In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  “You have purchased Doctor Ford’s property?” Godi-4 said.

  “Jessie Olason’s property.”

  “We think of it as the Ford property. He was one of the founders of Odin. You have chosen to join the Valhalla community. That is a significant event. Valhalla seldom has people move to it. Usually, they move away.”

  “I visited Valhalla a few years ago. I imagined living here.”

  “Yes,” Godi-4 agreed. “First we must imagine things before we can do them. You have to imagine the pyramids before you can build them.”

  “I have smaller ambitions,” Tom answered.

  Godi-4 smiled at Tom’s response. “This is not an exact duplicate of an Icelandic longhouse. The Vikings were early adoptors. They travelled to America and to the depths of Russia. They would have used whatever materials were available. In Iceland, they built with layered lava rocks and turf. Here, we use limestone slabs for our foundation. In Iceland, there is no limestone. Here, there is an abundance of wood, so we use wood. As you can see, we’ve incorporated electricity. When you come in the daylight, you’ll see that we have used turf to insulate our outer walls and we have a grass roof.”

  Jason and his small group from the beach came into the hall. Godi-4 quickly excused himself and went to intercept them. From the way they were standing, it seemed that a confrontation was taking place. Jason’s followers had gathered behind him. Godi-4 stood by himself, facing them the way a prophet or a proselytizer might face a mob.

  There seemed to be more than fifty people in the hall before Jason and his group appeared. Many of the women wore the same style of shift with shoulder straps as did the young woman who had served him tea. The men wore loose trousers and tops that came past their hips, tied with brightly coloured woven belts. They were standing around in groups quietly talking, and he realized that every so often a member of the group would turn to glance at him, but only briefly, never catching his eye. Tom sipped his tea and smiled at anyone who looked toward him, but no one came to join him until a young woman offered to refill his cup. Tom thanked her and said, “No thanks, one cup was fine.”

  Brokkr had come back. He touched Tom’s elbow to get his attention and nodded toward the door. Tom put his cup down and Brokkr led him out.

  “You knew my name though we hadn’t met. You were expecting me?”

  “Yes,” Brokkr replied. “Not at the exact moment you arrived but perhaps the moment before or the moment after.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Take this flashlight. It will help you find your way. It is easy to get lost when you have no light to guide you. Even though it seems quite safe here, there are wild beasts about. You can return it when you next visit.” He handed Tom the flashlight, and as clouds now obscured the moon, Tom was pleased to have it. Brokkr hesitated, as if to prolong the moment, then said, “Your life is now linked with ours. We believe that every act has meaning. Kill a butterfly and alter history. Dr. Ford, Jessie Olason, Tom Parsons, each forming a link in an unpredictable but meaningful chain. Is it a surprise that we are curious about you? Why you? Why here? What does it mean for us?”

  With that, he turned and slipped into the darkness, a small misshapen figure disappearing among the trees. Tom wondered if he made it a habit of prowling the woods at night, and if so, was it to catch nosy neighbours, or was it to keep track of the members of Odin?

  Chapter 22

  The Disappearance

  “They sing,” Tom said. “Beautiful voices. All together, in different groups. Four-part harmony.” He was leaning against the store counter. “I need a pound of butter.”

  “No one needs a pound of butter. Why don’t you try margarine?” Karla said. She got a pound of butter from the cooler. Because of the heat, Horst was lying down in their living quarters. Without him there, Karla looked more relaxed. “You’d be better to use margarine.”

  “How much do you charge for pickerel fillets?” He knew there were fresh fillets in the cooler and frozen fillets in the freezer. The fillets were the most popular meal.

  “Six dollars a pound. It’s a bargain. Do you know what you’d pay in the city?”

  “The fishermen have a quota?” he said.

  “Nine thousand pounds per licence. Not enough to live on unless they have the money to buy more than one licence.”

