The Tricking of Freya (16 page)

"Hey!" I yanked back with equal force, pulling her toward the crowd
she'd been yelling at, toward the park. We stood like that for a moment, in
the middle of town, at the corner of Centre and First, tugging each other.
Then Birdie put her hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye. The
air smelled like wet metal, and the clouds had turned the purple-green
color of bruises.

"Elskan," Birdie began. "Today is a very special day for you. For both of
us.

I nodded. For some reason I was trembling.

"I'm taking you somewhere," she continued. "To something much bigger
and better than our silly little Islendingadagurinn."

She glanced at her watch, then took my hand again. This time I didn't
resist as she began leading me down Second Avenue toward our house. The
street was completely deserted; everyone in Gimli was at the festival. What
could be better than Islendingadagurinn? Better than the tolling of the bell
and the laying of the wreath on the pioneer cairn? Or the sight of the Canadian Mounties escorting the Fjallkona into Gimli Park? Would I miss Vera's
speech she'd been practicing all summer?

"Where are we going?" I finally asked.

"Iceland, Freya min. I'm taking you to Iceland."

And then it started, as if she'd orchestrated the whole thing: a flash of
lightning, a crack of thunder, then the splatter of plump raindrops. As we
ran I caught glimpses of the lake, the wind whipping up whitecaps like dabs
of frosting on one of Amma's cakes. The water and the sky drenched the
same bruised green. We loved those summer thunderstorms, Birdie and I.
Thunder and lightning, thrill and danger. When other people ran in from
the rain, we ran out into it. Except on this day. On this day Birdie pulled me
through the rain laughing and dripping into the front door of the house.

"Quick, change your clothes. The cab will be here any minute!"

"Cab?" No one in our family ever took cabs.

"We're traveling in style, elskan."

"But where are we going?"

"I told you, silly, Iceland!"

"In a cab?"

"We're taking the cab to the Winnipeg airport." Birdie looked at me like
I was vitlaus, an idiot. But it was all happening so fast. It was hard to keep
track. A loud honk made me jump.

"Grab your suitcase, kiddo," Birdie instructed. It was sitting by the door,
cherry red and expectant. The next thing I knew Birdie was directing the
cabbie to take the long way out of town. To avoid the traffic, she explained.
The Islendingadagurinn commotion.

To avoid being seen by anyone we knew, I realized later. Much later.
And way too late.

And that was how your mother stole me willingly in broad stormy daylight
in the middle of the Islendingadagurinn parade.

Of course I did, Cousin! It was the first thing I asked, as soon as we got
in the cab: Does Mama know?

"Of course she knows!" Birdie answered, a look of shocked offense on
her face. "We've been planning this for months, your mama and your amnia
and I."

"But why didn't anyone tell me?"

"We wanted it to be a surprise, that's why, you little fool! Aren't you surprised? Aren't you?"

I nodded. "But why . . ." It was hard to know what to ask first.

"Why what?"

"Why are we leaving in the middle of Islendingadagurinn?"

"It's not the middle. It's the last day. Besides, it was the only flight I
could get."

"But how can we afford it?"

"Everyone chipped in, that's how. Your mama, your amnia, me, even
your uncle Stefan. They wanted to have a big send-off party for us, but I
know how you hate parties. I convinced them you'd like it better this way,
the greatest surprise of your life."

"Really?"

"Do you honestly think I would make something like that up?"

"No," I answered. Because that's what Birdie wanted me to answer. The
truth was I wasn't sure, but loyalty kept me from expressing any more
doubts. If I doubted Birdie's word, I'd be doubting her. Doubting her sanity,
her suitability, her fitness. I would be thrown into the other camp, of those
who betrayed Birdie (there were surprisingly many, by her count), those
who scorned her. I believed myself to be Birdie's one true ally in the world,
and for that loyalty I was gifted her affection, the heightened magic that was
life in her presence. True, Birdie shifted like lake weather, there were times
when I fell from her favor, felt the sting of her whip-sharp tongue. But even
that was better than the void of dullness that was my life in Connecticut.

