The Tricking of Freya (27 page)

Nothing for it but going home. Gimli home.

The sky was cloud-smudged and heavy the morning we departed Brekka,
our spate of sun-sparkled days suddenly rescinded. Justly so, I decided. I
felt ashamed as we said our good-byes to our hosts, Hrefna and Eirikur. For
sneaking into their boarded-up farmhouse at night without permission. For
using their beds and their food and their time and their telephone and giving nothing in return. Yet they seemed pleased by the visit. Daughter and
Granddaughter of Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands, at Brekka! We signed the
guest book, then Eirikur helped us pack up the jeep and we were off,
jostling along the gravel road that followed the slinking Lagarfljot River. I
was sullen. Our entire trip, as far as I was concerned, was no less ruined
than the old Brekka farmhouse. A shambles. Now we faced a two-day drive
to the airport in Keflavik. I stared bitterly out the window.

"Cheer up, elskan. Why so glum?"

"This isn't fun."

"Fun? You want fun? Then we'll be tourists again, Freya min!"

At first I thought she was being cheery-mean, sarcastic, but no, it was
just another lightning-quick mood shift. All the places we hadn't seen on our
drive east, she assured me, we'd see on the way back. We'd stay overnight in
the spectacular harbor of Hofn, take a boat trip on the glacial lagoon, visit
the magnificent beach at Vik and even the original Oddi, where great men of
letters like Snorri Sturluson and Saemundur the Learned had lived.

"Really?"

"Really!"

Fooled again. Birdie's promises not vows but bribes easily doled. Or maybe she did intend in that moment to take me to those places. Plans, realities shifted quickly now. Suddenly she veered off the road and down a
driveway.

"What ... ?"

The Valthjofsstadir Church, Birdie explained impatiently. As if I should
have known. Worth checking for Olafur's letters, but the pastor and his wife
had been out of town the past week. Returned last evening, according to our
Brekka hosts, who'd called ahead and made us an appointment.

Valthjofsstadir was just downstream from Brekka and set against the same
massive cliff. It was the very church, Birdie explained, that Olafur and his
family had attended, and where Olafur's grandfather had served as pastor. It
was not impossible that Olafur's letters could have found their way there.

The pastor, a long-faced man with a dark beard and drooping eyes, was
waiting for us at the gate to the churchyard. He took us inside the church
and we stood talking in its chill, stale air. As in all the old churches of Iceland, the walls and ceilings were painted a bright and heavenly blue. I felt
my spirits lifting from the defeated departure at Brekka. The pastor let me
stand in the pulpit, and I giggle-preached in English, "We are gathered here
today ..."

At that Birdie lost whatever patience she had mustered. She had no time
for church tours, much less childish shenanigans; she cut right to the
chase, skipping the usual queries about Ulfur, my tired but perfected
recital of Olafur's "New Iceland Song."

"We're looking for some family letters," she began.

"Yes, I've heard." The pastor paused, stroked his long beard, seeming to
carefully formulate his words before speaking them. "In fact, after I learned
you were coming today I put in a call to my old friend Ulfur Johannsson in
Reykjavik. We were at university together. He takes quite an interest in
Olaf ur's work. As you well know."

From my perch in the pulpit I saw Birdie stiffen. The Wolf!

"As you know," the pastor continued, "Ulfur is quite familiar with your
quest. He mentioned that the two of you stayed with him at Thingvellir
Lake. But he seemed to think that you had already left for Canada. I assured him that was not the case, that you were here at Brekka. He was
quite disturbed. Upset, actually."

The silence that followed grew so heavy it seemed that heavenly blue
ceiling was pressing down upon us. Birdie quickly buttressed it with lies.

"Oh, that Ulfur!" She laughed, high and girlish-squeaky, most un-Birdie.
"He can get quite confused. The absentminded professor!" Then she took
my hand and pulled me down from the pulpit and out the door with the
pastor calling after us.

"Get in the jeep!" She opened the door and shoved me in.

According to Birdie, the pastor was calling Ulfur in Reykjavik that very
moment. Telling him we had his jeep. Ulfur in turn would alert the police.
The Wolf too would be on his way east in no time. We were being hunted,
we were on the run.

