Murder of an Uncommon Man

By A.M. Kirsch

An unexpected call from Riverton, Manitoba in 2007 forced Janet Berg to confront the life and death of her father, Daniel. He was found shot dead in a field with a shotgun and the forty-year-old scientist needed to explain why. From her home in Seattle, half a continent away, she sifted through musty boxes and her own memories to piece together wha

• Language: English
• Publisher: A.M. Kirsch
• Release date: Dec 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781999189655

Book preview

DEDICATION

To Sarah and Dad—There would be no story without you. Sarah, you supported me over the kilometres and decades we travelled together. Your smiles resurrected me from the darkest places and encouraged me to find myself despite the pain it caused you. Dad, you were both the most simple and complex person I ever knew, and I knew you best only after you were gone. You left us too soon after seven decades.

MAP

PROLOGUE

For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away (Matthew 24:38-39).

When I was twelve, and our family camping at Clearwater Lake in Western Manitoba, we gathered around the picnic table one crisp evening to light the gas lantern. We could hear the mosquitoes swirling around our heads but it was too dim to see them, and there were still dishes to wash and cards to play before bed. The smell of kerosene filled the air as Dad pumped the lantern thirty times and twisted the valve to start it flowing through the tubes and mantles. We heard a pop as he pushed the struck match through the hole in the glass and the orange flames began to pulse to the rhythmic hiss of the gas. Instead of shrinking and brightening to white, the flames rose, turned red and escaped the vents atop the lantern. We stepped backward as the conflagration expanded, threatening to ignite the picnic table below and the tarp above. Fear held my imagination and I saw us engulfed in flames as the kerosene canister exploded.

Frozen in place, I looked to my family in the new light between us and first noticed Dad. In daylight he stood six feet tall with thick black hair, lively blue eyes, and a constant smile on his face, but tonight in the orange glow he was cowering and shrunken. His biblical knowledge and military training failed him for this surprise attack and he was paralyzed by fear. Mom stood to his right with the flames reflecting in her dark brown eyes, her arms clutching her chest. Her expression revealed an admiration for the flame and its drama. She would watch everything burn. My brother Paul, three years younger and about a foot shorter than me, stood at attention with his arms stiff at his sides, his blue eyes wider than I had ever seen them.

Outside my body and floating a few feet above us, I watched myself, long brown hair flowing behind me, scramble to the tent and pull a hand-woven carpet from underneath Pepper, the sleeping, blue merle Sheltie. Pepper rolled in the air a few feet and landed on the musty sleeping bag behind him. Running around the frozen figures and fire to the lake below our campsite, I soaked the mat and returned with it dripping on my jeans and shoes. I held my breath as I wrapped the lantern. Darkness fell in an instant to the hissing of the thick carpet on hot metal and glass.

No one else reacted until the orange glow went black and they awoke from the flame-induced trance. They had all been hypnotized by the fire and the darkness hit them like a finger snap. I discovered I had a hidden talent for solving problems that evening and I hoped that some day I would use it again.

* * *

My father, Daniel Berg, was born in April 1936 and grew up in the small town of Yorkton, Saskatchewan with stern, God-fearing parents. He had two sisters, Jane and Ruby, two and ten years younger, who both looked up to him as a bright and sensitive role model. Their mother, Norah, was an elementary school teacher with curly brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses from a family who could trace their lineage back to royalty in England. Norah supplemented the household income by giving piano lessons out of their living room. Their father, Andrew, my grandfather, was the son of Norwegian immigrants, and a lanky, bespectacled man with wiry hair who ran the only photography studio in town. Below the studio, grandpa kept a tidy gift shop where he sold picture frames and greeting cards.

Andrew supplemented their income raising mink, and Dad was given the curse of feeding them before school and cleaning their cages on weekends. He told of nasty, foul-smelling creatures drawing blood with curved rows of tiny, sharp teeth. None of Dad’s childhood memories were pleasant. He hated the deafening clanging of Norah’s piano lessons, the invasion of other children into the living room, and told me once how Andrew beat him for spilling ink on the living room carpet. His childhood stories were parables to make me appreciate my childhood and for him to work through his own traumas.

To escape his family and unspoken demons, he read the Bible, and learned to fly single-engine Piper airplanes when he was sixteen. At eighteen he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. He could never hope to be a fighter pilot with his thick Buddy Holly glasses but bargained that the RCAF would at least let him fly cargo planes. Sister Ruby described her family’s pride and excitement at seeing him land an RCAF jet at a local airfield one weekend in 1958.

