heard him cry out to them
in another room but they
stayed in his eyes
until we were all well-marked
by the days
of his going down into ruin.
‘Wrinkled now is the brow of
My all-star father
standing in the doorway
of the house of his grandsons
who yet must learn,
in smaller forums and with less
limelight,
how heroes are really made.’
Going to find Felix Batterinski that day in Pomerania, I remember thinking there were neither children nor grandchildren who would one day try to come to terms with him. There was only me.”
— Excerpted by permission from “Batterinski’s Burden” by Matt Keening, Canada Magazine, June 1982
April 4, 1982
Pomerania, Ontario
Pomerania is in thaw, as I drive down Black Donald Hill, down past the hardware store and Hatkoski’s barber shop, down toward what used to be the White Rose station and the turn, the kids playing up the Schama side road decide to burst their dam. They came running downhill alongside it, the water racing below the ice lip, them sliding above on the final crust. It bursts through the lowest slush ridge and out over Highway 60, and I have to slow to let them cross, five youngsters in mud-soaked mittens, toques pushed high on their heads, five future river-runners for the mills. If only they still used river-runners.
It looks like a war movie. I have to leave the rented car at Jazda’s and hike the rest of the way in, sticking to the high side and hanging on to wet alders to keep from sinking through the thick crystal of the plough banks. Twice I break through badly, once losing a boot which I must root for with a branch. On the first corner past Jazda’s I see where Poppa has tried to run it in the half-ton but sunk through to the axles. His steps, wide-spaced and deliberate, are still punctured in the cold muck leading away from the door. I step in his tracks the rest of the way home.
There is no mistaking the fire. I see exactly what happened as soon as I get to the laneway. The shed is badly burned but still standing on the house side, though Poppa’s green siding has been charred. Yet more than seeing things, I can smell. A smell sadder than burning leaves, the ugly smell of a mistake. Oil and paint, certainly. Cloth, perhaps. Shingles. Plastic. But none of these describe how rancid the smell is in total.
Batcha? Could it be her?
Poppa is inside, trying to measure out coffee, and when he turns to the sound of the opening door it is as if I have come upon a stranger pretending to be Poppa. It is not just his arm that is wrong, but his whole side. Above the ear the hair has been burnt away, the ear and exposed flesh glowing red and glistening with Vaseline. Over one eye there is no eyebrow, just a swollen, whitish ridge. He drops the spoon, staring at it momentarily as if someone else has thrown it, then carefully holds the arm in tight and comes toward me. We say nothing. He hugs with his good arm and I touch as if he has been constructed of newspaper and flour glue.
“You’re hurt, Poppa,” I say, my voice thin and stretched.
“I’m okay,” he says. “It just hurts to touch. The air is good on it.”
“How did it happen?”
Poppa seems reluctant to say. He backs away, back toward the kitchen and the pot of hot water. “I’m making coffee,” he says. “You?”
“Yah, me.”
But he cannot handle two cups. I move in and take over and he makes no protest. He sits in his usual chair, taking care not to let the arm brush the table or the backs of the other chairs. When his weight shifts he winces, and he sounds short of breath.
“You’d better tell me,” I say.
“I had to drag her out,” he says, voice swollen as his face. He speaks slowly, but not from reluctance. He wants to tell. “Her clothes were on fire and I tried to roll on her. It was pouring rain ... and there was still plenty of snow. But it was no good. She never came around. I thank God for that fire extinguisher you put in. I saved the house anyway.”
“I saw the truck on the way in. Were you going for help?”
“She was already dead. I wanted her buried from here. I thought maybe I could open the road.”
“How did they get her out?”
“Jazda’s snowmobile. He’s been good to me. Jan’s been good. You been good coming like this.”
