He tried to catch Freyja’s eye and would have indicated that they should leave, but Dolly came with the coffee pot and topped up their cups, and the twins pressed baked desserts on him. Verthandi, exhausted by speaking, closed her eyes and was still. Tom wondered if he already had a reputation in the village for having a sweet tooth. They remained sitting close, knees separated by the small table at their centre. He could smell the talcum powder they used and hear the creaking of their joints.
The Norns asked him about his house, and he detailed what needed to be done and how he would go about doing it. It was, he thought, an opportunity to sell his services, to let them know how careful he was about his work.
“Are the people in Valhalla really so dedicated to their heritage?” he asked. “Do they know their history and language?”
Skuld and Urdh leaned toward him, and Verthandi’s mouth pulled tight in disapproval.
“They think that the essence of their identity is vinarterta,” Skuld said. “You saw how Vidar ate it at the funeral reception. He must have gobbled up a quarter of a cake.”
“They spend their time debating whether vinarterta should be iced or not. Or how many layers it should have. That is their intellectual exercise,” Urdh broke in. “Ask them to recite verses from Hávamál, the wisdom of the Vikings, and they can’t say anything because their mouths are full of dessert.”
“What about the Odin group?” he asked.
There was complete silence, and he knew that he’d said something wrong. Dolly craned around the kitchen door to stare at him.
“Óðinn,” Verthandi said, correcting his pronounciation, emphasizing the “th” sound of the ð.
Urdh explained, “In Icelandic there are five extra letters in the alphabet. The ð looks like a d, and in being adapted to English, writers have conveniently dropped the crossbar at the top. You don’t speak Icelandic, so it is understandable that you would say O-din rather than Othin, but people who should know better say it. It drives us crazy.” And she unexpectedly broke into a mocking song to the tune of “Camptown Races”: “Oh din to run all night, oh din to run all day, Camptown ladies sing this song, doo dah, doo dah day.” Her bony chest rose and fell with indignation. “They don’t even spell the word properly.”
“Sorry,” Tom said.
“The Óðinn may be pretenders, but at least they are honest pretenders. They try to get their Viking history right,“ Urdh said. “They study the sagas."
“Not one of them is Icelandic,” Skuld objected. “They’re not even Scandinavian.”
“That may be,” Urdh replied, “but they’re better than the locals. Joseph Brandsson marrying that slip of a girl and calling their child Jesus! And he has the nerve to call himself a Lutheran.” She was so incensed her body jerked like she’d had a shock.
“You’ll hear them,” Urdh said to Tom. “The Óðinn telling people that there is gold buried here. We’re all going to be rich. Valhalla has been going to be rich for nearly a hundred years. People are afraid to leave because they might miss out.” She turned toward where Dolly was peering around the kitchen door and shouted, “Isn’t that right, Dolly?” Dolly’s head jerked out of sight. “Dolly wouldn’t leave Valhalla for anything. She knows she has a lottery ticket that’s going to win.”
Tom thought he’d move the conversation to a safer topic and asked, “Has Pastor Jon been here a long time?”
“If Pastor Jon was as good at saving souls as he is at saving tractors, we’d be a community of saints,” Skuld retorted. Talking about the foibles of the community had got her all worked up. The calm of the runes had been shattered.
Verthandi had shut her eyes again. It was all too much for her.
Skuld said, “Our people have been here since just after 1875. Five generations. It’s no wonder that people forget or don’t learn. We get frustrated with them. We have a noble history. We don’t want them to forget it.”
“I don’t think the Óðinn are so bad, either,” Urdh said. “At least they ask for advice. They do research about Viking times. You can have an intelligent conversation with some of them. They try to be authentic. They make excellent copies of Viking jewellery.”
