In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  He took the want that had surged up, folded and refolded it like a piece of delicate origami, and put it away deep in his chest where it would stay hidden.

  Freyja’s house surprised him. He had noticed it but thought it must be owned by one of the yacht people. It had a blue-shingled roof. There was a three-car garage with white doors, but the driveway wasn’t finished. The wooden forms for the cement were in place. They looked like they’d been there for quite a while.

  The front steps were concrete, and on either side there were concrete planters with pansies among yellowish-green shrubs. The sidewalk, like the garage driveway, was laid out, but the concrete hadn’t been poured there either. Even though it wasn’t finished, it looked out of place among yards littered with garbage, boats and old cars. Most of the houses were small and many had jerry-built additions of one sort or other, obviously added on as the need arose. A few were more decorated than others, with bits of brick or wrought iron, but that just made the houses look ridiculous, as if bits and pieces of other buildings from more hospitable climates had been stolen and transported and attached willy-nilly to houses that should have been made of nothing but wood.

  It would have helped the look of the village if it been had laid out as a grid. It was obvious that houses had been thrown up wherever it was convenient at the time, so there was no road that did not cross another road, frequently more than once. The ditches were shallow, narrow, and local people never called them ditches but cuts, meant simply to carry storm water to the large ditches that ran along both sides of the main road.

  Tom admired the fill that had been brought in to raise the house up out of the boggy land.

  He went around to the back, climbed the steps and knocked on the door.

  “Come in. I’m busy,” Freyja called.

  Freyja was working at the kitchen counter. There was a table with a white cloth and three settings. The lock on the screen door wouldn’t, he thought, keep out anyone but the most honest of men, certainly not any intent on intimidation or rape, or fuelled by jealous rage. However, in the closet next to the door, there was a twenty-two rifle propped up, partially hidden by coats and jackets. The butt was resting on a sandal.

  “Nice house. Did you win the lottery?” he asked.

  “Don’t I wish,” Freyja replied.

  She suggested he take a look around, so he explored the rest of the house. The living room had a leather couch and chair, and the dining room had a table and six chairs, but the trim wasn’t done and the living room only had subflooring. He went down the hallway. The doors to the three bedrooms were open. The first, obviously Freyja’s, was complete with ivory drapes, a British India rug over a maple floor and a king-sized bed with a patterned ivory-and-green bedspread and what seemed like an excess of pillows. From what he could see there was an ensuite and a walk-in closet. The second bedroom had a futon on the floor, and the third bedroom had a desk and a chair and a filing cabinet. Neither room was finished.

  “A work in progress,” he said when he came back into the kitchen.

  “You might say that,” Freyja replied. She was putting food onto the table.

  Freyja offered him a glass of wine, and when he said no, she poured him iced tea.

  He thought with satisfaction, She is not a knick-knack queen. There were carvings of a bear and a wolf on a window ledge. They looked like Albert Scutter’s work. He was relieved that there were no plaques with hokey religious sayings or pictures of Jesus’s head surrounded by a crown of thorns. He mistrusted plaques. His parents had none, but Anna had her walls covered with them. Most of her plaques had pictures of the suffering Jesus. Others said things like “Home is where the heart is.”

  He sat astride a kitchen chair. The table was set for three.

  “You need two watchdogs?” he asked.

  Freyja was taking a plate of sliced ham out of the fridge. “I’ve asked Ben over. I owe him a favour or two.”

  “Sarah says Siggi and friends might be coming to town tonight.”

  “Yes,” she said, putting potato salad on the table. Her voice was cautious. “If they’re drunk and ugly, they’ll just push him out of the way. They’ve known him too long.”

  “Guys on a drunk. Looking for action. Angry, aggressive. Sometimes these guys were bad dates. They didn't want to pay the rates they agreed on. It was easier to get a bad date to pay up and include a good tip than have to spend all day filling out forms and appearing in court.”