Dis. And so I am home. The calendars still flutter on the wall from the slight furnace draft, Poppa sits with his coffee staring into the back of the cereal boxes, and I sit in my old chair at the far end, overloading my cup with sugar, stirring slowly, thinking. It’s as if I just stepped in from setting some new shiners in the minnow pool. But eighteen hours ago I was in Helsinki, twelve hours before that in the Soviet Union. I have crossed nearly half of the world to be here. I have been body-searched, outraged, nearly arrested, deceived, attacked, laid and have asked a woman to marry me. But yet I have nothing to say to my own father about any of it.
“You’ve had some calls,” Poppa says matter-of-factly. It could be me just in from the minnows. It could be Danny on the phone with word the smelts are running.
“Oh? From where?”
“From over there.” He indicates the pump with his thumb. He means Finland. “Person-to-person. I could hardly understand them.”
“How many?”
“Three. Twice in the middle of the night.”
“Sorry.”
Poppa looks up, worried. “No trouble, I hope.”
I shake my head. “They were probably just trying to let me know the score.”
“You didn’t play in Russia?”
“No I left before.”
Poppa looks more upset with this than with the fire. “I hope they gave those bastards what for.”
“They would have tried, Poppa. I’m going to look in the shed, okay?”
I get up. Poppa doesn’t move; he doesn’t even turn in his seat because of the pain; instead, he speaks straight ahead, as if I am still there. “There’s not much to see,” he says.
But he is wrong. The shed has become a black shell of the Batterinski years here. Poppa has been moving about in it, his gumboots by the doorway caked grey with soot and his trail through the debris marked by periodic sweeps where he has kicked at things. The rain has hardened the ashes and I can see precisely where he went, but not whether the kicks were in anger or in search of things. The house wall is hardly touched, the old harnesses, lamps, snowshoes, found wire, coats, cables and rusted tools still hanging on their spikes. But the far wall is gone entirely, the charred frame only hinting at what was once there. Poppa’s .22 lies in the soot, the stock now as narrow and black as the barrel. There are ragged coats, tarpaulins, charred canthooks, rakes, a fishnet, meaningless without its string, dozens of burned and wrinkled magazines, their pages buckled and twisted as if trying to escape, newspaper scraps, wooden boxes, cardboard trunks, burst tins, paint cans, bottles, sealer jars and, everywhere, small scraps of paper — a corner, a half page, almost an entire page — but whatever was once on it erased by the fire or faded to nothing by the rain.
Behind me the door kicks open again and Poppa steps onto the ledge in his grey socks, a sweater loosely draped over his injured arm and held away from the skin by his good hand.
“A hell of a mess, eh?” he says sadly.
“How did it start?”
“I don’t know. Spontaneous combustion, I suppose. Place was full of rags and old paint tins.”
“You’re damn lucky the house didn’t catch.”
“Yah,” he says half-heartedly.
“Mostly junk here anyway,” I say.
Poppa says nothing. I kick a burnt crate and when I look back at him his eyes are glassy. The wind? The burn?
“Are you okay, Poppa?”
“We lost Jaja’s memoirs, Felix.”
His mouth trembles and he looks down and away, not wanting me to see.
“What do you mean you ‘lost’ them?”
“I don’t understand. “What were they doing out here?”
“We stacked them here as we finished. We were almost finished.”
“You lost everything?”
“There’s one box in the basement still.”
I breathe easier. “Thank God.”
“Don’t bother,” he says. “It’s just the financial records. All the history was out here.”
I am afraid to look at him. His voice tells me he cannot keep back the tears.
“I thought Marie was getting copies in Renfrew.”
“She was, but just of what was sent to you. It was here, too. We never thought — we should never have been so stupid.”
I go over and nudge one of the box skeletons with my toe. Inside there is mostly ash, but a few papers remain, pasted along the side with ash and ice. They have their form, almost, but none of their content.
“I’m just glad we at least have your copies,” Poppa says to my back.
My back answers him, head nodding, lying, afraid to turn.
Bless the telephone. Before Poppa can move on to ask to see the letters (“Tell me, Poppa, have you ever heard of Pulkova airport?”) a one long, two short gives me a chance to duck past him and in the back door. “Must be Jan now,” he says as I pass.
