In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  Tom pulled all his father’s pockets inside out. Nothing but a dime had escaped detection. It was in a suit jacket. Two days later, two men with grim unshaven faces came to the door and said, “You want to make a donation?” They said it like they were daring him to say no. Tom showed them the boxes.

  He went back to Anna and asked how he could get rid of furniture, other household items. “You going to leave? It doesn’t cost much. I won’t raise the rent.” Tom said he couldn’t live in the apartment. His parents’ ghosts insisted on staying. Anna told him, “I’ll call Zeke Solarchuk. I do business with him. He’ll make you an offer.”

  The auctioneer came. He was a thin, stooped man with a straggly beard and tired eyes. He looked at everything. He shook his head and said, “They’re old but not old enough to be antiques. They’re well taken care of but were never expensive furniture. I will take it to get it off your hands.”

  Anna shook her finger at him, pressed her lips together in disapproval and said something sharply in Ukrainian.

  “Okay,” the auctioneer said, “okay. We won’t bargain. I’ll give you a thousand dollars. I won’t make anything on it,” he complained.

  Tom gave him everything except personal items he wanted to keep. He gave Anna the Royal Doulton figurines.

  “You got a place to go?” the auctioneer asked. “People are moving out of an apartment. One bedroom. The furniture is rental. It’s clean. You interested?” The auctioneer provided a truck and driver cheaply because the apartment was in a rental building that belonged to his sister.

  Tom thought he might become a history teacher, maybe a professor, maybe join the RCMP, maybe apply for the local police force, maybe... he wasn’t sure what. He knew he didn’t want to be a bookkeeper like his father.

  Later, after he’d been accepted by the RCMP, finished his training, been moved about a bit, he went to have his teeth cleaned and the dental technician, Sally, asked him all about himself, was he married, did he have a job, a girlfriend, kids, as she scraped and polished. As he was leaving, she slipped a piece of paper into his hands with her phone number. He was lonely and called her. They went for pizza. Spent time in the back seat of his car. She called him the next weekend, suggested they go to a bar for a few beer, throw darts, watch sports on the big screen. After they’d been going together for four months, she told him she was pregnant, so they got married, and seven months later, Myrna was born.

  Tom had never given any thought to being a father. His father had never really accepted being a father. If they could have afforded sending Tom to a boarding school and just had him return home on holidays, he would have opted for that. Tom had never wanted to ship Myrna or Joel off to boarding school. He wasn’t sure what it was that he was supposed to do with a daughter and son, but he knew that they didn’t belong in a place where rules and structures were all important. Myrna had always been a tomboy. She climbed trees, did cartwheels on the lawn, wanted a mitt so she could play baseball. She wore dresses reluctantly unless she was playing dress-up, imagining herself as various characters she’d seen on television or in movies. When Joel arrived, he defied all their expectations. He’d always been fragile, thin and rather pale. He preferred solitary activities, reading and playing checkers, then chess, then computers. Sally hadn’t liked that. She wanted a son who was captain of the local hockey team, a hero she could cheer on from the sidelines.

  Tom grabbed the corner of loose wallpaper and pulled it. It came away in a long awkward strip. He pulled at another edge. It ripped, and he stepped back and pulled it down. Once he started, he couldn’t stop. The wallpaper came away easily, except in spots where the boards had knots or rough areas. There the glue had settled into the grooves and held the paper firm. He left them for later. He kept on until the room was stripped of its tiny pink flowers and the wallpaper lay in untidy coils. The lumber Oli had used for the walls was spruce. Tom measured with his hand. Many of the boards were five inches across, six feet long. He thought he would salvage them, take the nails out carefully. The boards came from before the loggers cut down everything of value. Cleaning out the old sawdust would be messy. He wondered if deer mice wintered there. If they did, he’d have to wear a mask. Their urine sometimes carried hantavirus. He’d need a spray bottle and a gallon of Javex.

