away.”

  “Never been back?”

  “Never could afford it. And who would have looked after the brood?”

  He wondered then about his father, his English accent never lost, his impeccable clothes, the Christmas cards and small gifts, the occasional letter, usually because someone had died, the religiously shined shoes, buffed until they reflected the light. That had been Tom’s job from the time he was little, making sure that his father never went out of the apartment without shined shoes. Images of his father’s shoes floated through his mind. The feel of them, the smell of the polish, the stiffness of the brush, the softness of the cloth.

  His parents had no excuse not to go back to England for a visit. No brood. One son who could have been left under the landlady’s care. It would, however, have meant breaking established rituals, taken away the utter predictability of their lives.

  Sarah’s kitchen was orderly, everything in its place. “The brood’s gone. Flown the coop. Nothing to keep them here. This place is much too big for me. Lots of bedrooms. When there’s work crews in the area, I board and room them. Karla and Horst try to get all of them, but those one-room shacks are freezing in the cold weather. Not properly insulated. And my food’s better. Karla’s been trying to get Horst to f
ix up those shacks and really promote ice fishing. Could be work for you, but they drive a hard bargain. Make sure you have a written agreement. I hope they succeed. We already get some sports fishermen in the winter—ice augers, tents and little huts out on the lake. Some ice fishermen have gotten big pickerel and they’ve spread the word and now we get a few over the winter. I’m sort of like a B & B without being a B & B, if you know what I mean?”

  “You told the Whites that it was Ben’s kid,” he said. “That the Ben who was taking care of Jessie’s house?”

  “That’s him,” Sarah said. “Ben Finlayson. You haven’t been here long enough to get to know everyone. He’s got a daughter who lives in the city. She’s got two kids. That’s her daughter, Angel, who’s died. God help Ben. He’s lived for Angel since Betty passed.” A silence fell between them. “Albert says it looked like you were fighting with her. Like you picked her up.”

  “She was lying face down in the water. I had to turn her over.”

  “The Mounties should be here soon.”

  “What do you think she was up to?”

  Sarah got up and walked to the window, pushed aside the kitchen curtains. He went to see what she was looking at. There were kids in the playground, climbing on a slide, through monkey bars, swinging on swings, riding on a teeter-totter.

  “Our kids,” she said, “the village kids. Angel isn’t the first death. Usually, though, they die somewhere else. It’s not as bad as on the reserve but...” she paused in frustration, shook her head, “some people feel the ground itself is poisoned. Not heavy metals. With evil. Biblio Braggi came and sanctified the playground to keep the devil out.”

  “Was he the local minister?” Tom asked.

  “Some people thought he was a minister, but he was just a Bible salesman. His big pitch was if you didn’t buy a Bible and get buried with it on your chest, you were going to hell.”

  If she was looking out the window for an answer, she didn’t find it, for when she came back to the table she said, “I don’t know what Angel was up to. With my kids gone, I don’t hear anything anymore. Kids keep their own secrets.”

  “That you?” he asked, pointing to a small framed picture that was sitting on top of a cupboard.

  She reached it down, handed it to him. She was young, in a long dress and a fancy hat, probably in her father’s inn. He wondered what her new in-laws had thought of her and her city clothes, there in the bush. Tom put the picture back, took down another, this one with her husband. They were standing outside a log cabin that was deep in snow. He had his arm around her shoulders. She was wearing slacks, mukluks and a homemade parka with fur trim on the hood. She’d pushed her hood back for the picture. She was resting her right hand on a pair of snowshoes.

  “You look like you adjusted pretty quick,” he said.

  “You ever tried to wash crinolines in a tub?”

  That made him smile. The idea of washing crinolines in a tub. He’d heard of crazier things, the kind of things people kept doing after they’d left the old country and come to Canada, trying to live in a soddy as if they were still in London or Glasgow.

  “I’ve still got that dress,” she said. “In the trunk I brought from Ireland. I can’t get into it anymore, but every so often I take it out and hold it up to remind myself of what I was like then. Do you do that? With your uniform?”

  He said he preferred to travel light, except for his books and a few other things. Sally had been nostalgic, though. She still listened to her music from high school, kept her pompoms from being a cheerleader, report cards, clothes she’d never wear again but held memories she didn’t want to let go. He envied her that, having memories that made her fall asleep smiling. When things were bad, she fell asleep with her pompoms beside her.

  In the picture, Sarah was young; now she was old, her face and body heavy from years of hard physical work. She leaned heavily on her cane and her body inclined slightly forward. If she’d felt any remorse or regret earlier in her life, it had disappeared from her face and been replaced by a granite look she must have developed in confrontation with the endlessly unexpected.

  She’d been watching him as he looked at the pictures. “We make our choices,” she said, “with no way of knowing the outcome. What will your life be like twenty years from now if you stay here? How won’t it be like what it would have been?”

  “Hard questions,” he replied. Thoughts flitted through his mind, not complete but fragmented, bits of images: his parents’ deaths, becoming a Mountie, getting married, not getting married, getting married to someone else. One of his father’s friends had offered him an office job, but he’d turned it down. If he’d taken it, he’d have become an accountant.

