Bretton
Loney is a novelist and short story writer whose work has appeared in anthologies
and literary journals in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Nova
Scotia. In 2013 his short story, Tommy’s
Mother, was shortlisted for the Writer’s Union of Canada’s Short Prose
Competition for Developing Writers.
In 2015, he
released Rebel With A Cause: The Doc
Nikaido Story, a biography of the late Alberta physician, Dr. Harry
Nikaido. Bretton lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia with his wife, Karen Shewbridge.
For more information, please see www.brettonloney.com Buying links below.
THE LAST HOCKEY PLAYER
By BRETTON LONEY
Chapter 1 – The Apprentice
Something
heavy hits the floor and jerks me awake, heart pounding. Gusts of cold wind
beat the open door back and forth as snow snakes its way inside. It’s hard to
see. The warming fires have died down for the night and smoke hangs around our
sleeping ledges. It parts to reveal a long, thick lump of dark clothing.
Someone has fallen through our door.
“Quick,
grab him and throw him out into the storm,” says Old William, who sleeps on the
ledge closest to the door. “He could infect us all. We can’t have a stranger
inside who hasn’t passed The Protocol.”
Some of the grey ones mumble agreement. Old
William knows The Protocol all too well. Last spring his two sons came back
from scavenging in the city and died in The Protocol Hut of the Second
Sickness.
The stranger doesn’t stir. The Leader lights
a torch and steps closer to the body. Puddles grow on the dirty floor as snow
melts from his wrappings and the icicles hanging from his beard. He’s a big
man. Bigger than Neil-Young who is the strongest and tallest of the younger
ones in our village. He carries no weapon.
“What do you think, Britanny?” the Leader
asks over her shoulder to the Teacher.
Britanny is wise. The Leader and other
council members often seek her advice. She’s the most educated person in our
village and does a lot of deep thinking. I know because as her apprentice, I
spend most of the day with her. It’s been that way since my father died when a
tree fell on him four summers ago.
“The Protocol is the right way,” says
Britanny, as she opens the deerskin curtain that separates her sleeping ledge
from the common area and props herself up on an arthritic elbow.
She pulls her fur covering more tightly around her. Britanny is always cold. She is
a grey one. “But if we throw this man outside tonight in the cold, he will die.
He looks strong. We all know our village needs another strong man. I say drag
him out to The Protocol Hut and light a fire to keep him alive. In the morning we can decide what to
do.”
The Leader weighs Britanny’s words. Many
times I’ve seen her and Britanny talk quietly about what must be done. What to
do with the sick. Who should join the hunting parties. Who must take the risk
of scavenging. Which villages we’ll trade with in the spring and which in the
fall. These decisions have given the Leader many wrinkles around her sad brown
eyes that sometimes fill with tears when she and Britanny talk, their heads
bowed together for privacy.
She waves her torch back and forth across the
stranger, his long legs and arms sprawled on a floor littered with bone scraps
the dogs have gnawed and little ones played with before bed.
“Britanny is right. We can’t throw him
outside. It would be wrong to waste a man’s life. Since the last sickness, we
have too few strong people to hunt, fish, and chop down trees. Old William and
Coach, tie a rope around him so that you don’t have to get too close. Drag him
over to The Protocol Hut and get a fire going, then bind the door shut. Sorry,
but you two will have to spend the night in the barn. Take a fire bundle with
you.”
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| Photo by John Silliman - Unsplash |
There are grumblings in the darkness from
some sleeping ledges as the sounds of the night’s constant hacking and coughing
resumes. Some agree, some disagree, but the Leader has spoken and so it is
done. She chooses Old William because he’s a grey one and can be lost if the
stranger has sickness. She chooses Coach as Old William can’t drag the stranger
through the snowbanks to The Protocol Hut by himself. They put a rope under
each of the stranger’s arms and pull fiercely. He must be heavy as a tree
trunk.
“Christ, why do I have to help?” Coach says,
not so loud that the Leader hears, but loud enough that others do.
Another grey one sighs, breaks away from the
arms of his wife, and comes to help. They drag the stranger from our warm nest
into the blizzard and slam the door. Outside the wind thrashes angrily, pushing
and pulling, desperate to find a way inside.
Chapter 2 - Britanny
We still know very little about the stranger
who was thrust into our midst. He spent two days in The Protocol Hut and
somehow survived. The hut is not well-made or warm because if anyone who stays
inside is actually sick, we have to burn it to the ground and build another
one. We warned everyone to stay three arms-lengths away as The Protocol says.