The funny thing, Cousin, is that out of all Birdie's cloak-and-dagger scenarios, this one proved true. As I found out later, the pastor did call Ulfur as
soon as we left; Ulfur did call the police; the police did alert the entire island by radio and newspaper to keep an eye out for two Canadian fugitives.
Not because we stole a car. No, the stolen property was more precious than
an old jeep. KIDNAPPED CANADIAN CHILD IN ICELAND, read the headline of
Morgunbladid. A policeman showed it to me a week later at the airport. You
see, Birdie had left out one link in the chain of events she predicted that
day: once Ulfur hung up with the Valthjofsstadir pastor, he called Sigga in
Gimli. Birdie's house of lies collapsed. Everything blew open. The nearly
three-week-long search for me and Birdie that had widened from Gimli to
the entire Interlake region and Winnipeg and all of Manitoba now shifted
exclusively to Iceland.

In the jeep screeching away from Valthjofsstadir, I neither knew nor
could have imagined any of that. Remember, I wasn't aware we were missing in the first place. In my mind our goal was simple: to get to the airport
in Keflavik before we were discovered by the police in the stolen jeep. For
once I shared Birdie's urgency, urging her faster and faster along the gravel
road that followed the Lagarfljot River to the Ring Road. She needed no
urging from me, pushing the jeep to demon speeds.

Then out of the blue she slammed on the brakes in front of a run-down
farm. We'd passed it many times in the previous days as we'd scurried
around the East searching for Olafur's letters. It was a weathered gray cement building shedding scabs of plaster and topped by rusted corrugated tin. A stone slab served as front step. Abandoned-looking but inhabited; an
unrusted car sat in the driveway. The truly strange thing about the house
was its tree, grown astonishingly large by Icelandic standards, its branches
scraping second-story windows. Now I saw there were things hanging from
one of its lower limbs. Some kind of small, dead, furred animals hung by
the neck with blue string. Tiny heads cocked, paws dangling, long dark
bodies swaying in the wind. I watched in astonishment as Birdie stopped to
stroke each one, then yanked a couple of them from the tree and tucked
them under her arm. She continued around to the side of the house. There
stood a drying rack, and like an escaped con stealing laundry from a
clothesline, Birdie swiped the things she wanted, nimble-fingered and
nimble-footed, racing lightly and silently back to the jeep. I was biting my
lip nearly through. What if someone came out of the house? No one stirred.
Whoever was inside must be old, I hoped, and sleeping.

Birdie dropped the things on my lap and I screamed. Animal skins with
gristly tendrils still clinging to the hides. Birdie took them from my lap and
tossed them in back on top of the sleeping bags. Started up the jeep again
laughing her loud raucous laugh. "Hush, elskan! That's enough fuss. Cat skin
is called for, but I imagine seal hides and mink pelts will suffice."

She was shifting again, into a state of what seemed to me pure nonsense,
mumbling Odin the hanging god, sacrificing himself to himself, discerning
runes from branches, humans strung from the World Tree, anything for
inspiration until I thumb-plugged my ears and merged her words into
engine-rumble and wheel-spin on gravel. Birdie's mad. The old Gimli rumors
truer than true. Utterly vitlaus, crazy-stupid-wrong. Something broke in me
then, a sickening shift of my own. Odd as it may seem to you, Cousin, up
until that moment I had revered your mother; yes, she was moody, sometimes rageful, but she was also a charm-sparkling genius. I'd been enthralled
in both the modern and ancient senses of the word: enchanted, enslaved.
Now the spell had broken and I saw her as something sick and terrifying,
hands trembling on the wheel, a tic I'd never seen before twitching the corner of her mouth, words rushing from her lips in a wide-ranging deranging
torrent. No fanciful word-meadow but a nauseating word-spew. My lip was
bleeding by the time we reached the town of Egilsstadir.

