Hockey Dreams (7 page)

We had to pick up the entire toboggan and carry him home. “That was pretty good —” he kept saying. “That was pretty darn good. Don’t you think that was good — I think that’s like the Olympics — that was pretty darn good.”

Today a safety campaign might be headed: “Do you know where your children are?” and have us thinking somewhat dreadful thoughts about what might happen to our kids. Dreadful things do and did happen.

Back then, in that bygone age, when the super six played, when during the playoffs every year some new star came out of nowhere from a farm team to dazzle us all, we were all running along the tracks jumping the boxcars of a slow-moving freight.

In the middle of a road hockey game we could leave our sticks and gloves on the street, and begin to run after it, catching up to it as it slowed down for a turn. Out of breath, with Tobias behind us, or behind everyone, except Stafford Foley and I, our boots half untied, our two goalies watching us, as goalies sometimes watch a brawl from their nets, we would jump the boxcar’s ladders and be carried along a mile.

Then just as the freight was picking up steam we would jump and roll down the hill laughing, with snow in our mouths and noses.

It would be strange for a mother to be asked if she knew where her little boy was, and say, “Yes, jumping boxcars — that crazy little kid — I told him if he falls he’ll be cut in two, but will a ten year old listen?”

All winter we went to the Sinclair Rink. Or played at the Foleys’. Often Stafford Foley’s mother would have to come out and break up our fights, or turn off the outside lights so we would finally wander home.

In the spring, on those warm days in mid-April, a stranger walking down one of our side streets might suddenly spy fifteen kids wandering about on the Miramichi River, on ice floes, with hockey sticks, looking like trapped penguins. Penguins wearing toques and mittens with chameleon-like grins on their faces, shooting snowballs off one another’s backs, with sticks that curved like Stan Mikita’s. The ice was breaking up; our rinks were melting and floating out to sea.

One Saturday we spent most of the afternoon trying to keep our rink intact. Of course, we weren’t that far from shore, but still and all it was a good feat.

“Take your hockey sticks and everyone — PUSH the RINK TOGETHER — one, two, three — heave. Bring the centre line up here.”

“Look at all them little fish under our rink.”

“It’s those fish — look at all those fish.”

Unlike Penguins, we never did win the Stanley Cup. Unlike Penguins if we slipped, there was a better than average chance we would drown.

And then one day every year, about the time the playoffs were ending, we would stop playing hockey, turn our sticks into spears and begin to spear the tommycod under our ice. The
breeze would be warming, our mittens would get soaked and we would not care. The sticks would be splinters, the pucks lost and chewed and hockey be done for another year.

Most of us would not eat the tommycod, but Michael and Tobias would take them home, ten tommycod tails sticking out of Tobias’ pockets, with the sun warming the stones along the bank.

This was our
other
place to play hockey in the winter. We played hockey on the river. Mangled trees and alders grew along its side in the summer, and by fall, the trees stood stark against the greying snow.

Fires would be lit near the riverbank, and Michael, who considered the rink his, would be out every day after school sweeping it clean, the ice clear and blue beneath his boots.

After Christmas of 1960, the year Tobias got his new boots and his new coat, I began to help Michael with this rink, along with Ginette and Stafford.

O
UR RIVER IS LARGE
. I
T
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.

On this river fires were always lit and kept burning by loved ones for loved ones. And that fire near our rink seemed to be like this. It burned when Michael was there alone shovelling the snow from it, after supper when the air was so splintered and cold that each breath pained.

It burned near us at night when the wind howled and there were only a few of us left flipping pucks or chunks of snow across a windswept, deserted rink. It was all so primitive I suppose — hockey, frozen hands, ice in your lungs and the fires burning here and there about the river.

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.

To try to
explain
this to my uncle, the father of my cousin from Boston, was a rather difficult feat. To explain hockey as being part of the natural world of my youth, and therefore essential to understanding a love of my country, seemed slightly pretentious. Still does.

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 the Russians 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.

Worse.

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.

We would play the game.

Their centre men were about a foot taller than ours. Their hockey sweaters were fantastically gaudy — red and white and blue. They had huge American flags on their backs. They skated about as if they knew everyone was watching them, spoke little asides to each other, perhaps about democracy, I don’t know, and stood still and moved the blades of their skates back and forth like pros.

When our team skated on the ice to do its warmup, it was as if a balloon of exhilaration had been deflated. Paul accidently hip-checked one of their players near the centre line, and went flying through the air and into the corner.

“I’m sorry — excuse me,” their player said, helping him to his feet. Paul limped over to the bench trying to save face by looking like he had been hurt in the actual game.

In the stands all our mothers and fathers — ready to cheer our boys — looked at one another.

And our boys looked like they were about three feet tall. Some of our players were wearing different coloured stockings. And Darren Foley went over to the side to get a pin off of his sister. And of course at that time in our country we didn’t really have a flag. Well the British Ensign, or we could have gone with the New Brunswick boat. (Honest to God, I’ve never been really sure what kind of boat it is. It looks like a cross between a Spanish galleon and a Roman slave ship.)

Our goalie during warmup was flipping about, like a pancake, going down on every shot trying to make fantabulous saves to impress everyone.

He slipped, hit his head on the crossbar and rolled about the ice for five minutes, whining in a disgusting manner at the top of his voice.

The trainer (he wasn’t actually a trainer — just Mr. Comeau) went over to check the bump on his head. “It’s a long way from yer heart,” he kept saying.

Then they piped in the national anthems while everyone stood still. Everyone sang the American Anthem:

“OH SAY CAN YOU SEE —

THE BOMBS BUR-STING IN AIR

THAT OUR FLAG WAS STILL — THERE —”

Everyone cheered and roared and screamed.

Then came our Anthem.

“— oh Can-er-da — our home and natives in our land on guard we go and stand”

We didn’t play bad. We got around them now and again on the boards, and shot from the outside. But we often had to dump and when we dumped the puck or tried to muscle them on the boards we were in real trouble. A lot of times we outplayed them. But they would simply stand near the net and knock us down. Overall they didn’t skate as well but they didn’t have to.

They passed and then mowed us down at the blueline. If we tried to check them at the blueline boards they would simply hold us off.