Finnie Walsh (5 page)

“It’s those fish,” he said when the subject came up.

When my father designed the fish habitat, or the fish tube, as Finnie called it, he intended to give the fish an unobstructed view of the cages. But he committed two critical errors. The first was making the tube tall and narrow. My father didn’t foresee that with such a small surface area at the top of the tube there would not be enough oxygen transferring into the water to keep the fish alive. As a result, all 25 of the fish were dead within two weeks. The second design flaw was that, since my father glued the
bottom mayonnaise jar to the floor of the garage, there was no way to remove the dead fish. Every month my father would drain the water out through the spout in the bottom jar and put in 25 new fish. The new fish would eat the partially decayed bodies of their predecessors and then the cycle would repeat itself. My mother and I thought it was a little weird, but Finnie recognized that Louise made more of it than that. It horrified her.

That season, a young Wayne Gretzky scored 55 goals and had 109 assists for a league-leading 164 points. Peter Stastny had 39 goals and 70 assists, his point total of 109 far shy of Gretzky’s. It was Stastny’s rookie year, however, and he was rewarded for his efforts, winning the Calder trophy, presented to the league’s most valuable freshman player. It was a record number of points for a rookie.

Gretzky never won the Calder trophy because he had played for Indianapolis in the World Hockey Association before coming into the NHL and because the WHA was a professional league, he was not considered a rookie when he entered the NHL. In his first two years, however, he broke scoring and assist records held by Phil Esposito and Bobby Orr.

Despite Gretzky’s point totals, broken records and exciting play, Finnie remained unimpressed. “Too flashy,” he said.

“What about Stastny? He got a whole bunch of points and you still like him.”

“He has to
work
for his points.”

Where hard work was concerned, Finnie knew what he was talking about. His skills as a goalie were limited; he was slow and he still had a weak glove side. Stout, almost cherubic, Finnie was on the verge of being overweight; although his size helped him to fill up the net, it did little for his speed. He wore his goalie equipment nearly constantly, even though it must have been unbearably
hot. By the middle of July, he had passed out from heat exhaustion twice, but it didn’t deter him. He knew that he needed to be fast and the only way he could do that was to lose some weight.

Occasionally, when we were allowed to play with Finnie’s brothers and their friends in the schoolyard, we would see Joyce Sweeney. We had worried that, since we were no longer in her mother’s class, she would stop being nice to us, but she was the same as ever.

One day, we were invited to play in one of those brutal schoolyard games. Frank Hawthorne’s family had taken him on vacation, leaving a spot open in the net, but as usual Finnie refused to play unless I could too. The crowd consisted of the Walsh brothers, Jim Stockdale and Jordi Svenson, who was big and mean but played cleanly, more or less. A freckle-faced kid named Bruce Selby also joined in. We had never played with him before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

I was playing well that day. Patrick Walsh was teamed with Jim Stockdale and Bruce Selby. Stockdale could pass like nobody’s business and Pat’s shot was blistering. Selby turned out to be a decent all-round player, but he was a particularly good checker. There was no way to stop them.

The other team, which consisted of Kirby and Gerry Walsh and Jordi Svenson, was not particularly skilled in any area of the game. Gerry could stickhandle, sure, but with no one to pass to he was forced to take the shot himself most of the time and it was hard to beat Finnie on a clear shot. Jordi wasn’t bad, but he was slow and easy to cover. As usual, I was perpetually stuck on defence.

After 15 or 20 minutes, it became apparent that Kirby Walsh’s team was severely outmatched. Finnie suggested that we redo the teams, but Kirby wasn’t about to admit defeat and responded by cuffing him on the side of the head with his stick. Finnie tried to slash him, but Kirby was too quick. Finnie’s stick met empty
space, the force of his swing spinning him around and causing him to fall to his knees. Gerry Walsh increased Finnie’s humiliation by firing the ball squarely at Finnie’s rear end. It made a loud slap as it bounced off him and into the net.

The game resumed and after several minutes Kirby came in on net. I let the ball go by me and as Kirby passed on the left I bent low in the knees and put my hip into him, knocking him off his feet. He landed hard and got up slowly. I thought he was going to throttle me, but instead he sneered menacingly and pointed his stick in my direction, shaking his head.

Since being hit in the ass with the ball, Finnie had been playing brilliantly. It may have been the best game I ever saw him play. He was in place well before the shot, making saves that by all accounts he shouldn’t have been able to make. Even his glove was hot. Over the next hour, he let in only a couple of goals and not once did he allow Kirby or Gerry to score. His play inspired me to elevate my own game and together we all but shut down the offence of each team. I had completely forgotten that Kirby was out to get me.

Then it happened. Pat Walsh brought the ball into the zone. He passed it off to Selby, who went by Gerry Walsh and dished it to Jim Stockdale, positioned to the left of the net. If he’d shot it right away, he probably would have scored; Finnie, for once, was out of position and would never have gotten there in time. But instead of shooting, Stockdale, true to form, opted to pass. Somehow I got my stick out and intercepted it. I turned and looked for someone on the other team and saw Jordi Svenson. I fired the ball onto his stick and was moving back into position when I heard, behind me, Kirby Walsh’s fearsome words: “Watch out for Ahab!”

