In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  All that was left of the shed was the floor, and he used his pry bar to rip up the floorboards. He was about halfway across the floor when he saw there was a wooden box between two stringers. The box was covered in thick spider webs that were heavy with dust. He swept away the spider webs with his hand, and they clumped together and clung to his fingers, so he had to pull them off. Small black spiders raced around on the ground and disappeared. He lifted up the box. It was a pale, faded brown. On one side it said Canadian Butter Saskatchewan 56 LBS NET. The corners were neatly dovetailed. He took off the lid. There was a glass sealer with a metal screw-on rim. He picked it up. Inside there was a piece of rolled birch bark and a gold-coloured coin about the size of a silver dollar.

  He looked around to be sure that no one was watching. He put the jar back into the box, put the lid back on and piled shingles to cover the box.

  He went inside and washed off the dust and dirt, then went to Odin.

  He found Godi-4 working in the garden and told him that he’d found something, and he needed him to come right away. Godi-4 put down his trowel and joined him.

  “What is it?” Godi-4 asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Tom said.

  They went back to the ruins of Tom’s shed and Tom pulled the shingles away and lifted out the box and then the sealer. He handed it to Godi-4.

  “Should we break the glass?” he asked, but Godi-4 said no, the jar itself would be worth keeping.

  The metal rim wouldn’t come off, so Tom got a hacksaw blade and pliers. While Goldi-4 held the jar, Tom cut the rim and eased it loose.

  Godi-4 lifted the glass lid off, and Tom tipped the jar sideways so the rolled birch bark and the gold-coloured coin slipped to the mouth. Godi-4 carefully took out the two items. He turned the coin over in his palm. The coin had a runic symbol on it that looked like a capital F.

  “Ansuz,” Godi-4 said. “The sign of Odin.” He gave the coin to Tom, then took the birch bark and set it on one of the boards from the shed. He pinned one end down with the fingers of his left hand and slowly pushed the roll open with his right thumb.

  There was a message and it said, in neat printing, Seek elsewhere.

  “No treasure map,” Tom said.

  “No treasure map,” Godi-4 repeated. He handed Tom the coin. “It’s yours.”

  Tom turned the coin over. “I’d rather have the money. I could pay some of my bills.”

  Godi-4 put his hand out. He weighed the coin in his hand. “We’ll pay you for the coin. The price will be the market price of gold on the day it is valued. May I also have the sealer and the note?”

  “Yes,” Tom said. “When I finish tearing apart the shed, I’ll dig up the ground just in case.”

  “We have suspected there was something buried on this property. It’s been found. That mystery is solved. Now, if Jessie Olason could forgive us for unintentional sins committed.”

  Godi-4 went over to where the contents of the shed were piled. He put his hand on the crib with the picture of a rabbit and a baby duck. “She had a child. It wasn’t well. It had a cough. There was no doctor and no way of getting help. The only person with any medical experience was a member of our group who had stayed for the winter. He was a homeopath. There’d been a conflict over the property, but she had no one else to turn to, so she asked for his help. He told her to bundle the child up warmly and put it outside for half an hour each day. It was the kind of treatment they used for TB. The weather became very cold, and one day when she brought the child in he didn’t respond. She believed he’d died of hypothermia. It may have been true. A child has so little body mass. But it may have been the illness.”

  “His grave is on the property,” Tom said.

  “She believed our person had done it deliberately to drive her away and get the property. There was no such intent. Our healer committed suicide over it. He walked out onto the lake and kept walking until he couldn’t walk anymore. He meant no harm. It was a waste of two lives. We needed him. This is a burden on us, three burdens. The child, the practitioner, Jessie’s sorrow.”

  “You didn’t do it.”

  “We are One. We share the credit and the blame. Otherwise, our beliefs mean nothing.”

  “I, too, am atoning for a sin,” Tom said. “We sound like Christians at Saint Peter’s gate. I helped Morning Dawn leave.” He told Godi-4 about what Morning Dawn had told him, and Bob and guaranteeing twenty dollars.

