Finnie Walsh (3 page)

“But I want to.”

“Too bad.”

Determined to find out more about what had happened, I snuck out the basement window and headed across town, past Finnie’s house and past the school. I knew where the accident had taken place, so I headed up the gravel road that led to the sawmill. The sound of machinery permeated the air and the smell of freshly cut wood was overpowering. I had never been inside the mill before, but sometimes, if my mother needed the car, she would drive my father to work, so I knew the entrance.

I tried the door and it was unlocked. It was just past four o’clock; the afternoon shift would be off in a few hours. Inside there was a short hallway with a flight of stairs and a door at one end. The hallway was a depressing shade of grey, the paint peeling off in places. I walked to the end of the hallway and stood, trying to decide whether to open the door or to go up the stairs. Then the door opened and Roger Walsh stepped on my foot.

“Paul! What are you doing here?”

I didn’t answer him. I looked down at my feet, sensing I was about to be in big trouble.

“You shouldn’t be here. I’ll give you a ride home.”

“I want to see the mill,” I said.

Mr. Walsh paused. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You want to see where it happened.”

“Yes.”

He paused for a moment, then held out his hand, which I took. We went through the door and onto the mill production floor. My father worked near the rear of the mill. After the bark was removed from the logs, they were run through a saw that cut the raw logs into various sizes of board. Then the individual boards were cut to uniform length. This was my father’s job.

On the night of the accident, my father had been cutting 2 × 6s into 12-foot lengths when, just for an instant, his attention wandered. He was on his fourth consecutive night shift and had gotten hardly any sleep that day thanks to Finnie and me. At three o’clock in the morning, his mind was not where it should have been. He nodded off for a millisecond. He experienced a false sensation of falling as he jolted awake. When he attempted to steady himself, he inadvertently stuck his arm in the path of the blade, severing it just below the elbow.

They rushed him to the hospital and although he lost a lot
of blood he survived. He would be eligible for a disability pension, but we had just been scraping by as it was and the pension was less than his salary. It would take a long time for my father to get used to the absence of his arm; I would often see him absent-mindedly reaching for things with it, surprised when he failed to grasp anything but air.

After I had seen all I wanted to see, Mr. Walsh drove me home. I thought for a moment he was going to come in, but he didn’t. “Don’t worry about your father, Paul,” he said. “The foreman tells me he’s a hard worker. Hard workers always end up aces.”

I did not believe that then, and I do not believe that now, but I thanked him anyway and went inside. No one had noticed I was gone.

My father returned from the hospital in the middle of October, three weeks after he lost his arm. That was how the accident was referred to around the house: “When Father lost his arm.”

At first my father acted as if he had actually
lost
his arm. Perhaps he had left it in the washroom, or in the kitchen behind the refrigerator, or it might have fallen under the seat of the car. I would often see him wandering around the house aimlessly, as if he was hoping to stumble across it. I didn’t know what to do; I felt awful about what had happened and more than a little guilty. I wanted him to have his arm back, I wanted to take back the shots that had hit the garage door and kept him awake and I wanted to tell him how sorry I was, but none of these things seemed possible.

I was relieved when he began to seem more like his old self again. On Halloween he decided that he would greet the trick-or-treaters at the door wearing a pirate costume. Louise and I
were disappointed when we found out that he wouldn’t be able to wear a hook; his stump had not yet sufficiently healed to support any sort of prosthetic device. He assured us that he would make up for this by fully embracing all other aspects of piratehood, including an eye patch and a surly attitude. We waited eagerly that night for the trick-or-treaters to arrive; Louise and I had decided to forgo our own trick-or-treating in favour of watching our father and we were not let down. His performance was nothing less than mortifying, so frightening that it sent several children, screaming, back to their waiting parents before any candy could be procured. One small boy became so distraught that he actually wet his pants and had to be taken home by his mother. She saw my father’s act from the curb and thought that he had gone too far. My father scared so many children that it wasn’t long before word got out that our house was to be avoided at all costs. As a result, there was plenty of candy left for me and Louise.

By mid-November, I noticed my father was acting even more strangely. He had never had so much free time on his hands, so to speak, and he spent a lot of it sitting on the back deck, thinking. My mother got a job as a secretary in a lawyer’s office downtown so, from the time he woke up in the morning until the time she got home, my father completed whatever domestic work he could manage and then for the rest of the day he just
thought
. This changed him, I believe, even more than the loss of his arm.

One day near the end of November I came home early from school. I had not had a good day and felt a little ill, but mostly I was just discouraged. I was having trouble with math and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t seem to understand the problems in my textbook. Finnie wasn’t any better than I was; actually, he was a poorer student, but it didn’t bother him the way it did me. I think it was because, in Finnie’s case, his poor grades were the result of a lack of effort, whereas mine were the result of limited intelligence.

