The Last of the Lumbermen Read online

  THE SNOW HAS STOPPED falling, and with the skies already cleared by a southward-bound cold front the temperature is plummeting. No matter. The east side of the heavens are star-filled, only slightly dimmed by the pink glow of neon from Mantua. The moon is rising in the southwest, the direction we’re going, and it is bath- ing the poplar meadows in brilliant silver light. To the north, there’s the faintest traces of the Northern Lights — Aurora Borealis. It’s a pretty sight, and the snow muffles every sound. The new snow has settled a little, and beneath it is a full metre of compacted snow with a slight crust on it from last week’s thaw.

  The moment we clear the backyard both of us abandon the trail and head out in our own directions. Bozo proceeds with great pouncing leaps that leave her, each time, shoulder deep in snow. If I used her method of locomotion I’d be done in a hundred metres, but I’ve seen her keep this up for hours. Even with the snowshoes it isn’t easy going for me, and my brain begins to empty with the effort. With each snowshoe I plant, there is a swish-crunch as the powder billows away and the snowshoe’s wood and webbing cracks the lower crust and sinks another few inches. I listen, and the rhythm empties me.

  By the time our half hour is up, the dog and I are a kilometre from the house, still outward bound. I’m as much working my way into the tangle of new facts in my life as into this winter landscape, but Bozo is in paradise. My track is straight, meandering only to catch the easiest topography and stay out of the dense stands of poplars, human in the respect that, even here, it’s going someplace. Bozo’s trail is a zigzag that intersects sociably every hundred metres or so with mine as she checks in. I can feel the cold against my face, making my cheeks feel thicker than they are, but there’s no threat in this kind of cold, no hid- den bite, no life-sucking chill. It’s simply there, a precise and inviting cold, and I accept its invitation.

  I LEFT THE HOUSE to escape, really. It wasn’t just the talk of the tournament, it’s the whole spooky package looming over me — the past pressing in, the present doing the same, right down to tommorow’s game with the Roosters. I need this emptiness so I can find some sort of balance.

  No, I’m not a very Zen kind of guy. Despite the perfect conditions, finding that balance is a battle. While I’m breaking trail it slips toward it, but after a hundred or two metres that pinging in my chest returns. So I flip-flop, following the the easier trail I made days ago, then back to breaking trail. The irritable conversation with myself goes on and on.

  And what’s the conversation about? Not what you’d expect. I recall what started me snowshoeing several years ago, not long after I moved into this house with Esther. I’d lived by myself for years, and for a time being around one person every day crowded me. With Esther being who and what she is I didn’t feel crowded for long, but I’ve kept up the snowshoeing. The dog loves it and it keeps me from having to buy a snowmobile, or ever having to go skiing.

  Well, I’m sorry. I don’t like snowmobiles, and I don’t ski. Why? Too much hot-dogging and high speed. I know, hockey has both of those. Maybe I get enough there. But snowshoeing, that’s the opposite end of the universe. When your shoes are a metre and a half long, looking like a clown is easy. But it won’t turn you into an asshole. You’re on your own, the technology is minimal, there’s no judges to mark form and there are no safety supervisors reminding you to stay inside their boundaries. You’re nose to nose with the elements, you have to pay attention to what’s in front of you and what you’ve got inside of you — meaning you have to respect your limits and nature’s signals. If you’re not up to that you’ll pack in your snowshoes in fifteen minutes, because the payoffs are subtle.

  When conditions are good and your head is in the right space, you bond with winter, almost. I say “almost” because if you do bond fully, you’re a popsicle — just like if you bond with summer you’re a skin cancer patient. I prefer winter. It’s the only season in which you can go everywhere, and the colder it gets, the heavier the snowpack, the better. A forest you couldn’t struggle your way through during summer without a chainsaw and a gallon of mosquito dope becomes a stroll through the park when the snow is two metres deep.

  I snowshoe alone, always, except for Bozo. Esther isn’t much for the great outdoors. She never misses a hockey game, but she leaves me to nature. She knows I’m not going to get my head smashed against a sheet of plexiglass, and she’s learned I’m not one for getting myself lost. And of course, it counts for something that while I’m out snowshoeing she knows I’m not hanging around bars getting drunk and watching the strippers, which is what most guys my age do for recreation.