  She stopped, turned and stared at him. “Is this the guy who’s too shy to ask me to dance?”

  He shifted uncomfortably. “There’s business, and then there’s personal. They were business. You’re personal.”

  “You’re blushing,” she said. “You really do blush. I haven’t seen a guy who blushes in years.”

  “I blushed so much in school it was like I had permanent sunburn.”

  He got up and took the twenty-two out of the closet. He pushed the bolt up and pulled it back. The chamber was empty. “You’re making sure you’re ready if a bear walks through here?”

  “Could be. Or a moose. Last winter a moose walked through town. John Anders got him. One shot. He kept a quarter, gave the rest away. Fed a lot of people. Quite a few of us owe him a favour. He provides meat for Dolly.”

  He put the rifle back. “No one wants to miss an opportunity like that, that’s for sure. Don’t have to spend all day cold and wet in the bush, then cutting it up and hauling the parts all the way back to wherever your vehicle is parked. Killing them is the easy part. Hauling is the hard part.” In one corner of the kitchen there was a large white freezer. “If a moose came by, you could just ask it to climb into your freezer. Save you the trouble of killing it, cutting it up, packaging it.”

  “Do you hunt?”

  “I’m a city boy, but I went with the guys for deer or a moose. We also hunted geese. I did fine. They teach us how to shoot when we’re being trained.”

  “Rats are like that. Always around. Even here. Local lore is they came on the freight boats. Got off and stayed. That’s why there’s so many cats. That’s why I’ve got Ramses.” She said it as a large black-and-white cat wandered into the room, sniffed at Tom disapprovingly, then went over to Freyja and rubbed against her leg.

  “Ramses is my first love. About three years ago, he appeared at my back door one day and cried to come in. He was so small. He must have been recently born. I asked around. Nobody claimed him. I rescued him and he rescued me.” Ramses got up on a chair and stared at the ham. She picked up a piece and put it in his dish on the floor. “He sleeps on my bed.” She paused, then added, “Are you allergic to cats?”

  “I take antihistamines,” he said, and he wondered if she meant allergic now, in the kitchen, or allergic in her bed. He went to look at a barometer on the wall. It had an oak case and was made of brass.

  “My father’s,” she said. “He was a lake captain. He left it to me.”

  “How’s Ben?”

  “Nothing’s working for him. He’ll quit drinking when his family goes back to the city.”

  “You like him?”

  “He was always good to me when I was growing up. Took me with him in the truck. Out on his boat.”

  He turned to her, surprised. “You grew up here?”

  “Yes. And I came back. Does that surprise you?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Lots of reasons. Aren’t there times when you want to go back to where you came from?”

  “No.” It sounded sharper than he had meant it to. The question had brought back the hallways with their stale smell of cooking, the rows of closed doors, the strangers who came and went, often sullen, resentful, sometimes dangerous, and the warnings of his mother to never accept an invitation into anyone’s apartment no matter what they offered him. It was an apartment block where a lot of cabbage was cooked, and he felt slightly ill remembering the smell. “No, there’s nothing there, nothing personal. Just an apartment someone else is living in. You don’t make f
riends in the city like you do in a small town. Strangers come and go.”

  “You must have been lonely.” She went to the window and when she saw no sign of Ben, she put wire mesh baskets over the food to keep flies and wasps off, then went to look for him. When she came back, she said, “He’ll come later.”

  She took off her apron, spread her fingers and ran her hands through her hair, pulling it back over her shoulders, and he wanted, for a moment, to lean toward her and do the same. She got a bottle of white wine out of the fridge. “An expensive habit,” he said.

  “Not much. We get the labels made. Make the wine. There’s six of us brew up a batch. We use nothing but the best ingredients. Rhubarb. Wild raspberries. Chokecherries. Blueberries. This is dandelion. Crisp, dry, tastes of apples and leather,” she said, mocking herself. “I’m not into it, but a few people run a small still and make vodka from potatoes. Are you shocked?”

