The Sacrament by Peter Gzowski: Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Down the carpeted hall, Cindy could hear the boys chattering reveille. It must be Brent's turn to get up. She reached out a languid arm. He wasn't there. Oh god, he still wasn't there. Eight days now, eight nights without him, longer than they'd ever been apart since the wedding. Still, the anger was there. Why didn't he call? He couldn't be missing. Well, missing, sure, but he must be somewhere. He couldn't be dead. Not her Brent. He wouldn't let it happen. He couldn't. Brock Perry had said the same thing when he'd called from Montana, and Brock was a pilot. He'd know. And he knew Brent. They had coffee together nearly every day. "If anyone's going to walk out of there, Cindy, it will be Brent Dyer," Brock had said.
Tuesday had been the worst day. She hadn't even known till noon on Monday when she got that call from Candice Bacham, her neighbour.
"Cindy? Oh, Cindy, I thought it was you."
"Who?"
"In the plane crash."
"Crash?"
"No, I didn't mean that. I meant missing. In the missing plane."
"Candace, what do you...?"
"It was on the news, about the plane being missing. All I head was Dyer and Johnson, and something about a woman, and I thought it was you. Who is it? Is it Donna?"
Yes, it was Donna, she'd said, and she hadn't wanted to tell Candice this was the first time she'd known they were calling the plane missing. That was so like Mom, and Brian too. They'd come over to her place on Sunday. To play cards, they'd said. But they didn't seem to have their minds on the game. And every time she'd tried to talk about Brent not having called, they'd change the subject. "Must be hung up somewhere," Brian had said. Twenty-one years old, with two kids of her own, but they still treated her like a child.
That was Sunday. Tuesday had been the worst.
Geoff had come home from school in tears.
"Is Daddy dead?" he'd asked.
"No, Geoffy, Daddy isn't dead."
"I knew it."
"Why? What's wrong?"
"Show and tell."
"What about show and tell?"
"Two of the kids had this story from the paper. It was about Daddy. It said his plane wasn't coming back."
"Of course it's coming back, Geoff."
"Where's my Daddy?"
"He's just stopped somewhere in the United States, where they went to get Aunt Donna's dog, remember?"
"When's he coming home?"
"Soon, Geoffy, soon."
"Mommy?"
"Yes?"
"I don't like show and tell."
Today was Mother's Day. Brent had always brought her...it was no time to think about that. She'd be going to her parent's house later on. They'd all be there, Aunt Joey and Aunt Marie and maybe Grandma and Grandpa Johnson. She had some presents. A Rumoli set for her mother, and some smaller stuff for the others. Maybe they could play Rumoli. It would take their minds off their worries.
She needed her family. There were some things they didn't talk about, the Johnsons, but they were always there. Like when she'd had Geoffrey. The pains had started at three in the morning. Brent's licence was still suspended, and she was too young to have one at all, so they'd called her dad. It seemed like only a couple of minutes before he was there, with his pyjama collar sticking out from under his sweater and needing a shave, but the Lincoln was warm outside the door and he was ready to go, without a word of complaint. She wondered if Brent would ever be like that. No, Brent would gripe. Brent griped about everything, even when he did it with a smile. They couldn't be more different, really, her quiet, steady, dependable father and the restless, spirited man she'd married. But they seemed to get along with each other - now. Maybe even liked each other, which was really something when she thought about the expression on her father's face when she'd told him that she and Brent were going to get married.
There was a time when even she had thought they wouldn't make it. Brent was still drinking. He'd done his time. That was something; married in may and, with the swell of Geoffrey showing in all but her fullest dresses, a jail-widower in September. And he'd got that first start with AA when he was away. But then after the baby was born he'd started drinking again and it was worse than it had ever been before. Ever-Clear. That's what he called it. Pure grain alcohol. He made it himself, made his own still and everything. "You could use this for gasoline," he said, but he drank it.
