In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  She held Ramses close, pressing him to her. She cried silently, her head bent. Tom helped her stand, put his arm around her and walked with her to where he’d dug the grave. Freyja slipped to her knees, then sat on the ground, Ramses in her lap. She rocked back and forth. Finally, when her rocking slowed, then stopped, Tom lifted Ramses from her and put him in the grave.

  “Wait,” Freyja said, got up and ran back to the house. She returned in a few minutes with Ramses’s favorite catnip mouse. “He can’t go anywhere without it,” she said. “He’d be lonely.”

  She sat there as Tom filled the grave with soil.

  “Stay here,” she said. “I can’t be by myself.”

  Freyja fell asleep on the couch in the living room. He got undressed in the guest bedroom, lay down on the foamy and went to sleep.

  When he woke in the morning, he could smell coffee. He got up and went into the kitchen. She hadn’t changed clothes.

  “I’ll kill him,” she said. Her voice was determined, certain.

  He said nothing, let her pour him coffee.

  “He wants me to stay married to him because he thinks as long as we’re married, I can’t testify against him.”

  “Wife beating?”

  “That and other things. When you’re scared, you make bad decisions.”

  “Cream?” he asked, and Freyja went to the fridge.

  “It may be sour,” she said after handing it to him and reached down a package of Carnation powdered milk. He sniffed the container and handed it back to her. He sifted Carnation into his coffee, stirring it with a knife that was on the table.

  “Divorces are messy.”

  “It will be more than messy. He is out of control.”

  “A winner.”

  She sat down and looked to one side, waiting for Ramses to come and pat her leg with his paw to be lifted into her lap. Then her face tightened, but it didn’t stop the tears.

  “I’m not a winner,” she said, misunderstanding him. “I’m a two-time loser.” Tears ran down her cheeks. She wiped them away with the side of her hand. “I got married at sixteen. Sixteen. Nobody in their right mind gets married at sixteen. He was twenty-one. My parents tried to talk me out of it. His parents thought it was fine. He had a good job welding. It lasted six months.” Tom wasn’t sure whether she meant the job or the marriage. He handed her a Kleenex. “I got a divorce. I went back to school. Kept going. Got a teaching degree. It wasn’t easy.” She gulped down air. “Then three years ago I came back here. Things hadn’t been going well with my life. Siggi came along. I was lonely, bored, stupid.”

  Ramses’s ghost ran around the kitchen, ate from his dish, drank his water, lay down on his blanket, got up, came to Freyja’s side and sat waiting for her to pull her chair away from the table so he could jump into her lap.

  Tom didn’t know whether he should touch her, should put his hand on her shoulder, should put his arms around her, pull her to him, make things better with the closeness of his body.

  “He isn’t worth spending years in jail for,” he said. As he said it, he was thinking he needed to get hold of Sarah, needed her to reason with Freyja, needed a woman to watch over her for the next day or two. She would need comforting and understanding.

  He stayed with her until she said she felt better, then got her to go with him to his place, where he made a cross from a piece of scrap two-by-four.

  “Was Ramses a Christian?” he asked, and Freyja smiled at his attempt at humour and put her hand on his arm. Where her hand touched him, his arm felt hot. She tightened her fingers, and then pulled her hand away.

  “Better than many,” Freyja answered. “He never did any of the things people who go to church have done.”

  They walked back together and he pounded the cross into the ground.

  “You can paint it and paint his name on it,” he said, thinking that keeping busy was good for dealing with grief and anger.

  They stopped at her front steps. “Thank you,” she said. “For everything.”

  “Don’t shoot anybody,” he said. “Prisons are no place to spend your time.” He had hoped she’d agree or nod, but instead, she just looked directly into his eyes for a long moment, then turned and went inside. He wondered, then, if he should have taken her rifle, thought that she could easily borrow another and that if Siggi appeared and harmed her because she wasn’t armed, he would have to live with the guilt.

