In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  “That’s not the way it was. It was crazy romance. Do you love me? Will you help me out? It was a personal loan.”

  “Were you smoking the product?”

  “Yes,” she said, but she said it cautiously. “Are you a prosecutor? Or are you going to arrest me? Send me to prison?”

  “No,” he said. “Just old habits. I’m thinking about Angel. If someone killed her—why? If it was another teenager, there’s probably no logic to it. Teenagers kill each other for the craziest reasons. They live in their own little worlds. But they’re not subtle. They come to school with a rifle and shoot someone who has bullied them or a teacher they don’t like. It’s not like they work out an intricate plot. If it had been a teenager, she’d have been stabbed or beaten with something.”

  “Someone held her head underwater?”

  “Possible, but there would have been bruises. People who are held underwater fight for air. How did she get so far up the beach?”

  Freyja had not moved back to snuggle against him. To calm her down, he said, “Whose life is most like that of a drug dealer?”

  “I dunno,” she said.

  “Guys on the drug squad,” Tom said. “They know the same people, they hang around the same places, they think about the same things, they have been known to share the same girlfriends.”

  “This isn’t sharesies,” Freyja said.

  “I’m glad to hear it. But it’s not unknown for a cop or a politician to have a wife who used to be the girlfriend of a dealer. You marry who you know.”

  “What about Anna’s daughter? You knew her.”

  “Pretty, pretty,” he said. “Tanya. Dark eyes, dark brunette hair, big smile. Her mother taught her to make killer perohy and holopchi. But I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being a maintenance man and cleaning apartments. The Galecians are formidable. Yeah, she was nice, but I couldn’t have spent the rest of my life looking at the crucifixes and the plaques. Every Sunday, church in the morning; every Thursday, bingo in the evening. What about you?”

  “Ingolfur was twenty-one. He was five years older than me. We were necking a lot. We were on the beach one night. I said I didn’t want to go all the way. He wouldn’t listen. I got pregnant. My parents said they didn’t want the kid to be a bastard. So we got married. We moved to Thompson. Two months later, I had a miscarriage. That often happens with first pregnancies. My parents paid for the divorce. Ingolfur got married again just about right away. His mother wanted grandkids. He’s a welder for the mine. He makes good money. They come back now and again in the summer. Big truck, thirty-two-foot trailer. Three kids.”

  “Any regrets?” he asked.

  She sighed. “That I got married at sixteen? Yeah. That I got divorced? No. Nice to have a thirty-two-foot trailer, though. Last time they came to Valhalla for a week, he told me he’d bought an eighty-inch TV. I got the message that if I’d stayed married to him, I would have an eighty-inch TV. Do you want an eighty-inch TV?”

  “No,” he said. “I’d rather read. Play chess with Helgi, if he’ll play without my having to drink.”

  “Make love with Freyja,” she said.

  He laughed, and she let him put his arms around her. “That too,” he said.

  They made love again. Now they were able to take their time. There was no rush. His leg ached, so after he’d entered her, he held her close and rolled over so she was on top. Her red, curly hair fell over her face when she leaned over, making her seem mysterious. He reached up to stroke and hold her breasts, then she sat up straight and he shut his eyes.

  On his way home he realized that the Stefansson’s camp store had supplied one package of three condoms. They’d used two. He would have to go to town or get Ben to buy him a box once he was feeling all right and doing his usual run.

   Chapter 30

  Odin

  The next day, Tom went looking for the house with the rooster weather vane. Asta Palsson was a tall woman with white hair tied in a bun. She had a long face and tired eyes. She was shovelling gravel into a trench that ran from her house to the ditch. Pieces of turf and a ridge of soil lined one side of the trench.

  When she noticed Tom, she stopped shovelling and leaned on her shovel. “Doesn’t do much good when the ditch is full of water, but the rest of the time it’ll drain off the puddles. You’d think when they settled this place they’d have had the good sense to pick a high spot of land, wouldn’t you?”

  “I thought it was because it was the only place there could be a harbour,” Tom replied. He held out his hand. “I’m Tom Parsons.”