He made a batch for Christmas 1972, their first as husband and wife. When they went down to her parent's cottage he'd decided it would be a good idea for his in-laws to join him in what he called a "piss-up," and he'd topped up her dad's liquor supply with his Ever-Clear. But then he drank so much of it himself that he could hardly stand. He and Brian had a fight, and she told him that was it. She'd just stay with her parents - they'd offered to take the baby anyway, if she hadn't wanted to get married - and he could go to the house on Nicholson Road and drink himself to death if he wanted. She wasn't having any more. New Year's he'd quit. He'd promised her he'd stop drinking and he'd never had another one. No more Ever-Clear, no more beer and no more fights - except with her maybe, but those weren't real fights. That was one thing about Brent. When he got mad he didn't let it build up inside him; he let you know. But they could always make up. Sometimes making-up made it better than before.
Sunday, May 13/79
2:30 P.M.
Cindy, we have just decided not to be heartbroken any more with the lack of planes in the air. Our main objective now is to build up our strength so that when the snow melts we can walk out of here. I had a real bad time this afternoon. I thought for sure I was ready to die. My chest hurt, my heartbeat was like a machine gun, and my breathing was just as fast. I [lay] down and prayed to God to let me know whether to fight or prepare myself for death. Like a miracle, strength returned to my arms and shoulders and I sat up and told Donna that I had to walk all the way home. I was going to.
We are eating pieces of your father to keep alive. We talked it over and decided that we knew he froze to death that first night when he gave his coat to Donna so that it would be stupid to turn around and starve to death on him. We have to make the plane ready for the night now. I love you and Geoff and Jay so much. Between you 3 and God I have been able to stay alive a week now.
The handwriting - printing, really - was laborious. In the warmth of the sun, Brent managed the ball-point pen easily. But there were not many pages left in the sheaf of paper he was using. He had burned most of the pages. Now he was hunched over the rest of htem, which were bound like a notebook, as he started his diary, he tried to ration the space.
The notebook was for Donna's school work, an assignment for Office Practice. She'd promised Mr. Hackney she'd catch up on her homework, even though she was doing well. At exam time she had stood in the top ten of the 200 kids who took Office Practice. Each page was the size of a file card, and you were supposed to mark them for filing. There was a typewritten letter on each sheet of paper, reduced from its original size, and you had to figure out whether that letter should be filed alphabetically, or by the company it came from, or by geography, or - what was it Mr. Hackney said? - subjectly. You figured it out and then you marked the card with a code.
When Brent finished writing a sentence in his diary he'd read it to Donna and ask her if it was right. That made her feel better too. It was as if both of them were talking to Cindy.
It's 4 now. We just took some chairs out of the plane to see if it would give us more room to sleep. I found my watch [buried] in the snow under a chair. I had to fix the band and reset it, but I think it will work. This had been the first day that I have really had enough strength to do anything. My heart feels so good when I think of you and the kids...Donna and I talk continuously about how much we love you and the kids. If it [hadn't] been for her arm around me there would have been some awful close calls with depression. Death. I don't think that either of us could get out of here without the other one. There is not much to say about the first few days because all we could do is cry - eat a little and when we ran out of gas for the fire we thought we were dead for we have been without a fire for 3 days now, so you can imagine how close I want to snuggle when I get home. We always keep wondering if you people have given up hope on us. But we always come right back with a lot of negative answers. We have to go in now because it is getting cold out here. Donna and I love you all so don't give up hope because we aren't. See you tomorrow.
For a day now, they had been eating the meat regularly, but they weren't used to it. They could never get used to it. No matter how much they called it "meat" or "breakfast" or whatever, they still knew what it was. They didn't talk about it, but they knew.
It was Don, parts of Donna's father, his flesh, the flesh from which she'd sprung. They prayed every time, offering grace. "Thank thee Lord for what we are about to receive," they would say, "in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen." And then they would bite into the flesh, and when they talked after that, it was often of Don. Again and again they would remind each other of his last act, of his will that they should live.
They devised a way to prepare it. From inside the engine cowling of the plane Brent had taken a flat piece of metal called the flight lock. REMOVE BEFORE STARTING ENGINE, it read. They called it their spatula. They would spread strips of the meat on it and pound them flat with their hands and then leave them to dry in the sun. "It's like beef jerky," Brent said. The pounding and the sun took the moisture from the meat, and they cut off small pieces with the tiny knife to eat it.
