A Rock Fell on the Moon Read online

  On Sunday mornings we reluctantly attended Sunday school at Omi’s Mennonite Brethren church at Prince Edward Street and Forty-third Avenue. Most of the congregation was made up of urbanized Mennonites from the Fraser Valley, many from Russian Mennonite communities, giving Omi a tight group of comrades. After half an hour of Sunday school, which Vona and I rolled our eyes at, we joined the adults upstairs. Married couples bunched in the centre pew, single women—mostly widows—sat primly in the left pews, and a sprinkling of single men—mostly widowers—occupied a few pews on the right. Sermons were in German, as were most hymns and almost all the prayers. But there was one hymn sung in English that gripped me like a fist—“How Great Thou Art.” Popularized by American gospel baritone George Beverly Shea during his sixty years with the Billy Graham Crusade, the words and music sent shivers down my spine. Mennonites could sing. When the soloist intoned, “I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed,” and the congregation soared in response, “Then sings my soooooul, my Saviour God, to Thee,” some superpower rippled through every molecule of my being.

  Those moments, however, were rare. Most of the time I tried not to nod off. The room was warm, the bodies close and comfortable, and the German language lulled me into a state of deep peace and relaxation. That is, until prayer time. Prayers were a peculiar, and for me dangerous, ritual. Everyone stood, heads bowed and eyes closed, and then spontaneously someone in the congregation who felt so moved told God their troubles. Out loud. Whatever they shared with the Almighty, they shared with all present. When one had finished with the recitation “In Jesus’s name, Amen,” another began. Sometimes two people started simultaneously and one had to yield. Sometimes men and women broke down while praying and couldn’t go on. All of this continued for what seemed like hours. On at least two occasions, I stood so long I became dizzy and fainted, but strong arms picked me up and rushed me outside, where I regained consciousness. Truth is, we attended church just in case not attending was seen as slamming our heart-doors to the Lord. If that happened, Omi said, we’d burn in hell.

  One Sunday morning, we woke to find Dad had come home in the middle of the night. Once again, we were all together as an ordinary family (except with one member missing, Caesar). But normal things weren’t. Dad paced and stared out the window. His hairline was in rapid retreat. He was out a lot, supposedly to find work. Mom and Dad held hands even in the house and conferred long into the night. Dad proclaimed we weren’t the country girls he raised, but had become “citified and sissy-fied.” We vehemently denied it and wrestled him to the ground to prove it. To show us what real women were made of, he treated us to a movie at the Orpheum Theatre called How the West Was Won. It was a special event: our first movie outing in Vancouver, and far removed from the casual evenings in the Elsa recreation hall where Dad sometimes ran the projector. Vona and I dressed for the occasion, wearing identical black felt skirts ringed with white appliqué poodles and white rabbit fur jackets (all made by Omi and Mom). Mom, arm in arm with Dad, was wrapped in a full-length muskrat coat, and Dad wore a white shirt and tie, a long overcoat and a fedora. These details remain vivid because on the way to the theatre, renowned Vancouver street photographer Foncie Pulice snapped a picture of us. But after the show, which we thought the most rousing, romantic and action-packed epic ever created, we returned to our basement, where Dad had to duck his head whenever he negotiated a doorway and where the dampness of the winter rains seeped through the walls and a constant chill permeated the air.

  “Darling, we must move to a real house,” I overheard Mom say that night. “One nearby so the girls won’t have to change schools and where we can have Caesar.

  “Yes, yes,” Dad said. “But first I need to find work.”

  The next week my father announced we were spending our first non-Yukon Christmas with his parents in Revelstoke. No one jumped for joy.

  “For Christ’s sake, can’t I take my family to my folks’ without everyone pulling a long face?” was Dad’s response.

