There is that black boy with them, Tosh notices as the gold jerseys of the East Hellespont team spread over the field. Stranger than the black boy’s presence, even, is that Sheldon Woodard, the captain of the Lions, is bringing the black boy up with him. Tosh puckers his lip, and rubs his whistle back and forth across it thoughtfully.

“Mr. Golding,” Tosh says, in the middle of the game, the two watching from the sidelines of the university’s field, as the women on the Barbarians and the university’s teams battle it out, “I was wondering if I could ask you a favour.”

Mr. Golding doesn’t take his eyes from the field, his mouth having been slightly open from the moment of the opening kickoff, as if wondering exactly what to cheer and who to cheer for. “Uh-huh,” he says. The fly-half knocks on the ball, and Tosh bites his lip—he wants to say something insulting about the quality of women’s rugby, but because Mrs. Golding is refereeing the game, he doesn’t.

“Mr. Golding,” Tosh says, hoping to get the older referee’s eyes off the game, “I feel a little nervous asking you this. It’s about something that’s really important to me.”

“I see,” Mr. Golding says, nodding his head but not looking the least bit concerned about Tosh’s anxiety. When Tosh breathes in to continue, the older referee lifts up his hand dismissively, “Why don’t you tell me all about it at the half? Go on, Margaret, they’re still playing advantage!”

Tosh sighs and looks around at the crowd. The Barbarians are cheering on their female counterparts enthusiastically on one side of the field, while the university’s men’s team cheers back even louder from the other side. Tosh wonders why they’re really cheering—if it’s for the benefit of the women playing or in competition with their adversaries on the opposite sideline. It had better be the second one, he thinks to himself as the referee blows the play dead and signals for a scrum, there isn’t much worth cheering for on the field.

He looks over at Mr. Golding again, knowing that what he had to ask was much more important than a bunch of untalented women playing a useless game. He feels hollow, wishing that he had the nerve to reach out and grab the older referee.

Tosh opens the back door, and tries to make his way up to his room without being noticed. He had taken his time walking home after class, wanting to put off the inevitable as long as possible. Unfortunately, the door slams hard, sending an echo throughout the house.

“Son?” comes his father’s voice, the kind of voice the kids at school would have made fun of. “Son! Get in here!”

Tosh walks back down the stairs and out into the living room. “I had detention,” he says, the best and quickest lie he could come up with to explain his being late. “I got into a fight with Jim again.”

“Sit down,” the father says. With the cowlick, the pot-belly, and slightly bucked teeth, his father has the perfect face to go with the voice, Tosh thinks loathingly, knowing what he is going to have to deal with because it was in this morning’s homeroom announcements. He sits on the sofa across from his father’s chair and buries the side of his head in the pillow. “I got a call from the school board, son.”

“Yes, dad,” Tosh says, submissively, knowing he can’t avoid it now.

“They told me that they’re going to need me to referee again this year,” the father says, and as Tosh pictures his dad, running around with his rugby shorts hoisted up high and the dark green jersey crammed down into them, his face burns with embarrassment. “They said it didn’t matter that my son might be playing with one of the schools,” he adds meaningfully.

“I don’t feel like playing, dad,” Tosh says, a different lie this time. He wants to play, but not with his dad on the field, someone all the boys on the team would laugh at, in the locker rooms, before turning around and laughing at him. He knows they will say things, like how he needs his father on the field to tell him what to do, or to keep from getting hurt, because he’s a little softer than the other boys, his big bones coming from his mother’s side of the family.

“Oh, you’re playing,” the father says. “I just want you to know that you’re not getting any special favours from me if I’m reffing your game. You’re gonna have to haul your fat little butt around the pitch just like everyone else.” Tosh looks up at his dad with tears in his eyes, having heard the insults enough to expect them but not enough yet to be desensitized. “Ebby!” his father calls out to the kitchen. “Ebby, get me a beer!”

There is a different air in the locker room, Tosh notices. He wonders if the other kids have finally realized just how much they’ve made fun of him after all these years, and are finally learning to keep a respectful distance. When he goes to his locker and opens it, and his gym clothes fall out, soaked completely and covered with shaving cream, he feels his eyes well up and he covers his face with his hands.

“Ha ha, Tosh!” they yell, “You big loser! Ha!”

Tosh grabs his soaked gym clothes and runs to the bathroom. As he sniffs back his tears, he cleans off his clothes, wondering over and over again how the kids had gotten into his locker.

There’s a new boy on the team that Tosh hasn’t seen with them before. Mr. Golding had reffed the other two East Hellespont games and had mentioned something about a really quick rookie on their team, and he figures that this boy is the one. Scored a try in his first game, Mr. Golding had brought up, somewhat excited, as if this was the sort of player who was going to be special. Mr. Golding forgot to mention that he was the black kid.

Tosh can hardly tear his eyes off him when Woodard, the one they call The Colonel, comes over from the East Hellespont side with his hand outstretched. “Hello, sir,” he says, with that look of cool annoyance Tosh knows the players always reserve for these little pre-game chats. “Same as usual?”

“Same as usual,” Tosh says, meaning the usual warnings against dirty play. The Waldron team captain sidles over from his side of the field, giving a long, vaguely-interested stare in the black boy’s direction as well, before shaking Tosh’s and The Colonel’s hand.

“Who’s the newby?” the Waldron captain asks The Colonel.

The Colonel smiles back. “You’ll see.”

“All right,” Tosh says, reaching into his pocket for a quarter. “Now, you guys know how I am, so it’s business as usual.”

Saturday morning at the Waldron tournament, the East Side Lions beat the West Side Barbarians thirty points to twenty. The Colonel, who Tosh remembers as having a less-than-perfect boot, makes each of the three conversion attempts—including a beauty ten yards away from the sidelines—and each of the three penalty attempts, two of which come early in the game from more than fourty yards away. The black kid, who is actually the East Side captain now, scored one of the tries and set up another one, and made a tackle in the first half’s injury time that would have put the Barbarians up at the whistle. Before that game, the black kid, whom the others call Blue for some reason, came up alone for the coin toss, introducing himself for the first time to Tosh. Blue had smiled politely when shaking his hand, but all the while Tosh saw the look in his eyes, saying, “I remember you. I remember what you did.”