But it is not. It is a person-to-person, from Finland.
“Yes, you’re talking to him,” I say.
Vaguely I hear something in Finnish, then a switching and a voice, suddenly loud.
“Felix Batterinski?”
“Yes.”
I catch the first name — Voitto — but not the second, and the newspaper, Sanomat. He says we have spoken many times before and I am sure we have, but that is for him to remember, not me.
“Erkki Sundstrom has admitted the penalty pay-offs were paid,” the voice says. “But he says that you originated the idea.”
“He does, does he?”
“Yes, he does. May I ask for a comment?”
Poppa has come through the door and stares at me as he carefully sets down the sweater. I pretend I’m having a hard time hearing and wave him away. Good old Poppa: he walks through the kitchen and out into the front room, closing the door behind him until it binds on the lay of the floor. I hear him on the stairs.
“Who called them ‘penalty pay-offs,’ Voitto?”
“They are referred to as that here. It is a bit of a national scandal, you see. You were the subject of a wild debate in our parliament today.”
“For what?”
“Many Finns are very upset about your bringing North American tactics to Finland.”
“Are they interested in making your hockey better?”
Voitto laughs. “May I quote you on that?”
“Sure. Finnish hockey players have all the skills but one. They can skate, pass, shoot — but they show no heart. All I did was try to give them heart.”
“Some would say that it isn’t something you can buy.”
“We made the playoffs, didn’t we? A team everyone laughed at the first of the year — everyone including yourself, if I remember correctly.” I do not remember at all, but I do know that what one sportswriter thinks, they all think.
“Yes,” Voitto says, hoping to entrap me with his ready laugh. “I did. But the question is whether making the playoffs is justification enough for paying for penalties.”
“Aha — but I have never said we paid for penalties, have I?”
“Sundstrom admits it is so.”
“Then it is just one other thing that poor bastard doesn’t understand. I wanted a simple bonus system for hard play, that’s all. Show a little heart and we’ll reward you. But it is a lie to say we paid players to take penalties.”
“Sundstrom has produced a score sheet though, so much money for this, so much for that.”
That bastard jerk Erkki.
“Well, we had to have some way to measure aggressiveness.”
“I see. But you still deny the charges.”
There’s no way Jerkki is getting away with this. “I go by whatever Erkki says. We were in it together, completely, and as a manager he’s far better able to comment on it than I am. The coach just follows orders. And you can quote me on that too.”
“I will. And thank you very much.”
“Just a second. Do you know the score from the other night?”
“The Leningrad game?”
“Yes. Do you have it?”
“Yes. Just a second. It’s here, somewhere.” I can hear him calling in Finnish over the muffled phone. He comes back on but I do not think I hear him right.
“Again?”
“12–1.”
I hang up, smiling. I do not need to ask who scored the twelve.
I hear Poppa on the stairs, then cracking back the door. He seems unsure of himself. His hand shakes as he loosens the chiselled hole that never received a knob. I am suddenly struck by how old he is — seventy-seven. He now stoops worse than Jaja ever did. His mouth precedes his speech, like an out-of-synch movie.
“What was it, son?”
“Nothing, Poppa. Just some business with the team. They’re going to be drafting next week. They need some idea on who to go after, eh?”
Poppa smiles, satisfied. “Build with youth, son. Just like the Islanders.”
“Yah,” I say. I cannot believe Poppa knows what he is saying. I am older now as a hockey player than he is as a human. As of this telephone call, Batterinski is dead.
The coffin is closed. Considering how Poppa looks after just trying to beat the fire from the bitch, I assume she is little more than caked ash herself. I cannot look at the box without feeling her hatred for me. Poppa dragged me over to see the wreath sitting on the head of the casket; I found it difficult to swallow — not from sorrow, but from my own anger. The wreath had a red ribbon banner with FAMILY etched in green, but I could not feel it had come from anyone but him. Batcha never was my flesh and blood, never will be.
