“I will foretell the future,” Freyja said in a slightly exaggerated manner, trying to lighten his mood. There was a plastic cup on the table beside her. She picked it up, peered into it and said, “You need to work on your house now. The summer will go, and then it’ll be fall, and everything has to be done before the weather turns cold. Get your house in order.”
“Yes,” he answered, but her attempt at humour didn’t drive away the image of Ben, his hands shaking, his lips trembling, tears sliding down his cheeks, and when he sat down, Wanda reaching over with a napkin and blotting away the tears. Tom turned on his heel and went out into the blinding sun, and his head ached and he knew that he mustn’t use any power tools. He was starting to have a migraine, and when that happened, he lost all sense of where his hands and feet were, and he could cut a finger or a hand off in a moment. He’d work at a task where if he got it wrong, it wouldn’t do too much harm. The watery corrugated circle that came before the pain had started, and he knew he needed coffee, double strength to try to keep it away. In the city he would have hurried to the nearest shop where he could get an espresso, but now he’d brew it himself, clumsy from the flashing light and disorientation. The light expanded, became coloured, and he knew there’d be no work done. He needed the espresso, two of them, then to lie down with his eyes shut. And he hoped there were no flies on the porch, for the sound of their buzzing would be like an airplane flying right overhead.
Chapter 24
The Norns’ Invitation
When he woke the next morning, the migraine still lingered, still made his head feel distant, but the flashing light was gone. He lay on the couch and stared at the one blue eye and one vacant eye socket of the wolf and thought that he should buy it a new eye or throw it out.
As he lay there, he thought about the house and how strange a turn his life had taken. At least no one had cut the screens again, and soon he’d have all the windows installed. A couple of them needed the entire frame replaced. Slow work—measure, measure again; always measure twice, cut once. The saw, the saw, the sharp whine of the saw as it cut through the wood, the whine of the planer, the sound of the drill as he inserted the screws. He tried to use nails as little as possible. Screws were more forgiving and only took a reversing of the drill to have them miraculously rise out of the wood. It allowed him to go back and fix errors. He wished he could have done the same with his life: reverse the drill, remove the mistakes. Make it right with hindsight.
He’d have to get Ben to bring him more two-inch screws, some two and a half inch. The house, the house, his thoughts like driftwood moving in the current. He thought he’d just move in, there’d be little to do, a few minor adjustments; he’d spend his time sitting on the reef, letting the sound of the waves wash away his memories, leaving his mind clean and clear. He took his wallet and pinched out the piece of paper he’d found in his father’s study, unfolded it. He’d hoped it might reveal answers to mysteries, but there was just the one word. He refolded the paper and put it back in his wallet.
He put on his bathing suit and went for a swim, washed himself in the lake and rinsed off the soap by diving and swimming underwater as long as he was able to hold his breath. The city swimming pool had been near their apartment, and his mother had been willing to pay for a yearly pass. He went often and practised his diving and swimming and liked it because swimming laps was something he could do by himself, always working against his personal best.
Now he dove a number of times, pulling himself to the bottom, feeling about for stones, finding one and bringing it to the surface, treading water as he looked at it, hoping it might tell him about its secret life.
His father had seemed so rigid, so set in his ways, living on so narrow a worn path, that it had come as a shock when Tom discovered that he gambled. It would have been no more surprising if it turned out that he robbed banks or paraglided. He wondered if his father had a secret life, somewhere beneath the surface, if he might have had other feelings, a life beyond his tailored, always slightly out-of-date brown suits, the endless calculating of other people’s numbers. As he studied the stone, he heard someone calling, shook his hair back off his face and swam to shore. Freyja was standing there waiting for him.
“The Norns have sent a message,” she said. “They request our presence.”
“The mythological ones?”
“No, the three sisters you met at the funeral reception are asking us over. Skuld, Urdh and Verthandi. How do you like them monikers?”
“Why would anyone do that to their kids?”
“Their father was a descendent of a famous wizard who was burnt for sorcery in Iceland. He wanted to keep up the family tradition. When they got old enough to realize what he’d done to them, they rebelled, but he retaliated by sending them to Iceland to go to school and work in a fish plant.”
“Why the invitation?”
“I saw Dolly at the store and mentioned you were interested in magic and Icelandic history. She works for them a couple of days a week. They’re expecting us at seven.”
The rocks were sharp, and as they talked, he carefully picked his way through them in his bare feet. Grey and black rocks covered with green slime that waved back and forth with the rippling water. “It’s sandy farther out,” he said. “Good bottom.”
“Me, too,” she said. “Don’t you think?”
“I thought you were going to be serious?”
“I’m doing my best. I’ve brought you a serious message. Don’t you think I deserve a reward?”
“Such as?”
“Breakfast. You said you could cook.”
“White’s?”
“Their eggs and hash browns are greasy.”
They went into the house and he changed into jeans and a T-shirt. He brought out eggs and bacon and bread.
“I think there are twenty outlets hooked up to one line. It’s a wonder the place hasn’t burned down. Nothing is to code,” he complained. “Not all the rings work.” He glared at the stove in an accusatory manner.
“You’re making excuses. Let’s see how good a chef you are.”
