In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  To indicate the service was about to begin, Pastor Jon pulled a purple-and-black stole over his shoulders. Sarah told Tom that it was originally Catholic. Pastor Jon had found it in a thrift shop and snapped it up. He had a dozen stoles he’d found in odd places and wore them as the mood suited him. Although the stoles were not Unitarian orthodox, he felt they were reassuring and added dignity. He also said that they were an outward sign of his ecumenical beliefs.

  One of the undertakers went to stand beside the boom box. After a nod from Pastor Jon, he turned off the music.

  “Friends,” Pastor Jon intoned, “friends,” he repeated as if to be sure that all were included, drawn in to the tragedy, “there is no explaining the loss of someone just at the beginning of her life. She was named appropriately, an angel with an angel’s voice.” He tipped his head back to look at the faded angels that had been painted on the curved, bow-shaped ceiling.

  Ben sat with his head in his hands and never looked up. Wanda rested her left hand on his back. Derk turned his head to one side then the other, as if to challenge everyone there.

  Pastor Jon raised his right index finger and the undertaker beside the boom box turned it on and they all listened to “Abide with Me.” The undertakers seemed impatient. It may have been because they were wearing black suits. One of them kept wiping the sweat from his face with a white handkerchief. The other kept glancing at his watch. It was obvious that Ben wasn’t paying a lot for the funeral. The coffin was made of plywood and painted white.

  Once the music finished, Pastor Jon said, “This was Angel’s favourite song,” and Tracy and Amanda, waitresses from the café, got up and sang a popular C&W song that didn’t seem to have anything to do with death or religion. As he gave the eulogy, Pastor Jon’s face gradually turned magenta, and here and there people squeezed out of the pews and went outside to get a breath of air. The eulogy was about loss, about a life with potential unrealized, about what could have been. At the end of the service, they all stood and sang “The Sweet June Days.” Song sheets had been left on the pews, but most people didn’t know the song, and its rendition, even led by Pastor Jon’s baritone, was ragged.

  People sat, uncertain what to do next. The minister, seeing the hesitation, said, “The family will follow the coffin to the graveyard. Those who wish may follow them there. Otherwise, go straight to the community hall, where there will be a lunch provided.” His face was even more magenta, and Tom, watching its colour intensify, sat there reviewing his CPR training.

  Ben and Wanda and Derk followed the coffin up the aisle, and the mourners, starting with the front rows, followed them. The coffin stopped at the front door and four men eased it down the stairs, carried it over the wooden bridge to the road, across the road to the second bridge and into the graveyard.

  Sarah followed the coffin and Tom followed her. The smell of the recently cut grass was rich and moist. The path that had been cut had actually been made by two passes of a scythe, one from the bridge to the grave and one back again. A few mourners filed along this path. A woman in a purple dress was scraping her feet against a headstone to get rid of the grass that clung to the soles of her shoes.

  The coffin was lowered into the grave. Pastor Jon, in deference to the fact that Ben’s wife, Betty, had been a staunch Lutheran, said, “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God: Angel. We commit her body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless her and keep her, the Lord maketh his face to shine upon her and be gracious unto her and give her peace. Amen.” He threw in a handful of dirt and stepped aside so Ben and Wanda and Derk could do the same. Tom saw one of the undertakers looking at his watch again.

  All at once, Ben’s knees gave way and he would have fallen into the grave if not for two men who were standing beside him. They caught him under the arms and held him up. They turned him around and helped him to the road.

  One of the undertakers went up to Wanda and Derk and said that they were sorry they couldn’t attend the reception, but they had another funeral two hours away.

  Instead of going directly to Tom’s truck, Sarah waded through grass that came to her knees. Tom followed her to a headstone. The stone was a large block of natural red granite with the name McAra in large letters. “Pastor Jon will scythe this hay when it’s ready,” Sarah said. “He needs it for his sheep and goats. Not much hay land around here. Every spot gets cut.”

  “Did your husband not have a first name?” Tom asked.