  “Not much,” he replied, imitating her tone. “As long as no one is cooking up meth.”

  “Funny, isn’t it?” she said. “How what was serious law-breaking at one time becomes accepted, and then made legal. We’re not there yet with distilling, but if the government could figure out a way to tax homebrew, they’d okay it. Like gambling. Used to be a big crime, but now the government promotes it.”

  “I guess,” he said.

  “Crime is mostly what we don’t approve of. If we approve of something, even if it’s illegal, we ignore it,” she said.

  “Why ask me over?” he asked. “You don’t sound like you’re a champion of the law.”

  “Why not? Who else? You’re an unknown quantity. You’ll be tested, and then people will know who and what you are. It’s always that way. Strangers come. Things happen. People draw conclusions. Brave. Cowardly. Smart. Dumb. Honest. Dishonest. Gradually, gradually the community builds a profile, an image. They see if you keep your promises, see how careful you are about your work, see how you take care of your belongings and your family. That’s who you are. They see the work you’re doing on your house. You’ve already done a few small jobs for people. Everyone knows how well you’ve done them. How reliable you are. That’ll be who you become.”

  “But I’m watching them also,” he said a bit defensively. “I’m making judgments about them as individuals and as a community.”

  “Yes, and you’ve got to decide where you fit in, if you fit in, whether you’ll stay or leave. You’ve run away once.”

  He said nothing for a while. Now he didn’t like where the conversation was going, now the tension was in his hands, in the muscles that had tightened in his stomach. Carefully, he said, “I never ran away.” But he knew that wasn’t the way others saw it. PTSD, shell shock, compassion fatigue—no one wanted to admit they existed. He wondered if he tried to tell her, if she would understand. At first there’s the shock and the horror, the shattered bodies, the crying, screaming family and friends, and your heart goes out to them, but after a while, you’ve seen it before, many times, and you don’t have any compassion left. You forget how to care.

  “From your job. From your wife. From your kids.”

  “Should I ask for my job back? A gimpy cop? Should I ask my ex,” his voice rose as he emphasized the ex, “to leave her boyfriend? Make that sacrifice for me?”

  For a second, anger rushed into his head, black, dark anger, anger that he’d bottled up for a long time, anger that could burst out like infection from a wound, and he nearly said, “It’s no wonder that Siggi kicked you in the head,” but instead, he stood up and filled his glass with cold tea. There were things that never should be said, never could be forgiven—he’d learned that—things he’d said to Sally because she hadn’t been in the car with him and didn’t understand. There were wounds that never healed. It wasn’t, he told himself as he stared to one side of Freyja, her fault; no one had driven the car but him, no one was depressed but him, no one had moved out but him.

  In the small world exposed by the window, there were children playing on the swings, then jumping off and chasing each other up the slide, then squealing as they slid down. Why, he wondered, couldn’t we stay like that? Happy with small things, being playmates. But, of course, that meant that there had to be adults in the background, out of sight, cooking and cleaning and earning a living, watching for bears.

  “Maybe,” he said, still refusing to look at her, “maybe there are things worth being sorry about. A career, an identity, an income, a marriage, a family, a future.”

  “It happens all the time,” she said. “Football players who pop a knee, baseball players who throw out a shoulder. Gymnasts are done before they’re twenty. Siggi was the town hockey hero. He was going to the NHL. He got picked to try out for the farm team in Winnipeg. He didn’t make it.”

  “You should have been a shrink,” he said, resenting the truth of what she said. “I feel like I want to have a tantrum. I want to scream and yell and smash things. I want to be unreasonable. That was never allowed. No one ever raised their voice.”

