Fever Season (19 page)

“You know,” Joe said to David after the boy finished eating his breakfast. “I lost my father when I was only eight years old. Of course, I still had my mother, but she had seven of us to look after. She turned our place into a rooming house so she could work and still take care of us. Even so, I had to quit school when I was your age.

Got a job in a cigar factory. I still work for them when the season's over, but not in the factory anymore. When I started getting famous as a hockey player, they figured I'd be more valuable as a salesman. Pay's pretty good, but it keeps me on the road an awful lot. Between that and hockey, I'm hardly ever at home with my wife and kids.”

This was a private side of Joe Hall few people knew about. David wondered if Joe's frustration at the long times he had to spend away from his family was part of the reason his anger boiled over so often when he was on the ice. It was hard to believe a guy who could be so mean could be so nice.

It was going to take the Canadiens six and a half days to get to Vancouver from Montreal. Even for David, every day on the train quickly became pretty much the same. People had to find something to do to occupy their time. All of the players had their routines.

David wasn't surprised to see Georges Vézina enjoying most of his time alone. In fact, he spent a lot of his days on the train sleeping. The goalie had brought some French magazines with him, but he only read them for a few minutes a few times each day.

“He worries about the strain on his eyes,” Joe explained. “You can't stop the puck if you can't see it!”

As a forward, Jack McDonald had no such worries. Jack had been a big goal scorer in his early days, but now he was a trusted substitute coming off the bench when someone needed a rest. He had brought a couple of books with him and occupied most of his time with reading. Some of the players teased him about that. Most of them passed the time playing cards.

Billy Couture and Louis Berlinquette were substitutes, too. They stuck together and loved to play gin. Didier Pitre and Newsy Lalonde were the team's star players and had been on the club the longest, going all the way back to when the NHA was organized in 1909. They played poker with Al and Mr. Kennedy. Just small stakes, though. Their boss was a lot richer than they were.

Bert Corbeau also liked to play cards, but he was something of a loner. He figured the best way to be alone in a crowded railway car was to play solitaire. Odie Cleghorn, on the other hand, was the restless type. He liked to keep moving around the car in an effort to stay busy. Cleghorn would tease McDonald about his book reading and was always trying to get Couture and Berlinquette arguing about something. He kept tabs on the other card players, too.

“You can move that row under the red ten onto the black jack,” he said, sliding into the seat next to Corbeau. “Oh, look at that!” he said excitedly as the removal of the ten turned up a red queen. “Now you can shift the whole thing back over onto the queen and then move up that black king you've got. Then you slide the pile over there.”

Corbeau slammed down the cards in his hand. “I know how to play the game,” he growled. “They call it solitaire for a reason, you know.”

“Sorry, Bert,” Cleghorn said. He got up to go, but his mischievous grin made it clear he wasn't sorry at all.

One of the ways everyone, except Georges Vézina, liked to pass the time was by reading the newspaper. The porters always brought several copies of the local papers onboard when they hit some of the bigger cities.

“Hey, George!” Newsy called out to Mr. Kennedy from behind a copy of the Winnipeg newspaper they'd picked up in a small town across the border in Manitoba. “Maybe the next time we make this trip you can rent us a couple of airplanes.”

“What are you talking about, Lalonde?”

“Says here they're gonna fly those planes clear across the ocean pretty soon. Says Billy Bishop might make the first flight. If they can fly a plane across the ocean, it's gotta be easier to fly one across the country.”

“You'll never get me up in one of those rickety crates,” Mr. Kennedy said. “If the man upstairs wanted us to fly, he'd have given us wings.”

The others laughed.

Sports was the usual topic of conversation when the players were reading stories out of their newspapers. Spring training was about to get started, and there was lots of news about baseball.

“Looks like Babe Ruth's gonna be a holdout,” Newsy said.

“How much does he want?” Joe asked.

“A three-year deal for thirty thousand bucks. But he'll agree to take fifteen thousand for one year.”

“Whew! That's a lotta dough! What do the Boston Red Sox say?”

Newsy squinted at the paper. “Owner's offering him eighty-five hundred for one year.”

“Boy, imagine turning down that kind of money!”

“Story says he doesn't even want to pitch anymore.

Just play the outfield.”

Joe whistled. “But the guy's a twenty-game winner.”

“I know, but he hit eleven home runs last year playing part-time in the outfield. Tied him for the American League lead.”

“That's like Georges leading the league in scoring! Still, is he worth ten thousand bucks a year?”

“Says he'll quit baseball and take up boxing if he doesn't get it.”

Joe grinned. “Big money in that.”

“If you don't mind getting beat up for a living.”

“Oh, like we don't get beat up?”

“But imagine if a guy as big as Babe Ruth was hitting you …”

“Knock you right out of the park!”

