The Last of the Lumbermen Read online

  I tell him about discovering that James Bathgate is my half brother. I half-expect him to tell me he’s known about it for years, but he doesn’t.

  “I’ll be damned,” he says, then laughs out loud. “We should have known that smart mouth of his had to come from some- where nearby. You spoken to your father yet?”

  “He’s out of town right now. Until the weekend.”

  “That’s going to be interesting,” Gord says. “On both sides. I’ve met Claire Bathgate a couple of times. She’s a very strong woman. Nice enough, though. Does the kid have any idea?”

  “Not according to Claire, no. But the way he’d been burning my butt makes me wonder.”

  “Well,” he says, almost wistfully. “Everyone carries their secrets in their own way. You know better than most people how deep that can go. Time for you to use a little of that wisdom you’re always claiming you don’t have. Figure out what the discretions are, and try to do the right thing by them.”

  Gord is staring at me, and it’s apparent that there’s an implicit request in what he’s saying to me. Not the pleading kind, just straight across and straight up. This is about him and Jack, and he wants me to acknowledge it.

  “Well, you know,” I say, grinning helplessly despite the gravity of the moment, “I can’t see a goddamned thing about you that’s any different than it was three days ago. Or Jack, for that matter — aside from having only one knee. Have you talked to him?”

  “They’re doing his knee at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. He’s pretty jittery, but okay. Thanks for asking.”

  I shake my head. There’s something wrong with the way Gord said that, too formal or something, as if I were inquiring about a member of a different species or something. And it’s important that I not let it get by. “Wait a minute, here. Jack’s my fucking friend, too. Just like before. Like always.”

  I catch the twinkle in his eye before I realize what I’ve just said. “No,” he says. “He’s my fucking friend, actually. He’s just your friend.”

  I give him a playful push — it’s like pushing a brick wall — and my chest hurts. “Let’s get out of here,” I say, “before I need another one of your prescriptions.”

  Stan enters the dressing room as we leave the office. “Hey, Weaver,” he says. “Your little pal ain’t as little as he looks.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I followed him out like you asked.”

  “Uh huh. Who picked him up?”

  “That’s just it. Nobody did. He’s got a Ski-Doo parked out back. And when he went past me there wasn’t no adult driving it for him. The little punko was skinning it at about sixty right down the sidewalk.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  OKENOKE, B.C. IS A ninety-kilometre, one-hour road trip from Mantua, across a stretch of post-glacial plateau dotted with small lakes and river valleys cut through by an ice-graded winter road that runs straight as a board from one clearcut valley to the next. I can recall a time — when I was a kid — when it was beautiful, and at this time of year it’s possible to forget how little timber is left behind the fifty-metre strips the government makes the companies leave to fool the tourists.

  Okenoke itself is another story. It was never beautiful, and now it’s a certified shithole, a testament to just how ugly a logging town can get. About thirty-five hundred people live within the city limits, another two- or three thousand more in the surrounding countryside. The hockey games draw a thousand of them most nights.

  About the only notable things you can say about Okenoke are that three generations of a family named Silver have played for the Bears, including their current player-coach, Blacky Silver; that the Silver family isn’t much like the Ratsloffs of Camelot; and that Okenoke is the only place in the world with a hockey cemetery. Blacky Silver’s father donated the cemetery land after the Silvers’ logging operations got bought out by the multinationals a decade ago. The old guy was the first to be buried there, and ever since, the Silver family has been scooping hockey- playing stiffs and reinterring them in their cemetery. As the regional coroner, Gord has been a help. He does it, he says, because it gives people in Okenoke a sense of place. Doesn’t help the forests or keep the locals from spending their vacation time and money in Thailand, where the Silver family bought a hotel after they sold out, but you can’t have everything.