Yes, I had one, of course, though looking back over these pages I see I've
scarcely mentioned it. There's not much to say. Life with Mama in Connecticut was a limbo I endured between Gimli summers. I kept my promise
about being good; I tried my best to be invisible. I never raised my hand in
class but answered correctly when called upon. I took care of Mama, kept track of her canes and her sunglasses. It was lonely. At night I dreamt long
and wildly, in the morning had no one to tell my dreams. Just Mama, who
nodded her head in that vague way that could mean either yes or no. Or
nothing.

See me as I was then: thirteen years old and taller than the tallest boy in
seventh grade. White-blond hair to my waist, thin and scraggly like the rest
of me. It fell in my face a lot and I let it. Kids thought I was strange and I
was. In addition to my not-playing, I walked around muttering to myself. Or
so it seemed to them. They called it witch-talk. Freya's witch-talking again!
Actually, I was working on leggja a rninnid laying in my mind, memorizing
poems Old Gisli had taught me, or ones of my own. And I read. I hid in
books, and behind them. I read like an addict, in class with a book sequestered on my lap, during recess leaning against the chain-link fence,
bouncing along on the school bus, at the dinner table, by flashlight under
the covers after Mama turned my lights out. Reading, reading, and counting the days to the Gimli summer. The only good thing about my life in
Connecticut was that no one knew. Let them think I was strange, let them
think I was a witch. I didn't care. As long as no one knew I'd nearly killed
my mother. Turned her dizzy and distracted and old before her time.

Six years had passed since my first Gimli summer. Six years of being
good. Six years of being something other than myself. Maybe I actually believed that our surprise trip to Iceland was fully funded and sanctioned by
the proper authorities, Mama and Amma. Or maybe I was, simply, ready to
go. The storm helped. Sometimes I think that if it hadn't been for that
storm, with its scent of danger and thrill of lightning and reckless thunder,
I would never have left town with Birdie ... that on a clear day I would
have kept a clearer head.

The storm had subsided by the time we reached the airport, out on the
prairie edges of Winnipeg. It reminded me of my first train ride to Canada,
how shocked I'd been by the flatness of it all. How Mama and I got out of
the train and spied a storm raining down in another corner of the sky. We
still took the train every year. Mama was still afraid of flying.

"I've never been on a plane before." We were sitting on plastic chairs in
the lounge, waiting to board.

"I know that, elskan. You'll be fine."

She held my hand as the plane took off. My heart flapped wildly. Finally,
finally, Birdie was taking me flying! Out the window I could see Lake Winnipeg. Gimli I couldn't locate. I wasn't used to seeing our world from on
high. "Where's Gimli?" I asked.

"It's a speck," Birdie answered.

"Do you think it rained on Vera's speech?"

"I do, baby," Birdie said with a satisfied smile. "I do."

Poor Vera in her soggy cape, her crowning moment eclipsed by daggers
of lightning, her much-practiced speech drowned by thunder. Even though
Birdie had said those speeches were bullshit. And that Gimli was nothing
but a speck.

The plane banked east, my stomach dipped, and anything I could recognize down below was gone. I stopped thinking Gimli then, began thinking
Iceland. Iceland! Birdie had often talked about taking me someday, but my
mother always claimed we could never afford it. A trip to Iceland seemed as
remote and impossible and enticing as rocketing to Venus.

It was a night flight, but it never got dark and I never slept. Birdie never let
me. She talked the whole way to Iceland. True night never had a chance to
fall, not when our plane was keeping pace with the sun. We raced that sun
all the way to Iceland. As we sped through the sky, it was continually setting. Then in some miraculous way, that same sunset became a sunrise in
Iceland when we landed.

In the hours between this perpetual sunset-sunrise, while the other passengers turned off their overhead lights and settled under blankets, Birdie
got talky, filling my head with visions of an Iceland so marvelous I quivered
in my seat. We would take the Ring Road, she began.

"What's the Ring Road?"