“He'd have to catch me first.”

“Hah!”

C
HAPTER
18

Joe Hall and David spent a lot of time together on the train. Most of the other players didn't pay much attention to him, but Joe seemed to like having him around. David figured it was probably because he missed his own kids.

Joe told David that most of the Canadiens were hoping to play Vancouver in the Stanley Cup series. “It's got nothing to do with you,” he said. However, like their concerns about David, it did have to do with money.

“It's because the rink in Vancouver is so much bigger,” Joe explained. “It's got nearly eleven thousand seats. Seattle's barely holds four thousand. That means the bonuses will be bigger if we play Vancouver because the money all comes from ticket sales.”

In fact, the players' money only came from the ticket sales for the first three games. The Stanley Cup series was a best-of-five series, but officials from the two leagues didn't want the players dogging it. Paying them for only the first three games meant no one would try to lose on purpose so the series would go the limit and they'd make more money.

“But it doesn't really matter who any of us
wants
to play, does it?” Joe said. “Whatever happens is going to happen no matter what anyone wants. When the PCHA playoff wraps up on Friday, then we'll know.”

The game on Friday started at 8:15 in Vancouver. It ended a little after ten o'clock. The Canadiens were on the train in Calgary, which meant it was shortly after eleven when word of the game reached them. A telegram was waiting for Mr. Kennedy at the station. A porter brought it to him in the car, and all the players gathered around as he took it. David had already climbed into his berth, but he certainly wasn't sleeping.

“It's Seattle, boys,” Mr. Kennedy told them. “They won it 7–5.”

David could hear some of the players groan at the news, but in his berth he fell asleep with a smile on his face.

“So you're going to Seattle,” Joe said at breakfast the next morning. “You must be excited.”

David
was
excited, but he knew better then to look too pleased with the other players around. He nodded and smiled shyly.

Joe hadn't asked David much about his uncle before. He didn't want to get him talking about it in case he wasn't going to get the chance to go to Seattle. Now that he was, Joe was curious. “So what do you know about this uncle of yours?”

“Not too much,” David admitted. “My mother used to tell me stories about him, but she hadn't seen him since he was younger than I am now. I'll show you …” David had the picture of his Uncle Danny with his sewing kit in his suitcase, and he went back to get it.

Like everyone who saw it, Joe was amazed by the resemblance. “He looks just like you!”

“I know.”

“So what happened to him? How come you don't know how to find him?”

David explained how his mother and her brother had both been sent to Canada and how a new family had adopted him but not her. “When they were all living in Montreal, my mother got to see him a lot. She said his new family was always nice to her, but they didn't want to adopt a teenage girl. Even after they moved all the way to Vancouver, my mother and my uncle still wrote to each other. But then Mr. Embury — Danny's father — got sick and he had to go to a special hospital in Seattle. My mother said that Danny and his mother moved there to be close to him, but then he died. She said after that the letters stopped coming.”

David also told Joe about Mrs. Freedman and the letters she'd written and the addresses she'd been sent and how maybe Embury was really Embery or Embree. “There's only eight addresses altogether. I'm going try to find those people and talk to them. Maybe one of them will know where my uncle is.”

But David had never told anyone the whole story before now. All that J-P and Mrs. Freedman had known was that David had an uncle named Danny Embury and that he lived in Seattle. When Joe heard the whole story, he realized that if Danny's mother had gotten remarried after her husband died, then she wouldn't be Mrs. Embury anymore. Danny's family name might have changed, too. While there was still a chance that one of those families might know something, Joe was worried that David might have come all this way and wouldn't really be looking for the right person.

C
HAPTER
19

As the train rumbled through the Rocky Mountains on Saturday afternoon, another telegram arrived for Mr. Kennedy during the long stopover to change locomotives at the station in Golden, British Columbia. This telegram confirmed when the games were going to be played in Seattle. After he talked about it with the players, Mr. Kennedy sat with David. “We're going to get into Vancouver tomorrow morning,” he told him.

“When will we get to Seattle?” David asked.

“Well, we're going to rest up in Vancouver for a bit. Then on Monday, after supper, we'll board the overnight steamship. When we wake up on Tuesday, we'll be in Seattle.”

David smiled, though his head shook in disbelief.

“Here's the schedule,” Mr. Kennedy said, handing the telegram to David.

SERIES STARTS 19TH (WED).
OTHER GAMES AS FOLLOWS:
GM 2 SAT 22
3 MON 24
4 WED 26
5 SAT 29

“As you can see, if the series goes the limit, we'll play five games in eleven nights.”

The nineteenth to the twenty-ninth only looked like ten days, but David counted on his fingers while Mr.

Kennedy was talking. It really was eleven days.