Forgiveness Read Online Free

as we came in. Grandpa took the spare room upstairs, I took the living-room couch. There was a small TV on top of a three-drawer cabinet. I turned it on and surfed the few channels Margaret wasable to receive. The TV was placed in such a manner that you could really only see it if you were lying on the couch as I was. There was dust on the “on” knob. Watching CNN in Margaret’s living room, I felt strangely out of place.
    I woke to the sound of frying eggs and the smell of coffee. I could hear the shower going. I stretched and untangled myself from the three blankets I had slept under. The top one was an old Hudson’s Bay blanket; I could almost see the paper catalogue it would have been ordered from, the one that came in the mail from the mainland.
    In the kitchen, a CorningWare coffee percolator was brewing on the stovetop. The cast-iron frying pan had clearly cooked thousands upon thousands of eggs. I sat at the small kitchen table just behind the cupboard that separated the kitchen and the dining room. Margaret spun around with an enormous smile.
    “Good morning, dear. I hope that you were comfortable enough on that old couch. Oh, how I wish I had another bed for you to have a proper sleep in.”
    I could tell she had been up half the night worrying about the sleeping arrangements.
    “I had a great sleep. I hope the TV didn’t bother you,” I reassured her.
    “Not at all, dear. I’m glad someone got some use out of it.”
    While I poured my coffee, Margaret dished me a heaping plate: four eggs, salted fish, two pieces of homemade bread, all smothered with fresh butter. Grandpa came in and sat down beside me with a smile.
    After breakfast, he and I struck out for a drive around his old stomping grounds. We were hardly out of Margaret’s front door before we stumbled into his memories. Almost everything was exactly as it had been when he was a child. We stopped the car at a valley and walked over the first hill to find his school. Behind the school was a clearing, more of a mossy bog that would ice over come winter. It was the local hockey rink.
    “Seems like I spent my whole childhood in that clearing,” he said.
    He told me there were two teams. The Uproaders lived up the road from the school and the Downroaders lived below it. Grandpa was an Uproader along with his brother Ford, his cousin Walter MacLean, Harold Patton, Deighton Aitken, brothers David and Robert Grey, and Michael Sumarah. The Downroaders donned Toronto Maple Leafs jerseys, while the Uproaders sported the jerseys of the Chicago Blackhawks. Michael Sumarah’s father, a Syrian immigrant who owned the dry goods store, had purchased the jerseys from the Hudson’s Bay catalogue—the same one from which Margaret would have selected her blanket.
    Fellow Uproader Deighton Aitken was Grandpa’s closest chum and his right-winger. Deighton loved to say the word
Judas.
He’d scream against the frigid air: “Judas—pass me the puck, Ralphie!” Deighton always wanted the puck. He was always on the make for the next goal.
    Ralph MacLean (
far right
) and the Uproaders in the Magdalen Islands
    After the first period Mrs. Grey, Robert’s mother, would usually come out with hot chocolate for all the boys. Hot chocolate under the stars with the game underway made for some of the finest nightsin Grandpa MacLean’s memory. Although it was a warm breezy summer day, I could hear the blades carve into the ice and see the vapour rising from his mouth.
    We lingered around the marshy rink for a while. Grandpa wanted to imagine being on the ice for one last skate as an Uproader, but we ran the risk of our shoes sinking in the mud. As we climbed back up the hill, Grandpa took a last look. He didn’t say anything, but I know he saw twelve kids wearing Leafs and Blackhawks jerseys, some leaning on their sticks, some skating. He heard an echo of
Judas
off the pine trees.
    We pressed on down the winding road and came to the local coffee shop. It was a