David was determined to do whatever it took to show Al and Mr. Kennedy he could do the job. He left the Home at 3:30 on Saturday afternoon and arrived at the Jubilee at 4:20. Like the day before, he had to make the ride alone. J-P wouldn’t be able to leave his job as the Shabbas Goy until after 6:15. The sun was setting much later now that it was the end of February. J-P was going to come down in time for the game and see if he could buy a ticket. With David in the rink it would probably be easy for him to put the ladder outside the window, but there was no way they were going to risk David’s chance at the job like that. If J-P could get a ticket, he’d meet up with David after the game. If not, they’d meet back at his sister’s. Once again David would have to spend the night there because there was no chance he’d be back at the Home by lights out.
He expected to walk into the Jubilee the way he’d done on Friday, but the rink was kept locked until seven o’clock on game days. There was a man at the door to let people in … but he didn’t speak English!
David tried to explain. “Mees-yure Kennedy told me to be here.”
“Monsieur Kennedy n’est pas là,” the man at the door said. “’Ee’s not ’ere.”
“No,” David said. “He told me to be here.”
The man shook his head.
“What about Al?” David asked. “Is Al here? Un homme named Al?”
“Je ne parle pas anglais,” the man said. “Je ne comprends pas.” And he closed the door.
David wasn’t sure what to do next. Hopefully, Al would come searching for him at five o’clock. But what if he didn’t? David could lose this job before he even had a chance to get it. Maybe he should go to J-P’s sister and see if Maurice could come back with him and translate?
As David was thinking it over, a cab pulled up in front of the rink and another man got out. “Keep it running,” he heard the man say. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
David had never heard the voice before — he would have expected it to sound more rumbling and mean — but he had no trouble recognizing the face. It was Joe Hall! The defenceman would be able to get David inside the rink, but he wasn’t sure he could summon up the courage to speak to him. To his amazement Hall spotted him and said something first. “Are you the boy who fixed my sweater yesterday?”
David stared for a moment. “Yes, sir,” he finally squeaked out.
Joe smiled. He knew that when most people met him the first time they expected him to be some kind of ogre. Off the ice, though, his personality was completely different. “You did a great job. Al mentioned you’d be helping tonight. Whatcha doing out here?”
“The man at the door wouldn’t let me in. I guess he didn’t understand what I was saying.”
“Well, come in with me and I’ll find Al for you.”
Joe knocked at the door. The man opened it again and nodded at Joe. But then he glared at David.
“C’est bon,” Joe said. “Il est avec moi.”
The man shrugged and let them both in.
David followed Joe around the rink to the Canadiens’ dressing room.
“Hey, Al!” Joe shouted as they got closer. “Al? Where are you?”
Al popped his head out from the dressing room door. “What are you doing here so early, Joe?”
“I’m gonna grab my skates and take ’em over to Art’s shop to get sharpened. I gotta a taxi waiting for me out front … Oh, and I brought someone for you.”
Al saw David behind Joe. “You’re early, too. Good. There’s a lot to do. Follow me and we’ll get started.”
David followed Al into the dressing room. Considering how plain Jubilee Rink was, the Canadiens’ dressing room was pretty nice. The man who had owned the Montreal Wanderers at the time had built the Jubilee back in 1909. He had intended for his team to play there — which it did for a while — so he had made sure the home dressing room was a good one. It had a wooden floor that wouldn’t dull skate blades too much, and wooden stalls for the players around the wall.
In each of the stalls were pegs and a hanger. Beside each one was a skinny metal locker for clothes. There was a wooden chair in front of each one for the player to sit on. Above each stall was a slate board with a player’s name and number written neatly in chalk. David looked around and spotted them all:
1. Vézina
2. Corbeau
3. Hall
4. Lalonde
5. Pitre
6. Cleghorn
7. Malone
8. Berlinquette
9. Couture
10. McDonald
It was hard to believe that within the next hour or so they would all be in there, talking and joking and getting ready for the game.
“First thing we gotta do,” Al said, jerking his thumb at a door on the far wall, “is get all the gear out of the back.” David followed him across the dressing room. “The smell can be a little hard to take at first,” Al warned as he opened the door and led David through.
David winced as the tangy odour of stale sweat hit his nose hard enough to make his eyes water.
Al laughed. “Just breathe through your mouth a bit. You’ll get used to it soon enough.”
The smell came from the players’ uniforms and equipment, which hung from cords strung like clotheslines.