  Visiting my paternal grandparents was a routinely unpleasant duty. No matter where they lived, their rented house was well worn, thin-walled and cramped. This one had only one spare room where Mom and Dad shared a twin bed. Vona and I squeezed into a single cot. I know they loved us because they said so but other than a peck on the cheek, they were stiff and taciturn. Everyone pretended our lives were the same but there were overflowing glances, petty conversations and canyons of silence. Granny was her coolly affectionate and sharply critical self. When we were all together Granddad barely said boo and reddened and sputtered when he managed to utter a few words. I knew he could speak in full sentences and even laugh because I heard him when he and Dad retired to the living room after dinner for smokes, drinks and cowboy records. Granny and Mom, meanwhile, mutely did the kitchen cleanup while Vona and I escaped outdoors to play in the snow and cold with Caesar. He’d turned himself inside out when we arrived. We’d been apart since we left the Yukon, six months earlier.

  On the long journey home, without Caesar, it was a new year and while Vona and I whined and pouted in the back seat, Mom predicted 1964 would bring changes for the better. Like all decent fortune tellers, she was half right. Vona and I continued trading stomach flu, fevers, coughs and sore throats back and forth like a pair of caged mice. My grades wavered and dipped and on my mid-term report card the school principal, Mr. W.E. Whatmough, wrote, “With your ability, I feel that Ds should not be a part of your report.”

  But by the end of January, my parents had found a new home: a good-sized, wood-sided, two-storey gablefront house at 485 East Forty-fourth Avenue, one block west of Fraser Street. With a large front porch and a fresh coat of white paint with red trim, the property’s winning features were its three bedrooms and fenced backyard. I could have my own room, in the partially finished basement, and we could bring Caesar home.

  But not before there was more cause for celebration. Dad came home one day from his daily forays and proclaimed that he’d found a job paying $500 a month through the BC and Yukon Chamber of Mines. Our rent was $100 so that left plenty to live on. Dad must have thought so, anyway. While Mom shopped in second-hand stores for beds, a kitchen table and chairs, Dad arrived home one day in February driving a shiny red Jaguar Mark II. He said he traded in our former car—an older model black Rover—for the Jag. We all went for a drive that evening, after Vona and I stroked the silver leaping jaguar suspended on the hood. We revelled in the double takes coming our way as we cruised westward toward Jericho Beach.

  “See, we are the fox,” Dad said as he zigzagged from lane to lane, passing one car after another, “and the others are chickens. Watch how we outfox them.”

  Dad had a penchant for foreign cars, especially British models, and swore he’d never buy an American car because he hated American “politics.” In the Yukon, his first car was an aquamarine Sunbeam-Talbot that spent most of its life up on blocks.

  The next day Dad snapped a photo of his three “females,” bedecked in matching red dresses, leaning against the Jag. It’s the only picture we have of our flirtation with luxury. The following week Dad took the Jag out on the highway “to see what it could do” and rolled it in a ditch. The car was totalled but he walked away without a scratch. “Born to be hanged and won’t be drowned,” he said when the dust had settled. A yellow Morris Minor convertible that started only when it felt like it replaced the Jag. This was the clunker Mom first attempted to learn how to drive in. After three humiliating lessons from Dad, however, she gave up until a later date. And a new teacher.

  Dad took up with a new friend through his work and suddenly we were socializing with a family that was very different from ours—the Fawleys. Of English extraction, Allan Fawley was a consulting mining engineer and geologist who had lived and worked in Tanganyika with his family until four years earlier. His wife Barbara was upper-crust English. With dark hair and a penchant for pearl
s, she dressed and talked like the Queen. They lived at 1947 West King Edward Avenue, behind a colossal cedar hedge, in a rambling rancher decorated with fine furniture and East African exotica, and had two daughters our age and a much older son whom we seldom saw. The family was friendly in a formal, frosty way, terribly proper and well groomed, and was obviously a class or two above us. But the Fawleys would play crucial roles in Dad and Mom’s lives—Allan Fawley would testify in Dad’s defense and believe in his innocence until he died, and Barbara Fawley would become and remain Mom’s steadfast friend until her own death decades later.

  The other family we saw frequently was of another sort entirely. The Klassens lived in semi-rural Abbotsford. Helene Klassen was the daughter of the Rempel family who had given Omi and Mom their first Canadian home some sixteen years earlier. Her sister Katie’s family—the Willimses—were buddies also. Both families were large, boisterous and big-hearted broods that we viewed as being fun but far too devout. However, that didn’t stop us from spending many days and evenings with them, playing games, eating good, plain food and feeling sort of like we belonged to a group even if their rules—no movies, no dancing, no rock and roll music, no makeup and no fashion—didn’t jibe with our sensibilities. Back home, Vona and I were on the cusp of discovering what the sixties had to offer.