  He went to Sarah’s. She wasn’t home. He remembered that she often went to Dolly’s to visit. He knocked on the door and Dolly said no, she wasn’t there but she might be at Ben’s.

  There was no one outside at Ben’s, but the door was open so he leaned in and yelled, “Anybody home?”

  “We’re in here,” Sarah called back. “You looking for me?” She came to the door.

  “Freyja’s cat, Ramses, is dead,” he said.

  “Ben found him.” She turned in the doorway and called, “Ben, you come here. He’s asking about Ramses.”

  “He was caught in a rabbit snare. One of the kids didn’t clean up their rabbit snares when the season was over,” Ben said.

  “She thinks Siggi did it,” Tom said.

  “I was going to come back and tell her, but then I saw that you were there and I didn’t want to intrude, if you know what I mean?”

  “She slept on the couch,” Tom said.

  “That so,” Sarah said.

  Ben stood behind Sarah. He obviously wasn’t going to invite Tom in, and Tom wondered if Ben still thought he had something to do with Angel’s death.

  “Yes,” Tom replied, his voice edgy with the lack of sleep, the sorrow of Freyja, his own turbulent emotions, the hammering in his head of his parents saying, “Don’t want anything” and his thinking not of Freyja but of her first husband and what his story would be, of him wanting Freyja and how it had all ended in tears and anger, and of Siggi, choosing Freyja even though guys with big trucks, big salaries, hundred-dollar bills to throw on the floor of the bar usually had lots of choices. There were always lots of young women, women like Sally, who would take off their shoes and everything else in the hope of striking it rich.

  “I’ll go tell her,” Tom said.

  When he got to Freyja’s, her red Jeep was gone. People in Valhalla seldom locked their doors when they went out. He opened the door and looked inside. Freyja’s rifle was gone. Oh shit, he said to himself, then turned and ran to his truck. He backed up, spun his wheels in the gravel as he raced away. He wished he’d paid more attention when she described where the embassy was, but he had some idea.

  The road wound and twisted through tamarack forest and swamp. The gravel that had been pushed from the crown of the road onto the sides was dangerous. He knew a vehicle was ahead of him because dust hung in the air. He pressed on the accelerator and felt the truck slew in the gravel. He straightened out, slowed for the next curve and accelerated into it. The plume of dust was thicker, whiter. Even with the windows closed, it settled over his face, got in his eyes and mouth. The road snaked around hogbacks. Built by following a cow drunk on fermented mash, the locals said. He swung wide on a curve and saw Freyja’s car nose down in muskeg. The back wheels were still on the road.

  He pulled up behind her, and a cloud of his own dust enveloped his and Freyja’s car. He waited until most of it had settled. He got out and went to the driver’s side. He knocked on the back window. Freyja ignored him. He knocked again, harder.

  When she put the window down he said, “You are damn lucky you didn’t roll over and end upside down. You’d be a candidate for a body bag.” He struggled not to shout.

  “I’m fine,” she said. Her cheeks were stained with tears.

  Her words were lies—she was not fine. Perhaps they were the truth in that she was uninjured from the accident, but he had seen her this way before, when he had first come to Valhalla searching for a plac
e where he could heal his pain, and he wondered if it would become his role in life to rescue her from her impetuousness, her inability to see the danger that lurked around her. He held tight to the car radio antenna as the sun bore down upon them like a great furious weight, and the landscape around them shrunk and hardened, the stunted tamarack now like a million dark spears against the sky and the muskeg underfoot, dark green and softly dangerous. Beneath his feet the road was silently sinking, providing briefly a place where he might stand with solid footing, and he felt that everything, like his heart, was on the edge of speeding up, and the road and the car might sink before his very eyes, and he would sink with them, disappear without leaving a trace of where they had gone.

  He felt that they were suspended on the edge of disaster, saved by the inconsequential gravel on the road, their lives only moments from what could have been. The dust was still slowly settling over him, over the red Jeep, over the muskeg, making no sound, although if his hearing were acute enough, he would have heard a thousand thousand boulders crashing onto the moss and over the trees. When he spoke it was as if he were announcing a reprieve to the condemned.