Even with the loose teeth removed, Brent had difficulty chewing the dried meat. When he had trouble getting it down, Donna would put some in her own mouth first, and soften it and then wordlessly pass it to him. They ate some each morning, just after they got up, and then a little more in the middle of the day, and some in the evening before they settled in for the night. It didn't satisfy their hunger. They bellies ached, and cried for more food. But it was something. The prayers helped.
Monday, May 14
9:15 A.M.
I imagine you and the kids are scrabbling about getting ready for school. Have faith because I am feeling stronger again today. My left arm is not near as sore as previous. My legs are not near as shaky. And I have managed to pull 4 loose teeth out of my bottom jaw so it feel better. The cuts on my mouth and chin are healing well. No infection. It's another beautiful day here today. The snow is melting right on schedule so within a week or so maybe we can start our walk out of here. We found your dad's camera in the snow. Donna says to make sure that...you...know there has only been two things that have kept us alive. One is love and complete trust in God & 2 the love for you Cindy, Geoff, Jay, Brian, Tara, Grandma Johnson, Great Grandpa and Grandma, Ron, my mom and dad, Aunt Sue, and everyone we know. When we get back we are going to have all of the relatives over to our place for a barbecue. We'll all pitch in and Donna and I want to talk to all of them about the real experience we had with God while we were out here. It is 12 noon. We are sitting in the snow and are sweating. It makes it hard on a person when now planes fly over and all you can do is keep eating and prepare for your walk out. Donna and I pray out loud all the time for the things we have received. It's funny though. No matter how hard you try there is always some point in the day you feel low. So you have to talk about them. I'm back at 2:30. 80 degrees with the reflections off the hills. We have our first BM's since we hit so we feel a lot better. Just in case but I doubt it: If I don't make it home again (which I will) I want you to take whatever is mine and divide it up. I think my guns and reloading supplies should go to Geoffrey. Out of any insurance money coming put enough away in each boy's bank account for their future. Cindy my love for you is greater than any injury or crash, and that's [why] I'll probably be reading this to you in person. Just in case here is my signature. (Brent Dyer) I am still going to deliver this in person if it takes until July when the snow is all gone...I love you and the kids more than anything in the world. A few clouds are forming so maybe we'll get a break from the heat. There is still too much snow to walk out yet and Donna and I are both too weak. It will probably be 5 or six more days before us or the snow are ready. We are not sure [which] way to go...
One of the few things in his mind and heart that Brent did not communicate to Cindy - and throughout his writings he maintained the style of a letter writer, or even, as in the frequent "see you tommorows," a telephone communicant - was his growing appreciation of Donna. Or, more accurately, of what was happening to Donna. The person he had regarded as a kid sister, a girl, was becoming a woman. His love for her - and now he understood that it was love - was not sexual. In the pain and discomfort of their life on the mountain, all appetite for pleasure of any kind gave way to the need to survive. But the deep changes in her bearing now affected him. There was a nobility to her, and the aura of a growing strength of spirit that he could not have imagined under the blonde curls of someone whose chief accomplishment so far as he knew, had been to twirl a baton.
One striking example was Donna's attitude toward the consumption of the flesh. Each "meal" remained spiritual agony for her, but having faced the necessity of the act, and having felt - or equally important, having come to believe she was feeling - some resurgence in her body, and some blunting of the cutting edge of hunger, she became grimly practical about what they were doing.
"We're going to have to eat it raw," she said one day.
"Oh, Jesus."
"We just should. Look, we're eating it anyway, and when we dry it in the sun we probably lose some of the protein. That's what we're trying to get. We're just going to have to."
They began to eat pieces of the flesh uncooked.
