BROTHER ISAIAH WAS THE HEAD HONCHO MONK. No one ever said as much, for theirs was an order that disbelieved in head-honchoness, but if there was deciding to be done, it usually got left to Brother Isaiah. He also did much of the actual teaching. There is a rumor that aside from the game of hockey I don’t know a hell of a lot. But Brother Isaiah the Blind taught me all sorts of things. He taught me how a bird flies, for example, but it’s too complicated to get into. He taught me history, mostly Roman stuff, great battles and whatnot. He made me read books, all sorts of them. Back then, I recall, there were books about a baseball player named Frank Merriwell. I read those all the time. He was a handsome do-gooder and always won the ball game with a grand-slam homer. They never did have any books starring a hockey player, at least not until they come up with the Clinton & Leary Farting Around series, which were pretty good. Here’s how they used to go:
Suddenly, a scream pierced the winter air.
“Egad!” exclaimed Clay Clinton. “That sounded like Meredith Potter!”
“Faith and begorrah!” piped up Leary, his Irish blood at a boil. “It must be the blackguard Pierre LaFrance is arter her, t’be sure.”
“Come on, Leary!”
Clay Clinton, his blond hair flying in the wind, ran off in the direction of the Potter home.
I only heard Clay say “egad” once. He had his arms wrapped around a toilet bowl, and I think it came up by accident along with a gallon of bad whiskey.
Another thing about Brother Isaiah the Blind. When a new boy would come to the reformatory, Isaiah would tell us the night before about the lad’s arrival. He’d stand up, his strange eyes looking at nothing any of us could see, and he’d say how a new tyke was coming (he wouldn’t say his name) and then he’d say what crime or crimes the fellow had committed. (A lot of the pups, by the by, were arsonists. I was sort of a hero for having ignited a house with dog dirt.) I think Brother Isaiah’s reasoning was that we’d hear of the misdeed—robbery, say—and we’d get a mental picture in our minds of a Bill Dalton sort, and when the boy came in he was always just an apple-cheeked scallywag like the rest of us, so in that way we learnt not to tag people.
This one night, Brother Isaiah climbs to his feet and says that a boy is coming who was found guilty of car theft. Car theft might be pretty common stuff nowadays, but back then it was quite the caper. For one thing, only rich people had automobiles, so stealing one never seemed like a particularly good idea. Brother Isaiah said there was some evidence to suggest that the young fellow had need of the automobile, a family emergency of some sort, but we all thought, They’re shipping us a dope. Brother Isaiah went on to say that when the fellow was apprehended he’d beaten the tar out of four or five peace officers. Aha, we thought, they’re shipping us a Big dope.
So I for one wasn’t that surprised when the four monks came back from the train station with Manfred Armstrong Ozikean in tow.
All us inmates gathered around to gawk at him. Manfred had grown a bit, which made him the biggest boy in history. He smiled at us, but his eyes were watering and his lips trembled. Most of the other boys were nervous around him, even outright frightened, so I decided to show off a bit. I stepped to the front of the crowd and gave a little wave, saying, “Ho there, Manfred!”
Manfred gave forth with one of his “Hey!”s. This scared the boys, not only because the “hey” was loud, but also because I don’t think they’d figured on Manny being capable of speech. “It’s my friend Percy!” Manfred told the trembling assembled.
“Percival,” asked Simon the Ugly, “are you acquainted with Mr. Ozikean?”
“Sure thing,” I answered. “We’re both from the old Bytown. He plucked me out of the canal.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Brother Andrew the Fireplug, “you could take him under your wing.”
“I’ll do that.” I waggled my fingers at Manny, and he came with me like a monstrous puppy dog. The lads gave us wide berth, and I reckoned I’d improved my status considerably.
“How’s things in Ottawa?” I asked Manny.
Manfred thought about that for a while. He finally said, “Clay is fine.”
Even at Clay Clinton’s funeral, people were a bit guarded with their praise. The minister, for instance, said how Clay was a fine man, but how we likewise shouldn’t forget that he was usually under a lot of stress. That’s playing it pretty close to the vest for a eulogy. I was the man’s best friend, his bosom companion, and even I have on occasion had a hard time saying something nice about him.
This wasn’t the case with Manfred. To hear Manny tell it, and by jim he told it, Clay Clinton was perhaps the finest human being that God ever assembled.