  In May, Dad returned Caesar to his rightful home and our family was finally complete. Caesar, who had never been neutered, had been known to engage in the occasional, and savage, dogfight, as did most Yukon dogs. We had our trepidations about how he would handle Pierre’s presence in his territory. Mercifully, he instinctively acknowledged Pierre as part of the pack. Although appalled by the miniature poodle’s obsequious behaviour—he’d envelop Pierre’s entire head in his open mouth as a warning—he never so much as snapped at him.

  When school ended in June, Mom, Vona and I picked strawberries in Richmond so we could buy new clothes for the coming school year. We rose before dawn and caught the city bus to the bottom of Fraser Street, where we jammed into a flatbed truck with rickety sides along with dozens of others and rode to the fields. Most pickers were recent Chinese or East Indian immigrants and attempts at chitchat on the ride out proved fruitless. We picked rain or shine, paid by the number of flats we filled. Anyone caught eating berries was docked pay. Mom didn’t earn that much as she had to take frequent breaks because the bending and squatting hurt her heart, as she put it. But after two weeks of work, I stuffed thirty dollars into my pocket and spent the summer conjuring up images of the fashionable outfits I would buy.

  I didn’t and still don’t know exactly what Dad’s work entailed but it frequently took him to Vancouver Island, Terrace and the Yukon for short periods, often accompanied by Allan Fawley. In July, he took Vona with him but instead of taking her with him to Terrace, as he said he would, he boarded her at the Beaverdam 3-Bar Guest Ranch near Clinton in the Cariboo. Vona was in raptures: she slept in a barn, swam in mountain lakes and was given her own horse, a Welsh pony named Bucky that she had to saddle, bridle and feed. It was the closet she ever came to Dad’s promise of a horseback trip through the Rockies. When she returned, she was more horse crazy than ever. Vona and I now received an allowance of ten cents a week and even had a TV, which we enjoyed on weekends. For the first while there were only two shows we watched: The Wonderful World of Disney and The Ed Sullivan Show.

  On the last day of August, something happened that no one could have predicted and that would shape our future in ways we’d never imagined. At the age of sixty-one, Omi received a proposal. As her face turned into a beet, she told us a Mr. Wilhelm Teichroeb—a widower at church she’d barely spoken to—had asked for her hand in marriage. Mom beamed, and Vona urged her to accept so that she wouldn’t be lonely, but my first reaction was total disgust. At eleven years old, I knew marriage meant intimacy beyond words and I couldn’t comprehend my old Omi and some old man engaged in that unspeakable state of affairs.

  After receiving the go-ahead from God, Omi accepted and on a sunny October Saturday, Maria Werle and Wilhelm Teichroeb wed. It was a joyous affair, and in the typical Mennonite way, understated. Vona and I, adorned in matching home-sewn turquoise brocade dresses, were the bridesmaids. The reception, prepared by the church ladies, was held in the church basement. “Grandpa,” as we quickly came to know him, was a man of few words but non-stop smiles and hugs. One of his few rules was that the greatest sin next to not loving God was wasting food. He owned a house not far from us at 6380 Sophia Street. Gentle, devout and generous, Grandpa had five grown children and fourteen grandchildren and counting. Suddenly, we were part of an enormous and greatly varied family. But four days later we were short one member. Dad was gone. Again. I remember the day. It was October 7, 1964. The next day, in Whitehorse, Dad’s first trial began.

  Chapter 15

  “In Geology, Anything Is Possible”

  You can thumb your nose at fear,Wish the horde in hell.With the haughty you can be Insolent and bold.

  What a difference eleven months made. That was the length of time Dad had between his preliminary hearing and his trial to turn our lives around. With Omi’s happy marriage as a good omen, we felt the stirrings of our formerly extinguished hopes—for a true home first, and then the adventures we’d been promised. Dad was doing the best he could. Not only had he secured a decent job, moved us into a real house and retrieved Caesar, he’d found geologists to act as expert witnesses on his behalf while managing to sway a very wealthy someone into bankrolling his legal fees.