He found an onion and some boiled potatoes and a tomato, a piece of cheese. “A frittata,” he said. “Will that be all right? And coffee. I’m afraid I don’t have any juice.” When he was cooking for Sally and the kids he often made frittatas. They were easy and there wasn’t much cleanup afterwards. He was good at bacon sandwiches. Fried cheese sandwiches. Pancakes from a mix. He wished he hadn’t said he could cook. She probably thought that meant he could make a soufflé or something with an exotic sauce. He had made lots of pies using ready-made pastry.
“I’ll go get us some orange juice from my freezer.” She looked happy then, as though their doing something together mattered to her.
He realized he was out of canned milk, so he ran over to the store. He remembered Dolly’s warning and checked the cans of condensed milk. Most of them were past their best-before date. Some had labels that showed smoke damage. Some were dented. He chose the least out-of-date can and vowed to make a trip to the city for cases of canned goods.
He reached into his pocket and realized he didn’t have his wallet. He checked his other pocket for change. It was empty.
“You’ve got a visitor,” Karla said.
“Yes,” he said. He’d checked his back pocket and shirt pocket. “I’m making breakfast for us. I forgot my wallet. Can I take the milk and come back after breakfast and pay you?”
“You want credit,” Karla said.
He stopped and stared at her. “I don’t want credit. What difference does it make if I pay you now or an hour from now?”
“You take a product and don’t pay for it, that’s asking for credit.”
“Oh, for cripes’ sake,” he said and thought about running back, grabbing his wallet, running back to the store, back to the house. “Fine. Yes, I want credit.”
Karla smiled at him, opened the ledger that sat on the counter. She entered, Canned milk, 3.30. �
�There’ll be a ten per cent charge for thirty days credit.”
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll be back after I have breakfast with Freyja.” He saw Karla’s mouth tighten and knew it wasn’t the thing to say, but he was annoyed.
When he got back to the house, Freyja had returned. She had taken the cast-iron frying pan off the stove and put a pot lid over it so the top of the frittata would finish cooking.
“You can’t go off flirting and leave something cooking,” she said.
“She was being a bitch,” he replied.
“That’s either because I’m having breakfast with you, or maybe she’s heard you ordered meals from Dolly.”
He cut thick slices off a loaf of bread that Sarah had given him, heavy white bread that she said had potato in it. He fried bacon in a large cast-iron pan. He put out butter and raspberry jam. He made the coffee strong, because he remembered Freyja saying once that she couldn’t stand weak coffee; he’d seen that she still made hers in a poki, a cloth filter sewn to thick copper wire. He thought it an affectation. It was the way his mother made her coffee. It was, he realized, one of her little rebellions. His father drank tea. Tom used a plastic cone and paper filters. He wet the filter first, added four heaping tablespoons for two cups, then poured the water slowly through the grounds. He wiped the picnic table and set it with paper plates. He used pieces of cardboard for placemats.
Freyja was familiar with the kitchen. She went to the cupboard beside the sink and took down two plastic glasses for the orange juice. He felt panic at her being in his space, a moment of déjà vu, a feeling that he’d made this breakfast before, that she’d gone to the cupboard for glasses before, that she’d turned toward him and smiled, as if this were a life he’d already lived.
He cut the frittata in half and set each half on a plate with three pieces of bacon and carried the food outside. He filled their cups, and then they sat across from each other.
The bottom of the frittata was overdone. In spite of that, she said, “You can cook breakfasts. Maybe you are a possibility after all. You’ve just gone closer to the top of my list of potential mates.” She was watching him closely. “Do you think that you’re a possibility? Could you support both of us?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I have a son and daughter. How would you feel about being a stepmother to an eighteen-year-old son and a nineteen-year-old daughter?” They were joking, but at the same time, they were testing each other, seeing what possibilities there were, if any, and he felt the way he had when he was still a Mountie and one time in early winter he’d had to go out on the ice to rescue someone and was not sure the ice would hold him.
“Are they like you? Or are they like your wife?”
“They’re like themselves,” he said. “My daughter is goth. My son wants to be a stand-up comedian. He supports himself by working as a waiter. He plays too many computer games. Right now, we’re not communicating much.”
“Am I being serious enough for you?”
She was, he thought, beautiful. He wished he could tell her that, that he could just blurt out, “You’re beautiful, so beautiful that I want to put my arms around you and hold you close, now and always,” but he didn’t know what he would want tomorrow, or the next day, and he wondered about what she wanted, if she wanted anything at all except to get a crazy ex-husband to leave her alone. The spray of freckles over her nose was charming and her green eyes this morning were emerald and her hair glowed in the sunlight like burnished copper.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“That I’m being serious?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. I’m just sorry.”
“More points for you. A man who can cook and say he’s sorry. What next?”
He shifted uncomfortably. There were spruce trees between where they were sitting at the picnic table and the trail that went from the dock to the store, and two women were standing there, staring at them through the trees. He wondered if they could hear what he and Freyja were saying.
Freyja saw him looking at the two women. “Ignore them,” she said. “They’ll use any excuse to come over. Nosiness is an Olympic sport here. They turn everything into a soap opera.”
