A descending roar shook the window blind and the lamp at her bedside. Flight 850. One o’clock already? The clock on the table confirmed it.
“Give me a moment, will you?”
Gloria left and started to pull the door behind her, but the thought of being fully enclosed in one room gave Joyce a twinge of panic. “Leave it,” she said. “Push it open.” Through the door she saw Gordon in the kitchen, his eyes averted from her. She appreciated him for it.
She let herself imagine Eric in a wide clearing of the woods, pacing irritably and pausing to sit on a downed tree trunk, not far from where the plane lay twisted and smouldering. Checking his watch and shielding his eyes to scan the horizon. Where was that bloody rescue crew? The light changing as clouds passed over the sun. Black smoke billowing from the wreck, carried away on the breeze.
//////
The loss of the PBY Canso—an amphibious twin-engine 22-seater, thousands produced during the war and later refurbished for civilian use—left the airport faintly embarrassed. The crash did not demand heroic effort. There was no grimly determined rescue team trekking into the wilderness and battling the elements. A daring airlift of survivors was not required. Saintly doctors and nurses did not work round the clock to save lives.
The plane had simply failed to gain altitude, and clipped the treetops about two miles off Runway 32.
The man from DOT would eventually conclude that the pilot had done his best. Maintained control and brought her down flat enough for the belly to carve a long furrow in the bog. A violent landing, yes. Hard enough to break a man’s neck. But maybe not if he was strapped in. The bog was wide and soft, with plenty of room. After the initial shock of impact there might have been a moment when they believed they had a chance. A moment before they saw the boulder. They must have seen it. The aircraft met the boulder with enough force to cave in the nose and send an unmounted compass a good 200 yards through the windscreen.
The wreck cast a broad circle of nylon, leather, plastic and canvas scraps, long shredded strips of rubber tire, life jackets, rescue flares, buttons, buckles, twisted scraps of clothing ripped from suitcases, shoes, cigarette lighters, and keys. One engine disappeared in the nearby pond. A cabin door lodged between dead trees. A thick husk of fuselage, emptied by the impact of the boulder, was angled to catch the sunrise on a clear morning and reflect it for miles.
//////
She told Gordon not to introduce her as Eric’s fiancée.
“What should I call you, then?”
“Don’t call me anything. Call me Joyce.”
Eric’s father and brother had arrived by mid-morning, the day after the crash.
“They went down to the Drill Hall for the identification,” said Gordon. “And they’ve been there ever since. At a bit of a loss, I think.”
The old Drill Hall on Foss Avenue had been commandeered as a makeshift morgue. “They’re using the shooting range downstairs,” Gordon explained. “Cooler down there.” Of the eleven dead, only Eric had lived in Gander. The rest came from around the island, with the exception of an American from Maryland. Men trickled into town throughout the day—fathers, brothers, uncles, in-laws—identifying bodies and waiting until Magistrate Clowe saw fit to release the remains for burial.
Joyce and Gordon pulled up in Eric’s truck, and Gordon said, “There’s the brother.” A man sat on a folding chair with a hand cupped over his eyes, watching as they approached. He shook Gordon’s hand and turned to Joyce. “I’m Teddy.” His forearms were burnt red, with white patches where skin peeled away.
“Joyce Pelley.”
“You knew my brother?”
A rush in her stomach like a long drink of cold water. “We hadn’t known each other quite so long, but…” She took in Teddy’s face. Red like the arms. “I only knew him since last year. I got here last year.”
“Is the skipper about?” asked Gordon.
“Dad!” Teddy turned to call over his shoulder. His neck was dimpled, with a loose pouch of flesh under the ear. An old wound, maybe. Or a surgical scar. “Dad, come over a minute!”
“Oh, there’s no need,” said Joyce. “We don’t have to interrupt.”
“Is that the wreck?” Teddy lifted his face. “The smell, I mean? The burning?”
Burning bodies. Joyce pushed the thought away. “Oh! No, no. That’s just trash. They’re burning trash over at the base.”
“Over behind the curling club,” said Gordon.