  But back then all I knew was that Dad was hard at work. Our fledgling Vancouver existence was slowly improving even if it was far removed from the life we’d known or the dream life he’d dangled before us like a candy apple at a fair. Dad’s employment had something to do with mining, that much I understood, but what really mattered was that it drew him away for regular three- or four-day stretches, making Mom a more than occasional single parent and us fatherless girls. Today, with the benefit of RCMP files, I figure he was using that time either to stake claims or assay ore samples for his new employer, who became his legal sugar daddy. Now I know that in exchange for footing Dad’s legal fees, Dad gave this man several Yukon mineral claims. As it turned out, the claims weren’t worth the airfare from Vancouver to Whitehorse.

  All of this became clear when Library and Archives Canada sent me the voluminous files amassed by the Mounties during their two-year investigation. Even with numerous pages withheld and many names blacked out, enough information survives to sketch out the essential facts. The money man Dad worked for was Robert Campbell, a wealthy Vancouver businessman who owned Campbell-Bennett Construction. But Campbell also dabbled in mining properties and had formed a second company called Colonial Mines Ltd.

  Smooth and savvy discourse was Dad’s forte and he must have spoken like Shakespeare to court Campbell, because after showing ore samples from his shipment to Campbell’s geologist, Allan Fawley, Dad and Campbell struck a remarkable deal. Besides paying him a working wage of $500 a month, even during the trial, Campbell covered all of Dad’s legal costs. In exchange, Dad would give Campbell the Moon claims as well as $50,000 cash, even though on another document he’d promised the Moon to Poncho. With one proviso, of course: that Dad be found not guilty and his ownership of the ore be beyond dispute.

  Dad’s tales of treasure proved irresistible to Campbell. He soon flew Dad to the Yukon to stake more claims close to the Moon. But while Dad may have been an adept assayer, he was no geologist. As an amateur prospector, his luck was no better than that of the tens of thousands of grubstakers who arrived during the Klondike Gold Rush, most of whom returned home ruined. The Mounties learned of Dad’s new flurry of prospecting from Gordon McIntyre, who as Mayo Mining District’s mine recorder had met Dad when he originally purchased the Moon claims, two years earlier. “Priest has staked, along with two native men—Tommy Moses and Jimmy Lucas of Mayo—a total of 20 claims which he recorded on 1
5 June 1964 in the Mayo Mining District office,” Constable Lauren McKiel wrote in an RCMP memo.

  As Dad coordinated the staking and registering of likely worthless claims in Campbell’s name, he also pursued geological experts to testify on his behalf. He already had Allan Fawley, who accompanied Dad to the American Smelting and Refining Co. (ASARCO) in Montana in January 1964 to collect samples for Fawley to analyze in preparation for his testimony. It would be the last time that Dad, Fawley or anyone else would lay eyes on the shipment.

  The following month, ASARCO processed the ore, which was registered to Alpine Gold and Silver Ltd. The smelting company did not inform Dad or anyone from Alpine before or after the operation. Instead, they notified UKHM and wrote the company a cheque for $125,322.17. Years later, that move would come back to bite both ASARCO and UKHM. Before receiving the cash, UKHM signed a letter of indemnity that essentially absolved the smelter of any responsibility in the event someone later laid claim to the money.

  Dad would find out about the smelting some time later and be furious when he did. For the time being, however, he was focused on amassing the best geological experts he could find for his trial. I suspect one was our family friend Angus MacDonald, who had worked extensively in the Keno area and who declined. The other was Charles Jewell Brown, a geologist and adviser to the White Pass and Yukon Route Company, who agreed to testify on Dad’s behalf. But it was Fawley who would emerge as the most impressive of Dad’s expert witnesses. Dad’s letters to these people reveal a man itching for a fight—someone who not only felt he could beat the charges but who drooled at the prospect of humiliating Al Pike and UKHM in the process.

  My case is going good as hell! Stick around and watch me lick the ass off of United Keno Hill. There’s a guy here with 3 million bucks that’s going to back me up to beat those bastards, and by golly, I think we are going to make it.