  “Your ex didn’t do it. Ben found Ramses in a rabbit snare. He put him on the porch because you weren’t home. If you are going to shoot someone, you’d better be sure you’ve got the right person.” He said the last sentence harshly as he struggled to contain his anger.

  Freyja rested her forehead on the steering wheel.

  “We’d better get your car out or it will disappear. This stuff is bottomless.”

  He moved aside and she struggled out, hung onto the side of the car because the muskeg provided no firm footing. He took her hand and pulled her onto solid ground. Then he went to his truck, got a chain and hooked it to Freyja’s Jeep and onto his trailer hitch. She stood well back as he pulled the Jeep out.

  “No damage done,” he said, “but it needs washing.” There was moss stuck in places and dirt all over the front of the car. “Where’s your rifle?”

  “Inside,” she said. She started shaking, closed her eyes and leaned against the fender. He opened the front passenger door, took out the rifle, ejected the bullet from the chamber, kicked it into the muskeg and put the rifle into his truck.

  He wanted to shout at her, tell her how stupid she had nearly been, but there didn’t seem to be any point. “Get back in. Turn it over,” he said. “See if it runs all right.”

  She started her car. When he’d pulled it out, he’d made sure it was facing back to Valhalla. “I’ll follow you,” he said and got into his truck. He wasn’t taking any chances on her turning around. Stupid, he said to himself, stupid, stupid. No idea what fifteen years in prison would be like. Shooting an innocent person and having to live with it. He’d seen the devastation caused by hunting accidents, drunken brawls, family arguments. As Freyja drove ahead of him and she couldn’t hear what he had to say, he shouted, “Stupid!” repeatedly, until he got it out of his system.

  When they got back to Freyja’s, he followed her into the house. He put the rifle back beside the door.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Her shoulders drooped, and her hair was a mess—it was white with dust—and tears had made white channels down her cheeks. With her whitened hair and her tear-stained cheeks, he thought that she looked like a lost waif.

  “You’ve got a bad temper,” he said. He was still angry.

  “Siggi knows how important Ramses is to me.”

  “An irresponsible kid was snaring rabbits and didn’t pick up his snares when the season was over. Are you going to shoot him?

  “No,” she said, “of course not. It was an accident. Stupid but an accident. Kids don’t think.”

  “You had the intent and the means to kill. You set out to commit murder. Do you understand that is a crime? You could go to prison?”

  She sat down at the table. “I couldn’t do it. I was going too fast. I was crying. I couldn’t have done it. I hit gravel and spun out.”

  “My hair,” he said, “is so thick with dust that it feels like it has plaster in it. I’m going for a swim. I’m going to be coughing up this crap for days.”

  He went out but didn’t go straight back to his trailer. He went to Sarah’s first.

  “Well?” Sarah said. He told her what had happened. “If you’ve got time, I think it would be good if you went over to Freyja’s.”

  “You’re angry.”

  “Angry? What makes you think I’m angry?” He could hear his voice rising. “I’m furious. I hate stupidity. She never gave one thought to the consequences.”

  “She’s got red hair. What do you expect?”

  “That’s an excuse.”

  “You sound like you care.”

  “No,” he answered back. “I don’t care. I refuse to care. She can shoot the whole damn village for all I care.” He would have slammed the door on his way out, but it was on a spring and slowly eased shut behind him. It infuriated him.

  “I’m taking pönnukökur out of the freezer for coffee,” Sarah called after him. “Come back in an hour, after you’ve cooled down.”

  It was so damn hot that it was like he was suffocating. The heat lay over everything like a blanket, he thought, trying to come up with clichés that would explain the weight of the air, the thickness of it, the feeling that it was pressing down. It was like being in an oven. It was. But he was too upset to keep searching his memory for clichés. Mrs. Galecian had been good at clichés; she never ran out of them, her apartment was crammed full of them, she kept the cliché business in business. If she were still alive, she’d give him a list.

