In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  Sarah asked him how the house was coming, and he said, “It’ll be livable by the fall. Jessie managed. I can manage. It would be good to have proper insulation and the drywall up.”

  “People say you look like you know what you are doing. It’s a good advertisement. A craftsman is known by the quality of his work. I hear you’ve been getting some jobs.”

  “Here and there. Bits and pieces. Nothing big.” She gave him a cup and saucer, a teaspoon and a bowl of sugar cubes. He wondered how many people she had served tea to since she’d arrived here, back of beyond, the Irish girl in the middle of nowhere. She had told him that when they first arrived there’d been no dock. She and her trunk had been lowered into a skiff and rowed to shore. She’d lived in a tent until McAra got their log cabin built. “Why did you leave Ireland?” he asked. “Was your family poor?”

  “They had a good living,” Sarah replied. “My father had an inn. But I had an older brother. He would have gotten everything. None of the local boys had asked me to marry. I was taller than all of them. Then McAra turned up at the pub one day with friends. They were on leave. A man my size. He hung around for two weeks, and then said he had to go back to his base in France and was I interested in coming with him? I packed up my belongings, shipped a couple of trunks. We got married on the fly, as it were; kiss the bride and she’s gone forever, never to return. Spent two years in France. Saved a lot of people a lot of trouble. They were already discussing, ‘What are we going to do with Sarah?’ I was a problem. I left and the problem was solved.”

  “Did your parents not love you?”

  “Oh, they loved me. They fed me and clothed me and educated me. They just didn’t know what to do with me. If I’d have been five foot four and ninety-eight pounds, I’d have fitted right in. One of the boys at the pub would have been keen to get his hands on me. I’d have gotten married, had a couple of kids, and we’d have kept doing what people do if they come from families that have a bit of money. No inherited money but trade money, money earned over the counter. The other solution, of course, the convenient one, would have been if I’d died. The trouble is dying isn’t often convenient.”

  “No,” Tom agreed and he thought of his father. He’d died at a terrible time. Tom was immersed in his studies, trying for grades that would bring him a scholarship, maybe lead to graduate school and a fellowship. “Sometimes,” he said, referring to death, “it comes when you least expect it. Other times, it won’t come no matter how much you wish for it.”

  “It’s never what you expect,” Sarah said. “That’s like Mindi Miner. Two canes. Legs that don’t work. Lying three days with the roof of the mine on his legs.”

  “A town of cripples,” Tom said. “I fit right in.”

  “You’re not Mindi. Don’t feel sorry for yourself.”

  “Do I look like I feel sorry for myself?”

  “Mournful, like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders. Cheer up. Everybody likes a smile. They’ve got their own problems. They don’t need anybody else’s.”

  “And you? What about you?”

  Sarah stared at him as he if were a prosecutor who might convict her of an indefinable failing. He thought he might have crossed a barrier into a dark swamp. “My parents are dead, my brother is dead, my husband is dead. My kids have gone. They write. They’ve done well for themselves. They send me pictures.”

  Sarah took a deep breath. Her chest rose and fell. Her face was soft with regret. “How old are your kids?” she asked.

  “Nineteen and eighteen. Myrna and Joel. As different as chalk and cheese.”

  “You’re lucky. One of each. Good planning. I’ve all sons. Nothing wrong with sons, but I’d like to have had a daughter. They want me to move to the city. I say to them, ‘If I did that, who would I be? Just an old woman living alone in an apartment.’ You move, you leave yourself behind.”

  Her comment shook him for a moment as he thought about everything he’d left behind: his career, his wife, his kids, his house, his coffee shops, the places where he’d found refuge when he’d walked entire winter nights because staying in his apartment was too dangerous.

  “I got transferred a lot. My kids were like air force brats. No place became home.”

  “Maybe every place became home.”