But there was more. From the beginning, they had leaned on each other. In Brent's darkest moments he had been able to turn to her for support: the two-cylinder engine. Her strength had been the strength of a child - almost as if her mind had been unable to comprehend the desperation of their real situation - and when he turned to her it was a momentary relief from his own fatalistic sense of realism. Now, though, she was his equal. Her ability to move around had returned before his; and as in the clearing of the snow from the plane's wings, she had been able to accomplish chores that he could not. The mobility had given her both power and pride, and they were an adult's emotions, not a child's. Now, as they reached the middle of their second week alone and faced the hopelessness of ever being helped form outside, she understood their plight as well as he. Her naïveté, such as it had been, was gone. She was his partner. And he needed her as much as she needed him.
This was not an easy discovery for Brent to accept. The world in which they'd both been raised was a man's world. Men rule their roosts on the Canadian prairie, a part of the world untouched, except in it few large cities, by many of the social forces that changed urban North America in the 1970's. Men give the orders on the prairies. Men hunt, men fish, men work the fields and make the decisions in the office. Women do the books. Women can join in some things: there are mixed curling bonspiels in the long winters, but it is the men's championships that count. Men wear peaked caps with the names of farm equipment dealers on their foreheads; women wear bouffant hairdos. On their hockey jackets, the common uniform of fall and winter, men sport crests that glorify their boyhood dreams. When women are allowed to wear hockey jackets at all, their crests declare them as a "booster," or "supporter." But on the mountainside, Brent and Donna were comrades, and Brent came to realize that nothing about their equality diminished him at all.
Constantly, Donna wanted to cry for her father. She would talk as calmly about her need to let loose totally as she did about her physical requirements. Once she told Brent that she could hold in the tears no longer, and together they planned her release. "Just cry it out," Brent said. "Let go, and I'll hold on." And she had allowed her grief to roll over her like a warm wave. But when it was over, she was together again; the catharsis had worked. She thanked Brent for his support as formally as, on another occasion and in another place, she might have thanked him for lending her his comb. But when Brent needed to cry, she was the spirit of strength, a seventeen-year-old earth mother who could hlep him release his tears and not feel less of a man for doing it, and offer him a wisdom beyond her years, who could comprehend that on the other side of his brazen and impudent nature was a frightened soul, and that his tears came from the same part of his complex nature as the jokes that sometimes cheered them up.
And the tears did come. He could not have imagined himself crying before. Oh, there had been moments of remorse - that awful Christmas when he'd drunk for the last time, and he had cried as he pleaded with Cindy for another chance. And tears of self-pity - alone in the jail at Regina, thinking of what he'd done to himself. But they had been something outside himself, symptoms of emotions that, to tel the truth, he sometimes did not wholly feel. Now the emotions were overwhelming him, the horror of their situation, and the joy, the sheer, sweet joy that would come welling up inside him until it burst. The tears were not from, but of him, and he felt no shame.
To Donna, this emerging woman, he could open parts of himself that even to Cindy, his beloved Cindy, he had kept closed. He could talk to her of his love for his father, and wonder why he had never bothered to tell Jimmy that he loved him. He could say that right now, at this moment, he would like to cry in his fathers arms. And when he said such things he could look at his sister-in-law and know that she understood. Love? Yes, it was love - a love of life, a commitment to survival, a deep feeling in his innermost being that this unspeakable experience he was going through, this terrible, gruesome, painful, wretched ordeal was forcing him to discover himself in new ways, to feel life and all that life meant to him more deeply than he had ever felt it before.
It was, he decided, just a son of a bitch of a good thing to have happened.
The search was winding down. They Wyoming patrol, never really convinced that GYVP would have strayed far enough south to cross its borders, had packed up its operation on Saturday. Idaho, with most of the possibilities now covered, stopped flying grids not long after. In Bozeman, Sam Griggs held on, but there were no new clues to follow up.
There had been a flicker of hope over the weekend. In an unprecedented move - perhaps a comment on the presence of active politicians in the search, although no one wanted to say so - a Canadian Armed Forces Transport and Rescue squadrom, invited formally by the officers of Scott Air Force Base to cross the border, sent down a Twin Otter and crew. The Otter was specially equipped for reconnaissance, with double observation windows and highly trained personnel. The Canadian plane searched all through Saturday night, and their reports of three seperate fires in the mountains raised expectations. Griggs despatched ground parties to check out all three sightings, but their reports quickly dampened everyone's spirits again: the fires belonged to groups of campers and some young people in a secluded house who appeared to be merrier than the searchers would have expected on a cold weekend, and who wanted to truck with anyone representing authority.
