The Last Season

by Roy MacGregor

  “This here’s God’s country,” I said to Jerzy, stressing the dis.

  I wasn’t lying. Pomerania suited God perfectly. Filled to the brim with suffering and true believers.

  We passed one of the old railway houses, where a man hailed Poppa from an upper window where he was scraping paint. He had a cap on, but not pulled low enough that I couldn’t see the large dent in his forehead. Old Sikorski, from down at the lake. From the cartons and full half ton in the yard he must have just moved in. He worked with the wire brush as he talked, many of his words indecipherable for the rasping, but it didn’t matter. We needed very little of what he said — “...Leafs stink ... you’d think Indians had been living here ... goddamn tourists fucked the speckle fishing ... Trudeau’s a fucking communist ... no one’s shoving French down his throat…” — to stand and nod in sympathy.

  A woman appeared in the window behind him, holding a new brush and a purple stained paint can. Thick with the Pomeranian look, there was something about her I couldn’t fix on, and waited until we’d all cursed the tax department a few more times and taken our leave before I asked Poppa about her.

  “It’s the same wife,” Poppa said with a look of surprise.

  “But she was dying of cancer.” I saw the thin, crying woman at the kitchen table, waiting for Batcha.

  “Well she didn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “How should I know? I never asked. She got better. The cancer went away.”

  Poppa didn’t seem interested in talking about it. And I couldn’t ask. Was Mrs Sikorski saved by doctors? By prayer? By the bitch Batcha? By cutting the heart out of a poor cat? Poppa would laugh if I asked.

  “You’re sure it’s the same woman?” I asked.

  Poppa blew his nose against his finger, disgusted. “This isn’t California, Felix. People don’t get divorced here, remember?”

  “Okay, but maybe she died and he remarried.’

  Poppa looked at me as if I’d taken leave of my senses. “And nobody noticed?”

  I let it drop. The sun beat against my back and my fishnet shirt was stuck to me like Saran Wrap, but not stuck tight enough to prevent the shiver. Last night there was wax in my bedroom door keyhole again. I poked it out with a coathanger, knowing it would be useless to complain to Poppa. I knew also it would be in place again when I returned. The bitch at work.

  Poppa led the way up the hill and through the church parking lot, on up past the newly split winter wood and into the graveyard. I followed silently. Some grass was thick, with grasshoppers snapping off in long arches around us. Some grass was freshly scythed and raked into a corner, where it was drying yellow. There were careful paths about the stones and wooden crosses, and where the end path petered out in the far eastern corner there was the Batterinski family plot.

  Poppa stopped in front of Jaja’s marker, carefully removing his straw hat. Jaja had a cross with flaking white paint, small diamonds whittled at the three exposed corners, his name chiselled in Polish and painted black, his dates, 1861–1955, and, at the end, prosie zdróvas: “He beseeches a Hail Mary.”

  “Here’s Ig,” Poppa said.

  I looked over. He was pointing to a settled, worn area marked only with four cornerstones. At the head of the grave was a small, cracked encasement of plastic flowers. They were doing precisely what they were invented not to do: wilt. The colours were washed out, the stems sagging and the flowers folding in on each other to form joining globs. It must have been the heat and the years. But Poppa made no move to remove the case.

  “Batcha misses him terribly,” Poppa said, his voice uneven.

  “We all do.” I said.

  “But her most of all. She thought he was hers, to protect.”

  “And then he got killed.”

  “And then he got killed.” Poppa repeated.

  There was nothing to gain in saying so, but I couldn’t contain it. “And she blames me.”

  “She blames herself. It was her suggestion that he go after the berries.”

  “It was my friends.”

  “But it was not you.”

  Poppa moved beyond Ig’s grave. I tried to follow, but couldn’t. I stood over the grave and bowed my head, unable to make my hand stop instinctively making the sign of the cross over my heart. I hadn’t done that for years. I hadn’t even prayed since Clarkie had had the dumb idea that we should all attend a nondenominational service as a team, something that turned into a once-only disaster when Torchy let squeak a silent stinky that had us shaking like boiling kettles when the preacher announced “The Lord is all around you!” and Torchy sniffed loudly and answered with, “Is that what that is?”