In the second game, Waldron plays sloppy ball but still manages to defeat the University of Hellespont by a penalty kick, the only scoring play of the second half.

Tosh looks at his schedule, and sees that they stagger the club games with the high school games, because of the fact that so many boys play in both, if not with the clubs’ regular sides themselves then with their junior teams. In between the school board and the HRFF, he will be reffing games every day of the week, since there is only him and Mr. Golding.

He does the mental arithmetic in his head, trying to figure out how much extra he’ll be bringing in with so many games to do. There’s a game on the television that his father is watching, and it distracts him somewhat. “Turn it down!” he yells angrily from the kitchen table. Four seconds later, as the noise suddenly grows quieter, he relaxes. There was a time he can still vividly remember when things were different, but no matter how many times he pictures his father and his bent, cowardly shape doing what Tosh tells him to do instead of the other way around, it still somehow doesn’t feel adequate.

His mother comes into the kitchen to check up on dinner, and Tosh grins at her. He has mostly her family’s blood in him, what had at first been the big bones brought with them the broad shoulders and wide smile set in a square jaw, and an affinity for neat, straight haircuts. He had even taken to wearing tight-fitting clothes to better show off his musculature. She told him many times when he was younger that everyone in their family started out fattish before puberty, when a good burst of height kicked in. Even she has some of that athletic massiveness in her, which still makes Tosh wonder why she let his father bully her around for the longest time.

“Smells good, Mom,” he says, and grins even wider.

“Thank you,” she says, but with the same nervous eyes she used to have for his father, and he stops grinning. He thinks about getting up and going into the living room, and giving his father a good strong one across the face.

“What I was wondering, Mr. Golding,” Tosh says, as the two groups of women huddle on opposite sides of the field, with more water than he sees the men usually drinking, “was if you could give me a recommendation to referee provincially.”

Mr. Golding looks over at him a little too quickly, as if it were the sort of thing contrary to all good sense. “You want me to do what?” he says, and Tosh feels something in between anxiety and shame, and then a little anger as he thinks it isn’t out of his place to ask such a thing. But finally Mr. Golding’s face widens into a good-natured smile, and Tosh relaxes.

“I want to referee provincially,” Tosh says. “I know you’ve done it, and I want to know how I can do it. It’d be nice getting out of the city for a bit.”

“Well, I suppose we’re going to have to meet and talk about this over lunch,” Mr. Golding says, reaching over and patting Tosh on the shoulder. Tosh accepts it and smiles widely, the chills going through him something similar to when he had refereed his first game.

The high school coach, Mr. Dickie, looks over the crowd for a moment before throwing an exagerratedly disappointed look at them. “Well,” he says, “I guess you’ll have to do.” Tosh looks around at the other kids to see their reaction—he had thought that the bunch of them would have been good enough for a team.

The kids, however, don’t seem to be too fazed by coach Dickie’s remark. They stand around, with their eyes intensely focused ahead, as if saying, “You’re fucking right we’ll do.” When the coach backs up and yells for the kids to spread out along the goal line, Tosh has to move quickly to keep up with the rest of them, struggling a little to find a space in which to fit his large body. He ends up having to run further down the line to find a spot.

“All right,” coach Dickie says, “rugby is a sport with lots of rules, and it doesn’t look like any of you brats are going to be smart enough to handle all of them, so I’m going to have to run the lot of you into shape. If you’re in better shape than the other team maybe it won’t matter how stupid you are.” He looks around at individual players as he talks, before his eyes finally fall on Tosh. “You going to get into shape, kid?”

“Yes sir,” Tosh says nervously. His voice cracks, and some of the other boys snicker.

“What’s that, kid?”

“Yes sir,” Tosh says, louder, sneaking sideways glances at the rest of the crowd. All the boys are looking at him.

“I can’t hear you, piglet!” coach Dickie yells.

“Yes sir!” Tosh says, feeling his eyes well up, wondering why the coach is picking on him. At first he thinks it has to do with how big he is, but that doesn’t make much sense, because his father had told him he would’ve been perfect to play prop-forward. Then again, he remembers how often his father used to call prop-forwards the “fat fucks.”

“I still can’t hear you,” the coach says, storming forward. “Give me twenty push-ups, piglet. Do it, now!”

“What are you doing up there, boy?” comes the voice of his father, sneering and ugly, through Tosh’s closed bedroom door. Tosh brings his heaving to a halt, and stands up, the sweat dripping all over his round face. There is a trace of nausea in his gut but he swallows it back.

“Nothing, Dad,” Tosh calls back. For a moment there is silence, before he hears the heavy plodding of his father up the stairs, his scrawny, pot-bellied form banging along like a wrestler on television. Tosh straightens himself and looks down at the sweat marks darkening around his armpits. He panics, not knowing what’s going to happen or what to do about it. By the time the door is thrown open, he’s wearing a look of frightened guilt.

“What the hell are you doing up here?” Tosh’s father asks, looking at the sweater and raising his brow, his bucked teeth visible over his lower lip and his cowlick bobbing angrily.

“Getting in shape, Dad,” Tosh says quickly, figuring that it’s not necessarily bad to tell the truth to tell at this moment. “For the team.”

Tosh’s father says nothing, but Tosh can see the anger in his father’s eyes slowly transforming into something that looks like approval. His father turns around, saying, “Well, get on with it,” before closing the door slowly, and Tosh turns around, back to the floor, to continue with his exercises. As he begins the repetitions again, the one picture that he cannot get out of his head, the entire time that he sweats and heaves away, is of the look his father’s eyes took, somewhere in between that anger and near-approval. He’d seen it before, but never directed towards him. It had always been on the faces of people before authority, like coach Dickie or the referee, the sort of person whose aura demanded that they be shown respect.

“Two more laps for you, piglet,” coach Dickie says, and Tosh begins running again, not wanting to argue. At the first turn the field seems to have gotten bigger, and Tosh lets the mindlessness of running set in. This is his fourth lap, and he is breathing in and out through his mouth now to keep going. The other boys stand around as their coach talks, a couple of them looking his way and smiling in that manner he was so used to seeing. But he wasn’t about to let that stop him—if he had to run extra laps to make this team, he would run extra laps. For some reason, the timidity he knew that had been almost ingrained into him by those kids disappeared with each successive practice, as though he were alone out in the field performing the ripping and ball-handling drills. Even during tackling practice, it was as though the impacts Tosh felt were more real than the players they had come from.