  The questions of the Norns plagued him. They were like a swarm of wasps that he was constantly waving away. He didn’t know the name of the farm from which his mother’s family came. However, there had been letters. He’d found them, a wooden box of them and what he assumed was a diary, but they were in Icelandic, and not being wanted, he refused to want in return, and he’d thrown the box into the garbage.

  Anna had rescued them, said she’d put them away, and if, some day, he wanted them, he could have them.

  He’d followed his father to Valhalla, or thought he had, but now it was his mother’s voice he heard behind the doors in the endless hallways, and he wished, for the first time, that he could open a door and ask her questions, but the thought was so painful that he slammed shut the door that had opened. There were things better left alone, forgotten.

  He would feel better after swimming. The water close to shore was shallow and warm, but if he swam farther out, dove down, down into the darkness, to where he could grab a stone from the bottom and bring it to the surface, a stone that had been hidden for centuries, down there, the water would be cool.

   Chapter 26

  Helgi History

  “You’re sure I have to wear a tie?” Tom asked.

  When Freyja had come by to say she was sorry about the day before, he’d told her that he was going to Helgi History’s, so she stayed to inspect him.

  “A light summer sports jacket would help.”

  “In this heat?” he said. The armpits of his shirt were stained, and there was a line of sweat running down the centre of his back.

  Tom rummaged in a box, found three ties, picked out the string tie, thought it would be regarded as frivolous, and put on a blue silk one with polka dots that Sally had given him one Christmas. She liked it when he was dressed up. He ironed a short-sleeved cotton shirt, polished his shoes but then decided he couldn’t wear them in the heat and brushed his sandals instead. He touched up a pair of tan slacks that were tight in the waist, taking out some creases, put on a straw hat and his sunglasses, and put a pen and a notebook and his mickey of Scotch into a grocery bag.

  “You’ll have to come by and tell me how your meeting goes,” Freyja said. “I’ll have something cold to drink. He has dogs. Do you like dogs?”

  “No,” he said, thinki
ng of the dogs in the apartment block. “Are they German shepherds?”

  “No,” she answered. “They bark a lot, but I’ve never known them to bite anyone.”

  Dogs, bloody dogs, he thought. He’d once had a Rottweiler lunge at him when he went to clean an apartment. The owners had left it behind, and it was crazy with thirst and hunger. A wiener dog had bitten him just above the ankle and Anna had to take him to the doctor.

  The forest trail was motionless except for the bees. High grass leaned inward. He stopped to pull his socks over his pants. There was a sign at the store to check for ticks. He was soaked with sweat by the time he came across a wooden sign that said Helgi Helgason, Independent Scholar. The name was carved and the letters highlighted with black paint. A university graduate’s cap was carved on one side of Helgi’s name and a book on the other. It looked like Jumpy Albert’s work. There was no gate and no sign of a house.

  The driveway was just a single lane, barely wide enough for a car. It curved into the trees. It obviously wasn’t used a lot, because grass was growing over it and small saplings sprouted here and there like weeds. There were two shallow ruts made by a vehicle’s tires.

  By the time Tom could finally see a house through the bush, a dog began to bark and a second started baying. A moment later, a brown mastiff with a square head and crazed eyes came sprinting toward him. A beagle followed, baying all the while. Tom stood absolutely still. He wished he still had his service pistol or a shotgun. The mastiff skidded to a stop, coming so close that when he shook his head, saliva sprayed on Tom’s shirt. The beagle circled around to cut off Tom’s escape.

  Just then there was a sharp whistle and a man’s voice called, “Dogs, here!” in a commanding tone. The mastiff’s head turned toward the voice. He gave Tom a threatening glare and a low growl, then raced back the way he’d come. The beagle followed.

  When Tom reached the house, Helgi was standing in the doorway with the dogs on either side of him. His black hair and beard were long, and his hair stood out stiffly from his head and face. He wore half-frame glasses, and with his face buried in hair, not much showed except his nose—it might have been a mouse hiding in a haystack.