Hockey Dreams by David Adams Richards Read Free Book Online

nobody named Stafford on defence.
    “Jeepers,” Stafford said kicking his foot monotonously against the wall.
    I knew that that meant I would curl — for the rest of my life. A curler. The only other sport that Canadians were the best in the world at, my mother said.
    But for Stafford it meant something else.

Part Two

FOUR
    S UCH A LONG TIME AGO , 1960; I sometimes forget how many movies I did see in our theatre on the other side of town. Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Rory Calhoun, Clark Gable, William Holden, Dan Duryea and, of course, the most American of them all, Jimmy Stewart, who had that kind of New England rage that passed for morality.
    All of these actors played war heroes, cowboys or, as in the case of Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable, sports heroes.
    The sport was baseball or football.
    I wanted to be an actor for a little while. The Newfoundland poet, Al Pittman, has a poem about leaving a theatre in a small village in Newfoundland and trying to find an urban setting so he can act out the drama he has just seen. We did that as well. Everyone in rural Canada must have done that at one time or another.
    The sets were always just slightly south of us. And, of course, we related. Canadians are very good at “relating.”That’s what the movies from America and Britain allowed us to do.
    As a matter of fact, I wanted to become an actor that Christmas. I think that this was the
one
time in my life that I wanted to participate in a school activity.
    They were putting on a play called
The Hold Out
. It was one of those one-act plays found by the drama teacher in an old musty book of one-act plays from the United States. I knew nothing about it.
    Our school was a dark, aging, high-ceilinged place. Always I have tried to describe the peculiar aspect of oppression it fostered upon me. I have never managed it.
    It had heavy, grey hallways and linoleum floors. Lord Beaverbrook had gone to this school in the 1890s.
    And here I was, with Stafford, close to Christmas of 1960, standing at the door of Mrs. Grey asking if I could be in the school play.
    Mrs. Grey got her actors from the top — the crème de la crème of scholars. We weren’t the crème de la crème. We weren’t even close to the crème de la crème.
    She was writing in her attendance book when we went in on that grey afternoon in mid December. The remarkable thing about this is that I remember her as being as pleased with herself as any child of twelve when she said this: “Well well well well — are you two at the top?”
    And that was it. Not only were Stafford and I not able to skate well enough to play hockey, we were too stupid to act.
    “We could act better than any of them,” said Stafford, who didn’t care if he ever acted. And then he said something else. He said that on the day of the play, December 21st, he was going to
boo
. He would boo them off stage.
    He also told me that the girls would be naked in the play. (They did wear pyjamas, and it was the first time I had ever seen a girl, other than my sister, in pyjamas.)
    December 21st came. We filed into the auditorium class after class of boys and girls. I was sitting somewhere in the middle. From the sets and design of the costumes, the play might have taken place in 1930. Or perhaps 1960.
    It was a play about a poor boy, played by John Sullivan who we all called John L. Sullivan, who would not join his friends or go out to play baseball. No one knew why. They teased and tormented him until a fatherly, moustached, philanthropist, played by Garth, rescued this poor boy at Christmas.
    Garth made a moral speech to the small group sitting by the Christmas tree and called the boy forward. The speech was about the goodness of this child. The sacrifices this child made for his family — working to support his mother — that this child was the living, unrehearsed embodiment of Christmas day.
    “It’s all in here,” Garth said sternly, to the audience, touching his breast with his hand. He then