In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  The snow came up to his thighs. He cleared it away from the front of the car, got a good hold on the bumper and, when she reversed, put his weight on his good leg and pushed. The Jeep moved, but the back wheels didn’t catch. He signalled her to stop, and then dug packed snow out from under the Jeep. On the second try the back tires caught and the Jeep rolled back.

  The driver rolled down her window. “I’m going that way,” she said, pointing in the direction he had come from. “I’ll buy you a drink the next time I see you.” He wished for a moment that she had been going in the same direction as he was.

  When she was gone, Tom looked at the hole in the snow where the Jeep had been stuck. She’d just missed a sign that was nearly covered by a snowdrift. It had a picture of a pickerel with a hook in its mouth jumping out of the water, Valhalla in blue letters and the words a fisherman’s paradise. A local humourist had changed the second a to an e with a black marker so it said Valhella. If it snowed much more, the sign would be completely buried.

  Because the road was narrow, the surface treacherous with ice and the snowbanks so high that vehicles coming out of driveways wouldn’t be seen, he cautiously edged his way into town. The houses were buried in snow. Snow had drifted up to the eaves and over the lower parts of roofs. A forest of tall spruce trees towered over the houses. Dark green spruce, so old that their branches were sparse and ragged against the pale winter sky. The Canadian Pacific Railway hadn’t built this town, he thought. Roads wandered haphazardly to create a puzzle. He could smell woodsmoke, and when he stopped to look, he could see smoke that rose for a couple of feet from the chimneys, then was swept sideways by the wind.

  The snow, pristine, blown into drifts, made him think of the books he had read as a boy, of families curling up contentedly before a blazing fire. He’d never had that in the city, only an imitation fireplace that provided no heat.

  He followed the road until it ended at the lake. Here there was more evidence of activity, for there were snowmobile trails and a Bombardier trail that went down into the harbour and out over the ice until it disappeared in the glare. The fishermen up and down the lake used these enclosed, teardrop-shaped vehicles with skis at the front and metal tracks at the back to travel over the ice in winter. Just in front of the harbour, snow had been scooped away to create an open area. There were boats raised on empty oil drums and wooden blocks—four fishermen’s aluminum skiffs covered in tarps to keep out the snow. Three sailboats were mummified in grey plastic. The harbour was empty. The finger docks were nearly invisible under the snow, the main dock was black, abandoned, and to the north a reef shaped like a crooked finger bent back toward the south. White slabs of ice had broken against and overtop it. Beyond the harbour, the lake was a vast field of drifting snow. A yellow Bombardier and three snowmobiles were parked outside a tin-clad shed.

  He sat sideways to the wind, the truck engine idling, so the exhaust was blown away from the truck. It was as if the village were frozen in time, but by ice and snow instead of lava. The snow where the pale sun shone on it was white, but in every place where there was a shadow, in the windblown excavations of the drifts, behind the boats and poles and buildings, the snow was blue. Where the shadows crossed, the snow was a deeper blue touched with grey.

  When he’d been here for the drowned fisherman, it was mid-September. No ice or snow then, just warm days, cool nights, everything turning gold and red. The gardens aglow with pumpkins and late-ripening tomatoes, an intense red among yellow leaves.

  He backed up and turned his truck around to face a two-storey log building with a front porch held up by peeled tree trunks. It had a sign over the porch that declared in faded white letters: White’s Emporium. He’d stayed for two nights in one of their cabins. The cabin had been spartan, but it was clean. The mattress lumpy and filled with wool or cotton that had been pressed down by fishermen over many years. There had been a hot plate, a toaster and a kettle, plus two cups and saucers and two plates. None of the dishes matched. The sheets were clean, but he was careful to fold the top of the sheet over the comforter. He’d used the toilets and showers at one end of the emporium. Each day he’d gone to the emporium for a breakfast of bacon and eggs, and fried fish for lunch and supper.

  He turned the truck around to look back at the town. He thought it looked like a Christmas card, the houses nearly buried by the snow, the tall trees, the smoke from the chimneys. The tangled roads, the snowdrifts that looked like frozen waves, the windows like the openings to caves filled with secrets, but warm and comforting. He turned off the motor. It was the silence that overwhelmed him. Except for the sound of his breathing, the silence was complete. When he moved, he could hear the rasping of his jacket. In the city, the noise had never stopped. Traffic flowed even in the night’s darkest hours, and desperate individuals held up corner stores when the world should have been fast asleep. He smiled to himself. Viking warriors had been promised that if they died honourably in battle, they would be immortal, would go to Valhalla, where they could feast and drink and go into battle for eternity. If they were killed during the day, in the evening they would rise and continue with the feasting and drinking and wenching. He doubted that any Viking warriors would have settled for this Valhalla while they waited for Ragnarök, the end of the world.

  A path just wide enough for one person had been shovelled on the three steps leading to the front door. He parked in front of the building. There was a sign in the window that said, White’s has the best bites. He wasn’t sure if it was referring to fish biting or the food that was served. The sign was faded, the edges curled. He thought the emporium might be closed, but when he pressed his face close to the glass of the front door, he saw there was a single light. He tried the door handle, the door opened and a bell jingled sharply. He stamped the snow off his boots and stepped inside.

