they know our skates were tight? When it came time to pick the teams, we were still chosen last. We’d show them and we did. We even touched the puck a few times that afternoon. I swatted it away from one of the big guys, when he had a scoring chance. I swatted it away with my stick and shot it right into a hole in the ice. They had to stop the game to get it.
“Put your hand down there and find it,” someone said.
“You shot it in.”
I gladly put my arm into the icy water, all the way in, swished at the muddy bottom of the pond and came up with it.
“You made a good play,” Harv said, the big guy I swatted the puck from. “You made a good play,” he said as I smiled. I smiled over and over that day, because I had made a good play.
We played until after dark, about five hours that day. I was hungry. I was too hungry to walk home on wet, icy skates. I didn’t have my boots with me. I tried to unlace my skates, so I could walk home in bare feet, but the laces were frozen tightly in place.
I was thinking I could run home, in bare feet. It wouldn’t take too long, but I couldn’t get the skates off. So, I started toward the creek with my skates on. I walked to the edge of the creek, slipped, rolled down the bank and lay with my back down in the icy cold ankle-deep water. I didn’t look for the branch we had used to cross the creek the first time. Instead, I got up and waded across the water, one step at a time. I felt the ice cold water flood over my belt, down my pant legs. It was cold, but I trudged forward, as a soldier does.
I plowed through the water up the other side of the bank and lay there, wet and exhausted at the top of it.
“I don’t have to play hockey anymore, so it doesn’t matter if I’m wet,” I thought.
I fell to the ground, rested a few minutes, and then started the walk across the plowed field toward home. I noticed my pant legs start to freeze.
“It has gotten colder now,” I thought. “My pant legs are freezing,” I thought further. I have kneepads now,” I thought and as they hardened, I smiled a little more. I smiled more as it began to snow.
I walked across the plowed field for a long time, not making progress quickly. I walked and walked; then I walked some more. The faint lights at the farm weren’t getting brighter very fast. My legs burned. I was completely exhausted even before I had started across the field. I felt I couldn’t walk any more, but still I walked. I walked in my skates, with pant legs frozen as knee pads, holding my hockey stick with frozen hands. I was wet, but I didn’t walk sadly. I walked as a hockey player, one short hockey player step after another.
The muscles in my legs burned on the inside. I had never experienced that before. They burned intensely. The burning seemed to seize them up. I was a six-year-old boy then, with the body size of a five-year-old. I wanted to go. I tried to go and I went. But, I didn’t go very fast. In fact, I was working harder all the time, but going slower. All at once, I sat down in a furrow, without thinking, reflexively. I didn’t think about it that way, but I couldn’t walk any further. I felt comfortable, sitting there in the cold.
Finally, as I sat there in the middle of the plowed field, I heard an angel calling. My mother, who wasn’t sure if I had gone to Gabe’s pond, had been looking for me for about an hour or two. She had become quite worried.
“Mom!” I yelled, but she didn’t hear me. But my leg muscles revived a little. I was moving again, not very fast, but moving.
When she heard me, she ran across the plowed field quickly. She seemed to know how to do it. The furrows didn’t seem to slow her down. When she got to me, I thought she would be angry. Instead, she picked me up.
“Silly boy,” she said. “You’re all wet.”
I wanted to tell her about it. I couldn’t walk anymore, but I had big news. I wanted to tell her the big news.
“I made a good play at hockey,” I said finally. “I swatted the puck away from a big guy. I shot it right into a hole in the ice. They said I made a good play too. I think they’re going to let me play on Gabe’s pond, whenever I can get there.”
“That’s good,” she said, “but you need a bath to warm you up.”
3
THE DAY I MADE THE BIG TIME
I kept working at hockey that winter. I turned seven the next year in late November. I would shoot a puck in the barn after school every day, after the cattle were fed. I couldn’t shoot raisers yet, but once in a while, if the puck hit something like dried manure, or dirt, it would bounce into the air. There was no pattern to my shooting. I didn’t practice technique, because I didn’t know any. I didn’t know it mattered either. I was pretty good with a pitch fork by that age and with a shovel. I guessed that shooting pucks was the same thing as handling a fork or a shovel.
It was to some extent. By the end of winter, I could shoot the odd raiser. One time, I even raised the puck with a backhander. I didn’t know about slap shots, so I didn’t practice those.
Then one day, it happened. I pushed against the puck, with my Sunoco stick. I pushed hard against it. The stick broke. The blade flew waist high, all the way to the back wall at the end of the barn. The puck made it about half way. I was very happy I had shot the puck so hard, it broke my stick. After that, I used a tobacco lath to shoot pucks and sometimes a push broom. I held it sideways or shot backhanders with it. I thought I was getting pretty good, especially with the tobacco laths, except that I broke a lot of them. I liked the laths though. They had some spring to them. The puck seemed to sling-shot off of them.
But that wasn’t the big time. It happened this way. The big guys and some of the girls from Grades 6, 7 and 8, decided to make a skating rink.
“We need a real rink here at school,” they said, “with boards and everything.”
Jim and I were in Grade 2 then. We were a couple of farm kids, used to work. We were pretty good at cutting out snow chunks and carrying them over to the others who were building the boards for the rink, using the snow blocks we carried to them. Their plan was to flood the asphalt square that had just been put in at our school, Sacred Heart, or Old Number 2, as we called it.
It was a great plan. We worked at it for more than a week. The snow boards were built head high. One of the guys, I think she was a girl, suggested that if they wet the inside of the snow with water each night, it would make the boards hard, with an ice shell on them.
I had never played hockey with Grade 7 and 8’s before. I did have one big game against Jim and his hockey buddy, Randy. It was a game of two-on-two. Norman was my team mate. Norman was a tough, wiry farm kid like me, only bigger. Randy was a smoothie. He could skate real circles, turn both left and right with the puck, skate backwards. He was amazing. Randy also laughed and talked as he was doing it. One time during the game, he skated toward us with the puck.
“Now you see it,” he said as he pushed the puck toward me. I swatted at it. “Now you don’t,” he laughed as he pulled the puck back over with the toe of his stick, and pulled it around me, depositing it into the empty net.
The nets were actually made with a pair of farm boots acting as goal posts at each end. They made really good nets because if you did shoot a raiser, they could bounce off the top of the boot and into the net or bounce wide of it.
Jim
