The Last Season Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE LAST SEASON

  “MacGregor’s description of this rural Ontario family is reminiscent of William Faulkner’s descriptions of rural Mississippi families — the sense of foreboding, the family members bound together by a dark secret, the mentally retarded relative, the clash of organized religion and the occult…. Clearly then, The Last Season is much more than a sports book.”

  — Globe and Mail

  “[The Last Season] is so rich in meaning that to call it simply a hockey novel is misleading…. In giving Canadians Felix Batterinski, Roy MacGregor has shown them a vital part of themselves.”

  — Maclean’s

  “A classic Canadian novel.”

  — Calgary Herald

  “Sports literature as good as it gets.”

  — Vancouver Sun

  “The best book of fiction on hockey.”

  — Edmonton Journal

  For the Toronto Maple leaves [sic], who added me to the roster for their tour of Finland, April 1981, and for Ottawa’s Canterbury Rusty Blades, who let me dress the rest of the time.

  Contents

  November 18, 1960 — Vernon, Ontario

  December 13, 1981 — Helsinki, Finland

  September 2, 1963 — Sudbury, Ontario

  January 19, 1982 — Over the Gulf of Bothnia

  January 11, 1976 — Philadelphia

  March 15, 1982 — Lahti, Finland

  April 4, 1982 — Pomerania, Ontario

  “... Talking with Batterinski in Finland this past spring, there was absolutely no hint of what was coming. We sat, measuring out his curious career in coffee spoons and flat beer, in a small restaurant in Lahti, a small city a hundred or so kilometres north of Helsinki. That evening Batterinski’s Tapiola Hauki would meet Lahti in the first round of the SM Liiga Hockey Championships. He seemed completely content with himself, a great tickle of a grin spreading over the face that ‘seems to have been shaped by a furious Greek sculptor with his fists,’ as Philadelphia sportswriter Jim Kennedy once wrote.

  He was going out a winner, he said. He was wrong, of course, but it was as hard to see then where he was going as it was to understand from where Felix Batterinski came. His own past he shied away from the way others avoided the arena corners he would patrol that night. They have a saying for this in hockey, and that is that the player ‘hears footsteps.’ And whenever it came down to Batterinski’s early life and what had shaped him, he would suddenly turn on edge, wary, almost as if something might be sneaking up on him from behind.

  And so he lied. His father, he said, was ‘an entrepreneur.’ Much later I would discover that Walter Batterinski, a tall, silent man with the flattened face of inherited oppression, was nothing other than the owner of a dilapidated live bait business up a long dirt road that seemed to dead-end twice, once at his doorstep, and again in the small Ontario backwoods village of Pomerania.

  It was here where a couple of hundred beaten Poles came following their failed revolution of 1863. And here they remained beaten. The local economy is simple and double-edged, lumbering or welfare, each compensating the other. Opportunity is equally simple: it lies elsewhere. And no one would ever understand that better than Felix Batterinski.

  Incredible as it may sound for those of us whose first memory is of television, he grew up in a tar-papered shack, without electricity, with no running water, hot or cold, no toilet, no privacy, confused by one language at home, another at school, and yet another at the Latin Mass celebrated at the massive St. Martin’s Roman Catholic Church that sits at the top of the village’s largest hill, ever watchful.

  The Batterinskis were people without a past. Felix would say he was a Polish Canadian, but nothing else. I asked Walter once about the family background and he just bit his lip and shook his head, almost as if to say he was ashamed not to know where they had come from. A simple family that could not even keep track of itself….”

  — Excerpted by permission from “Batterinski’s Burden” by Matt Keening, Canada Magazine, June 1982

  November 18, 1960

  Vernon, Ontario

  I can see Poppa plain as day and it has got to be — what? — twenty-two years if it’s been a day. The silly bugger sitting in the Rileys’ very own kitchen and waving his damned Polack newspaper like a fly swatter. You’d think he felt he had to pound the lies into me. All I can say is I’m glad I was there to catch his knock. Thank the Christ none of the neighbours saw him snooping about. They’d have called the cops, sure as sin.

