Chapter Ten
SAINT
I didn’t reply that night. Some saves you don’t play until you know what the shooter’s doing, and I didn’t know what I was doing, which for me is a condition roughly as common as snow in Austin, and it had been happening all season.
I want to explain about the pipes now. Not to you. I had to explain it to somebody that week, and the somebody I chose first had a folded ear and no discretion whatsoever, so you may as well have it too.
Olle Lindell came to Duluth from Sweden at nineteen with a duffel bag and a welding certificate, and he was my grandfather, and he built things his whole life, and the last thing he built was a hockey rink in his backyard for a grandson who would not stop standing in front of things.
That’s what he said, that’s the origin story as he told it: I was four, and anything anyone threw or rolled or slid in that house, I got in front of.
Balls. A cat. Once, memorably, a full laundry basket coming down the stairs.
My mother wanted me evaluated. Olle watched me take a beach ball off the chest, fall down, get up, and set my feet again, and said, in Swedish, the sentence that decided my life: “He’s not broken. He’s a goalie.”
The rink went up the winter I turned six.
It was not a nice rink. It was a masterpiece.
Two-by-six boards he milled himself, a garden hose, a shovel wide as a door, floodlight on the garage wired through a switch he mounted low so a kid could reach it, and a net he welded out of scrap so heavy that when the wind took the neighbor’s trampoline into the next county, our net did not acknowledge the weather.
And two posts. He painted them himself, red as a barn, and one of them, the left one, he cut from an older piece of stock, pipe he’d had in the garage since before my father was born.
“The left post is older,” he told me, six years old, both of us breathing steam under the floodlight. “Respect your elders. Tap it first.”
That’s the whole secret. That’s Saint Fact No.
1, the wiki entry, the thing strangers in Ohio tap on their husbands.
It’s not liturgy. It’s a welder’s joke to a six-year-old, sixty seconds of a January evening in 1997-something, and I have carried it into every rink on two continents because the man who made the joke is dead and the tap is load-bearing now, if I may borrow a parenthetical from a shared document.
All of it is Olle’s. Every fact she catalogued.
The stretch order, hips before groin, “a goalie is a door and a door is only as good as its hinges,” him bent over creaky at seventy in boot tracks beside me while I did them in the snow.
The oatmeal is his recipe, steel-cut, cinnamon, one banana, what he ate before every shift at the yard for forty years, “food for standing up all day,” and 4:40 because that’s when his shift meal was and I never asked why I kept the time after peewee schedules stopped requiring it.
Never stepping on logos: his, from the yard floor, where you didn’t walk on a fresh weld or a painted mark, safety habit turned superstition turned inheritance.
Talking to the posts is his too. He talked to everything he built.
The truck. The boiler. He said things listen better when they know you, and he said it in Swedish, so I say it in Swedish, and when I lean into my left post before a game I am, functionally, a twenty-nine-year-old professional athlete leaving voicemails for a dead man on a phone made of pipe.
He died two summers ago, in July, in a lawn chair, between one sentence about the Twins bullpen and the next, which is the way he’d have engineered it if they’d let him weld his own exit.
I was at a development camp. I flew home for the funeral and gave no eulogy because I had counted the words I had about it and there were not enough to stand up with, and that winter I signed with an expansion team in Texas, and everyone in hockey said it was strange, and one reporter wrote that Lindell “goes to the desert to get away from something,” which was the closest anyone came, except it was backwards.
I went toward. Theo was the toward. But the rituals came in the duffel bag, every one, because here is the arithmetic I have never said in English: the taps and the oatmeal and the stretches and the posts are the only parts of Olle that still happen.
They happen at 4:40 and before every period.
As long as they happen, some engineering of him is still running.
If the rituals go, the game goes. And if the game goes, then a man built a rink in the snow for sixty winters of nothing.
I know how it sounds. I’m a goalie. We’re mystics with dental plans.
But that’s the load the taps bear, and that’s what was behind the veto, and she deleted the crown jewel of her content calendar one letter at a time rather than ask me why, and I had been carrying that around for weeks like a puck I hadn’t decided whether to freeze or play.
Tuna got the full version on a Tuesday.
Optional skate, building empty, and afterward I sat at my stall in the quiet with the cat on the chest protector, and it came out of me in Swedish, all of it, the rink and the hose and the floodlight switch mounted low, the lawn chair, the bullpen, the voicemails made of pipe.
