Finnie Walsh

  “Sure,” I said.

  “We won’t tell, Joyce. Don’t worry.”

  “Thanks.” She could tell we were sincere. She didn’t know it was because we thought that, if we kept her secret, she might repay us with our own trip into the bushes. Both of us wanted to find out what “that” was all about, although had anyone asked us we would have denied it and said that girls were gross.

  After she left, Finnie and I discussed Joyce Sweeney and “that.”

  “My dad told Patrick that sex is the most overrated thing ever,” Finnie said. Patrick, the eldest of Finnie’s three older brothers, had just turned 16 and had recently achieved a certain level of fame for his conduct during “career day.” When asked by his teacher what he wanted to be when he grew up, he had proudly announced his intention of becoming a porn star. “I’m going to hump my way to the top,” he’d told his dumbfounded teacher.

  The incident had almost resulted in his expulsion from the Portsmouth Boys’ School. Had Mr. Walsh not been the school’s most financially generous alumnus, Patrick would almost certainly have been expelled. He’d simply been sent home for the day with a stern warning.

  I’m sure Roger Walsh did not have a real problem with his son’s aspirations; he no doubt recalled having similar ambitions when he was Patrick’s age. He did try to discourage his son though, as he was positive his late wife would not have approved of Patrick’s career hopes. Besides, he wanted to shield his son from what was assured disappointment. The life of a porn star is not as glamorous as teenage boys think it is.

  As far as I can remember, my father never mentioned whether sex was overrated or not. At least not in my presence. I doubt my mother would have appreciated such a comment. I was only seven, after all, and Louise was Louise. I’m sure it never even occurred to my parents that either of us might require their opinions on the subject. They were right, of course; it was a very long time before I ever got a chance to do “that,” and by then I had figured out what I needed to know and wouldn’t have wanted to talk to my parents about it anyway. That didn’t stop Finnie and me from speculating about the subject though.

  “Joyce Sweeney is hot,” Finnie said.

  I agreed with him. Joyce was definitely a girl to keep an eye on.

  Before we could get into any detail regarding exactly why she was worth so much consideration, a car pulled into the school parking lot. It belonged to Mr. Walsh, but it was driven by Patrick Walsh, who had earned his driver’s licence only days before. He would have had it a month earlier if he hadn’t been grounded for his infamous porn star remarks. Patrick got out of the car and ran toward us. Without saying anything, he tackled Finnie off the swing and started punching him. I was used to this; it was the standard treatment Finnie received from each of his brothers. Patrick was the least severe of the three. He was the largest and the strongest, undoubtedly, but he was secure in his position as top dog and only exercised his power when he thought it necessary. I watched as Patrick pounded his fists into Finnie’s padded chest. I didn’t want to involve myself in what I considered to be a family affair.

  “Goalie pads? You think goalie pads are gonna help you?” he screamed, punching away.

  “Fuck off, Pat,” Finnie yelled, his arms flailing blindly, hitting nothing but air.

  “Who is your king? Who?”

  “Fuck you!”

  Patrick sat with his knees on Finnie’s elbows, pinning his arms. He held Finnie’s head still with one hand and extended his middle finger. Finnie struggled wildly, but Patrick was too strong. With his middle finger, Patrick tapped Finnie rapidly and steadily in the middle of his forehead. After several minutes of this, Finnie broke. He could take the punches, but he hated this particular brand of indignity. “You’re the king!” he cried.

  “Who? Who is the king?”

  “You are!”

  “Say the oath!”

  Finnie started to fight, but the tapping resumed and once again Finnie broke. “Long live King Patrick!”

  This was not good enough. “The whole thing!”

  “The king is dead. Long live King Patrick. God save the king!”

  Patrick got up off a flustered Finnie, acting as if nothing had happened. He calmly lit a cigarette and took a tentative drag. “Why the hell is he wearing all that stuff?” he asked me.

  “We were playing hockey,” I answered.

  “Dad’s pissed that you’re not home yet,” he said to Finnie. “He sent me to find you.”

  “We were on our way home.”

  “Whatever. Come on, get in the car. I got better things to do than chase you around.” He turned to me. “You want a ride?”

  “No thanks.”

  Finnie walked to the car. “See you tomorrow,” he said over his shoulder.

  I didn’t see him the next day, though. It was a Monday, but my mother let Louise and I stay home from school on account of the accident. I spent the day silently observing Louise’s kingdom and the steady stream of people who came and went, leaving food and cards and other gifts they thought were appropriate. Finnie did not come by, believing that he was not welcome.

  We were not allowed to go see my father. It was not considered suitable for children to witness such things. I didn’t understand why, so I asked Louise what the big deal was.

  “Mom says kids shouldn’t have to see stuff like that,” she said.

  “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 a
ll 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. The
y 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.

  I confess I didn’t give him much practice. I knew that I could score on his glove side at will, but the truth of the matter is that I didn’t really want to score, ever. Every time I scored, I heard, in my head, the horrible sound of a ball hitting the garage door. I did my best to take shots that I thought Finnie could stop, but not such easy ones that he would suspect I wasn’t trying. I’m not sure if he knew or not. If he did, he never said a word.

  On rare occasions we would play at the schoolyard with Finnie’s older brothers and their friends. Usually Frank Hawthorne played goal, but he was grounded a lot, so sometimes they substituted Finnie. None of the other kids had goalie equipment and neither Frank nor Finnie was willing to loan his out. I was invited because Finnie refused to play unless I did.

  They were absolutely brutal games and if I hadn’t been so bored with just playing against Finnie, I probably wouldn’t have gone. I did go, though, and tried my best not to make a fool of myself when the older boys whizzed slapshots at the net, more interested in seeing if they could kill or maim Finnie than in scoring. Every so often, Finnie would stop a shot with some particularly vulnerable part of his anatomy and it would take him a while to get back up, but he never let them see how much it hurt and he certainly never stopped playing on account of injury.