  “Is that so bad?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We’re not robots. We’re not machines playing chess. We have feelings. We need to be unreasonable so we can be reasonable.” His chest felt as if it were being squeezed in a giant bear hug. It was like he wouldn’t be able to take another breath. He put his hands on the table and pressed down. He took a deep breath and sat back. “My father said reason would always prevail. If you could just explain consequences to people, they would stop doing self-destructive, foolish things. He thought people should run their lives like a chess game.”

  “Why don’t you chop wood for me? When I’ve been upset, I’ve chopped wood. It helps.”

  “What does it mean if you chop a woman’s wood in Valhalla?”

  “It means that you’re trying to work your way into her bed by doing her favours.” She pulled her chair back from the table and the corner of her mouth twitched a bit. He realized she was laughing at him again. His anger rose up again, but now it was confused—he understood that she wasn’t mocking him, that she was gently teasing him, while at the same time telling him something about the town and its values. He’d asked the question and she’d answered it in a wry way that he didn’t fully understand. His mother would have been disapproving of the question. Anna would have been more blunt.

  “You’re constantly worrying about what people might think about your being here, about your chopping wood. You’re on the edge of a freak-out, but you know what? It’s great. Because I know that I don’t have to be afraid of you. I’m not afraid that you’re going to treat me like a piece of furniture. That’s another part of you falling into place.”

  He got up and barged out of the house, went over to the woodpile, found an axe and the chopping block, and began splitting wood. He sent the straight-grained pieces flying. The pieces that were twisted and knotted he attacked furiously, pounding them into submission, chipping off chunks that would do for kindling. He worked for half an hour. By the time he quit, his shirt was dark with sweat and stuck to his skin. He sank the axe into the chopping block and went back to the house.

  Ben was sitting on the front steps with Freyja. He had his plate on his knees. “Did you know Wanda in the city?” he asked.

  “No,” Tom replied.

  “You never seen Derk before? You could have with his business.”

  “I wasn’t on the drug squad.”

  “You ever see Angel? Did you go visit schools?”

  “No.”

  “She had plans,” Ben said, and he couldn’t say any more for a minute. “She was going to make something of herself. She was going to make her grandmother proud.” He put his head in his hands, and they waited in silence, for it was obvious that he had something more to say. He looked up and wiped at his cheeks. “Maybe you could help us,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”

  There was a pitcher of lemonade and ice and an extra glass. Freyja carefully filled a glass and handed it to Tom. He drank it all at once and took a
n ice cube into his mouth and cracked it with his teeth.

  The chopping had flushed out Tom’s anger. He didn’t shout, but his voice was determined, insistent. “I found your granddaughter. She was lying on the ground. There wasn’t anything I could do.” He was still angry with the unreasonableness of everything, and his words came out short, chopped, like the wood.

  Ben was looking older, his shoulders were rounder and he sat with them forward, as if he might, in an unguarded moment, topple over. His checked shirt looked like it needed to be washed.

  “She was a good kid,” Ben said defensively.

  “And I’m a good man,” Tom replied. “I’m not interested in little girls.”

  “She came here because her mother was drinking again. She gets crazy when she drinks. She says things she doesn’t mean. She does things.” Ben shook his head slowly. His eyes were focused on the ground. Tom wondered what he was seeing, what he was reviewing, if he was wondering how it all came to this, where it had started, where it would end.

  Then, to Tom’s surprise, Ben said strongly, as if he were making a public declaration, “We were good people. Betty never drank. I drank too much, but I quit. When you’re young you do stupid things.” He stopped and Tom could see the anguish, the self-accusation, and wondered if this was why he had started to drink again, an anesthetic that hadn’t been needed when he and his wife were raising Angel and things were working, the past was laid to rest, the craziness was neutered, forgotten, a second chance to get things right. And then it went horribly wrong, and maybe he lay awake at night replaying everything, like a movie in a loop, in a perpetual motion machine—was this what I did wrong, was it this, this, this, was it this I neglected to do?—and wishing and wishing that he could go back and redo whatever it was that ended with his granddaughter lying face down in a water-filled rut.