  The café side of the emporium had customers at three tables. The rest were empty. There was the soft murmur of voices and the clink of cutlery on plates.

  When he paid her for the butter, Karla asked, “Did they explain what that hysterical performance out front was about?”

  “It never came up,” he said. “I see that some of the sailboats left this morning.”

  “There’s a regatta down south. It always takes business away from us. I think some people were offended by the performance and left the next day. I explained that it’s never happened before.”

  “I’ll bet nine months from now there’s going to be a cluster of babies born. All those guys watching the spinning.”

  Karla wasn’t amused. She stared at him the way his teachers had stared at him when confronted with his sarcastic humour. Sweat formed on her face. She pulled at her blouse and flapped it.

  “You’d think a storm would cool things off. All we get here are extremes. A hundred above in the summer and forty below in the winter.”

  “You sang like a bluebird the other night. Some of us squawk like ravens.” He knew that a compliment about her singing always made her easier to deal with.

  “Have you had any music lessons? Any music in the family?”

  “My father had a good voice, but outside of the church choir he wouldn’t sing.”

  “People should use the talent God has given them,” she said with a bit of a sniff.

  He realized that her ability, whatever it was, had given her a belief in her own superiority in the same way that ex–hockey players, even when reduced to selling cars, carried a physical arrogance about them the rest of their lives.

  “Tin ear,” he said, then realizing that she might have thought he was referring to his father, added, “Me. No talent.”

  “I can teach you. You’d have to pay, of course.” She winked at him. “Now, Freyja there, she might provide lessons for free. She has a nice voice. Not much range but pleasant. I’ve got much better range than her, more experience. I can show you tricks that she can’t.”

  “I’ll bet,” he said.

  She studied him as if she didn’t understand him, as if there was a mystery about him yet to be unlocked.

  “You like looking, but you’re not an action man. None of this grab a girl by her hair and drag her off into the bush. The local boys are action men, or at least they like to think so. Unless, of course, you ask them if that’s a wedding ring they’ve got in their pocket.”

  Tom took out his wallet and the picture of his father. He handed it to Karla. “This was my father,” he said. “He used to be a big fly fisherman. Did he ever come here to fish? It was a long time ago.”

  She studied the picture. “We’ve been here fourteen years. My mom died, we came to help my dad. He couldn’t manage on his own. Sacrificed my career. Had to pass up big opportunities. Now, he’s in a nursing home in the city. Alzheimer’s.”

  “Have you kept your guest records from long ago?”

  “My father never threw anything away. There are boxes of paper upstairs. Does it matter?”

  “Only to me,” Tom replied.

  Just then Horst came out, dragging his oxygen canister behind him. Karla handed the photo back to Tom, straightened up and went to check on the waitresses.

  “You want something?” Horst demanded with a hint of irritation in his voice. Tom wondered if he’d always been so irritable or whether it came about because of his daily struggle to breathe. Asbestos mines, he thought, killing people slowly, making money for the owners but destroying the workers’ lungs.

  “Information about Jessie,” Tom said.

  “She’s dead
.”

  “I know she’s dead. Was she connected to Odin?”

  “How would I know? I don’t mind other people’s business.” He settled into his chair, touched the plastic lines that led into his nose and scowled at no one in particular.

  “You’ve lived here for how long? Fourteen years and you buy and sell real estate and have the only store, and you don’t know?” Although Tom tried to control it, irritation had crept into his voice, and he immediately regretted it because he knew that Horst would think Tom’s irritation was a triumph.

  “I could find out,” Horst replied. “It would take time and effort. How much is it worth to you?”

  Tom just about said, “Fuck you.” Instead, he took the pound of butter and left.

  Instead of going home, he dropped by Sarah’s. He put his pound of butter in her fridge and handed her the picture of his father.

  “He is,” Tom ranted to Sarah, “the most obnoxious person I’ve ever met.”

  “Who?” She put on her reading glasses to see the picture better. “This guy?”

