In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  “Was Angel pretty?”

  “Pert. More cute than pretty. Great eyes. That innocent look. Not the kind who’s going to make the catwalk or win any beauty contests. ”

  “How could someone age fifteen get so drunk or drugged that she’d pass out in the middle of a water-filled rut?”

  He was asking it, but he already knew the answer to his own question. He’d done the same around the same age. There’d been a wedding his father had felt obligated to attend. He took Tom and Tom had drunk a glass of wine that had been left at a table, then a glass of orphaned whisky, then a second glass of whisky that had been left on a table when someone went to dance. Everything started spinning, he started staggering and his father had gripped his arm, led him outside and told him to sit there with his back against a tree until he came to get him. Luckily, it was summer. He threw up.

  His father had let him share his taxi home but insisted he sit in the front seat with the driver and that he keep his window open.

  The next morning he thought he’d get a sermon, but his father never said a word. Finally, over supper, he’d apologized, said he wouldn’t do it again.

  “You got drunk,” Anna said when he came to help her clean an apartment the next day. “You looked green like spinach.” She then staggered back and forth to show him how he’d looked. She laughed out loud. Every so often while they were working, she’d look at him and imitate his staggering and laugh.

  Because two couples from the dock had sat down at a table, one of the teenage waitresses came onto the porch. She had dark hair caught at the back with a pink bow. Her hair fell between her shoulder blades. She was wearing a frilly, low white top, a red skirt and leather sandals. Tom wondered if Karla had picked out her clothes or if she was just mimicking her boss.

  “Hold it there, Tracy,” Karla called. “That’s it. Just like that.” She snatched up her camera and took a quick shot. She looked at the result, then raised one thumb in approval.

  “PR shots,” Karla explained. “Every girl has a dream. I used to model quite a bit when I was her age, even when I was older. Had my own band for a while. C and W. We drew big crowds. Toured. I like hiring the ones with ambition, the ones that want to go places. I show them how to walk, how to put their best foot forward. It’s good for the restaurant, and you never know who might drop by on a fishing trip. Sometimes it's people with connections. Miracles happen. We had one waitress get picked for a part in a movie. Celebrities come for the big walleye. We’ve had movie stars stay here. You’ve got to be seen to get a chance.”

  Karla tried to go back to her files and receipts, but she was too agitated. She picked them up and left.

  He hoped there would be a letter from Myrna, but there wasn’t any mail except an old phone bill that had caught up with him. It was already past due. It would have to wait some more. He had lumber to pay for.

  He absentmindedly bought himself the chocolate cone he wasn’t going to have and wandered down to the beach. Earlier, the surface had been roiled by a light wind, but it had died down, and now the water was dead calm.

  The owner of the Lazy Johanna was throwing a Frisbee for his poodle. The dog missed the Frisbee, and it landed in the muddy ruts close to the shore. The poodle started to chase it, then stopped, dashed into the water and picked up a pink flip-flop. The owner started yelling at his dog to put it down. The dog stood there grinning at him. The man went over, picked up the flip-flop and threw it back into the water. Tom waited until the Frisbee session was over, then picked up the flip-flop.

  Off to one side, there were some commercial fishing boats coming in. He went down to the dock to watch them pull up. The plastic boxes were filled with pickerel, perch, some striped bass, a few large sunfish. Most people didn’t know what to do with sunfish. They were no good for filleting. His mother stuffed sunfish like a chicken and baked them.

  “Good catch,” he said, meaning it as a compliment.

  A runty guy with a beard who he thought was Frenchie looked up and grunted but didn’t say anything. He swung two boxes onto the deck, then slung them into a grey panel truck with the back doors missing. He drove off. The other fishermen were at least polite but didn’t have much to say either. They had a lot of fish and they were in a hurry to get their catch packed in ice and sent to the processing plant. They all gathered at the same tin shed. At some time in the past, they’d decided it was better to share a space, to have one ice house instead of each of them having his own.

