IT has a long history. When we lit a fire to warm ourselves, we were doing something that had been done for generations. When Michael talked about getting fish net for backing for the nets he was making, that was exactly how nets were first made in Nova Scotia about 30 or 40 years after that little boy died in 1825.
We were just specks on the river. Once Michael went skating on the
skates he had gotten from the Foleys’ basement and Stafford followed
him. They were dots out in the middle of the river. When they turned to come back the wind changed, and the fire got farther away. Stafford started to get sluggish, and said that it was a good time to sit down and have a rest. “You can’t have a rest here Staffy — you’ll never wake up,” Michael told him. Michael was wearing his jean jacket, with his shirt opened. The air was dazzling cold and far away the sun was lighting the tree line at twilight. Stafford’s small bony legs got weak and he took out his handkerchief to wipe his eyes.
“Hey Mike —” he said.
“What?” Michael asked.
“I want to go to sleep.”
Michael got behind Stafford and pushed him, but couldn’t make it.
Then he tried to pick him up. And by then Stafford looked as if he was play-acting. Whenever anything happened that made you realize how fragile and wonderous life was, Stafford looked like he was play-acting. He sat down, and looked about, and Michael kept skating about him on his old broken skates wondering what to do. And then suddenly something happened that would not happen in too many other places in the world. A car came along.
“Need a lift?” Neddy Brown said, his old 1954 Chevy filled with children and a wife and a drunken grandpa. There they all were in the middle of the Miramichi River, Neddy out for a drive across the frozen ice.
So everyone made it back by nightfall. Ginette wouldn’t leave the rink until she saw them coming, and ran to get more sticks for the fire. She couldn’t leave anyone, Ginette, in her life.
Fires had burned when Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo when the house I mentioned where the child was waked was just being built and fires had burned all along the river when Savastapol fell in the Crimean War in 1857.
In both those wars boys from the Miramichi had fought. By the time of the Crimean War my great great-uncle was a boy on the river, and his son was the first in my family to play hockey.
I have travelled the world and have tried to explain that hockey is more than a game. That it is more than baseball. That it is the non intellectual impulse for life. But my uncle didn’t buy this. Why should he? At any rate when he came up to visit us that year just after New Year, I wasn’t talking like this. I wasn’t going about the house saying, “Hockey is the non-intellectual impulse for life.”
Even then I suppose I wasn’t that crazy. I didn’t even know how to answer them about Mickey Mantle. And like a Canadian to my American cousin I said that hockey was almost as good as baseball. “Well, hockey is almost pretty near as good as baseball, maybe —” I said. “I mean, if it just wasn’t so funny and cold perhaps —” I queried. And they both smiled indulgently at me, as if I really wanted to tell the truth but because of some misplaced national pride I couldn’t.
My uncle from Boston was my first foil. He worked for Cotts beverages
and travelled the Maritimes and Quebec, because he was bilingual. I had been bragging a bit to his son. I finally confronted my cousin, after three days of listening to him brag about baseball. I told him about the NHL, and that when they played hockey in the States they had to come to Canada to get hockey players. “Like me,” I added, sheepishly one night.
Of course my cousin didn’t keep this conversation between boys, he went to tell the men. He needed and wanted some quick clarification. My uncle told me that they played hockey everywhere. “Not just Canada,” he said a little sadly at my xenophobia. I’ve heard this statement since, saturated with the same kind of sadness.
My uncle was the first who doled out information to me about theRussians and the Americans. “You should go see the Russians,” my uncle told me, “and we Americans too.”
“The Russians —” I said, fear welling up in my heart. I didn’t want to hear from him what I was afraid he was about to say. “They are the real champions,” my uncle said. “And we Americans have good strong clubs as well. In fact, my son didn’t want to tell you that we won the Gold at the Olympics last year. So I believe Canada is somewhere in third place now.” “We are — you did, they do,” I said, my voice a skeletal remnant of what it once was. “You did — you have?”
“Of course we have very powerful strong clubs in the States. We won the Gold.”
I had known it was all out there somewhere, beyond the woollen sweaters and the sweat, beyond the great moves of Jean Beliveau and Rocket Richard about the net, but I did not know they would bring it here to me. I was just a sad little boy. I tried to look even smaller than I was, and bowed my head a little to look melancholy. But I was beginning to understand two things about hockey. One was this; that it was a far more political game than baseball, and that my love of it was national. That Cold War collaboration and national interests were at stake no one spoke about. And secondly that, because of this, even as children we were not, as childhood baseball lovers, safe in the delusion of the game.
“Oh I think if they played our pros — they would find out,” my father said. But his voice was like mine — it was a little humble, worried and apologetic that I had bragged about Canada. My uncle wiggled his toes in his socks, lit a cigar and said nothing, smoothing some lint off his huge pair of corduroy pants, a deliberate smoke ring disappearing above his balding head.
You and I know it is always worse. It always gets worse. In everything. For instance I never thought Michael’s cough could get any worse, and it did. I never thought some of those children I knew would be left alone to fend for themselves and that the very air would swallow them and their dreams together, and it did. I never knew fifteen of my friends would die before the age of twenty. I never in a million years thought we would lose against my cousin’s team from Boston.
I wasn’t on the team — I never was on any team. This was the bigger lads — the lads like my brother and Paul. They were Bantams for Christ sake. But when Boston skated out and did their warmup, they were huge. Lumbering skaters, but huge, well-padded boys with big bums, from another world.
Our gutless coach wanted to protest, saying they had sneaked some juveniles with them. But this was not the way it was done. The oldest, the Yanks said, was twelve — in American terms they were small — tiny really.
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