When he argued, he could feel something growing inside him, expanding the way the shell of dynamite must before it shatters and sprays into the landscape. His father, shouting, eyes closed and thinking about maybe the rising value of bungalows in Kitchener, is convincing the table that Canada is the cause of his sickness.
“Where do you think the name Canada comes from?”
This is his thesis.
“From the Portuguese. Ca, nada. Ca. Nada.”
This, in Portuguese, means literally ‘here-nothing.’
“So they came here, and said; ‘Look at this shit. Not anything we can use. Let’s go south, someplace where we won’t get ulcers.’”
This is his father’s affliction: a peptic ulcer growing contentedly and being unknowingly patted on its cancerous head with each shake of the fist, each aggravated disbelief, every cup of wine.
“But they were great explorers,” he says, knowing this is true and being halfheartedly proud.
The boy looks out the window. He screws up his face to show his disagreement. Maybe he rolls his eyes. He wants to say something else, but he has given in, and his imagination has exiled him from the kitchen. Tonight, he is going out.
“This isn’t just me being crazy,” his father continues. “This is fact in parts of the world. Fact. But the winners, they always write history. But the people know. The Newfies, they know. Did you know that Labrador is a Portuguese word? It means ‘worker.’ And Newfoundland used to be called Terra Nova. Do you see? You want to stay here. You don’t know what’s good for you.”
The boy feigns muteness. Everything he has learned outside his home, everything he feels makes his father’s words irrelevant. What does it matter, who was here first? The boy suspects that this is a waste of energy.
“This country has no history. The Portuguese discovered most of the world, and we never hear about it. That’s what you should be learning in school. They should be teaching you Portuguese, not French. French is a dead language.”
He thinks about this, walking up the stairs to his room.
It was a very good evening to be at work, windless and not too cold. The boy stood outside with the other workers and watched them smoke, listening to their stories. Some of them, he thought, were funny, and good story tellers. He wished his father joked more, the way these men did. There was something wolfish about some of them, though, in the way he didn’t know what they were thinking.
One of the older workers, Ronnie, was talking about one time, the time he had almost died. His voice was low and his eyes an icy blue, drifting between malice and camaraderie like an ice berg on the Davis Strait.
“I was back at home. Me and my buddies used to take out these skidoos out into the bush, to go and fish. On Deer Lake. And we were just a bunch of dumb kids, so one time I ended up falling clean through the ice. Holy shit, my balls. I’ll tell you, that water just sucks the wind right out of you. Woah, boy, the ice.”
His eyes were like ice. He smiled so that everyone knew what kind of trouble he was in.
“So I was just there, splashing around in the freezing water. I could feel my legs turning to stone, and then I couldn’t feel nothing. My buddies were afraid to do anything, because the ice was breaking and breaking.”
Another of the workers, James, interrupted the story.
“And then an angel came up from underneath the ice and carried you out by your hand, and she turned out to be Anne Murray. You’re fulla shit, Ron.”
Everybody laughed. Ronnie laughed too, but something about the way he looked convinced the boy that he was telling the truth.
He said, “I can’t get away with telling a true story,” and smiled.
He might have ended the story, but the group was joined by Paul, supervisor and all around nice guy. The boy looked at Paul, grinning in expectation. Paul hands him a cloth bag, and the boy takes out a skate, and smiles.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Be careful,” Paul says, sort of laughing, “I don’t have any one to replace you, if you break your leg.”
“Sure,” said the boy.
After work, on a subway flying southward underneath Yonge Street, the boy became anxious. He looked around, at the looks on the faces of other riders, and thought about his father, and about leaving Canada. The boy actually liked the cold. He didn’t care that Canada had no history.
Exiting the subway, the boy crossed the street and made his way down into the park. It was nearly midnight, but the rink was lit, and the snow began to fall in thick flakes, slowly enough to be sucked up into his nostrils when he inhaled. He put his hands on his hips, surveying the park in the blackness. From atop the hill, and as he began to walk toward it, the ice was like a giant flashing mirror. The fence, as he approached, grew larger and colder-looking. He put on gloves and climbed it, pausing momentarily at the top like a hesitant raccoon.
On his way down from the fence, he noticed that the ice had been recently flooded and was since untouched. It was terrifically seamless, a perfect expanse of blue-whiteness, like clean paper. The boy sat down on the ice, and could feel the cloth of his pants freezing fast to the surface of the rink. He took off a glove, and put a hand to the ground. Strange, he thought, that it didn’t feel cold. It had a hard gentleness to it, unlike anything he had ever felt before.
Then, after clawing himself up the chain link fence, he was standing precariously on the skates. Digging into the ice beneath him, he began to move, slowly and drunkenly, the sound of the blades louder and more exciting than he had ever imagined. It felt good to be sliding along that way, moving faster than he usually did. Slipping along, he tried everything. He tried lifting a leg, turning, stopping, and skating as fast as he could. His ankles became sore from keeping balance, but he was not satisfied until he looked at his watch and found out that it was almost three o’clock in the morning. Finished, he sat down again on the ice to remove his skates. Taking his boots from out of the satchel and replacing the skates, he realized immediately how strange it felt to be walking again, how much slower it was.
He begins to make his way up the fence. Straddling the peak and about to begin his descent, the boy looks one last time upon the ice, and is perplexed by what he sees. The ice, once clean, is now entirely covered in sharp lines bordered by minute shavings of ice. The rink, the boy thinks, is a canvas, covered in his travels. It looks like a Miro, or like a hundred other people had been moving on it. It is beautiful, with it’s glinting parallel arcs, it’s reflection of the whole white night. The scribblings of the steel could be words, or pictures, and the rink a map, a tool for exploration. He wants to remember it, to take it, to have it with him to show to others. He wishes his father could see it. Someone in his head whispers the words ‘Everything is close to now.’ And for him, it is.