for Phyllis, Velma and Tom
Contents
First Period
Second Period
Third Period
Overtime
First Period
Finnie Walsh will forever remain in my daily thoughts, not only because of the shocking circumstances of his absurd demise, but because he managed to misunderstand what was truly important even though he was right about almost everything else. Finnie Walsh taught me that those in need of redemption are rarely those who become redeemed.
Finnie Walsh’s parents owned more than half of Portsmouth, the mill town of 30,000 where Finnie and I grew up. I still remember the startled look on my father’s face the first time he peered out the front window and saw me in the driveway shooting pucks with his boss’ youngest son. My father’s concern was not motivated by fear for Finnie’s safety; Finnie Walsh, a strawberry-blond, freckled boy with stubby fingers and slate-grey eyes, was not at all frail. He was of a sturdier than average build for a child his age, almost pudgy in a cheerful sort of way, and was only small when compared with his father and three older brothers, who were gigantic.
Mr. Walsh had felt that Finnie would benefit from some toughening up, so instead of sending him to the all-boys’ prep school that his brothers and most of the other children of Portsmouth’s wealthier citizens attended, Finnie was enrolled in Portsmouth Public School. It was there, in September of 1980, packed into Mrs. Sweeney’s third-grade classroom, that my friendship with Finnie Walsh began.
For four generations, the Walsh family had been Portsmouth’s main employer. My father was the most recent in a long line of men named Robert Woodward to work in the Walsh family sawmill. The older I got, the more I understood how much my father wanted me to break the cycle and work somewhere else. With this in mind, my father insisted that I not be named Robert. “Our family,” he often said, “is stuck in a rut.”
When I met Finnie Walsh, I was too young to realize that we weren’t supposed to be friends. It didn’t take long for Finnie and me, thrust together in the back row of Mrs. Sweeney’s alphabetically ordered classroom, to become inseparable. We each had substantial hockey card collections, although we were at odds about which cards were valuable and which were not.
My favourite player was Wayne Gretzky, who had just begun his second season in the NHL. Finnie’s favourite player was Peter Stastny, a Czechoslovakian rookie with the Quebec Nordiques.
“Gretzky’s okay, I guess, if you like that sort of thing. I think he’s flashy,” Finnie said.
If there was one thing Finnie Walsh didn’t like, it was “flash.” It was for this very reason that we ended up playing hockey in my driveway that day instead of the much larger and smoother driveway leading up to the Walsh estate. Finnie agreed that his driveway was in all ways superior to mine; he just didn’t want to play there.
The Walsh house was very flashy. It was situated in the middle of a seven-acre lot overlooking the river. Upstream from the mill, of course. The grounds were surrounded by an imposing wrought-iron fence. In many ways the house resembled the American White House, except that it was made of brick. Fountains, benches and a gazebo dotted a magnificently manicured lawn surrounded by an excess abundance of flowers. Mrs. Walsh had been an avid gardener. She had died when Finnie was a baby, but as a tribute to his late wife Mr. Walsh hired an extra gardener to maintain the flowerbeds.
The first time Finnie and I played hockey in my driveway, we didn’t even have a net. I drew one on our garage door with chalk and for a while we just passed the ball back and forth, taking the odd shot. My father was working the night shift that week and every time we scored the ball slammed against the garage door and woke him up.
Having had his sleep disturbed several times by a strange echoing thud, my father got out of bed and came to the front window to investigate. He peered between the drapes, watching me stickhandle, feathering a tape-to-tape pass between the legs of an imaginary defenceman. Through the window, I saw him frown and furrow his eyebrows. Finnie took the pass, went inside-out and shot one hard at the top corner. Thud! My father clenched his jaw. Suddenly it dawned on him exactly who had taken the shot. When he realized that Finnie Walsh, Roger Walsh’s son, was in our driveway, his eyebrows arched and his jaw unclenched. He disappeared behind the curtains.
