In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

“The greed of Horst White. And those pagans praising false gods. Have you heard of them? The Godi.” She spit out the word. “You’ll see.”

  Tom felt he was on dangerous ground. Horst White was so obnoxious, he could see why she wouldn’t want to sell to him, but he had no idea who the communist Vikings were. It was an odd combination of characteristics. He knew that the tsar’s royal guard at one time had been made up of Scandinavians, but there were no communists in those days. He felt trapped and thought, This old woman is crazy, but then thought about life in his crappy basement apartment in a building where its six suites and hallways always smelled of mould and cabbage. “I’d want to live here all year long. I’m looking for a forever home.” He’d seen the term “a forever home” in an advertisement for abandoned pets and had empathized with a black lab with sad eyes.

  She relaxed. The wrinkles in her face loosened. She had the palest blue eyes he’d ever seen, so pale they seemed nearly colourless.

  “You are the answer to my prayers. The Lord does provide if we just have faith. I have prayed long and hard that the Lord would send a buyer for my house. ” She clapped her hands together. “Hallelujah, hallelujah.” She smiled at an inner truth, then caught herself and said, “Have you come far?”

  “Winnipeg,” he replied.

  “You’ve come a long way under difficult conditions. You must have a mission. I came out here one summer as a junior missionary. I was just a girl then, eighteen. That’s how I met my husband. The Lord brought me here, and I obeyed him, though His work here has fallen by the wayside and I am shamed.”

  “You’ve been here a long time?”

  “Sixty-two years,” she said. “My husband never wanted to leave this place. He was born here. He said I could do the Lord’s work here as well as in a foreign place. The people here certainly needed help with their morals.” She hesitated, then smiled at a new thought. “I have an older sister in the city and she’d like me to come live with her. We can take care of each other.”

  “Eighty thousand?” he said.

  “I know it needs a new roof and there’s wood needs to be replaced. It needs better insulation. It’s not a youngster. Dr. Ford built it in 1938. My husband was a good fisherman, but he wasn’t handy at fixing things. He could cut down a tree, but he couldn’t make anything useful out of it.”

  He was surprised by her openness about everything that was wrong with the house. She’d never make a living selling condos in the city, Tom thought.

  The kitchen had a wood stove against the back wall and beside it a white refrigerator and an electric stove that must have been nearly as old as its owner. On the north side there was a window over a counter and under it what must have been the original sink. On either side of the window there were plain wood cupboards painted white. The floor was covered in battleship linoleum. Lino was, he’d read, coming back into fashion.

  Everything about the kitchen that was within Jessie’s reach was tidy and clean, but around the ceiling light and where the ceiling and walls met there were cobwebs. She showed him the bathroom that was off the kitchen, and Tom was happy to learn that the outhouse wasn’t the only toilet. The bathtub had feet. The floor was black-and-white tile. “There’s some tile missing,” Jessie said, “but I’ve kept them. They just need putting back. The toilet quit working two weeks ago and I haven’t been able to get anyone to fix it. Are you handy?”

  He took the lid off the tank at the back of the toilet. The chain that lifted the stopper had broken. He got her to bring him a piece of copper wire and joined the two pieces together. When he pushed the handle down, the toilet flushed.

  “I should have taken courses in mechanics, but the Lord had other tasks for me,” she said.

  “It’ll cost quite a bit to fix everything.”

  “The Lord will provide. His ways are many. The Lord brought you, but he didn’t say I had to give away my property,” she declared. “It’s on the water. It has potential if you live long enough. We bought it as a place to live, not as an investment. People in those days didn’t talk about their houses as investments.”

  She showed him two bedrooms that were surprisingly large. It was obvious that there’d been a third bedroom that had been divided to create a bathroom, plus a laundry room that also included an oil heater.