  “I don’t think that works.” The shrink had said about his sense of not belonging, “You’re a citizen of the world.” And he’d replied, “Bullshit.” When you belong everywhere, you belong nowhere. No roots. Like the scruff he’d seen on the beach, pretending they had a life. He wished he’d found a job that meant they could have lived in one town. He wondered if he should have taken the job his father’s friend had offered him. Become an accountant, had the same office, in the same building, on the same street. “My kids have no place to call home.”

  “Maybe they’ll join you.”

  “Maybe,” he replied, but there was no conviction in his voice. “We don’t communicate much.”

  She looked at the clock. “I’d better get ready to go to the knitting group. We do more talking than knitting, but nice sweaters still get made. They’ll be for sale at the Christmas bazaar. You can buy one.”

  He was walking back home when he saw Mindi Miner struggling along with a black canvas bag over one shoulder. He was coming from White’s, and the bag had groceries in it. He used both canes, swung his legs forward in short crescents. Tom would have offered to carry the grocery bag for him, but Freyja had warned him never, under any circumstances, to offer to help him. He accepted no favours. His model was an early pioneer who had frozen both feet, had them amputated and cleared his land on his knees.

  “I’d shake your hand,” Mindi said, “but if I do, I’ll topple over, and you’ll have to set me right side up.”

  “I’d offer to carry your groceries, but I was warned not to offer. You don’t accept favours.”

  “Sarah told you that, I expect.” Tom didn’t reply. “She and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, but she’s right about that. You have to do everything you can for yourself or you start to be dependent.”

  “I’ve just come from Sarah’s. She makes a good cup of tea.”

  “She has her own way of seeing things. I wouldn’t take everything she says as gospel. She’s got it in for the Odin group. I wouldn’t pay much attention to what she has to say about them. They sell me fresh food all summer. If Brokkr, their blacksmith, stays over the winter, he sells me root crops. They don’t overcharge. Good quality.”

  “She thinks they don’t have any morals.”

  “Different morals. She’s got a bone to pick with them. You got a grudge, you see everything that way. Ask me about McAra. I haven’t got anything good to say about him.”

  “What’s the grudge?”

  “Standing is hard for me. If we’re going to talk, let’s go sit over there.” They went to where a large spruce stump had been cut off at chair height. Mindi shuffled his way around and sat down with a sigh.

  “When McAra disappeared, what we wanted to know was, where was his dog? Big bastard. Half-wolf. When he growled, everybody froze. He never bit no one, but nobody wanted to be the first. He followed McAra everywhere. He raised him. When McAra didn’t turn up when he should have, Sarah went to look for him. When she didn’t find him, she got a gang to go looking for him. We found a spot where there was broken ice. It was frozen over again, but the ice was thin and clear. It was in a spot where there’s strong current, and it eats away the ice from underneath. Strange place for him to be.”

  “The dog?”

  “In the spring, they found him washed up on the shore still attached to the toboggan. Bones and fur. The toboggan had held him down. A storm had washed him onto shore.”

  “No sign of McAra?”

  “Sarah searched the shoreline for years. No sign of him. We thought he might turn up in someone’s nets. Nothing.”

  “I’ve seen his headstone at the graveyard.”

  “There’s no one in that g
rave.”

  Tom remembered the smell of newly cut grass, the headstone with the name McAra cut deep into it. There’d even been an overturned plastic flowerpot with dead stems. Who knew how long ago it had been placed there, or by whom? Sarah had leaned with both hands on her cane and stared at the stone as if waiting for it to speak to her. Then she’d stepped back, dissatisfied. He’d thought the grave contained long-held grief.

  “It’s rocky bottom in places. He could have gotten jammed up against a reef. His clothes could have snagged,” Tom said.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. There was a ski plane in the area around that time. Maybe sports hunters after wolves. Could have landed. Some of the Odin women were smoking hot for McAra. They liked how big he was. There was one especially. Older, lots of money. She never came back after he disappeared. Maybe just coincidence.”

  “There’d have been tracks.”

  “I was out there looking for him. No tracks. Not much snow that winter. Lots of bare ice. Windy. An hour after you made tracks, they were gone.”

  “Where was she supposed to have taken him?”

