Valhalla

by Newton Thornburg

  Ruby turned away in disgust. Dawson only shook his head. Tocco laughed happily. And Smiley Baggs decided there had been enough acrimony. Moving between the two men, he gave Dawson a consoling pat on the back.

  “Come on, Ray,” he told him. “You gonna miss the fire, and the food be all gone soon. Man wants a little drink, hell, that don’t hurt no one.”

  Dawson sullenly helped himself to more chicken. Stone meanwhile was trying to hold up his end of a conversation with Mrs. Goff, or Edna, as she insisted he call her. By whatever name, she seemed to have no interest at all in the food or the fire or in fact in anything except “the phenomenon,” as she termed it. A lifelong schoolteacher, she said she had made it a point each year to study some new subject in depth—“more out of boredom than anything else”—and faith healing had been one of those subjects. The one universal characteristic of such phenomena, she said, was that the person to be healed had to be a believer, in effect had to contribute as much to the miracle as did the miracle worker. And she wondered if Stone had any idea what Jagger’s condition might have been, that of a believer or a skeptic. Stone told her he could not be positive but in the few days he had known the man he had seen no evidence of his belief in anything except his own well-being, and this excited Mrs. Goff. She asked Stone what he thought had happened—why Jagger had recovered his sight—and he said that he could not think of any reason except the obvious, that the swelling in Jagger’s head had gone down and relieved the pressure on his optic nerve.

  The old woman smiled thoughtfully at that. “What a strange coincidence, happening right after Mama Dawson did her thing. It’s almost as if the powers that be were trying to trick us into superstition again.”

  Stone asked what powers those might be, and she shrugged in mock despair.

  “I wish I knew. For sixty years now I’ve been trying to find out.”

  Stone decided that Edna Goff was not quite the straitlaced small-town librarian he had thought. Though he was not a Missourian, he was familiar enough with the state to know that a free-thinking teacher in its southern environs was about as common as a Maoist.

  “Well, keep trying,” he told her. “And if you have any luck, let me know.”

  Throughout their conversation, her husband had stood meekly by, listening but offering nothing. Stone had heard that the old man had heart trouble and emphysema, which probably explained why his only concern in life seemed to be in staying as close to his wife as he possibly could.

  Moving on, Stone hoped to get some more whiskey before it was all gone. At his approach, Annabelle, who was still Tocco’s captive, gave Stone a look that was openly ironic and amused and something more, something that dared him to turn away. She was about thirty, a slim, full-breasted woman with abundant auburn hair and the manner of a massage parlor hostess. Her normal expression of languid amusement was not too different from the look she had given him, but there had been an added thing, almost as if she had surreptitiously measured his genitals and found him wanting.

  Tocco meanwhile was holding forth on the failure of the O’Brien brothers and their girlfriends to attend “this gala affair.” Only Oral was on guard duty, he said, along with Sister Newman, who was out at the barn, “probably right this minute cavorting with his favorite goat.” No, there was only one reason Harlan and the girls weren’t there, he said, and everybody knew what that was—because after dark the two brothers and Pam and Kim turned into helpless, blubbering canasta addicts, having to play the game all night long, sometimes all four of them at a time and sometimes in pairs, and sometimes switching partners, but always doggedly keeping at it until daylight or until they collapsed.

  “By mornings, their playing hands are just all raw,” Tocco laughed. “Oh, them poor kids.”

  Baggs, Eddie, and Spider all were laughing with him, unable to help themselves. But Dawson and his wife and the Kellehers obviously did not care for his sense of humor and glumly stood watching the dying fire. Most of the chicken and cider was gone. Stone managed to get one last pull on the fifth of Jack Daniels, then he drifted to the edge of the group and sat down alone on a log. He was feeling enormously tired all of a sudden. It had been a long, long day.

