A Rock Fell on the Moon

by Alicia Priest

  Despite the trouble Dad was in, Rick said, “He was not a bitter man. He was in good spirits.”

  Not so when the two returned to Vancouver, where Dad’s spirits plummeted. Surrounded by his family, he grew quiet, almost morose. Anchored at the kitchen table, he’d oil his guns, time and time again, peeved about the lack of work in a city he detested, and anxious about the outcome of his long-postponed appeal. We crept around his dark moods and joyfully joined his less frequent sunny ones. One evening when Rick was over and Vona was out, we tackled another round of off-the-cuff poetry. The topic was “your country.”

  Her Russian blood astir, Mom wrote:

  Stand up for your country

  You miserable wretch!

  March forward and hold your head high.

  You slumbered enough doing nothing at all.

  Now go! And don’t mind if you die!

  Patriotic young Rick wrote:

  What does my country mean to me?

  It means much more than a dogwood tree.

  It means much more than a maple leaf,

  Or selling stocks of surplus beef.

  It means a land of liberty,

  A land of free fraternity,

  This is what it means to me.

  I, forever courting Dad’s favour, wrote:

  The flag up there—it stinks

  You dirty rotten finks

  You give the rich more land,

  The poor with empty hands.

  You ruin our lakes

  And poison our pancakes.

  You push us from our house

  And give it to the mouse.

  You louse!

  And Dad wrote:

  Oh Canada, you wondrous land!

  You take me by my little hand,

  And throw me in a prison cell.

  I say now, isn’t that just swell?

  Here’s to beautiful Canada,

  Fertile, free and rich.

  Take back your jail—get me out on bail,

  You miserable son of a b_ _ _ _ .

  As the day of his last stab at a legal victory approached, Dad ran his fingers through his increasingly retreating hair, blew more smoke circles in the air and spent more evenings striding city streets with Caesar in tow.

  Then, finally, for three days in May 1966, three years after the whole shemozzle began, Dad made his final court appearance. At the time, the court consisted of justices from the BC Court of Appeal and the case, like almost all others, was held in Vancouver. Hogan and Wylie both made lengthy submissions to the three appeal court justices but no records of their submissions survive. The press attended, and once again Mr. Priest was in the news. A Vancouver Sun story headlined “Yukon Friends Aid Appeal” stated, “The Yukon came to the B.C. Court of Appeal Tuesday when friends financed the appeal of a Vancouver man against conviction and a prison sentence in connection with a $140,000 lode of silver. Gerald Henry Priest, 38, of 6136 Main, was convicted in March of last year and sentenced to four years for conspiracy to sell a substance containing silver.”

  Whether in the Yukon or in British Columbia, however, the scales of justice were not tipped in Dad’s direction. A tiny clipping of yellowed newsprint, its two columns running a couple of inches, sports the headline “Assayer Loses Appeal against 4-Year Term.” Overlapping the headline in blue ink is Mom’s handwritten May 19/66. She retained a lifelong habit of dating documents. That same day, in her coil notebook, she scribbled, “All hopes are lost!! Hogan phoned… I knew right away Gerry was not coming home for a long time—what a sad, empty feeling.”

  With his conviction now immutable, Dad would bounce back to Oakalla for nearly three months, then move to the BC Penitentiary for more months. He was a model prisoner, spending his time eating, sleeping, reading and playing chess.

  With Dad’s renewed absence, our home life got both better and worse. A lightness returned to the house, and daily existence resumed its calm, spontaneous and yet predictable nature. I was finishing grade seven and my grades grew stronger. I had made a few friends, girls I chummed with at school or walked to Oakridge Mall with on a Friday evening, but never would confide in or dare invite home. I’d joined the choir and the tumbling team and I nervously anticipated a fresh start at John Oliver Secondary School in the fall. “Jayo,” as it was and is still called, was a massive multi-building institution at Forty-first and Fraser Street with an enrollment of almost 1,200 students—twice as many people as Elsa and Calumet combined. High school threatened to swallow me whole. But I had a sister there, and I had a passion for choral singing, which was a plus because under the directorship of Teo Repel, a renowned choral conductor of Polish descent, I had an opportunity to sing in a choir that was consistently among the best in the province, and that included many Mennonites. (Mennonites have a strong choral tradition that in Canada includes famed tenor Ben Heppner and soprano Edith Wiens.)

