GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

led to a country home where we heard music coming from inside. Frank settled on a bench in the drawing room, and began to play his bagpipes — Scottish reels, mostly — alongside an older bespectacled woman on piano and a fellow named Brian MacDonald on violin. The caleigh was meant to celebrate the fact that, for the first time ever in North America, a school had produced a Grade 12 graduating class in Gaelic, an enormous achievement meant to preserve and promote the history of the region. What I remember most from the event was the concentration on the ex-fighter’s face as his hands moved across the pipes. We told him it was great, which it was. More Oland.

We golfed the following day listening to Rollie Melanson and Fred tell hockey stories. I shot the ball like a cat playing with its litter box excrement, but after even more cans of Oland, the day was a blast. That night we slept better than death until, at around eight o’clock in the morning, the phone rang. It was Frank. He was bringing John Brophy to see us. He was also bringing lobster.

The old coach arrived and sat down on the porch of the Beatons’ cottage — our home for the weekend — where, the previous night, stars had carpeted the Maritime sky, falling to the flat of the late evening surf. John Brophy’s face bore the scars of a life lived to its capacity: a tough life, but a good and important one. The old coach told a few stories in his hardbitten Maritime patois, but once he started swearing, the stories got better, seemingly remarkable in their breadth of experience. Brophy remembered walking down the streets of Toronto with his visiting children, only to be converged upon by Leaf fans asking for autographs, and his kids stopping in their tracks, suddenly aware of who his father was, and what his life was about.

As the old coach spoke, Frank and his brother, Don, put the lobster pot on boil, and soon, they were pulling out the catch, delivered to us at a picnic table. They were enormous things, steam coursing out of their bodies dripping wet and hot. Brophy, sitting beside me and slow to his plate, gathered the lobster in his hands. He cracked and snapped and dug his hands into the shell, feeding the meat into his mouth.