A Rock Fell on the Moon

by Alicia Priest

  My sister and I took turns sleeping with Omi. Omi’s greatest fear now was that her daughter would succumb during an operation, ending her maternal relationship with her “girls.” Co-habiting with Dad in a world without her daughter would be impossible. She understood correctly that he could never live with her. Dad was slovenly to the point of squalour, and she was the quintessential Germanic woman. It made for a vexing household arrangement. Born into wealth, Omi was raised by Russian nannies and sent to the finest all-girls school. Yet every Saturday she knelt down and washed and waxed our kitchen’s checkerboard linoleum floor before baking several loaves of bread. Every Tuesday she did the laundry, including my dad’s underwear (which he used to brag only felt comfy after five days’ wear), using a state-of-the-art wringer washer. She hung the laundry outside where it froze stiff as cardboard in colder weather. She ironed the sheets before they went on the beds she changed, and embroidered the pillowcases we slept on. She even washed and polished the leaves of our giant, trailing philodendron houseplant.

  At around 8:30 p.m., after telling us our Bible story and bathing us in kisses, Omi would turn out the light, and then pray in the darkness while we floated to sleep, rocked by her soft-voiced German. When Mom didn’t die but recovered quite nicely, Omi showed her gratitude to God by fasting one day a week for the rest of her life. On Thursdays, till the day she died, she only drank water. However, Omi yearned for her independence, her like-minded companions and the warmer, sunnier climes in Vancouver. She loved us more than her own children, she often told us, but needed to be with her soul-sustaining Mennonite community, which was thriving in “Little Deutschland,” a neighbourhood in southeast Vancouver centred on Fraser Street and Forty-first Avenue.

  As Omi filled her Yukon days attending to our home, her son-in-law and us girls, Dad wrote Mom of his promising business venture.

  May 2, 1962

  About the other thing Liebchen—don’t worry or let it keep you in suspense at all. Things are going just fine, and if it’s successful—just dandy!! If it isn’t, we’ve got the most valuable things of all, each other and the children. Ja?

  At the end of that month, on UKHM letterhead embossed with the words “Elsa, Yukon Territory,” he wrote: “I still have lots to do with my business here and imagine that most of my Sundays and spare time will be taken up with it.”

  Summer arrived, Mom returned home, all the kittens had new owners and Dad was indeed busy. In June, he and Poncho inked a private deal—the first of a growing pile of papers signed or initialled by the two—regarding the soon-to-be-purchased Moon claims. They agreed to split the cash value of the ore shipment equally, but with a small percentage of the total going to the third man. Once the initial “mining” was completed, Poncho would gain full ownership of the claim and be free to explore it as he wished. Three days after they signed the deal, Dad bought the Moon claims from John Strebchuk for $1,000. Then he wrote the Yukon Territory’s mining inspector, stating that he intended to mine the Moon “on a very small scale.” If a claim holder did not do a minimal amount of work on his claims, they reverted to the territorial government and became free for someone else to stake. Dad told us about his claims, but we thought little of it—even then, we knew that the Yukon grows prospectors like the Prairies grow gophers.

  Shortly after, another letter, penned again in the UKHM assay office, was mailed to the American Smelting and Refining Co. in Helena, Montana.

  Dear Sirs,

  I should like to enquire about the possibility of marketing a small shipment of hand picked high-grade silver ore… If I could manage an average of, say, 2,000 oz of silver and 25% lead, what could I expect to receive after deductions for transportation, smelting, etc.? How would it be advisable to ship providing you would accept it?

  Sincerely,

  Gerald H. Priest.

  Over the following fall and early winter, there was a lull in the activity and as far as Vona and I were concerned, life was blissfully normal. In October, Poncho quit the assay office and moved to Keno City and we rarely saw him. But as 1963 got underway, Dad initiated a flurry of correspondence, along with numerous phone calls, and also purchased some extraordinary goods. He bought a Ski-Doo for the princely sum of $988.49. Such an exotic contraption had never been seen in Elsa and would be the first such machine operated in the region. When it arrived, Vona was beside herself with excitement. Me, not so much. It sounded like an angry mosquito and chewed up the snow like the war tanks I’d seen in the movies. I didn’t see the point of all that noise and stink but Vona jumped at every opportunity Dad offered for Ski-Doo rides, up and down hills and along snow-packed roads.