  With tonight’s bright moonlight I alternate, going on- and off-trail, letting the inner talk return for a while on the easier going, then pushing it back out by breaking trail. When the trail I made days ago runs out, I keep going until, at the top of a long, upward slope, I stop and squat down on my shoes, nearly emptied of thought — and feel the conversation restart. Ah well. I’ve got things I ought to be talking to myself about.

  Out here though, it’s hard to fuss — except about Bozo, who has gotten nearly two hundred metres directly ahead, chasing a rabbit she’s flushed. I reach into my pocket and pull out the dog whistle. A single, inaudible-to-me burst brings her to a halt. Reluctantly, she lets the rabbit disappear into the trees and, lying down in the snow, waits for me to come to her. It’s her way of complying without quite obeying.

  We tramp across the wide bowl of an open meadow side by side, and at the next hilltop find ourselves looking to the south along a gentle slope of mixed poplar and pine as pretty as a Christmas card. At the bottom of it, a half kilometre away, is the construction site of the university campus. We’ve come more than four kilometres.

  Under the blanket of new-fallen snow, the site looks like a Christmas card too. But the reality — I feel a mental hiccup as the conversation kicks to life again — is the usual pipe dream. I remind myself that beneath this particular Christmas card lies Mantua’s current version of the monorail and the power dams, and, except for the smaller scale, this one is as big a fiasco as the others. When the campaign to get it built began, the project boosters blew it up like it would make Christmas every day for Mantua: business as usual in the North.

  Stillness, stillness is what you came for. Stillness is all. And inside it I see the pattern of things: light and dark, mud and snow, brainlessness and graceful beauty. Where am I in this?

  I’m at home, one of the idiots. I’m cut from the same cheap cloth as everyone here. But there’s something else, as of today. I’m now implicated in this mess as much as it’s possible to be: not just a procurer and producer but a father, like my father before me — wherever the poor drunken sonofabitch may be.

  I’d like to stay here on this hilltop and enjoy these airy thoughts, but this isn’t a country that lets you have those kinds of luxuries for very long. A whiff of sulphur from the pulp mills, carried southwest on the cold front, reminds me of where it is I live. So does the cold beginning to penetrate the wool that protects me. My nose is running, and Bozo is snuffling impatiently at my mitts, wanting to get on with it. She doesn’t care which way we go, but she thinks it’s time to move.

  On the way back the moonlight is at my back, and the winter-whitened trunks of the poplars are a ghostlier silver than I can remember, etched with ebony where the young boughs have withered and broken off. Prettier than a Christmas card, even if doesn’t smell anything like Christmas. Maybe that’s what I came here to figure out: that I can’t stand still.

  It’s after midnight by the time we arrive back at the house. Esther and Wendel are sitting at the kitchen table with pads of foolscap, furiously making lists. Esther looks up at me as I enter and smiles. She’s unperturbed by my long absence, her mind evidently — thankfully — on other things. I hope it isn’t a hockey tournament. But if it is, I can imagine worse things.

  Just barely.

  FOURTEEN

  THE
THREE OF US sat up until after two AM talking about the tournament.

  We talked about it, sure, but agreed? Not bloody likely. By the time I got back to the house Esther had bought into Wendel’s enthusiasm, and I was outnumbered and outgunned. So they brainstormed about how to reinvent the Mantua Cup tournament — already real in their minds — and I offered them arguments why what they were suggesting was impractical, ill-advised, and goofy. When that didn’t deflate their enthusiasm, I went to impossible, suicidal, and deranged.

  Nothing I said deterred them. It was like discussing how to soft-boil eggs with a steamroller — in this case, two steamrollers. Esther and Wendel rolled over whatever dish I served up, crunch, crunch, crunch.

  The next morning, I can hear Wendel snoring on the couch while I make some scrambled eggs. He’s inherited a version of his mother’s gift for sound sleep, except that his sound sleep could drown out a band saw. Bozo is outside somewhere on dog business, having wolfed down her breakfast and splashed most of the contents of her water dish across the kitchen floor.