  He was going home when he saw Ben’s truck pull up to his place. He ran to meet him. Ben didn’t get out of the truck, his hands gripping the wheel. Tom went up to the window and knocked on it. Ben didn’t respond, so Tom opened the door.

  “Ben,” he said. “I’m sorry about your granddaughter.”

  Ben never turned to look at him but sat staring straight ahead. “She never drank,” Ben said. He sounded like he was defending Angel against accusations that someone had made. “She promised me. She’d never drink. She was a good girl. She promised me.” He was saying the words, but they seemed to come from someplace else, some place disconnected from him. “Wanda, her mother, drinks. She saw too much of that. She said she’d never do it.”

  His words were anguished. His face crumpled and he put his hands over eyes that were watery with tears.

  Tom thought Ben’s face was a kind face, a worn face. His eyes had seen a lot, maybe too much in the fish camps, the lumber camps, in the beer parlours he’d once haunted.

  Tom had seen other parents, husbands, wives like this—in shock but still functioning for a time like an automaton until the reality broke through. That’s when they collapsed. Now, Ben was still pushing reality away, fighting it, insisting that she couldn’t have been drinking and she couldn’t have died because of it. He had a pattern to his life and the pattern helped hold him together. For now. Later, Ben wouldn’t remember anything about the trip.

  There were two-by-fours for Tom on the truck. He went to the back of the truck and started to pull them off and stack them beside the house. Local people, having seen Ben’s truck come into town, started to appear, first looking from a distance, then hurrying over. The gathering crowd in Tom’s driveway was silent, communicating with a touch or a nod of a head or a hand on a shoulder. Three young girls came but hung back, keeping their distance, and one of the women went over to them and quietly chased them away.

  A young woman in pink slippers came up to the truck. She was carrying a baby. “The Lord has collected her to Him,” she shouted for everyone to hear. “She was His angel and He called her into his arms. Accept God’s will and be at peace.”

  A large man wearing a bandana over his head caught her by the arm and led her away. “Mary, keep your advice to yourself,” he said angrily.

  “I believe in Jesus,” she shouted. “Everything happens for a reason. God rules our lives. She is going to be a bride of Christ.”

  She would have continued to lecture Ben, but the man spread out his arms and blocked her. He flapped his arms the way he would to chase away birds, herding her out of the driveway onto the road. “No one saved this Angel,” he said. “Leave him be.”

  Two of the men helped Tom finish unloading, then one of them opened the driver’s door and told Ben to move over to the passenger’s side. He backed the truck away, then turned it around and drove Ben home. The people who had crowded around the truck followed it in a straggling line. From where he stood, Tom could see others appearing on the road to Ben’s.

  There had been no invitation for Tom to join them. The moment the lumber was unloaded, they left. Like the summer people, he didn’t belong, didn’t have an earned place in the community. He followed them but stopped where his driveway met the road and stood there by himself. There was nothing he could do. He didn’t know the rituals, didn’t have the friendships, felt that if he went to Ben’s, he would be seen as an intruder, the stranger in a place he di
dn’t belong. He wondered what he should do. If he worked on the outside of the house, would that be seen as not caring? But he knew that others had work that had to be done—with the summer temperatures of the lake, the fishermen had to lift their nets so their fish wouldn’t spoil. The emporium still needed to serve meals, sell groceries. The sports fishermen, even if they knew what was happening, wouldn’t stop casting their lines.

  Later, while Tom was struggling with a piece of eavestroughing, something kept nagging at him. If Angel had been wearing a swimsuit and had gone for a late-night swim and got a cramp or caught in the current, that would have been one thing. But she was fully dressed, so she probably came along the beach. Or she could have fallen off the dock. But then she should have been lying at the water’s edge. If she’d been drinking, that would be easy enough, but local kids didn’t hang around the dock. The boaters and the locals mostly kept some distance from each other. Besides, she’d have to have swum from where she fell, then staggered or crawled to where she drowned in the rut. And why would she swim in her clothes? The ruts ran up from the lake. Even sober people slipped on the wet clay. He’d seen people who were pushing a boat slip on the clay, fall to their knees. Maybe she was partying with the beach people and was taking ecstasy, smoking pot; nowadays who knew what kids ingested. He’d shoved the flip-flop into his pocket. Now, he took it out and studied it. It held no answers, so he put it on the picnic table and went to work on the house.

