Hockey Dreams by David Adams Richards Page A

the Miramichi River had escaped the great Miramichi fire. The night of the fire, in October 1825, they were waking a child about Tobias’ age on the kitchen table — that is, about 20 or 30 years before they played the first hockey in Nova Scotia.
    They had six altar candles set about him, at his feet and head. He was dressed in a slightly pre-Dickensian coat and tails, attired in small boots. The great Miramichi fire had chased his parents to the river where they spent the night, up to their necks, leaving the child to rest where he was.
    In the morning when the fire was over they walked back to the house. The candles had burned into the table, like little black smudges. The little child was still as solemn and as quietly dead, his hands folded about his wooden beads.
    The child had fallen over that embankment like Tobias, chasing a ball. He had fallen. And in knowing those who fell 130 years later we saw his face.
    Once a boy named Rory flew through the air on a toboggan and landed in the middle of the river. A fall of 100 feet. When we ran up to him he was clutching the toboggan straps so maniacally that we couldn’t pry him off.
    We had to pick up the entire toboggan and carry him home. “That was pretty good —” he kept saying. “That was pretty darn good. Don’t you think that was good — I think that’s like the Olympics — that was pretty darn good.”
    Today a safety campaign might be headed: “Do you know where your children are?” and have us thinking somewhat dreadful thoughts about what might happen to our kids. Dreadful things do and did happen.
    Back then, in that bygone age, when the super six played, when during the playoffs every year some new star came out of nowhere from a farm team to dazzle us all, we were all running along the tracks jumping the boxcars of a slow-moving freight.
    In the middle of a road hockey game we could leave our sticks and gloves on the street, and begin to run after it, catching up to it as it slowed down for a turn. Out of breath, with Tobias behind us, or behind everyone, except Stafford Foley and I, our boots half untied, our two goalies watching us, as goalies sometimes watch a brawl from their nets, we would jump the boxcar’s ladders and be carried along a mile.
    Then just as the freight was picking up steam we would jump and roll down the hill laughing, with snow in our mouths and noses.
    It would be strange for a mother to be asked if she knew where her little boy was, and say, “Yes, jumping boxcars — that crazy little kid — I told him if he falls he’ll be cut in two, but will a ten year old listen?”
    All winter we went to the Sinclair Rink. Or played at the Foleys’. Often Stafford Foley’s mother would have to come out and break up our fights, or turn off the outside lights so we would finally wander home.
    In the spring, on those warm days in mid-April, a stranger walking down one of our side streets might suddenly spy fifteen kids wandering about on the Miramichi River, on ice floes, with hockey sticks, looking like trapped penguins. Penguins wearing toques and mittens with chameleon-like grins on their faces, shooting snowballs off one another’s backs, with sticks that curved like Stan Mikita’s. The ice was breaking up; our rinks were melting and floating out to sea.
    One Saturday we spent most of the afternoon trying to keep our rink intact. Of course, we weren’t that far from shore, but still and all it was a good feat.
    “Take your hockey sticks and everyone — PUSH the RINK TOGETHER — one, two, three — heave. Bring the centre line up here.”
    “Look at all them little fish under our rink.”
    “It’s those fish — look at all those fish.”
    Unlike Penguins, we never did win the Stanley Cup. Unlike Penguins if we slipped, there was a better than average chance we would drown.
    And then one day every year, about the time the playoffs were ending, we would stop playing hockey, turn our sticks into spears and begin to spear