By the time his two laps were over, he sees that everyone has gone back into the locker room, including the coach. This feels odd to him, that he had thought himself to be labouring away for the benefit of someone, like a stage actor. As it is, though, the reality of his effort disintegrates into the cold afternoon, leaving him standing there, breathing hard and swallowing back the growing ache in his head, and wondering what to do now.

He feels strange, standing alone in the middle of the field, as if, back in the locker room, or in the high school, or anywhere in the streets of Hellespont, there is nobody around to witness his recovering moments.

One of them, Jimmy, the smallest and cruelest of the boys who pick on him, comes up one day in the locker room and says, “Are you going to keep trying out for the team, Tosh?”

Tosh nods, his eyes wide, trying to figure out what Jimmy is going to do. The boy didn’t bring anything with him, and Tosh isn’t holding anything that can be used against him, except for his towel, and he doesn’t know how Jimmy can use that. He looks around at the other boys, a couple of whom are paying attention.

“Well, you’re going to have to be initiated, Tosh,” Jimmy says. “You know what that is?”

Tosh shakes his head. He knows what the word means, of course, but he doesn’t want to say. He wants Jimmy to tell him what it is, because he wants to know for sure what he should be expecting.

“It means you have to do as the rest of us say for the entire season,” Jimmy says, smiling. “You have to do what we tell you to do, and at the end of it, if you’ve done everything right, you’ll be a part of the team.”

Tosh raises an eyebrow. Something is going on here, he thinks, but he doesn’t know what.

“You have to do exactly what we say, Tosh,” Jimmy says. “Exactly what we say.”

Jimmy walks away, leaving Tosh standing there, holding the towel. All the sweat he was covered with in after gym class is gone now, and he feels cold. He turns around, expecting to see that something had been planted in his locker while Jimmy was distracting him, or to have someone attack from behind now, but nobody does. His breaths grow thinner, and his stomach begins to quiver, nervously.

He thinks about high school as he’s listening to Mr. Golding instructing him on how to properly referee games, on the places to stand in different situations, on the particular things to be looking for. In high school, there was none of this, being taught by someone one-on-one. High school was strangely savage and chaotic compared to this, but it had been a savagery and chaos he had grown used to. This instruction that he is getting right now, with the seriousness which Mr. Golding is showing him and the obvious role of student that he plays, feels new and strange to him.

Mr. Golding is telling him about how to handle the problem of one player giving another player the boots. “The thing is, strange as it is seems,” Mr. Golding is saying, taking a seat across from Tosh, “most of the time the player giving the boots feels that what he’s doing he has a right to do, no matter whether or not the guy on the ground getting the boots actually did anything to deserve it. So, the player you call the penalty on might do one of two things. Firstly, he might give you an argument. If this happens, you can breathe a sigh of relief, because it means he is acknowledging your authority, even though it might seem like he’s challenging you.”

Tosh nods, writing the situation down in note-form.

“The second reaction, however, is much more difficult to handle. If he walks away from you, saying nothing, you’re dealing with someone who believes that what he had done is necessary, and whether or not he gets caught makes no difference. Now, this is someone you have to deal with, unless you want the game to degenerate into a bunch of hoodlums trying to get back at each other in similar ways. The moment you let that person get away from you, you lose your authority.”

Tosh looks up. “How do you handle it?”

Mr. Golding stands up, “Well, that’s a tricky matter. I’ll give you some examples about how different referees have handled it, but you might find that none of them work for you. This is one of those times when the only way to get experienced at handling it, is to be willing to handle it with no experience. The one thing you’ll learn after a while is how and when to stop things before they ever get a chance to start.”

“This referee sucks,” Tosh hears one of the boys in red saying behind his back after he calls a scrum for the other team. He’s not entirely certain how to handle this—Mr. Golding had never told him what to do when a player insults a referee behind his back. He runs through his head for all of the situations he remembers from before which would provide some insight, but there aren’t any, nor were there any problems remotely similar to this in the notes he took from Mr. Golding’s tutelage.

Feeling his gut swell with a little excitement, he brings the whistle to his lips. The boys, who had been setting up their scrums, stop what they’re doing and look up at him. He looks back at them, but doesn’t say anything right away. Finally, he turns around to find the boy who had spoken, but in the spot where he was sure the voice had originated there are actually two of them, standing together. Tosh points his finger at the black one, who looks like he belongs to the voice he heard.

“Don’t argue my calls,” he says, before signalling a penalty kick for the other team. The red team reacts angrily but hurries to run back ten yards. The captain of the red team calls out at the black boy to keep his mouth.

“But I didn’t say anything,” the black boy says, and his eyes are growing wide with confusion.

“Shut up,” says the captain.

“But I didn’t say anything!” the black boy yells back. “If I said something then-”

Tosh feels the anxiety grow even bigger within, and he brings the whistle to his mouth again, and as he runs ten yards further down into the red team’s territory, maintaining his upright arm, he blows out another whistle.

“Shut up!” the captain yells. “Don’t say a goddamned thing!”

A blue team player runs forward with the ball in his hands, and then drops it lightly onto his boot at Tosh’s mark, before catching it back in his hands and beginning to run for the far corner of the field. Tosh’s eyes light up at the blue team claims a quick overlap on the reds, before making a series of passes that result in the final blue player scoring a try.

Against Waldron, the black boy who the other team has never seen before has been tearing up the field all day. The players in red have been doing everything in their power to get their hands on him, but nothing works. The Waldron scrum-half can’t ever get past the Lions’s eight-man on the lost scrums, so all of the black boy’s passes have gone out to the fly-half unobstructed, and off the rucks and mauls he’s been getting the ball out before anyone realizes that the ball has been won either way. There are a couple of exceptions, the first off a sloppy maul which he handles with a dummy pass that fools even his own players, before kicking a chip that his backs recover, and the second where he allows himself to get caught in a weak stand-up tackle, at which point he tosses the ball back into the forwards, where the short, older-looking prop-forward catches it and runs for fifteen yards, bringing the ball safely out of Lions territory, before another maul is set up and the black boy is right up behind it again.

