by Ron Thompson
It was a rambling riddle, this speech, one more rhetorical flourish from a man whose eyes saw nothing now, for he hadbeen blind as a bat since the previous winter. And although he lived for another two years, it was his final great oration. Henever again left the reserve, not even for the Poplar Lake Fair, for the following year, elements of the Orange Lodge took control of the organizing committee and put an end to Violet’s progressive experiments, all that cavorting with Jews and Catholics, with savages and foreigners. The Cree still held a powwow on the opening day but there were those who grumbled even about that.
Thus the 1911 event was the most famous of the early fairs, and Sol Bugelmann made a killing at his hospitality tent, where he sold cold drinks and jerky, pemmican, and gefilte fish, all purchased locally, mostly from the reserve, for he always did what he could to help the Cree. Uncharacteristically for Sol, the tent was dry. There was not a drop of alcohol available, even out back, even for the most trusted of the town’s drunks. This fact did not escape notice, for his soft spot for Violet was well known.
“And who knows,” I concluded. “Had he won Violet’s heart, he might never have become a bootlegger. He might have only snuck around and tippled, as married men do. A lot of men give up everything for the woman they love. Look at Edward and Mrs Simpson, or Anthony and Cleopatra. Look at me and you . . .”
* * *
Genny gasped and stopped in her tracks. “That’s hogwash! What kingdom have you given up? You were bored at Commonwealth Atlantic and you know it! You hated doing derivatives. You wanted to come to Africa.”
I was taken aback myself. I had just been prattling on with my story, and suddenly, that had come out of my mouth.
I looked at Genny and found her watching me intently. “You’re having second thoughts,” she said. Her eyes were suddenly misty. “You wanted to come with me . . .”
Lord above, I thought. Do I have the jelly to commit to her? To stand by her? Or will I shrug and let her slip away? Will I fail her too? I stood looking at her for the longest time, deciding what to say.
“I am coming with you.”
She brushed below each eye and studied my face. “Come on,” I said, taking her hand. We walked in silence. What if I told her what I was thinking? About what I had and had not done; what I was capable of. What if she knew about my serial failures as a human being? What would she think of me then? Would she stand by me? Or walk away, realizing at last that I was beyond redemption. I flinched at the thought and inadvertently tightened my grip on her hand. She squeezed back, and when I looked at her, she smiled tentatively. I smiled back, thinking, Genny—maybe. We walked on in silence.
“Would you like to get something to drink? A coffee or tea? A soda?”
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s find a place.” We walked on together in silence.
“You were talking about the fair. That it always started with a powwow.”
“It did. Until the government banned them.”
“What? They banned powwows?
“Just out here in the west.”
“But where else do they have powwows?”
“They didn’t actually ban them per se. Nativ—ah, Ind-dd—a-a-aborrr—uhm. The people who lived on reserves could hold them there, but they couldn’t hold them off-reserve without permission.”
Genny dropped my hand. “From the ‘Great White Mother!’”
“Father, by then. The churches pressed for it. They thought powwows and dancing were distractions. They wanted the ‘natives’ to stay on their reserves and work.”
I had made a show with my now-free hands of placing ‘natives’ in quotes. Genny shook her head and grumbled darkly about pettiness and racism, and what was this but apartheid, pure and simple.
Well, I thought, that’s a bit harsh. Soon we would be in southern Africa, on the doorstep of an actual apartheid regime that was clinging viciously to power. There, we were bound to see real racism.
* * *
We continued past the cattle and horse barns, the exhibition halls, the bleachers, the long oval track where chuck wagons raced for a week every year. Genny was in a reflective mood.“You haven’t been sleeping,” she said at last.
“What? Why do you say that?”
“I know you’re lying awake.”
“Too much coffee, I guess.” I pointed towards a building at the edge of the fairgrounds. “That’s the arena over there, and the field beyond it is where we used to play football—”
“No, it’s not coffee. It’s being here, home, in Poplar Lake. It must be strange, after so long. What was it really like?” She pointed at the ground. “I mean, here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, back then.” Back then.