  She took the leather glove off her right hand and shook hands with him. There had been, he noticed, a slight hesitation, and he wondered what that was about. She held herself quite stiffly, her chin tipped up just a little. Anna would have described her as shrewd and a bit standoffish. Her grip was firm, the skin on her hand calloused. She put her hand back into her glove, and he took it as a sign that she had work to do.

  “They could have driven back and forth. There’s higher land five miles north of here. Men always want to live on top of their work.”

  “I’ve come to ask about your husband’s rifle,” he said, getting right to the point. “I borrowed Sarah’s and lost it. I need to replace it.”

  “I lost my husband to cancer,” she said, and sounded like she was blaming herself. She wasn’t the kind of person who lost things. Tom expected she kept everything under control and wasn’t pleased when she was helpless in the face of the uncontrollable.

  “It’s an ugly disease,” he said. He remembered Mrs. Galecian. She’d been a hearty, heavy-set woman, the kind who could make dozens of perohy, a pot of borshch, feed everyone, fill up the kitchen with her energy and still be ready to dance. She’d gone to see the doctor about a lump on her leg. At first, it had seemed like nothing. Mrs. Galecian had made light of it. When anyone mentioned it, she flicked her fingers, dismissing it. Gradually, though, the visits to the doctor became more frequent, longer, with bouts of radiation and then surgery. They all talked about how good treatments were nowadays, but everyone could see that she was failing. The treatments, each of which was going to work, didn’t, and they went from hopeful to fearful to resigned. Toward the end, she sat in a wheelchair, her hands in her lap, busy with her rosary. She’d had to give up teaching cross-stitch and making pysanka, intricately detailed Easter eggs, at the Ukrainian Centre. The last time he saw Mrs. Galecian, Anna was taking her to a hospice. He bent down and hugged her one last time, thanked her for everything and told her he loved her. “Tommy,” she whispered, “you take care of yourself. Skinny is no good.”

  “Come in,” Mrs. Palsson said. “I’ll get it from the attic.”

  They went in and she went back out and returned with a wooden stepladder stained with many colours of paint. He’d have offered to get the rifle, but she obviously didn’t want help and probably didn’t want a stranger rummaging in her attic. Attics were private places, filled with people’s past lives, objects that might lead to questions. She set the ladder up, climbed it and pushed open a square door in the ceiling. She caught hold of the sides of the opening and heaved herself up. She disappeared and he could hear her walking about on the studs. She came back, knelt at the entrance and handed him the rifle. She backed down the ladder, pulled the door into place and brushed herself off.

  “Dusty,” she said. “I haven’t been up there in years. Spider webs everywhere.”

  “How much do you want?” he asked.

  “Five hundred dollars,” she said and handed him the key for the trigger lock. He turned the rifle over, inspecting it. It was covered in Cosmoline, and because it hadn’t been wrapped in plastic, the wax had solidified. He wondered if it had been dipped but doubted it. That meant there wouldn’t be any wax in the bore. It still would be a lot of work to clean it up so it could be used. He turned it over, took it to the window. He could spray it wi
th WD-40 to soften the Cosmoline, then wipe it off. He might have to get mineral spirits. It would be tedious work. He unlocked the trigger, then took out the bolt and the magazine and put them on the kitchen table. The stock was clean, and the sights were in good shape. He aimed through the window with it, then looked down the barrel, and the barrel seemed okay. He put the bolt and the magazine back in place.

  “It’s going to be a lot of work to clean it up. It has to be taken completely apart and all the wax scraped out. It’s kept the rust off, so that’s good. The stock needs to be cleaned and lightly sanded, then finished.”

  “How much?” she said, and he knew she was re-evaluating him.

  “There’s the price a dealer asks. There’s the price if you’re selling it privately, all cleaned up and ready to go. With the work needed, three fifty. That’s top dollar.”

  “Three fifty?” She was weighing the words, weighing him.

  “I’d have to pay you fifty dollars a month.”