Dad recalled that he wanted to join the RCAF so badly that he schemed to pass the recruiting physical by hiding his flat feet. For months he walked back and forth barefoot across the cold kitchen floor until the slap of his forefoot was quieted. The barefoot walk with other recruits went off without a hitch as his temporarily arched feet avoided notice in the parade. Four years later he tried to re-enlist but the physical was solo and the doctor asked for long strides, breaking the magic of his trick.

He was directionless after the RCAF and left Saskatchewan to look for a new career. My mother, Anne Brandon, said he was selling private health insurance in Calgary, Alberta when they met. It was love at first sight for him, and at sixteen it was Mom’s first serious relationship. Over a pot of tea in her kitchen she showed me a few photos they took of each other when they were dating. Her snapshot of Daniel showed off his jet-black hair, twenty-two-year-old muscular physique and easy smile. He was looking directly at her, and it was the only photo I had seen of him without his glasses. As hard as it is to admit as his daughter, he looked handsome.

Mom was similar star material in the pictures he took of her, with the distant look of Greta Garbo. In the first, she sat in the dappled shade of a tree and looked over her right shoulder at the stream passing through the park. In the second, she was tying up her long brown hair at a beach, wearing a black, one-piece bathing suit with white buttons running down the front. She was smiling as if watching a child play in the sand a few yards ahead. I could see from the care that Dad took in composing the photos he was smitten with her. In his eyes she was the most beautiful woman in the world, but to me, her indirect gaze betrayed her ambivalence towards him.

After a few dates she broke it off, citing his emotional immaturity and realizing she just didn’t love him. Against her mother’s advice, she found a job in Edmonton after high school and tried to make it on her own. All of the interesting men at her office were already married and she soon found herself miserable and unprepared to manage her personal finances. She tearfully asked her mother what to do, and heard, You won’t do any better than Daniel in Alberta. Get married. They were wed three months later in May 1961.

In their early years together, Dad was still trying to find a purpose—a career his parents would be proud of. Never one to trust psychologists or career counselors, he counselled with the United minister in Calgary who had married them and was told that seminary was the best direction for him. Ministry fit with his deeply-held belief in God and a pull from his soul to help those more troubled and less fortunate than he. Mom quickly put a stop to it.

I didn’t want to be a pastor’s wife, and I knew they didn’t make enough money or stay in one place long enough to be comfortable, she said.

Instead, they both enrolled in the University of Alberta’s teaching college, where Mom excelled and found herself blooming intellectually. Dad went the opposite direction, became restless, and dropped out after two years. He didn’t think a university degree would bring them a better life fast enough and Mom, afraid of being on her own again, gave up on her dreams and followed him. His plan was to sell copying machines and work his way through flight school to become a flight instructor. A three-month course in Vancouver, British Columbia on aviation electronics gave him prospects for steadier airport jobs in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where I was born in 1966, and eventually led to union work with the phone company in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Paul was born in 1969.

In 1970 they bought their first house in Stony Mountain, a sleepy farming and part-time bedroom community twenty-six kilometres outside Winnipeg and Dad settled into a routine of work, church, flying, family, and Toastmasters. He returned from his Wednesday Toastmasters meetings with his polyester suits smelling of cigarettes and his eyes lit with energy. Inspirational speeches, free coffee, and leadership seminars pumped him up and filled him with dreams of better things to come. On weekends, he tutored flying students in his wallpapered, six-by-ten-foot den, and taught them how to fly at a local airport with a plane to rent. I caught glimpses of his eyes sparkling then too.

After I left home in 1984 for university and my brother in 1987 for the Army, the empty house and rural isolation of Stony Mountain ate at Mom. Stony Mountain, population 919, was a suburb of a suburb of Winnipeg that remained mostly farmland. There were only a few streets off the highway lined with single-storey, ranch-style homes, all built in the same span of a few years by the same developer. We had watchful neighbours, quiet streets to ride our bikes, and our own elementary school just blocks from our house. Dad had been commuting for twenty-three years to Bell Telephone in Winnipeg and learned to tolerate the drive, carpooling with Allan Field from church in an overheated Volkswagen Rabbit. Mom missed the amenities of a city and longed to walk tree-lined sidewalks and mix with educated neighbours.

In June 1993, they found Mom’s dream home next to the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. It was a two-story Foursquare built in 1920 on a corner lot, surrounded by