  The room was dark. The front of the building was all windows, but because the porch was wide enough to accommodate tables during the summer and the porch roof had a wide overhang, the windows let in little light. Tom took off his sunglasses and stood unmoving. The change from the brilliant sunlight reflected by the bright snow to the dim interior left him blind until his eyes adjusted. When he could see again, he realized there was a man sitting on a bar stool on the other side of the store counter. He was wearing a wine-coloured cardigan and fingerless gloves. Beside where Tom was standing, there was a wood furnace made from an oil drum set on its side. A flickering light from the open draft reflected off the floor in front of it.

  The store’s guardian sat unmoving. If he was surprised to see a stranger in the middle of winter, he didn’t show it. He had tubes in his nose from an oxygen tank. He furrowed his brows as he studied Tom, but he also kept flicking his eyes to the right. Tom turned to look at what he was watching. A woman in a long blue parka was sorting through vegetables on a slanted shelf that was shoved against the front wall.

  “You the real estate White?” Tom asked, indicating the yellow metal sign nailed onto the opposite wall that said, Horst White, Realtor.

  Horst hesitated before he nodded briefly, as if he were reluctant to admit his identity.

  “Are there any places for rent here?”

  Horst shifted on his high-backed stool, mulled over the question. “No, nothing for rent now. Places for rent in the spring,” he said in a rasping voice. Between each sentence, he paused and took a breath.

  The woman in the parka that made her look like a large blue puffball plunked a bundle of limp carrots onto the counter. The carrots had reached the stage where they were flexible. Horst ignored Tom while he weighed the carrots on a scale. He made a notation in a ledger on the counter.

  “Your tab is a hundred and fifty-seven dollars,” he said in an aggrieved voice.

  “End of the month. As soon as the cheque comes in,” the blue puffball said, and took the six mangy carrots and stuffed them into one of her pockets. She asked for a package of cigarettes, and w
hen the storekeeper went to a cabinet to get them, she pointed at Tom, then at herself, then at the door. She took her cigarettes and went out.

  “Nothing at all for rent?” Tom said. “When should I check back?”

  “End of April maybe.” Horst wheezed after he said April and was so short of breath every word seemed to be an effort.

  “Any chance of getting a hot meal?” Tom asked. “I’ve come a long way.”

  Horst looked offended by the question. The emporium was all one room. To Tom’s right was an ice cream freezer and a window where orders could be taken in summer. Six round wire-legged tables were set out with flimsy wire chairs. There was a side counter and behind it the kitchen was dark and empty looking. The smell of french fries hung heavy in the air. Because there was so little light, the room seemed cavernous. Shadows filled the corners and every place the weak light from the one light bulb did not reach. There was a small pile of three-foot tamarack logs beside the heater.

  “The kitchen is shut down for the winter. If you want to buy groceries off the shelves, you can turn on a light.” There were a number of bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling over the grocery area.

  Tom declined and went out onto the porch. The woman in blue was standing at the corner of the building having a cigarette. When he got close to her, she quietly said, as if afraid of being overheard, “I’m Pearl. I think Jessie might want to rent her house.” She pointed across the road.

  Through a strand of full-grown spruce, he could see there was a house. “She won’t hire Horst to rent it for her. They don’t get along.”

  With that, she flicked her cigarette butt into the snow, pulled up her hood and scurried away.

  It was cold enough that the snow squeaked under his boots. The surface of the road, in spite of being plowed, was packed, hardened snow. He suddenly felt his feet go out from underneath him, and he tried to catch his balance, spun, then fell back against a snowbank. He pushed himself upright. The dry snow squeaked under his feet, and when a clump of snow fell from a branch, he could hear it land.

  He walked along the road down which he’d driven into town. The house Pearl had pointed out to him had an old-fashioned closed-in porch on the front, overlooking the lake. At the rear there was a shed that protected the back door from the weather. He walked all the way to where the road was blocked by a ridge of lake ice. He looked back through the trees and, though it was still early, saw that there were lights on in the interior. From where he stood, the road ran straight west and separated the house from the dock area and behind that the emporium. The fish shed was closer to the shore and to the north side of the harbour.

  If it hadn’t been so cold, and if he’d had a coin, he’d have been tempted to toss it to decide if he should knock on the back door of the house.

  He walked back to the driveway, followed it to the garage, and then stopped on a path between an old half-ton Chevy and a snowbank that reached his armpits. The truck’s wooden box was filled with snow. The path was narrow, as if the person digging it had no energy to waste or wanted it to be invisible to all but those who already knew of its existence. On the far side of the snowbank was the garage, its door held shut with a chain and a large padlock. To the side of the garage and farther back among the trees, there was a shed. Because of the protection afforded by the spruce, no more than a foot or so of snow had found its way past the periphery of this private forest. There was a path to an outhouse, and it was obviously being used because the snow had been dug away so the door could be opened and closed. Cold visits, he thought. There’d be no lingering.