Maybe it's grown by now, but Egilsstadir then had nothing but a gas sta tion, grocery, post office, and a few stores. Birdie pulled into the Esso station, yanking the pink head scarf nearly over her face before approaching
the attendant, an uninterested teenager who clearly did not know us from
Egil. No one else was around. Tank full up, Birdie maneuvered the jeep
over a sidewalk and behind a closed fish-packing plant, hidden from the
road. She ordered me to lie down in the backseat and covered me with Saemundur's army green sleeping bag. Don't move. I did not. I lay panicstiffened under Saemundur's cover, inhaling its musk plus a stale stink of
canned fish, worrying our fate. Jail in Reykjavik? Returning not only emptyhanded but handcuffed? Certain disgrace. Or maybe Birdie would lose
control on the way back, wreck the jeep over a sheer cliff and into an icy
fjord below .. .

Birdie was back. Ordering me into the front seat while she loaded the
back with two plastic jugs of water and a bag of groceries. Then she unfolded a map she'd bought in the gas station and studied it a long time before starting the engine. Time we didn't have. I should have understood
then or at least suspected that we weren't headed for the Keflavik Airport.
That trip required no consult with a map: it was a straight shot on the Ring
Road. Soon Birdie was veering off the Ring Road onto a dirt track. A sign
said F88. I reached for the Iceland Road Guide, began thumbing its pages
frantically.

"Don't bother," Birdie advised. "It's not listed."

Then I understood the why of the new map. The place we were going
was purposefully excluded from the Iceland Road Guide. It was not a place
for tourists; it was not safe to drive.

The next sign we saw read OSKJULEID.

Askja Way.

Pause with me, Cousin, if you will, at these crossroads proverbial and literal, the juncture of the Ring Road and Askja Way. Don't worry, I promise
not to hold up the story with cowardly tangents. Not for long, anyway. You
want me to go on and I will. Though I can't say I don't resent you for it, you
who dog me forward into the past. No fair, you protest, you don't even know
I exist, may not even exist yourself? Granted. I write as much for me as for
you; there's no point pretending otherwise. And I've vowed to keep nothing
from you, you whose very birth was a state-sanctioned secret, you who were
sent into this world swaddled in lies.

So fear not, Cuz. There's no turning back now. Just reassure me that
once you see this last Birdie, this end-of-the-road reckless madwoman,
you'll still remember the Birdie of before, a kind of star I had no name for
yet fervently revered, the Birdie who enchanted me with kennings, who
told me I was named after a goddess, the Birdie who promised to teach me
to By.

Rarely in life are the fateful roads we turn down actual.

"Askja?" My heart pounded.

"Askja, Freya min!" Birdie spoke gaily, her eyes shone. The paranoid urgency of the last several hours lifted. Askja, she assured me, guiding Ulfur's
jeep down a road better called a dirt track, would shield us. Askja was our light-mother, the volcano that gave birth to us, its steaming crater our own
embryonic lagoon. No one on earth would ever look for us there.

Right you were, Birdie mine.

Askja Way, rutted like the corrugated tin roof of a decaying Icelandic
farmhouse, made the Ring Road seem a velvet ribbon. Soon we were deep
into the terrain known as grjot, a black-pebbled wasteland stretching out to
the ends of the visible earth. Through the grjot charged a muddy river,
whose source was the immense Vatnajokull glacier. Askja Way followed the
river's twisted path; what else was it to do? That river was the only sign of
life; to leave its side would be suicide; even the road knew that much.
Birdie never hesitated, steering the jeep with fierce certainty over ruts that
bounced us like jackhammers, impervious to fear. I had no such immunity.
I would have preferred apprehension by the authorities and a tidy little
prison cell with bars to the anxiety I felt riding unfettered through the reeling grjot, the menacing taunt of flat black deadland and the glowering
clouds pressing down on us from above. Marna wouldn't like this. Marna
wants me out!

"This place is creepy," I said out loud. No, that sounded too adolescent.
I tried to summon adult reason. "I think we should turn back. We won't be
in trouble, Birdie. We'll just say it was a misunderstanding about the jeep.
That we thought Ulfur loaned it to us. No one will care." I paused. "This is
dangerous, Ingibjorg." I'd never called her Ingibjorg before. I was hoping to
sound like Stefan, the most steadfastly rational person we knew. It didn't
matter. Birdie had counter-reasons all her own.