All the Way by Jordin Tootoo Page A

quads and go up the river to our ice shacks and just fish all afternoon. And we were getting paid to do it! That was probably the most fun I ever had as a hockey player. What more could a fifteen-year-old ask for? And I wasn’t even supposed to be there. It just kind of happened.
    Terence and I moved in together with a couple, Rosie and Ed, who were our billet family. Rosie was a schoolteacher and Ed worked at the pulp mill. As a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old kid,moving in with a billet family is one of the most intimidating things you can do. You grew up living with mom and dad all your life, and now you have to go and live with a family that has a different structure and different rules. Every billet family is different. Some of them are warm and loving, and some of them are just in it for the money they get from the team to house and feed you. As a player, you want to try to fit in and make sure you get off on the right foot. If things don’t go well with a billet, that can be a determining factor in whether a kid wants to quit hockey or stick with it. Ideally, you want to make sure you have an environment where the family can cater to your needs and welcome you with open arms.
    That’s the way it was with Rosie and Ed. They were in their late fifties, early sixties, and they had grown-up kids who had moved out of the house. We were just something to keep them busy, and they liked having us around. It was a very healthy family, and they really looked out for me and my brother.
    And OCN is also where I really started pumping the booze. Every weekend was a gong show for us. I was hanging out with older guys, and when you’re part of the team, you’re part of the team—it doesn’t matter how old you are. I was in grade ten, but I was out in the bars with all of the boys. And the women. . . . We were fucking stud muffins, juggling different broads and telling stories and whatnot.
    On those nights out, Terence looked after me. We liked to drink together, but I had to go to school in the morning. Some nights I would say, “Fuck it, let’s get another case and keep going.” And he’d be like a parent, and say, “Get to bed, you haveto be ready for school tomorrow.” I always knew I was in good hands.
    We won a championship that season, and I was named OCN’s scholastic player of the year. The truth is, because almost our whole team was nineteen or twenty years old, there were only two or three guys who were even in school. But I owe a lot to our billet Rosie, who took my education seriously because she was a teacher. I’d never really had someone hounding me to make sure I got my work done, on my ass every day, waking me up every morning, telling me it was time to go to school. And I’ll tell you this: I had no fricking interest in going to school every day. I’d much rather have been living the life like all of the other nineteen-year-olds on my team. So kudos to Rosie. As much as I hated it then, it all worked out in the end.
    But the best part of that year was being away from Rankin Inlet and being with Terence. Whatever was going on back home, we would back each other up. Every conversation we had with our parents, we made sure we’d find a way to let them know that everything was good at our end. No one had to tell us that things weren’t so good at home. Terence would send a lot of his hockey money to our parents, just to please everyone and shut them up and keep them out of our hair. During his last two seasons there, after I left, he even took a side job at an auto body shop owned by the family he billeted with—Murray and Karen Haukass and their three boys, Brett, Luc, and Ty. Terence had always loved cars and he earned a little extra cash that way.
    My brother’s treat for me was that, after every practice, we would go through the Tim Hortons drive-through and he wouldbuy me a French vanilla cappuccino and a doughnut. Always the same