  There was an oil tank on a stand. Smoke was rising from the chimney. His father would have said, “Don’t intrude.” But Anna, having spent years managing apartment blocks, supporting herself and her daughter, was never one to miss an opportunity. She would have said, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained, huh? Ain’t that right?”

  He had to shuffle sideways to get past the truck to the enclosed porch. Hanging over the door was a cage filled with suet and seeds. A chickadee was clinging to it, digging the suet out from between the wires.

  To knock off the snow he kicked the toes of his boots against the back step, then let himself into the porch. Whoever lived here was burrowed in for the winter. There was no light in the shed, but he could see that there were men’s jackets on hooks and a collection of various kinds of boots lined up against the wall. He put his hand out and touched a brown jacket. It was frozen stiff. He opened the storm door, but before he could knock, the inside door opened and an elderly woman with unhealthy, yellowish skin and a narrow face covered in wrinkles faced him.

  “Come in, come in. Shut the door behind you. Don’t let the cold in.” A cloud of white mist enveloped her.

  He quickly stepped inside, pulled the storm door shut, then the inside door, then stood on the rubber mat meant to keep snow and water off the floor.

  “Turn around,” she said, and when he did, she brushed the snow off him with a straw broom. “I saw you slip. Footing is uncertain here. You could have fallen and broken a leg and got covered over with snow. Nobody would have found you until the spring. It’s happened before. Bernie Solmundson disappeared in a blizzard. We walked over him all winter and didn’t know until the snow melted.”

  She stood the broom against the wall.

  “I’ll watch my step,” he said.

  “Pearl phoned me. I’ve been expecting you. Take off your things. I’ve water on for tea.”

  He hung his jacket on a hook beside the door, pulled off his boots. When he’d finished, he straightened up and said, “I’m Tom Parsons.”

  “I’m Jessie Olason.” She held out her hand. He could feel the looseness of her skin and the bones beneath it. “You sit.”

  She went to the stove and took the kettle off, poured water into a teapot and brought it to the kitchen table. She put out milk and sugar and cookies. She gave him a small plate and a paper napkin.

  “The tea will be ready in a bit,” she said as she sat down opposite him. “Pearl says you were asking about a place.”

  “Mr. White said there were no places for rent.”

  “Never are. You might get a cottage for a week or two in the summer. You interested in forty acres and an old house?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “You mean this place? You want to rent out this place?”

  “To sell.” She snorted. “It’s the only place I’ve got. Unless I’m going to sell you somebody else’s place and run off with the money.”

  “How much?”

  “Eighty thousand. You got four acres with the house. Waterfront. Across the side road to the west is thirty-six acres. You crossed that road on your way into town. It’s just at the end of my four acres. It runs parallel to the lake. Thirty acres is cleared. It’s good for hay. Six acres is underwater in the spring and wet summers. Good fishing in the marsh behind it if you like jackfish and carp. They come right in. Can you afford that?” She said it in a determined fashion, as if she might be enquiring about the state of his soul.

  Her insistence on selling unsettled him. “I don’t know if I can get a mortgage,” he protested. He felt confused. Buying had never crossed his mind. “If I bought, I’d have to start a handyman business. I was just thinking of renting.” Depression started to overwhelm him and his head filled with uncountable voices all contradicting each other. “I’d be working for myself here.”

  “You a Christian?”

  “Yes,” he said but then felt guilty, for his yes was based on decades before, baptized, confirmed, getting married in the church but, in the years that followed, moving around for different postings, finding an easy excuse not to attend church. Besides, he’d often had to work on Sundays. At first, Sally took the kids to Sunday school, but as they kept moving from place to place, different churches, different ministers, she lost interest.

  “Do you come with a mission? Not Lutheran b
y any chance?”

  “No,” he said, concerned that she might not want to sell to any other faith. “Anglican.”

  “It will have to do,” she said. “I could give you a mortgage on this place. Ten per cent down. I’ll take back the rest at four per cent. You pay six hundred a month. More, if you’ve got it. Open mortgage. It would give me a steady income.”

  “Okay,” he said. It was only two hundred more than he was paying for the crappy basement apartment. The house, at least, was above ground.

  She held out the plate of cookies and he took one. “Peanut butter,” she said with pride. “My husband, Oli, loved peanut butter cookies. He drowned.”

  “When?” He didn’t dare refuse a cookie, but he knew he’d regret it. Peanut butter gave him heartburn and, occasionally, a migraine.

  “Five years ago last September.”

  “I came to help find him. I was with the police.”

  She jerked her head up so hard that she nearly spilled her tea. “You!” she exclaimed. “You found him. And now you’ve come back and found me.”

  He wasn’t sure where the conversation was going, so he bit into the cookie. Jessie had clenched her hands in front of her and he thought she might be going to pray. She was wearing two sweaters, one pink and one green, and under her light purple dress, she had on men’s long underwear. She wore fishermen’s grey socks inside beaded moccasins.

  “You would have to promise not to sell to those Whites or to those immoral communist Vikings north of here. Do you promise?”

  “Whatever you want,” Tom said. He hadn’t bought the property yet and she was already talking about his selling it. “Why don’t you want them to have the property?”