  I’m not expecting Esther in the kitchen. She likes to be awakened Sunday morning by breakfast in bed, and I rarely get a word out of her before her stomach has fully communed with a steaming cup of black coffee.

  When the eggs are ready I shut off Wendel’s sawmill imitation by putting my hand over his open mouth. On cue, his eyes pop open. “Breakfast, chum,” I tell him. “Serve yourself.”

  He staggers into the kitchen behind me to watch me load a tray with orange juice, black coffee, and a second plate of eggs for Esther. She snaps awake the moment I sit down on the bed next to her, smiles, and sits up. I prop a couple of pillows behind her back while she settles the tray in front of her, sips a first and second draught of coffee, then samples the eggs, all without a word. Talked herself out last night, I guess.

  Okay by me. I return to the kitchen, where I shovel the remainder of the scrambled eggs onto a plate, top up my coffee, and sit down across from Wendel, who is emptying a nearly full bottle of ketchup across his eggs. He’s as silent as his mother, but without the smile.

  Game time is one-thirty, so there’s no need to hurry. It’s almost ten before Esther wanders out and orders me into the bedroom.

  “What for?” I ask, mainly for Wendel’s benefit.

  “Your back, silly. I’m not letting you out of here until I’ve worked out those kinks I found yesterday.”

  Wendel ignores us, too busy shoveling mouthfuls of a second batch of ketchup and eggs he’s made for himself into his mouth.

  It’s amazing the way normality asserts itself. Every and any crisis we go through — short of actually dying — attaches itself to whatever live normalities it grows from, and weaves itself into the fabric. Yesterday’s revelations — Esther’s confession and my accidental discovery about Wendel — are already normal. This morning and its specific priorities — breakfast, preparation for the game — don’t leave enough room for the crisis to go on clamouring for attention. The real world has ordered it into the back seat and told it to shut up unless spoken to. It’s as if the past is the child of the present, not its parent. Life is going to go on. Sometime in the near future I’ll have to figure out how to make a clean breast of things, but not right now. Maybe, like this morning, the three of us will eat scrambled eggs together when that secret is gone. I sure as hell hope so. This morning, anything seems possible.

  ESTHER DROPS ME OFF at the arena around noon, and wanders off on some errand of her own. She’ll be back at the Coliseum by game time even though she’s long since stop watching the warmups. Too many chilly early mornings years ago helping Wendel lace up his skates, I guess.

  Wendel, never one to hang around in the morning, left the house while Esther was still working over my back. By the time I get to the Coliseum dressing room he’s there, suited up, and he’s lacing on his skates all by himself. Gord and most of the other players have arrived and are in various states of readiness.

  Jack breezes in from the direction of the ice, still in his civvies, frowning. “Gonna be a rough one today,” he says. “The Roosters stayed out of the bars last night.”

  This is not good news. The Roosters are much easier to play when they’re hung over. They’re not any nicer or any less owly, but they’re slower. Chances are the Old Man lowered the boom on them after what happened in Okenoke Friday night.

  “They’ll take it out on us,” Bobby Bell whines from across the room.

  “Maybe you should practise your diving instead of doing your normal warm-up,” Gord answers.

  He doesn’t mean this entirely as a joke. We’re neither the biggest nor the bravest team in the NSHL. On a good night we’ll hold our own against the Bears or the Stingers, but the Roosters, like I said, are different. They have a nasty habit of skating with their sticks at jugular height while they’re not carrying the puck, and more than one player on our team has found himself spitting out his own teeth after forgetting it.

  So that’s what we’re thinking about in the dressing room: getting slashed, cross-checked, crushed, splattered, splayed, beaten up. Except Gord, who has this dreamy look in his eyes, like he’s thinking something serene and Buddhist. With him, you never know.

  THE PRE-GAME WARM-UP IS uneventful, meaning that none of the Roosters crosses the red line to beat on us. As I line up for the opening face-off, Godin, the referee, delivers a speech to Neil Ratsloff and I that makes it sound like we’re about to begin one of those twelve-man over-the-ropes wrestling matches, not a hockey game. Or maybe it’s boxing he’s thinking of, probably because Neil is standing across the circle giving me the old Sonny Liston stare-down. I wait for Godin to finish.

