The Tricking of Freya (5 page)

"Storm clouds," Mama said. "It's raining there."

How could it be raining in one part of the sky and blue in another? The
dark clouds brightened for a second. Lightning. The storm raced our train to
Winnipeg and won; when I stepped onto the platform raindrops fell so hard
they pinpricked the skin of my arms and the back of my neck. Mama didn't
seem to notice. Her gaze was fixed on the large group of people waiting under a tin awning. Suddenly a pair of arms shot up above the crowd. The arms
were long and pale and slender, crisscrossing dramatically through the air
like those of a person stranded on a desert island signaling to rescuers. The arms moved through the crowd until they reached the front edge of it, then
connected to a person, a woman in a lilac dress, who began running toward
us in the rain. Still waving grandly.

"That's Birdie," Mama said, raising her own hand in a modest gesture of
acknowledgment.

"I know that!" I started running to meet Birdie but my mother gripped
my hand and we walked instead.

First Birdie threw her arms around Mama, then she stepped back and
took Mama's two hands in hers. "Anna," she said. "Anna Anna Anna!" Her
voice was like a song. Then she knelt onto the platform and looked me in
the eye. "Little Freya."

"I'm not little. I'm the tallest girl in first grade."

"Frey," my mother admonished. "It's not nice to boast."

Birdie didn't seem to mind. "Of course you are," she said apologetically.
"We'll call you Freya the Tall." Then she pulled me to her.

"Birdie," Mama said, after a few moments. "That's enough. You'll ruin
your stockings on the pavement."

Birdie did not let go. My chin rested on Birdie's shoulder, my nose
against Birdie's long soft neck. "You smell purple."

"Good nose, kiddo." Birdie sounded pleased. "That's Lavender Dawn. I'll
dab some on you when we get home."

I took my mother's hand, then reached up for Birdie's. Every few steps I
swung in the air between them, a feat I'd often watched other kids-ones
with two parents perform with envy. By the time we reached the parking
lot, a very tall man in a dark suit was putting my red suitcase into the back
of his car.

"Stop, thief!" I shrieked. Foxy was in that suitcase.

Birdie laughed. And laughed and laughed. There seemed no end to her
laughing. "That's no thief," she managed to get out, gasping for breath.
"That's your uncle Stefan."

"It can't be. I have one aunt no uncles."

Stefan stood awkwardly at the side of the car.

"Stefan's not a blood uncle," Birdie explained. "He's the kind that chooses
you. Even better."

"Does that mean he's like your brother?"

"Exactly!" Birdie seemed pleased. Stefan blushed.

Stefan's car was old-fashioned and shiny. A Rambler, he called it. I sat
up front between Stefan and Birdie. Mama sat in the back. "I can't see anything," I complained. So Birdie pulled me onto her lap.

"Take us through Winnipeg, Stefan," Birdie commanded. As if Stefan
was a chauffeur. "Let's give Freya a tour of the old West End."

"Oh no," Mama protested. "That's out of the way. No need for that. Stefan's nice enough to come all the way from Gimli to fetch us."

"It's no trouble," Stefan said.

"I won't hear of it," Mama insisted. "Anyway, Frey and I have had a long
trip. We're exhausted."

"I'm not exhausted!" I protested.

"Just a quick tour," Birdie pleaded. "Freya's never seen where we grew
up.

"I thought you grew up on a farm."

"We did at first," Mama explained. "In Arborg. And then after our father
died we moved to Winnipeg. The Gudmundssons were kind enough to take
us in until your amnia Sigga found work in Gimli. I don't know what we
would have done without the Gudmundssons."

"The Grand Gudmundssons," Birdie said mockingly. "The Great Doctor
Gudmundsson."

"Why was he great?" I wanted to know.

"He was the first Icelandic doctor in Canada," Mama began. "And his
daughter Vera was my age, and treated us like her very own sisters."

"Are you kidding, Anna? She treated us like country bumpkins fresh off
the farm. She made fun of our accents. You were her special charity project, she only wanted to My- Fair- Lady-ize you."

"Vera was good to us," my mother insisted. "Dear Vera!"