Well, after the hardship of the pioneer years, finally, there was Progress. It was not dispensed by a benevolent God, nor bestowed by a politician. It came from the people themselves. People worked hard, they banded together—
“No, no, no. You know what I mean. More recently. There were hard times. I can tell. You haven’t told me about them, but I can tell there were. There had to be.”
The Thirties. Out here, it was not the crash on Wall Street that destroyed lives. It was not the collapse of global trade or eastern manufacturing. It was the drought, the wind, the elements. It was swarms of locusts, sawflies, and grasshoppers, the blight of stem rust, scab, and smut. A pestilence was visited upon the land. The Bread Basket became the Dust Bowl. Productive land became desert, its fertile soil dissipated, blown away, its bounty spent, its fruits withered in the earth—
“Every time I ask, you tell me a story from the old days, or start talking about football. It’s all interesting, I mean the history, not the football, but you don’t tell me what it was like for you. Tell me. Tell me what it was like. I want to know.”
* * *
There was a sense of security. We roamed the streets and played our games in mobs. Summer, winter, in between, we got into the usual tussles. My brothers looked out for me when I was little, I’ve told you all that before.
“When you were older,” Genny prompted impatiently. When I was older and they were off somewhere, my parents insisted I join some activities on my own. “It’ll bring you out of your shell,” my mother said of them. In Grades Seven and Eight, I ran track and cross country. Sometimes I played pick-up shinny with Victor. And I played football, which I’d played for as long as I could remember.
The year I entered Grade Nine, Clinton Sturgis came to town. We became friends, and that fall I persuaded him to sign up for nine man football. The previous year, I had played six man flag, which involved few practices and required no equipment;but at age fourteen, the game got serious. It was full contact now, and it required full equipment, which was fine for me, because there was plenty of used gear around my house, enough to suit me up and Clinton as well.
The league was for fourteen and fifteen year olds, and there were four teams, all coached by volunteers from town. We practiced and played on the fields next to the arena. We used the arena dressing rooms over there (I pointed for Genny’s benefit) and hauled our gear home every day.
Clinton and I were assigned to the Bisons, coached by Mr Hardcastle, the owner of a local accounting firm. He was big, burly, and blonde, a ruddy-faced man whose face went redder still when he shouted at his players—which was often. He was known as Hardcastle the Hardass because he was tough—tough but fair, Victor said. Victor had played for him for a year before graduating to the high school team in Grade Ten, an exceptional athletic achievement (one of Victor’s many), for only the best made the Lakers before Grade Eleven.
Although I was klutzy and uncoordinated when I was little, my years of training at the hands of my brothers had borne fruit. I understood the game, and I could catch, and I had a good arm. So did Clinton, and we both got look-see tryouts at quarterback. The coaches were impressed w
ith Clinton. “You work hard, you listen to us, and you can start in this league,” the Hardass told him. “But not this year.”
In the first few practices we cycled through every position. We were both too small for the line, but we could both catch; Clinton had a better sense of the open hole, but I was faster. He became a starting receiver and backup quarterback, while I became a defensive safety and backup receiver. It meant I would see two-way action in most games. I would also get to return punts, which was no different than playing with my brothers, what with everyone chasing me and piling on all at once.
* * *
“Baby? You’re doing it again.”
“What?”
“It’s becoming a long anecdote about football.”
“Sorry. I guess it is. Nothing much happened when I was a kid. It was—”
“Yes, I know, I know. Idyllic. It couldn’t be. No town is. Not every day. I could tell you stories about Antigonish.”
We crossed the football field and headed for town. “What about Antigonish?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s a long story.” She laughed but it sounded forced. We walked on together, lost in our own thoughts.
* * *
Before our first game, we had two weeks of practice, three times a week after school as well as Saturday afternoons. The Hardass drove us hard, with laps and push-ups for punishment and plenty of contact in scrimmage. “It’s gotta hurt the other guy more than you!” he’d bellow. “Knock ‘em flat!” He smoked a cigar during practice, puffing blue smoke as he shook his head in dismay. “What was that? Hit like a man, not a girl!” he’d shout. “In the numbers! Pull him down!”