Finnie and I celebrated the goal, a perfect combination of teamwork and individual skill. My mother appeared in the window. Her face changed from disbelief to shock as Finnie won the face-off, beating the opposing team’s centre, and rifled me a pass. I took the puck on my backhand and, spinning around, gave it back to Finnie. He had gone to the net and was there to tip it by the goalie, who had no chance on the play. My mother vanished into the depths of our house.
Sometime, late in the third period, my mother opened the front door and told me that supper was ready.
“Can Finnie stay?” I asked.
She looked startled, even though I often had friends stay over for supper. “I’m sure Finnie has supper waiting at home for him already, Paul,” she said.
“Please?”
My mother hesitated, not wanting to offend Finnie. She didn’t know what to make of the situation. “Would your father mind, Finnie?” she said slowly.
“No, Mrs. Woodward. My father usually doesn’t get home until late.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose it would be all right then.”
We went inside. I caught my parents shooting each other questioning looks while my mother set an extra place for Finnie between me and my sister, Louise.
Louise squinted at Finnie; she was always squinting. Louise was two-and-a-half years older than me, a shy kid who didn’t really have many friends; she seemed content to keep to herself. She spent most of her time in the basement, where she had an impressive array of toys. Some of them most girls would never have wanted to play with. For that matter, some of them no one would have played with, boy or girl: an old ironing board, a tire jack, a collection of pine cones and duck feathers. What she did with them I never knew. I wasn’t much interested in toys then. Whenever I got a new toy for my birthday or Christmas, I would half-heartedly play with it for a few days before it was invariably relegated to the basement, a new fixture in Louise’s imaginary world.
Occasionally, when it rained or we were home sick, I would sit on the basement stairs and watch Louise rule her tiny empire. It was understood that I was not welcome to join her, not out of jealousy or spite or sibling rivalry, but because this world was hers and hers alone. She was indifferent to my presence, not ignoring me, but not paying me any special attention either. Louise’s “kingdom,” as my father jokingly called it, was an interesting but perplexing place.
“Hi, Louise,” Finnie said.
She didn’t answer him. She looked at the ground, her fingers kneading the tablecloth.
“Louise, be polite,” my mother said.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Woodward. I understand. Louise is shy.”
My father, who apparently was not used to such candour from a seven year old, nearly choked on his coffee. Louise blushed and pulled more frantically at the tablecloth.
We had meatloaf that night, which was never my favourite dish, but since then I have liked it even less. Finnie, however, looked as though he had never eaten meatloaf before and he ate it with such obvious relish that you would have thought it was lobster and caviar instead of ground beef and ketchup.
This impressed my mother immensely. She was not used to people enjoying her meatloaf. “Would you like more, Finnie?” she asked him after he had wolfed down the contents of his plate.
“I sure would, Mrs. Woodward.”
“Anyone else?”
“No thanks,” my father and I said. Louise said nothing. She wasn’t really expected to answer.
My mother piled Finnie’s plate high with a block of ground beef. My father was pleased; the more meatloaf Finnie ate, the less would wind up in his lunch box. Although he never complained, my father didn’t like it when he had to eat the same meal at work as he’d eaten for supper that night.
“Did you boys have a good day at school today?” my father asked us.
“Peter Bartram threw up at recess,” I said.
“Has he caught something?” My mother always wanted to know if there was a flu going around.
“No,” Finnie said. “Jenny Carlysle kicked him in the balls.”
“Peter Bartram is an ass,” Louise said.
“Louise!” my mother said, horrified.
We were all shocked. I was shocked that Finnie had gotten away with saying “balls” at the supper table; my parents were shocked that Louise had spoken in front of a non-family member.
“She’s right, Mrs. Woodward. Peter Bartram is an ass. He beats up kids way smaller than him and he put a firecracker under a dog’s collar and lit it.”
“He did what?” my father asked.
“He put a firecracker under a dog’s collar and lit it!”