  “If you get angry, if you get depressed, get tactile,” the shrink had said. “Feel things. Smell them. Taste them. Listen to them.” And his usual passive, non-judgmental voice sounded angry, and Tom wondered how he managed to listen to other people’s pain day after day. He wondered if the anger was at him, or if it was from the hour before, or about the hour to come. Later, he heard that the shrink’s marriage was coming apart. He wondered what the shrink smelled, tasted, felt. Maybe not his wife.

  Tom’s anger had eased. He closed his eyes and breathed out. He needed sunshine, he needed to go outside, so he went to look at the southeast corner of the house. The corner had dropped, maybe three inches. The ground stayed damp there because of the shade of the big spruce. He’d see who in town had a chainsaw and knew how to take down large trees. Maybe trade the wood for the work.

  The corner needed to be lifted. Would it have made any difference, he wondered, if he’d known about the problems? He thought not; he’d have bought the place anyway. Jessie’s price was firm. It was like the house was waiting for him, maybe seen in a dream, or in a picture. Maybe when he came to help find Jessie’s husband, he’d made note of it, not consciously but unconsciously, the wide eaves, the narrow panels of stained glass bordering each window, the clean lines from another time.

  Tom rubbed his hand over the shingles. Those closer to the bottom were punky. They would have to come off. He’d do it carefully, preserve everything that was good, get rid of everything that was bad, make it better than new. He’d keep the basic structure but redo Oli’s slapdash solutions.

   Chapter 9

  Eating Rats

  One thing Tom had learned about small towns was that if you want friends, you’ve got to participate, doesn’t matter how you feel about the activity. It’s not like there are myriad choices, as there are in the city. If you don’t participate, people assume that you think you’re too good for them.

  One of Tom’s colleagues had once said about small-town postings, “If they eat rats, you eat rats with them.”

  He went for a swim, then put on clean jeans and a short-sleeved shirt with pictures of ducks on it. Joel had given it to him. In the summers Tom had taken the kids to parks in the various places they’d lived and always took a loaf of stale bread to feed to the ducks. When Joel was little, he called Tom Daddy Duck, and that connection had stuck. At least he didn’t associate his father with the various brands of stale bread. Daddy Duck was okay, but Daddy Stale Bread would have been difficult to accept.

  There was bingo at the community hall. He wasn’t sure of the dress code, but underdressing wasn’t likely to be a problem. Because it was hot, he wore his shirt untucked. It also covered up the fact that his pants were tight.

  He hadn’t played bingo since Anna had occasionally taken him to the Ukrainian church. They’d eaten perogies and borshch in the basement. The air was delicious with the smell of frying onions. For dessert there was poppy seed cake with icing. There was no smoking while people were eating, but once the meal was over and the bingo cards came out, people lit up.

  The Valhalla community hall was one large room with a stage at the front and high, narrow windows on each side. A kitchen and cloakroom had been added on the east side. On the stage were a folding table and a cage for balls. Two rows of wooden tables had been set up for the players. He bought a set of sheets with bingo cards printed on them and picked a seat close to the door. He barely had a chance to look around before Sarah O’Hara plunked herself down beside him.

  “Don’t be such a cheapskate,” she said. “No one buys just the basics. This is a fundraiser for the school.” She called a volunteer over and said to him, “Sell this guy five more
.”

  “I’ll take a blue, pink and yellow,” Tom said.

  “You got a lot to learn,” she said.

  “Seems like it,” he answered. “I saw Ben. He was going to town to pick up a load.”

  “He needs the money,” she said, but she wasn’t really paying attention. She was using Scotch Tape to stick three sheets of the same colour together.

  People were shuffling through the front door, saying hello, stopping in the aisle to share news and blocking others from getting to seats at the front. There were cries of “Keep moving” and “Sorry” and “I’ll talk to you later” and the scraping of chairs, and calls of “More cards here.” The caller had taken his seat. He was a young-looking man with a smooth face but a grey beard that dropped from the point of his chin. He wore a blue polyester suit and a yellow tie, making him more formal than everyone else and giving him authority. He turned the handle of the cage and the wooden balls rattled. He kept turning the cage until everyone had quit talking. When the first ball came out, he picked it up and shouted, “Under the B, three.” With that, everyone bent to their cards, and from where he sat, Tom thought they all looked like students intent upon their exams.