  “I am sorry to hear that. But she was not One with us. She was with Jason. His return has not gone well. He would prefer to give up nothing and gain much.”

  “Angel sometimes joined Jason and his group. Would he have done her harm?”

  “It is hard to say. If anything Morning Dawn said is true, then no possibility can be ruled out.”

  “The stories of enlightenment through sex are told and retold.”

  “Not with children. Not by force. Only from mutual desire. There are many portals. Sex is just one. One is music. Another is art. Meditation. We seek the entrance to our other world. There are many who would like their desires to be satisfied but do not want to give up anything for it. How much would you give up to be One with us?”

  “I’d prefer a relationship with one person and to have friends.”

  There were, however, times when he’d been vulnerable, desperately lonely and lost. When he was a teenager, after his mother left, after his father died, when he joined the Force, desperate to belong. At those times he might have given everything and anything to belong, to have a place. Sally had six siblings and he thought he’d be part of an extended family, that he’d never be lonely again, but she was resentful of her siblings, alienated, jealous. They hardly ever saw any of them.

  “This woman Freyja we have seen you with, she’s had previous relationships, none have lasted. Yet you think she’ll stay with you.”

  “I don’t know. I hope so.”

  “Your previous relationship failed.”

  “Marriage,” Tom corrected. “It was more than a relationship.”

  “Have you changed so much that whatever caused you to make an unfortunate choice doesn’t exist anymore? Unless we change ourselves, we just keep making the same mistakes again.”

  “I’ll try harder.”

  “She’s very pretty, this Freyja. When she comes to our Viking week, she dresses in a Viking warrior costume. But what about when looks are not enough? What is it that she needs that her previous relationships didn’t satisfy?”

  With that, Tom thought of his mother and his father and never knowing for certain why his mother left, or why she left when she did, not a moment earlier or later, and he felt a moment of panic, as if Freyja was already leaving, and he was alone, and no matter how he tried to hold on to her she would slip away, like his mother, like Sally.

  “I might be no more suitable to be One than Jason,” he replied.

  “Would you have done the things Morning Dawn said he did? Would you covet a piece of land so much that you’d destroy another person to get it? You did not hesitate to hand me the gold coin. You picked up Gabriel and carried him. There was no benefit to you in that.”

  Tom thought then of his basement apartment, with its green walls, its low ceiling, his cell-like bedroom, his loneliness, the emptiness of feeling there was no place for him. “Yes,” he said. “I understand.”

  “Where is your mother?”

  “I don’t know,” Tom said. “She left when I was young.”

  “Your father?”

  “Dead.”

  “Your wife?”

  “With someone else.”

  “Your children?”

  “Gone.”

  “Life fragments,” Godi-4 said. “We think it is solid, substantial, that it won’t change, that it is as trustworthy as the earth under our feet, but earthquakes happen, tidal waves appear and our world disintegr
ates. You will get to know us better. We will get to know you better.” He half smiled and put his hand on Tom’s shoulder. “Maybe we are a tribe, a cult. Maybe everything we believe is false. But then, what isn’t? People came because there was an emptiness in their lives. Those who stayed found what they were looking for. We belong to each other. We all have a place, a refuge. No one who is One is ever alone.”

  Sadness descended over Tom, and in spite of the heat, he was back in his parents’ apartment, sitting in the window, looking down at the snow-blown street, the figures struggling against the wind, the other figures with shopping carts and bedrolls huddled in doorways across the road, and he thought of how flimsy the barrier between him and them was, how easily he could become One with them, a man with no place, and he was overcome with despair.

  Godi-4 broke into his thoughts by saying, “You think that Angel did not die accidently?”

  “I don’t know,” Tom said. “I know that there are people who think I am implicated. I need an answer to what happened, no matter how innocent it might be.”

