by Chuck Crabbe
Please complete the enclosed questionnaire and have a copy of your high school transcripts sent to us. In addition, please have your coach send us a game film as soon as possible.
Sincerely,
Brian Kelly
Head Football Coach
Sir Wilfred Laurier University
Other letters came from some of the smaller programs in the United States. They dangled the possibility of athletic scholarships in front of Canadian players who were offered none at home. One of his teachers at school brought up the possibility that he wouldn't be able to go to school across the border because of his criminal record.
On a cold night at the end of November, Belle River lost their league championship thirty-one to seven. The night before Coach Walsh had called him at home to tell him that the Windsor Star wanted to do a story on him for the weekend paper.
That December he sent out applications to the writing programs at three different Ontario universities: The University of Toronto, Sir Wilfred Laurier, and The University of Windsor. Of the three, the idea of attending school in Toronto appealed to him most. He had no desire to go to Windsor and stay at home, but Windsor had the lowest academic requirements and Elsie told him that he had better apply there just in case. The main reason he applied to Laurier was because they had sent him a highlight film from their previous seasons and it looked like they had a high power passing game, but he knew nothing about the school other than that they offered writing.
TRANSMUTATION
In the months after Christmas he backed away from his victories on the football field and wrestled with the art he had taken up. He did not understand it. The first mistake he made was believing that each time he sat down to write he could get much more done than he actually could. As soon as he started working he would try to put every mad idea he had down on paper. He would do this for the first half hour or so, and then, looking back at what he'd written, he would see that it was full of plot problems and didn't make proper sense. Would he ever be able to complete anything of quality? His patience wore thin. When he really looked at the words he found no firm ground on which to stand. How was one supposed to know when something should begin and when it should end? Or what, exactly, should be left out or included? Every bit of dialogue he wrote seemed wooden and full of clichés, so he began to read plays to try to understand how to write conversation. When he watched movies he paid close attention to the way the actors spoke to each other and tried to remember that everything they said had once been words on a piece of paper. Sometimes even poorly written words, even the wrong words, sounded good if they came from the right actor. Had those words ever sounded as hollow as his did when he read them back to himself?
Sometimes, while he wrote, he came to problems in his plot, or ideas for which he had no solution. Again, he had no patience, so he would rack his brains at his desk in his bedroom, pulling at his hair and wringing his shirt until he had tied himself in such knots that he was ready to put his fist through the wall. But over time he found that solutions did come. Mostly the answers came a day or two later when he was doing something besides writing, like walking with his headphones on or shoveling the snow off their long driveway. They came, however, when they wished to, not when he, in his vanity, demanded them.
After he finished a story he would try to read it like someone reading it for the first time, but he could not. He would stare at the words and the way they were strung together and play out the way they sounded, sometimes silently and sometimes out loud. There were days he hated them, but other times, when he read something out loud, he was certain that he had created something beautiful, and that there was something great and mighty in him.
So Ezra went on in this way, writing night after night and then becoming so full of spite and frustration for what he had created that he would quit for days or even weeks. But always something pulled him back to his task, and he would try again with fresh hope, a hope he would then marry to the fear that threatened to tear his heart asunder.
Late that spring Elsie gave birth to a baby girl. She was big and healthy and they named her Diana Marie. As soon as they heard that their sister was in labor, Olyvia and Sarah left Walpurgis and drove to Belle River together. The whole thing lasted just over twenty hours, mostly because Elsie had to argue with the doctor over the caesarian section he was trying to convince her to have. Overtly, the reasons for the section were her age and the problems there had been with her first baby's health, but Elsie was not one to accept a doctor's opinion just because it was a doctor giving it. She spoke with Ariadne, who was a midwife after all and who knew that pregnancy was not a medical condition, about the reality of the risks the doctor was presenting to her, and soon decided that they were just phantoms.
As happy as she had been to be having a baby there had been times during her pregnancy when she had feared the moment when she would first hold the child. She worried that her joy would, in some way, be a betrayal of the little baby boy she had lost, that her happiness would make her a traitor to her sorrow. Her other concern was that Ezra and Layne would feel displaced because she had a child of her own now. She had, for all purposes, been their mother, and for over ten years it had been just the two of them. But when they handed her the baby girl she did not feel any of these things. She looked into the baby's shining eyes and felt that everything had been resolved. Shortly after she had given birth, Ezra and Layne and everyone else came into her room. The two brothers took turns holding the baby and Elsie saw that they were excited and proud to have a little sister. Sometimes, despite our fears, our past, and everything we do to get in our own way, moments take care of themselves
Just two hours after she had given birth Elsie decided that it was time to go home. The doctors warned her against this too, but intuitively she knew everything would be fine this time. Gord gathered her things and she signed the necessary documents. Olyvia carried little Diana Marie.
"I'm looking for Elsie Mignon's room." The voice came from behind them at the nurses' station. Elsie recognized it at once, but even as she recognized it she did not believe it. She spun round and the nurse looked past the well-built old man with Brillcream in his silver hair, and made eye contact with her.