“You have been taken in by Godi-4,” Skuld said. “He’s a smooth talker, asking you to explain how a sunstone works. Don’t you think he knows about using Icelandic spar to get his direction when it’s foggy? He uses flattery to get your approval.” She abruptly changed the subject. “The local people make things up,” Skuld complained. She squirmed on her chair, her hands clenching and moving in circles over her lap. She looked like she might be churning butter. Tom hoped she wouldn’t have a heart attack. “I heard one of them telling a tourist that Icelanders rode on reindeer.”
“That’s because Laxness created that fool of a farmer, Bjartur of Summerhouses, in Independent People. He rides a reindeer across a river. Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous?” Urdh said in exasperation. “The rantings of a communist Catholic. And the Swedes gave him the Nobel Prize for it! Whose fault is that?”
“You must have read Laxness, Constable Parsons,” Urdh insisted, and when Tom said no, he hadn’t, she looked pleased and said, “Good. Don’t waste your time. Icelanders have a noble heritage. You won’t find it there. Read the sagas, instead. We have complete copies in English. If you would like, you could borrow them over the winter.”
Tom was watching Verthandi’s chest to see if it was moving. He thanked Urdh for her offer, then asked her what she could tell him about the history of the Óðinn, careful to pronounce it correctly.
“For that,” she replied, “you should talk to Helgi History. I think he is writing a book on them.”
Tom and Freyja stood up, but before they could leave, Verthandi opened her eyes and said, “Constable Parsons, we are a small ethnic community.” Because she barely moved her lips, her voice was weak, and they had to lean close to hear it. The air was still hot from the day. The humming of mosquitoes seeking blood and the moths rubbing against the screens as they sought light combined to sound like distant waves on a beach. “Our reputation is important to us. I don’t expect that you know Hávamál. It is a collection of the sayings of the Vikings. It says that we all die, but that what lives on is our reputation. It is true. If someone is a buffoon or a philanderer or a thief or a murderer, that remains after they are dead. It is the same with a group. We hope nothing damages our reputation. Because of your mother, our reputation is your reputation, too.”
“My mother had me read Hávamál, but I didn’t memorize the poems. She never told me anything about Iceland except how beautiful it was. Freyja says that there were executions at,” and he tried to remember how she pronounced the word, “Þingvellir, where the parliament was held.”
The Norns were silent, and he wondered if he’d crossed some boundary into unacceptable history.
“Yes,” Verthandi replied. “Thieves were hanged. Male adulterers were beheaded. Sorcerers were burned at the stake. One of those was an ancestor of ours. He was accused of making someone ill and causing his sheep to die in mysterious ways.”
“Women,” Skuld added, “were tied up in a sack and drowned in Drekkingarhylur, the Drowning Pool.”
“For what crimes?” Tom asked.
“Incest, adultery, breaking vows,” Skuld answered. She hastened to add defensively, “It wasn’t just the Icelanders. The Scots had drowning pits.”
“It was the Reformation,” Urdh said. “The old religion wasn’t so cruel. The new religion was very cruel. Everything was about the punishment of sin.”
The Norns remained sitting on their slightly raised dais while Tom and Freyja backed out of the room. The small circle of light enclosed them, and he felt for a moment that they should have both bowed.
When Tom and Freyja were on their way back, the sun was below the treeline. Shadows had flooded the forest.
“Are they always like that?” he asked.
“They were well behaved tonight. No one mentioned the kreppa an
d the bankers. They lost some money in that. Six per cent on bank deposits, fifteen per cent on bonds was what the Icelanders promised. They couldn’t resist. Didn’t you know, Icelanders are so honest that they never had any police? You used to hear that all the time. You don’t hear it anymore.”
“Was it true?”
“No,” she said and laughed. “Icelandic Canadians didn’t understand how the legal system worked. People were locked up on farms. If their crimes were serious, they were shipped to prison in Denmark. Conditions were so terrible that most died there.”
“They disagree on some things.”
Freyja laughed again. “When they were young, they used to duke it out in the yard, pulling hair, screaming and yelling. Tonight, they were on their best behaviour.”