  In March, Dad bought a pair of Ojibway snowshoes, snowshoe harnesses and a towing toboggan. The next week, he phoned the Northwest Sack Co. in Vancouver and ordered seven hundred heavy twill sacks at thirty cents apiece, along with seven hundred specialty sack ties. By late March, all the goods had arrived, and it was time for Dad to take his holiday.

  “Pappy is gone taking his ski doo for his Easter Holidays. He has gone to his claim. Tomorrow he will come home,” Vona wrote in an April 1963 letter to our adopted aunt and uncle, Dolores and Louie Brown. “Our ski doo is yellow, round, and [has] a curved windshield. There is one ski. A large one in the middle and two rubber tracks on the side. The seat can come off and you can put hammers and things like it [inside]. The toboggan is six feet long, made of plywood. About 2 and half feet wide. I can drive the ski-doo all by myself. I know how to stop and start it.”

  While on holiday, Dad let a few select people know of his good fortune. He’d discovered “float,” a surface deposit of silver-rich ore, on his claim, he told one man. “He was going to mine this float and haul it out,” said mill worker Joe Sekulich (not his real name). “Poncho was trying to build a road to the claims the summer before but had wrecked his Cat. So Gerry was going to use his snowmobile and toboggan to haul the stuff out. He expected to make seventy or eighty thousand dollars, but first he’d have to break it up in little chunks and put it in sacks so he could haul it to the road where the White Pass trucks could pick it up.”

  Offering his help, Sekulich built Dad a special sacking stand so that he could more easily load the ore during his wintertime forays. Days later, Sekulich bumped into Dad in Elsa during the Easter break. “He had a beard and was dressed for the outdoors. I asked him how it was going, and he said fine.”

  Johnny Yandreski (not his real name), who drove his pickup truck daily between Elsa, where he worked, and Keno City, where he lived, also helped Dad during the early spring of 1963. “He asked me if I would take some stuff for him from Elsa to the junction of the Wernecke and Klondike Keno Roads. Since I drove that way all the time I said yes. A couple of days later, I stopped by his house and he had about five bags of grub and tools and a sleeping bag. When we got to the Wernecke–Klondike junction his motor toboggan was parked right there.”

  Yandreski would shuttle Dad back and forth a few more times. However, Dad was tight-lipped about what he was doing on those cold days and nights, and Yandreski knew it was bad form to pry a prospector. Still, he was puzzled: there weren’t any snowmobile tracks along the roads. If Dad was using his fancy machine to haul ore, he wasn’t taking the most obvious route.

  Poncho, meanwhile, was busy on other fronts. At the end of April, after returning to Elsa from a trip, he wrote Toronto lawyer Richard Irwin Martin asking him to incorporate a new mining company. Martin had experience with mining companies in Ontario.

  Since I have left, Priest has been taking out ore from the claims, hauling it with a snow toboggan. The ore is such as I have never seen at United Keno. I want you to come up here to the Yukon and prepare an agreement. I want you to incorporate a new company called Faro Silver and Gold Mines.

  Shortly after, a new company was registered with an official address on Church Street in downtown Toronto, not far from the financial heart of the nation, including
the well-heeled owners of UKHM. But it wasn’t called Faro Silver and Gold. The company’s name was Alpine Gold and Silver.

  A few weeks after that, on a Friday, Vona and I came home from school and received stomach-churning news: in four days we would be leaving Elsa forever. Mom, Vona and I flew to Vancouver on June 4, leaving Dad and Caesar behind to join us later. Dad said he would find a good home for Mitzi. Much later we learned he took her out back and shot her. His last day at the assay office was the following Saturday. Then, he got down to business—the first grunt work Dad had done since the frenzy to pull the cached ore out of the mine more than a year before. Poncho, Dad and Ed Sivak, a miner they’d hired, shovelled, sacked and tied up the ore into 671 bundles and hid them deep in the gully off Duncan Creek Road.

