Hockey Dreams

by David Adams Richards

  Stafford touched every pole on the way to the movie, and every pole on the way back. If he missed a pole he would go back and touch it. Then as we turned along King George Highway he began to worry about his socks. He sat down on the sidewalk, in the slush, took his boots and shoes off and switched his socks about. Two women passed by, and he looked up at them, as indifferently as if he was in his bedroom with Tobias.

  He had to have them on the same feet for Detroit to have a sliver of a chance. And he had mixed them up, because his mother was dumb enough (his words) to wash them. This mixup in his socks is what cost Detroit the cup in 1961

  Game six was Chicago’s. Bassen was in the net for Detroit because Sawchuk had played poorly in the fifth. However Chicago won by the same score the Trail Smoke Eaters won the World Championship in March: 5–1 Detroit’s dream was over. As yet it still is.

  Stafford kept his head under a couch cushion for almost the entire game. Now and then, when you looked over at him, you would see a giant cushion, and two half-blind eyes blinking from under it, as he stared morbidly at the TV.

  Stafford was cantankerous after Detroit lost. He looked sad and feeble. Worse, Garth actually kept all the things he took. Stafford’s twin brother Darren managed to get the bitten hockey puck back, because it had come from a Moncton Hawks’ game, the only important game Stafford had ever been to. Darren brought it home and set it back on Stafford’s desk.

  Every night he got into bed, and lay upon a plastic sheet, and stared through the window across the hallway at the stars. He had forgotten much about his Lloyd Percival pamphlets, and when I tried to cheer him up by talking about Lloyd, he looked at me and shrugged.

  SEVENTEEN

  MY FATHER WAS PRESIDENT of the Recreation Council in 1961 and Gordie Howe was invited to give the talk at the closing banquet. My father picked him up at the train station, and mentioned to him, that though I had played hockey that year, I felt that I hadn’t played quite well enough to deserve a dinner. So I was going to stay home.

  Gordie said kind-heartedly that that was not right, and telephoned me and asked me to go, saying he wanted to see me there.

  Of course I forgot all about Stafford. He came to the door and I was getting my white shirt and tie on, tucking myself together.

  “Where are you going?” Stafford said.

  “Oh — I guess I’ll go along to the banquet.”

  “You said you weren’t going — you talked me into not going —”

  “Well — I wasn’t planning to — but Gordie phoned me, wants to see me there — you know.”

  “Gordie — Gordie who?”

  “Gordie Howe —”

  Stafford looked at me. He looked at my mother. He looked at my brother. He looked at my mother again.

  “Gordie Howe — the real Gordie Howe.”

  “Of course.”

  Stafford came close to me and whispered, “The one in my poem —”

  “Same Gordie.”

  “What did he say?!”

  “Just the usual small talk — you know what Gordie’s like.” I answered for some reason as if I was aggravated.

  My mother was bent over fixing the cuffs of my pants and telling me to stay still, and I was wobbling back and forth in the hallway, with the most exasperatingly worldly look on my face that Stafford had ever seen.

  I never noticed him leave.

  Things were happening at the Foley’s Tire Garage all over Easter — incidental things — small things. Jimmy J. went there every night to eat peanuts. It’s a rather strange thing for men to leave the comfort of their home, and sit in an old garage and eat peanuts with the cold drafts forever through the great doors.

  But at any rate he was back to being Jimmy J. He talked about having killed a polar bear. He talked about fishing. He talked about space ships. He had a cigarette behind his left ear and a cigarette behind his right. He hated communists. He believed he knew some.

  When Paul or Mr. Foley came into the garage he would leave, two young boys following him out. But when the garage was left in charge of anyone else Jimmy J. would pop his head back in the door, walk nonchalantly over to the peanut machine, and put in a nickel.

  Now the story was that he owed everyone money and his wife’s hairdressing business was being put on the auction block because of Jimmy J.

  Jimmy J. would always chew one peanut at a time. He had come back to the garage to tease Stafford about Detroit, but whenever Stafford saw him he would turn and walk in the other direction.