"Dear Vera," Birdie echoed. But she didn't say it fondly, the way Mama
did. Her voice had what Mama called that tone. Don't use that tone with
me, Birdie. That tone had a name, sarcasm, that made me think of an unhealed scar. But all that would come later.

"Stefan," Birdie commanded. "Pull over!" Stefan parked the Rambler in
front of a two-story brick building with bright blue shutters and a pair of
white columns out front.

"Jonsson Funeral Home," I read the sign out loud. "Is someone dead?"

"Plenty of people are dead," Birdie said. "People die all the time. But
that's not why we're here. Tell her, Stefan."

"My family runs this business," Stefan said. "I grew up here."

"In a dead people's house?"

"Indeed. All the old Icelanders came here, some young ones too. My
father sent them on their way."

I studied Stefan closely. His glasses looked like the kind my own father
had worn, black and rectangular. "Do dead people wear glasses?" It was
something I had wondered about for a long time, and Stefan seemed like a
good person to ask, given that his family were experts in the ways of the
dead. He thought it over for a moment.

"I doubt there's a need for eyeglasses in heaven," he replied. "But proba
bly no rule against it, either." He pulled away from the curb and a few
blocks later said, "We're in the old neighborhood now. The West End."

"Home of the Goolies!" Birdie said it like a radio announcer.

"Who are the Goolies?" I asked.

"Who are the Goolies?" Birdie repeated. "Who are the Goolies?" As if it
were impossible for anybody not to know. Then she laughed. "I'm a Goolie,
Stefan 's a Goo lie, Anna s a Goo lie. You"re a Goo lie too.

"I'm not a ghost!"

"A Goolie's not a ghost. A Goolie's an Icelander. It's what the Anglos used
to call us, when we first came to Canada. It comes from the word gull, which
means yellow. For our blond hair." She ruffled mine. "And right there" she
pointed to a beige cement building on a comer, plain and square, with a sign
that read GOOD TEMPLARS-"that's the Coolie Hall. Center of it all. And now
we're turning onto ... Victor Street! Home of the First Lutheran Church,
where all good Goolies go on Sundays."

"And home of the Gudmundssons," Mama added from the backseat.

"Oh yes, the grand home of the Gudmundssons-pull over, Stefan."

Most of the houses on Victor Street were small and wood-framed, but the
Gudmundsson house was brick and imposing, surrounded by a wrought-iron
fence and framed by rosebushes. "Can we go inside?" I asked.

"Yes, let's," Mama said. "Maybe Vera's home."

"No time for visits now," Birdie decided. "Sigga's making dinner for us back in Gimli. The tour must go on! Besides, you'll see Vera tomorrow.
We're having a little coffee party in honor of your homecoming."

I turned around and looked at my mother over the backseat. To my surprise, Mama was wiping tears from her face with one of her embroidered
hankies.

"Why are you crying?"

Mama didn't answer.

"Seven years is a long time, Anna," Birdie said. She didn't sound worried
about Mama, just ... satisfied.

"It couldn't be helped, Birdie. You know that."

"All I know is we missed her first seven years." Birdie locked her arms
around my middle. "We missed you." Birdie was starting to sound mad. Suddenly I didn't like her anymore-she'd made my mother cry! and I tried to
squirm out of her grasp, but she held tight.

"Well we're here now," Mama said cheerily. "Isn't that what matters?"

"That's right," Birdie answered, cheery-mean. "Sweep everything under
the rug like you always do! Sweep sweep sweep-"

Stefan put a hand on Birdie's arm. "That's enough, Ingibjorg."

"How come you call Birdie Ingibjorg?" I asked Stefan.

"Because that's her name," he answered.

"Because Stefan is ever so proper," added Birdie.

"Next stop, Gimli!" Stefan called it out like a conductor. Ever so proper.

By the time we were out of Winnipeg and heading north to Gimli the
rain had stopped and Birdie rolled down her window. It was still very flat
outside but there were trees and shrubs the new light green of early summer. I stuck my head out like a dog.

"Frey!" Mama called from the backseat. "You know you're not allowed.
Something could get in your eye."