  In September I enrolled in grade eight and Vona in grade nine. One day while changing classes, I spied my sister with her group of friends. “Hi Vona,” I called out, waving with pride to be in high school just like her. Like any older sister that age, she rolled her eyes, turned her back and walked on without any response, obviously embarrassed to be singled out by her younger sibling. As normal a teenage reaction as that may have been, I was hurt, and it was a sign of a bigger problem. Vona was drifting away from us and spending more time out of the house than in. Between Mom and Dad, there was talk of Vona “running with the wrong crowd” and a proposal to take her out of Jayo and send her to the educational equivalent of prison as far as an adolescent girl was concerned: the Mennonite Educational Institute in Abbotsford. But that would mean boarding her away from the family and Mom vetoed the idea.

  With prospects of triumph and retaliation gone, Dad’s letters became harder to take. A humiliated man with an increasingly sarcastic sense of humour, Dad struggled to maintain a modicum of pride. When cousin Rick, the boy Dad had taken into the bush, wrote him a letter, he took offence: “Who twisted his arm? Tell him I’ll stand up on my hind legs and wave to him too, when he walks by my cage. Come to think of it, I’m short of peanuts these days.” And when Mom wrote that we both now had our periods and were maturing quickly, causing her to wonder if some basic sex education might be appropriate, he responded: “Well, there’s nothing I can do about the girls from here—Go to the museum and get some medieval chastity belts for our daughters until I get home with my shot gun!” (Sex was a four-letter word in our home. The closest Mom came to “education” was leaving a thin paperback on the kitchen counter titled What To Tell Your Children About Sex. I didn’t touch it.)

  When Mom asked Dad one day if our neighbour Art could borrow his tent and cook stove, Dad acquiesced but added: “Ye Gods! I just thought—Dad has my car, Art’s got my gear, U.K.H.M. has my ore, the jail has me—all I have to hear now is who has my wife!”

  On that score, Dad had nothing to worry about. Mom had neither the energy nor the inclination for an affair despite several suitors, both married and not, knocking on our door. Every letter from her husband, however, reminded Mom that she was the only girl for him and that when they were reunited happiness would reign. One line captured his sentiments perfectly: “You’ll never find anyone who loves you as much as me.”

  Unable to do anything except fantasize about future schemes and apply for early parole, Dad kept Mom scrambling. His demands included contacting the John Howard Society to see if they could help him find work once he was out, asking for a claims map of Keno and a map of the Queen Charlotte Islands (where he heard valuable opals were waiting to be discovered), repeated requests to phone Hogan, and requests that Mom attend to his mother when she came to Vancouver for medical tests.

  Mom’s biggest worry was what job Dad would get after prison and where we would live. If the only work Dad could find was in some remote locale south or north, sh
e would have to, reluctantly, follow. In jail, his re-education proposals included everything from a course in geology to classes in gemology, to studies in refrigeration and air conditioning—none of which he seriously pursued as his time for release drew nearer.

  Once again, Mom may have greased the wheels of the freedom chariot. In mid-October, a Mr. Sheppard from the National Parole Board visited her. And according to Mom’s notebook, “We had a long chat.” A week later, Dad was transferred to the minimum-security prison in Agassiz, where we visited him one memorable day—Saturday, October 22, 1966.

  We packed a special lunch with his favourite foods, such as cold chicken, potato salad and pickles. Mom still couldn’t drive so Grandpa drove us out in his true red 1963 Ford Comet with a “three in the tree” gearshift. We motored through a valley so green and wet it courted neon. I recall the day so sharply because it was the first time we’d seen Dad in more than six months. I sat back balancing a cocoa-cream-filled chocolate cake on my lap as a fine mist soaked the world—we passed flooded fields, cows shivering under trees and a few shuttered houses rimmed by rusting hulks of trashed metal. This was the same broad valley Mom and Omi emigrated to from Russia via postwar Germany some seventeen years earlier.