  This particular Friday night in Okenoke, though, a few quite notable things happen. One of them is, well, borderline remarkable: the Mantua Mohawks put a trouncing on the Bears nine to two, and there isn’t a moment in the entire game when the Bears look capable of beating us. Wendel gets four goals, one shorthanded. I put Artie Newman between Gord and Freddy, and they put up four goals and two assists between them. Artie pots three of the goals unassisted, mainly because the Bears become very distracted trying to avoid his two behemoth wingers. Freddy and Gord don’t mind at all. The three of them are so much fun to watch that I forget they’re playing on my line, and that there might be a few objections to breaking them up when I return. Screw them. I’ll play with Wendel.

  The other notables? One is the weather, which begins to warm up Friday morning. By game time the temperature is well into the forties, turning the roads to slush and Okenoke’s crowded little arena into a steam bath.

  Another notable is Freddy Quaw’s uniform, which he’s had someone redesign to fit him. He’s added a dollop of his own design as well. Chief Wahoo now sits inside a circle of white tape, with a strip of red tape across his face. Freddy doesn’t explain the redesign, and no one says anything about it except to laugh. My only comment is that it’s an improvement. I won’t be surprised if Jack, when he returns, doesn’t arrange to have the rest of us do the same thing.

  Gus Tolenti doesn’t disgrace himself. He even gets into a fight when the Bears try to tease him about his white skates and gloves. He’s in front of their bench when they start in on him, but Gus isn’t deterred. “This is hospital issue,” he roars as he wades into them. “You’ll be seeing more of it after I get through with you.”

  He doesn’t do so well once the fight gets going. He takes on their toughest player, a big winger who worked as a faller and knows his way around. He pulls Gus’s sweater over his head and then proceeds to pound him until Freddy grabs him from behind in a bearhug. Freddy’s move is more peacemaking than aggression, and the ref doesn’t even park him for it. But more than anything Gus does by himself is the effect he seems to have on Pat Horricks, the kid I’ve paired him with. Pat plays better than I’ve seen him play outside practice, better than I thought he was capable of. He rushes the puck every chance he gets, and when he does, it doesn’t turn into a breakaway for the Bears as usually happens.

  James does his job, although I have to tell him to shut up a couple of times when he starts giving the gears to the Bears’ players. He takes that well once I point out that he’s working now, and that it’s my job to stand on top of the bench to scream and yell and point out who’s an idiot.

  I stuck him with Bobby Bell for the drive up, but on the way home I put him in the back seat of the Lincoln with Wendel, explaining that it’s my job to make sure he gets home safely. He doesn’t complain, and within ten minutes he’s asleep with his head on Wendel’s shoulder. Ten minutes later he’s in Wendel’s lap, snoring.

  The sight gives Esther a case of the giggles she can’t exactly explain to Wendel, and doesn’t need to explain to me. On the whole, it’s been one hell of an evening. Partly the easy win, partly that Wendel asked to drive up with Esther and I. And the sight of my son in the back seat of my car with his uncle’s head nestled in his lap isn’t something I ever expected to see.

  We win five to three on Sunday afternoon in Camelot. We beat the Roosters pretty much the same way as we beat the Bears, except that this time Gus keeps his nose clean (and intact) and so does everyone else, including all the Ratsloffs. I don’t think the Roosters quite know what to make of us a
fter Freddy knocks Neil Ratsloff cold in the first period. Neil tried to rough him up in the corner, Freddy lashed out an elbow that looked like a sixby-six, and down Neil went without a whimper. After that, it’s the cleanest game I’ve seen in this league for years.

  And in between the two games, I talk to my father for the first time in thirty years.

  KICK ME FOR IT if you want, but I can’t bring myself to call him Saturday morning. I tell myself I don’t know when he arrives back, but that’s a technicality. Some part of me I don’t have any experience arguing with has told me that the next move is his. Hasn’t he known I’m around when I didn’t know he was? Still, I’m not quite convinced. I keep going to the phone and picking it up, then putting it back on the receiver, like a teenager mustering up the courage to phone for a date.