It started that first night at the Bowmanville (Annex) Reformatory. We all went to bed in the bunk hall, but instead of talking about girls (which we didn’t know anything about) or hockey (my favorite) or baseball (I was an excellent infielder, you know, and likely could have played in the major leagues) Manny Ozikean regaled us with tales of the great Clay Clinton. He said as how Clay was the best friend a guy could have. Manfred came from a huge family, one with aunts and uncles and kids in the double digits, and Manfred told us they might have starved to death if not for Clay Clinton bringing them food. (Likely stealing it from some other poor family, I thought.) It was sickening. We had to listen to how Clay played Rover-Come-Over with Manfred’s baby brother, Oliphant. We had to listen to how Clay took Manny’s sister Winnifred to the parish hall dances. The other pups listened, their eyes bugged and their jaws on the ground, like we were discussing King Arthur or Lancelot, not some teenage porker from Ottawa. But that’s the way it was with Clay. People always talked him up.
Manfred Ozikean set up a little private altar before he went to sleep. He took his statue of Christ, the one where the wound in His side was so gaping that innards were slipping out, and nailed it to the wall. Manfred had a little model of the Virgin, which he set on his bedside table. He took the huge silver crucifix from around his neck and laid it down gently beside. Then Manfred took candles, five or six of them, and arranged them in a circle on the floor. He lit the candles, but everything seemed to get darker. Manfred took a photograph, a purple one with dog-eared edges, and set that in the middle.
I took a gander at the photograph. It was blurry and filled with strange clouds, because no one was much good at making pictures back then. It was a photograph of a girl. I understood why Clay had become so friendly with the Ozikean clan. I knew this was Manny’s sister Winnifred, and I also had a pretty good hunch as to why her photograph was lying there in the candlelight.
Well, I have to tell you that the team from the Bowmanville (Annex) Reformatory was one hell of a hockey team, mostly because of me, Little Leary. The year before we’d won the county championship pretty handily, and that was against a team with near adults and everything. We took hockey pretty serious, we did, so the day after Manfred’s arrival we practiced, which is what we did every day.
We were in for another surprise. It won’t be as much of a surprise for some of you people, seeing as the name Manny “The Wizard” Oz is almost as well known as mine.
We divided teams for shinny, which is how we warmed up for the weird drills and maneuvers that Brother Isaiah would put us through. For some reason Isaiah named his drills after flowers, the Rose and the Tulip and such. I once tried to put the Ottawa Patriots through the Rose when I was the coach and I damn near had a mutiny on my hands.
So we divided for a warm-up game, and no one picked Manfred until the next-to-last call. He and I ended up on opposite sides.
Manfred looked mighty clumsy waiting for things to get started, his ankles all trembly, his upper body having to twist every so often so that he wouldn’t pitch forward. It looked as if Manfred had trouble even standing in skates and, of course, that’s entirely correct. Manfred had trouble standing in skates.
Brother Isaiah skated to the middle of the ice. His eyes looked like stones left over from digging a grave. Isaiah held out a puck over what was likely dead center of the round rink. He put two fingers into his mouth and tooted. We commenced.
I scooped the face-off. Down the boards I went in a Brother Andrew Bulldog. I mowed down two lads, stepped around another. Then I saw Manfred waiting for me. Well, my only concern is that he doesn’t fall on me. I decided I’d take him out with my (still rudimentary) St. Louis Whirlygig. I went into the move, and all of a sudden I was arse over teakettle, and Manfred was waltzing down the ice like a ballerina. He out-skated Brother Simon the Ugly! Manny spent more time in the air than he did on the ground. Every so often Manfred would set a toe to the ice, but it was more like how every so often a whale has to break surface to breathe. Manny cranked up to shoot and the goaler dropped his stick and covered his head, not that I could blame him. Manfred just floated the puck over the lad’s shoulders, and his team was a point to the better.
Those four monks stood there looking like they’d died and gone to heaven. Even skinny Theodore was grinning. Manfred looked bashful. You might remember that look if you’ve got any great age to you. I recall when the Patriots tied up the Stanley Cup finals with Toronto in one-nine two-five. Manny scored the tying goal, one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, and while the crowd went wild, Manfred stood there looking like he’d just shit his drawers.
So we had another face-off. I won it, flipped the rubber backwards to a teammate, and then I hardstepped toward the other end. Manfred was nowhere to be seen, which I found a mite puzzling. I took a position near the side of the net, and all of a sudden I hear this cheer. I spun around, and down at the other end the goaler was flipping the puck out of the net. Manfred wore the expression of a dog who’d just buried something disgusting in the backyard.
Well, it wasn’t all bad that day. I did score two or three goals, but at dinnertime no one wanted to talk about me, they all wanted to talk about Manfred. Except for Manfred, who wanted to talk about Clay Clinton. I shoved some peas around on my plate and then went to bed.