“What was that we ate that tasted like an outdoor toilet smells on a hot day?”
“Hákarl,” she said, amused at his discomfort. “Rotted shark. Eat it fresh and you’ll bleed to death. After it’s been buried in the sand for six months and dug up, the urine in its flesh has dissipated enough that it’s safe to eat.”
“They eat that?” And then: a vague memory of his mother objecting to eating laverbread and his father saying, “How can you complain about laverbread when you used to eat rotten shark?”
“During the Móðuharðindin, they boiled and ate their leather shoes.”
He tried to say Móðuharðindin, stumbled over it, gave up.
“This was the mist after the Laki volcano erupted in 1783. It spread ash and fog that killed a quarter of the population.”
“I don’t know anything about this stuff. I shouldn’t have let myself be goaded into saying anything about my Icelandic background,” he said petulantly.
“You came to a place called Valhalla,” she answered. “What did you expect? If you wanted to live among the Brits, you should have chosen some place with an English name.”
“And you? Are you one hundred per cent Icelandic?”
“Yes,” she answered. “Is it a crime? I don’t think I’m a member of a master race, and I don’t think I’m inferior, though if you want to talk English prejudice toward the Icelanders in Canada, we can talk about that. The English hockey teams wouldn’t let the Icelanders in Winnipeg play in their league. But in 1920, the Falcons went on to win the first Olympic medal. All Icelanders on the team except for one player.”
Before he could think of an answer, Freyja took out a whistle and blew on it. “Bears have been seen around lately,” she explained. “You don’t want to surprise them.”
“What was that visit about?” he asked.
“Cattle die, kinsmen die, the self must also die. I know one thing that never dies is the reputation of each dead man,” Freyja said. “That’s from Hávamál. Reputation is everything to them.”
He kept running his tongue over his lips, trying to get rid of the taste of the rotted shark. “Why didn’t you warn me about the rotted shark?”
“How was I to know that they had hákarl brought from Iceland on one of the charters? Besides, we both ate it. We can kiss goodnight. Just like if one eats garlic, the other has to eat garlic.”
“Did you arrange this visit?”
“No,” she replied. “Dolly housecleans for the Norns. She cooks for them. She knows they love to have an excuse to read the runes. Besides, she got to cater the evening. She’ll get well paid for that. Her prick of a husband hardly ever sends a cheque.”
“They’re very strange,” he said, thinking of the painted faces grouped together, pressed toward him.
“They spoke Icelandic at home. No English until they went to school.”
“Mumbo-jumbo. Hocus-pocus.”
“Yes.” she answered. “But they try to get the hocus-pocus right. Skuld said she wasn’t predicting the future. She knows her mythology. She got a master’s degree in it. She knows that predicting is supposed to be left to the völva. The völva is a shaman, a seeress. Even Odin so valued her knowledge that he chanted her out of her grave to answer his questions about the future. Would you like to go to the graveyard at midnight and chant the völva out of her grave?”
“Do the locals go to the graveyard at midnight?”
“When they’re drunk. To prove how brave they are they sit on a tombstone to drink their beer. Some, I’ve heard, have got pregnant on a grave under a full moon.”
He snorted in derision but remembered what he’d said to Anna about his parents’ ghosts refusing to leave the apartment, though he didn’t know if his mother was dead. At times, it had been as if his parents were standing nearby, watching him, still stern and disapproving.
“Who is this Helgi they mentioned? Sarah talked about someone called Helgi History to me at bingo. He needed a haircut.”
“Helgi History,” Freyja said. “The local historian.”
“Where does he live?”
“North,” Freyja answered vaguely. “He’s a terrible drinker. When he’s drinking, he’s friendly. When he’s sober, he’s grouchy and bad-tempered. When he’s sober he’s mostly silent, but when he’s had a few drinks it’s nearly impossible to shut him up. He’ll lecture you on any topic you mention.”
