His father had lectured him on staying focused, on doing nothing that would interfere with his career. An education, a job, financial security come first, then you can think about marriage. As if, years in the future, he was supposed to come up to a woman and say, “I’ve got my education, a job and financial security, would you like to marry me?”
His shirt, where Freyja had rested her head, still smelled of her. He put his hand on his shirt, held it up to his face and breathed in. Freyja had gone to White’s Emporium. If Karla was there, there’d be tension, maybe a few sparks. Karla resented Freyja’s being younger and prettier. Freyja resented Karla’s attitude that she was superior because she could sing. When the two of them were in the same room, even if they didn’t say anything, they competed.
He was cutting boards with the ripsaw when Freyja returned with vanilla and chocolate ice cream cones. She walked over to him and handed him the chocolate cone. “Here. I’m sorry I hit you.”
“It’s okay,” he said. Freyja was turning her cone around, running the tip of her tongue over the dripping ice cream. “If there’s a problem, you can always come over. The door is always unlocked.”
“Karla might be over teaching you how to yodel. I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
He ignored the suggestion. “Nobody who has hit me has ever bought me a treat afterwards.”
“You got hit a lot?”
“It was part of the job. Picking up drunks and druggies, stopping fights. Domestic ones were the most dangerous. Husband and wife beating on each other. You get between them and they both start beating on you. Cops get killed on domestic calls.”
“Me and Siggi?”
“Maybe,” he replied. “I guess we’ll find out.” Her face clouded and she twisted on her heels. She didn’t say anything, so he asked her about something that had been nagging at him. “Do you know anything about Icelandic sorcery? My mother said Icelanders were very superstitious. At Christmas, she told me stories of the thirteen Yule Lads, and sometimes if I misbehaved she threatened me with Grýla.”
“Grýla,” Freyja repeated. “She carried away many children and ate them. If you want to know about these things, come over after work. I have a book about Icelandic superstitions. In English. You may borrow it.”
She left and he stood there admiring her: the long curly red hair, the way her shorts fitted around her hips, the long line of her legs, not at all voluptuous, not like Sally, all tits and ass, but still very feminine. He’d heard about and seen the anger of rejected suitors before, boys who were going to teach a girl a lesson, teach her to keep her place, bring her down a notch or two, teach her to be scared, obedient. It didn’t even seem to have much to do with sex for its own sake; it was sex as a weapon, sex as intimidation. In many cases the girl hadn’t done anything except have an attitude, maybe teased a bit, flirted. So who were the guys getting even with? Mom? A female teacher? Or maybe it wasn’t that at all, maybe it was about being young and having a hard-on all the time and having nowhere to put it.
But here, with the sun shining against his back, the sound of children playing, the low rumble of outboard motors, people talking, people resting, relaxing, reading, fishing, where everyone knew everyone else, where no one was a total stranger, how, he wondered, could it be that anyone needed protection? But then he glanced toward where he had found Angel and the broken sticks on the ground, then back to Freyja’s retreating figure.
After he’d finished his work for the day, he took Freyja up on her invitation. She was hanging out clothes.
“Just how superstitious are Icelanders?” Tom asked. They were standing on either side of the clothesline in Freyja’s backyard. “I read an article that said they still believe in huldufolk. They build highways around rocks so as to not disturb the hidden people. Do you know anything about that?”
She handed him two wooden clothespins. “Do you know how to use these?”
He helped her peg a sheet to the line. “I’m impressed,” she said. “You’re definitely husband material. Next thing you’re going to tell me you can cook.”
“I can.” He was going to qualify it by saying he made great toasted bacon and cheese open-face sandwiches, but before he could, Freyja said, “One special recipe. BBQ in the summer. Live off that all year.”
His pride hurt, he said, “I’ll make you a meal. But it’ll have to wait until Ben goes into town and I can get an order for a recipe. Will curry do?”
Curry was safe. He had learned how to make it from a classmate from Trinidad when he was in college. She was right. It was his once-a-year BBQ meal. His mother had been the queen of the kitchen. He was allowed to set the table, wash the dishes, but no cooking. Before she left for what was supposed to be a month, she’d shown him where she kept everything. She taped lists of the contents on the cupboard doors.
Freyja was on the other side of the clothesline. She pulled it down and smiled at him. “I appreciate you scaring off those hoodlums the other night.”
“He’s not a hoodlum. He’s your ex-husband.”
“He’s not ex yet. We’re legally separated. It was a moment of madness, desperation, stupidity. A mistake,” she said. “Anyway, it doesn’t sound like your marriage was any great success either.”
“She was determined.”
“Was she now?” She handed him three tea towels and some more wooden pegs. “Hang these up. And you were just a helpless waif? Putty in her hands? Unable to say no?” He hung up the towels. “Was she older than you?”
“Three years.”
“Were you, how shall we put this delicately, a virgin, a naïf, a guy who, presented with an opportunity, didn’t have the common sense to say no?”
“I don’t want to fight.”
