The Last of the Lumbermen Read online

  THE LAST

  OF THE

  LUMBERMEN

  THE LAST

  OF THE

  LUMBERMEN

  A NOVEL BY

  BRIAN FAWCETT

  Copyright © 2013 Brian Fawcett

  This edition copyright © 2013 Cormorant Books Inc.

  This is a first edition.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright. ca or call toll free 1.800.893.5777.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Fawcett, Brian, 1944–, author

  The last of the lumberman / Brian Fawcett.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77086-287-6 (pbk.). — ISBN 978-1-77086-289-0 (mobi).--

  ISBN 978-1-77086-288-3 (epub)

  1. Title.

  PS8561.A94L38 2013 C813’.54 C2013-903666-0

  C2013-903667-9

  Cover art and design: Angel Guerra/Archetype

  Interior text design: Tannice Goddard, Soul Oasis Networking

  eBook development: WildElement.ca

  Printer: Friesens

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  The interior of this book is printed on 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper.

  CORMORANT BOOKS INC.

  10 ST. MARY STREET, SUITE 615, TORONTO, ONTARIO, M4Y 1P9

  www.cormorantbooks.com

  For Gord Smetanuk, Jack Larkin, Alex Ritson, Ken Silver

  my boyhood hockey heroes

  Love is to reason as the eyes are to the mind.

  LOUIS ZUKOFSKY, On Shakespeare, 1963, P. 266

  Contents

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  PART TWO

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  PART THREE

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  PART ONE

  ONE

  LET ME TELL YOU the story of my life.

  First, I’ve got my head down. That makes me pretty much like an awful lot of people, so I’ll be specific. I’m on a sheet of ice in a cold arena full of hockey fans and hockey players, and I’ve got my back to the other players with the puck on my stick just inside my own team’s blueline, a step away from the boards.

  I can hear things I can’t see. This time it’s a young kid a few rows into the stands above our bench. He’s yelling at me in a high, reedy voice that’s had the needle in me since the game began. No, wait a sec. This kid has been on me since the beginning of last season. Or maybe the beginning of time.

  “Wake up before it’s too late, Bathgate,” he’s screeching. “There’s a hockey game going on.”

  For sure. I can also hear a stick banging the ice behind my left shoulder. That’s going to be my winger, Gord. Last time I saw him he was near centre, but now he’s come back to pick up the pass from me. Without looking I flick the puck between my legs along the blueline, a neat move that will allow him to deal the puck to my other wingman, Jack, who will be crossing centre ice.

  Yeah, yeah. A blind pass in your own zone is hockey’s equivalent of picking your nose in public. A house league move. But what’s life without a little adventure? If the move works, Jack has a breakaway if Gord can make a pass as slick as mine. Or at least he will have until the Stingers run him down.

  So, that’s the plan. But in the real world, Gord is cruising toward centre like he ought to be, and my brilliant pass lands on the stick of the Stingers’ right winger, who’s too lazy to check Gord knowing how easily he can catch him. And when the puck lands on his stick, he slips it to the other Stinger winger, who’s also screwing around at our blueline. He skates unmolested into the sweet part of the slot and rockets a shot at — not accidentally — our goalie’s head. On cue, said goalie ducks, and the red light goes on behind him.

  I’m not a witness to this, because the blind pass isn’t my only mistake. I haven’t heard the third Stinger forward coming in behind me. Just as I straighten up and begin to turn so I can watch my handiwork, he jackhammers me into the boards, and my stick jams against the bottom of them so the butt skewers me right above my solar plexus. A nanosecond later, my flimsy old Jofa helmet hits the glass, hard.

  When the lights come up again, they carry a whole lot of soft pastels you’re not supposed to see in a hockey arena. I can’t get any air into my lungs, but damn, I hear birds. Robins sweetly twittering away about how tasty the worms are, but there’s also a raven’s squawk echoing in the hollow distance of a very dark forest. Then there’s only the dark.

  SO WHY IS THIS the story of my life? Well, first, that dark forest is a place I’m very familiar with. Second? I’m a guy who’s seen a lot of plans that didn’t work the way they should have. Sometimes it’s been ignorant armies and falling trees; things got destroyed and money lost, and sometimes people got hurt or worse. Sometimes I’ve been on the business end, like now. Not that I’m complaining. It’s how life is: a deep, looming thicket, and only temporary clearings.

  Then there’s hockey, which I’ve played since I can remember. Hockey has rules and it’s played in the light. That makes it very different from life, which has no rules, and which asks you to spend all your energy and heart trying to invent ones that work or trying to elude the stupid ones other people are trying to plant on you. Hockey has been my clearing in the dark forest. It’s preserved my sanity again and again, whatever it’s done to my body.

