Travelling Light Read Online Free PDF

Beliveau flipped the puck over the goalie’s prone body into the net.
    Everyone was on their feet cheering. Seven rows below, Monsieur Tremblay was hugging his wife. On the ice the Canadiens were dancing on their skate blades and touching Beliveau with the tips of their sticks, hoping for a piece of his magic.
    With one minute left in the game, the Tremblays left their seats and began moving towards the exit. Monsieur had a cigar in his mouth; his wife was holding his arm. That was when Joan called, “Hello, Monsieur Tremblay! Hello!”
    Monsieur Tremblay glanced over his shoulder. He smiled and waved vaguely in their direction and kept going down the stairs.
    â€œHe didn’t see me,” Joan said. “He didn’t know it was me.” She stood up quickly but Molly and Frank grabbed one of her arms each and pulled her back into her seat as the crowd began chanting, counting down the last few seconds on the clock.
    The siren sounded and the Boston players left the ice and fled down a passageway to their dressing room. The Canadiens clustered in front of their bench, hugging their goalie, slapping each other’s pads, congratulating each other. People were chanting, “Bel-i-veau! Bel-i-veau!” Joan was the only person in the whole Forum still in her seat. Her coat had fallen on the floor. Ross picked it up and Molly took it from him.
    The crowd roared even louder as Beliveau was pushed out from the knot of teammates and started skating a slow victory lap around the rink with long, effortless strides. Beliveau dipped his head from time to time, acknowledging the cheering, and Ross, who couldn’t take his eyes from the team captain, felt love sweeping through his body, like wind fluttering a banner.

VOODOO STARFIGHTERS
    I know that she’s not crazy. She hears secret messages. Not really secret, but I’m too young to hear them. When the fighters cut across the summer sky — Sabres, Voodoo jets, CF-Starfighters — they split the air like thunder, and my mother goes into her bedroom and hooks shut her door.
    Messages come from out on the muskeg late at night, when my father is away on base. Base is sixty miles from our house. I have never seen it. I was born in Montreal and then we went to Germany, but the muskeg swamp is the only home I remember.
    When she hears messages, she comes into my room, her feet scraping on the floor. She lights the lamp and wakes me. I know what to do. I kneel and pull the shotgun out from underneath the bed. There are shells in the pine armoire but I don’t need them; she doesn’t make me take them anymore.
    She waits in the room while I go down the stairs and across the kitchen, carrying the 410. Things that once frightened me — the shape of the stove, a kettle hanging from a nail on the wall, a jacket thrown over a chair — are familiar now in moonlight. I unhook the screen door and step out onto the porch. There is the smell of creek water, and sometimes I hear a loon or a beaver tail slapping. I stand for a minute or two with the gun barrel pointed at my toes. I know the Dipper, Orion, the Dog Star. My father says sentries on the base stay awake at night by sorting through the constellations.
    I go back inside and upstairs. If she is asleep in my bed, I touch her shoulder to awaken her. After she has gone back to her own room, I slip the gun beneath the bed and put out the lamp.
    She and I have always lived at Rockingham. There is no town, only pulpwood loggers, fishing guides, and farmers. The closest town is Saint-Viateur, twenty miles away. On Friday nights my father drives in from base, his car loaded with groceries. He stays two or three days, sometimes longer. He was a pilot in the war. He knows they’re watching him at the base, and he hates the checkups the base medical officer puts him through four times a year. Any month, he says, may be his last on the flight list. In the meantime he is still a pilot. Voodoos and