“But it’s close by? The place where they went down?”
“Just beyond Runway 32.” Gordon lofted a hand overhead, in the direction of the airport. “They barely got airborne.”
“We all met because of the band,” said Joyce.
“Well now, me and Eric go back a ways before that,” said Gordon.
“Of course,” said Teddy. He looked from one to the other without a spark of recognition. She could see that Eric had never mentioned her.
A white-haired man appeared from the shady side of the building. Small, but with a perfect bowling ball middle. The belly looked firm, protruding like a pregnant woman’s. He wore a dusty dark suit and a plaid shirt buttoned to the neck. He walked with a roll, one side rising and the opposite shoulder pitching, like an unseen hand was yanking at the left side of his trousers with every step.
“Dad, this is Joyce Pelley. She and Eric were close.”
“Well now,” said the old man. He reached for her hand and lifted it. “Well now, my dear.” His eyes were small bluish pools, nearly swallowed in doughy flesh.
“I only…” said Joyce. Her throat closed and tears gathered, sinuses aching with the pressure. “I knew him with the band.” Teddy sank back into his folding chair.
“That’s alright now,” said the old man. “Going up on the Labrador, was he?”
Joyce nodded, biting hard on her bottom lip. “Just for a few weeks. He had a few weeks work up there.” They had argued about it. Joyce thought it unwise for Eric to quit a good job at the airport for six weeks work somewhere else. Eric argued that it was nearly twice the pay, with travel and board included. And couldn’t he always find something when he got back? Wouldn’t there be all kinds of jobs in Gander, or anywhere, once he had eight weeks experience as a rigging foreman?
They hadn’t said much that morning, though he had thanked Joyce several times after she gave him a tin of sweet biscuits for the trip. Nice ones from Browning and Harvey.
The old man released her hand. “His mother had great hopes for him, you know. If only he’d stayed put.”
“Dad, please,” said Teddy, without looking up.
They paused as an EPA mail plane made its groaning ascent over the hangar, banking lazily to begin its northern trek.
“He was never one to stay put,” said Joyce.
“You fellows must be starved with all this waiting around,” said Gordon. “We could get a bite to eat.”
“I was just talking to a fellow.” The old man pulled a white hanky from his pocket and wiped his nose. “A fellow, and he was saying…” Another swipe across the nose. “He was saying about the service they got planned. Did you know, Ted, they’ll have the priest and the Anglican fellow and whoever all up there on the altar together? Each man taking his turn? Who’s your parish priest here, love?”
“Father Kiloran.” Joyce raised a hand to wipe the tears tickling her eyes, but they had already dried in the sun.
“And he doesn’t mind having the Protestant fellows on the altar? What a sight! Won’t that be a sight, Teddy?”
“We won’t be here,” said Teddy, raising his voice.
“What’s that?”
“They say we’ll get hold of him tonight. We can take him home on the overnight train, if there’s room.”
“What about his passage?”
“The fellow at the station says there’s no charge. He sa
ys they load up all the baggage and mail and what have you, and if there’s room we can put him on, and there’s no charge. If there’s no room we got to wait for morning.”
They spoke as if arguing, as if each had lost patience with the other. But they didn’t appear agitated. Teddy tilted back in his chair and squinted into the distance. The old man stood over him, hands on his belly, lips parted and moving slightly as he whispered to himself, repeating what he had just heard.
“I’ve got to make me water,” said the old man.
Gordon took him by the elbow. “We’ll go around to the Elk’s Club. You been in Buchans many a year, I suppose.”
“Since twenty-six, when they collared the Lucky Strike.”
“Twenty-six!” said Gordon. “You must have been there for the first bucket of ore.” They disappeared around the building. Teddy looked up from his chair and said, “You can stay at the house with my missus. I’ll stay at Dad’s.”
“The house?”
“In Buchans, for the funeral.”
“Oh,” said Joyce. “But I have to work.”
“The house will be quiet, you know.” She said nothing, and he added, “We’ve no youngsters, me and her, and the wake’ll be down at Dad’s.”