My apprentice pushed a bowl of rabbit stew to him with a long stick. It was not
much, as it is early winter and our food stores are already wearing thin as
they did last winter. The hunting parties have caught some small game and
birds, the fishers some trout and pickerel through the pond ice, but not
enough. Hunger growls in every stomach.
The Leader and I come out in the failing
afternoon light and tell the stranger to strip off all his clothes, even though
it is very cold. We tell him to raise his arms so that we can see if there are
boils under his armpits or rashes from the Black Sickness. He has strong
shoulders and well-muscled arms. His chest and stomach are covered with thick
brown hair. There is a large, jagged scar near his ribs.
The stranger has powerful thighs and a knee
that is crisscrossed with thin, pink surgical
scars. The Leader tells him to move his massive thing one way and another to
make sure no open sores or lumps hide behind it. We cannot help grinning at
each other as he does this.
“Oh,
to be young,” I whisper to the Leader, who has a greedy glow in her eyes.
“You have passed The Protocol, stranger,”
says the Leader. “Now the three of us will go over to the Lookout’s Platform
for some privacy to talk about where you’ve come from and where you’re going.
We need to know of life beyond our village and the neighbouring villages.”
 |
| Photo by Elias Schumann - Unsplash |
The stranger tells us he is originally from
another Nova Scotia village that is a week’s journey from here. It is probably
abandoned now, but no one knows for certain. He was working in Hershey,
Pennsylvania, and got stuck there when The Crumbling came, eighteen years ago.
He says that he and other foreigners were about to be deported by the U.S.
Government when the second wave of the Bogota Virus washed over the world. It
killed hundreds of millions in North America and around the world, destroying
governments and institutions and decimating the medical community. Worse was to
come.
He says that when he eventually decided to
leave, it took him more than a year to walk to our village. It is insane to
walk all that way alone. He is lucky to be alive.
The stranger has seen many things and people
during his travels. Some were cannibals and he stayed well away, the piles of human
bones scattered around the edge of their villages a warning sign of imminent
danger. One night in upstate New York, he walked past a village in a forest
that was all lit up, guarded by huge, barking dogs. The stranger says he was
sure it had electricity. I burst out laughing at that one. I am certain that no
one has had electricity anywhere since The Crumbling.
 |
| Photo by Lukas Neasi - Unsplash |
Some of the villages the stranger passed
through were organized like ours, with a few families living and sleeping
together in one large shelter and sharing the food caught in the water, hunted
and gathered in the forest, and the little that can be grown and traded. In
others, individual families live in their own huts and only eat what the
hunters and fishers in their family catch. How they manage to survive without
sharing, I have no idea.
I tell my apprentice about all this
afterward, as it is important for a bright boy like him to know as much as
possible about the world outside our village. Because of his clubfoot, he has
never travelled more than the half-day’s journey to the village of TimHortons
that we trade with regularly. Even that trip makes his foot sore for days
afterward, not that he says anything, but I can tell.
“I think some of what the stranger told us is
B.S.,” I whisper to my apprentice as we get ready for bed. “Either that or he
is crazy as a loon, and I don’t think he is crazy. His eyes are too wary to be
crazy.”
I blow out the candle above our sleeping
ledge and ponder the meaning of this stranger’s arrival. He has stirred my
memory. You almost forget that once there were streetlights, waterproof coats
and hot baths instead of the swallowing darkness of a winter forest, greased
animal skin cloaks to cut the biting cold and, if you’re lucky, a pail of cold
water to wash your face. It is
depressing to remember what once was, and dangerous too. To stay strong it is
best to try and forget the old life.
The warming fires cast eerie shadows on the
ceiling of our shelter as I try to fall asleep.
Thank you for
being our guest this week Bretton and sharing the first chapters of your captivating story.
We look forward to your 4Q Interview.
The Last Hockey Player can be purchased here:
Amazon : https://www.amazon.ca/Last-Hockey-Player-Bretton-Loney/dp/1775393305/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1546097313&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Last+Hockey+Player
Kobo : https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/the-last-hockey-player
The Last Hockey Player can be purchased here:
Amazon : https://www.amazon.ca/Last-Hockey-Player-Bretton-Loney/dp/1775393305/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1546097313&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Last+Hockey+Player
Kobo : https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/the-last-hockey-player