  Watching the others, he began to see that the Kellehers were not at all the tight-knit little family he had supposed at first. The son, Richard, was in his early twenties, a blond, clean-cut, athletic-looking youth who seemed always to be alone, even—or perhaps especially—when he was with his father and sister. The father appeared to be in his late forties, a slim gray-haired man with a strangely fey and vulnerable look for a man who had built up and operated one of the largest plumbing supply companies in the state. Had his daughter Tracy been his wife, the word for him would have been uxorious, for he doted on her and looked after her and kept so close to her one would have thought she was wasting away with some insidious disease. If so, she failed to look the part, for she was a paradigm of that clean-scrubbed, vibrant, blond beauty one had always associated with cheerleaders and cover girls on Seventeen. Yet there was about her too, as with her father, an unsettling aura of the aberrant. There was just something not quite normal in the way she stood with him, not unlike Annabelle with Tocco, leaning back against him, holding his arms firmly around her waist and insinuating her golden head against his. And her look was simply too dreamy, too moonstruck. Stone did not push the thought any farther than that, because he knew it would have been preposterous. They were both so obviously the most proper of Wasps that he imagined it all was simply a case of a man and his daughter clinging to what little they had left in the world—each other. Still, Stone did wonder why the son was excluded from that tight little circle. He wondered why Richard looked so angry and isolated, so different from his father and his sister.

  While Stone was reflecting on the Kellehers, Eve and Flossie and Mama Dawson came out of the lodge. Everyone moved to meet them, anxious for the latest word on Jagger.

  “He’s okay,” Flossie said. “He’s still got his sight. He jist wants to be alone, that’s all.”

  Dawson asked his mother what Jagger had said to her, and she grinned almost sheepishly.

  “Oh, not much. He’s still a purty frightened boy. I guess he’s scared it won’t last, that what the Lord give him, the Lord can take away again.”

  “Do you think it’d be all right if I went in to see him?” Eddie asked Eve.

  “I don’t know. He says he wants to be alone.”

  Eddie laughed uneasily. “Like Garbo, huh?”

  Stone had been saving something for Eve, and he gave it to her now. “Home-made cider,” he said.

  She took the drink and thanked him, without really looking at him.

  “How much does he see?” Stone asked.

  “I guess better at the sides, his peripheral vision. Straight ahead is kind of fuzzy. He’s very frightened.”

  “Why would he want to be alone, then?” Eddie asked.

  Eve just shook her head. Then she moved away from them. It seemed that she too wanted to be alone.

  The next morning Stone woke to find Flossie standing over him in the half-light like some deranged old Hollywood wrangler in drag, dressed and powdered and perfumed, with her hair up in rollers.

  “It’s six o’clock,” she said. “Rise and shine.”

  Still not quite believing what he had seen, Stone watched the apparition stride across the room and repeat its message to Eddie, who was lying on another couch, buried under blankets. Like a fearful turtle, he peeked out at her.

  “No late sleepers here,” she said. “Here, we work.”

  Then she marched on into the kitchen, contentedly humming “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Like Stone, Eddie slowly sat up on his couch, keeping the blankets around him.

  “Why’d I ever leave California?” he lamented.

  Stone told him. “Mexicans.”

  “I don’t know—they couldn’t be worse than this cold. Fucking goddamn Midwest.”

  “You got a point. Only this is t
he Ozarks.”

  “Fire’s out, ain’t it. What’re we gonna do?”

  As if he had been hiding down the hallway, waiting for Eddie to ask this very question, Smiley came on into the main room and announced, redundantly, that it was six o’clock, “fire building time.”

  Neither man responded, just sat where he was, and Baggs laughed.

  “What’s the matter, boys? A mite too early for you? Listen, all you need is to be married to old Flossie for forty year and you git right good at gittin’ up with the chickens. ’Fack, you git to lookin’ forward to it.” Again, the old man whooped with laughter.

  The wood for the fire was already on hand, piled next to the fireplace, and within a few minutes Baggs had emptied the ashes and rekindled a new fire from the embers of the old. As he worked, he explained to Stone and Eddie what the next hour held for them. Breakfast would be served at seven. If they used the bathroom, they would see that there were two buckets of water: a double-size one on the floor for flushing the toilet and one up on the sink for “drinkin’ and washin’.” Whenever a bucket was empty, they were to take it out to the lake and refill it. And if any bathroom was being used, or if the septic tanks were backing up, as unfortunately was the case more and more lately, there was also a new outhouse near the barn that they could use—all of which he already had told them the previous afternoon.