  “Angel did come to us. Music was to be her portal to the rest of her life. Two or three times she stopped with Jason and his group on the beach. He is no longer satisfied with being One. He has been preaching a new vision. It is not one we share.”

  They walked around to the front of the house and stood at baby Oli’s grave.

  They were both looking at the concrete slab. It was tipped slightly and needed to be lifted so it was level. The concrete had darkened at the edges. Dirt was gathering once again around the coloured stones that had been pressed into the concrete.

  They went back to Odin together and found Jason weaving a willow chair. He looked surprised and stood up as if to get ready for a confrontation.

  Godi-4 put the question to him and Jason said yes, Angel had joined them, been with them three times, but what he had said was true; she had not been with them the night she died. “Her death had nothing to do with us. We said nothing because we didn’t need any complications.”

  Godi-4 said, “Morning Dawn did not return to her parents’ home. When she came to Mr. Parsons, she wanted him to let her into his house and hide her. She was afraid that you would do terrible things to her.

  “Instead, Mr. Parsons helped her leave with a local person in the middle of the night. When they got to Winnipeg, she did not wait for him to find her a ride home, as she had said she wanted. If she was in no danger of being punished in the ways she said, why would she say so?”

  “She has a vivid imagination.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” Godi-4 agreed. “However, perhaps her purpose was more devious. Mr. Parsons had found Angel. He’s been under suspicion. If he let a young girl into his house and she then claimed he’d assaulted her, everyone would have believed it.”

  “The property belongs to Odin,” Jason said stubbornly.

  “I believe Morning Dawn is working in a café and waiting for you people to join up with her. She sought shelter with one of our members and hinted that a trap had been set. Would you destroy a reputation and a life for a piece of earth and an old building?” When Jason didn’t reply, Godi-4 handed Tom the sealer, took the lid off and extracted the paper and the coin. He held up the coin so Jason could see it. He put it back in the jar and gave Jason the paper to read. When Jason had read the note, Godi-4 put it back in the sealer with the coin. “For this you would betray everything we believe in?”

  “The property rightfully belongs to us.”

  “And the demonstration in front of White’s? You did not bring this to One to discuss. You mistakenly believed that Morning Dawn had been assisted by Mrs. White.”

  “She hates us and wishes us harm, and I had heard she was going to help a follower leave. As for him,” he edged closer to Tom so that he was staring directly into his eyes. “He wants to take what is ours. He knows it belongs to us. We have to defend ourselves. We can’t just be passive and wait.” He looked in that moment, his face darkening with anger, ready to kill, like an enraged participant in an old ethnic battle, in Ireland or Yugoslavia or Palestine or a thousand thousand other places where a sense of injustice excused any act.

  “We cannot be One with such beliefs,” Godi-4 said quietly. “I had hoped that this would not happen, but it is best that you leave and seek what you wish from life elsewhere.”

  Jason’s face grew taut with anger. He turned back to the gardens and waved to those who were working. They all looked up, but most looked down again and kept working. His followers dropped their tools and joined him. They disappeared in the direction of the beach.

  Tom and Godi-4 stood there for a time saying nothing. Then Godi-4 said, “The way is hard. He would be a leader but not for the One. He would lead to satisfy his own ambitions.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tom said. “If I hadn’t pushed it...”

  “No,” Godi-4 said, cutting him off. “This would have happened, instead of today perhaps tomorrow, or next week, or next year. It was inevitable.”

  “Do you know this man?” Tom asked and showed Godi-4 the picture of his father.

  “I don’t recognize him.”

  He opened his wallet and took out the paper with the name Valhalla on it. “I wondered if he might have come here.”

  “I’ve only been Godi-4 for the last ten years. When Godi-3 died, I took over. I had been elsewhere.”

  “My father died in 1979. He was a bookkeeper. He did pro bono work for a few charities.”

  “Brokkr might know. He’s been here that long. He’ll be working at the forge.”