His effortlessly clean play makes the late hit they give him not completely unexpected—Tosh evens finds it somewhat reassuring to see that this kid isn’t untouchable after all. It is off an East Hellespont lineout—the Waldron players go for the spoil, and it works beautifully, the ball being slapped high into the air and in the black boy’s direction. For a moment, nobody seems to move, until the Waldron flanker bursts through the back of the line, gearing up for a perfectly timed hit the moment the black boy touches the ball. But the black boy, whom Tosh thinks can’t possibly see the flanker coming, grabs the ball out of the air and ducks down off and to the side, a liquid movement that doesn’t take more than a split-second, and the flanker finds himself grabbing at a stray piece of gold jersey where once a scrum-half had been, and he falls forward, rolling along the ground.

The black boy gets the ball away to the fly-half, who kicks it far downfield at the same moment that another Waldron player, this time a goliath second-row, crashes through the line and gives the black boy a cheap shot from behind, right into his lower back. There are protests all around, but Tosh ignores them, his whistle in mouth but playing advantage.

The fly-half’s kick bounces just behind the Waldron twenty-two on the far side of the field, and the Waldron winger, who had dropped back to cover the possibility of a kick, picks it up and gives it a boot out of bounds, and the touch-judge lifts his flag in the air, marking a lineout at approximately the same place as the lineout just now, only on the other side of the field. Tosh thinks about it for a second, and then runs across to the other side, signalling that there will be a lineout.

There are more protests, this time directly from The Colonel himself, and backed up by the Lions pack leader and that older-looking prop. In fact, everyone wearing gold is giving him lip except for the black boy who got hit in the first place. He’s stood up by now, his hands just above his butt and twisting his back as if searching for the exact location of the pain, all the while looking back in Tosh’s direction, expectantly. Finally, the inside-centre, that big European brute, rips his mouthguard out and comes over, asking why Tosh is letting the other team get away with that hit.

Tosh doesn’t respond. “You never have to justify your calls, especially advantage,” Mr. Golding had said, “It’s one of the trickier aspects of the sport, and if they don’t recognize that, too bad. They’re not reffing the game.” As he continues to run over, he looks back at the East Hellespont players intently, hoping they challenge him just one more time. The Colonel is shaking his head, but he’s turned around and waved everyone back, and both teams jog over to the other side of the field, to set up the lineout again.

The scrum-half looks at The Colonel expectantly, and when The Colonel says something, the whites of his eyes nearly swallow the rest of his black face. Then he looks off to the side and his mouth forms the word, “bullshit.” Watching as the black boy runs across the field to take his place behind the lineout, Tosh pauses for a moment before bringing the whistle to his mouth, to signal a penalty against the Lions.

Tosh watches the first year from the sidelines, despite being one of the largest players and yet, with all of the exercises that he has done lately, one of the least exhaustible. He knows the rules better than anybody out there, but every time the starting lineups are announced at practice his name isn’t mentioned. During the games, the only time someone asks for him it is so that he can bring the water-bottles out at half-time, for the kids who do get to play.

He watches his father referee with a sinking feeling every time, and he feels like he has to make an excuse for himself after each game that Tosh doesn’t get to play in. But his father says nothing the entire time—instead, the only reminder that Tosh is somehow connected to the referee comes from the other kids’ ridicule at their vastly different yet equally ridiculous appearances. The silly intensity his father puts into his voice when making his calls only worsens it, and Tosh gets to hear about his father’s voice every time, afterwards in the locker room.

There is another referee, though. Mr. Golding, who refs a very clean and fair game, has nothing said about him by the boys afterwards, and before every game, when the players have their fingernails and cleats checked, Mr. Golding has a firmly polite and encouraging smile for each player, Tosh included. During the games that Mr. Golding is assigned, Tosh watches him run around the field powerfully and confidently, keeping up with the play at all times and, unlike his father, having enough breath after a good chase to make an assured, confident call. It is these games that Tosh misses the most—seeing Mr. Golding on the field makes Tosh painfully want to somehow be a part of things.

After every practice and every game, regardless of who reffed it, Tosh has to pick up all the bags and take them back down into the locker room, help in gathering all the flag-sticks along the field’s perimeter, and take down the protective mats from the goal posts and drag them to the locker room’s equipment closet. He does more work than the official team manager. Everything requires several trips, and by the time it’s over, most of the players are gone, except for a couple who watch with grins on their faces as Tosh takes his soaking clothes from his locker, and puts them on before walking home, small puddles trailing behind him the entire way.

Saturday afternoon, The Colonel isn’t perfect this time around, but he doesn’t have to be, as the East Side Lions beat the University of Hellespont twenty-five to three. The Lions spend all but a few fleeting moments in the university’s half of the field, and the three points that are scored against them come only from a wind-aided penalty kick at mid-field. Tosh watches as Blue scores twice again, including one try on an annoying series of sloppy tackles in which neither the university’s inside-centre, outside-centre, winger nor fullback can drag him down.

In the second game, the West Side Barbarians play poorly, missing all three of their conversion attempts but still managing to slip past the Waldron Wanderers by a single point. The Waldron kicker hasn’t made a conversion all day, and while he did make three penalty kicks, they were all on stupid penalties by the West Side team, all directly in front of the posts.

The East Hellespont Lions are leading the tournament with two wins.

“You’re not quitting the team, do you understand me?” Tosh’s father yells angrily through his bucked teeth. “You’re not!”

Tosh is standing there before him, perfectly still. Earlier that day, after the last practice before the start of the midget season, the coach announced the preliminary starting lineups for the first games, and for the third year in a row, Tosh is going to have to watch from the sidelines, even though he isn’t the fat kid who gets picked on anymore.

“But Dad, I never get to play,” Tosh says. His eyes feel dry and cold—he has long since lost the blubbering instinct. “Coach Dickie has me showing the kids on the bantam team the rules. I hate it. He just doesn’t like me, Dad. None of them like me.”

“You’re staying, you fat shit,” the father says, standing up, sucking in his breath, tightening the flabby girth within his hoisted-up pants. “You’re goddamned staying, you got me?”