  When the fire was going to his satisfaction, Smiley picked up the two empty wicker carriers and went outside to refill them with firewood. Stone and Eddie moved closer to the flames before shedding their blankets. Shivering still, they put on their boots.

  “I wonder how Jag is,” Eddie said. “I bet he didn’t sleep all night long, you know? How could he? You’d have to be afraid if you closed your eyes you might wake up blind again. Especially Jag.”

  “Why especially?”

  “I don’t know—I guess because he’s an athlete. They live by their senses.”

  “And you don’t, huh? You wouldn’t mind being blind?”

  “I didn’t say that. I only meant I could probably take it better than he could.”

  “Because he plays better tennis, huh?”

  Eddie was angry now. “Maybe so—yeah. You got some better yardstick?”

  Stone shook his head in wonderment. “I don’t know—there must be something about the man I can’t see. To me, he’s such an obvious shit—yet he seems to inspire such abject devotion.”

  “Abject, my ass! I’m his friend!”

  “Sure you are. His abject friend.”

  Eddie had the look of a wolverine again, cornered, ready to strike. And Stone was at a loss to understand why he had baited the little man. It seemed he could not even talk about Jagger without losing all sense of proportion and values. Now he tried to undo some of the damage.

  “Look, I’m sorry. It’s not you I got anything against—it’s your friend.”

  But Eddie was not buying. “Any fucker that’s against Jag is against me.” He wheeled and headed for the bathroom.

  Stone found breakfast better tasting and more filling than the previous night’s supper. There was tomato juice, fried mush, scrambled eggs, and toast with real butter. He did miss coffee, however, once again reluctantly settling for a hot grain beverage that tasted more like soup than anything else. Because of the cold, the group ate not in the many-windowed dining room but in the kitchen, at a long table squeezed in near an old wood-burning stove. Ruby Dawson had come in early to help Flossie with the breakfast, and now the two of them served everyone else—except Eve and Jagger, who had not come out of their room yet, and Kelleher and Tracy. No one mentioned the absence of the latter two, so Stone assumed it was a routine thing, a special dispensation they received for some reason or other. About Jagger, though, there was a good deal of interest and speculation. Tocco wondered why, if the man really had regained his sight, he was not up and about, hungrily taking everything in. Eddie not unexpectedly took umbrage at that, saying that Jagger had not been blind from birth, for Christ’s sake, but only for a couple of days. Mama Dawson calmed the waters.

  “No sense wondering if he’s still got his sight—of course he does. The Lord wouldn’t give it to him one day and take it back the next. The Lord is not cruel.”

  “Amen to that,” her son added.

  “Well, just excuse the hell out of me,” Tocco said. “Remember, I don’t have that pipeline direct to God you all have. I gotta make do with common sense.”

  “Very common,” Newman put in.

  Tocco looked over at him, smiling, apparently not upset in the least. “Eat your mush, rabbi,” he said. “Pretend it’s bacon.”

  The conversation then veered to the visit of an ex-grocer from Spalding the morning before, by boat, from across the lake. Occasionally he would bring them supplies of one kind or another, surplus he would trade for eggs or sell outright, to Kelleher, for silver, a revelation that gave Stone a pretty good idea why the plumbing contractor and his daughter did not have to get up as early as the rest of the group. But the matter of interest now was what the grocer had said—that he had heard that a group of Mau Mau had overrun the Tomahawk Summer Camp five miles north of the lake, on Spalding Creek. Of course no campers or Boy Scouts were ever there anymore, the grocer said, just the Wiggans family, who owned and operated the place. A number of their relatives had moved in with them and it was rumored they had a pretty good stock of food and supplies. If there were any survivors, Evans hadn’t heard about them. In his opinion, they were all dead now. Murdered.