  We arrived at a high, wire-fenced, flat-roofed concrete building and were ushered into a large, overheated room with benches and plywood tables crowded with other prisoners and their visitors. Omi and Grandpa stayed in the car. There was Dad. His face surrendered into Mom’s shoulder for what seemed like forever and then he pulled back and hurriedly hugged and kissed us. But before we unpacked the feast, he recovered and began joking, ridiculing boyfriends we didn’t have, daring us to get straight As, reciting “The Cremation of Sam McGee” or stanza after stanza of “The Highwayman”: “The moon was a ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas.” He was so clever, so witty—no matter what, we adored him.

  After the meal, which he picked at, he rolled a cigarette and then brought out a surprise: three pieces of jewelry he had created in the prison workshop. My sister got a bracelet with glinting blue and green gems. I received a sparkly guitar-shaped brooch. Mom’s gift was the prettiest: a multi-spiked chrysanthemum ornament festooned with amber stones. We were agog. Not only was Dad a superior craftsman but he had access to jewels—in jail. The only explanation that made any sense was that he received special treatment because people at the top knew he was innocent.

  Three weeks later, Mom heard from Mr. Sheppard that Dad had been granted parole.” Is this really the end of a long, long nightmare?” she jotted in her notebook. Five days later, Dad was free, retrieved in Abbotsford by Omi and Grandpa and delivered to his ecstatic family. Mom wrote, “What a relief—home to stay at last!”

  Not everyone, however, greeted the news with jubilation. When Justice Parker heard that Gerald Priest was released on parole on November 15, 1966, he was incensed. In a letter to the National Parole Board, he noted that in his eight years as a judge he had never before complained about a decision to grant early release. “Your actions make the Court proceedings something of a joke,” Parker wrote. “It may, of course, be that Priest is dying of some incurable disease and that is the reason you are releasing him. If this is the case, then I think I should have been told.”

  He continued: “What have you done about Bobcik? He was Priest’s partner in the several crimes but was a much finer personality than Priest. Bobcik was a rather likeable fellow, while Priest was a most objectionable person. If you have not already released Bobcik, you should do so immediately because it would be a gross injustice to retain him after releasing the other man. The most agreeable thought which I can summon in connection with the matter is that it is most unlikely that Priest will return to the Yukon.”

  National Parole Board executive director F.P. Miller responded to Parker. Miller explained that Bobcik “was simply not interested in parole… Some first offenders are so independent that they prefer to serve out the sentence in the prison rather than to have any restraints or restrictions placed on them after their release.”

  Miller’s next bit of news would make Parker’s blood boil. Unbeknownst to the board, Dad had not even served the legal minimum time in jail, which was one third of his four-year sentence—sixteen months. Because of Dad’s five months out on bail, he’d only served fifteen. How could this miscarriage of justice have transpired? For whatever reasons, one or more of the penitentiaries failed to inform the board of Dad’s hiatus from prison, and so they released him under the false understanding that he’d done his due time.

  Nonetheless, Miller felt comfortable in the decision, and taking a tip from Parker sketched his own psychological portrait of Dad. “This is the rigid type personality who feels he has been hard done-by, carries on for many years as the hard-working employee but concocts some elaborate scheme to get some of his employer’s funds,” Miller wrote. “We find that these people usually are so rigid that they cannot destroy their own self-image by even admitting guilt. However, their control again takes over and we find that they are unlikely to commit another offence of this nature or any other nature.”

  And so it was that a strange bird flew the coop early, much to the chagrin of the man who’d slammed the door and turned the key.

  Chapter 19

  Free Fall

  And I know at the dawn she’ll come reeling home With the bottles, one, two, three;One for herself to drown her shame, and two big Bottles for me,To make me forget the thing I am and the man I used to be.