“Was the dog hurt?” My mother looked like she was going to cry.
“Not physically,” Finnie said. “But I don’t think it’s quite right anymore.”
“Why did Jenny kick him?”
“It was her brother’s dog,” I said.
“If it were my dog, I’d have done worse,” my father said.
“If it were my dog, I’d have put a firecracker in Peter’s pants,” Finnie said.
“I’d have put a nuclear bomb in Peter’s pants,” my father said.
Finnie and my father laughed. He appeared to have forgotten who Finnie’s father was. The two of them were talking like they were old friends. Even after my mother cleared away the dishes, they made no move to leave the table. Finally my father looked at the clock and stood up. “Well, I suppose it’s about that time.” That was what he said whenever he had to go to work.
“What time?” Finnie asked.
“Time to go to work,” I said.
“Now?” Finnie apparently did not know that people worked at night.
My mother handed my father his lunch box and he left.
Later, as Finnie was leaving, he thanked me for having him over. “A lot of people don’t like me because of my dad.”
“Why?” I didn’t see why that should have anything to do with it.
“I don’t know,” Finnie said. “Your dad is nice. He looks awfully tired, though.” Finnie stepped out the door and got on his bike. He smiled and rode up the street toward his house.
I closed the door and thought about what he’d said. My father definitely was nice. He often looked tired too, that was true, but that evening he’d looked especially tired.
After my father’s accident, both Finnie and I suffered great guilt. Finnie took it the hardest, though. He was never quite the same after that; he was always trying to make amends. I suppose it was a turning point in his life. It was my father’s accident that turned Finnie Walsh into a goalie.
Without Finnie, I probably would have lost interest in hockey; I really wasn’t that good and I knew my family couldn’t afford to buy me skates, let alone pay for me to play in the town league. I liked playing on the driveway, but for a long time after the accident it felt wrong. The sound of the tennis ball hitting the garage door gave us the shivers.
“It sounds worse than somebody getting disembowelled,” Finnie said.
I didn’t know what that might sound like, but I imagined it was pretty bad.
There is a difference between someone who plays goal and a goalie; Finnie Walsh was a goalie. He believed it was his mission, his duty, to keep pucks out of nets and, in the larger scheme of things, to keep tennis balls from hitting sleeping mill workers’ garage doors.
Finnie was my only friend who had real goalie pads. Three days after my father’s accident, Mr. Walsh took Finnie and me to the sporting goods store. It was a Sunday, but Mr. Walsh owned the store and could go there whenever he wanted. He told Finnie that he could have any pads he wanted. We looked at menacing black pads, gleaming white pads and lush sable ones, but Finnie was unimpressed. He went to the back of the store and out of the second-hand bin, picked out the most beat-up, world-weary set of dirt-brown pads I had ever seen.
“Why the hell do you want those?” Mr. Walsh asked.
“They have history.”
I thought that their history, whatever it may have been, did not look very encouraging. “They have holes,” I said.
“Holes can be patched,” Finnie said and smiled. And so the pads were his. He rummaged through the second-hand bin some more until he found a helmet, pants, a blocker and a chest protector. There were no catching gloves in the bin so he was forced to accept a brand new catcher from his father. It looked out of place, this shiny black glove, next to his beat-up pads and blocker, but it was still by far the best set of goalie equipment owned by any kid around.
Mr. Walsh made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. “Tell you what, Paul. You’re gonna need yourself a new stick, if you’re gonna get anything by Finnie when he’s wearing that getup.”
Looking at Finnie, who had by then donned all of his gear, I was forced to agree with Mr. Walsh. Goalie equipment wasn’t as big back then as it is now and though Finnie may have been big for his age, no seven year old is that big. He was so weighted down he could hardly move, but behind his mask he was grinning. He looked huge.
Mr. Walsh was an understanding man, even if he was a little gruff. That was probably one of the few times I ever saw Finnie genuinely appreciate anything his father tried to do for him.