Forty minutes. The longest anyone had heard me speak in either language on any continent, and the audience was eight pounds of orange with a folded ear, purring through the sad parts, which Olle would have approved of.
He didn’t trust anyone who made a performance of listening.
Cats and posts and welders. Things listen better when they know you.
Junie got the half version on the Thursday, and she got it because of pancakes.
We’d fallen into Marge’s, the two of us, some weeks, no cameras, off the calendar, a habit neither of us had ratified.
Dot brought her migas without being asked now, hot sauce on the side, and signed “ceiling” at me, and Junie had learned the sign for thank you and used it correctly, which Dot treasured, and I filed that in the drawer with everything else she did quietly and never posted about.
She was walking me through the kiss-cam numbers, professionally, both of us handling the amended rule 4 like a live wire neither of us would admit was humming on the table, and then she stopped mid-sentence, no segue, and said:
“Fact ten. You don’t have to. But I keep thinking about it, and I’d rather you know I think about it than manage you, because managing people is my whole trauma and you get enough of it from the league. So. Withdrawn question, standing offer.”
And I looked at her, and I turned my coffee mug a quarter turn, and I told her half.
I told her about Olle. The name, the welding, the backyard rink, the boards he milled, the net the wind couldn’t argue with.
I told her the left post was older because he cut it from older stock and made a joke about elders, and that the joke outlived him, and that the oatmeal was his shift meal and the stretches were his hinges and the logo thing was his weld-floor rule.
I told her he died two Julys ago in a lawn chair discussing relief pitching, and that everything she’d catalogued in fifteen-second increments was a dead welder’s daily habits wearing my gear.
I told it flat, in order, maybe two hundred words, my hands doing the quarter-turn to the mug over and over like tape on a stick. For me it was a keynote address. For me that was standing up at the funeral, three years late, in a diner with mustard-colored booths.
What I did not tell her was the arithmetic.
The voicemails. The load. The belief with no engineering behind it, that the rituals are the machine keeping some of him running, and what it would mean if the machine ever stopped, and what it had been doing to that machine all season that the rituals were quietly reorganizing themselves around a woman with a ring light.
If the taps are for Olle and I’ve started needing her laugh in the tunnel the way I need the taps, then the inheritance is being rewired live, with the power on, and Olle was the only electrician I ever trusted.
Half. She got half. The half with facts in it.
And here is what she did with it, and I need it on a record somewhere, because it is the whole reason for this chapter and possibly for several decisions I made afterward:
Nothing.
She didn’t fill the silence.
You have to understand what silence costs a person like Junie Bloom.
I’d watched her for two months. Silence, to her, was a net left open; she covered it by reflex, with jokes, with follow-ups, with the sunshine, because somewhere in Dallas a man had taught her that a quiet Junie was a Junie about to be described to an audience.
She patched silences the way I cover post. It was, per Hazel, whom I’d met exactly once and believed completely, “her whole cardio.”
She put her fork down. She looked at me.
Her eyes were doing something shiny that neither of us pointed a camera at.
And she let the silence stand, the whole minute of it, in a diner, with the register chiming and Dot pouring coffee somewhere behind us, a minute of nothing at all, of just being sat with, and it was the single loudest thing anyone had said to me since a lawn chair in July.
The volley never came. No joke arrived to paint the moment and roll it away.
She reached across the mustard-colored table and turned my coffee mug one quarter turn, my own tic, returned to me gently, like an order memorized in a taco line, and left her hand there next to mine, not on it, next to it, available, and said, eventually, quietly, five words, none of them for any audience:
“The left post is older.”
That’s all. Confirming the fact. Filing it where I could watch her file it, in the private set, in whatever folder she kept next to the deleted caption I knew about and the deleted draft I’d watched go letter by letter.
And I sat there in the booth with my voicemails made of pipe, and the other half rose in me like a puck popping loose in the blue paint, the arithmetic, the rewiring, the tunnel, her laugh in the ritual where a dead man used to be, all of it right there, one clean sentence away, and the sentence assembled itself, and I opened my mouth to play it.
Dot arrived with the check and signed “ceiling,” and the moment closed like a glove, and I said none of it.
But I almost. For the first time since July in the lawn chair, in any language, to anyone without whiskers or weld seams: I almost.