  On June 21, the first of three White Pass and Yukon Route trucks arrived at the Duncan Creek site and more than two hundred stuffed sacks were heaved onto its flatbed. The following day two more WP&YR trucks were loaded, and soon headed for Whitehorse.

  By then, another family had laid claim to our house, the only home I’d known. Such was the demand for desirable Panabodes in Elsa that they were spoken for immediately after an outgoing family announced their departure. But Dad had no feelings for the house or community where he’d spent the past dozen years. His last letter to Mom before leaving Elsa and the Yukon for good (or so he thought) was a typical amalgam of fact and fiction.

  Elsa, Y.T. June 18, 1963

  My dearest:

  Please forgive my writing—I’m writing from my tent, and it’s kind of cramped. My hands are awful stiff and sore too, from handling ore.

  I got your letter and I’m glad to hear that everything is fine there. Things couldn’t be better here, everything is just dandy and in only a few more days, (next Sunday or Monday) I’ll be in that truck with Caesar and heading south. I’ll send you postcards as I go down the highway.

  I’ve only been back to Elsa once since I cleaned up the house (yes, I swept the floor—and, oh yes! Dorothy Chisholm got our house) the camp already looks strange and not at all like the place where we lived so long. I’m living out in the bush here—last night a bear came while Caesar and I were down at the creek. He ate up my sausage and cookies and butter, and was just making off into the bush with my garbage pail under his arm. He dropped it and ran away fast when the brave Caesar went charging after the villain, roaring like Puff, anyway, the bear got away and I had a big mess to clean up.

  We do lots of running around in trucks, and that suits Caesar fine. He was very lonesome and sad the first few days after you left and didn’t eat much. But he is fine now, and loves the bush.

  Well, my dear this is Tuesday—on Friday & Saturday we load the big trucks and then that’s where the Yukon and I shake hands. Tell the children I think of them (many thanks for the Fathers day card!!) and of course I’m missing you and loving you so very much.

  Bye for now, darling—I love you,

  Gerry.

  Chapter 8

  Smeltdown

  A man once aimed that my life be shamed, and wrought me a deathly wrong;I vowed one day I would well repay, but the heft of his hate was strong.

  In Vancouver, we went from needing nothing to needing Christian charity to get by. I felt hidden, almost beneath the earth, invisible in our beige-wallpapered, white-particleboard-ceilinged sub-basement near the graveyard. Suddenly, our homemade one-of-a-kind outfits were billboards of shame. We had a few plastic animals while the other kids had store-bought clothes, strap-on roller skates, bicycles and televisions. Our bicycles were still in Elsa, and belonged to other kids by now. The highlight of the week was Friday afternoons when we were allowed to watch half an hour of Fun-o-Rama—next door.

  Omi’s Mennonite friend Mrs. Krause owned the 1920s wooden clapboard house, and lived upstairs. Back then, even a war widow with a little chutzpah and a low-paying job could buy real estate in Vancouver. Besides being industrious, thrifty and honest, Mennonites knew God had made the earth and He wasn’t making another. And with no Lucifer around to usurp private property, home ownership became the eleventh commandment. Until our sudden arrival, the basement suite had been Omi’s rented home, but while we lived there, waiting for our promises to become reality, she moved in with a nearby friend and continued to work as a cleaning lady. Four days a week, she caught the early morning bus to the homes of various “ladies” who lived far to the west or north, across the Lions Gate Bridge. Her employers adored her and often gave her gifts and excess groceries. On weekends Omi walked over pulling a rectangular upright cart packed with homemade zwieback (two yeast rolls baked on top of each other), cheese, ham, eggs and apples, and sometimes a creamy, crumbly chunk of halva.

