the tommycod under our ice. Thebreeze would be warming, our mittens would get soaked and we would not care. The sticks would be splinters, the pucks lost and chewed and hockey be done for another year.
Most of us would not eat the tommycod, but Michael and Tobias would take them home, ten tommycod tails sticking out of Tobias’ pockets, with the sun warming the stones along the bank.
This was our
other
place to play hockey in the winter. We played hockey on the river. Mangled trees and alders grew along its side in the summer, and by fall, the trees stood stark against the greying snow.
Fires would be lit near the riverbank, and Michael, who considered the rink his, would be out every day after school sweeping it clean, the ice clear and blue beneath his boots.
After Christmas of 1960, the year Tobias got his new boots and his new coat, I began to help Michael with this rink, along with Ginette and Stafford.
FIVE
O UR RIVER IS LARGE . I T has a long history. When we lit a fire to warm ourselves, we were doing something that had been done for generations. When Michael talked about getting fish net for backing for the nets he was making, that was exactly how nets were first made in Nova Scotia about 30 or 40 years after that little boy died in 1825.
We were just specks on the river. Once Michael went skating on the skates he had gotten from the Foleys’ basement and Stafford followed him. They were dots out in the middle of the river.
When they turned to come back the wind changed, and the fire got farther away. Stafford started to get sluggish, and said that it was a good time to sit down and have a rest.
“You can’t have a rest here Staffy — you’ll never wake up,” Michael told him. Michael was wearing his jean jacket, with his shirt opened.
The air was dazzling cold and far away the sun was lightingthe tree line at twilight. Stafford’s small bony legs got weak and he took out his handkerchief to wipe his eyes.
“Hey Mike —” he said.
“What?” Michael asked.
“I want to go to sleep.”
Michael got behind Stafford and pushed him, but couldn’t make it. Then he tried to pick him up. And by then Stafford looked as if he was play-acting. Whenever anything happened that made you realize how fragile and wonderous life was, Stafford looked like he was play-acting.
He sat down, and looked about, and Michael kept skating about him on his old broken skates wondering what to do. And then suddenly something happened that would not happen in too many other places in the world. A car came along.
“Need a lift?” Neddy Brown said, his old 1954 Chevy filled with children and a wife and a drunken grandpa. There they all were in the middle of the Miramichi River, Neddy out for a drive across the frozen ice.
So everyone made it back by nightfall. Ginette wouldn’t leave the rink until she saw them coming, and ran to get more sticks for the fire. She couldn’t leave anyone, Ginette, in her life.
On this river fires were always lit and kept burning by loved ones for loved ones. And that fire near our rink seemed to be like this. It burned when Michael was there alone shovelling the snow from it, after supper when the air was so splintered and cold that each breath pained.
It burned near us at night when the wind howled and there were only a few of us left flipping pucks or chunks of snow across a windswept, deserted rink. It was all so primitive I suppose — hockey, frozen hands, ice in your lungs and the fires burning here and there about the river.
Fires had burned when Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo — when the house I mentioned where the child was waked was just being built — and fires had burned all along the river when Savastapol fell in the Crimean War in 1857.
In both those wars boys from the Miramichi had fought. By the time of the Crimean War my great great-uncle was a boy on the river, and his son was the first in my family to play hockey.
To try to
explain
this to my uncle,
Most of us would not eat the tommycod, but Michael and Tobias would take them home, ten tommycod tails sticking out of Tobias’ pockets, with the sun warming the stones along the bank.
This was our
other
place to play hockey in the winter. We played hockey on the river. Mangled trees and alders grew along its side in the summer, and by fall, the trees stood stark against the greying snow.
Fires would be lit near the riverbank, and Michael, who considered the rink his, would be out every day after school sweeping it clean, the ice clear and blue beneath his boots.
After Christmas of 1960, the year Tobias got his new boots and his new coat, I began to help Michael with this rink, along with Ginette and Stafford.
FIVE
O UR RIVER IS LARGE . I T has a long history. When we lit a fire to warm ourselves, we were doing something that had been done for generations. When Michael talked about getting fish net for backing for the nets he was making, that was exactly how nets were first made in Nova Scotia about 30 or 40 years after that little boy died in 1825.
We were just specks on the river. Once Michael went skating on the skates he had gotten from the Foleys’ basement and Stafford followed him. They were dots out in the middle of the river.
When they turned to come back the wind changed, and the fire got farther away. Stafford started to get sluggish, and said that it was a good time to sit down and have a rest.
“You can’t have a rest here Staffy — you’ll never wake up,” Michael told him. Michael was wearing his jean jacket, with his shirt opened.
The air was dazzling cold and far away the sun was lightingthe tree line at twilight. Stafford’s small bony legs got weak and he took out his handkerchief to wipe his eyes.
“Hey Mike —” he said.
“What?” Michael asked.
“I want to go to sleep.”
Michael got behind Stafford and pushed him, but couldn’t make it. Then he tried to pick him up. And by then Stafford looked as if he was play-acting. Whenever anything happened that made you realize how fragile and wonderous life was, Stafford looked like he was play-acting.
He sat down, and looked about, and Michael kept skating about him on his old broken skates wondering what to do. And then suddenly something happened that would not happen in too many other places in the world. A car came along.
“Need a lift?” Neddy Brown said, his old 1954 Chevy filled with children and a wife and a drunken grandpa. There they all were in the middle of the Miramichi River, Neddy out for a drive across the frozen ice.
So everyone made it back by nightfall. Ginette wouldn’t leave the rink until she saw them coming, and ran to get more sticks for the fire. She couldn’t leave anyone, Ginette, in her life.
On this river fires were always lit and kept burning by loved ones for loved ones. And that fire near our rink seemed to be like this. It burned when Michael was there alone shovelling the snow from it, after supper when the air was so splintered and cold that each breath pained.
It burned near us at night when the wind howled and there were only a few of us left flipping pucks or chunks of snow across a windswept, deserted rink. It was all so primitive I suppose — hockey, frozen hands, ice in your lungs and the fires burning here and there about the river.
Fires had burned when Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo — when the house I mentioned where the child was waked was just being built — and fires had burned all along the river when Savastapol fell in the Crimean War in 1857.
In both those wars boys from the Miramichi had fought. By the time of the Crimean War my great great-uncle was a boy on the river, and his son was the first in my family to play hockey.
To try to
explain
this to my uncle,
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