  Tom would have liked to have talked to Sarah more, but it was obviously against the rules, and given the way she gripped her false teeth together and scanned her cards, it would have been a serious criminal offence to distract her. He thought people might have stayed away, given that Angel had only died two days before, but if they were in mourning, it wasn’t going to keep them from a chance to win the $175-dollar grand prize.

  Sarah gave him the point of her elbow. “You missed number twenty-one.” She was playing her cards and keeping an eye on his as well.

  Because there were no ashtrays and there were two large red signs saying No Smoking in black letters, he hoped people obeyed them, but you never knew.

  Some of the women wore makeup and dresses, but most were in loose track pants that looked like long underwear and tops that hung out. The women who were dolled up and had done their hair were by themselves, and he thought it meant that they were single and looking for a man. Those who already had a man didn’t need to set bait. The men, in spite of the heat, wore long-sleeved shirts and blue jeans. Some of them had their sleeves rolled up. Parents had brought their children. Babysitters would be in short supply. If the kids wanted to run around, they went outside. Some of them were bingo mavens in training. Their parents bought them an extra sheet and then helped them keep track of the numbers.

  A little blonde girl with pigtails and a short pink dress that stuck out like a tutu was walking about, tugging on the legs of people she knew. Each in turn picked her up and held her on their lap until she squirmed away. She kept going back to a very thin young woman holding a baby. Her mother’s top was stained, either from feeding the baby or from it throwing up. Her face was shaped like an ellipse and filled with tiredness. He thought he recognized her, and then realized it was Rose. She had given him directions to Pearl’s. She ignored the child that kept pulling on her leg, wanting to get onto her lap with the baby. She stared at the bingo card in front of her with the intensity of someone trying not to see some terrible dark fate approaching. Finally, an older girl, prodded by one of the women, took the child’s hand and led her outside.

  From what he could tell, the people were all locals. No boat or cottage people. There probably wasn’t any such thing in their neighbourhoods. They did their gambling for real money in Las Vegas or the local casinos. They had lots of good surprises in their lives. New cars, boats, planes, houses, furniture, clothes, exotic trips, the sorts of things people who lived locally just dreamed about. If any of them did come, it would be self-conscious slumming so they could regale their friends with stories over dinner.

  A woman at Tom’s table yelled bingo and after her numbers were called out by the fellow who was selling cards and her win was confirmed, the seller went to the front and brought her the picture of a package of pork chops that had been cut from an advertising flyer and glued onto a piece of cardboard. All the prizes except the last one were for meat. Because of the temperature, the prizes were kept in a freezer on the stage and the winners would be able to pick them up after the last game.

  There was a break after game ten. People got up for coffee and cold juice. Everyone started talking at once and it was like the roar of the lake in a storm. He was relieved when he saw the smokers head outside. He filled a paper cup with juice that was vaguely lemon, dropped a loonie onto the donation plate. A pretty blonde woman appeared holding up a broomstick with sugared donuts on it. People took a donut and gave her a loonie. Tom dug in his pocket for a dollar.

  When he sat back down beside Sarah he said, “No one seems overcome with grief.”

  She turned sharply in her chair and stared directly into his face. Her eyes were blue, and at the moment, they looked like they could be made of ice. “When my husband died, I ran his trapline and lifted his nets. People helped me for the first couple of weeks, then I was on my own. They got families to feed and take care of. Do you think I should have played Ophelia?”

  “Hamlet?” he said.

  “Do you think just because we live back of beyond and don’t have a lot of money that we don’t know how to read? After he’s had a few drinks, ask Helgi History over there to recite from the Edda. He’ll keep you up all night.” She indicated a man whose dark hair and beard resembled a haystack. In spite of the heat, he was wearing a linen sports jacket, a white shirt and a tie. There was obviously an old argument in her head, for she added, “Just because we can’t afford big boats doesn’t mean we’ve haven’t got big brains.”

