He and Freyja walked side by side. Small clouds were racing across the sky.
“Frigg is spinning,” he said, trying to impress her.
“Good for her,” Freyja said stiffly. He wondered whose idea it was that she should have a horse. She didn’t look horsey. Horsey women had big square jaws and wore jodhpurs. He glanced at her. He had to admit she would be pretty attractive dressed in a Viking getup riding a small horse. He’d let her capture him.
“Where would this horse be coming from?”
“A farm in Ontario. I’d have it by now except for Siggi and the money. There are a lot of people who want Icelandic horses. They’re thoroughbreds. Their bloodlines go right back to the Vikings. Once a horse leaves Iceland, it can never return. I put a down payment.”
“Can’t you just get your money back?”
“I don’t want my money back. I want Snorri.”
“Snorri?”
“That’s what I’m going to name him.”
Vidar was spreading nets in his yard. Tom waved. Vidar waved back. As soon as Ben brought the drywall, mud and tape, Tom promised himself he’d get started on Vidar’s two rooms. Tom waved at Johnny Armstrong, but Johnny ignored him. It was too bad they’d disagreed over the screw jack. Johnny would know where there were jobs that needed doing. As much as Tom regretted it, he knew there had been no way to avoid the confrontation. If he’d given in, he’d have become known as a pushover. Maybe, maybe, he thought, there’d be a way to come to an understanding. Johnny would just need to see there was a mutual benefit. He’d have to ask him for the loan of his big ladder so he could fix the church steeple.
He and Freyja came to the corner where the lakefront road joined the main road out of town. Tom hadn’t done much more than glance at this part of his property. A ditch overgrown with grass and bulrushes and the remnants of a barbed-wire fence ran along each side. There were a number of posts that had fallen sideways and were partially held up by the wire, then a few upright posts, then more that were tipped over. Godi-4 was right. Replacing that many fence posts would be a lot of work for one person. Tom and Freyja crossed over a metal culvert topped with gravel and grown over by weeds. They came to a rusted gate. Tom lifted the gate latch, and the hinges squealed as he pushed the gate open. Freyja knelt down and pulled her socks up over her slacks. “Ticks,” she said. “You don’t want to get Lyme disease.”
Past the gate, off to one side, were three Bombardier snowmobiles—two yellow and one blue. They all needed a fresh coat of paint, and one had a cracked front window. They were curved at the front, the sides shaped like teardrops lying on their side, with a stovepipe sticking out of the roof and a series of small round windows from front to back. There was a door on both sides at the front. They had caterpillar tracks at the back and skis at the front. The fishermen used them for going to their nets and travelling to communities or homes along the lake in winter.
“Albert sometimes cuts hay and takes it for his goats,” she explained. “A few others take hay as well. Pastor Jon takes hay, plus what he gets off the graveyard. He uses a scythe for the graveyard.”
“Using dead people for fertilizer?”
“There’s very little good pasture. They take what they can get. Even so, they have to buy quite a bit of hay.”
They waded through the grass. “You want to be careful,” Freyja warned him. “There are bits and pieces of equipment around. There’s a mower over there. There’s a hay rake. Oli never grew grain. Just hay. There’s the old hay wagon. Watch out for holes people have dug. They get notions and dig.” She pointed at a dilapidated wooden wagon. “There’s rolls of barbed wire about. Watch you don’t walk into them. I hope you’ve got your tetanus shot.”
The barn was enclosed on three sides by small trees. It was small but had a loft. Freyja pushed open the side door. The air was hot and had the soft smell of old hay. He scraped his foot over the floor. Under the debris were pale grey planks. An alleyway led from the large double doors at the front. There were four stalls. A ladder was nailed to the end wall. It led to an opening in the loft. The first step of the ladder was missing. He led the way up, tugging at the railings before putting his entire weight onto them. There was a mound of hay in the loft. Light streamed through the cracks where the loft doors didn’t quite fit. A wooden latch fitted into a wooden holder. He lifted it up and pushed open the doors. They were on ropes so they could easily be pulled back. The rope was rough, and when he rubbed it with his hand, pieces of it fell away.
He picked up a handful of the hay, then dropped it out the door and the slight breeze swept it away.
“Jessie didn’t mind people using the barn but wouldn’t let the Godi on the property.”
“What did she get out of it? Anything?”
“Goat cheese from Albert and lamb from Pastor Jon.”
“And the Bombardiers?”
“Palsson’s, Stefansson’s, Vigfusson’s. They just leave them parked there. Out of the way. They’d give her a fish now and again.”
“Pretty lonely for a horse during the winter,” he said. “You’d have to come every day and see that he was all right and feed and water him. How are you going to keep his water from freezing?”
“There’s electricity,” she said, pointing at the wires coming in from the road. He looked up and saw a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling. He found the switch and flipped it. The light came on. He flipped the switch off.
She stood there in a light beam streaming through the door. She was so enthusiastic that he was tempted to get carried away with her to that place where anything was possible no matter how impractical. The dust they had stirred up was golden as it floated through the sunbeam.