She looked away from the women to the top of the spruce trees. “There’s Huginn and Muninn,” she said, pointing up at two ravens that were eyeing the remains of breakfast. “Ravens are smart. Some people get chicks and teach them to talk. Like a parrot. See if you can get them to sit on your shoulders and whisper in your ear.”
As she ate, she studied him, until he said, “What is it?”
“Are you sensitive about your scar? Should I pretend it isn’t there?”
“I was. Not so much now. I’ve gotten used to it.”
“We’ve all got scars,” she said. “It’s just that most of them are hidden.”
“All I cared about, once I was able to care about anything, was whether my eye would be okay.”
“If you had lost it, like Odin, you might have become all wise.”
He shook his head. “Does this cult really believe that Odin will return? That the world will end and they will rise to Viking heaven?”
“Do Christians believe that Christ will return?” Freyja replied. “Do Muslims think that they’ll rise to heaven and have seventy-four virgins waiting for them? Make a list. Besides, Vikings are exciting. Great costumes. Have you seen Kirk Douglas and Tony what’s his name being Vikings?”
“So you think the Godi are playing? Pretending?”
“There are over four hundred recognized religions in the world. Aren’t they all just playing dress-up?”
“Maybe,” he said, but he was uncomfortable with the question and his answer. He’d lost his faith somewhere among the blood and bodies, the crazy, demented people in slums where a job was petty theft, but he hung onto some shreds of his faith, some stubborn belief from confirmation class and hymns he enjoyed singing. “But isn’t everybody guilty of playing a part, wearing a costume? My daughter is goth. Every day she looks like she is in a play. My son is a computer nerd and looks it. Mountie uniforms, nurse’s uniforms, all of it. The world’s a stage and we are merely players on it. Or something like that, but I don’t remember the exact quote.”
He pointed toward the road that led down to the dock, and through the trees they could see that two Odin women in their long, light brown Viking dresses were going to the dock.
“They buy fish off quota. You won’t hear the local fishermen bad-mouthing them,” Freyja said.
“Rituals,” he said. “Karla says they had orgies. Sex is always mixed up in these things. Witches were supposed to cause men to go mad with desire.”
“That was when the Odin group first came. I don’t think they’ve had orgies for a long time. Now, it’s more like a group hug.”
“Do people really believe in this crazy story about Odin’s hidden treasure?”
“People buy lottery tickets.”
“But they know there’s a prize. The winners are reported in the newspaper.”
“Fourteen million to one. Not great odds.”
“But there are no odds here. No one has found anything. It’s all just rumour.”
“That’s not true. Years ago, McAra found a tobacco tin. It was rusted and when he broke it open, there were gold coins. Someone had been helping themselves, creating a private stash. At least that’s what people thought. And three gold coins have been found on the beach. People have gone over the property with metal detectors. They still do. But over the years, the beach has eroded. Every northeast storm takes a bit of land.”
“A lot?”
“Maybe fifty feet so far. Cottages have been put on skids and moved back more than once. Your house used to have fifty more feet of land in front of it. I’ve seen people going back and forth in canoes, one paddling, another holding a metal detector over the water. After a storm, people scour the beach. The believers don’t like it when non-believers intrude, but they can’t do anything about it. The beach and la
ke are public property.”
“Crazy,” he said.
He offered her more bread, butter and raspberry jam, but she turned it down. If he’d had a chest of silver and gold, precious gems, he’d have offered them to her as well. Having none of those things, he said, “I could come over now and again and do some work at your place.”
She looked pleased but replied, “That’s very kind of you, but no. If I let you do that, people would say I was just leading you on to get my house finished.”
“Now who’s worried about what people might say?”
“I’ll leave you with the dishes,” she answered, handing him her paper plate.
“The Norns say there will be coffee and cake. You’ll like that. They’ll have lots of desserts. It’s an Icelandic thing. I’ll come by and pick you up. ”
After Freyja left, Tom looked up at the ravens. They were still watching the bread. “Huginn and Muninn,” he said, “here’s bread.” He picked up a slice and held it up. He tore off a piece and threw it into the air. It fell and he caught it. He did it twice more, then on the fourth try, one of the ravens dropped from the tree, swooped down and caught the bread at its apex. The air from its wings beat on his face. He tore off another piece and threw it. The second raven launched itself and snatched the bread from the air. He tore the rest of the slice into pieces and scattered them on the table, then he got busy cleaning up. He went into the house, and when he looked out, both ravens were on the table eating the bread.
Tom went into the small bedroom and searched through the boxes until he found his pickle jar full of coins. He took out three dollars and thirty cents and took it to the emporium. Karla was still behind the counter. He put the money down and said, “I want to see you write paid. Either that or give me a receipt.”
Karla behaved as if his request was perfectly normal. She opened the book and said, “Oh, yes. I’d forgotten about that. One can of milk, three dollars and thirty cents. The bill is due in thirty days. If you pay before the end of the thirty days, there’s no interest charge. You know, you didn’t need to rush away from your date. Interest isn’t charged by the day.” She printed Paid behind the amount. “Did you have a pleasant breakfast?”
In Valhalla's Shadows Page 32
