excerpt from "Tug of War"
by Kevin MacDonell

It is brief—just three minutes—and jittery, and blurry, and magical in the way of a dream that stays with you. The first smeared images show ten men in blue jeans and brown jackets, bare hands on the rope. They lean far back, rigid, in a row all the way to the anchorman in his loop. The men are in a field somewhere, and in the background runs an indistinct wall of evergreens, and blooms of what look like black snowflakes—which the lab said are a type of mildew attacking the film.

There is my father, the collar of his rain jacket up around his sideburns. Alders stir in the background. It is a windy day, maybe rainy—impossible to say for sure. A little boy appears, wearing rubber boots and a blue windbreaker with the hood up. It’s Francis. He hops around next to Dad like a cricket. Is this before his encounter with the horse? I don’t know.

The men aren’t really pulling—they’re just leaning, at forty-five to the ground—holding the line, almost comically motionless. With a flourish of his arm, Dad sticks his wrist out from his raincoat and checks his watch. I realize this is a timed exercise.

The camera cuts to a series of shots of each man. My father and a fellow coach, John S. MacIsaac, walk up and down the line, appraising the team’s form like drill sergeants. The man in the lead position, named Lauchie Rankin, forgetting perhaps about the camera, sneaks a glance to see where my father is and then visibly relaxes, loosens his grip on the rope, and straightens into a more comfortable position. It’s a funny moment preserved out of time, made possible by the lab, which worked on the clip to restore the images. “We were able to significantly improve it,” they said in their email, “and gave it back some green trees and a bit of blue sky and blue jeans.” Preservation does seem a tricky thing.

 

 

 

From The Malahat Review's summer issue #227