Joyce found a tissue in her purse and lifted her feet one at a time to wipe her shoes. The hot wind had left a fine layer of dust. “I just don’t know. Of course, you’re his family, so…”
“It’s alright, love,” he said finally. “Never mind.”
“I just don’t know what I would be…”
“It’s fine. Never mind.”
They both lit cigarettes, Joyce flicking her lighter rather than bending to share the flame from his match. She was relieved not to be pregnant, but that didn’t fully account for the liberation she felt.
“I wonder will they take the sacrament?” said Eric’s father when he returned.
“Who’s that, Dad?”
“The crowd when they come to the service. What’s to stop any of them taking the Holy Communion, putting their tongue out for the host, as bold as you please?”
//////
Joyce’s bed was littered with cards. Chaulk’s, Eaton’s, the Co-op, DOT, the weather office, Oceanic Control, the Skyways Club, the Naval Station, Shell Co., TWA, Royal Dutch, Trans Ocean, Pan-Am, Gert and the girls at the ticket counter. A bottle of whiskey from the boys at the Bristol Building. A note from the wire chief at CN, who had briefly courted Joyce a few months ago.
“I don’t know who I am, or what I am in all this,” she said. “I just insulted his brother, anyway.”
Footsteps sounded in the hallway, and she sighed with relief as they continued past their door and on to the stairwell.
“Go somewhere,” said Rachel, lying on her bed with a paperback.
“Go? Where would I go?”
“Anywhere.”
“Cripes, Rach. I can’t just disappear.”
“Why not? Every day you put people on those airplanes.”
Joyce waved this away and they fell silent. Rachel read. Joyce rubbed her eyes and temples and neck. The next set of footsteps stopped to knock. “Joyce?” It sounded like her lips were right at the crack of the door.
“It’s open.”
Katie let herself in, leaning against the door as she closed it. “I’m sorry. Is it alright I came?”
“Everything still grounded?” asked Rachel, taking the measure of Katie in full stewardess guise, hat, eyebrows, and all.
“Everything, till after supper at least. I’m sorry, we haven’t… Katie Hogan.”
Rachel offered her name without rising from her pillow.
“Is it alright I came, Joyce?”
“Of course.” Joyce had no idea what was appropriate.
“Joyce should get out of here,” said Rachel. “I told her to go away somewhere.”
“Oh!” Katie looked to Joyce. “I can get you out, you know. As soon as we’re flying again. Do you want to go to Montreal for a bit? You can have my apartment.”
Joyce recalled rising from the toilet and turning to see the clockwise swirl of reddened water, a darkened fold of toilet tissue at its centre. She saw it as though looking down from a great height. By then everything had been sealed. They were already down, no survivors.
“I can’t go,” she said. “Not now.”
“Of course you can,” said Rachel.
“We went off the same runway three years ago,” said Katie. “It was nothing. Only we skidded off into a snow bank, and everyone was fine, only I had headaches for a bit, and sometimes still. But, I’ll stop now.” She was still pressed up to the door, hands behind her back. Like they kept her in the room against her will. “Everyone’s afraid, only they won’t admit it. I can’t be around them tonight.”
Joyce shared a tin of wieners with Rachel for dinner, got cleaned up and went to the drill hall, where Maeve Vardy was to lead the rosary. The shooting range in the basement was long and cool and dim, with plain coffins laid side-by-side along the far wall.
They began with the Agony in the Garden, and carried on with a mix of the sorrowful and glorious mysteries. Joyce picked through her beads and swayed gently on her knees, stumbling over the Hail Holy Queen, as always. She muttered what phrases she could recall—“…send up our sighs…this our exile…”—and emerged slowly back into the room. There was quite a crowd, three dozen or more.
“I understand, Joyce,” said Maeve, pulling her aside. “I went through it all in the war, when Toby’s ship was lost. It’s a sisterhood, really. So many of us.” She produced a sheaf of paper from a folder. It was thick, cream-coloured paper scripted with fancy black letters. To everything there is a season…began the first page. “Will you do a reading for the general service, Joyce?”