His stick shot into my groin. All I remember after that is pain; it’s possible that I blacked out. When I came to, I was curled up
in the foetal position on the pavement. Gradually, I became aware of a scuffle going on around me. I looked up and saw Kirby and Finnie locked in combat. Kirby had a hold of Finnie’s jersey, but he couldn’t land a punch on Finnie, who was in prime form, dodging and striking like a mongoose. Whenever Kirby swung, Finnie would step or duck out of his way and reply with a shot to Kirby’s midsection. After evading one particularly brutal punch, Finnie tagged Kirby square in the kidney. Kirby went down, clutching his side. Finnie began to kick him, raining blows upon Kirby’s head. Kirby attempted to protect his face, but his efforts were futile.

“Watch out for Ahab yourself, you stupid fuck,” Finnie screamed, drawing forth a spurt of blood from his brother’s nose. “The king is dead! Long live King Finnie! Long live King Paul!”

Patrick and Gerry pulled Finnie back, but they merely restrained him. They did not retaliate in any way; they would, in the future, go so far as to prevent Kirby from exacting revenge. I don’t think they picked on Finnie as much after that and I never heard the oath again.

I saw that a person had to stand up for himself if he wanted to get anywhere, especially in hockey. From then on, I didn’t hesitate to knock people down if they came in on me, even if they were bigger than I was. So what if I was scared of them? If I let them walk all over me, I’d have to be even more scared of them. Thinking back on the incident, I realize that the important lesson, the one that I didn’t learn until it was much too late, was that if you’re going to swim around in strange waters acting like a big fish, you’d better watch out for Ahab.

From then on, Finnie and I were afforded a lot more respect, even though most of the players were five or six years older than us. We were invited to play more often, but this was short-lived, because by the middle of September the real hockey season was
about to begin. Portsmouth’s Memorial Arena was home to a variety of junior teams and both Finnie and I were eligible to play. I had never played on ice before; I had never even been on skates. Finnie had skated numerous times and had his own pair, but he had never played goal on ice. We decided that we would have to make the transition.

I waited for weeks until I thought that my parents were in the right mood to ask for their permission and, more importantly, for enough money to buy equipment. The main difference between street hockey and ice hockey, besides the ice, is the amount of equipment involved. To play on the street you only need a stick, but to play in an ice hockey league you need shin, shoulder and elbow pads, pants, gloves, skates, a helmet, an athletic cup, a jersey and socks and a large bag in which to put it all. Since my father lost his arm our family had been on a tight budget; money was scarce, even with my mother’s job and my father’s pension. I knew that if I wanted to play, my timing would have to be perfect.

Finnie was relentless. Every day he’d ask for an update.

“Did you ask them yet?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Wrong time.”

“If you don’t ask soon, it will be too late.”

It was never the right time. It wasn’t so much that my parents were in bad moods; my mother was almost always the same stern but understanding woman I had known all my life, but my father was changing at such a pace that I really didn’t know what to expect from him anymore.

It had taken my father six days to save us from the garage. On the seventh he should have rested, but he didn’t. It would have
been nice if it was a Sunday, but it wasn’t. It was a Tuesday. That day my father had gone downtown and gotten himself a library card. He had signed out the maximum number of books and had spent his days since on the back porch reading. For a while, he read a lot of Hemingway. He liked
A Farewell to Arms
best. He would read and reread the ending: the guy’s girlfriend dies giving birth to their baby, who also dies while the guy’s eating a sandwich in the hotel. When the guy finds out, he just turns around and walks away as if nothing ever happened, except you know that’s not how he feels. My father admired this; for him, it was impossible to be detached from even the most trivial of life’s details. My father cared how many birds were using our bird feeder. He cared how many spoons were in the cutlery drawer. He cared whether the towels in the linen closet were correctly folded and ordered.

He also read some Melville. Unlike Kirby Walsh, he actually finished
Moby Dick
. Whenever he was in a certain mood, he would point at whomever he wanted to chastise with the stump of his arm and growl, “Bad, bad work, Mr. Starbuck.” None of us ever knew what it meant exactly and even after I read
Moby Dick
and found the part where Stubb says that, I still don’t know what the heck my father was on about. As far as
Moby Dick
and my father are concerned, I can’t really say which perplexes me more; I understand very little about either of them.

The real clincher, however, was when my father discovered that the library had every issue of
National Geographic
published since the society’s inception in 1888. He began to start all his sentences with, “Did you know…” Invariably the sentence would end with an obscure fact somewhere between very and not at all interesting. “Did you know that Alexander Graham Bell was the first president of the society?” “Did you know that a blue whale is over 100 feet long, but can’t swallow anything larger than a
herring?” “Did you know that there actually is a Blarney stone?” Whether or not you knew, and whether or not you even answered, his response was always the same: “How about that! Who would have guessed?”

He started with the first issues and worked forward; he even made a long-term plan. He was, he figured, some 93 years behind or, if you prefer, 1,055 issues. Thankfully for him, the magazine didn’t become a monthly until 1898, or he would have been lost. He decided that he would read three a week, from front to back. At that pace it would take him five years to read them all, at which time he would be five years, or 60 issues, behind on the newly published magazines.

At first it took him a long time to read even one. He was not well-practised and often stumbled over words. He also found it difficult to turn the pages because of his arm, so he had to be extra careful with the older, more fragile issues. Eventually, as the issues got hardier and he became more proficient, he got to the point where he could read an entire issue in about four hours, which, given the amount of time he spent out on the back deck, was not very long at all.