I pulled my head back in, but later I stuck it out again because Mama
was sleeping in the backseat. Except she was only pretending. Normally
she slept with her mouth a bit open. Now her lips were closed tight, hands
folded in her lap. I wondered if Birdie would make me stick my head back
inside, but she didn't.

"Good dog." Birdie laughed, patting my head. I liked her again.

"Woof!" I barked, but quietly, so my mother wouldn't hear. Then hung out my tongue and panted all the way to Gimli, imagining the gold-roofed
houses I would find there-Gimli the town and Gimli the heaven having
become one in my mind-dreaming of flying. Surely tomorrow Birdie would
take me flying.

Forgive me, dear Cousin, for having confused that most splendid dwelling
of the gods with a rinky-dink resort town on the mosquito-laden shore of
Lake Winnipeg. I was simply a seven-year-old girl with my own ideas of
majesty. And Gimli itself had harbored grand ambitions once: to serve as
the capital of a New Iceland, est. 1876. It was a lofty dream almost instantly punctured by grim reality. In its first year, the New Iceland settlement was ravished by smallpox, a few years later by devastating floods. The
lands the settlers usurped from the Indians and so painstakingly cleared
quickly reverted to bog. Only the foolish and die-hard remained, our grandfather, Olafur, among them.

Granted, Gimli revealed itself no home of the gods, but let's give the
settlers due credit for optimism. Remember, it doesn't take much to look
heavenly when the land you've left behind is covered in a foot of volcanic
ash, your farm littered with the rotting corpses of your entire flock of
sheep, the air itself burnt and stinking of rotten eggs. And the Ash Districts accounted for only a portion of the Icelandic diaspora. A spell of particularly wretched climate, lives of grim servitude in a near-feudal social
structure, the seemingly unending suffering bestowed by foreign rule: reasons aplenty to get up and go. Life in Iceland was harsh; life in New Iceland only differently so.

By the time I arrived in Gimli, nearly a century later, all that remained of the capital of Nev,, Iceland was a floundering fishing village masquerading
as a beach resort. Welcome to Gimli-Your Place in the Sun!

So I suppose it won't surprise you, Cousin, when I tell you that Oddi,
our grandmother's house, was no palace capped in gold but an old dingywhite farmhouse with yellow trim, roofed with utterly ordinary red shingles. But you are, by now-assuming you've made it this far-an adult. I
was a child fully expecting gold when Stefan pulled his old Rambler station
wagon onto Second Street. I ran ahead of my mother and arrived at the door
first, eager to meet my grandmother the queen. But Sigga too was a startling
disappointment, in her plain brown apron and sensible lace-up shoes.

"Elskan!" She held out her arms to hug me, but I shrank back.

"Where's your crown?" I demanded.

?
"My-. "

"And your green velvet cape!"

Sigga began to laugh. Then she stepped past me and folded my mother
in her long arms. Marna, my mother said. Marna. Marna.

That too shocked me. To hear Mama call someone Mama. Wasn't Sigga
a grandmother, an aroma? But she was also the mother of my mother. That
idea cramped my brain. I turned to Birdie. "Mama and Amma," I said.

"Indeed," Birdie replied. "The big mother-daughter reunion. Quite a moment to behold."

I had no idea what she was talking about. I tried again. "Mama and
Amma," I explained. "They ... have the same letters in their names. But
scrambled."

"Indeed, elskan. How clever you are!"

While Mama and Amma stood in the kitchen chatting and Uncle Stefan
brought our suitcases from the car, Birdie led me on a tour of the house,
beginning with the living room, which she called a parlor, a small room
nearly overpowered by the dark wood of the wainscoting and a gleaming
black piano. Lace curtains hung in the window, lace cloth covered the coffee table, lace doilies rested on the arms of a plush green couch. I tested
the couch, bouncing on it lightly, then stood by the fireplace examining the
photographs on the mantel. Some were identical to the ones on our mantel
in Connecticut-Olafur with his pipe, Mama and Birdie wading, even a photo of me with two front teeth missing but there were many unknown
to me as well. "Are these Our People?"