  Jessie saw him looking at the fireplace in the living room. It was large and made of glacial granite and conglomerate. She had a piece of plywood fitted into the fireplace to stop drafts. Someone had painted the plywood white and stenciled, The Lord is my shepherd and crudely drawn a herd of sheep. As soon as he could afford it, he’d put in a wood heater insert with a glass front.

  A solid four-inch plank had been used to make the mantel. Perhaps she felt she had to excuse the extravagance, saying, “We didn’t build this place. We bought it from Mr. Ford’s family in Illinois when he died. They weren’t interested in keeping it. He had a lot of money, and used to come up here by boat from Selkirk to hunt and fish. Later, he flew up. Used to bring big shots from the US of America.” From her tone of voice, she didn’t approve. “I was young then. There was just a winter road. We travelled by boat in the summer. Breakup and freeze-up we hunkered down.”

  There was a set of moose antlers over the fireplace and a bearskin on the floor. A stuffed Canada goose was on a shelf in one corner, along with a mallard and a teal. A stuffed wolf that was missing a few patches of fur and its left eye lurked in one corner.

  The floor was covered by a wool carpet. Jessie bent over and pulled one corner back to show him the floorboards. “Maple planks,” she said. “The real thing. Never been sanded.” Under the winter light, the wood was the colour of buckwheat honey.

  She saw him studying the walls. Every room was covered with a different pattern of wallpaper. The living room wallpaper was covered in small pink flowers.

  “This place was never meant to be lived in during the winter. It was just for the good weather. May, June, July, August, sometimes September.” She counted out the months on her fingers. “When we moved in, there was just studs. No insulation. We couldn’t get insulation like nowadays, but Oli brought loads of sawdust in his skiff from a sawmill north of here. Managed to get lumber he could nail over the studs. I put up the wallpaper. You can take it off and put up drywall. Make it modern.”

  She had plastic taped over the outer door and the windows of the closed-in front porch to keep the frost out of the house. The porch was obviously being used for storage. There was a jumble of furniture and boxes. There was no heat. Part of an animal’s leg was hanging from the ceiling. Pieces had been cut off it. From the size, it was probably the thigh of a moose.

  The porch, he thought, with added insulation and baseboard heaters, could be turned into a usable room in winter. He could get rid of the wood stove in the kitchen and keep the oil furnace in the small room between the two bedrooms for emergencies when the power lines went down. After he put a wood stove insert into the fireplace, there’d be plenty of heat.

  “If you have guests, there are extra chairs,” she informed him. There was a stack of old-fashioned wooden chairs with leather seats that had sunk in the centre. “I won’t be taking them. I won’t be taking much of anything. My sister’s got all the furniture she needs. You can throw out anything you don’t want.”

  He realized that as far as she was concerned, the deal was done: she was leaving; he was moving in. She was just explaining the circumstances. His father would have described her as no-nonsense.

  “My sister, Josie, goes away in the winter to Arizona. She doesn’t come back until April or May. I have things I need to do in May. I’ll be gone by the middle of June. You can move in July one.”

  There was no arguing, no negotiating. He either took it or he didn’t. The Lord had sent him or He hadn’t. Financially, he could manage. Eight thousand down; pay off the rest as soon as he could. Get a line of credit. He hoped he wouldn’t have to
ask Sally if she’d co-sign it. She was working full time and she’d got the house, so there was no mortgage to pay there.

  “Is that fine?” Jessie asked. She had her hands on her hips and was looking at him as if he might say no. He realized she was asking about leaving her belongings behind. She had to tip her head back to look into his eyes. She had a small pointed chin, a sharp nose and eyeglasses that sat closer to the end of her nose than to her eyebrows. She made him think of a teacher he’d had once. No nonsense in her class.

  “Shouldn’t we sign something?” he asked.

  “Why?” she replied. “You want it. I want to sell it. We’ve come to terms. I’ll be in the city at the end of May. You write down your address and phone number. We’ll get the papers signed. This place is paid for. No mortgage. No liens.” She looked out the window. “You’d better be going. It’s a long drive back and it looks like more snow.”