  Poppa looked like a degenerate. He would have shaved before flagging down the bus as it flew through Pomerania, but by mid-afternoon he always managed to look like other men do at the end of a hunt, no matter what. He had on his church clothes: the black pants that rode too high on the belly and shone like polished pews under the ass, the white shirt buttoned tight, no tie, and the heavy grey sweater with Batcha’s pink darning in the left elbow. Pink on grey — the old bitch must have been going colour blind.

  But the hat. My good God, the hat! That he must have picked up downtown at the year-end clearance at Vacationland Sports. It was straw woven in a fedora style, with a hollow plastic golf ball sliced in half and stapled onto some slime-green plastic grass that rode up top. And sticking up out of the band was a red plastic flag with the number “4” on it.

  He had to be nuts. Imagine the silly bugger coming all the way over here from Pomerania, 6 bucks on the Ottawa-to-Vernon milk run, just to tell me this. And him swallowing it in the first place. But there it was, written up like it had really happened, in the Polonia, his damned Polish newspaper, practically the only mail we ever got apart from the baby bonus.

  The Polonia was full of the appearance of the Virgin Mary on a church steeple in downtown Warsaw. Poppa claimed she’d been there four weeks, surrounded by some goofy glow and smiling down with big sad eyes on the crowds that were gathering each night to see her. The paper said the police could barely keep order. They had to marshal the crowds into six-deep ranks and then march them around the church so everyone could get a fair look. Some said they saw only the aura. Some said they saw her completely. But no one, naturally, had the guts to admit that they saw sweet screw-all.

  “Krasinski was right!” Poppa shouted. “Poland is God’s daughter!” Krasinski? Christ, but there it was smack in the middle of page two of the Polonia, Poppa’s long spruce cone of a finger tapping the damn poem like he was trying to make a frog jump. Poor dumb Poppa, expecting me to remember Krasinski like he lived back home in Pomerania, maybe just down the road from our shack in a hollowed-out maple somewhere between Dombrowski’s and Shannon’s. But I could barely remember. The name of Krasinski’s damn poem, yes — “Przedswit” — and perhaps one or two lines … “Be thou then the Truth, as Jesus is” — no, no, no — “as He is, everywhere. Thee I make my daughter.” Only a dumb Polack could swallow that kind of crap.

  Far more than the words, I remember Jaja’s bony knees, me sitting on my grandfather’s lap before the old man died, the smell of split cedar on his clothes and pipe tobacco on his breath as he tried night after night to teach his only grandson that silly poem. And all that garbage about this Krasinski being a distant relative of the Batterinskis and how I should be so proud.

  Hell, Krasinski should be so proud to be related to me. Hadn’t they just named me to the Muskoka midget all-star team? Hadn’t Felix Batterinski been voted first-string defence? I made the front page of the Vernon Muskokan. Krasinski only made the second page of the Polonia. And no picture, either.

  But here was Poppa, acting like I should model my game on someone who’d been dead for a hundred years.

  He didn’t even seem interested in my hockey. Once we’d disposed of the Virgin Mary, he had to go over all the latest new
s from home. Uncle Jan had just bought another new car, a Chevrolet Impala with power steering and automatic transmission, which caused Poppa to half spit and say it was the same as having a chauffeur. Uncle Ig was still the same, which was to be expected for someone who was so retarded. But at least I could smile about Jan’s car and good old Ig, who next to Danny Shannon was probably my closest friend. Poppa expected me to do the same for Batcha, but I couldn’t. So what if she was now making more money on her phoney cures than Poppa had all summer on worms and minnows? I hadn’t given a sweet damn about her since Jaja had keeled over in the chicken coop and left her a widow in permanent mourning. I still carried the scars on my neck from that memory of the bitch. So no thanks, Poppa, all I wanted to know was when he was going. Before he was seen.

  “Why have you come, Poppa?”

  “I want to see my son play hockey.”

  “We don’t play tonight. It’s juveniles tonight. Midgets don’t play till tomorrow.”

  “Fine then. I’ll stay till tomorrow.”