“Do you know what Snorri looks like? Have the breeders sent you pictures?”
“I want a grey,” Freyja answered. “Do you disapprove?”
“Let’s walk the property,” he said, avoiding the question. Somewhere in the box of books about Iceland his mother had given him there was one on horses. He vaguely remembered them as variegated. “I haven’t had time to see this ground that so many people desire.”
“You’re going to say no, or you’re going to try to convince me that it’s impractical.” Freyja stood petulantly with her left fist on her hip like a defiant little kid, and he thought he saw what she must have looked like as a child, exasperated with people who didn’t agree with her.
“No,” he said. “I won’t try to convince you of anything. This horse thing is your decision.”
They opened the loft doors and stood at the edge looking out. “Would you want the hay as well as the barn?”
“Enough for the winter would be nice.”
“How would you cut it? Dry it? Store it?”
“Maybe if you rent it to the Godi and they overwinter some animals, Snorri could stay with them. Maybe they could share the hay.” It was obvious that she’d already given the question some thought.
“You don’t think I should put in propane and set up an operation to supply Derk?”
“He was just joking. He’s always been sarcastic. He’s a bright kid.”
“He may have been joking, but he’s got a problem. You want to create pressure, teach a lesson, you could do it on a delivery boy.”
“Oh God,” Freyja said. “Everybody just wants the problem to go away. Just get the bills paid. Siggi gets the bills paid and life goes back to normal.”
“You still infatuated with him?”
“No. It’s more complicated than that. You live here for a few years, you’ll understand. Nobody is just themselves. We’re all part of everybody else. We don’t even have to like each other. Somebody leaves. Somebody dies. It all shifts. Nobody is separate. You’re already becoming part of it. Can’t you feel it?”
“Should I take Dolly’s advice and sell to the Whites, take you to live in the big city?”
“It would change everything. Like an earthquake. When you say that, it’s like I can hear huge pieces of rock grinding and crashing upon each other.” She momentarily put her hands over her ears, even though there was nothing but silence. “Don’t you understand? Everything has gone wrong. Nobody meant for this to happen. It just grew, and then it got out of control. When you owe money how do you say no to your lenders?”
“Pastor Jon is hoping I’ll sell and use him for a real estate agent.”
“When he bought the church property, some land that goes on past the road came with it. It had already been subdivided. He has dreams of a cottage development. Johnny Armstrong wants a cottage development. All that land to clear. All those foundations to put in.”
“I’m holding up progress.”
“Or pipe dreams. Like the hidden fortune of the Godi that everyone is waiting to be discovered.”
“Every girl should have a horse,” Tom said. He was thinking of Myrna. She’d desperately wanted a horse at one time. They couldn’t afford a horse. The best they managed were riding lessons from a local farmer’s wife who rented out a couple of horses. Myrna had visions of herself on a noble steed. She got to ride on an old nag. Maybe she could be tempted to Valhalla with a chance to ride an Icelandic horse.
“Do you mean that?” Freyja asked.
“Yes. Of course. Why not? People want the strangest things. We’d need to see if we can get a deal with Godi-4.”
She stood staring at him. She looked like she was trying to decide if he was telling the truth. In his basement apartment in the city, the only animals were the occasional mice, and once a baby rat had sat on the counter beside his toaster, eating crumbs. It wasn’t the slightest bit afraid of him. He opened the fridge door and took out a beer and the rat continued to sit there eating crumbs. It wasn’t a big complication. There was no water, and rats need water, so he knew it wouldn’t stay. The problems were of his own making: the images in his head that drove him into the night to walk the streets, to drink coffee in twenty-four-hour gas stations, to prowl the city until the sun came up and he could sleep again. “Do you have any idea what might have happened to Angel?” he said and hoped she would have the answer he was seeking.
“I don’t know. She was only here off and on. I hadn’t seen her all winter or spring. I figured things must be going better for her. It was an accident. Let it go. Just enjoy having an old barn.”
“Okay,” he said, taking her advice. “How about making love in the hay?”
After, they stood again in the hayloft door, looking out across the land to the south. There wasn’t a building to be seen. Trees and water and bulrushes, the white limestone surface of the road and the telephone poles disappearing behind the trees, reappearing, disappearing. They might have been the only two people on the planet. The church was too far away for them to see the spire. In spite of the heat, Tom had his arm around Freyja’s shoulders and she had her arm around his waist. The hay and the tops of the trees, the tips of the bulrushes were moving gently.
Because of the emptiness of the land, the forest, the swamp, the silence, he felt how small they were and he wondered how the first explorers who had come this way could have borne the sense of emptiness and how the early immigrants, alone in a log shack with a sod roof, could have borne the loneliness. Husbands went away for months at a time to build railways or work on farms in more settled areas and left their wives alone with small children. The bears and wolves were an immediate danger, but the greater danger was the silence. Some people forgot how to talk, hallucinated, became so bushed they fled when another person did turn up. But he’d been like that in the city, and he remembered that the loneliest place could be in the midst of a crowd.