When I got home, my father was out on the back deck. He heard the front door slam and, knowing it was too early for me to be home, came to investigate. He saw me just as I kicked off my shoe considerably harder than I had meant to. It flew across the hallway and smacked against the wall, leaving a dark smear on the wallpaper.

“Paul!” he scolded.

“Sorry,” I said sheepishly. Frustrated with the day’s events and mad at myself for just about everything, I started to cry.

“Follow me.” His voice was stern. My father was a tall, thin man with a leathery face and a receding hairline and, although he was not physically imposing, he had recently developed a certain quiet intensity that I had not yet become accustomed to.

As he led me through the house and out the back door, I thought that maybe I was in for a spanking. My father hadn’t spanked me more than a couple of times before he lost his arm, but Louise and I had secretly speculated that one possible benefit of his disability might be that he could do so even less now. He hadn’t so much as raised his voice to me since the accident.

My father had me sit in one of the folding chairs set out on the deck. He sat down beside me, retrieving something from his pocket and placing it in my hand. “Here, hold this. You’ll feel better.”

That was all he said. For the better part of an hour after that he remained silent, staring out at our tiny yard, occasionally lighting a cigarette or taking a sip of orange pekoe tea, which he had recently taken to drinking instead of coffee.

He had given me a rock, a very ordinary rock, special in no way that I could see. I sat there looking at the rock, trying to figure out why the hell my father had given it to me. I was just about to ask him when he stood up and ground his cigarette under his heel.

“Guess I’d better start supper.”

Later I told Finnie what had happened and showed him the rock. He turned it over in his hands, shaking his head. “Your father is a very smart man,” he said.

“What? I don’t get it. It’s just a rock.”

“Exactly.”

I didn’t understand what Finnie meant any more than I understood why my father had given it to me. My father gave me a great many more rocks over the years, but it wasn’t until much later that I understood why.

It was nearly Christmas before I could convince Finnie to come to my house again. He hadn’t been there since the night of the accident, three months earlier. Finnie had great respect for my father. Unlike me, and nearly everyone else, he understood my father almost instantly. In some bizarre way, Finnie was envious of my family. We were, he imagined,
normal
.

There was snow on the ground when we tramped into the backyard and, even though it was well below freezing, my father was sitting out on the deck. He looked up at us and waved, accidentally, with his missing hand. “Afternoon, boys.”

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hello, Mr. Woodward.” Finnie was shaking from cold or fear. He tugged down on the ear flaps of his furry winter cap.

“I haven’t seen you around for a while,” my father said, smiling.

“No, sir.”

“Come here for a moment, would you, Finnie?”

Finnie blanched. He looked at me, wondering if my father was about to exact revenge. I shrugged; I hadn’t the slightest idea what my father was up to.

“You come here too, Paul.” Now it was my turn to be nervous. Maybe my father was going to cut off our arms.

Slowly Finnie and I worked our way across the yard and onto the deck. We sat down beside my father, who was well dressed against the cold.

“Why aren’t you boys playing hockey today?” he asked.

“Well, um, we don’t much feel like it anymore, sir,” Finnie said. This was a lie; Finnie and I had been playing at the reservoir nearly every day after school.

“Paul, have I ever told you why we named you Paul?” He had, and he knew that he had; this was for Finnie’s benefit.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then you can tell Finnie.”

“I was born on the day that Paul Henderson scored the winning goal to beat the Soviet Union in the 1972 Super Series.”

Finnie’s eyes widened. “Really?”

“Really,” my father said. “Now, I know that you boys like to play hockey. And I know that our driveway’s a fine place to play. So if you want to play hockey on the driveway, then go ahead. Just mind that you don’t hit the car.”

I was relieved; we could keep our arms and what was more we wouldn’t have to hike all the way to the reservoir to play anymore.

Finnie appeared unconvinced, however. My father saw this and reached into his pocket. He handed Finnie a rock. “Hold onto this. You’ll feel better.”

Whatever doubt had existed in Finnie’s mind now disappeared. My father saw that Finnie understood how the rock worked, but it didn’t matter. They had connected. He never gave Finnie another rock. I guess he didn’t have to.

We resumed play in the driveway, with some minor adjustments. We placed our net at the street end of the driveway. Occasionally
Louise would venture away from her kingdom to watch us. She displayed no interest whatsoever in actually playing, even though I was almost desperate to have someone to pass to, but she would watch me take shots on Finnie for hours, carefully observing our technique and once in a while even offering advice. “Your glove side is weak, Finnie.” She was right too. He had never liked his catcher; it was “too flashy.” He refused to look at the glove while he played, so he hadn’t developed any sort of
relationship
with it, which is an absolute necessity for a goalie.