  Poppa dropped to his knees and kissed the earth carefully. It was another plain marker like Jaja’s, again with plastic flowers but also a small, encased box containing a plaster cast of Jesus’ head and upraised arms, looking pained and, unfortunately, half-buried in the grass.

  Poppa stood back up. “Your Matka,” he said, his voice slipping.

  Poppa’s eyes were shining when he stepped back, and turned toward the church. He walked with his hands behind his back, playing with the brim of his hat; his eyes worked along the markers, reading, recognizing, remembering. I stared at my mother’s marker, leaning forward but afraid to step on the grass over her. The dates were difficult to make out, the weather having eaten away much of the black paint and leaving only letters formed by shadows in the chisel work. Her birth was clear, 1914, but not the final date. But that I knew by heart: my birthday.

  I felt sick. I went down on my knees — to hell with the grass stains — and I simply waited for the tears to come. They squeezed out of my closed eyes, around the corners of my nose and dropped off my upper lip. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to take my two hands and pound them into the soil until I, too, was gone from the face of the Earth.

  Had Poppa brought me here deliberately so I could see my conscience laid out before me in perfect rows: Jaja, a heart attack doing my chores — so I could make Father Schula’s useless hockey practice; Ig, mowed down by my so-called buddies; Matka, dead because Felix Batterinski was too much to bear.

  Too much to bear — even then! What in God’s name was happening to me? Two weeks after I sign the best contact of my career I’m acting like this? What kind of an idiot am I? Why have I come here?

  I belong in California with the sun tonguing my back, not here. Batterinski’s record is written up in the NHL Guide, not here, not some spooky graveyard in village that has nothing more significant going for it than a goddamn road kill on the side of a tourist highway.

  God’s country indeed!

  Poppa and I walked home together with our own thoughts, me thinking of going in to see Danny and Poppa thinking God knows what. We passed by the spruce where I had hidden the leather cowboy hat and still not a word was said. We both knew better than to mention it. It could rot, for all I cared. It would serve a porcupine better than me.

  I washed my pants when we got home, but the stain remained on the knees. I tried bleach and the grass faded, but only slightly. More bleach but still the stain would not go. Matka’s stain. The mark of my mother’s grave. I buried the pants out in the ash dump, overturning several dead rats as I dug, all with their mouths broken up and tongues leaping from the crush of the trap. I felt they were sticking out their tongues at me, laughing at me, laughing at the California I was trying to bury.

  Danny sat waiting on the steps of his house. He and Lucy had taken over one of the square railroad houses that had been tacked onto the hill like coathangers, which is all they were intended to be, a place to put the line workers up for the night, and then abandoned by the railroad when the idea of a grain line from the Great Lakes through to Ottawa seemed as likely as sending fresh water back. Danny’s was newly painted pink on three sides, black tar-paper with the Johns-Manville factory stamp providing a little relief on the east side, where the wind blew least. The Packard was in a drive someone had forced onto the hill
with crib support, fill and enough stolen planking from the mill to finish off Danny’s east side four times over. The car was massive, longer than the drive, blacker than the tar-paper. Had there been a wreath on the back window I might have crossed myself.

  Danny was glowing. A single-stranded shaft of yellow light was slipping through the white pine further onto the hill, a light that seemed cleansed and crisp and angled, and it settled on Danny like an ill-exposed photograph. He sat, knees spread wide for his gut, cigarette as comfortable in his fingers as nails, a half-empty, glowing brown beer bottle at his side, and he was wearing an Ottawa football jersey. When he saw the car was the Corvette he’d been expecting, he stood, stretched and stepped off the steps like a Buddha descending.

  “Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, straight from Hollywood, U.S.A.” The voice had somehow remained thin as Danny had thickened.

  I winced. “Cut the shit, Danny. How ya been?”

  Danny surveyed his property. “Fine. Good.” He scratched his belly, lifting the jersey so a great bellybutton could smile silently through its thin beard and then vanish.

  “Where’re your kids?”