Tosh looks at his mother, cooking in the kitchen. She’s staring out at them timidly, but her hands never cease work on skinning the chicken in front of her. “What do you want?” his father yells at her, and then sits down again. “Go get me something to drink.”

Tosh goes and gets a beer, and while he’s in the kitchen, his mother looks at him sympathetically for a moment, before her eyes light up. “I think you’ve grown another inch, Toshy,” she says. “We should measure you after I clean my hands up.”

Tosh’s eyes go towards the series of pencil marks next to the kitchen entrance. The pictures of his father as a child show that Tosh is far beyond his father’s developing rate. Already his shoulders are widening and the square jaw of his mother’s lineage is settling in, as the baby fat slowly recedes away.

Under the mediocre lighting, mounted on make-shift poles around the Waldron field, the West Side Barbarians beat the University of Hellespont by the score of fourty to seven in the biggest rout of the tournament. The University squad, exhausted from their two earlier games and having played ridiculously poorly in the last round, still looks upbeat and satisfied, having managed to steal a try from their overwhelming opponents. “You didn’t see them score a try on us,” says the number-eight from the Lions, all of whom were watching this game very closely. Blue is keeping track closely too, from what Tosh can see, asking around how many points the Barbarians scored.

Mr. Golding, who refereed this game, comes off the field wiping his brow. “Don’t let the fact that it’s evening fool you,” he says, coming over next to Tosh. “It’s hot out there.”

“I don’t mind,” Tosh says, tucking his green jersey into his rugby shorts, and then slipping the metal ring of his whistle over his finger. “I’ll be all right.”

“You’ve been doing a decent job out there, Tosh,” Mr. Golding says. “A pretty good job. You’re making good calls, as far as I can see. The boys in Vancouver will be happy to hear that.”

Tosh does his best to appear unimpressed. “Whatever,” he says. “Not thinking about that now.” When he goes onto the field and blows the whistle, however, it’s all he can think about, refereeing in a metropolitan city, and then maybe the provincials, and then who knows...?

“What if I make a bad call?” Tosh asks Mr. Golding in the abandoned classroom they have been using for the tutelage. “Do I have to reverse it? What do I do?”

“You’re always going to make a bad call now and again,” Mr. Golding says, pausing in the middle of his referee-placement diagram. “Of course you’re going to. Remember, you’re the only judge out there for thirty players. That’s the highest player-referee ratio in organized sports, and this is a contact sport. Technically, the touch judges are supposed to help you, but they never will, not at this level. You aren’t going to see every punch thrown, and you’re going to be getting complaints all the time about who on the other team is getting away with what. Just keep your cool. You are, for all those concerned, God on the rugby pitch. That’s the most important thing. Ideally, as referee, you don’t want to affect things too much, but, whenever you have to, remember that your word is scripture.”

“Yes sir,” Tosh says, his focus far away, imagining the players looking at him reverently as he makes his calls. “I got you, Mr. Golding.”

Tosh shows up at the gym office, currently occupied by coach Dickie. The coach looks up, smiles, and motions for him to come in. Tosh, who has never before gone to see the coach on his own, is surprised by the apparent good humour. “Come in, Tosh, come in,” the coach says, even inviting him with a gesture to sit down. “What’s up?”

Tosh bites his lip. “Sir, I was just thinking about things, and...” his words trails off, as the coach stands up, and begins pacing back and forth, distracting Tosh. He looks down at the floor and tries to begin again. “I was just thinking, and I think that-”

“You don’t want to be on the team anymore,” coach Dickie says, and Tosh looks up. “It’s all right, you know, I understand. I knew from the first moment I ever saw you that you didn’t belong with the players on the rugby field, Tosh. I’m very good at judging this sort of thing. I understand. Some people just aren’t cut out for it.”

Tosh swallows hard. “Well, I don’t know if it’s that as much as-”

“Oh, of course you like the sport, Tosh,” the coach says as he sits on his desk. “Who can blame you? You’ve put so much effort into it. You understand it, and you can even teach it. You know, something Tosh? I have to confess I’ve had something in mind for you lately. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit.”

“Oh?” Tosh says, raising his eyebrows.

“Yes, Tosh,” the coach says, looking around his desk for something. “While I stand by what I said, you know, not being the type of person who belongs with the other players on the field, I think there is a place where you can fit in. It’s a place reserved for only a certain type of person, Tosh, and I think that maybe-” His eyes light up as his fingers uncover a booklet, underneath copies of the team roster. He hands it to Tosh. “Here you go.”

Tosh looks at the booklet. HRFF Referee Handbook, it says, written in blue letters and outlined with gold. “You’re just about old enough to be reffing bantam games, Tosh,” the coach smiles. “Give it some thought.”

Tosh leaves the office with the handbook, and he imagines his father, running around the field with the book folded over and stuffed into his rugby shorts, just in case. Then, he stops thinking of his father, but that other referee, Mr. Sanders, running through the warlike chaos of players, with all the knowledge written inside the booklet perfectly memorized, and instantly, effortlessly available.

The Waldron Wanderers give up an early try when the Lions execute a good series of runs, mostly from trailing players crashing up the middle of the pitch, before they switch to a finesse style of play and swing the ball out to the backs, and when the outside-centre gets a pass he outruns the last of the Waldron players up the side of the field, before crossing the goal-line and jogging untouched to the middle, scoring right below the posts. But Waldron, who has a way of making their opponents play down to their level when they want to, immediately takes the finesse from the game the moment they steal possession from the Lions, crashing with their forwards into the Lions centres over and over again, so much that when, at one point, they don’t run the ball but kick it instead, East Hellespont isn’t ready, and while the Wanderers would never have gotten that tactic by The Colonel, they have much more luck against the other less-experienced winger, who handles it poorly, gets tackled, and the Waldron winger recovers the ball in Lions territory, and the Wanderers finally establish some solid field position, nearly fifty yards of grass from their own goal. The Lions forwards scramble back in time to tackle him and a ruck sets up, but when the Wanderers get the ball out and begin crashing again up the middle, they punish every player who tries to stop them and tie up the centres with crashing plays, and for a little while, it works. The black scrum-half can’t unite his team into stopping Waldron, who score two quick tries which they can’t convert, and the Wanderers have a three point lead on the Lions midway through the first half.