  And so I push my way through the darkness by sheer will and head for the clearing, thrashing my way through the coloured lights and the birdsong, and find myself where I’m supposed to be: the brightly lit ice surface of the Mantua Memorial Coliseum, Friday, January twenty-third, third period of a game between the Mantua Mohawks and the Wilson Lake Stingers.

  The first thing I hear? It’s the boobird in the stands.

  “Niiice play, Bathgate, you old fart.”

  Better him than my teammates, who must be thinking the same thing.

  Screw them all. It took me twenty-five years to perfect plays like this
one. When you’re a prematurely grey forty-something playing on a last-place team in a nowhere league just south of the North Pole some rules don’t count. If my wingers had been playing as creatively dumb as I was, and the other team had been more cooperative, I would have looked like Wayne Gretzky, who also specialized in doing the unexpected. So he always knew where his wingers were. So what?

  “So,” Gord wants to know as we skate back to the bench. “What the hell was that all about?”

  “I thought that was you calling for the puck,” I say, opening the gate and letting him go first.

  “Listen,” he answers. “You know I don’t call for a puck unless I can do something with it.”

  Gord is right. He isn’t stupid, unless you count playing hockey at his age. I sit down heavily beside him — and instantly feel the darkness move in on me again. He has to grab my sweater to keep me from going backward over the bench.

  “Who was that who nailed me? Was it that goddamned Bellado kid?”

  Gord doesn’t have to answer. Roddy Bellado, the Stingers’ twenty-something centre, had been chasing me around all night, and we both know I’d been lucky to elude him as long as I did. “You going to be ready for another shift anytime soon?” Gord asks.

  As a test, I straighten my spine. There’s an odd pain somewhere between my shoulder blades that tells me tomorrow isn’t going to be a barrel of fun. But then tomorrow is something I’ve never given much of a crap about. “Give me a sec here,” I say. “Clear the cobwebs.”

  To Gord’s right, I hear Jack guffaw. His standard line is that once I get on a sheet of arena ice, grey hair and cobwebs are the only grey matter I’ve got. I scowl, get to my feet, and bang the tips of my skates against the bench gate.

  “I’m okay,” I growl, making a show I don’t feel. “Let’s play some hockey.”

  That gets a laugh from the whole bench.

  I DON’T MISS ANOTHER shift, but I might as well not be out there. A cloud of fog seems to be moving across the surface of the ice, and the lights keep dimming. And as the last minutes of the game wind down, the fog takes on the properties of thick, black bunker oil.

  We score another goal, this one with Gord setting a pick on a Stinger defenceman like parking a semi in front of a Volkswagen. I have just enough of my wits left to see it coming. I take the puck into the corner and pass back to Bobby Bell, the one defenceman we have who can read an offensive play. He crosses the blueline behind me and puts the puck away, high and stickside, where it ought to go. As I come off the ice I use my remaining brain cell to point my stick at the kid up in the stands. I even make a little circle with the tip.

  Nothing is going to impress this kid. “You’re still dead on your feet,” he screeches. It gets a laugh from the crowd, but I can’t see the humour because I’ve gotten lost watching the way the fog pattern I made with my stick dissipates.

  The Stingers score again too, but I’m not on the ice for it, and I don’t really care. By the time I stumble onto the ice for my last shift, the sharp pain between my shoulder blades is gone, replaced by a numb feeling that has tentacles down into my fingertips and up into my skull. There are black cloudlets at the edges of whatever I focus on, and they seem to be on the move …

  A thud behind me brings me back. It’s Bellado, the peckerhead, trying to finish me, and the only reason he doesn’t succeed is that Gord has planted him halfway through the boards.

  That’s what they tell me later, anyway. I don’t hear the final buzzer, and Gord has to steer me off the ice. The only things I recall after the game are the familiar scent of Je Reviens, a halo of red hair near my face, and fingers that don’t seem to be mine undoing my skates. After that, warm water coursing over my shoulders and neck, snippets of conversation, some flashes of very electric colour in the air, and more fuzzy cloudlets. It’s harder and harder to keep them at bay, but I’m damned if I’ll let them win. I know what’s waiting for me if they do. It isn’t a hockey game.

  I don’t recall leaving the Coliseum, don’t remember the drive home, or hitting the sack. I do have a glimmer out the window of a high-bed 4x4 as I fall, and a world that has just one colour in it. That, at least, makes sense. It is snowing.

  TWO

  SNOW IS BLANKETING THE ground outside the bedroom window the next morning, another thirty centimetres of it, and my brain is circling and recircling something Gord said to me a few days ago at practice. He was saying something philosophical about time — feeling it in his own bones, I guess. The two of us were standing along the boards, pretending, like we usually do, that the practice was for the other players. He was telling me he thought time operated like a freight train.