  When he left, he could feel it was getting colder. The chickadee had fled the suet and seeds for shelter. The top of the sun was just visible over the trees. Pale yellow, providing fading light but no warmth. Even though the wind had stopped, the cold was sharper, stung his face. He pulled the earflaps of his chapka down tight.

  He’d come to inquire and now he owned a place. He could back out of course. There was nothing signed. He stopped and turned around to look at the cottage under its weight of snow. The spruce trees protected it, but even so, snow rose as high as the windows where the house wasn’t sheltered by the trees, was deep on the east side of the roof. The shadows that had been light blue when he’d come were now darker, deeper and had shifted toward the east. The kitchen window gleamed like a jewel. As he watched, a rabbit hopped across the drifts.

  When he got back to the city and came to his senses, he could back out, but as he watched the smoke rising from the chimney, he realized he wouldn’t want to. He was still standing there when the door of the shed opened and Jessie called for him to come back. He slipped and slid his way to her. She thrust a brown paper bag at him. “Here. This will keep you going until you get home.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and for a moment, he felt his throat tighten. He found kindness hard to deal with. If he’d known her better, he’d have hugged her. “Thanks. Thanks.” He stopped with one hand on the snowbank, because the snow beneath his feet was sheathed in ice. “Remind me what happened. You said your husband was a good fisherman, but something went wrong.”

  She pulled her sweaters more tightly around her. “They say a squall came out of nowhere. He was pulling up nets to reset them where there was better fishing and had anchors resting on one of his gunwales. And some of these fools who were jealous and resented that he wouldn’t overfish his limit later said that the wind was created by a hand that rose out of the water and turned the boat over. It didn’t. But if it did, it would have done no good, because he always wore a silver cross I gave him.”

  He felt his feet slide on the uncertainty of the ice, so he reached back to rest his hand on the truck fender.

  “You have,” she suddenly declared, as if she’d discovered a truth and needed to proclaim it, “a hangdog look. It doesn’t become you. The Lord has just given you what you wanted. You should smile more.” With that, she pulled her sweaters even more tightly around her shoulders, went into the shed and shut the door.

  He went straight back to his truck and drove away. Once he was on the road, he used his right hand to reach into the bag. There were a half dozen peanut butter cookies.

   Chapter 5

  A New Beginning

  At the beginning of May, on his two days off work as a security guard, Tom drove out to take a look at Valhalla and the house he was buying. There was still snow in the shadows on the south side of trees, but runoff had made the road soggy, particularly where it passed through muskeg. Mud soon covered the back window of his canopy. The ditches that had been hidden by snowbanks were deep and narrow, the water in them, in spite of the brightness of the day, black and unfathomable. Mallards paddled in them. In marshy areas were piles of branches and reeds, and the mud of muskrat houses rose up in dark domes.

  Crushed limestone had been recently poured onto the surface of the road, but it was already sinking. The forest here was nearly all stunted tamarack. Although things could grow, they could not thrive. Where the ground rose up, occasional larger trees stood like beacons over a forest of miniatures. Fire had burned through the area at some time and these larger trees had been reduced to branchless trunks that were blackened and charred.

  Just outside of Valhalla, a black raised Dodge Ram 3500 raced toward him. Tom pulled as close to the ditch as possible, but there was no shoulder, and the edges could easily collapse under the weight of a tire. The Ram threw up mud as it nearly brushed him off the road. “Bloody hell!” Tom yelled as a wave of mud and water splashed across his windshield. He braked, stopped and got out. He left the wipers on and got an empty coffee can from behind the seat, scooping water out of the ditch and throwing it over the windshield. He wished for a moment that he was still on the Force.

  At the edge of the village he could smell smoke. The snowbanks had disappeared and the sign saying Valhella was revealed in all its glory. When he had come the time before, snow had covered the part of the picture showing a fisherman holding a rod.