“I don’t know,” said Joyce. “Isn’t it every church? You want readings from the different bibles? Whatever they use?”
“I got the sister-in-law of the pilot. They’re Baptist. Is it Baptist? Anyway, Father Kiloran agreed to it, whatever bible they use.”
“I might be in Buchans,” said Joyce.
“Oh, well then.”
Gloria came to Joyce’s side and clutched her hand. “The children are doing the offertory,” she said. “Father Kiloran can’t be letting old Reverend Wiseman have his way all the time.”
“Each crowd gets their prayers and blessings,” said Maeve.
“You don’t have to do a reading, Joyce.”
“That’s up to Joyce,” said Maeve, turning a shoulder to block Gloria out.
//////
Joyce waited until the hallway was silent, then crept from her room to the telephone. She called Den. As good a confessor as any.
“Should I go to Buchans?”
“It’d look awful queer if you don’t,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you?”
“I’d have to go as his fiancée.”
“Yes.”
“It’s wrong.”
“Ah.”
“Not wrong. But it doesn’t feel honest.”
“Ah. How bad would it be, to be there?”
“Easier than here, I’d say.”
“People go to funerals with all kinds of feelings. Nobody’s completely honest about it. Don’t mind that.”
“I already said too much, to one of them at least.”
“You won’t be held to it. You’re in shock, like everyone. Will you be alright, Joyce? Want me to come with you, as your brother, or uncle?”
She considered this, declined, and thanked him. Called the Eastbound Inn, had Finley on the night desk track down Teddy.
“I’ll come with you,” she said.
He sighed. “We’re leaving first thing.”
Morning dawned pink. The skipper dozed as soon as the train pulled out.
“We’ll introduce you as
the fiancée,” said Teddy. “Will you agree to that?”
Joyce nodded, tugging at her hem.
“Then we’ll talk no more about it,” said Teddy.
//////
For two days the crowd pressed into the old man’s house, bringing in the smell of the town. A grinding, smouldering odour. The smell of friction. The brother Joyce had met before, the one working for the sawmill women in Appleton, spent most of the first day outside, pulling rotten planks off one corner of the house. The others implored him to come in, not to ruin his good clothes. “Look at this,” he replied, holding up a plank and pulling it apart. “Rotten. Look.” There was a brother who worked the Lucky Strike Mine, a brother with one eye who had helped cut the drift to the Oriental Mine, and a brother who said the Maclean would be the deepest pit of them all, just you wait. There was a brother who had won two Herders playing defence for the Miners, and a brother who had burned the theatre down by letting the film overheat in the projection room. The women mostly spoke on the run, in and out of the kitchen. They were all older than Joyce, except a cousin near her age whose husband never showed, and a novice with the Presentation Sisters who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. There were little boys who stuck pencils in each other’s ears and were sent outside whenever someone noticed that they had come back in. There was an ancient man who had towed the very first ore sample across Red Indian Lake so it could be shipped overseas for testing.
“Do you meet the movie stars in Gander?” asked the brother who had burned down the theatre. He had a florid face, as if he had been permanently scorched by the blaze. “Did you meet the ones who came to do a picture with Jimmy Stewart. Did you know about that?”
“No,” said Joyce.
“Jimmy Stewart wasn’t in Gander,” said Teddy.
“And that’s what he was,” said the brother who burned down the theatre. “They made a picture. And when they were done they had a big dinner laid out for the whole crowd of them. Sixty pound of lobster, that’s what they ordered. I have it on good authority.”
The girls always talked about stars spotted at the airport. Monty Clift last week. Ida Lupino, coming in soaking wet on a Sunday morning. Bob Hope on the radio while his flight refuelled. In his cups, said Den. Joyce didn’t pay it much mind. But she knew the heightened buzz that ran through the airport when someone special was sighted. She had been shocked to look up one day and see Bobby Darin striding by right in front of her. Hands in his pockets and a nice blue checked jacket. Disappearing into the men’s room.
The End of Music Page 18