  One nightmare ends and another begins. Liberated at last, and home with his wife, daughters and dogs, Dad is different. Thin and pasty. His eyes are enormous, deep and piercing. When he furrows his brow and fixes his gaze, his face looks as intense and incontestable as a hawk’s. Who is this man I love like no other? Who can roll a smoke while driving a car, sing all sixteen verses of “Strawberry Roan” by heart, who smells soothingly of tobacco, coffee and car grease, and whose long, strong arms still cradle me to bed. Who can play with a story, the truth and a lie so skillfully, it’s anyone’s guess what is where. Dad is as much a part of me as my arms and legs. Not home a month, however, he is itching to be elsewhere. I’ve never seen him squirm so, as if after existing in a cage, he can’t cope with freedom.

  One moment he proclaims his devotion to us and blusters about his determination to now, finally, restore our happy home. “No, I don’t want to chase around the bush anymore,” he says. “I plan on a job that keeps me with my family, even if that means not in Vancouver. It’s a good thing we all agree to get away from this wicked coast country as soon as possible.” Mom and I swap downward glances. The next moment, he turns as nasty as a fox in a leghold trap. When I tell him Vancouver is not so bad and that I am actually beginning to enjoy school, especially singing in the choir, he says, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of that group—The Disgustables, right?”

  When Vona asks if she can go to a Friday night school dance, he says, “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I said so.”

  His tyrannical responses used to be greeted with rolled eyes and bitten lips. Not anymore. At least as far as Vona is concerned. Sometime, during Dad’s incarceration, she picked up the notion that a family is a democracy.

  “Come on Pappy! Why not? The dance is supervised by teachers and all my friends are going and I’ll be home by ten. I promise.”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  Vona is mum.

  “Answer me or I’ll clean the wax out of your ears!”

  “You said No,” Vona mumbles.

  “Damn right I did—your days of fraternizing with a bunch of callow, blind, opinionated and hormone-crazed hoodlums are over!”

  Steamed, Vona stomps out of the house equally determined to never let Dad see her cry and to somehow attend the dance. That will entail either saying she’s at a girlfriend’s house or sneaking out our bedroom window. Both tactics hav
e been used successfully before.

  Mom brightly suggests we celebrate Christmas with Omi and Grandpa and the Nelsons, who have done so much for all of us.

  “I don’t see why I have to put up with their Jesus chatter,” Dad says. “Anyway, I’ve decided we’re spending Christmas with my folks this year.”

  And so we journey to Williams Lake, where another dismal festive season awaits. Vona and I find comfort in the crystal cold sky and diamond whiteness, but Mom is unusually quiet and excuses herself after the dishes are done. That evening I overhear Dad and Granddad chatting.

  “How’s Helen? She seems rather poorly,” Granddad says.

  “Well, no doubt having a husband back is a bit of a shock,” Dad replies. “She’ll adjust. Or not. But if Shakespeare tamed the shrew, no reason the Priests can’t do likewise. Eh?”

  Two days after we return home, Mom is admitted to Vancouver General Hospital for a week. She undergoes numerous tests including a heart catheterization and a barium swallow. Dad visits her every day and brings her roses and halva. When she is discharged, she weighs 100 pounds, down 15 from her normal weight.

  As 1967 unfolds, Dad’s moods rule the roost. He can be affectionate, broody, taunting or teasing; his temper is spookily unpredictable. Petty things like how we spend our babysitting money on pop records make him furious. The Beatles are a bunch of squirming cockroaches. Stevie Wonder, a yowling jungle bunny. And The Beach Boys sound like a bunch of strangled cats. Why is Dad so contrary? Is it lack of work? He’s always professed that idleness causes a black streak within him to bubble to the surface. Searching downtown for a job most days, he returns with unsavoury prospects that he throws out just to trigger our dismay. One day there is talk of an assaying position in Yellowknife, NWT, the next day one in Edmonton, another in Hermosillo, Mexico, which Dad says he’d jump at if skipping the country didn’t violate his parole.