  “All the NHL hockey games are fixed,” Jimmy J. stated.

  He liked to state this, because it gave him the moral higher ground, and an instant credential he never had to prove, about his value as a social critic of the game, as he popped one peanut into his mouth and chewed it rapidly, while jostling the other seventeen peanuts in his hand.

  “You wouldn’t see me watching a dumb hockey game — for I tell yas boys them are all fixed —”

  This was Jimmy J.’s revelation. They were fixed and that’s why he didn’t watch them. He was, of course, an offshoot of the branch of Garth.

  The branch of Garth flowered over many years into a variety of offshoots. And all of these offshoots have been discussed at least somewhat. It is the branch that allows us to boo Team Canada in Vancouver in 1972. The branch that allows us to believe that passion is only worthy of rednecks. The branch that makes us grovel to political correctness, and to conveniently pull the wool over our own eyes to changes wreaking havoc upon the sport.

  Yet it is a branch, not without its truth, because as we know, no tree can bear fruit without truth.

  Jimmy J. was an offshoot who would create a larger offshoot. He flourished between the time of the original six and expansion. Jimmy J., although his shoot still exists, has evolved into the branch that comfortably asserts that all hockey is simply vulgar business and they wish nothing to do with it.

  Stafford’s branch — the branch which lost all of his snakes and things to Garth, stretched toward the sun in a different direction. His branch would create shoots and offshoots as well. The branch of Stafford, and the branch of Garth, would become more and more alienated from one another. The two worlds of hockey, the two solitudes.

  The night of the dinner Jimmy J. left his house, that was now in darkness, and made his way down the long street toward the river, still frozen in the frozen wind, and raw temperature. He got to the garage about 8:30.

  He was angry with the peanut machine. And sat there until about 9:43 talking about it. The idea that a man could spend well over an hour talking about a peanut machine may seem strange — but I’ve known friends of mine at the tavern who have talked for four hours straight about an axe handle. So an hour about a peanut machine and how corrupt the Foleys were to have a peanut machine like that in their garage was not so much for Jimmy J.

  The other man in the garage was Mr. Comeau, the trainer, who rushed that long ago night to our goalie’s aid when he hit his head on the crossbar during his warmup for the Boston game, the man who had made the statement, “It’s a long way from your heart.”

  He was keeping the garage opened (it was Friday night) until the Foleys got back from the banquet.

  Finally he gave into Jimmy J., and gave him the nickel he said he had lost in the machine the week before.

  Jimmy stood up and took this nickel, with a great amount of wounded pride, and went to the machine. He put the nickel in, bent over to turn the dial.

  Just then a car backfired — or so everyone thought — and Mr. Comeau fell to the floor dead with a rifle shot through the heart. He slumped and he fell, his hands still clutching some coins — and that was it. Like murder always is — it was banal.

  The one other person who saw this was Paul Foley, who had just come in the door, still in his white shirt and tie.

  Most people said it was not Mr. Comeau, but Jimmy J., the man was after. The man who committed the murder was found washed up on shore two months later tangled in a herring net.
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  For a while Paul acted normal. But soon cracks began to show. By the night of the game on the river, it was as if he was in his own world.

  There were some good players on this team that night. My brother was good enough to be considered as a draft possibility in expansion. Darren was fiery and tough. Paul was a great hockey player — but that night he kept giving the puck away.

  Michael — Michael was the greatest of us all.

  All of our hockey sticks were broken and taped — some of them right up the handles. The nets were made of fish twine, as they were made in Nova Scotia in the 1890s. The river was as clear as a bell. Far away, up the bank, still pockmarked with dark snow the sound of a train rattled the windows of a row of dark wooden houses.

  There was also a permanent smell of sulphur that meant that the air was trapped and spring was on its way. The wind would blow again out of the southeast in the next few weeks, and hockey would be over.