  “Inside. You want to see them?” Dem, of course. As bad as Poppa. Danny asked this as if I’d come to inquire after some used tires.

  “Of course I want to see them.”

  I got out of the car and Danny, still smiling, looked me up and down, again scratching his great belly. “You look like a goddamn movie star, Bats.”

  I smiled. “They won’t let you stay in California unless you do this, did you know that?”

  “Why all the jewellery? You gone fag on us, lad?”

  I cuffed my own throat, as if just now aware I was wearing anything. “Ah , they all wear it. All the guys.”

  “Real gold?”

  “Some, yah.”

  “Ugga-bugga, man. You’re doing all right, Jack.”

  “Yah, I guess so. Where’s them kids?”

  Dem. I said it deliberately, hoping to tarnish some of the gold a bit.

  “Come on. I’ll get us some beer for the road.”

  Danny pulled the screen door back and I noticed that the bottom portion bulged like a sail and was split all up the latch side. Danny saw me look and punched it straight. “Fuckin’ kids,” he said.

  “Lucy!” he shouted up the stairs. “Get down here and see who’s here!”

  The answer was the kids shouting and scrambling over the floor, with a woman’s drill-sergeant voice ordering them back into their beds. Danny waved me forward and I followed him, thinking of my own pants and the double fitting Lou had forced on me even when I assured him they fit perfectly; Danny’s jeans fell flat off his rear, bagging in and out as he walked, greyish underwear offering a two-inch trim above his belt, bisected perfectly by the top of a hairy crack that snaked slightly as he walked. He went through the hall with the lines of pegged coats and corners of boots, through the kitchen with the dishes drying in the rack, the usual triple calendars, the fading Santa that wished “Merry Christmas” to anyone who could run a thumbnail fast enough down the plastic tape hanging tongue-like from his mouth, out through a badly suspended door with an inner tube for a latch and into the back shed. The case of beer was in a corner, piled on case upon case of empties, the recent history of Danny’s gut.

  As he loaded up the grocery bag I looked about. The shed was as crucial to Pomeranians as the hot tub to Californians. The smell was the same as Poppa’s, though Poppa had said he’d not yet been to Danny’s. Coal oil and wood chips and oil and cleanser and lime and fish scales and skinned rabbit and old leather and rotting wool and musty boxes. Cables, hubcaps, licence plates, used air cleaners, empty Javex bottles, makeshift anchors, water-logged preservers and sun faded cushions, broken snowshoes, tangled fishing line and bulbless light receptacles wired into extensions with Band-aids and hockey tape. The light was not good, but I saw on the far spike Danny’s old skates, the leather shanks hanging tired, dust over the boot, the blades barnacled with rust.

  I pointed to them. “You ever use ‘em anymore?”

  Danny had to follow my finger. “Skate? No way, lad.” He slapped his gut. “I’d turn the rink into ice cubes in one shift.”

  I laughed, because it was easier. Danny was ashamed of his skates, ashamed of his gut. I had seen the rust; I had proof before my eyes that he no longer skates; but yet I had to ask. Could it be that I was rubbing it in?

  “Hi Daddy,” a small, flat voice said from behind.

  I turned. A small boy, four maybe, was standing with a tattered pink — or once pink, anyway — blanket, his other hand on the inner tube latch.

  “You’re supposed to be in bed,” Danny growled.

  The boy said nothing. He was staring at me, looking directly at my neck and the lunacy hanging from it. He was thin and brown, with black curly hair like Danny’s once was, but with a thin face and small eyes, unlike Danny. He smiled. I smiled back.

  “You know who this is?” Danny said to the boy. The boy shook his head. “This here’s Mr. Batterinski. You know what he does?”Another shake. “He plays hockey in the NHL. You know what that means?” Shake, no. “It means Mr. Batterinski is one of the finest athletes in the world. Now mind your manners and show Mr. Batterinski some proper respect, understand?”

  The boy looked awestruck. “Hello,” he said in a voice as small as Danny’s was large.

  “Hi there, what’s your name?”

  “Tommy.”

  “Hi, Tommy. I’m an old friend of your Dad’s.”