  “Vancouver. San Diego. There were rumours. More than one person who went to the West Coast for a holiday said they thought they had seen him clean-shaven, dressed up fancy. They weren’t sure. He’s not the only big man in the world.”

  “She took over his fishing and trapping licences?”

  “Didn’t have much choice, did she? Six kids to feed.”

  “She shot her own meat?”

  “And set her own traps. And lifted her own nets. And decked more than one guy who set his nets too close and his traps on top of hers. Some guys are like that, you know. They take advantage of a situation.”

  “She seems okay now. Not rich but not hand to mouth.”

  “It was all hand to mouth until ten years ago. She got a bit of an inheritance. Family member died. Maybe a brother. She hasn’t run traps for a long time. No money in it anyway. She just fishes one licence. More out of habit.”

  “Nothing more than that?”

  “No,” Mindi said. “Just gossip. How about you? What if you were tied down with a wife and six kids and a woman with no kids and lots of money says, ‘Come with me’? You’re divorced, I heard. Left a wife and kids behind. You just weren’t lucky. No rich broad wanting to keep you.”

  “No rich broad,” Tom agreed.

  “I can’t say I was sorry when he disappeared. Nor were a lot of other people. We were scared of him. One time at a dance, I was talking to a girl I fancied and he came up behind me, lifted me up like I was a small child and set me down to one side. I’ve never forgiven him for that.”

  Mindi struggled to his feet, got a good hold on his canes. He was going to start off when he paused and said, “You asked if I’d heard anything that night when Ben’s granddaughter died. I’ve been thinking about that. I didn’t. But I saw her getting into Siggi’s truck. Not that night, maybe the night before, maybe it was the day before that. I don’t pay much attention to what day it is. They’re all the same now.”

  “Siggi. We shook hands at the dance. He was making the rounds.”

  “Local hero,” Mindi said. “Boy wonder. Chamber-of-commerce kind of guy. He’ll always lend you a fiver. When my son got picked up for DUI, Siggi loaned me the money to pay his fine. He’s the kind of guy you want on your side.”

   Chapter 23

  Ice Cream

  “You think it’s fun being an attractive woman in Valhalla?” Freyja asked.

  She was sitting at Tom’s picnic table, looking like the heat didn’t bother her. “Cool as a cucumber,” his mother would have said. She was swinging her feet back and forth. He was trying to focus on picking out bits of lumber, but she was wearing short blue shorts and a nautical striped top.

  “Everyone likes being popular,” he said. As he said it he was thinking back to high school, where he stood uncertainly in corners with his back against the wall while others were gathered in small groups, talking and laughing. He had wondered then what it would be like to be popular, to have people calling out his name, inviting him to join them, putting their arms around his shoulders.

  “You’d like to have women knocking at your window at night, trying to get your attention? A couple of drunks doing figure eights in your yard, yelling, ‘Come out and fuck. We’re horny’?”

  He thought about the towns where he had worked and said, “Small-town courting behaviour. Goes on everywhere in the boonies.”

  She stopped swinging her feet and glared at him. “You think it’s flattering when a guy comes up behind you and pushes his cock against you?”

  “Have I done that? It sounds like you’re blaming me.”

  “Are you different?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. I never had a girlfriend until I met Sally and she—” He wasn’t sure how to put it, finally settled on, “She wasn’t shy.”

  “If you wanted to pick me up, what would you do?”

  “Put my arms around you and lift.”

  Freyja rolled her eyes. “Adolescent humour. You know what I mean.”

  He smiled. He liked his own jokes. “I don’t know. I didn’t make the moves.”

  “Your wife made all the advances?”

  “Yes,” he said. The second time they’d gone out, she’d taken him to the apartment she was sharing with two other girls. They were conveniently out for the evening. She had gone into her bedroom and waltzed out in a pair of pyjamas that didn’t leave much to the imagination.

  “How did you meet?”

  “She was cleaning my teeth.”

  “Good God,” Freyja said. “Now that’s romantic. At least she wasn’t giving you an enema.”