  Tocco, who had brought up the matter, tried to use it as a springboard to his favorite subject—taking over Valhalla. “Up there we wouldn’t have to worry about no goddamn Mau Mau,” he said. “We’d have everything we needed, and we’d be able to hold off an army.” But no one was interested. Just the thought of the Mau Mau seemed to terrify them so much that all they were interested in was debunking the grocer’s story. Certainly the Mau Mau were not as close as all that, they said. And as for their killing everyone at the camp, that was ridiculous. All the Wigganses would have had to do was share with them—“just as we would here at the Point,” Newman said. “There’s no reason to get yourself killed. Not unless you’re totally selfish and stupid.”

  “Rabbits,” Tocco said to Stone. “We dine with rabbits.”

  Stone noticed that the O’Brien brothers and their girlfriends contributed almost nothing to the conversation, and indeed seemed not even to hear it, so deep was their exhaustion. Both boys had fresh scratches on their necks, and one of the girls, Pam, had a fiery-looking rash on the right side of her face, as if it had been rubbed raw by sandpaper—or whiskers. Looking at the four of them, at their flushed faces and heavy eyes, Stone was reminded of what Tocco had said about them the night before, that by morning their hands would all be raw, poor canasta addicts that they were—Stone remembered and grinned.

  Breakfast was almost over when Eve came in, looking red-eyed and nervous. Everyone immediately began to bombard her with the same questions—How was he? Could he still see? Was he coming to the table?—and she tried her best to answer. Yes, he was fine and he still had his sight. And it was better now. He could see straight ahead as well as at the sides. But he hadn’t slept very well and he wasn’t coming out for breakfast—she hoped they understood.

  “’Course, we do,” Flossie purred, patting her hand. “I’ll just make you both up a tray and you can take it back to the bedroom, okay?”

  Eve thanked her.

  “Don’t mention it.” Flossie was on her feet again, starting to fill a tray. “Somehow doing for him is like doing for the Lord. Don’t ask me why. I just know it’ll come back to me someday, a hundredfold.”

  Tocco laughed out loud. “That’s not exactly altruistic, Flossie. In fact, it sounds downright selfish if you wanna know.”

  Flossie did not deign to look at him. “No one wants to know what you think about anything, Paul Tocco. It’s the Lord I answer to, no one else.”

  Tocco looked lugu
briously across the table at Stone, in a comic plea for commiseration. “How’d I ever get stuck in the Bible Belt, huh? Could someone tell me that?”

  Mama Dawson could. “Because you was lucky, sonny. Because the Lord Jesus looks after every one of us—even one who’s a foulmouthed, evil-tempered disciple of the devil.” Her almost toothless mouth gaped in silent laughter.

  Smiley supplied the sound, bellowing happily. Awesome and Ruby and Newman all joined in, eager to voice their common disapproval of Tocco. But it bothered him not at all. Smiling, he filched a piece of Mama’s toast and popped it into his mouth.

  “God’s gonna get you for that,” he said to her. “You cute little ebony sex goddess, you.”

  Some others laughed then, including Smiley Baggs. His good spirits were not doctrinaire. It was a lighthearted moment. Yet it did not dispel Stone’s growing conviction that he sat at a deeply divided table, except perhaps when it came to fear. That, he believed, was democratically shared by all.

  Later Jagger did come out of his room, only he was not the Haden Jagger that Stone remembered. For one thing, the old sneer was gone, the snotty hauteur that had seemed to challenge one’s right even to the same air he breathed. And the malice was absent too, that stinging tone of voice that for days had struck Stone like a kid glove across the face. But in their place, it was not some sudden sweetness that had blossomed, not some gentle softening of the Jagger personality. Rather he seemed merely cold and frightened, as if he were being led to a battle he knew he could not win. As he made the rounds with Smiley, Flossie, and Eve, seeing for the first time persons he already had been introduced to, he was barely civil, mostly just nodding, saying nothing. And when he came to Stone, he could not look him in the eye, settling instead for a listless smile and a few mumbled words to the effect that he guessed he owed him some thanks for the help Stone had given them. Then he hurried on, inexplicably moving more stiffly and cautiously than he had when he was blind. And as soon as he could, he broke away and went back to the lodge, to stay alone in his room through the rest of the day.