“Reliable?”
“He knows his stuff.
“Do I need an introduction?”
“A bottle of whisky will do. I’ll draw you a map. There’s a sign. You can’t miss it. I’d walk. It’s about half an hour.”
“Why not drive?”
“He talks best when people drink with him. You may come home the worse for wear. If you want him to take you seriously, you have to wear a tie. Do you own a tie?”
He thought about it. In a box of clothes that was currently stored in the guest bedroom there were two ties. Or he thought there might be two ties. It was possible. He wasn’t sure if he’d thrown them out or packed them. His father always wore a tie, even when he went fly-fishing. He dressed like an English gentleman. His father insisted that Tom wear a tie to school, even though it was a public school and no one except the principal wore a tie. When he left in the morning, Tom wore a tie, but once he was safely away from the apartment, he took it off and put it in his pocket. He put the tie back on before he returned home. If he had turned up at the school wearing a tie, he would have been made fun of by everyone there.
“It wouldn’t hurt to press your shirt. Short sleeves are all right in this heat. Wrinkles are a sign of a careless, inferior mind. And polish your shoes.”
“How do I get inside his door?”
“You said you used to play chess with your father. Helgi tried to start a chess club here. No luck. Boys like to play hockey and kill aliens. So he plays mostly against himself. Mention chess to him.”
“What does he do for a living?”
“This and that,” Freyja said. “He’s brilliant. PhD in economics of small nations. People avoid him unless they’ve got an hour to spend and don’t mind listening to his ranting about what’s wrong with the way politicians, business people, the church, the administration, everyone is doing their job. He’s got the answers to all the world’s problems. He comes to Valhalla to live in his winterized cottage, to drink and to do research and to write undisturbed. He supports himself doing translation, genealogical research and government contracts. He fills in for professors on sabbatical.”
“Urdh said he was the expert on Odin. Othin," he corrected himself. He was going to get the pronunciation right so he didn’t have to listen to another version of “Camptown Races.”
“He’s the expert on everything. Last winter he offered two lectures in the community hall. The first one was on the effect of temperature changes on harbour ice in Iceland in the eighteenth century and its consequences for trade. Two people came. I stayed. I’m a loyal fan.”
She skipped ahead of him, partly hurrying to escape the mosquitoes, he thought, but also partly because she liked hurrying, always just out of reach, teasing him, tempting him to chase her. Her red hair was loose and swung as she moved, sometimes obscuring her fa
ce, then revealing it. He reached out to her and she danced away. She laughed and tagged him with her fingertips, then darted away. For a moment, he forgot about his leg and its multitude of pins and screws and plates. He felt young, younger, a teenager again, and he followed her along the forest path with her saying, “Come on, come on, come on.” He favoured his leg as he followed her, and she didn’t run fast enough to outdistance him, but she was laughing and flirting, always staying just out of reach, and he forgot his annoyance and began to laugh at the game she was playing with him.
When they reached her place, they were both running slowly for the fun of it, enjoying themselves, and he thought she might invite him in, thought he might want her to invite him in, but when they reached the steps, Ramses was lying on the porch, dead. Freyja clasped her hands to her face and screamed a high-pitched scream of despair.
When he knelt to look at the cat, he saw that it had been strangled. There was a copper wire tight around its neck.
Chapter 25
Ramses
Tom got a shovel from Freyja’s garage, went to the edge of her property where her garden ended and began to dig.
He dug a grave six shovels long and three shovels wide, and deep enough that no wild animal would dig up the cat’s body.
When he was finished, he went to the porch. Freyja was sitting on the top step with Ramses’s body in her lap. He reached down, pushed the copper wire through the loop and eased it away from the cat’s neck.
“Come on,” he said. “It’s better to get this done.” His father had been like that—get the pieces picked up, buried, say a few words, move on. In war, there had been no time for grief. The dead were dead.
In Valhalla's Shadows Page 34