  We played under the light of the moon, all of us wearing skates except Ginette and Tobias. We played with Stafford’s bitten puck because he insisted.

  The river was dark, and each of us was hit with the puck a number of times. Ginette would wobble out with her broom and take a swipe at it, and it would veer into the corner. Darren would pick it up and start up along the boards — those railway ties Michael had stolen. But someone would be there to grapple with him, or the puck or to fall upon it.

  It would squirt out as Paul always said it would if you were patient. Once or twice it even wobbled to me. The idea that I was skating and holding a puck with my stick was ecstasy. Paul would come back, flip my stick up and take the puck and start back. Only to be hip-checked by Michael.

  Tobias would run out in his rubber boots like a small demon, and start up the ice. He would go sprawling forward, the puck on his large goalie stick — a stick that Michael had gotten him after a Miramichi Beaver game. The puck would be lost in the middle of us.

  Tobias was slashed across the wrists, and didn’t make a sound. There would be an almost silent swish of a skate blade behind you and someone would be coming to ram you up against the boards or run you down.

  Michael potted a goal for us and Darren had potted two or three for them. Of course we could score easily on Ginette if we could get there — that was the secret.

  But they were always up near or close to our net. Tobias fought back with every tiny bit of muscle he had. And Michael and I kept coming back to help him. We were slashed on the ankles and legs, and in the light of the moon, we could see blood from where a tooth had gone through Tobias’ lip.

  Yet as always and quite suddenly, for Tobias and Michael, there was, because of hockey, no more real cold or pain, or terrified nights alone. There was no more shame. They were free.

  And this is what the game was about for Ginette, Michael, Tobias, Stafford and me.

  I don’t think any of us had ever been free before.

  We just held them that was all. It was always about our net. Once in a while Michael broke away — and he broke away like a runner out of the blocks, a horse from the gate. Suddenly he was gone with the puck, and no one could catch him, broken skates and woollen socks over a pair of torn jeans, water in his eyes.

  Ginette would gallantly try to block him with the broom she had used all that year.

  On her thin wobbly legs, like a young calf, and wearing a pair of black woollen slacks, a training bra under her sweater, her lovely dark hair smelling of wood smoke, she would come out to face him, bravely trying to stop what she couldn’t, but once or twice actually managing to poke-check the puck away.

  And back they would come.

  Tobias wore no gloves. His hands were rapped more than once by Darren or my brother trying to get the puck.

  His whole world became that net smelling of earth and twine that his brother had made with his own hands. They had only managed three goals. Perhaps he would have given up long before he did if he did not love Michael so much.

  No matter how well, how badly we played, the game was ours. It was what the Colonel said it was — it was in our hearts. It was life.

  One place we weren’t suppose to be at that time of year of course, was on the river.

  Tobias had lifted the puck and it went by everyone, and drifted onto Stafford’s stick. Stafford looked about, realized he was home free — that he could score the goal to tie the game. He began to skate so ferociously that he didn’t move an inch.

  He had a great deal of momentum however. He was laughing his head off. He was joyous. He was absolutely pleased with himself.

  Then he just disappeared.

  The puck trickled forth, and stopped a few inches before the net. Everything was quiet. The wind blew slightly. Michael and Paul, without thinking that they could go under also, rushed over to where he had been, and thrust their arms down. Took their arms out and thrust them down once more. Everything happened in slow motion — exactly as they say it does, and everyone was absolutely calm.

  “Feel him?” Paul said.

  “Ya I got him by the hair and the ear,” Michael said.

  “Haul him out.”

  Stafford came to the surface, spitting and howling. He was dragged to the side of the river, where the rest of us gathered around him — handing him our coats, being supportive. Telling him he’d better dry off before he went home because none of us wanted to get into trouble.

  And then we all turned away from the river, away from Michael’s rink, toward home.

  “I could have tied the game boys — I could have scored. I could have got it. Me. Me. I could have got a goal,” Stafford kept saying, spitting and coughing, and talking about Lloyd Percival, all the way up the hill.