  He calls me. When I get back from grocery shopping with Esther late Saturday morning his voice is on the answering machine, a hesitant, grave tenor that makes me realize I have no private memories of him that haven’t been utterly corroded by the contempt my mother heaped on him after they broke up. And I realize another curious thing: ever since I’ve learned that he’s here in Mantua and still alive, I’ve held back from imagining him.

  “Andy?” the voice on the machine says. It is a voice absolutely without authority, neither quite asking a question or demanding my attention. “This is your father. I arrived back this morning on the plane, and Claire tells me you’d like to see me.”

  There is an excruciatingly long pause before he continues. “I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. And that you seem to have taken James under your wing. Can you call me when you get a moment, so we can set up a time where we can meet face to face?”

  Click. For a moment I stand looking out the window, with Bozo nuzzling my hand and Fang tugging at my pantleg. When I turn around to face Esther, there are tears rolling down my cheeks.

  Esther guides me into the living room and sits me down. Next thing I know, she’s pressing a cup of tea into my hand. But the tears just keep coming, without anything else, no blubbering, not even the familiar constricted throat. Just these strange tears.

  I sit there for fifteen minutes, until Bozo remembers that tears are deliciously salty and begins to slobber all over my face. As abruptly as they took me, they’re gone. I push Bozo gently away, not quite sure if I’m grateful for the intervention, pick up the phone, and dial the number from memory. As I listen to the telephone’s drrrrrup, I realize that the number I’ve just dialed is the only thing in my head. The rest is blank — I have no plan whatever, not even for the formalities on which to coast into this thing. I’m hoping I won’t start blubbering over the phone, that’s all.

  Claire Bathgate answers, which throws me because, well, I’m not sure who — or what — to ask for. Do I ask for “father,” or do I take possession and ask for “my” father? Or is it a stranger named “Ron Bathgate”? All of them, I guess. What did I call him while I was a kid? Dad. But that was nearly thirty years ago, and I haven’t used the word since.

  In those seconds between Claire’s “Hello” and my reply, I go through a virtual lifetime. I see a tableau of my father from a childhood I thought I’d forgotten — looking up at him backlit through a haze of sunlight, a tall, potentially terrible figure who somehow wasn’t ever terrible or frightening but rather a softvoiced warmth with a thick halo of dark hair and large rough hands resting on my shoulders. I recall a view of him from theback window of a car — was it a taxi? — as my mother and I left him.

  I hear my voice ask this question: “Can I speak to my father, please?” Before I speak to him, it is done, over. I’ve taken possession of him, reclaimed him from the long absence.

  His first words confirm the claim. He repeats the words he used on the answering machine: “Andy? This is your father.”

  For an excruciating moment, no words will come. Then they stutter from my lips: “I know. Yes. It is you.” Absurdly, I find myself closer to laughter than to tears. I stop myself, try to compose the tangle of feelings, and succeed so far that I can deliver a single coherent sentence. “I’d like to come out there and see you.”

  “Yes,” he answers. “I’d like that very much. Will you bring your wife and son? I’d like to meet them, too.”

  “Sure, yes.” There’s no way to explain the complexities of the situation to him right now, and no reason to. Esther will come with me, but Wendel is off on his own — plowing his way through the slushy streets on his way, as is James by a different route, to the hockey practice I’m going to skip. “An hour?”

  “That’ll be just fine. I’m looking forward to it.”

  THE THREE HOURS THAT follow are exhilarating, excruciating, illuminating, disappointing. Big words, small events. We shake hands, we embrace, we sit down in chairs, we talk. But the big moment — the true, real one, is the first one, on the telephone. Everything that follows is aftermath, the settling in. I guess that shouldn’t surprise me. The big moments in life never turn out to be dramatic or long. They’re so quick and unexpected that most of the time we miss them and we’re left with the rest of what our lives are made up of. But if we’re lucky enough to catch and appreciate those moments of real life, everything that follows is bigger and wider and richer than it was before. But not, I think, any easier to explain or to live.