  “It’s not my problem anymore,” he said and yanked the old drainpipe off. With it, a section of eavestroughing came down. Years of rotting spruce needles and leaves showered over him.

   Chapter 8

  The End of the Beginning

  Work is our salvation. So Tom’s father always said.

  The house would give him an opportunity to focus and forget his troubles, he thought wryly. At first, he’d felt overwhelmed when he realized how much the house had been let go, how much had been hidden by snowdrifts, all ignored by his desire to own the house, to have a place here, among the tall spruce slightly bent to the south by the relentless wind from the lake, to wake in the morning to the sound of the waves on the shore, to make coffee, sit on the veranda and look out over the water or the vast field of ice stretching to the horizon.

  He was standing in the living room, trying to decide what to do about the wolf. It was a large wolf, black. Whether the taxidermist had intended to give it a snarl or whether time and humidity had created it, the wolf had a curled lip and a glare that if it had been alive, would have sent everyone fleeing. Then he was distracted by some wallpaper that had come away at a seam and curled a bit. The glue on the paper had long ago dried out. He tugged slightly and the paper pulled away, revealing planed boards.

  At the time the cottage was built, people were using tongue and groove, but a local sawmill wouldn’t have been able to do that. They might have had a planer. The sawdust that Oli had brought from the mill would long ago have sunk down, leaving the top part of the walls uninsulated. At least there was the outer shingle, the wooden boards, the studs, the inside board walls. He could, if he wanted, put drywall right over the boards, but he rejected the idea. He needed to put in proper insulation and replace any old wiring. When he first met Jessie, she was wearing men’s long underwear, a dress and two sweaters. She might have been cold because she was old and unwell, but the house would have been hard to heat.

  His father had often told him the story of the boy who paid too much for a whistle, and he wondered if in spite of his father’s warnings he had let himself be that boy. For a moment, he felt ashamed, but then he realized that, finally, he actually wanted something, which was the first indication that he was still alive, that everything inside him wasn’t dead, that on his ruined plain a green shoot had appeared. Wanting. His parents had warned him about wanting. But wanting was life.

  His parents had never thought they’d be able to have a child. Tom’s father, Henry, was fifty, his mother, Gudrun, forty, when he was born. He was a shock that, at first, left them unbelieving, then perplexed, then uncertain. For a time, they’d kept his crib in the living room as if he were crib surfing, a temporary visitor, but when he needed a bed, his parents emptied the room his father had been using as an office and moved him into it.

  Just down the hall from their apartment was a large storage closet that wasn’t being used. Tom’s father negotiated for it with Mrs. Galecian, Anna’s mother. They’d moved Henry’s desk and filing cabinets, his office chair, a trilight and a footstool to this room with no windows. Henry bought an electric heater and put in a telephone. He suffered this exile until Tom was twelve, and then he said, over a full English breakfast one Saturday morning, that Tom was old enough to sleep on his own. In Wales, boys of twelve had worked in the mines and the mills; they did men’s work. And after fried eggs, beans, streaky bacon, fried tomatoes, fried bread, sausages and black pudding with their morning tea, they moved Tom’s bed, chair, desk and bookshelf down the hall into the large closet-cum-office and moved Henry’s belongings back to the room from which he’d been exiled.

  More than once, his parents forgot that Tom might need to use the bathroom and they put the inside chain on the door of the apartment. Tom kept a pot under the bed just in case he was caught short. There was no window in the room, but there was a window at the end of the hall, and when he couldn’t sleep, he’d creep out and sit there. It looked out over a narrow alleyway. Even when he leaned out, he could only glimpse a sliver of sky. Down in the alley, in the early morning, he could see rats foraging in the garbage and street people huddled in the shelter of a back door.