  He might have scored.

  I never would have heard the end of it if he had.

  The expansion came as they said it would. But surprisingly it did not come to Newcastle, NB. And I don’t think it ever will. Although who knows?

  Once in Spain years ago we watched that hockey game between Barcelona and Valencia, my wife and I, on Spanish TV. I watched the Roanoke Rebels in Roanoke Virginia, when I was down there, and followed the British ice hockey scores one time when I was in England.

  I’ll always be able to find or fashion a hockey stick I tell you that — even though 1961 was my last year of organized hockey, and I took up curling, as my mother prayed I would.

  Those children are all gone away now. The skates the sticks have disappeared. I have not been back to my river in a long, long time, and don’t think of it as my river any more. It belongs to others now. I too have gone away.

  Every December when the World Junior is on, and every April when the World Championship is on, and every four years when the World Women’s Championship is on it will not be hard to find me. I will be home — usually alone, in front of the television, screaming my head off. I will celebrate the women’s play as much as the men, not because I am politically correct — far from it. They deserve to be celebrated. I know. I know. I played with Ginette.

  Paul Foley far more than Phillip Luff could have made it to the Montreal Canadiens. He knew it. I knew it. But something happened. Perhaps it was simple fate. He walked into the garage after the banquet to tell Mr. Comeau he could go home and Mr. Comeau was ready to say something to him, which Paul was never, ever allowed to hear.

  After that he concerned himself with other things. He decided one day in Grade 10 to become a missionary. And he did, and kept his humanity while doing it.

  Time passed. The next year there was no rink at all on the river. In January Tobias went to live somewhere else. Michael promised him he could come back — promised him, they would stay in touch.

  “Where will I go and stand — like stand there so you can come and get me?” Tobias said hopefully — tears for the first time running down his face.

  After the world changed and the Beatles came I lost touch with Michael. He moved in a different circle. Became as tough as nails and could hit like a mule. He still wore his
hair like James Dean, drank too much, and had a parade of sad young girls. One night coming back from somewhere there was an accident. He was thrown from a car and killed.

  When their house was torn down, when I was still young enough to think I was going to become a writer, I went back to that spot, as if to examine my youth. Cattails and thorned alders grew against the pale November sky. In the tatters of the house, graced with the smell of longing and November smoke, the coat that Michael had bought Tobias with the bingo money sat crumpled up in a hole in one of the fallen walls. As if it was at one point, years before, used by someone to stop some unstoppable draft.

  Stafford would never obey anyone of course. Not Paul. Not the doctors nor his poor parents who fretted and worried to death about him.

  In the end he only pretended. Pretended he could watch hockey that was no more than a faint shadow on the television. Pretended he could read Yeats when he could not see the page. Pretended he could organize a hockey pool and get rid of all the Swedes, over the objections of all of those other more practical fans.

  No-one wanted him in their hockey pool, calling him a man of dissension. Not a visionary, but a divisionary.

  All of us suffer from the one great delusion, Paul said. We were and are all delusional spirits. The delusion is this. That perhaps HOCKEY — hockey can keep this country together. Hockey can save Canada — for we see to the bottom of our heart there is no Gretzky without Lemieux. Perhaps we are that delusional, and perhaps for one time when we really need it to — when we really want it to, a delusion can work for us instead of against us.

  After a while Stafford, who had only loved Melanie, found comfort in an older woman who would come in and take care of him. He teased her unmercifully — because at times she had to bathe him. And he hid his bottles from her, and drank behind her back. She thought she was doing a very good job, and he didn’t have the heart to tell her that she wasn’t.

  He lived in a room surrounded by his past without seeing it much anymore. Daily, he made his trips to the library and liquor store. He was gentle enough and kind enough to follow my career, because he felt it would matter to me. He tried to teach the woman about hockey — from the Stafford Foley perspective. And finally after a few weeks of instruction, he touched his breast with his hand and whispered, “It’s all in here.” And he smiled.