By Sunday, more than 18,000 square miles of the map between Livingston and the heart of the Idaho mountains had been coloured in on the mapped grids, many of the rectangles several times.
One by one the volunteers began to go home, back to their jobs and families to tell the dispirited citizens of Estevan there was no news.
Each night, as those remaining gathered in the Black Lantern Lounge of the Holiday Inn in Bozeman, the talk turned to Norm Pischke. With all their physical clues exhausted, the searchers tried more and more frequently to put themselves into the pilot's mind. Was there something - anything - about Norm's history that would tell them where he might have gone? The talk would range on until closing time, and as the weary searchers took one last paper cup of beer to go, it would carry on in their rooms at the Holidy or Ramada Inns, or among those who had moved in to the smaller Thrifty Scot to offer support for Sharon.
A bush pilot. That was the central fact of Norm's character they would return to again and again. And, like all bush pilots, fiercely proud of his skills. Griggs had heard of these men, many of them legends of aviation history, who'd helped to open up much of the Canadian frontier, flying on baling wire and moose glue, going into the teeth of sixty-mile-an-hour winds in temperatures of thirty and forty below, helping the law track maddened killers, bringing out the victims of dreadful accidents and sudden illness. When they were lucky, these men lived to write stirring memoirs and enthrall their grandchildren; when the breaks went against them, they were not heard of again. Even in the Canadian artic, there were no old unlucky bush pilots.
As a young man, Norm had been one of htem. Long before he'd settled down with Sharon he'd had his share of mercy missions and emergency landings, and he'd loved the thrill of his adventures. He'd often talked of them to his friends. LIke the time he'd been taking a load of truck-springs into northern Manitoba when the weather closed in on him totally - "visibility zer-goddamn-oh" - and he'd gone down into the fog and the snow and come out just above the trees and there was a clearing, like he'd designed it, and he simply touched her down in there, using the wheels as skis.
It had seeemed to some of Norm's friends that he missed those days and that in his career as an agricultural pilot, an ag pilot, a flatland man - he'd sometimes try to seek out thrills. There were marks on the top of the Norm Air truck, someone said. Norm used to buzz it to see how coulse he could come. He'd been known to touch the odd telephone wire, too, and just a few weeks before the Boise flight, he'd taken off from Winnipeg in weather so severe that the highways were closed. He'd been to a seminar on flying; every other pilot there had been content to stay an extra night, but not Norm. He'd taken off and landed back in Estevan in two feet of heavy snow. Busted a wing, too, which he'd later had to have fixed, but he was all right. So was the pregnant woman who'd been his passenger.
Norm had seemed troubled in recent weeks. His business hadn't been in good shape. A lot f people in Estevan knew that. He'd been behind in his payments to Shell Oil, and there'd been some accuracy of the meters on the pumps Shell was filling for him, and from which he sold fuel. The pumps had been locked, one of the Estevan pilots recaled, but Norm had taken the seals off, and someone had actually come and taken the hoses away. Even that hadn't stopped Norm. He'd pumped the fuel from the underground tanks into his spray truck, and continued to serve his customers. But that had been straightened out.
So had the business with Sharon. They'd had some bad times, sure. What pilot didn't have trouble with his wife? It was part of the job. Long trips, coming home washed out. And Norm and Sharon had even split up for a while. She'd taken their older boy, Lee, down east to some kind of Mormon group - always looking into different kinds of religion, that Sharon - and Norm had been pretty Despondedn when she was away. He missed her - no one could remember Norm ever fooling around - and he missed Lee. He was crazy about his kids. Would any of these troubles have bothered Norm's flying? Never, said the people who knew him. When he was in a plane, he was all pilot, among the best any of them had ever seen.
"He might have been the greatest bush pilot in the history of the world," someone said at the bar. "But if he tok that Cessna into some of the country we've been flying over, he was also a goddamn fool."