  Tommy said nothing. The hand came off the inner tube and into his mouth.

  Danny lunged for the hand, pulling it out so quickly Tommy’s mouth popped like a burst bubble. “Get that outta there!” Danny shouted. “And you keep it outta there or I’ll burn that damned blanket when you’re asleep, you understand?”

  Tommy sniffed and nodded. He turned his gaze back to me.

  “You play hockey, Tommy?” I asked.

  Tommy shook his head.

  “He will, he will,” Danny said. “He’s a tough little squirt too. Just look at him.”

  Danny scooped up his son and thrust the boy at me. When I took him, Tommy grabbed back instinctively for his father, but curiosity overcame him and he came into my arms and stared fixedly at my neck. He smelled of flannelette and dried urine. The smell of my childhood. It didn’t offend me. I wanted to bury my face in his pajamas and remember, to know if I only could that the glory was all ahead rather than falling further and further behind. I breathed deep.

  “Tommy! Get up here!” It was the woman’s voice again, edgy, exhausted.

  “He’s with us!” Danny shouted back.

  Danny went back into the kitchen and I followed, waiting while he looped the rubber latch tight for raccoons and porcupines. Tommy showed no eagerness to escape. He rode my arm comfortably, hanging on to my shoulder with one arm, the torn, small pink blanket with the other, and staring still at the vanity around my neck.

  “Tommy!” the woman shouted. She was halfway down the stairs, leaning over the banister so she could see into the kitchen. Tommy cringed back into my arms for protection. I tightened my grip.

  It was Lucy. At least I was pretty sure it was Lucy. The marvellous, churning butt that used to drive Danny and me to the point of self-mutilation had turned from cream to fat.

  I could barely recognize her as the daydream I had carted around for the past fifteen years, me always trying to imagine what might have happened if I’d gone on to the majors and Lucy had stayed at her peak. I would be maybe thirty and I’m wearing my grey and silver pinstripe, an open powder-apple silk shirt, Texas handcrafted cowboy boots, gold-plated razor blade around my neck, California tan and mirror-backed aviator shades, and I’m dusting along in the silver Stingray with mag wheels, and suddenly I shoot through a time warp straight onto Pomerania’s Old North Road, where I come out of a controlled drift straight toward the chewing cheeks of her pert little bum as she hums toward town. Like a lift? I s
ay, and she recognizes me instantly, no questions asked, but it’s obvious I’ve got it made and my face has cleared up. Before we’ve gone two turns down the road she’s screaming at me to turn into the gravel pit, and fast....

  But now, she herself had turned into the pits.

  “Pet, you remember Felix Batterinski, don’t you?”

  “Hi, Lucy. Good to see you.”

  She looked at me and smiled. Even her teeth had faded. But in her look I saw the old Lucy Dombrowski smoldering still, the embers of the fire that had soldered the image of being naked with the young, luscious Lucy forever in my mind. I felt awkward, as if this was a Saturday night Legion dance in 1963. And I could see in her eyes that she, too, was seeing the old Batterinski with the pimples and the Frankenstein haircut and the crummy clothes from out Batterinski Road. And I saw that she had known all along that my secret passion for her had been something she had been aware of always.

  “You’ve certainly done well for yourself, Felix,” she said.

  “I can’t complain.”

  “Great kid,” I said, indicating Tommy.

  Lucy smiled, agreeing. But her voice argued. “He’s supposed to be in bed.”

  “I don’t want to go to bed,” Tommy said, clinging closer.

  I looked at him. “Would you do as your mother wants if I gave you a present?”

  Tommy smiled and shut his eyes.

  “Shit, you don’t need to give him nothing, Bats,” Danny said. “I’ll put him to bed so he stays.”

  Danny reached for the boy but the boy burrowed into my neck. “Hey, wait,” I said, trying to laugh away the tension. “Here, I want to, okay?” I said to Danny, who shrugged. I handed Tommy to his mother and then looped the first neck chain off — the shark’s tooth — and ceremoniously put it around his neck. The boy’s tiny eyes bulged as he grabbed at the prize.