We got better. After our last practice, a Saturday, he came into the gap between the change room and the showers, and blew smoke into the steam rising from the tiles. “You ladies ready?”
“Yeah!” we shouted.
“I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”
“YEAH!” we roared.
“Then are you ready for THIS?” He pulled a jersey from a box and held it up. It was brand new, blue with white trim, a buffalo on each shoulder, a number on the chest. He flipped itover to show the number on the back below a giant HARDCASTLE that stretched shoulder to shoulder.
“YEAH!” we roared again. We were gelling at just the right time, and now we would start the season with new uniforms. The Hardass had paid for them himself. We crowded around, dripping on the floor, self conscious in our nakedness as he tossed out sweaters.
“Who wants fifteen?” he called, pulling a sweater from a box. “Weasel!” he said, throwing it to Clinton. He had nicknames for everyone. Clinton’s was Weasel, Reggie Lafleur’s was Frog, mine was Buttcrack.
Once the season began we played one game a week and had three practices. The Hardass continued to push us hard, and after the main practice he stayed late to work with the rookies on offense. That was when Clinton got to be quarterback, with the coach observing and giving him pointers on his throwing dynamics and play selection. I ran patterns, still hoping to crack the offense as more than a backup, and Mr Hardcastle gave me pointers, too. I got better at the mechanics of the game, at reading the flow of a play. I learned when to abandon the pattern and just get free, and when to come back to the quarterback if he was forced to scramble. Afterwards, Clinton and I rode our bikes home in the dusk, the straps of our duffel bags digging into our shoulders, taunting each other about flubbed throws and passes bobbled anddropped. That season Clinton was our leading receiver and got in at quarterback in the fourth quarter, and I scored three touchdowns, one on offense and two on defense. The Hardcastle Bisons went three and three and placed third in the league. We won our playoff against the second place team, the Stag Billiards Gophers, but lost in the final to the Altarboys, who were stacked with Grade Tens who would be too old to play in the league next season.
The Saturday following that game, the Hardass threw a party for us at his office downtown. He bought colas and root beer, chips and hotdogs, and we watched Super 8 movies shot by his assistant. The footage ran from the early practices to the championship game. We wisecracked and howled when someone fell or got hit or dropped a sure one. When a player broke one for a big gain we cheered as though it were live on TV. Reggie Lafleur ate nine hotdogs before he puked, and we all laughed so hard our sides hurt. For the first time in my life I felt like I belonged.
When the party was winding down, Hardass stood in our midst with a cigar clutched in his oversized mitt and gave us his final motivational speech. “Work on what I told you to work on in the off-season. Stay out of trouble, study hard, and most important of all . . . for your own sake . . .” He paused and stabbed a finger at the crowd. “Stay away from girls!” We all booed and he grinned and took a pull on his cigar. “Okay, forget that last part! See you next fall, boys, if you don’t make the Lakers. You better hope you don’t. We’re going to win it all next year!” We all knew that losing to the Altarboys had grated on him. They were the de facto farm team for St Vitalis, the town’s Catholic high school, whose Martyrs were the Lakers’ archrivals. The Altarboys were coached by the Hardass’s nemesis, Father Agricola of the Church of the Immaculate Conception.
* * *
That season had been amazing but the feeling I’d had at the party, like I belonged, did not last long. It ended when the season did. My teammates remained nodding acquaintances but not real friends. They moved on to other sports and activities, and Mr Hardcastle himself transitioned without letup from football to hockey. He sponsored and coached the town’s Junior B team, the Ice Dogs. For ten straight years the Dogs had been contenders for the regional championship. They had won it four times. Several of his players had graduated to Junior A, and a couple of them even made it to the pros.