"The Ring Road," Birdie explained, "is the crowning achievement of Icelandic engineering. The first highway to circle the entire island, completed
with much fanfare several years ago. Now it may not seem like much, elskan, this building of a road, but in Iceland even roads face unimaginable
odds. Roads take a lot of abuse, they contend with forces of nature you
can't even imagine. Glacial floods. Mud slides. Avalanches. Lava. But the
Ring Road has been built to survive all that. It's the only way to see Iceland.
You can't drive across the island, Freya min, it's completely untraversable in
a normal car."

Why? I wanted to know.

"The interior, where they exiled criminals in the old days, is nothing but
glaciers, my girl, and vast lava deserts, and glacial rivers that change course
so quickly that no sooner do you build a bridge than it's washed into rubble.
Only huge buses with enormous wheels can cross the interior. Used to be,
in your grandfather's time, people rode horses to get from one place to another, or hopped in a boat. But now there is the Ring Road, and on the Ring
Road, my girl, we'll traverse the whole island, you and I."

The Ring Road was only the beginning of Birdie's pre-travelogue, the
golden thread upon which she strung wonder after wonder, beginning with
Iceland's most famous waterfalls, Gullfoss and Dettifoss. Then she waxed
eloquent about the greatest glacier of all Iceland, all Europe, Vatnajokull.

"And next to Vatnajokull, Freya rnin, is the glacial lagoon where giant
icebergs float. I'll take you there. And right underneath the glacier is a volcano.

I remembered my mother's story about the eruption of Askja, the fall of
black snow, the flight of Olafur's family to Canada. "Are we going to see
Askja?"

"Of course we'll see Askja, silly! But Askja's only one of them. There's
Laki, Hekla, Krafla... Volcanoes can erupt at any time. The whole island's alive, I tell you. If you look closely enough, you can see the land
breathe."

How long would it take, I wanted to know, to circle the entire island?

"Ten days or so, I've heard. I've never done it. The Ring Road wasn't
built when I visited Iceland back in the sixties. It'll be the first time, for
both of us."

We would visit Thingvellir, site of the ancient parliament. Sigga, Birdie
informed me, especially wanted to make sure I would see that. The original
Oddi, too, the farmstead where Snorri Sturluson was raised. And of course
we would travel to the East, to visit Olafur's farm, Brekka, the site of the
wondrous Olafur story Birdie had told me my first summer in Gimli.

"Brekka is still there?"

Birdie laughed. "Where would it go?"

And multitudes of far distant cousins. Sigga had made a list, Birdie explained, of various people I absolutely had to meet. A lie of course. From
time to time, Birdie would toss in little remarks like that-Sigga wanted to make sure I met so-and-so, Mama wanted me to see such-and-suchmeant to validate the trip in my mind. And it worked.

Traveling to Iceland had seemed about as probable to me as flying. Now I
was doing both. But as night became morning, I began to understand that
there were other reasons for our journey, reasons that went beyond the edification of Freya.

"I had a very bad winter, Freya min. Dark beyond belief. But this trip is
going to redeem everything. I'm going to get the letters back."

"Letters?"

"Olafur's letters. The ones he wrote to his uncle Pall back in Iceland after he emigrated. You see, Pall was one of the ones who stayed behind.
Swore he'd never abandon his homeland. Pall was a famous poet in his own
right, in the farmer-poet tradition, and he mentored Olafur when he was a
boy in Iceland. It broke Olafur's heart to leave Pall behind. And so when
Olafur left for Canada, he wrote to Pall, every week for ten years, until Pall
died. The letters are wondrous, wondrous! Or so I've heard. Remarkable
and detailed descriptions of life in the colony, the tragedies that befell New
Iceland. The smallpox, the flooding, the frightful freezes. Not to mention
the religious disputes that split the colony in two. And of course every letter
contained a verse or two composed by Olafur. These were the very letters
your amnia Sigga read as a girl when she was growing up in Iceland. She
was a cousin by marriage to one of Pall's sons, and worked for a time on
their farm at Brekka. Pall was dead by then, of course, but his son had kept
Olafur's letters, treasured them, and during the long winter evenings they
took turns reading them out loud. It was those letters that convinced Sigga
to come to New Iceland and meet the poet Olafur himself."