"Dad?" she said, half calling him and half in disbelief. Her voice and the strange word it shaped drew everyone's attention and they all saw Harold Mignon, who had abandoned his daughters after his wife had died, who had barricaded himself within the walls of his vineyard these many years, and who just that summer had come to know his grandson.
For a moment the group stood away from him, and then Elsie, once the shock of seeing him had worn off, walked over and hugged him cautiously. The rest of them followed behind her with Olyvia, still holding the baby, at the rear. She had not seen him for twenty years, not since that night she had left Pelee Island forever to try to protect her music and love. The old man looked very much the same to her, still handsome, still healthy.
"Well, how did it go for you, Elsie?" he asked roughly.
"It went well dad, really well."
"Everything okay then?"
"Everything's okay."
"And you, Gordon?" Harold asked.
"I'm good, Harold."
For a moment there was an awkward silence. "Dad, how did you know to come?" Elsie asked finally.
"Ezra called me this morning. I would have been up here earlier but that lazy Ruiz was slow getting me to the ferry."
Elsie looked at Ezra and he looked back at her, as if to say: 'Yes I did call the old man, and I would do it again.'
"Lyv, bring the baby up here so Dad can see her," Elsie said. Olyvia stood in front of her father, still looking at the baby and not at him. But he looked at her.
"Hi Lyvy," he said.
"Hi, Dad."
"What did they call her then?" he asked, trying to gather himself.
"Diana Marie," Olyvia answered.
"That's a pretty name."
"It is." No one knew quite what to do or s
ay. Olyvia broke the silence. "Would you like to hold her, Dad?"
"Oh, I don't think so," he said, flustered. "It's been a long time since I held a baby."
"Nonsense, come on now," she said as if her mind had suddenly been made up, "you'll be fine." And she took the baby and carefully laid her in her grandfather's arms. Still unsure of himself, Harold cradled Diana Marie and looked up at everyone to make sure he was doing it right. Elsie nodded to him warmly. The old man looked back down at the newborn. "Look at that now," he said, rocking her a bit. Olyvia reached out and fixed the soft blankets around the baby's face.
There was a light, cold rain outside when they walked through the hospital's front doors and out into the big parking lot. The black asphalt shone like a mirror in places and it was a little cold. Olyiva held the baby tightly to her chest to protect her from the rain. They walked down a row of cars and Ezra saw Ruiz at the end of the lot leaning against Harold's truck and smoking in the dark. Ruiz smiled at him as he inhaled, and the tip of his cigarette brightened for an instant.
"Hello, Cabra," he said happily.
"What's up, Ruiz?"
"Just driving the old man, that's all."
Ezra introduced him to everyone and Olyvia held the baby so that Ruiz could see her. He looked down at the baby's face and then at all the women. "Another Mignon beauty," he said, stroking the infant's cheek. "Looking at these lovely ladies, I am not surprised. A little sister then, eh Cabra?" Ruiz asked, apparently forgetting what he had been told about Ezra's parents.
"Yup," Ezra said. "Diana Marie." Elsie smiled behind him.
"What's all this 'Cabra' stuff?" she asked.
"Goat," Olyvia answered before Ruiz had a chance to. "Cabra is Spanish for goat."
"Goat?" Elsie asked. Ruiz nodded and smiled at her.
"Alright, we're off then," Harold said suddenly, as if he had been waiting for the niceties to end.
"Dad," Elsie began a little tentatively, "everyone's coming back to the house. None of us has had dinner yet. Why don't you and Ruiz eat with us?"
"Can't do that," Harold said abruptly. "There's work to do first thing in the morning and no one but myself I can rely on to get it done." Ruiz rolled his eyes at Ezra, and Ezra smiled back at him.
"Oh, alright..." Elsie said, taken aback by the sudden harshness that had returned to the old man's voice. "Thanks for coming, Dad." She hugged him in that reserved way that people do when they are not really comfortable with the hug they are giving or receiving. Olyiva and Sarah said goodbye to him in much the same way, though Sarah tried to make her affection appear more genuine. Harold shook hands with Gord, Ezra, and Layne, said his farewells, and then got into the passenger side of the pick up. Ruiz started the engine and the truck drove away into the darkness.
Ezra's final season of football went much as his previous one had. Although he had grown tall he had not yet acquired mass. Tight ends at American universities were expected to have more size than he had, so as the year came to a close, that great false grail of Canadian high school athletes, the American scholarship, became less and less a possibility. He had the height for a receiver that the west coast offenses had made popular, but he did not quite have the speed necessary to impress scouts.
There had never been any question that Elsie and the rest of the family expected him to attend university. Ever since he had been small she had spoken to him about a university education as if it were a given, simply the next step one took after graduating from high school. His grades were not great, and his acceptance to some of the Canadian University writing programs he had applied to was doubtful.