  Like wreckage at low tide, the houses and trailers had reappeared from the snowdrifts. The pristine white had turned to tangled yellow grass, and the yards, once billowing waves of snow, looked dejected, the equipment in them having taken on the dull colour of the yards. Here and there children’s plastic toys, forgotten in the fall and now exposed, provided bursts of bright colour.

  At the first houses there were large patches of blackened grass and lines of fire where people burned off last year’s lawn while the ground was still wet enough that there was no danger of the fire spreading into the trees. Just in case the fire might leap up with a gust of wind, there were people shepherding their ragged flickering orange lines, holding wet gunny sacks so they could beat out any errant flames. They were all wearing heavy jackets and toques because of the bitter breeze from the still-frozen lake.

  Spring was the ugliest time of year. In the city, filthy snow that had shrunk to ice still lined the edges of the roads, and the roads were thick with dirt and gravel. Here, the pristine snow of winter was covered with spray from the water that lay on the road.

  When he pulled up to the harbour at Valhalla, the Christmas card snow-covered look of the town had changed to shallow ditches filled with water and roads that had melted into rutted trails of mud. The straw bales around the foundations of houses that had been hidden by the snow were black with mould.

  He parked at the edge of the lake. The snowpack had disappeared, and the ice was blue and grey. There was a hundred feet of open water. A strong east wind would drive the ice onto shore, grind it hard upon itself, pile it into a ridge. A shift in the wind would drive it back onto the east shore, create more open water. The ice would groan and heave as it ground upon itself. Once the ice was gone, for a time, the water would be so clear that the rippled sand and rock of the bottom would be visible at twenty feet.

  Tom wished that he’d already moved into the house so he’d be able to stand on the shore every day and watch as the lake changed. Since returning to Winnipeg, instead of regretting his impulsive deal with Jessie, he’d become aggravated by his apartment, the other renters, the landlord who despised everyone who rented from him. He’d begun to dream about having his own house, started fantasizing about what he would do to modernize it but still retain its lines. The need for more money for the house had driven him out of the apartment and into a night security job. Instead of spending his days sleeping or staring out his one basement window at a brick wall and a peeling fence, he made sketches and floor plans from what he could remember. He wished he’d taken a camera, but he had, he reminded himself, not planned on buying anything.

 
He left his truck at the foot of the dock and walked to the Ford place, Jessie’s place, his place, he thought to himself. The half-ton blue Chevy was still sitting in the driveway. The snow in the back had melted. Since there were fish boxes and anchors in the back, he assumed the truck hadn’t been used since Jessie’s husband drowned.

  He had brought a small box of chocolates to repay Jessie for the peanut butter cookies. He knocked on the back door. There was no answer. He opened the storm door and pressed his face close to the window in the inside door. He knocked again. Jessie didn’t appear. There weren’t many places she could be. At the store or visiting neighbours, he supposed. He walked over to the store. The bell jingled when he opened and closed the door, but no one appeared.

  Ice cream hadn’t yet been put in the freezer for the summer trade. It held some brown paper packages with the names of various cuts of meat written on them in black pen. Mostly hamburger. The dark wooden counter that separated the kitchen and living quarters from the general store area was old, its solid wood surface scarred and worn. It would have been brought in, he guessed, from a bar or hotel that had been torn down or modernized, because it had a brass rail for patrons to rest one foot on. The shelves in the south corner looked like they held the same potatoes, carrots and onions that had been there in the winter. The grocery shelves contained canned and boxed goods, but the shelves farther back were taken up with sports-fishing items. Cases of soft drinks were stacked in one corner. Beyond that were free-standing shelves filled with a confusing array of goods, from spare outboard motor parts to bear spray.

  He went back to the front door and opened and closed it three times, just in case someone was around. The jingling finally got a response; he heard someone moving about in the living quarters. In a minute, Horst White came out, pulling his oxygen tank.

  “I was sleeping,” he complained irritably. “What do you want?”

  “Jessie Olason. Do you know where I might find her?”