  He could feel his face flush. She was stirring up too many embarrassing intimate moments. “She was a dental hygienist, not a nurse.”

  “Are you thick?”

  “I don’t know. I got good grades in school. I was good at my job. My reading comprehension is above average.”

  “Thick about women?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, I guess so. I haven’t got much experience.”

  “You never dated?”

  “When I was in grade eleven a girl in grade ten asked me out for Sadie Hawkins. I had to wear a silly corsage.”

  “Why did she ask you out?”

  “I think she needed help with math. I tutored in my spare periods.”

  “Oh, God,” Freyja said, and put her palm against his chest. “I clearly don’t need to worry about you grabbing my ass and saying, ‘Hey baby, I’ve got a case of beer in the back of my truck. Wanna come and share it?’”

  “I don’t drink beer.”

  Freyja broke into laughter. She still had her palm against his chest, and he could feel the heat from it through his shirt. She leaned close and put her forehead against his chest, and he could smell the sweet, warm smell of her hair. He wanted to drop the piece of wood he was holding and put his arms around her but kept his arms at his sides. He hadn’t been this close to a woman since he’d left Sally.

  “Will you be my champion?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I get hit on a lot. Horny guys with no place to put it. Men in packs are dangerous. Rejected suitors have been known to get together to teach an uppity woman a lesson. You know the kind of lesson I mean?”

  This is crazy, he thought. The dock had people sitting on it, sunning themselves, fishing, kids squealing and jumping into the water then thrashing back to climb out and do it again. The sun was high and hot. He could feel a bead of sweat run down the side of his neck. The smell of the spruce needles, bruised by their feet, enveloped them in a rich sweetness. Freyja had her sunglasses set on the top of her head. She looked like she might be going to play tennis. She’d been very animated when she’d been teasing him, but now she was still, watchful, waiting for his reply.

  “What do you want me
to do?”

  “Come if I call. Drop by to say hi. Come and visit when the yahoos are in from Fort McMurray. Or Siggi and his crew are in town. Do you play games?”

  “Yes. Checkers. Chess. Whist. Bridge. My parents enjoyed card games. Have they tried to break into your house?”

  “They know I’ve got a rifle. I know how to use it. But I don’t know if I’d have the nerve.”

  “Better not. Lawyers, courts. You end up bankrupt even if you don’t get convicted of anything.”

  “You get raped, nobody does anything about it.”

  “Treat women with respect,” his mother had always said. He wondered if playing Sir Galahad was a form of respect.

  “When I’m scared I sleep with the rifle beside me.”

  He would have told her to call the Mounties, but he knew better. There was nothing they could do, and they were two to three hours away, depending on the weather. There wasn’t much that would make them slog over sloppy road, eat dust if it was dry, plow through snow. Her saying somebody was doing wheelies in her yard wasn’t going to get a visit. Not even if someone threw a beer bottle through her window. She was right. Order and justice were local.

  “Nobody is going to believe we’re playing checkers,” he said.

  “Do you care? Will it damage your reputation? Are you going in for the ministry?” She was, he realized, on the verge of being offended.

  “It wasn’t my reputation I was thinking about,” he blurted out.

  She smiled with the left side of her mouth, but her eyes didn’t warm up. “I’ll ask Albert,” she said. “Do you think he’d be a help?”

  He looked at her in her sailor’s outfit and wanted to say, “Come with me and be my love,” but instead said, “I’d love to come and visit. I’m flattered that you’ve asked me. I’ll do my best to be good company.”

  “If I were bigger, I’d punch you,” she said, then did it, punching him in the chest. Just once, as hard as she could. She turned on her heel and stalked away. He could see how stiffly she was holding herself. Women, he thought. I’ll never understand them. In spite of what he’d said about Kelly asking him to the Sadie Hawkins dance because she’d wanted help with her math, he thought that she’d wanted him to kiss her. They’d lingered outside her parents’ apartment door, both shuffling a bit, uncomfortable, then her mother had opened the door, and he’d said hello to her mom and good night to Kelly.