His success had made him something of a celebrity in town. “He seems like a wonderful man,” my mother told Clinton’s over tea in our kitchen. It was a Thursday night, and Mrs Sturgis had just arrived home and dropped in to say hello. Her work often took her out of town, and although she left meals for Clinton when she was away, my mother had started inviting him to eat with us. “He drives himself as hard as his players,” Mom said. “Look how he goes from one sport to the other. But have you noticed the colour of his face? I’ll bet his blood pressure’s through the roof. That man should lose some weight. For his own sake.”
“And for Mrs Hardcastle’s,” Mrs Sturgis said, and Mom tilted her head back and laughed. Mrs Sturgis laughed too, but must have sensed I was standing in the doorway, for she glanced up and met my eye, and when I blushed, her grin faded from sharea-bawdy-chuckle with a friend to a gently sympathetic smile for a child.
That winter, after school, Clinton and I played pick-up shinny or went one-on-one against each other at the neighbourhood rink. Even after his breakout season with the Bisons he was a loner like me. He didn’t feel the need to be popular or the coolest in the room; yet there was something about him. He was the coolest, without even trying.
Some days we played handball in his unfinished basement; orwe listened to music at full blast, the house empty but for us. His friends in other cities, the places he had lived, sent him punk tapes, fantasy comic books, and graphic novels, things we couldn’t get in Poplar Lake. He lent them to me, and I shared my Classics Illustrated in return, feeling inadequate in the exchange, but he read them all with interest. His favourites were A Tale of Two Cities and The Count of Monte Cristo. He liked the clash of themes: redemption versus vengeance. We argued about which was more satisfying. Then we debated who was better, Vicious or Rotten? Brando or Dean? Butch or Sundance? Farrah Fawcett or Wonder Woman?
Through that winter and into the following year, he ate with us whenever his mother was away.
CHAPTER 13
“Tell me about your First Love!” Genny had demanded playfully, more than once. She would nudge me, as if this were something we might chuckle over, a trivial detail from some meaningless trip. But tha
t was too much for me. There are things that should stay private, places that remain yours and no one else’s; memories you don’t reveal, even to the one you love today.
Maybe because you love her; or maybe because you are incapable of love—incapable, because you are incomplete. You recognize this in yourself. You see it in your hollow heart, and you worry that you will try anyway, despite yourself, and only fail; and hurt her in the end.
I had distracted her with historical yarns and football stories. Once I had turned her First Love question back on her, and she had gotten flustered and babbled something vague before changing the subject. There, I thought. Who did you love, and how did it end? How did it work out for you?
I had no desire to pursue the question. She was entitled to her memories. I had no right to them—nor she to mine. But her questions had triggered thoughts I had suppressed for years, memories still painful and shameful and complicated; and now they jostled for attention in my mind. Late that night I lay awake, remembering what it felt like when everything in the world was fresh and exciting and confusing all at once. Genny was right about one thing. Not everything had revolved around football.
But speaking of football: the year I entered Grade Ten at Poplar Lake Regional High, Clinton and I both tried out for the Lakers, the school team, and were cut within a week. Coach Blucher told us there was no shame in playing nine man for another year. You’ll get more playing time, he said. Who do you play for? He nodded at Mr Hardcastle’s name. He’s a fine coach. Really understands the game. You can learn a lot from him that’ll help you here. Come back next year, fellas. There’ll be a place for you then.
Coach Blucher made getting cut sound like a good thing. There were only three Grade Tens who made the team. Reggie Lafleur was the only one from the Bisons.
We were Bison veterans now, and because last year’s quarterback had moved up to the Lakers, Clinton had a shot at being the starter. He made good of it; before the end of our first week back the Hardass tagged him as his Number One. I was pegged as starting safety, and so I no longer practiced with the offense, but I hung around to catch for Clinton whenever he stayed late to drill with the coach. Mr Hardcastle didn’t seem to mind. He worked us both hard and gave me tips on the patterns I ran. “Okay, coach. Thank you,” I responded the first night. Afterwards Clinton and I rode home on our bikes in the gathering dusk, Clinton mocking me on the way with, “Oh, thank you, coach. Thank you! Thank you!” I told him where to go and ended up laughing along with him.