  The skin around Sarah’s eyes was taut. He’d obviously stepped into sensitive territory. The relationship between the locals and the summer types wasn’t all that good. He’d noticed that when the commercial fishermen came in from their nets, the summer people sometimes went down to look at the catch, but he’d never seen them having an actual conversation with the fishermen.

  He half stood up to look for the blonde woman with the donuts, but she had disappeared.

  “Dolly’s sold out,” Sarah said. “It gives her a bit of cash. She also makes donuts for hockey games and any events where she can make a few dollars. She’s a good cook. If you want, she’d make you some real meals.”

  The big prize went to a woman in a bright orange-and-blue dress. When she yelled bingo, she pounded the table with her fist. There was a collective groan. Everyone who had won earlier prizes crowded up to the freezer to collect their bacon, pork chops or steak.

  The next day, when he went to check the mail there was a letter from Joel. The envelope just said Tom Parsons, Valhalla, Manitoba. No postal code. Inside, there was one page, one line. It said, “I’ve got AIDS.” It had a drawing of a stick man lying down with Xs over the circles that were his eyes.

  Tom stood there staring at it. It might have been a language incomprehensible to him. Swahili maybe, or Russian. Even if someone had yelled fire, he couldn’t have moved. There was no return address, and the postmark was two weeks old. Young, white, male, involved in theatre, comedy, in Vancouver. He didn’t think Joel was gay—at least, he’d shown no signs of it. However, he’d preferred computer games to girls.

  He knew there were people talking, making noise, but he couldn’t hear anything. People were clustered at the ice cream counter, the café tables were full, Horst was putting chocolate bars on a shelf on the counter, but there was no sound. Everything slowed down.

  “Is anything wrong?” Karla asked. She’d just come in the door from waiting on an outside table. She stood there, her hip thrust out and her hand on it. The voices, the clanking from the kitchen, from the dirty dishes being picked up, Horst’s wheezing—all came back in a rush.

  “No,” he said too abruptly. “No, fine.” And he went over to the vegetable stand, where he pretended to look at limp carrots and wilted l
ettuce.

  He stood staring at the printed letters and wondering if this was one of Joel’s crazy practical jokes. When he’d been at summer camps, he’d sent them messages saying, “I’ve been eaten by a bear.” Or “I had my leg cut off because the cook ran out of meat for dinner.” It was his way of making fun of their fears. He usually embellished his one-line notes with cartoon characters. The notes usually included a plea for another five dollars for treats.

  Lost, Tom thought, imagining the vast distances of the prairies, the foothills, the mountains, and then the coast. Myrna had relented and given him a phone number in case he wanted to call her brother, but she couldn’t imagine why. Siblings, he thought. He’d never had one and didn’t understand why they fought. At times he’d had fantasies that his mother or father had secret children he could discover one day. He’d imagined that if he’d had a brother or sister, he wouldn’t have always been lonely.

  Just then, two men came in. They were wearing white shoes, white pants, short-sleeved shirts with anchors embroidered on the pockets and captain’s caps, bright new ones with gold stars that he knew were an affectation. Potbellies. One of them had a dead cigar clenched between his teeth.

  The girls who served ice cream were scooping steadily. Absentmindedly, Tom watched the two men watch the girls bend over the ice cream freezer in short skirts. As if from a great distance, he could hear the orders being given to the kitchen. The waitress clipped the orders with clothespins onto a line in front of the kitchen pass-through but also called out the order for the cook.

  His son, he thought, the son he piggybacked around the house, taught to ride a bicycle. The son who, before he lost him, used to challenge him to chess every Saturday morning when he wasn’t on duty.

  The waitresses were coming in and out delivering and taking orders. Their uniform was a pink top and pink skirt with a white apron.