“Thanks, Dad,” Finnie said, stumbling across the sporting goods store and hugging his father as best he could.
There was an old reservoir, no longer in use, a 15-minute uphill hike from the Walsh sawmill. There had once been a road leading up there, but since the city had stopped using it the road had been reclaimed by the surrounding forest. Few people ever made the trek, partly because of the lack of a road, but mostly because there was no real reason to go there in the first place.
The reservoir was basically a large hole covered by a flat concrete lid. Beside the reservoir was a decrepit shack that had once been a pumping station. There was also a large pile of gravel, its purpose unknown. Other than that, there was nothing but forest and the faint smell of sawdust coming from the direction of the sawmill.
After leaving the sporting goods store, Mr. Walsh gave me and Finnie a ride to the sawmill and we hiked up the trail that led to the reservoir. Finnie had been wearing his goalie equipment since we left the store, even though it was difficult for him to move and he’d had a lot of trouble getting in and out of the car, let alone up the hill. I had suggested that he carry the equipment in the bag Mr. Walsh had given him, but Finnie had refused.
When we arrived, he stood in the middle of the reservoir and looked around. “What do you think?”
“Of what?”
“Our practice facility.”
“It’s pretty far to walk just to play hockey,” I said, knowing full well that Finnie would walk to the moon before he’d play on my driveway again.
“That’s okay. It’ll toughen us up.”
I, unlike Finnie, was not particularly interested in being toughened up, but it was a good spot. The concrete surface was smooth and flat and there were no garage doors or sleeping fathers around. Eventually we got a net, but that first time we used a couple of beer bottles for posts. I took shots on Finnie and almost always scored. He wasn’t bothered by this; he knew he would get better.
“I was really close that time,” he would say. “I think I’d get that shot next time.”
We played until it was dark, until we could play not a second longer. Finnie was exhausted by his own gear and I was tired of chasing after my shots when they went by him. We were both still reeling from the events of the past few days.
We got back to the sawmill just as the night shift was arriving for work. I saw the startled looks on the faces of the men who had worked with my father; if they hadn’t thought it strange that Finnie and I were friends before the accident, they certainly did now. Finnie pretended not to notice and so did I. Mr. Walsh had left for the day, so we had to walk back to town. It wasn’t far, but we were tired so we stopped at the school to rest. We were sitting on the swings, not swinging, when our teacher’s daughter, Joyce Sweeney, emerged from the bushes behind the playing field. Frank Hawthorne followed her a moment later. Frank was 12 and in grade five, having failed several times. Neither of them saw us. He was certainly not someone Mrs. Sweeney would have chosen to be behind the bushes with her daughter. Everyone, including Finnie and I, thought they knew what went on in those bushes. “That’s where people go to do that” is what Finnie had told me.
After Joyce and Frank awkwardly parted ways, she walked across the field toward the playground. There she stumbled across two seven year olds, one of whom was wearing goalie equipment.
“Oh!” she said, frightened by our not-at-all-sudden presence. She smoothed her dress, which was not rumpled. “What are you two doing here?” she asked us.
“Nothing. What’re you doing?” Finnie asked.
She could see what we thought she had been doing. We were wrong, of course, but we didn’t know that then. “Not what you think.”
“What was Frank Hawthorne doing?”
“How should I know? You should just mind your own business. Why are you wearing all that stuff anyway?”
Finnie had apparently forgotten he was still wearing his pads and suddenly became embarrassed. He didn’t answer.
Joyce sensed that she had beaten him and turned to me. She must have realized I was an unworthy adversary, however, because she only had kind words. “Sorry about what happened to your dad, Paul.”
I appreciated her sentiments, but didn’t know what to say. I smiled.
Joyce turned and walked away, then stopped and walked back. “Hey guys, don’t say anything to my mom about seeing me here, OK? I mean, I could get into a lot of trouble.”
Finnie Walsh Page 1