“We’re not even dating. How can we have a fight? We can’t fight when we haven’t kissed yet. We’re just exploring the reason for your knowing how to hang up laundry and cook.”
She held up a pair of pink panties with lace on the edges and put them back into the basket. “I’d better hang these up inside. I don’t want to inflame the local males.”
“I came to ask about superstition. Rituals. The kind of things that people do behind closed doors.”
“If you’re serious about this, save up your money and go to the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft in Hólmavik. You’re half-Icelandic. You probably have lots of relatives there. They’ll feed you puffin.”
“No,” he said, and the fear of meeting his mother’s relatives made his stomach clench. “I don’t need to see what they do there. I just need to know what people might do here.”
“We sometimes use Ouija boards for fun. I sometimes give tarot readings at the spring fundraiser and dance. I’ve got an old fishbowl that, turned upside down with a light inside, gives a pretty good impression of a crystal ball.”
“Freyja,” he said, “is the most beautiful of the goddesses. The powerful practitioner of the art of seiðr. If people are unhappy, they can get her to change their destiny.”
“No one believes that stuff anymore.”
“Did Siggi think you could change his destiny, make things work better for him?”
“Yes. Sometimes with spells and runes, sometimes with white magic. I bought some books. I didn’t take it seriously. Sometimes he wanted me to read the cards. He’s superstitious. He’s always talking about his luck. He says the Vikings believed that a man not only had to be brave and smart but had to have luck. I always said to him, ‘A wise man makes his luck.’”
“And the Godi? Do they practise magic and spells?”
“Yes, but it’s just in fun. I’ve been there when someone has read the fire. It’s like telling ghost stories. There’s an old tradition of the baðstofa, telling stories in the evening in the main room while people knit or did other small chores. Sometimes they read the Bible. Sometimes they sang rímur. On some farms, everyone had a quota
of knitting. They used wake-pics, little wooden sticks, to hold their eyelids open until the knitting was finished. What is this all about?”
“Angel.”
“You think she died because someone cast a spell?”
“People who believe weird things do weird things.”
“No one has recently been burnt at the stake as far as I know.”
She picked up the clothes basket. “The rest of these things need to be hung up inside. We can talk while you’re helping me do that.”
They went inside and she hung a cord across the living room, but it was obvious that she wanted to avoid talking about Angel and sorcery. “When things are dry, I take the line down. I don’t have laundry hanging inside all the time. When we’re married will that bother you?”
“We are not getting married. Why do you do this? I don’t know anything about you. You don’t know anything about me. We’re strangers.”
“You’ve eaten at my table. You’ve chased away my enemies. You’ve spent the night in my bed.”
“I have not. I went home. My screens were slashed.”
“People think you stayed. They can’t imagine you not staying to reap the rewards of playing Sir Galahad. I could say that you slept across my door with a sword at your side that night, but they wouldn’t believe that for one minute. That’s not nearly as exciting as thinking that we spent the night making passionate love.”
She held up a black bra. “Isn’t this sexy?” she asked. She held it across her chest. “So you hate women, but you can’t look at them without getting a hard-on.”
He instinctively looked down at his crotch to see if his erection was showing. She laughed and he blushed.
“I don’t hate women,” he said. He was angry, angry with his mother, angry with Sally, angry about what had happened to him, but he didn’t hate anyone—maybe, he thought, the druggie who had stolen the car. Trying not to get involved again, not get hurt, wasn’t hatred. There was his clumsiness, his fear, his world that had crashed into a thousand pieces, but he didn’t know how to explain it.
She held up a pair of baby doll pyjamas. They looked like they were meant for a kid. “How long do you think it would take you to get these off?”
“About thirty seconds,” he answered.
“Now, we’re being honest. Sarah O’Hara says that you’re wound so tight that if you don’t unwind, you’re going to explode. She tries to talk sense to you. I tease you. Do you know how to laugh? Are you serious because you’re religious?”
He was amused and flattered by her teasing, but he couldn’t shake the image of Angel, and of Ben with tears streaming down his cheeks. “A lot of magic and sorcery is ugly. People use it to try to get ahead, to try to control the weather or other people. They use poetry to wish others harm. My father thought it was mumbo-jumbo. He was a bookkeeper. He thought in numbers and columns, but my mother believed in it.”
“Did she stick pins in dolls?”
“That’s voodoo, from the Caribbean. Icelanders have lots of their own superstitions. They don’t need to borrow others. When she was angry with her mother, she wrote a poem and drew a diagram that was meant to make her mother ill. I think that’s why she felt so guilty when, years later, her mother did become ill.”
Freyja studied him as if she was uncertain how to respond. “Isn’t this rather far-fetched?”
“Probably. But people believed it enough that they had others killed because they thought their wife or their cows were ill because of someone else’s magic. It doesn’t matter what is real. What matters is what people believe.”
“Godi-4 is a good man. He’s kind. He looks after his flock.”
“But what about Jason, the tall guy with the black beard? He looks after his flock, but I don’t think you could say he’s kind.” He thought of Morning Dawn’s frightened face outside the porch screen. “They have rituals, punishments.”