Poppa said it was no way to die, but what way is there? Would she have preferred the cancer? Or Ig’s way, staring down the road at a half-ton and a windshield full of his nephew’s laughing, drunken friends? Or Jaja — the last thing he heard the squawk of chickens, their wings offering wind for his fall? Or Matka, knowing that my cry should have been hers? How can he say that, no way to die? Batcha is dead and I, quite frankly, don’t give a sweet damn about her. I have come for Poppa’s sake, not the bitch’s.
There are so many others in the room now, and I know them all and also not at all. Uncle Jan, Cousin Jazda, Schama, Shannon, Murray, Toposki, Batterinski, Father Schula, Dombrowski, Hatkoski — and as I stare at them or shake their hands I sense that they are much the same as before, though worn. Like the newspapers Poppa stacked in the shed: discoloured, wrinkled but filled with the same words. Uncle Jan and I talk about how it was and what a shame it was about Batcha, and eventually he gets around to the one thing he wants to talk about: is Gretzky better then Orr? There is no comparison, I say, and leave him to make his own.
What is it that happens to uncles? I remember my childhood and how Jan always meant excitement, new gimmicks, candy, pop, a chance to take over the steering wheel, look under the hood, spit from the window. Jan always made me feel special as a kid. But now when I look at him I think only of death. The last few times I have seen him have been at funerals. The Batterinski family has become nothing other than ceremonial, something dragged out in bad times and displayed as proof that at one time, somewhere, for some reason, they were all in this horror together. No wonder they flee and only gather again at the next death. Can this possibly be what Jaja meant when he talked about heritage?
Jan is changed. Thinner, bald now as Ig was, and not even the laugh remains. He pulled up to the Catholic funeral home in a broken down Ford station wagon that rattled and spit through twenty seconds of pre-ignition when he turned it off. And just as the car contradicts my
memory, so too does Jan’s marriage. He has become quiet and brooding. His wife, Sophia, who I remembered as silent and frightened, is now loud and bossy and known to Poppa as “The Whiner.” Their little girl has grown up, run away from home at sixteen with a cadet from the Petawawa army base and hasn’t been heard nor seen in the two years since. Thank God, I say, that Jaja is no longer here to record us.
“Felix.”
The voice is soft, tentative. I turn, expecting the priest.
“Danny!”
He nods and smiles shyly. I am so glad to see him that I want to scream “Ugga-bugggaaaaa!” so loud that Aunt Jozefa will scald herself with tea.
Lucy has also come. She has a new dress on and it hides her weight well. No, she has lost some, enough that I wish again that I were coming up behind her with the top down and the FM turned up loud, her seventeen-year-old bottom exhausted from churning down Batterinski Road. When she smiles I see that she has new teeth. A sign of her poor past, of Danny’s improved present. The yard foreman’s wife gets to hand out the turkeys at Christmas, and by God she better look like the boss’s wife when she does it.
I take Danny’s hand in mine and it feels like two Dannys. He has stretched himself into a new Renfrew suit that some Toronto retailer has sent to the minors. The lapels are wrong, the wide grey stripes a nudge against Danny’s fat, the knees cracked and folded where it has been insulted by a hanger. Lou Myles would be outraged, but Danny thinks he’s the cock of the walk. He looks old. The hair is thin as balsam now. If Kristiina saw us standing together now, she would assume I was talking to a friend of my father’s. Which I suppose Danny is now. More than mine, anyway.
“Thanks for coming,” I say, after some useless talk.
But Danny shows no sign of moving on. Lucy does, toward the coffee and placeks at the far end of the room.
“So,” Danny says, breathing deep, the formalities done with. When he smiles my Danny passes through Poppa’s Danny and I smile back, glad to see him finally. “How’s she been going for you?”
I pretend it is a thought that has seldom crossed my mind. “Good, I guess.”
The Last Season Page 38