  “No,” Tom said. “Horst White. That’s my father. Did you ever see him around Valhalla?”

  When he said the picture was of his father, she moved it back and forth until she had it at exactly the right distance. She looked at the picture, then at Tom.

  “I got these glasses at Walmart for ten bucks. They may not be the right strength.” She held the picture up beside his left ear. “I’m trying to imagine you with a moustache.”

  “I look more like my mother,” he replied.

  She handed him the picture. “How long ago?”

  “He died when I was twenty.”

  “A lot of people come and go. Not us, but the summer people. Some come once, never come back. Others come back a few times. The ones who come back year after year get known, at least enough for people to say that’s Herb from the Pelican II. We’re just the quaint villagers to them.” She paused. “You’re agitated,” she said. “You’re doing that thing with your thumbnail. You need a cup of tea.”

  He looked at his hands. When he was stressed, he had a habit of locking them together and scraping his left thumbnail with his right. It had driven Sally crazy. He unlocked his fingers and put his hands at his side.

  “So what’s your problem with Horst?” she asked, going back to his earlier comment.

  “He’s the most obnoxious person I’ve ever known.”

  “Including the murderers you dealt with?”

  “They were nuts.”

  “And he isn’t?”

  “He’s just greedy, acquisitive. He’s got a house. He doesn’t need another one. Jessie sold me hers. Get over it, people.”

  “For less than he was willing to pay.”

  That brought him up short. “Less? How much less?”

  “She was waiting for the right buyer. She could have sold years ago.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “The Odin group thought Ford’s land was theirs. They were wrong. It was Ford’s. His relatives didn’t like the Odin group. They thought the Odin leaders had been milking Ford for his money. The Kerrs, Karla’s parents, were interested in the land, but Jessie’s husband, Oli, had been Ford’s fishing guide. Jessie knew all Ford’s business. She had the names and addresses. No flies on her. Jessie beat them all to the punch. She tried to get the Odin property too, but Ford had turned it over to the group. They’ve been waiting ever since. Christians have been waiting for millennia. People wait for the end of the world. People get a fixed idea and they wait.”

  Tom slumped in his chair. “I don’t want to get involved in whatever craziness is here. I came for a simple life. Like Thoreau. I just want to fix things that are broken.”

  Sarah smiled widely. “Lots of broken things around here. That Karla been showing you her tits? Are you going to fix whatever’s broken there? She sleeps upstairs. Horst can’t manage the steps. He sleeps downstairs. Maybe that’s why he’s grouchy.”

  “She’s inclined to lean over.”

  “She’s got a husband who’s got one foot in the grave and is sinking fast. He kicks the bucket, you want to move into her bedroom and run a store the rest of your life? You know why he’s got nearly everything valuable behind the counter? Because people steal stuff. You want to deal with shoplifters? With unpaid bills? He’s got a ledger with pages of people who buy on credit when their welfare runs out.”

  “There’s no harm in looking.”

  “It all starts with looking.”

  “You sound like my mother,” he said testily. “If you don’t get to practise as a teenager, you make mistakes when you’re older.”

  “Practise?”

  “Falling in love. All that kind of stuff.”

  “You’re cute,” she said. “And uptight. You know there are bets in town about who’s going to get you into the sack first?”

  “Nobody’s been climbing into my bed at night.”

  “You have a penchant for women who are trouble,” she said. “That Freyja. She’s trouble. That won’t keep you away, will it? Men like trouble, a little bit of excitement. It’s sort of like HP on their steak. You want her reading your future and telling your children-to-come about trolls and giants?”

  “Some men.”

  “You any different?

  “I’m in no shape to handle trouble. I came here to avoid it. Besides, I’m not having any more children.”

  Sarah laughed out loud. “You poor laddie,” she said. “Life is full of surprises, and it isn’t always a black bear coming through the kitchen door looking for bacon fat.”

