Usually I gave them back to him at the rink, but today we had a pregame skate I wasn’t sure I’d make, so I’d brought them out to Tatch’s camp.
“Did I hear my name?”
Tex bounced out of the trailer behind Tatch in sweats and high-top sneakers, unlaced. He slapped Tatch hard on the shoulder. Tatch lurched forward and I caught him with one hand.
“What’s up, Coach?” Tex said.
Tatch twisted around to look at the boy. “You trying to kill your uncle?”
Tex grinned. “Sorry, old man.”
“Got your skates,” I said.
On the trailer, a shred of cardboard duct-taped over a cracked window waggled in the breeze. I smelled something wafting out, at once acrid and sweet, maybe canned beans burned onto the inside of a pan. A preacher’s voice tinned through a transistor radio: “There is no ice in hell…”
Tex squirmed past his uncle, towering over both Tatch and me, pale biceps bulging against the threadbare sleeves of his gray Spitfires T-shirt. “Thanks,” he said, taking the skates. One by one he turned them over, shut one eye, and peered with the other down the length of each blade. Each time, he nodded and said, “That’s it.” Then he looked at me. His hair, black as a puck, was matted on one side. He’d been napping.
“Who’s Mic-Mac’s guy again?” he said.
“Holcomb,” I said. “Pinky Holcomb. Number nine.”
“Pinky? The guy a fag?”
“Be tolerant, son,” Tatch said.
“You don’t want to mess with Pinky,” I said.
Mic-Mac’s captain and top scorer had gotten his nickname after dropping his gloves in a hockey fight and having his left pinky severed by a skate blade in the melee. He wasn’t the most skilled player, but he played with unrelenting fire, a little cannonball who would skate through a brick wall for a stray puck.
“Well, only wimps wear nine,” Tex said.
I hesitated because Gordie Howe, the Red Wings great, had worn number 9.
“Right,” I said.
Tex’s eyes focused behind me, his smile fading.
“I’m out of here,” he said. “Thanks for the skates.”
“Hey there, Mr. Breck,” Tatch said. “Was just about to come up.”
I turned around. Standing before me was the clapping man from up on the ridge. He wore a long denim coat and a wool cap tight on the back of his head. His too-small wire-rim glasses pinched his face in a way that made him look like a sallow John Denver. I felt unsure that I would like him. He smiled and offered his hand. I took it.
“Mr. Gus Carpenter,” he said. “Of the Pilot. ”
“That’s me.”
“I am Mr. Breck.”
“You’ve seen my byline?”
“Some, yes. Forgive me, but I find that newspapers offer little of value. There is no salvation to be found on the sports page.”
“Hard to argue with that.”
“What brings you here?”
The way Breck had commandeered the conversation, with Tatch just standing meekly by, made me wonder if Breck, not Tatch, was actually in charge.
“Brought Tex his skates,” I said. “He’s a little superstitious.”
“Matthew,” Breck said.
“Matthew.”
“He’s got a warm-up skate before the game on account of it’s a playoff tonight,” Tatch offered, sounding apologetic.
Breck folded his arms and looked at the trailer behind Tatch. “We need his strong shoulders on the hill. Everyone’s working hard. We cannot count on the county to do the right thing. We will have to force their hand.”
“I’ll get him going,” Tatch said.
“Thank you, Mr. Edwards.”
“What about the county?” I said.
Breck turned back to me. “Your town,” he said. “You come looking for a boy to bring you a trophy so you can hoist it high over your head.”
“Excuse me?”
“You ask a boy to carry your town on his shoulders.”
“Actually, I just did him a little favor.”
“On the contrary, Mr. Carpenter, you did yourself a favor.” He smiled again. “You have a mistaken idea of what a messiah is. You and everyone down there.”
I gave Tatch a who-the-hell-is-this-guy glance. “Well,” I said, “I’m not sure what to say. It’s just a game.”
“Indeed,” Breck said. “You, of all people, should understand that.”
Tatch touched my elbow. “Mr. Breck’s been a good friend since he come to us a few months back. Met him at a Christian convocation down to Monroe. He’s helping us out with our tax issue, the legal stuff.”
“Have you told him?” Breck asked Tatch.
“No,” Tatch said, looking guilty nevertheless. “Told him he might want to attend that drain commission meeting tomorrow.”
“I see.”
“You from around here?” I said.
“I am now,” Breck said. “We are building a Christian community. I’m sure it doesn’t look like much to you. But we are working hard. Our faith sustains us.”
“And a backhoe?”
Breck twisted his glasses off and turned and pointed them at the ridge. I saw shovels flinging dirt and the backhoe shuttling backward and up. Many a developer had begged Tatch’s father to sell the land, but he refused to do anything but put his trailer and a pole barn on it.
“The Lord helps those who help themselves,” Breck said. “Do you see that line of trees there, the one that tops out with the oak on the ridge?”
I looked up. I felt my breath catch. I hadn’t noticed before. The trees were filled with crosses. Christian crosses. Dozens of them. Small ones made from two-by-twos, larger ones from two-by-fours. Painted black, white, red, gold. Nailed into the tree trunks at twenty, thirty feet above the ground, out of reach without a ladder. Some facing down on the clearing, some facing up toward the sky.
“Mr. Carpenter?”
“Yes,” I said. “I see.”
“Do not judge, so that you may not be judged,” Breck said. “Where I’m pointing approximates the property line on the western edge of the Edwards’s parcels. On the other side of that line is land owned by your friends in Pine County.”
I was less interested in the property line than in those crosses on the trees.
“The county purchased it in the nineteen-seventies when the economy was poor and the land could be had cheaply,” he said. “Of course the people who run the county could never decide what to do with it, so it sits.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Long ago, a handful of homes once stood there, and beneath them a septic field. We believe it to be leaking.”
“Thus the backhoe and the shovels.”
“It’s bad enough, wouldn’t you agree, that the county wants us to eat their property tax crap.” He glanced at Tatch. “Please forgive the language.”
“They just want us out of here,” Tatch said.