“It’s really not the right area for a horse, is it?” she said, interrupting his reverie. “Swamp instead of prairie. Rocky outcrops.”
“No. But it never is. It’s like having kids. If you wait until you can afford them, you’ll never have them.” He momentarily tightened his grip on her shoulders, then eased it. “You could board your horse during the winter.”
“Can’t afford it,” she said wistfully. “If I had my money back from Siggi, I could. Bad decisions.”
“Yes. Me, too,” he agreed.
In his despair, in the crazy, violent world of his head, he had given Sally everything she wanted, fought for nothing because nothing mattered, because there was no future, because the dying and the dead had taken over, because with no separation between the nightmares of the day and the nightmares of the night, when he’d sat with his service revolver in his mouth, trying to decide if he should pull the trigger and afraid that even that would not stop the images, he’d thought, Perchance to dream, remembering the phrase from his grade twelve literature class, and he could not remember the quote for certain, and he put down his pistol and searched frantically through his books, but the play wasn’t there, a small blue book. And he’d gone out and walked until the stores opened, and he’d searched through a used bookstore before he found a copy and paid $1.50 for it and went to a sidewalk coffee shop and sat over a cappuccino and read until he came to: “To die, to sleep. / To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.” He sat there with his cold cappuccino and thought, What if death is that? What if death is not being able to stop the dreaming? What if all the doors come open all the time? He had lurched up from the table, nearly knocking it over and with the book gripped tightly in one hand began to walk. He walked until he couldn’t walk anymore, then found a place under a bridge where he fell asleep sitting up and slept until early afternoon, when he was able to walk home. His pistol was still on the table, but the bullets had been removed, and there was a scrap of paper underneath on which were printed just two words in capital letters: YOUR DAUGHTER.
He should not have been making financial decisions, any decisions, he thought. The wreckage of his life had become even more wrecked after he signed the separation papers.
He took one rope and she took the other, and they pulled the doors to the loft shut and he pushed the latch into place.
A horse, he thought, but he didn’t say it out loud, didn’t want his skepticism to ruin the moment, diminish whatever dream Freyja had.
He climbed down first, then helped her down. They went outside, and he saw that she had hay in her hair. She stood still as he picked it out, and she did the same for him.
“We’re getting rid of the evidence, you realize.”
“It won’t matter,” she answered. “Someone will have seen us, and whoever it was will tell someone, and someone will tell someone else, and someone will tell Siggi. Siggi won’t believe we went to see if the barn was suitable for my horse.”
“I worry about his craziness,” Tom said. “I’ve seen too many women killed by jealous husbands and boyfriends.” He pulled her tight, and they stood there in the tall grass, among the old farm equipment, the barn, the Bombardiers and the silence.
Chapter 32
Opportunities
Frenchie was working on his outboard. Tom dropped off the dock into the boat.
“Bugger off,” Frenchie said. He had a beard that was streaked with white, the eyes of a weasel and the nervous posture of a perp who feels there’s someone watching him.
Tom pushed a toolbox out of the way.
“This is private property, you know. You’re trespassing. Get off my boat,” Frenchie barked.
Tom sat down. “How much does the compartment in the floor of your truck hold? Five hundred pounds of fillets when it’s full?”
The commercial fishing boats were kept separate from the sailboats and the yachts, as if their presence might offend the finer senses of the tourists. It was an extension of the gated communities they came from. The privileges of the upper classes had infuriated Tom’s father. The sons of the poor were slaughtered while the sons of the rich got nice safe posi
tions far from the bullets and bombs.
“Go to hell,” Frenchie replied. He picked up a wrench.
“Five hundred pounds a trip when the fishing is good. The back doors of restaurants, butcher shops. What’s the back-door price? Three dollars a pound? Fifteen hundred a trip.”
“Shut your mouth. You got no proof about nothing.” He still had the wrench in his hand, but he’d lowered it.
“The income tax people come, they’ll get a list right away. You think your buddies will keep a secret? Forget it. Scared people talk. Someone will cut a deal.” Tom was thinking about how Sarah had said that cops were just enforcers for the tax collectors, and there was no modern Robin Hood to take back part of the money the rich stole. Ben had mentioned the tax people as well, so it was a subject they were all aware of, nervous about—sleeping on their money, Ben had said. Onshore, the tin fish shed’s glare blinded anyone looking at it.
“What do you want?” Frenchie demanded. “A cut?”
“I don’t care about the tax collectors. Let them do their own work.” Frenchie eyed him suspiciously. “I want to know about Ben’s granddaughter. I think she swam to shore. In her clothes. Why?”
“I dunno,” Fenchie said. Now that the questions weren’t about illegal fish sales, he no longer cared. “You gotta ask Karla. They’re her girls. They’re her parties. She provides the food. She sells stuff.”
“Tupperware?” Tom said. “Girl Guide cookies?”
Frenchie didn’t get it. “I don’t know anything about Tupperware. I just hear that some of these guys who come are big shots. TV. Movies. They want pictures to take back with them. They show the right person the right picture and a girl gets to be a star. Karla creates opportunities.”
In Valhalla's Shadows Page 50