Everyone at school was speaking about plans for the following September. He heard about people moving to Montreal and Toronto and began to feel as if Belle River and his present life were children's clothes that needed to be cast aside. The problem was that he did not know, for himself, what other shores he longed for, so he worked towards university alongside his classmates.
For the next two months he stopped writing and focused on his schoolwork. He resented the time he had to spend away from his stories and cursed the stale tasks with which he was weighed down. But by the end of the term most of his grades were into the high seventies and low eighties, and in March he was accepted to the writing program at Sir Wilfred Laurier in Waterloo. He decided, after talking it over with Gord and Elsie, that that was where he would attend. They had the best passing offense in the country. Some people said that Bill Kubas would break every CIAU passing record there was by the end of his senior season. Ezra had already spoken to the coaches several times even before he found out he was accepted. and they seemed very excited to have him.
School would be expensive, and Elsie and Gord would help him as much as they could, but he would need student loans to make ends meet. He had planned to return to his grandfather's vineyard again that summer to work and save for school. But, just before school ended, he was offered a job at the Ford Foundry. Nick Carraway's father had worked for Ford his entire life and had managed to pull some strings to get Ezra and Nick jobs for the summer. Ezra was disappointed that he would not be returning to his friends at the vineyard, but his grandfather only paid $7.40 per hour and at Ford he would make an unimaginable $16.00 per hour. He needed the money for school and couldn't say no.
Every morning at six-fifteen Nick picked Ezra up in his little red Escort. They got coffee on their way and usually drove into Windsor in silence. Once they parked they took their lunch pales and filed into the big factory with hundreds of other men. Here he felt like a man for the first time and knew the nobility of these silent and troubled soldiers of labor.
There are people who hate unions and who lay the blame for all kinds of modern evils at their doorsteps. They say that the members are spoiled and lazy, that they are corrupt and overpaid. Members already make too much money, take too many liberties, in all things get more than they deserve, and then ask for even more. But this is just a case of the masters training us to point our finger at each other and not at them. The money they are talking about is already being made, and the only question is whose pocket we want it to end up in, our neighbour's, or the CEO's. That we begrudge our brother better wages, fewer hours, and good conditions is a symptom of our shortsightedness, not their greed or laziness. The world has become sick with work and progress.
The inside of a foundry looks something like an ill begotten hybrid of the industrial world's hell, and a furnace room churning out smoke and heat in the bowels of a late nineteenth century steamship. Everything is black and covered in ash. The molten metal sends up burning fireflies into the air around huge crucibles, machines, and transport vessels. Workers wear heavy, silver, full-bodied protective suits that one would expect to see worn when an alien planet is being explored, or when the damage of a nuclear accident is being surveyed. Men move around with long handled tools and pour out rivers of hot flowing metal that look like they should only be handled by the shades of Hades. Forklifts drive through plumes of smoke and heavy cranes on tracks line the high, blackened roof.
Anyone who has worked in a factory that employs students in the summer knows what kind of work they get. Ezra and Nick got the hottest, nastiest, biggest pain in the ass jobs their foremen could find. The temperatures in the foundry were so hot that work time was split into twenty-minute shifts. For the first twenty you poured the fiery liquid and sweated as you had never sweated in your life, for the next twenty you retreated to a break room where you drank as much water as you could hold.
For the first couple of weeks he worried about his weight. He was working out every day and trying to add muscle and mass for the fall, but how could he do that with sweat pouring off him all day? On the way home they stopped at a gym in Tecumseh to lift weights. It was hard and when he came home he was bitter that his responsibilities left him without time or energy to read and write. The long hot days went by. The nights and moons drifted past and touched his sleep.
One morning, at the beginning of August, some
thing very strange happened at the foundry. Apparently, as some of the widely differing incident reports read, metal for a cylinder block, which is an engine's heart, had been poured into a mould and left to cool and harden. There was nothing special about this, of course, because it was done several times a day. What made this particular cylinder block unusual though, was that when it was removed from the mould the man removing it discovered that it had hardened into what appeared to be gold. This caused a big stir in that area of the foundry, work stopped, and all the men gathered round to see what looked like a very unlikely miracle. The foreman, seeing all this happen, called the floor manager who came out and declared that all work needed to stop until the matter was investigated fully. More of the metal could be corrupted (that was the word he used), and if this was another prank, the culprit had to be identified before he did any more damage to production. The cylinder block was quickly covered and moved away to the management offices.
Nick and Ezra were working in a different part of the plant and were sent outside without knowing what had happened. Glad for the respite from the heat, whatever the cause, they each took a couple of bottles of water and filed outside with everyone else.
They walked out through the parking lot and took a seat on the low wall by the road. Cars sped by on the busy street in front of them. They drank their water and hoped that whatever the problem was wouldn't be solved soon. Yvonne, a sixty-year-old French Canadian who drove one of the forklifts and who always smelled of hard liquor, pulled over in his truck to the side of the road. He was going home.
"Hey now, you rookies get back to work," he slurred, and flicked the butt of his cigarette at them.