  “I don’t know why you’re telling me this,” I grin at him. “Tell that crazy sonofabitch. I’m just here to play hockey.”

  Godin rolls his eyes and drops the puck. I swipe it backward to my left and step aside as Ratsloff rolls through the spot I’ve just vacated. Bobby Bell takes the puck, pulls it toward his body momentarily, then, from just beyond our blueline, flicks it ahead to Jack, who is skating, not very fast, toward the Rooster blueline. Jack plays the puck off his skate onto his stick and crosses the blueline without looking up. Then he does something very uncharacteristic: he veers toward the slot, still holding the puck.

  Jack doesn’t see JoMo Ratsloff coming at him until the last second. When he tries to deke left to avoid a collision, JoMo, the oldest and dirtiest of the Roosters, splays his big knees wide and pumps forward, catching Jack’s right knee flush. Jack goes down, sliding though the left face-off circle in a heap, with the puck underneath him.

  It’s no dive. He’s hurt. I spin around, looking for Godin, but his back is turned, and, interestingly, his head is down. He’s examining his whistle as if he thinks the pea has dropped out.

  Gord doesn’t wait for Godin. He drops his right glove as he crosses the blueline, skates a couple of steps and plants his bare fist in the middle of JoMo’s grin as he comes out of the spinaround. The punch connects with a “whup” that sounds like someone kicking an empty cardboard box, and down goes JoMo on his backside. He doesn’t move except for the blood spurting from his ruined nose.

  A few seconds later I’m waltzing around the ice with Neil Ratsloff, who is doing all the usual dance steps, along with one I haven’t seen before. He keeps lifting me off the ice and shaking me like a wolf would a rabbit. It’s annoying, but he could just as easily be pounding my skull against the ice. Jimmy Ratsloff makes a half-hearted lunge at Gord, but Gord catches his arm as he comes in, spins, and flings him toward the net. Everyone else is dancing too, except the goalies. The moment Gord clobbered JoMo, Lenny Nakamoto went kiyiing down the ice to pair up with Junior. Junior, as usual, isn’t having any of it, and is playing peekaboo with Lenny around our net. JoMo is still out cold, and Old Man Ratsloff is soft-shoeing across the ice toward him with a towel and a bucket of ice.

  “I don�
��t know why the fuck I have to play against you,” Neil is grumbling, looking very much like he’d rather make a run at Gord, who is now bending solicitously over Jack.

  “Why don’t you go for it?” I suggest. “Die young.”

  This time Neil does take a swing at me, but I duck the punch and lean on him, Muhammad Ali-style. I’m lucky enough to get hold of both his burly arms, and I bury my face in his sweater and try to push him toward the boards. Just as I’m about to lose my grip I hear Old Man Ratsloff yell his name, and Neil stops flailing at me.

  “Let’s cut this shit,” I say. “Jack is hurt.”

  Neil lets go of me without a word and grabs Dickie Pollard, one of our defencemen who normally just heads for the bench the moment there’s a fight. Gord is motioning for Geezo Williams, our trainer, to come onto the ice, but Geezo is standing on the bench, motioning Fred Milgenberger out of the stands. Fred is a doctor, and I see him begin to move across the benches to the walkway.

  The look on Jack’s face alone convinces me. He’s as white as a sheet, grimacing, and pawing at his right knee. “Jesus, Jesus,” he groans, and gazes up into Gord’s concerned face. “That’s it for me. I’m gone for the season, done.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Gord says, not sounding very convincing. “You took one hell of a whack on your knee there. Maybe you can skate it off.”

  Jack struggles to get up, but Gord recognizes that it’s too painful and plants his big fist in the middle of Jack’s chest to keep him down.

  Jack closes his eyes, lets out a wail, and opens one eye. This time he’s looking at me, knowing I have a glass head. I shrug and turn away. I heard the ligaments go, and I can’t hide it as well as Gord can.

  Geezo and Milgenberger take over, and Gord and I skate to the corner to confer.

  “It’s bad,” I say.

  Gord nods. “You wanna coach, or do I have to?”