Fever Season (9 page)
Aaron was sent home from the war late in the summer of 1917. He was in bad shape, but it was hard to tell. By then the streets of Montreal were filled with broken-down men back from battle. There were men missing an arm or a leg. Others had had parts of their faces blown off. You didn't see them much. They were horrible to look at and rarely went outside. “Compared to them,” Sammy told David, “Aaron seems fine.” But he wasn't.
“His lungs have been damaged by the gas,” Sammy said. “And if you see him without his shirt, his stomach is full of scars. I don't know what happened, but it's hard for him to eat properly.” It was also difficult for him to go to the bathroom, but Sammy couldn't bring himself to tell David that. But there was one other thing he did have to let his friend know. “We have to move.”
David didn't understand. “Move what?”
“Move away. To live.”
The doctors had told Sammy's parents that it would be best for Aaron to recover if he could be somewhere quieter with more fresh air. The family was going to move north of the city.
They left just before school started in September. David never saw Sammy again.
The war was changing everything. By November 1917, it even looked as if there would be no more professional hockey. It seemed that almost every day David read a story in the newspaper saying that the National Hockey Association was going to go out of business. Then, on November 10, it actually happened. The NHA announced it was shutting down. The league was supposed to have five teams that season, but the owners decided there weren't enough players available.
Almost as soon as the old league was dead, though, rumours surfaced that a new one would start. Only four of the old NHA teams would be in it, but no one was certain which four. Everything was finally worked out at a meeting in Montreal on November 26. David read all about it in the next day's newspaper. The new organization was called the National Hockey League, and the four teams in it were the Montreal Canadiens, the Montreal Wanderers, the Ottawa Senators, and Toronto. In the NHA, Toronto's team had been known as the Blueshirts. In the NHL they became the Toronto
Arenas ⦠because they were owned by the same company that owned the arena they played in.
It had come down to a last-minute decision if Toronto or Quebec was going to be in the NHL. Toronto got the nod when the Bulldogs decided not to run their team at all. The Quebec players were divided among the other teams in the league. The Canadiens wound up getting Joe Malone from the Bulldogs. They also got Bad Joe Hall.
David remembered the brawl at the end of the last game he'd seen with his father. Hall had started it. He'd cut Newsy Lalonde for ten stitches the first time David had seen him. Like his dad had told him, those two always seemed to be fighting.
“And now they're supposed to be teammates?”
David didn't realize he'd said it out loud until his mother asked, “Who's supposed to be teammates?”
“It's nothing, Mom.” David reached for the pair of scissors. “Just something in the newspaper.”
David knew his mother didn't really like hockey. “Such a violent game,” she was always saying.
During the next two weeks, there were lots of stories in the newspaper about Hall and Newsy. At first even the reporters seemed surprised that the two might be teammates. But by the beginning of December it looked as if they really would be.
David read in the newspaper on December 3 that Hall had almost agreed to accept the contract George Kennedy, the Canadiens' owner-manager, had offered him. But Bad Joe was still at home in Brandon, Manitoba, and the Canadiens were about to begin training camp. He wasn't there for the first practice on December 5, but the next day's newspaper said he'd be on his way shortly:
WESTERN WILD MAN TO BE IN
CANADIENS UNIFORM SOON
George Kennedy received a telegram from Joe Hall today. It says that the “Bad Man” will leave Brandon on Saturday night. Hall will probably be out for practice on Tuesday with the Canadiens, side by side with his dear friend Newsy Lalonde.
Hall arrived in Montreal by train on the evening of December 11. The next day he was out for practice ⦠and a pack of reporters were there to see what would happen. Nobody really knew what to expect, but everything went smoothly:
NEWSY AND HALL MADE PEACE
AT PRACTICE TODAY
Joe Hall and Newsy Lalonde, long sworn enemies on the ice, turned out as teammates for the first time when the Canadiens held a noon practice at the Arena. Hall arrived last night from Brandon and had his first workout with the champs.
“I'd rather have you with me than against me,” chorused these two veterans of half a dozen vicious fights on the ice as they shook hands in the dressing room today. And they both meant it.
So any problems the Canadiens might have had seemed to be solved. But the NHL still had troubles. Even with only four teams, so many players were in the army that there wasn't really enough talent to go around. The Montreal Wanderers were the hardest hit. Their owner had been losing money every year since the war started. Now, between injuries and army enlistments, they barely had enough players to make up a team. All during December the Wanderers begged the other teams to loan them players. Nobody did. When the season opened on December 19, only about seven hundred fans showed up for the Wanderers' first game. David could hardly imagine the beautiful Westmount Arena so empty. The Wanderers beat Toronto 10â9, but they lost their next game to the Canadiens 11â2. Two more lopsided losses followed.
Then, early in the morning of January 2, 1918, fire broke out at Westmount Arena. It was thought to have started in the electric wiring in a small dressing room used by the Wanderers. The Arena was built from brick and steel. Many people thought that made it fireproof. However, all the seats were made of wood. The dressing room where the fire started was under the stands, and within a few minutes the whole inside of the Arena was ablaze.