“I don’t know,” Freyja replied. “He turns up for a month in the summer. He brings people with him. They don’t mix much.”
“The music and chanting in front of White’s Emporium wasn’t entertainment. It was putting a curse on the Whites.”
“People pray,” Freyja said. “They bow down. They drink wine that turns to blood. They eat bread that turns to flesh. They ask for forgiveness. Read your psalms. I don’t remember them exactly, but I think one says let the arms of the wicked be broken.”
He thought about his parents and their straight backs in the pews at the Anglican church, rigid, looking straight ahead, knowing the ritual by heart like a mathematics lesson. And Mrs. Galecian, Anna’s mother, with her walls covered with crucifixion scenes with purple blood and religious mottos on pieces of wood and manger scenes set inside large seashells from exotic places.
“And here, in Valhalla, are any people practising old rituals, Christian or otherwise?”
“Hardly anyone goes to church anymore. Pastor Jon has a hard time shepherding people to his services. I’ve heard a fisherman say, ‘I hope to hell another fisherman doesn’t get any fish.’ Does that count?”
She meant it lightly, but she had become serious and quiet. Her eyes had darkened to jade, and there was a wistfulness about her; her face seemed fragile and she was hesitant. “You’re very serious, even depressed. If you don’t want me to tease you, I won’t. I’ll be serious. Are you sure that’s what you want?”
He didn’t know how to reply. To want, to want, to want, that was the question, to risk wanting and disappointment, and the emptiness that went with it. And his father saying, “If a girl starts to flirt with you, ask yourself what she wants, what have you got that she wants, what is she going to take away from you?” as if no one could want him for himself. He needed someone, something. He needed people to laugh with. Everything seemed not here but there, out of reach.
“I don’t know what I want,” he said, and he wondered if his voice sounded as anguished as he felt. “I’ve got to find out about Angel. I can’t live here with people thinking I killed her.”
“I don’t think that. Sarah doesn’t think that.”
“I wake up at night and I’ve been dreaming that I did.”
“Angel? In your dreams?”
He hesitated, then looked into her eyes and said, “No, not Angel.”
In his dreams, the girl he killed over and over had red hair, and she kept coming alive, and he kept killing her and burying her. He’d never told anyone that, and he wondered if he told her would she hate him for it, for this inexplicable dream world where he lived in terror and committed crimes against a dream woman for no reason. He woke in fear, struggling to escape from a world he didn’t understand.
The shrink said that when he quit killing and burying the sensitive side of himself, his anima, the dreams would go away. There was no place for anima in the Force. No place for feelings. No place for tears. Just pick up the pieces and put them into bags. After his accident, Tom was talking to one of the guys he'd last worked with. He asked Tom what he was doing and Tom said, half-jokingly, “I'm working on my anima."
“Enema?" his former colleague said. “If you're constipated, take Ex-Lax."
“They are just dreams,” Freyja said. “I ride elephants. I fly through space.”
“Maybe she was doing drugs?”
“No,” Freyja replied.
“Was there water in her lungs?”
“Yes. Wanda says she drowned. She didn’t die of an overdose.”
“No fentanyl,” he said. “No alcohol, and yet she lay on the ground with her face in a rut full of water.”
“Maybe she hit her head on a rock. There was a bruise on her forehead. Nothing serious. Not like somebody had hit her with a baseball bat.”
“Blunt force trauma?
“Not from what Wanda says.”
“Her face was partly covered with mud. I never saw a bruise. There
weren’t any rocks where she was lying. I’d have noticed. You don’t get bruises from clay.” There was something unfinished about the way they stood, facing each other but not touching, unfinished the way the room was unfinished, the subfloor planks with the screw heads that glistened silver where the sun touched them and the lack of trim revealing where the floor and drywall didn’t meet. Over them, instead of a chandelier, there was an open hole in the ceiling with wires tied in a knot and fitted into a red plastic cup. Tom felt that it was all hopeless, that no matter how hard he worked, no matter how carefully he reasoned, nothing would come to a conclusion, and he would be left with the shattered pieces of his life never made whole. He thought in his mastering of how to assemble, to fit, to build he had found a way to take the pieces of his life, the lives of others, and give them if not perfection, then the possibility of comfort and safety.
Tom felt depression settling over him. He hadn’t wanted this conversation, would now have preferred that she’d kept teasing him.
Seeing his face darken, Freyja tried to change the topic by saying, “I read the tarot cards and the coffee grounds for fun. If you want to know your future, you need to ask the Norns.
“The Norns?” he repeated. He vaguely remembered the name.
“They’re the fates. Three sisters. One tells the future, one tells the present, one tells the past. They weave our fate. We have our own version here in Valhalla. You met them. The three weird sisters you sat across from at Angel’s funeral. They know everything about Iceland’s history.”
“Three weird sisters,” he replied, not remembering because when Freyja mentioned the funeral, what loomed was Ben trying to speak but being unable to, and how he struggled and then sat down.
In Valhalla's Shadows Page 31