  The forge was a trailer with an anvil set up under the canopy. Brokkr and his assistant were wearing leather aprons. The smell of burning coal was sharp. Brokkr was hammering a white-hot steel bar. Tom waited until the assistant put the bar back into the coals.

  Brokkr came over to him with his hammer in his hand.

  Tom showed him the paper and then the picture. “This was my father,” he said. “Did you ever see him?”

  Brokkr took the picture, held it up to get a better look. “We have had many visitors over the years.”

  “He was a bookkeeper,” Tom added.

  “There was someone who used to come. He always brought an army rucksack.”

  “Do you remember anything about him?”

  “Vaguely,” Brokkr said. “He did our books for us. Never charged. Instead, he came here for a week in the summer to fish. He never had much to say. He liked the music.”

  “Did he like anything else?” Tom asked.

  “He’d fish every day and what he caught he would give to the kitchen. He had his meals with us. In the evening, he would listen to the music. He got up early, went to bed early.”

  “He had no car,” Tom said.

  “We would have arranged transportation.”

  Brokkr handed him back the picture. “It was a long time ago. Many people have come here and left. It’s the army rucksack I remember. It was an odd sort of thing to have.”

  There was a rack with black metal hooks and trivets and silhouettes of metal cowboys in various poses all hanging on a series of crossbars. There was the soft woof, woof of the bellows and the heavy smell of the glowing coal. Brokkr’s assistant pulled the metal bar out of the fire. Tom raised his hand in thanks, and as he was walking away, behind him, there was the steady pounding of Brokkr’s hammer shaping the glowing metal into an object that would be sold at a fair or craft show, in a country store, or maybe at a roadside stand.

  Tom walked to Freyja’s. He told her about the gold coin and the note and Godi-4’s story of Jessie’s child.

  “The smallest things can do harm,” he said, feeling guilty in spite of Godi-4’s words. “Even when we mean no harm.” He felt a kind of agony, as if a knife were twisted inside him. He thought of Jessie’s child, and the child in the car he had pursued. Distraught mothers. Decades apart
, but both had their child wrenched from them by strangers. He hoped the woman in the parking lot would have another child. She was young, nineteen or twenty, and she was married. It would never replace the child she lost, but it would comfort her. He wanted to fall down and cover his head with his hands and cry until he couldn’t cry anymore, and part of him wondered, a part not totally overwhelmed by grief, if that was such a bad thing, a weak thing, to feel pain for another person’s loss, to grieve another’s grief, to care about another’s suffering.

  “What are you going to do about Siggi?” she asked.

  ”Nothing,” he said, and his words echoed in his head, as if it were an empty box. “I’m not a cop anymore. Maybe he’ll stick to what he said. Maybe he’ll have a good crop, pay his bills. Maybe his suppliers will be satisfied with just getting their money. Maybe he’ll quit being stupid and go back to Fort McMurray and work on the rigs. A Valhalla solution.”

   Chapter 33

  A Heart’s Desire

  Tom left Freyja’s and went to Ben’s.

  “Ben home?” he asked.

  “No,” Wanda said. She was lying in the sun face down on a foamy covered with a yellow blanket. She had on pink shorts and a matching top with a string tie at the back. The strings were undone so she wouldn’t have a tan line. Her sandals were lying on the ground beside her. There was a child’s yellow plastic bucket with a bottle of beer set in ice.

  “You’re going to get sunburnt,” Tom said.

  “Not if you rub this lotion on my back.” She held out a tube of sunscreen. He sat down on the grass beside her and took the tube from her, opened it and squirted sunscreen onto his hand. He rubbed it onto her shoulders.

  “That’s quite the tattoo,” he said. The dragon wrapped itself right around her leg and disappeared into her shorts.

  “Big mistake,” she said. “They seem like a good idea, but after a while they get boring, and it would be fun to have a different one. It’s better to have the kind you wash off. Have a different one every month.”