  He felt disgruntled, irritated, as if everyone else in the world knew things he didn’t, shared things that weren’t shared with him, secrets, always secrets. His family was full of secrets, everything under lock and key, especially their feelings—his father’s office, his parents’ bedroom door, the food cupboard, the china cabinet, as if a stranger might sneak in and drink from his mother’s precious china or sully her sterling silver. The family photo albums were kept in the oak cabinets, each glass door kept closed to keep out the dust, each glass door locked to keep family secrets secret.

  When his father’s relatives came to visit, they all spoke in code, in an adult language he didn’t understand: short, abbreviated sentences, intermingled with knowing looks, nodding heads, looking into space, pressed lips, barely audible laughter. A cousin might say, “Emma.” And they all would glance at each other, look away, restrain a smile, nod, shake their heads, not quite restrain their growing grin. Another cousin might add, “Oxford.” Still another would add, “Christmas.” Then there’d be silence as they sipped their tea, nibbled their Christmas cake, drank their port, and were overcome with all their shared thoughts about Emma, who might or might not be in one of the black-and-white photos in one of the family albums. Women in big hats and men in suit jackets that looked too small. But all was a mystery, a secret, for there were no names, locations, dates, just the photos of strangers from a past life. After his mother had left and his father had died, Tom had the keys to the various locks in the apartment, the keys found in his father’s office, and he opened the cabinets, took out the photo albums and searched them for clues about who he might be.

  When Cousin Donald in the pork-pie hat had come to help him go through his father’s papers, Tom had shown him the albums and asked him about the people in the pictures. He’d named some, was not sure of others.

  “We’re not a close family,” he said. “It was our upbringing.

  “Nobody told me anything,” Tom said.

  Cousin Donald was rifling through Henry’s files, making notes. “There’s nothing to tell that’s worth telling,” he said. “We were grubby and hungry, and did no job as well as filling up the local graveyards.”

  “No lords or dukes or people like that in our family?” Tom asked.

  Cousin Donald showed his teeth as he laughed silently. “Not unless one of our girls working as maidservant got caught bending over making a be
d. Then we might have had a lord in the family for a while, you might say.”

  Tom had been shocked. He had never heard either of his parents talk like that. He couldn’t imagine his father saying such a thing about the women in his family. Or about any woman. Decorum was his byword, and how could you be decorous bent over a bed with a lord having sex with you? He wondered if the women it happened to kept doing whatever they were doing or if they paused, waited until it was over, then continued as if nothing had happened.

  “You’re a good lad,” Cousin Donald said, “but you’ve got a lot to learn. Your folks were brittle and a bit tight with the port, but they were all right. They made do and never borrowed a dollar from anyone.” Tom wasn’t sure what to say to that.

  “You’ve drifted away,” Sarah said, startling him. “You do that at times. You’re here and then you’re not here. It wouldn’t be a good thing to do when you’re in a skiff or out on the ice. Where were you?”

  “Thinking,” he replied. “Remembering a man in a pork-pie hat. A cousin of sorts. He helped me with my parents’ estate and helped himself to part of it.”

  “There are lots of those around.”

  Sarah filled up the room. Her husband, she’d said, had been a huge man, six foot six, broad shouldered, able to walk all day in the bush, sleep on spruce branches outdoors in winter, pull a sleigh loaded with supplies. Together, they must have been formidable, intimidating, but she’d said that her husband was gentle, well liked, enjoyed telling stories.

  Tom had grown familiar with Sarah’s kitchen. Everything in it was big, made by hand by big people for big people. The table was made from birch planks. It now sat six but with all the leaves in it would seat twelve. According to Sarah, there was a matching piece that, when added, accommodated twenty. There was an old-fashioned clock enclosed in an intricately carved case. A sports fisherman who had once stayed with them sent it as an anniversary gift.

  Who, he wondered, would make bread and pies on these too-high counters after she was dead? What good was a house of giants to a race of pygmies?