  She pulled a long face and her brow furrowed.

  “If you’ve got work you need done, we could trade. Your back steps need replacing. We could work out a price. No need for cash.”

  “The rifle’s for Sarah?”

  “Yes, if I can’t find hers.”

  “If you do, will you want to bring this one back?”

  He shook his head. “No, I need a rifle for hunting season.”

  “It’s not hunting season now.”

  “No, but I heard there were bears around. That made me nervous. If you let me have it so I can clean it up for Sarah, I’ll pay you fifty now, then we can negotiate any work you want done. Otherwise, cash payments.”

  “I’ll trust you for it while I decide,” she said.

  “I might do like Jessie and die.”

  “It happens,” she agreed. “She always thought her sister would go first, being older.”

  “One minute older,” Tom said.

  “Older is older. You come first, you go first. That’s the proper order of things.”

  “Life isn’t that organized.”

  “You going to arrest some of these people?”

  “I’m not a policeman anymore. It’s not my job.”

  “That’s too bad. People get away with little crimes, it just encourages them to do big crimes. Lot of stuff goes on that shouldn’t. You going to do stuff you shouldn’t?”

  “I hope not.” What, he wondered, were the things that he might do that he shouldn’t? If her husband had been doing anything he shouldn’t, it hadn’t paid well. The floor had a bit of a slope to it and the floor tiles were chipped in places. Her kitchen counter was covered in worn brown linoleum. A lifetime of living and hard work that never returned much except meals and clothes and a place that kept off the weather. She’d had to work hard at preserving her dignity.

  As he went to leave, she caught his sleeve. “That Johnny Armstrong is all right. He’s good to his wife and kids. He works hard. Blasting. Cement. My Hjalmar worked for him when there were jobs. He paid fair. You can’t criticize him for who he works for. You live here, you got to take work where you can get it.”

  On the way home with the rifle, he thought that Asta Palsson must have coffee regularly with Johnny Armstrong’s wife.

  Tom mulled over Valhalla. There were, as far as he could see, no gods, fallen or otherwise, no figures larger than life, just flotsam and jetsam, shipwrecked survivors scattered on the shore. I wonder which I am, he thought. Flotsam or jetsam?

  He rolled four old oil barrels from the back of the property to the driveway. There was going to be a lot more junk than he’d expected. He’d thought he’d sell Oli’s one-ton Chevy for whatever he could get for it, maybe trade it, but now he was reconsidering. He didn’t really want to take a lot of this garbage in his own truck. Rough metal edges, rusted nails, broken glass were better in the wooden box of Oli’s truck. It wouldn’t cost much to license it for three months. Jessie had never mentioned the truck. He’d assumed she’d sell it before she left to join her sister. Josie didn’t mention it either. He’d need to get a signature transferring the truck over to him. Josie had said she was going on a cruise, but not when. She said there wasn’t anything she wanted and that everything left there went with the house. She just wanted shut of it so she could cruise and holiday. She said that she liked to dance with the men in white coats the cruise ship provided for the older ladies. “When you get to be my age,” she said, “you don’t get to hold a man very often. When you’re young, it’s different. They want to get their hands on you. When you get old and scrawny, you have to pay them.”

  When he’d mentioned Jessie’s mission, Josie had spluttered and said, “Spent her life chasing God. Didn’t do her much good. She never had much luck with those heathens. She taught Sunday school, she helped with confirmation, she washed vestments, she made sandwiches, she organized a ladies’ aid society. Look around. See if you can find much evidence of them. She should have come back home and found a man with a good job, a lawyer or a doctor or a businessman. There was a jeweller who was interested in her. He was all set to give her a ring. No, oh no, what did she do? Married a fisherman in the wilderness and gave up a civilized life.”