  Den. Den. Fine den. What did the old bugger say down at Vacationland Sports when he pointed out the hat? “I tink I’ll take one a dem tings?” Christ, until I heard him I hadn’t realized how much I’d lost. It was amazing what laughing behind your back could do for your front; I fell asleep thinking “th” and woke up saying it.

  “Never mind,” Poppa said quickly, though I had said nothing. “I’ll get a room at the hotel.”

  I couldn’t be sure whether he expected me to argue with him or not. But how could he have possibly stayed at the Rileys’? If he went to the bathroom he wouldn’t even know to flush.

  “This is a dandy place, son.”

  Dis. Dis. What was next? Prit near? He sat drinking in the place, gawking around like he’d suddenly realized he was in out of the rain. I knew what he’d be noticing: paint on the walls, and wallpaper, and no big spikes anywhere to hang up coats and hats and rusted cables he’d never use; real fancy dinnerware that’s all the same colour; four different sizes of Canada geese on the wall rather than four calendars — all from the same year; a four-piece toaster and sharp red plastic on the breakfast nook table rather than oilcloth you can’t make the pattern out on anywhere except where he’d hammered the overlap back up under.

  “What does this Mr. Riley do?” Poppa asked.

  “He owns his own business.”

  Poppa laughed. “So do I!”

  “You saw the hardware store on the corner where the bus came in?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s his.”

  I would have told him about the size of it, about all the gear and delivery vans and everything else, if he’d asked, but I knew from the way he picked at his knees he wasn’t interested.

  Then he smiled. “Where’s Danny Boy?”

  “Just up the street a bit.”

  “Nice place like this?” Dis.

  “Yah, sure.”

  “Free, too?”

  “Yah, sure.”

  “Just for playing hockey?”

  “Just for playing hockey.”

  “By God, you hang on to that, son.”

  “I will. Don’t worry.”

  “You been going to mass?”

  “Father Schula’s uncle is the priest here, Poppa. You remember that.”

  “I didn’t ask about him. I asked about you.”

  “We play Sundays. Usually.”

  “We pray Sundays. Usually.” Poppa thought this very funny, slapping the table so hard the knife-and-fork drawer rattled.

  “What’s that?”

  “Just the drawer. Utensils.”

  “Utensils?”

  “Yah. Knives and forks and spoons.”

  Poppa bent down and examined it, whistling. “Say, that’s a hell of an idea.” Dat’s.

  I had to get him out of there before the Rileys returned. My nerves must have shown, for Poppa shook his head and wagged a finger at me.

  “You haven’t been going to church, have you?”

  “We’re going to start serving after Christmas. Danny, too. Mr. Riley’s arranging it.”

  “Riley. Irish Catholic, eh? Watch them, Felix, they’ll steal the wine right off your tongue, eh?”

  “Mr. Riley doesn’t drink.”

  “Then he can’t be Irish. How’s about school, how’s it?”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  “Grades good?”

  “Got none yet.”

  “You working hard?”

  “Danny says he’s quittin’ the day he turns of age.”

  “That’s a Shannon. You’re a Batterinski. You think your Matka and Jaja would like to hear that?”

  How typically Poppa to call on the dead to do his work for him. Did he really believe I had anything to do with my mother’s death any more than I could have caused my grandfather’s heart attack?

  “How can they hear that? They’re dead.”

  The tongue cluck. Always the tongue cluck. “You get your schooling, son. Something to fall back on after hockey.”

  After hockey. Always the same phrase: after hockey. Like I was going for a crap or something.

  Poppa was talking too much. Maybe he was as nervous about the Rileys coming home as I was. He had his big hands on the table, fingers drumming, and I could make out every line in his skin by the black. He’d scrubbed, I knew that; I could practically feel the pumice stone rising from the can he’d hammered in above the basin. But it did little good. Ever. Poppa’s hands always looked like they’d just left a transmission.

  “Well,” he said, rising and reaching for his idiotic hat. “I’d better get going if I’m going to get a room. You’ll have supper with your father, eh? I’m buying.”

  “Mrs. Riley’s got a roast on special tonight. Can’t you smell it?”