It is a difficult game to call this late in the day, Tosh realizes, and he wishes Mr. Golding weren’t on the sidelines watching. There have been dirty punches thrown by both teams in the second phase, cleats hard at work on the players that fall to the ground, and fingers clawing away at each other in the mauls. Tosh lets it go a little at the beginning, but it persists and he begins to call it more vigilantly. He ends up awarding possession to the Wanderers more often because, although he finds himself out of position frequently and having difficulty with the less-than-perfect lighting, he is still able to see the dirty play that the Lions are apparently not all that concerned in hiding. In one three-minute-long span he awards Waldron two penalties for dirty play and, following the second, another for the Lions not giving the required ten-yard gap quickly enough. The third penalty sets up a crashing play which the Lions forwards are becoming too weary to handle, and the Wanderers fight their way to their third try of the game—although, once more, they miss the conversion.

Down eight points, the Lions try to rally off the kickoff, recovering the ball from a tackle and pushing close to the Waldron goal-line with one strong run from their prop-forward, but the Waldron defence sets in, and the Lions can’t get any closer than the twenty-two. Their half-hearted running leads to fumbled passes and hard tackles, and when Tosh plays advantage off the knock-on from an errant pass from Blue, an enterprising Waldron hooker picks up the ball and runs the entire length of the field, narrowly escaping The Colonel, who isn’t fast enough to catch him, and Blue, who had been knocked down earlier in the play, to score in the corner. Following the failed conversion attempt, Tosh, looking down at his watch and, realizing that time had actually run out two minutes earlier, blows the whistle to signal the end of the first half.

Sneaking a quick glimpse during the break, Tosh sees that Mr. Golding’s eyes never leave the field as the evening darkness falls over the older referee’s face. Tosh stays on the field, refusing to get water from the sidelines, not wanting to seem weak, or overwhelmed by the game.

“Are you ready for initiation, Tosh?” Jimmy asks when Tosh comes down after the last game of the season, carrying a load of flag-sticks. He stops, breathing heavily, leaning his round body against the side of the door. They’re surrounding him, and instantly the exhaustion goes away. He sucks in a quick gasp and turns around, ready to run back up and outdoors, but they catch him.

“I thought I was doing it,” he protests, over and over again as five of the boys drag his struggling form to the showers. “I thought I was doing it!”

When they push Tosh up against the shower wall, Jimmy says, “Shut up, Tosh!” and slaps him across the face, before grabbing him under the jaw and squeezing his cheeks together. “Hey piglet,” he says, smiling, pinching his face harder and harder until the pain grows too sharp for Tosh to keep his eyes dry. “Hold him down,” Jimmy says to the others, and they do, throwing him to the floor and sitting on his body to keep him from moving. Two of the boys have gone out of the locker room to watch for unexpected visitors, while another boy comes in through the entrance to the showers, carrying dishsoap and duct tape.

Tosh starts crying, and the boys laugh in response. “Here you go, piglet,” Jimmy says. “We’re going to grease you, piglet.” Tosh starts rolling around, back and forth, and his momentum actually throws one of the boys off, but there are two more on him in an instant. Jimmy takes the duct tape and holds it up in front of Tosh’s face, saying, “It’s time for initiation, piglet,” and tears it open, rips free one piece and slaps it over Tosh’s mouth. “Strip him down,” he says to the boys, and they begin to grab at his clothes, uncovering the flabby form underneath, and they bring his sweater over his head while somehow managing to keep a hold on his wrists. Then they pull off the shirt, and then the jogging pants, at which point Tosh starts kicking, and actually hits one of the boys in the face, but once again there is another boy ready to hold him immobile.

He starts hyperventilating when they go for his underwear, and he knows he isn’t getting enough air through his nose. The cold makes his body shiver, and his mind starts to swim, but his attention is brought back to the darkness of showers when Jimmy says, “Poke the piglet!” and the boys begin poking at him, all over his naked body, even at his nipples and his uncovered crotch, and with the bruises being stamped onto him he cries out again. “Poke the piglet! Poke the piglet!” they chant, while Jimmy wraps the duct tape four times around his knees, binding them together. Then they roll him over and wrap the duct tape around his wrists four times again, securing his hands behind his back. Jimmy then grabs the dishsoap and starts to pour it all over his body, and then all over the floor, before handing the half-empty bottle to one of the boys who isn’t securing Tosh.

“Turn on the water,” Jimmy says, and three of the boys go around and turn on all the showers, and soon Tosh is soaked until he is slippery and covered in bubbles, at which point Jimmy orders them turned off again. They drag Tosh, who can’t find the energy to kick any more, over to the far corner of the showers, where it is practically complete darkness, and the light from the showers’ entrance throws silhouettes all over the faces of his attackers. Jimmy pours more soap on Tosh, and then empties the rest along the path towards the exit, and the boys run out of the showers, grabbing their bags and heading up the stairs and out of the locker rooms, saying, “So long, piglet!”, making squealing noises as their forms disappear up out of sight.

Tosh doesn’t move for a minute, as he waits until he’s sure that they’re all gone, and he begins attempting his escape, which takes an eternal half-hour because he can’t work his hands or his knees free, and the concrete floor of the showers is too slick to get a handle on. It almost teasingly feels like he can walk, but that was the idea behind binding his knees instead of his ankles, he realizes, and he still falls down so often, each time with a painful splatting impact, that he gives up on walking and tries to drag himself to the exit, but he has to settle for rolling himself when his knees and feet can’t push off the slick floor.

Tosh comes home after a late session with Mr. Golding and sees his father sitting in the living room, holding a beer bottle and watching the football game. “Run, goddamn black shit-eating...” he curses at the screen, and Tosh goes by without saying a word.

“Go to the fridge and grab me a beer,” his father says in his high-pitched sneer, and Tosh shivers, squeezing his fist. But he says nothing, and goes to the kitchen to comply.

In there, he sees his mother on the ground, weeping and holding her face. “Dad! Mom’s hurt!” he calls out to the living room, and runs up to his mother and pulls her hands away so he can see. Her jaw is swelling. “Mom?” he asks, and he sees the purple filling in around both of her eyes. Then she looks beyond him and her eyes widen in fright. Tosh turns and sees his buck-toothed father is standing there, immobile for a moment with an empty bottle in his hands, before going to the fridge and taking out another beer.