  “He took umbrage with anyone who used it,” Sarah said. “He made me promise many times to bury him without it.”

  “What was he like?” Tom asked.

  “Big, a good sense of humour, worked hard, smart, popular. Everyone liked him. He went through the ice one winter.”

  By the time they pulled up to the community hall, nearly everyone except Ben and his family were there. When Tom and Sarah appeared, the roar of conversation faded briefly as everyone looked toward them, but the crowd soon went back to talking.

  Sarah said, “You’ll know you’re starting to fit in when the conversation never skips a beat as you come in the door.”

  Tom handed her the bag of peanut butter cookies he’d brought. She took it to the kitchen so one of the women there could put the cookies on a plate. Tom didn’t see anyone to talk to except Karla and Horst. Karla was wearing a low-cut black dress and was surveying the crowd, looking for an audience. He avoided catching her eye. Horst was already staring at Tom with his mouth pulled tight with disapproval. If he did go over to them, Karla would flirt and Horst, jealous and resentful, would make snarly remarks and sneer at anything Tom said.

  “Hi,” a woman’s voice said from behind his left shoulder. He turned sharply. At first glance he thought she was in her late twenties, but then when he looked more closely he realized that she was in her early thirties. Her hair was nearly copper coloured, natural, pulled to one side so it hung over her left shoulder. “I’m Freyja. You’re my Good Samaritan, aren’t you?”

  “If you were wearing a fur hat and driving a red Jeep this winter, that’s me.”

  She smiled and said, “You don’t look like a cop.”

  So she’d heard about him. It would have been surprising if she hadn’t, he thought. The gossip mill never stopped. “I let my hair grow.” He’d always had a short military-style haircut, but now his hair reached the back of his neck. It was his way of rebelling—although when he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, he was overcome with momentary guilt, certain that his father’s voice would tell him to get a haircut, because a good haircut and shined shoes told people you were respectable.

  She was shorter than him, maybe five eight. She tipped her head back to look at him better. Green eyes, he realized. Cat’s eyes. She was pretty—more than pretty—not quite Rubenesque but lots of curves.

  “Do you dance?” she asked.

  “Game leg,” he said.

  “Polka, schottische, waltz, butterfly?”

  “I’m out of practice.”

  “There’s a dance on Saturday. Old-time music. You coming?”

  “Three days from now?” he said. He looked around the room. People were chatting together as if everything was normal. The only sign that it was a funeral was a small table covered in a white tablecloth. It had on it a group of framed pictures of Angel with two vases filled with local flowers.

  Freyja dressed for her red hair and green eyes. A pale green silk blouse, a soft summer skirt that clung to her hips. More than pretty, he thought, gorgeous.

  Their conversation was cut short by Ben and his family coming into the hall. The hall had been raucous with conversation. It stopped. Everyone stood up. There was silence, except for a slight shuffling of feet as everyone turned toward Ben and his daughter and grandson, who stood just inside the door. Ben, with the two men who had held
him up at the graveyard walking beside him, went to a small table at the front of the room. His daughter and grandson followed.

  The same tables that were used for bingo were set with paper plates, plastic knives and forks, and paper napkins. There were two tables covered with pots, casseroles and plates of food set end to end along the east side of the hall.

  Ben stood, waved for people to sit down. There was a rustling of feet and scraping of chairs. Tom and Freyja sat at the end of a bench. When everyone was seated, Ben tried to speak. He stood there for a moment, bent slightly forward, as if he were carrying a great weight on a tumpline. He looked up but looked over the heads of the crowd. After two tries without being able to say anything, he shook his head and sat down. The man who had called the bingo came forward. He was wearing his electric blue suit and a red tie with a hula dancer and a palm tree on it. His shoes were white and brown and had a pattern of pierced holes.