  “And you don’t care what train you’re on, as long as it keeps rolling on?” I asked.

  He leaned forward to flick a stray puck back to where Wendel and a few others were taking slapshots at Stan Lagace. “No,” he answered. “This train stops for everything. Normal people toss their baggage into the boxcars and jump on. But in this town, most people just stand in the middle of the tracks and let the train run over them.”

  “I hate it when you talk politics,” I said. “I never understand a word you’re saying.”

  He brushed aside my try at laughing him off. “Sure you do. And I wasn’t finished. I was going to say that you do something different from everyone.”

  I nodded my head as if I agreed and understood what he was talking about. “Different how?”

  “You,” he said, “keep your baggage hidden inside your head, and you don’t go anywhere near the tracks.”

  I shrugged, but said nothing — hard to say what he was onto with this. He might have just been feeling foolish about playing a kid’s game at his age and was taking it out on me, or he might have been up all night reading some philosophy book. Like I said, with him I’m never sure.

  He fixed me with a stare that was just this side of a glare. “I was just thinking that the train must have given you one hell of a rough ride once upon a time. You act like a man who doesn’t want a past or a future.”

  I decided he must be feeling his private freight train bearing down on him. But geez, did I have to get on it? “We have two games this weekend,” I answered. “How’s that for a future?”

  He rolled his eyes and skated off to toy with a loose puck, and I skated after him. “So,” I said. “Why do you keep on playing?”

  He laughed out loud. “Because I can. And because” — he jerked the thumb of his glove at Jack, who was across the rink lecturing Junior about something — “somebody has to protect you two clowns.”

  I let that one go, no chippy remarks about the durability of dirigibles or the Michelin Man. I’ve learned to listen to Gord, and not just because he’s the size of a freight train.

  I SIT UP IN bed, cantilever my legs onto the floor. On the birdfeeder I put up outside the bedroom window, two whiskey jacks are arguing over something, stopping now and again to peck at the window so I’ll get up and feed them: one of my smaller plans that’s run amok.

  I dress, find some bread to silence the birds, and I’m back at the Coliseum by ten. Except for a slight pinging in my right ear and an odd sensation between my shoulder blades, I seem to be a reasonable version of myself. My lower back has seized up, but it usually punishes me the morning after a game.

  No one seems to think it’s odd that I’m up and around this morning, acting more or less normal — not Esther at breakfast, not Gord when he arrives at the Coliseum. Hell, even our Newfoundland dog, Bozo, seemed to think I was okay when Esther sent her in to lie on my face to help me wake up.

  I don’t tell Esther how little I remember about the end of the game. If I went around declaring an emergency every time I get a bump on my backside, they’d have named a hospital ward after me a long time ago.

  Gord you’ve met. He’s my winger on the Mohawks, all two hundred sixty pounds of him, and my best friend. Es
ther you might be wondering about. The red hair and Je Reviens perfume in the dressing room last night was hers. She also drove me home in the 4x4 last night — her truck.

  Esther did mention this morning over breakfast that she woke me several times during the night to make sure I wasn’t slipping into a coma, but that’s her standard practice whenever I get whacked hard during a game. Her training as a nurse kicks in, and she sets the alarm so she can flip my eyelids every hour or so. She does it without much to-do. In her mind, it’s part of the deal. My eyeballs must have stayed where they were supposed to, because I woke up in my own bed. If she believes I’m okay, then I’d better act like it.

  Except, really, I don’t feel like it. While Esther and Gord yak, I wander over to look at the display of photographs in the Coliseum lobby. It’s a display of the team photos of each team that won the old Mantua Cup, twenty years of them. I’m probably the first person to look at them for longer than a few seconds in the last ten years.

  There are good reasons why nobody ever looks at these photographs. First off, there hasn’t been a Mantua Cup tournament for twenty-one years. Second, no Mantua team ever won the Cup, and who wants to look at a bunch of scratchy-faced goons from somewhere else when your own town is full of them, live and in living colour.

  And speaking of colour, the idiot who installed the display put tubes of fluorescent light right above the photos. You know what light does to colour photos? After two or three years every uniform turns the same limey yellow, and so do the faces. These photos make it look like Mantua hosted hockey tournaments for teams from outer space.

  That’s not far from the truth, actually. Everywhere I’ve been in the northern part of this country, the hockey arenas are the primary sites for local extraterrestrial activity. Mantua is no better or worse. Most days during the winter, the Coliseum is about as close a glimpse as you can get to alien life without having to be an astronaut. If space aliens walked into Mantua most citizens would simply assume the arena must be closed for the day. If it was a full-fledged UFO invasion, they’d assume there must be a hockey tournament about to start. Not worth stopping the pickup for a look-see either way.