  Poppa sniffed the air like a deer. Probably nothing had got through that mat of nasal hair in years.

  “She’ll expect me to be here,” I added quickly.

  “Sure. Sure. But you’ll come after supper, eh? And bring Danny Boy. Maybe show me the town, what do you say?”

  “Yes, Poppa. I’ll come down as soon as I eat.”

  “Here,” he said, grabbing up the copy of Polonia again. “You keep this. I can get another from the church.”

  He set it down so the paper faced me properly and I realized that the big story had pictures of the crowds but none of the main attraction. “If she was there, Poppa,” I said, “why didn’t they get a picture of her for the paper?”

  Poppa scowled. “The Holy Mother would not come down to pose for newspaper photographers, Felix. Don’t be sacrilegious.”

  “But they could have taken one anyway. She didn’t come down for them maybe, but they were there. They got pictures of the crowd.”

  “That’s not important,” Poppa said, snatching back his copy. “What’s important is that she chose Poland to appear in. You think about that, son. Why Poland?”

  “What if it had been China, Poppa?”

  “Don’t be smart with me, son.”

  He said it so matter-of-factly, so soft and free of anger, that I felt immediate guilt and stood up, smiling, to see him to the door. Another awkward handshake and then he was gone, the straw hat with the plastic golf course bobbing down the walk, past the cedar hedge and down the road toward Main Street and the hotel. He was whistling. I couldn’t hear, but could see the fine stream of his happy breath in the cold air — Poppa, drawing attention to himself. I watched for a moment and then ran. I had too much to do.

  Downstairs, where my bedroom was just off the family room, what Poppa’s doorbell had interrupted lay all over my bed, accusing me. Four National Geographic magazines were laid out like the little tents, their straight pins lined up at rest along my homework table. I had to work fast to get everything back together and clean again. Every month when the magazine arrived, Mr. Riley ceremoniously handed it over to Mrs. Riley so she could head upstairs and do her censoring. On a good month she’d return it with at least five pa
ges pinned together. A pin for each corner and one along each side so it was impossible even to peek inside.

  But this afternoon, with them out driving in their brand-new Pontiac Fire Chief, I was downstairs with the pins out and the pages open. Africans, but at least you could see their boobs. Not great, mind you, kind of flat and triangular like a splitting wedge, but when you’re fifteen years old even a hot water bottle looks good.

  I didn’t mention Poppa at all during supper — not that he was in Vernon, not that he’d be at the game. Nobody ever said much at all when the Rileys ate; there was never the time for it. They were on their second bowl of Neapolitan ice cream when I excused myself and went to the washroom to work on my hair and zits. The hair only took a second; there was only so much you could do with a brushcut.

  Some of the guys had been saying I looked like Tim Horton and that was just fine with me. I thought I played like him, too. Horton looked then like the Maple Leafs cut his hair on the skate sharpener, grinding it down, but I made do with Herb Broadbent’s scissors and not a damned thing else. The style was a natural for me and Herb was even talking about hanging my picture, complete with hockey uniform, in his shop window to advertise.

  But I knew he wouldn’t. A picture of Batterinski wouldn’t look like an advertisement for hair, but like one against zits. I was convinced I had zits because I was Polish. No one in my family had good skin; no one in Pomerania, as far as I had seen, ever had either, except for a few Irish like Danny Shannon. Maybe it was all the sugar in the mazureks, because Poppa, Jaja, and Ig all had swollen noses, moles, blackheads and broken vessels. Maybe it came from not pronouncing “th” properly, I don’t know.

  At least I had hair. Hair like Poppa’s, too, not poor Ig with his damned Scotch tape and floor sweepings from Hatkoski’s barber shop. How could they have been brothers, Ig with a quarter of Poppa’s brain and not a speck of his hair? And goddamn that Danny, too — him going on after practice yesterday to Powers and Bucky, telling them all about my Uncle Ig taping on somebody’s white hair over some of Danny’s own cuttings. Danny Shannon should have known better. Sometimes I wondered, who’s the more retarded, Danny or Ig? The real difference was Ig couldn’t help himself and smartass Danny could, but didn’t bother. The prick.