  “You all know me, and if anyone doesn’t, I’m Barnabas. I’m a friend of Ben’s. Ben,” he said, “asked me to say a few words for him if he couldn’t. We know his story. We know the story of Angel. You know how she grew up. You saw her playing with your kids and grandkids. You saw her when she was staying with Ben, riding in his truck with him. Sometimes, she went to school here. Although she wasn’t here all the time, she was one of us. You heard her sing. More than anything, she liked playing music and singing. She wanted to start a band. She had a lot of talent. She was a good kid. We don’t understand why things like this happen. We’ll miss her. Ben appreciates everything everyone has done to help in this difficult time.” He paused for a moment of silence, then said, “Please help yourselves.” With that, people stood up and began to line up at the buffet.

  Tom had thought that he and Freyja would sit together while they had lunch, but one of the women working in the kitchen motioned for Freyja to come. He watched her as she disappeared behind the coffee urns.

  Sarah suddenly appeared. “Are you drooling because you’re hungry or because of Freyja?”

  “I pulled her out of the ditch this winter.”

  “That was you?” Sarah said. “I knew someone had rescued her. She was on her way to some sort of teachers’ meeting in the city.”

  “Yup. The beautiful damsel in distress and Quasimodo rushing to her rescue,” he said, exaggerating.

  Sarah rolled her eyes. “Oh, the poor cripple demonstrating his beautiful soul. Or something. A lot of people get killed stopping to help rescue strangers.”

  That had happened to one of his colleagues. He stopped to help a stranded motorist at night and was struck by a vehicle. Tom didn’t want to think about it. “There’s a lot of food,” he said, indicating the overladen table and changing the topic.

  “It is. Potluck,” Sarah explained. “Ben couldn’t afford to feed all these people. He used up every penny he had for the funeral. He got the best he could afford.”

  Sarah went to see if Ben wanted anything. Tom stood uncertainly, not sure of his place. Having found Angel’s body, he seemed to have taken on some of the responsibility for her death. He would, he knew, be referred to for a long time as “the guy who found Angel.”

  Karla sashayed up to him. Even if she’d come in complete darkness, he’d have known she was there because her perfume was overpowering, cloyingly sweet. He could feel his chest tighten. She hadn’t been to the food table yet. She straightened his tie and quietly said, “It’s over. It’s done. Bad things happen to good people, but the show must go on.” Her tone of voice was that of a disciplinarian talking to a recalcitrant student.

  Tom was trying to imagine her ten years earlier, onstage, swinging her fringes for the men in the crowd, getting them excited. Showing a bit of leg. He’d seen women like her up on the stage in beer parlours and bars. Egging the men on. Making the tassels over their breasts rotate. If they were really talented, making them rotate in different directions. Fixing their eyes on a guy in the front row and rotating their hips, his buddies hooting and hollering.

  Horst was in the lineup, but he was turned to the side, watching Tom and Karla suspiciously.

  “It’s a tragedy, but tragedies happen all the time. We can’t make a fuss about it, raise questions. People don’t like trouble. The summer people create opportunities, and we can’t risk scaring them off. You’ve got to let it blow over. You can’t take opportunities away from people,” she said. She was eyeing a group of fishermen who had gathered beside the coffee urn. They were passing a bottle around and pouring whisky into their coffee. “See that? They must think you’re going to be okay. You aren’t going to come and arrest them. It’s a compliment. You’re new here. People have got to figure you out.”

  “Opportunities.” The word filled up his head. When he heard businessmen say there were great opportunities, he immediately thought of scam artists. That was their opening line. The real opportunity was lining their own pockets. It was a word he’d learned not to trust. Selling liquor under the counter was an opportunity. A good markup and no income tax to pay.

  When Karla saw Sarah coming back, she went and joined Horst. Sarah was holding two plates of food. “I got Ben this, but he says he doesn’t want anything.” She handed Tom one of the plates. “Come over here and meet a few people. Show them you’re not stuck up.”

  He followed her to a table. There were two seats in the middle. Sarah climbed over the bench and sat down. He put his plate down, eased one leg over so he was standing astride the bench, turned and, putting his left hand under his knee and lifting, got his other leg over and under.

  “Doesn’t work as well as it used to,” he said to no one in particular.

