Thirty-seven ... the number seven ... I am still seven ... it is not too late.
I am afraid to touch. I grab one of Poppa’s wooden matches and dab at the powder and some of it sticks to the match. I pick it up and stare at it, the match head an inch or so from my eye. It is nearly transparent, layered, more dust then skin, but like something that has been deliberately powdered. Like I was.
It has to be me!
One long, two short. The fucking phone! At this time? I jump for it, worried about Kristiina, worried about Poppa.
“Hello!”
The voice at the other end seems surprised at the speed. He chokes for words. Not Kristiina! Shit, shit shit, shit!
“...Would this be Walter Batterinski?”
I find I am hissing, an angry goose. “I’m his son. What do you want at this hour?”
“I’m sorry, sir. This is Constable Dupuis with the Renfrew detachment of the OPP. We’ve had a case of vandalism overnight, sir at the cemetery.”
“Yes? What?”
“A grave on your site, sir. It was somewhat damaged, I’m afraid.”
“By who?”
“We don’t know sir. We were wondering if you had any ideas or whether this was just a case of random vandalism.”
“Well, I’m sure I have no idea who would do something like that. You’re sure it was in the Batterinski plot.”
“Yes sir. A recent grave. Mrs. Karol Batterinski.”
“My grandmother.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I —”
I hang up the receiver, smiling. Then lift it off again quietly so they cannot call again. I have work to do.
What do I do with this stuff? Say I follow through with what Old Frank said and eat it. Will that prove the bitch was right? She had to be right — I’m surrounded by proof. But what can doing it now do for the thirty years since I was seven?
It can’t bring back Jaja. Or Ig. Or Philadelphia. Or even Helsinki.
But maybe Kristiina. Perhaps it can still save Kristiina for me. Perhaps it can still save me. What the hell — what have I got to lose? So what if it can’t fix the past. It just might save tomorrow.
Look, there’s the dawn, pink and full of promise.
But how will I eat this? It’s already in a cereal bowl, so perhaps that’s a sign. I look in the cupboards and come up with a huge plastic bag of rolled oats. I put on the double boiler, heat the water and dump in some salt and two cups of oats. I turn it slowly, no longer even thinking, entranced by this new calm. It is like a fight I am winning. I no longer feel fear. Nothing. I know from the cop call I really was at her grave. It was not a dream. I know also that I have picked the right jar. I have found myself.
Porridge is perfect. The oats burp big circles of steam and the mix thickens. I turn off the stove and hold the pan under the tap, letting cold water run along the sides to cool it, then I drop four tablespoons of it into the bowl with the powdered caul, turning it over and over until the grey powder is no longer visible through the light brown and white of the porridge. I won’t even see it.
Nor taste it. The secret here is brown sugar. I take Poppa’s big jar off the high shelf and spoon in three giant scoops, tossing and turning it through the mix until it glistens with sweet mica. Then some cold milk and I am ready.
I sit down in my own chair and breathe the steam of the porridge deep. I am even hungry. The vodka has worn off entirely and I am clearheaded. I pick up the first spoonful, tilting for extra milk to flow in, and raise it first to my nose. I cannot help but smile at the very idea. I hold my past in my hand, myself thirty-seven years ago. I have found Batcha’s curse. I am devouring my past to nourish my future. Just like Jaja.
I take the first bite, swallowing quickly. It tastes like porridge, not Felix Batterinski. Batcha could have done this thirty years ago. For God’s sake, I wouldn’t even have noticed!
Think of the trouble it would have saved everyone.
I take another bite, this time chewing, enjoying.
Delicious!
“‘It’s Felix,’ the old man said the morning I came up to him as he stood crying at the well pump. Nothing else. Nothing else was necessary.
He did not know me. He did not even know I was coming. Yet he sent me into the house almost as if he knew that I had to see how the story would end. Perhaps he felt that someone else could better make sense of it all.
I went inside and Felix Batterinski was slumped down on the floor, his tongue twisted, blood clotted across his forehead. The kitchen table was knocked over. There was porridge all over the floor. Rolled oats. And a smashed cereal bowl.
I did not know that it was more than simple porridge. Nor did the coroner down at Renfrew know until the report came in that so stunned the world of hockey. Felix Karol Batterinski, holder of the NHL’s single-game penalty record, had committed suicide by deliberately mixing rat poison with sweetened porridge and eating it. A calculated, desperate act by a troubled man.
But why had no one — myself included — seen what was happening to this simple man? Sure, the Ontario Provincial Police had called about vandals at the local cemetery. By terrible coincidence the violation had been on the fresh gravesite of Felix’s beloved grandmother. And when his father found the family Bible sitting on her bed he knew that his son had been up that night reading it, remembering her. But that sad coincidence cannot explain it all, surely.
Are the still-unknown vandals any more guilty of setting Felix Batterinski off than, say, the management of Tapiola Hauki, who conspired with him in a bizarre and highly controversial scheme to bring North American blood (and guts) to Finnish hockey? And is anyone more to blame than the National Hockey League itself, which used Batterinski’s fists until they were worn out and then turned him away without an explanation? Or the agent, the infamous Vincent Wheeler, who bilked Batterinski out of his graceful retirement plans?
For that matter, can there be any more guilt than that which falls on the fan? Who was it but the average fan who made of Batterinski a false god? And who turned from their worship when the god was cast down? Where were the cheers on Felix Batterinski’s last lonely night on earth?
We can only pity poor Walter Batterinski, who says it is all his fault for having the rat poison where his son could find it. But of course it has nothing to do with him. Felix may have found the container in his burned shed, but we all know that, in truth, he brought the poison home with him, all by himself.
Perhaps it was not suicide at all. Perhaps it was murder. One basically good man turned evil and eventually destroyed by a callow system. And perhaps we are all to blame.
All Walter Batterinski is left with today is the scrapbook of his son’s tragic life. He made me go through it with him when I stayed for the funeral and the subsequent burial in the St. Martin’s plot next to his grandmother. He smiled and pointed highlights out to me right up to the second Stanley Cup the Philadelphia Flyers won in 1975, then he abandoned me to finish on my own. Beyond Philadelphia the pages were seldom thumbed. There was nothing on Finland, most certainly not the spitting incident in Sweden (see photo top right, page 22). Someone has spilled oil and neglected to clean it up, almost as if hoping the oil would somehow make the letters run in a more pleasant configuration.
The last six pages were empty. Walter Batterinski mentioned this to me when I handed him back the scrapbook. I believe he wanted me to fill them in, to complete the story of Felix Batterinski.
‘We know that hockey is where we live,’ Fred Shero had once written on the dressing room chalkboard when Batterinski was still in Philadelphia, ‘where we can best meet and overcome pain and wrong and death. Life is just a place where we spend time between games.’
Felix Batterinski, a simple, uncomplicated man from simple roots, would have bought that idea completely. When there was no longer a time between games for him, there was no longer life. And so it ended. A simple, sad story of hockey meaning everything and in the end nothing.”
— Excerpted by permissio
n from “Batterinski’s Burden” by Matt Keening, Canada Magazine, June 6, 1982 (Winner of the 1982 Canada Foundation of Investigative Journalism Gold Medal)
Copyright © Roy MacGregor, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
Originally published by Macmillan of Canada in 1983.
Project Editor: Michael Carroll
Copy Editors: Laura Harris and Laura Fitzgerald
Design: Courtney Horner
Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
MacGregor, Roy, 1948-
The last season / Roy MacGregor.
Issued also in electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-0686-6
I. Title.
PS8575.G84L37 2012 C813'.54 C2012-904635-3
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The Last Season Page 43