“Everything’s organized by the players’ numbers. You gotta make sure you keep it all together or it’s too hard to tell whose is whose. And believe me, the players will get angry if you mix it up. They all got their patterns and superstitions, and they get plenty cheesed off if you mess them up. So we always do everything the same way. The sweaters and socks get hung on the hanger inside the stalls. The underwear and other stuff go on hooks in the lockers. Pile the pads on the chairs and put the skates on the floor inside the stalls. Sticks get lined up on the wall by the door. And don’t get any of them crossed! The guys think it’s bad luck. Cleghorn goes crazy if he sees crossed sticks. Of course, it doesn’t take much to make him go crazy. He’s not as bad as his brother, though. Those Cleghorns both got a temper like Joe Hall at his worst.”
Odie Cleghorn was new to the team this year, but he’d been a top player since 1910. For years he and his brother, Sprague, had starred together with the Montreal Wanderers. The war had kept Odie out of action during the first year of the NHL, and now that the Wanderers were gone, Odie was scoring goals for the Canadiens while Sprague was anchoring the defence in Ottawa. They’d be battling against each other in the playoffs. Sprague was the real wild one, but Odie could mix it up, too. Still, it was Joe Hall who had led the NHL in penalty minutes two years in a row.
As David carried the equipment into the dressing room, he realized he’d never given much thought to what the players wore for protection. It was amazing how little there was! Skinny leather pads lined with felt to cover their knees and shins. Pants made of canvas with wooden dowels sewn in to protect their thighs and butt. Nothing but extra layers of felt sewn into their undershirts to protect their shoulders and elbows. How did they hit each other so hard with equipment as flimsy as that? Only their leather gloves seemed sturdy enough to give decent protection. The sticks were solid and sturdy, too … yet they hit each other over the head with them and nobody wore a helmet!
When David was finished getting all the equipment, Al told him that if he got the job, one of his responsibilities would be to maintain the fire in the coal stove that kept the dressing room warm.
“It’s only gotta be warm enough to take the chill off,” Al said. “You make it too hot, and it’s trouble. The last thing you want is for the guys to work up a sweat getting their gear on in the dressing room and then have their muscles freeze up when they go out into the cold. Guys can get hurt when that happens. Or catch pneumonia or something. You know how to work a coal-burning stove?”
David hesitated. Should he say that he did? But then he decided it would be worse to lie. He shook his head.
“There’s nothing to it, really. You start it up with some paper and kindling, then throw a few logs in. Once they really get going, you just add the coal. When you do, you gotta make sure the draft’s fully open. Afterward you can shut it down some. But you know what? I’ll usually be the one to start it. You’ll be the one who has to come in a few times during the game to throw a bit more coal on so it doesn’t burn out. Then, when the game’s nearly over, you can toss in a whole bunch and really heat it up in here. I’ll do it with you tonight, so you know how much to use. But after the game’s over — and after you’ve hung up all the equipment in the back room and the players have left — you’ll be the one to shovel the ash out from the bottom. Coal makes ten times as much ash compared to wood.”
By 6:30 the players had all begun to arrive. As at practice the day before, Georges Vézina was the first to show up. He nodded at Al as he entered the dressing room, then looked David up and down. It was hard to read anything in his expression. Vézina peered into his stall, and when he saw that everything seemed to be in order, he slowly undressed and put on his long underwear.
“Never known anyone as quiet as he is,” Al whispered to David as the goalie did a few leisurely stretches. “I’m pretty sure he understands English, but I’ve never heard him speak it. As far as I know, he only speaks French. And it’s got to be something pretty important before he’ll even speak that!”
The dressing room got noisier once the other players showed up. They all seemed to like joking around.
“Big game tonight, Joe,” Bert Corbeau said. “You ready, old man?”
At thirty-six Joe Hall was one of the oldest players in hockey. “Readier than you’ll ever be,” he said to Corbeau, his twenty-four-year-old defence partner.
“Hey, Odie,” Bert said, “give us some dirt on your brother. What can we say to get him really riled up?”
“You don’t want to get him riled,” Odie Cleghorn said. “He gets better when he gets angry.”
“Unlike you. You just get stupider!”
Things got more serious as game time approached. Newsy Lalonde was the coach of the team as well as the captain, and he had a few words for his teammates before they faced the Senators.
“These guys beat us 7–0 last week, and they beat Toronto 9–3 a couple of days ago. They won seven of their last eight games, and we’ve only won three. They think they’re better than we are, and if we let them beat us again tonight, it’s going to be even tougher for us to stop them when we go to Ottawa for the next one. We gotta show them we mean business. We gotta beat ’em tonight, and beat ’em bad!”