  “This here is Vidar Sigurdsson and his better half, Arlene. Here’s Bob and Linda Olafson. And over there,” Sarah indicated three women at the end of the table, “these are the daughters of Fridrik Simundson—the twins, Urdh, and Skuld, and this is Verthandi, their older sister.”

  Tom tried not to stare. The three women might have been painted and shellacked. There was no telling what colour their skin might really be. Their eyes were circles of dark makeup, their lips violent red, their cheeks blossomed with rouge. Their eyes glittered as they momentarily leaned toward him. Their hair—he was not sure it was their hair, for although the twins were obviously over seventy and the elder sister, he suspected, over ninety—all looked the same, as if they all wore wigs bought in bulk. They were thin, thinner than thin, emaciated even, and he looked at their hands, for unless they were hidden inside mittens, hands did not lie.

  All three of them had long fingers with no flesh on them, more like birds’ claws, with long nails painted pink. Their narrow wrists, he imagined, led up bony arms to birdcage chests that led to skin-covered skeletal frames. All three wore the same brown-rimmed glasses. Bought, he wondered, like the wigs, at a bargain price in bulk. Their dresses he recognized as traditional women’s outfits from the time of Icelandic immigration. His mother had had a similar dress that she’d kept hidden in a wooden trunk and didn’t take out until after her sister had asked for forgiveness. For the annual celebration on June 17 at the legislative grounds she made alterations so it would fit. When Tom had asked what the occasion was, she said it was to celebrate Iceland’s independence.

  He thought he’d seen Vidar at the dock, but he didn’t recognize Bob. Vidar was big, heavy-set, with a mop of curly hair starting to go grey. Bob was short, with a round head and a goatee.

  “How’s the fishing?” he said to Vidar.

  “All right,” Vidar replied. “A box to a net. But it won’t last. Good fish, good fishing, then one morning, I’ll go lift my nets and I’ll be lucky if there’s one fish in a net.”

  “Why’s that?” Tom asked.

  “You’re not going to buy a licence?”

  Tom shook his head and took a mouthful of potato salad. When he’d swallowed, he added, “I’m a handyman. Carpentry, plumbing, drywall, even electric if
it’s not too complicated. Roofing. Jack of all trades.”

  Vidar looked like he didn’t believe him. Finally, Bob said, “Not much construction around here in the winter.”

  “Lots of interior work,” Tom said. “I can drive to jobs on the farms west of here.”

  “I heard you were going to buy a fishing licence,” Vidar said stubbornly. He scowled at a point in the middle of the table, as if there were something there he disapproved of.

  Tom had started on a pickerel fillet. “Sports fishing. Ice fishing.”

  Vidar’s wife poked her husband with her elbow and shot him a sideways look that said, “See, I told you.” She looked exasperated.

  “What do you do?” Tom asked Bob, to stop what looked like a disagreement from starting. “You fish?”

  “Long-haul driver,” Bob answered. “Here to the West Coast, sometimes Florida, other times California, east to Quebec. I never know what the next job will be. That’s my rig in front of our place.”

  “It’s like being married to a sailor,” Linda said. “Come and go, come and go. Mostly go.”

  Bob shrugged. “I take a load to Toronto, say, then pick up a load there, take it to New York, pick up a load and take it to Regina, then back home. I don’t want to be running bobtail. No profit in that.”

  Bobtail, Tom thought. He hadn’t heard that in a long time. Running without a trailer. One night he had chased a stolen cab over country roads. It took three cars, but they’d penned it in.

  “Linda, do you ever go with him?” Tom asked. He always used people’s names in an effort to remember them.

  Linda smiled. She was a dumpling of a woman. Short, bursting at the seams, in a short-sleeved dress that showed her fat arms. “Not yet, but when the kids are old enough to look after themselves I will. It’ll be nice to see a few of these places he talks about. And,” she added playfully, “keep him out of trouble at the truck stops. Lots of stuff goes on there you don’t want your husband involved in.”