nineteen
Fred sat alone. His skates were still on. He was still wearing his equipment. And as the last of the voices echoed from the hallways outside, there was nothing left but the clank of the main door, which sealed in the silence.
But it was not long before Fred heard the drone of an engine and, shortly after, the sound of scraping. And more scraping still.
The footsteps started far away. And came closer. The door to the dressing room swung open. “She’s ready,” announced Virgil proudly, and then he frowned. “You can’t smoke in here.”
Fred looked guiltily at the burning cigarette in his left hand and the half-empty can of beer between his legs. “Now that I know it wasn’t booze that caused my accident I thought I would celebrate, buh, buh, I just feel sick.” Fred butted out the cigarette, struggled to his feet, drained the beer and belched.
Virgil followed Fred as he clomped down the darkened tunnel toward a brilliant light. When Fred reached the end of the tunnel, he stopped. The pristine ice surface shimmered so brightly that Fred squinted. A frozen lake in the mountains at sunset might have rivalled but would not have exceeded the beauty Fred was seeing before him. “Wowee, not bad, not bad, it’s almost as good as mine, buh, buh, are you sure? You will just have to do it again when I am done.”
“Go on.”
Fred pushed himself onto the ice. Such was the devotion of Virgil’s work that two strong strides were all it took for Fred to glide from one end of the ice to the other.
It wasn’t often that Virgil was able to witness first-hand the appreciation of his labour. But the look on Fred’s face as he came rocketing back was ample recognition indeed.
Fred turned and circled again. And again after that. For half an hour his mind galloped ahead of tomorrow and he had himself a vision. He was looking for a house. With a fireplace. It didn’t need to be made of logs, but he did need a dog. A house without a dog just wasn’t a home. He saw Taillon curled up in front of a roaring fire. He saw Jack and Marilyn living together at Marilyn’s place and Jack cooking pancakes for Ryan, Kenton and Claudia as he would have done had he and Vera had children. He saw himself rounding a corner at the far end of the Keystone Centre rink in the seat of a Zamboni, unable to raise his fist for a double-barrelled laugh because he had to keep his good hand on the steering wheel.
The faster his mind raced, the less urgent his strides became. Until at last he narrowed his circles along with his options and came quietly to rest at centre ice. And that’s when Fred shouted to Virgil.
epilogue
It took Fred thirty seconds, using the phone in Virgil’s office, to tell Jack he wasn’t coming back.
It took Jack all night and into the morning to see that Fred was making the right choice.
It took George five seconds to tell Jack it was a huge mistake.
It took Fred fifteen minutes of second-guessing himself the next morning before he tore up his return ticket.
It took Jack the better part of the afternoon to go to the bank and visit Jiri. It took Jiri no time at all to plunge the needle into Taillon’s neck. It took Taillon a few seconds before his eyes fluttered and closed.
It took Jack, Marilyn, Claudia and Kenton many hours to drive to Brandon. They had to drive slower because the backs of the two trucks were fully loaded.
It took Fred twenty-five seconds to limp from the front door of Virgil’s apartment building to the cage in the back of Jack’s truck, and another minute for him to be convinced that Taillon was sedated and not dead.
It took Virgil two and a half hours to find space in his apartment for all of Fred’s clothes.
It took Fred a full five minutes to understand that the twenty-five thousand dollars Jack was giving him was his. Jack had banked every dime Fred had paid to him for rent in a separate account. It took Fred thirty seconds to realize he was financially free of his father. His double-barrelled laugh that followed lasted ten seconds. It had taken Jack eighty-four months at three hundred dollars a month to get him there.
It took Fred and Jack two hours to get Fred’s provincial assured income for the handicapped payments set up. It took half an hour to say goodbye. And five seconds for Fred to accept an invitation to come visit at Christmas.
It took Virgil three days to offer Fred a full-time job at the Keystone Centre. It took many hours more to write the notes that Fred would need to complete the menial tasks. It took Fred three days on the job before he realized he was being groomed as Virgil’s successor. It took him forty-five seconds to send his father a postcard from Brandon telling him he had found a job and George should come visit some time.
It took Fred a week, with help from Virgil, to find a sturdy one-bedroom house with a decent yard. And a wood-burning fireplace.
It took Kenton two weeks to get over the fact that Fred wasn’t coming back. But only a day to get started on a rink of his own.
It took Claudia a full night of crying to realize she’d miss her gimpy neighbour more than she’d expected.
It took Fred no time at all to see that junior hockey was every bit as good as the professional game, minus the snobby, money-hungry players and owners.
It took Marilyn five days to get all of the junk off her land. It took one day to have the dairy cows delivered. It took Jack half a day to get over his fear of cows.
It took three weeks, but Virgil eventually found out about Brad Tate’s cross-check. He heard it from someone who had heard it from Fred who had been telling everyone in town. Fred wasn’t getting even. Telling folks about his accident was something he’d always done. Virgil stopped being embarrassed by the pleasantly surprised faces of his neighbours when he offered to pick up something at the grocery store because he was going there anyway.
It took Wally Chilton a month to accept Brad Tate’s offer to come out and work for him in Newfoundland. Fred was staying, and Brandon was not big enough for the two of them.
Wally sold all of his furniture, gave most of his clothes to the Salvation Army and packed what was left into the cargo hold of a shuttle van to Winnipeg.
At a stoplight on the way out of town, the shuttle driver heard what sounded like an endless note in low G from a bagpipe. The sound was hypnotic but this wasn’t what really impressed him. “Damn, that’s a gorgeous dog,” he said. “You see that?”
Wally didn’t bother to look.
The driver whistled as he watched a regal white beast sitting on a mound. Not too far away was a man, his head tilted back, looking north, blowing on what looked like an animal horn. The dog kept his eyes on the man. And the man kept his on the sky.
A car behind the van honked and broke the driver’s reverie. The light was green. The driver waved his hand to apologize for the delay and stole one last glimpse at the beautiful white dog, sitting proudly and protectively behind the man with the horn.
It took Wally nine hours to get to St. John’s.
It took Jack nine months to move in with Marilyn.
It took Fred Pickle nineteen years to find his way home.
Copyright © Robert Sedlack 2004
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Sedlack, Robert
The horn of a lamb / Robert Sedlack.
eISBN: 978-0-385-67323-5
I. Title.
PS8587.E346H67 2004 C813′.6 C2003-904028-3
“Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” (by Jim Croce). © 1972, 1985 Denjac Music Co. Administered by Denjac Music Co. for the World excluding the U.S.
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One stanza used as epigraph from Collected Poems 1947–1980 by Allen Ginsberg, Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
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