  Perhaps that had been the bond between Sarah and Jessie. Tweedledum and Tweedledee; physically different but sisters at heart, Freyja had called them. Women travelling into the heart of darkness; he vaguely remembered reading a book by that name in one of his English courses. Sarah and Jessie had come north, left civilization behind, travelled into the wilderness and the unknown, but the main character in the novel had returned to England. They had stayed. They had found, he thought, their own heart of darkness, but they had stayed in it, survived in it, not been defeated by it. The main character—he searched his memory for the name—a journalist gone rogue, had disappeared into Africa, become godlike. Marlow, he remembered. But Jessie and Sarah had stood against the elements, faced the worst that could come, the loss of their husbands, and held on to what they believed. Here, in Valhalla, there was just individual craziness bouncing off each other. Unless the Godi were into pagan rituals. With cults, he thought, anything was possible.

  He studied the shed. He wasn’t sure what to do with the contents. He could haul everything to the dump on the edge of town. He’d ask Ben about whether anyone might want old traps and antique Evinrude motors. He still hadn’t looked into the fish boxes and expected they’d be filled with nets. They’d hardly weighed anything when he’d picked them up. The lids were nailed on, but the wood was so old and dry that all it took was lifting one end with his hand for one lid to come off.

  Inside the box, there was oilcloth—bright yellow with red poppies—the kind that at one time was used to cover kitchen tables. It would have cheered up a house on a winter day. It was folded over at the top, and he pulled the folds loose. There were items wrapped in brown butcher’s paper. He unwrapped one. It contained a white knitted baby’s bonnet. He carefully set it aside. The next package held a baby’s blue knitted sweater. He was kneeling amid the debris of a life. The gasoline drums, the rusted traps, the nets, bits of harness for long-forgotten horses and the two wooden fish boxes. Rough cut but unstained, they’d never been used for fish. They’d been brand new when Jessie had packed away her dead child’s belongings.

  Following the original creases, Tom folded the wrapping back around the bonnet and sweater. He pressed the nails back into the original holes, then knelt there, unsure of what to do. This child was wanted, he thought, this child under the cement pad, with his name cut into the concrete, coloured stones set into the wet concrete; he wondered by whose hands: Jessie’s, Oli’s, both of them? A child anticipated, desired, and he imagined Jessie, young, excited, knitting, knitting, delighted, showing Oli what she’d done. The crib might have come by freight boat from Winnipeg, perhaps, or on a Cat train, pulled on a freighter’s sleigh across the ice by tractor. He imagined the
crib in the small bedroom. Wanted, wanted, and he put one box on top of the other, then picked them up and took them inside.

  It was not for a man to decide, he thought. He’d ask Freyja or Sarah or maybe both of them. And he thought of Myrna and Joel; they’d not been planned, but they’d been welcome, and he and Sally had prepared a place for both of them, shopped for clothes and toys, before their lives had started to come apart. He’d wanted both of them to know that they were welcome, and he was sure Sally did, too, but that was in the beginning. He’d never wanted them to sit alone like he had at a window, looking out at the people passing by and wishing he had a place to go where he would be welcome. But now Sally’s door was shut against them, and he was here, in this distant place, and they were... he wasn’t sure where. And he thought about all the times he’d heard about how his bassinette and then his crib sat in his parent’s living room, and he was an unexpected guest who wouldn’t leave, and, finally, his presence forced his father out of his office, down the hall, dispossessing him, intruding, and the shocked look on his father’s face the time that he’d put on his father’s shoes, monstrously large and come clumping into the living room, a harbinger of doom. He put his hand on the top box, rested it there and thought about Jessie, the little woman with the sharp nose, no nonsense. What had she wanted from him? What had she hoped he would do?

  He left the stifling air of the bedroom and went outside and replaced shingles.

  He’d forgotten about the invitation to Odin until he saw the two children waiting for him at the edge of the spruce trees. He hurried to change and went to join them.

  “Am I expected to bring anything?” he asked.

  They looked at each other, and then looked back at him and both shook their heads. They turned and walked ahead of him, taking their task of leading him seriously. Gabriel’s sandals looked a bit too big for him. Tom assumed they were hand-me-downs he hadn’t quite grown into. Gabriel stubbed the toe of his right sandal on a tree root and stumbled. Samantha caught him.