Tosh is on his feet the instant his father’s back is to him, and he rushes his father and tackles him face-first. There is a painful-sounding impact with the floor, but Tosh doesn’t stop, turning his father around onto his back, grabbing him by his hair and lifting his head off the ground and slapping him hard, over and over again, with one knee planted on his father’s chest to keep him down. His father struggles at first to hit back, and then to cover his face, but before long he’s unable to do anything but take it, staring up at his son through a bloody mask. Tosh drops his father’s head on the ground and then stands up, and begins to kick him in the side, his foot finding all the soft places first before going for the ribs.

His mother watches all this in silence from the kitchen, and when he’s finished, he goes back to her and lifts her up. He brings her delicately out to the car and sits with her as she drives to the hospital. All along the way, she gives him sideways glances, and Tosh smiles as reassuringly as he can for her, but her eyes are just as wide as ever.

Tosh does get to play most of one game, during his first year on the team, when the starting prop-forward gets a bloody nose and his father, who is refereeing the game, sends him off. Tosh takes off his sweater, and taking the other boy’s jersey, he comes from the sidelines frantically trying to cover his naked upper body, which is still massive despite all the exercise he’s been doing. Jimmy, who is playing scrum-half, gives him a sour look when he comes on the field.

Tosh had been found by coach Dickie, passed out on the floor, naked and bound by duct-tape, and while the coach listened to Tosh’s pleading and didn’t tell the high school principal or his parents, he made everyone on the team stay late after the next practice and forced on them a gruelling, endless series of sprints, causing four of the boys, Jimmy included, to vomit all over themselves. But even those four kept running, because coach Dickie promised that the parents of every boy who didn’t finish the drills would be getting a phone call at home, and they would learn what their children had been involved with. Tosh had watched from the sidelines as they ran back and forth across the field, and then squat jumps for fifteen minutes and then burpees for ten more minutes, and then even more sprints back and forth. He could still remember every single drill the coach put them through, and the names and faces of the boys who threw up their lunch.

They never picked on him again, after that, replacing it with a vigilant ignorance of his existence. “You better not fuck up, Tosh,” is all Jimmy says when Tosh comes to the scrum, but it is the most he has heard from him since that night in the showers. He’s no longer being called “piglet”, either.

When play starts, Tosh runs around the field as best he can, grabbing who he can and giving the ball to his teammates whenever it comes his way, all the while trying not to do anything to get the attention of his father. The longer the game goes on, the more Tosh feels like he’s alone out there, running with fourteen other boys who are trying to win the game from the other team, while he’s struggling just to play in it. Even though his exercises are beginning to pay off, and he isn’t completely tired out by half-time, it still requires a lot of effort to move himself around the pitch. Even when the second half starts, and Tosh has found his breath again, other players who look more tired than him still run faster than he does, and with an ease he can’t match.

Two minutes before the final whistle, Jimmy picks up a loose ball and runs into a player from the other team, who tackles him to the ground. A ruck is set up quickly over the two boys, and Tosh finds himself immediately over the top of the two writhing boys, struggling over the ball. The boy from the other team is punching Jimmy in the back and is grabbing at his face, and the look on Jimmy’s face is of surprise at the ambush of dirty play.

Tosh, giving a quick glance around, sees that the ruck has completely swallowed him out of sight from everyone, from the rest of the players, coach Dickie and the spectators on the side, and even his father. There isn’t anybody who sees as Tosh brings his cleats up and stomps down hard, with all of his weight, on the helpless form of his teammate, over and over again, lifting himself off the ground with each stomp to get all of his bulk into it. He continues relentlessly for nearly fifteen seconds, before his father calls the play dead.

The Colonel kicks off the second half, and already it is obvious that the Lions have lost nearly all of their first-half weakness. The Waldron second-row who calls for the ball has both the Lions’ flankers crashing into him hard the moment he catches it, and the Lions’ number-eight, as if knowing even before the tackle that the ball was going to be knocked loose, scoops it up and runs into his Waldron counterpart, who is knocked to the ground, while he continues to run, and even though he is eventually stopped by three players who join in on a tackle, they still can’t bring him down nor prevent the clean maul he sets up. The Lions set up and immediately push down the field with crisp passes amongst the backs, and even though a Waldron player eventually recovers the ball after a questionable tackle and manages to kick it to touch, the team in red is visibly shaken, while the team in gold methodically sets up for the lineout.

Waldron manages to keep the Lions from getting too close to their end zone, but on one play Blue brings the Wanderers off-side with a fake pass out of a ruck, and The Colonel kicks the penalty which brings East Hellespont back within ten points, with still practically the whole half left to play. On the ensuing kickoff, the Lions’ second-row is immediately protected by his own teammates. A clean maul follows and the onslaught begins again. The Lions push to within the twenty-two and Blue throws a dummy out wide and gives a reverse pop pass instead to the crashing inside-centre, who has all his forwards trailing him when he finally is stopped, and after a couple of rolling mauls the East Hellespont hooker breaks free from the second phase into open field, and somehow outruns the Waldron fullback and winger to the corner of the endzone. The Colonel misses the conversion, but now the Lions are within five points, and even in all the chaotic play, their subdued demeanor shows that they have no intention of letting the excitement get away from them. Once more, on the following kickoff they handle it perfectly, and again begin their march back up the field.

Tosh is a little surprised by how easy it is to referee the opening minutes of the second half, when the first had been a practical nightmare. However, Waldron gets down the business of smothering the East Hellespont players with good coverage, and even though it seems the Wanderers lose possession the moment they steal it away from the Lions, the signs of life are beginning to show again. With each passing tackle, clean ball becomes harder and harder for the Lions to create, and before long, the Waldron scrum-half takes the ball and kicks it downfield, where a lucky bounce traps the fullback in the corner. He kicks it to touch, but it doesn’t go as far as he would have liked, and Waldron, winning the lineout after an incredible hoist, contents themselves with running back and forth across the field, crashing repeatedly, not really looking to gain ground on the Lions but to maintain possession, to punish them as they did in the first half, all the while waiting for the mistake that would mean a scoring chance.