  The questions made him uneasy. There’d been no maliciousness in Sarah’s voice, though, no hostility, maybe a touch of sadness, and he wondered how often she had regretted her decision, the decision of a young girl with no warning of what she was getting into.

  Sarah didn’t sit down or offer to refill his cup, so he thanked her for the tea and bannock and went out into the sunshine. There were kids swinging as high as they could on the swings in the schoolyard. From the look of it, they were competing to see if anyone could go over the top.

   Chapter 3

  The Past Intrudes

  The sun was so bright he squinted to shield his eyes and put on his sunglasses. The air was wet, muggy with the evaporating rain. The smell of the ground was thick, and he could feel his chest tighten. His asthma was always there, waiting, ready to squeeze his lungs until he started wheezing and coughing. Summer it was the dust and pollen, and fall it was mould. Winter, in spite of the cold, was his best season.

  The Mounties and medical examiner hadn’t arrived yet. Joseph was still sitting in his chair, but instead of reading his Bible, he was talking to a young girl holding a baby. Tom avoided him by going around the back of the emporium. He came out on the main road, then walked down it to his driveway. He couldn’t escape the image of Angel’s foot sticking out from beneath the tarp. Details like that triggered memories, unexpectedly opened doors. Stop, he said to himself, stop, and he began to hum, “She wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow.” Sometimes, when the images wouldn’t go away, he sang or played songs, searching for an earworm that would block out everything else.

  He wanted to flee, to disappear into the forest, set up a tent on the beach where there was nothing but wilderness; however, since he found the body, there was no avoiding an interview. They’d find him, and his trying to avoid them would make them suspicious.

  Why me? he asked himself. Why not Sarah on her way to her boat? Why not an early rising angler? Since leaving the Force, he’d avoided his former colleagues, and when he accidentally bumped into them their conversations were awkward. He was no longer part of the tribe; he was an embarrassment, an awkward reminder of what could happen to them. He was not looking forward to the interview.

  That was one of the reasons he picked this place. Quiet, out of the way, nothing to do but take care of daily business. All new people. He would have preferred it if no one had known about his past life. He’d put up a poster at the emporium and on the town bulletin board as someone who could do repairs, drywalling, carpentry, plumbing. He’d be busy in the summer with the cottagers, busy with local people and the farmers to the west all year round, and he’d have time to read in the winter. There’d be plenty of time for fishing. Or so he hoped.

  He went back to replacing dry rot. Ben had done chores for Jessie, taken care of the house for her sister after Jessie died. He’d said when Tom got to take a close look he’d find that there was a lot of work to be done. Ben had been right. From a distance, you’d have thought there was nothing wrong with the house. It was when the snow had melted and he’d gotten a close look that he’d been able to see everything that needed fixing, the places where wood crumbled under his hand. There was dry rot in the banisters, in a couple of the floorboards on the porch. The house and
roof were covered in cedar shingles. Replacing them would be expensive. It looked like he’d even have to take out part of a wall on the south side where the spruce trees grew too close, blocking out the sun. He’d carefully lift the window frames out, support the roof and then pull out the rotten two-by-fours.

  He was cutting some boards with the table saw when he saw two blue and whites pull up beside the blue tarp. Joseph stood up to meet them, talked to them briefly, then pointed to Tom’s house. Tom was watching through the screen of trees. One car stayed and the other car backed up, crossed the gravel road down which it had just come, then bumped along the narrow driveway covered in spruce needles and rough with shallow roots and parked behind Oli and Jessie’s old Chevy half-ton, which had come with the house. Prince Travis got out and Tom hissed under his breath.

  If there was anyone he didn’t want to see, it was Travis. They’d worked together a couple of times. Travis was a sharp-creases, smile-a-lot prick, a stuck-on-himself kind of guy. He knew the rule book by heart. He gave people speeding tickets for being two miles over the speed limit. He enjoyed nailing people for rolling stops and constantly watched for seatbelt violations. He was the only person Tom had ever worked with who issued littering citations.

  His mother gave him his first two names, Prince Albert, to honour the English royal family and to display the family’s loyalty and ambition. But not too much ambition, not overweening ambition; otherwise, as some of their colleagues said, she’d have named him King, like one of the K-9 dogs. His suffering in school with his classmates calling, “Here, Prince. Fetch,” must have made him the jerk he was. Those who knew about his middle name tormented him with questions about when he was going to England to claim the throne. He responded by being an insufferable snob. He was, Tom thought, the epitome of good intentions gone wrong.

  Travis swivelled his head, looking everything over, and from the look on his face, not approving. A guy who pressed his underwear and socks wouldn’t live in an old house that needed fixing, that badly needed a coat of paint. The storage shed with the moss-covered roof. The outhouse. The lumber pile. The yard that was still littered with the previous owner’s disintegrating possessions. For a moment, an old tape kicked in and Tom felt he should go inside, shave, whip on a pair of dress pants and a dress shirt, if he could find them in the boxes, and reappear respectable. The moment passed. He turned off the saw.