  What I’m saying is that after an hour or so of conversation, Claire and Esther are in the kitchen talking up a storm and on the verge of friendship, and my father and I are in the living room talking — and close to arguing — about the wisdom of letting my half brother operate an illegal snowmobile on city streets.

  I’m getting the distinct impression that my father’s attitudes are borderline survivalist, and that he has more in common with Wendel than he has with me. I’m also getting bits and pieces of a very complicated life story from him — cryptic details of the breakup with my mother from his point of view, the alcoholic years, the depth of his gratitude to — and affection for — Claire, the way they’ve brought up James.

  There is no carelessness or neglect there. My father’s survivalism — if that’s what it is — is carefully thought out, but it isn’t fanatical. James has been brought up to take care of him- self, and to understand the machines and tools he uses. My father has planned the trail by which he comes to and from town, he’s gone over it with him on foot, even cleared and leveled stretches of the trail to make it safe. James uses the Ski-Doo in the winter, and in other seasons a dirtbike.

  My father isn’t, of course, aware that James has been bringing the Ski-Doo right into town. He’s supposed to park it in a rented shed near the bridge, and to use the bus system from there. My father hasn’t accounted for how goofy an independent fourteenyear-old can be, maybe because he missed that part of my grow- ing up. We agree that both of us will talk to James about it, and that, between the four of us, we’ll make sure he keeps the Ski-Doo off the streets.

  Will we tell James that I’m his half brother? Yes. When? We set a date for it: Tuesday, after the hockey practice. Esther and I will drive out, and we’ll do it together.

  Explaining the way my life has gone to my father and Claire is harder than listening to them relate their story. Mostly, and graciously, Esther tells it for me. She leaves out the details of the bus accident, which I’ll explain to my father some other time. I’m pretty sure he knows the story, since everyone else seems to. Questions will be asked, answers given. A life stretches out in front of me now, different than I could have imagined ten days ago, much more complicated but infinitely better.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  HOCKEY IS EASY WHEN you’ve just won three games in a row after a semi-permanent losing streak. Even the practices. They’re fun: fundamentals go out the window, and with them goes the nastiness that losing breeds. In the scrimmages you find yourself stunting like the hockey stars you secretly hoped you were, rediscovering the joy of play. That’s what the Mohawks do, and
that’s what I’d be doing — if I weren’t on the DL.

  That’s all I am now that Jack is back: an old guy on the DL. I’ve been relieved of the general manager’s duties, and of Fang, who spent half his time with Esther and I hanging from my pantleg and the rest pestering Bozo and chewing on the furniture. We weren’t exactly unhappy to see him go, even if we did offer to keep him until Jack is mobile.

  He didn’t take us up on the offer. Maybe it was the look on my face, or maybe it was the chewed-up legs of the coffee table. “Gord’s around for a few weeks,” he said. “He can walk the little thug until I’m back to normal.”

  Jack’s in fine form, meanwhile, crabby and cheerful at the same time, glad to be home despite the cast and crutches he’ll have to put up with for the next two months. Gord says the operation was a success, as far as it can be, and Jack’s way of dealing with it is a predictable mix of “one day at a time” and “anyone who makes a cripple joke gets a crutch across the side of the head.” Okay by me. He’s pleased at what I managed to add to the team, and I’m glad to be rid of the problems, Fang included.

  But five minutes into Jack’s first practice James hasn’t yet appeared, and that is a problem. I let it go ten more minutes, then begin to fret seriously. When another fifteen tick by and he still hasn’t showed, I retreat to the dressing room to call Claire Bathgate.

  She picks up the phone on the first ring. “No,” she says, “He left soon enough to get there on time. In fact, he should have been a few minutes early. But the weather, you know …”

  The way her voice trails off triggers my alarm bell. We’re thinking the same thing: the thaw could have made the backwoods trail James uses to get to town treacherous, particularly after last week’s heavy snowfall.

  “Listen,” I say, still stumbling over the awkward nomenclature. “Is Ron … is my father around?”