The heat from the fire caused three explosions. The first to blow were the boilers in the basement. They were what kept the lobby so warm. After that the tanks full of chemicals that froze the pipes to make the ice exploded. When David had gone to his first game in 1914, the Arena still relied on natural ice. The pipes to make artificial ice had been added the next year.
After the chemical tanks burst, the force of the detonation blew out the brick walls of the Arena. The steel girders holding up the roof were still standing, but not for long. They were soon so hot that they began to bend. The roof fell in with a loud rumble. Then the flames leaped to the six buildings across the street, but the firemen were able to bring those blazes under control quickly. Still, the heat from the fire broke the windows in many of the homes along Wood Avenue. There was nothing the firemen could do to save the Arena. Within an hour nothing was left but burning rubble.
The day after the fire the Canadiens announced they would move their home games to Jubilee Rink. With only 2,633 seats and standing room for only a few hundred more, Jubilee was less than half the size of Westmount Arena. It did have one advantage for the Canadiens, though. It was in the east end of town where most of their French-Canadian fans lived. Most of the Wanderers fans were English and lived in the west end.
After the fire, the Wanderers made one more plea to the other NHL teams to loan them players. When they didn't, the Wanderers decided to drop out. The league would carry on with just three teams.
About a month after the Arena fire, David and Alice came home from school to find their mother already there waiting for them. She had gotten a telegram. Their father was dead.
For the longest time it hardly seemed real. Eventually, the army sent home some of David's father's things, but there was never a proper funeral. “Body unrecovered for burial,” the telegram had read. David was afraid to ask his mother exactly what that meant. He had a pretty good idea, though. His father's body had been so blown apart by shellfire that there wasn't enough left to bury.
Although she tried her best to hide it from him and Alice, David could tell that their mother was sad. She looked older now. There were streaks of grey in her brown hair. But the strange thing for David was that so little seemed to change after his father was killed. He had already been gone for close to two years. David had stopped expecting him to come home soon a long time ago. And there was still school, work, and sewing to help out with. Just as there was before.
By the end of the summer in 1918, it was starting to look as if the war might actually be near its end. More and more wounded soldiers were returning home. David noticed the way his mother gazed at the men in uniform when she passed them on the street. It was as if she were searching for something in their faces, as if the army had made a mistake and one of these men would turn out to be her husband. That was when it finally became real to David. Unlike these men, his father was never coming home.
Soon there was something new to worry about. During the summer of 1918, a different kind of war story was sneaking into newspapers. There wasn't much written about it, so it was easy to miss.
Since the spring, more and more of the soldiers in the hospitals of Europe weren't suffering from battle wounds. They were ill with some kind of sickness. It was like the flu â with a runny nose, cough, aches, and a fever â but it was much worse. Men were coughing up blood, and they seemed to be choking on the fluids that filled their lungs. The disease struck soldiers in England, France, and Germany. Civilians, too. Soon people were sick all over Europe.
Although it was a serious problem, very little about the disease was reported in the newspapers. There was enough bad news from the war already. But Spain wasn't fighting in the Great War. During the month of May, eight million people were sick in Spain. The newspapers there printed plenty of stories about the sickness. As a result, the disease became known as Spanish Influenza ⦠or Spanish Flu for short.
Near the end of the summer of 1918, soldiers returning home from the war brought the Spanish Flu back to North America. By now the disease was much more deadly than it had been in the beginning. In late August three sailors were sick with the Spanish Flu at a navy barracks in Boston. Within a few weeks thousands of people in Boston were sick. Most people got better, but lots of them were dying. Soon the same thing was happening in other American cities. Returning soldiers also brought the disease to Canada. It spread everywhere: big cities and small towns, rural farm communities and remote islands. It didn't matter. Anywhere there was air to breathe that air could carry germs.
The Spanish Flu hit Montreal during the last days of September. Some of the stories about the disease were so bad they didn't seem real.
“One of the boys at school has a cousin in Boston,” Alice told David on their way home one day. “He says it turns your skin blue. He says some people turn so dark you can't tell if they're white people or Negroes.”
David had heard the same thing, but he hadn't wanted to believe it.
Alice's voice dropped to a whisper, her eyes big and round. “He says that blood comes out of your nose and mouth. Sometimes even your eyes and your ears.”
David shook his head. That couldn't be true. “He's lying. He's just trying to scare you.” But David had heard those stories, too. What if they were true? “Even if it's true in Boston,” he told Alice, “the newspapers say the cases here are mild.”
But they quickly got worse. About a hundred people died in Montreal during the first week in October. Soon the newspapers were filled with stories about the Spanish Flu, or
la grippe
, as they called it in French. Death tolls were reported almost like sports statistics. People were getting spooked. Something had to be done.
Dr. Boucher was in charge of the Department of Health in Montreal. He decided that the city had to close all its public buildings. Theatres, dance halls, concert halls, and sports events were all cancelled. Schools were closed, too.
“You can catch it from anyone, so I want you to stay inside as much as possible,” David's mother told him and Alice. “But fresh air is important, too, so keep the windows open. And if you want to go out, stay on the third-floor landing. I don't want you going down to the street for any reason. And if the iceman comes, or anyone else, don't let them in unless they're wearing a mask over their nose and mouth! And both of you have to wear your masks, too, as long as other people are in the house.”