  Until Tom was four Mrs. Galecian took care of two apartment blocks, including the one in which Tom and his parents lived. After her daughter, Anna, had her baby, Mrs. Galecian gave the care of Tom’s building to her daughter so she would have an income. Henry had been indignant at Mrs. Galecian’s eighteen-year-old daughter having a shotgun wedding, a baby and a divorce within twelve months. “What can you expect of those people?” he asked. Those people he was referring to were the DPs: the Eastern Europeans, the Ukrainians, the Russians, the people with no English manners, thick accents and dubious morals.

  “Young girls sometimes make mistakes,” Gudrun replied.

  Although the Germans had been hard at work trying to seduce the Icelanders with flattery and by providing instructors in skiing and mountain climbing, there’d been no opposition by the Icelanders to the English invasion in 1940. The Icelanders had no armed forces and only a handful of unarmed police. The English had broken a door at the telephone office but promised to replace it. The Icelandic president asked his fellow citizens to treat the troops as guests. American troops replaced the British a year later, but Commonwealth troops plus a few English got to stay.

  There were around 120,000 Icelanders. Of those, about 40,000 lived in the capital city, Reykjavik. The country was isolated and rural, predictable. The arrival of the soldiers destroyed predictability. The soldiers, resented by the Icelandic men, were welcomed by the Icelandic women. Why not? Here were young men, well dressed, physically fit, exotic, with loose money in their pockets. The women put on their best dresses, did their hair, put on makeup and went trolling. The locals, unhappy about young women being seduced and seducing the soldiers, sailors and airmen, called this ástandið, the situation. In desperation, families sent girls off to stay on farms in the countryside to get them away from temptation. In 1942, there was an investigation of women’s morals and a law was passed that allowed women who consorted with soldiers to be locked up in one of two reformatories.

  In 1950 Henry was sent with a small army group to see if there were any British assets that could be repatriated. Henry and Gudrun met at Tjörnin pond in Reykjavik. They dated secretly for three months. When her father found out, he bundled her into a car and took her to a farm to stay with his brother’s family. There was no escaping, since the distance was great, the farm isolated, travel difficult. During the time that Gudrun w
as being held on a farm at Grindavík, Henry was posted back to England. Gudrun eventually managed to get back to Reykjavik. All might have worked out for the best if her mother hadn’t said, “Well, if the kanamella hasn’t returned.” Kanamella meant Yankee whore.

  In the meantime, Henry had returned to England and written five letters to Gudrun. Gudrun’s mother had hidden the letters in a dresser drawer. She didn’t mention them to Gudrun. One day when Gudrun was putting away laundry, she found the letters. In one of them, Henry had proposed. She wrote down Henry’s address, put the letters back and said nothing. Humiliation was piled on humiliation.

  Gudrun replied to Henry, accepting his proposal. She packed a bag and without saying anything to her family got passage on a fishing boat taking cod to England. By the time the war was over, the boom years had begun in Canada, and Henry had met Canadian soldiers in Iceland and England who had told him about the opportunities in the Dominion. Being English he’d get preference over all the DPs who were coming to work on the frontier and as domestics.

  Gudrun did not write home. Her adolescent rage had turned her, in her own mind, into an orphan. If asked about her family, she shrugged and said, “The war.” Most people had no idea of what went on in Iceland during the war years, remembered the destruction of Europe, said they were sorry, that was a shame and let the topic drop.

  In Iceland, when the Christians and pagans were in danger of going to war, they compromised. The pagans agreed to become Christians in public, but they could practise the old religion in private. Gudrun followed their example.

  She made shepherd’s pie, Yorkshire pudding, pickled beef tongue, mixed grill, kippers. She served high tea to their new English friends: crustless cucumber sandwiches that had cream cheese, dill and chives on them; chicken sandwiches with horseradish sauce on brown bread. She learned to make scones. She listened to BBC radio and imitated the way the announcers spoke. She got a part-time job at an English tea shop on Portage Avenue and worked among the Irish and English and Scots.