The Lions never give them that chance, but they don’t get many of their own, either. When Blue finally does get a handle on the ball, he has the massive Waldron second-row on him in an instant, and as he kicks the ball downfield the second-row brings him hard to the ground. Tosh is getting ready to follow the players down to where the ball has been kicked when sounds of fighting come to his ears. Tosh looks around to see Blue, trying to get up while the second row holds onto his gold jersey, and as Tosh lifts his whistle to his mouth, Blue breaks free and swears at the Waldron player, who gets up and walks over, towering above the smaller scrum-half with an amused look on his face. Tosh keeps himself from blowing the whistle as he comes over, waiting to see who is going to commit the offence first. The Waldron players mouths something, and Blue winds up and punches him straight across the jaw, and as the larger player turns the side and bends over, covering his face, Blue lets fly another punch which whips the second-row around onto his knees. Players in gold and red jerseys come over to separate the two of them, and Tosh blows the whistle, hearing the words “asshole” and “nigger” being thrown around. As Tosh fights his way into the middle, he grabs Blue by the collar and drags him away from the others.

Blue tries to slap the arm away, but can’t get out of Tosh’s hold. With his free hand Tosh brings a finger to Blue’s face and says, “Don’t fuck with me, boy. You keep that shit out of the game, you hear me? This is your one warning.”

Blue, shaking with anger, takes a few deep breaths to calm down, and finally nods. Tosh keeps eye contact even after letting him go, and calls a penalty against the Lions. As both teams set up Tosh feels the adrenaline pouring through him, both of the physical heat of the moment and the anticipation of the kick, which might or might not mean the match, because an eight-point lead requires two scores to overcome, and the way Waldron had started playing, the Lions didn’t look capable of even getting one score at this point.

But the Waldron player misses the kick pretty badly, keeping the lead to five, and when the fullback touches the ball down for a twenty-two drop out, Blue tries to start rallying his teammates with encouraging shouts and verbal prodding, making Tosh wish that he could whistle him into shutting up. The Colonel drop-kicks the ball high into the air and Blue is the first player there to tackle the Waldron player who catches it, and the second phase that gets set up, while clean according to the rules, looks more fierce than anything Tosh has ever had to witness as referee in his life. The ball comes out and the play progresses, and Tosh watches as the players throw their bodies at the loose balls or the opposing players, the hits becoming harder and harder. Even the spectators’ cheering response to each successive tackle can only barely be heard amidst the noises of hatred on the field. The kicks become more dangerously high, the runs more grueling, and through it all, Blue is at his most intense, leading his team back and forth across the field while slowly marching them towards the Waldron endzone. The Lions finally get to the Waldron twenty-two and Blue is about to send the ball out of the second phase once more, when looks to his fly-half and the rest of his backs, who appear too exhausted to run anymore, and he looks at his forwards, who seem to be capable of holding up the maul but no more than that, and taking the ball away from the second phase, he shakes off the lone Waldron player who runs at him, and he drop-kicks the ball. It rises fast and straight and high before splitting the posts, and the cheer from the sidelines is immense.

Tosh looks down at his watch, and sees that they are approaching injury time, so he takes his time going back to the centre, eager to see this match end, even waiting an extra couple of seconds before letting the Waldron player kick off. But the Lions receive the kickoff cleanly and set up quick, and the fly-half kicks the ball deep into Waldron territory, where somehow it manages to stay in bounds. The Wanderers fullback picks up the ball and tries to kick it out of bounds, but The Colonel, who covers the kick, judges his position on the sidelines by exchanging glances downwards at his foot placement along the touch line, and upwards at the ball floating down, his hand waving away the spectators who are too close to the playing field. When it looks like the ball is about to hit the ground out of bounds, and Tosh is ready to signal the lineout and hence, because it would be a dead ball, the end of the game, The Colonel jumps into the air and knocks the ball back into the field before he lands out of bounds. When the Lions fullback gathers the ball and the rest of the Lions set up a passing line, they charge up the field, passing the ball off just before they get hit, making their way deeper into Waldron territory until finally, the Lions flanker who gets the pass can’t keep from getting wrapped up by the Waldron defence. The Lions frantically try to get the ball out of the second phase again so that the play can’t be whistled dead, and even Blue runs in there, trying to get back possession. Tosh brings the whistle to his lips, but the maul moves like it might open up, and he holds back, and just when the Wanderers send in their fullback and winger to smother possession, and it looks like the play is swallowed up once more, Blue somehow manages to get through the swarming, clawing bodies, and escapes with the ball on the other side of the crowd of red jerseys, running up the middle of the field, which is vacated by the Wanderers’ backs. The winger is the only one who can get close, but Blue is able to keep him out of arm’s reach for the last twenty yards, even turning around and running backwards the last few steps, holding the ball out teasingly.

Tosh brings the whistle to his lips and blows before Blue can touch the ball down to the ground. Blue does it anyway, jumping in the air, twirling his fists and smiling, and Tosh almost feels sorry for him, as he waves off the try, yelling “unsportsmanlike taunting!” And then, as Blue stops jumping and looks at Tosh in disbelief, Tosh looks down at his watch and then blows the whistle three times, signalling the end of the game. The Waldron players throw their hands in the air and begin hollering victoriously.

Tosh begins to make his way to the sidelines, ignoring the Lions players who run up after him, Blue included, yelling at him, asking him why he called off the try. Tosh lifts his hand dismissively as he reaches his bag, saying, “I made my decision.”

“You suck, Tosh!” Blue yells angrily, pointing a finger at him. “You fucking suck!”

Tosh looks up at him and says, “You want to sit out the rest of the tournament, boy?”

Blue throws his hands in the air and storms off to the centre of the field angrily, before pausing momentarily, and then bringing his hands up to face and falling onto his knees. Tosh smiles when he sees Blue bent over and hiding his face, knowing that the scrum-half now realizes just whose fault it was out there. When he turns to direct a satisfied look over to Mr. Golding, however, he sees none of his happiness being returned his way. As the smile begins to drop away from his face, Tosh feels his cheeks growing red, and he clenches his jaw as he feels the older referee’s disappointment wash all over him.