* * *
—
At the same time, you can imagine how gloriously we trained:
We fought in the yard, we fought on the porch.
We fought beneath the clothesline, sometimes in the house—everywhere we could—and first it was Dad and me, but then everyone had a crack. Even Tommy. Even Penelope. Her blond was slightly greying.
“Watch out for her,” said our dad one day, “she’s got a frightening overhand left.”
As for Rory and Henry, they’d never gotten on so well, as they rounded, fought, and clapped each other, clashing arms and forearms. Rory even apologized once, and willingly, too—a miracle—when he’d hit him that little too low.
In the meantime, at school, I took it best I could—and at home we did defense work (“Keep your hands up, watch your footwork”) and attack (“Make that jab all day”) till it was close to now-or-never.
On the night before it happened, when I was finally to face Jimmy Hartnell, my dad came into my bedroom, which I shared with Clay and Tommy. The other two were asleep at the bottom two slots of the triple bunk, and I lay awake on top. As most kids do, I closed my eyes when he came in, and he gently shook me and spoke:
“Hey, Matthew, a bit more training?”
I didn’t need any talking into it.
The difference was, when I reached for the gloves, he told me I wouldn’t need them.
“What?” I whispered. “Bare fists?”
“They’ll be bare when the moment comes,” he said, but now he spoke quite slowly. “I’ve been for a visit to the library.”
I followed him to the lounge room, where he pointed to an old video cassette, and an old video machine (a black-and-silver ancient thing), and told me t
o get it working. As it turned out, he actually bought the machine with some scratched-together pay; the start of Christmas savings. Even as I looked down at the video’s name, The Last Great Famous Pugilists, I could feel my father smiling.
“Pretty good, huh?”
I watched it swallow the tape. “Pretty good.”
“Now just press play,” and soon we sat in silence as boxers paraded the screen; they arrived like presidents of men. Some were in black-and-white, from Joe Louis to Johnny Famechon, Lionel Rose to Sugar Ray. Then color and Smokin’ Joe. Jeff Harding, Dennis Andries. Technicolor Roberto Durán. The ropes flexed under their weight. In so many of the fights, the boxers went down, but climbed back up to their feet. Such brave and desperate weaving.
Near the end I looked at him.
The glint in my father’s eye.
He’d turned the sound right down.
He held my face, but calmly.
He held my jaws in his hands.
For a moment I thought he might echo the screen, saying something like the commentary. But all he did was hold me like that, my face in his hands in the darkness.
“I gotta give it to you, kid—you’ve got heart.”
The before-the-beginning of that one.
* * *
—
Leading up to that moment, there was a day for Penny Dunbar, a morning, with a sweetheart named Jodie Etchells. She was one of her favorite kids, held back because of dyslexia, and she worked with her twice a week. She had hurt eyes, tall bones, and a big long braid down her back.