  Only our place wasn’t home. It was four neat rooms, smelling of hairspray and fried onions, full of prissy, stiff furniture, crocheted doilies and, on the walls, framed Bible quotations such as “Delight thyself also in the Lord: and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” None of our belongings—our maple beds, the hand-carved wooden moose lamp with the log cabin and forest in the shade, our upright piano, our sapphire blue painting of a glaring tiger in the jungle, our fifteen-volume Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia set, our cherished books and records—were here.

  Caesar was missing too and we ached for his quiet, princely presence. Pierre wasn’t a real dog, although he eventually wormed his way into my heart. Caesar was temporarily with our paternal grandparents in Revelstoke, and would join us once we had our own house. Letters quickly arrived from the grade three, grade four and grade five classes back in Elsa. All three classes shared one room in our old school and their missives indicated how close-knit our community was. “Dear Girls,” read the grade four letter. “We bet you are having more fun than a barrel of monkeys. We suppose Vona has her horse and Alice has lots of animals and you feel like floating sky high.” I didn’t write back.

  We asked Mom when we would have our own house. “Soon,” she said, and then added the chilling phrase: “Don’t worry.” Around this time Mom took up a lifelong habit of nestling her right hand under her left breast, against her heart.

  For the most part, Dad had vanished, appearing sporadically with little mention of where he’d been or was going. When he was home, he sat at the kitchen table slurping coffee spiked with half a can of Pacific evaporated milk and two sugars, circling his fingers with his thumb and blowing smoke castles in the air after each deep draw on his hand-rolled cigarette. Niggling and tickling us, he elicited our squeals and hoots as usual, but his troubled face troubled us. Vona devised a plan to smooth his brow: Smile at him. Be kind to him. Laugh with him when something is funny. Be friends with him and play with him if he wants to.

  He was our father and could do no wrong. To Vona, he was the Pied Piper of her heart. He now called her Pal and they shared a passion for all things outdoorsy and western. If possible, she would have become a boy, but being a tomboy would have to do. By this time, Vona clearly was “Pappy’s girl” and I was “Mammy’s girl.” Jealousy, which had woven its way into the family fabric from my earliest beginnings, was now firmly entrenched. Still, we continued to do many things together quite pleasantly. One family pastime was writing separate nonsense poems about a chosen topic and then reading them out loud. For whatever reason I kept a few. This time the subject was outer space.

  Mom wrote:

  Up so high into the skies,

  Go astronauts today,

  And ride around the world those guys,

  To think! What next they’ll play!

  Vona wrote:

  Beyond the eerie planet Mars,

  We travelled on past distant stars,

  When what appeared but a meteor falling,

  Then a Martian saying, “Avon calling”

  I wrote:

  Space. Where everything is free and black,

  And empty, you quack,

  I�
��ll marry a star

  And we’ll go far, to all the universes;

  We’ll steal the ladies’ purses

  Ah space you go on forever,

  So clever!

  And Dad wrote:

  Oh space, I salute thee!

  And root-a-toot thee.

  While Russkies and Yankees

  Merrily scoot through thee.

  But one bit of you causes me tears,

  And that is the part of you

  Between Vona’s ears!

  More often than not, domestic frivolity was the exception to the rule. Dad was frequently gone. And when we asked Mom or Dad what was happening, their responses were vague or dismissive. One of his favourite retorts was simply “Little pigs have big ears.” Then one day we got a long distance call from Montana of all places. When Mom got off the phone, she said Dad was in America, where ore from his claims would be processed at a giant smelter, and soon he would come home a rich man.

  A few days after Pennsylvania Railroad boxcars #87796 and #23346 slid into the American Smelting and Refining Co. (ASARCO) rail yard in Helena, Montana, the FBI stepped in. So far, the facts were few and straightforward: one, two boxcars containing 671 sacks of silver-rich ore were registered to Alpine Gold and Silver Ltd., a Canadian company; and two, a corporate Canadian silver producer in the distant Yukon Territory, United Keno Hill Mines Ltd., disputed that claim, alleging the ore was stolen from one of their richest mines. UKHM had a long and lucrative relationship with ASARCO. But Alpine Gold and Silver was a newcomer and a nobody.