Evidentia

They say dead men tell no tales. So when I learned recently that Stan Pyrc, the Goose Bay barber, was murdered on June 24th 1988, I looked up the court record of his assailant’s appeal to the Newfoundland Supreme Court, to find out how it all happened.

Darrell Francis Ivany was 18 years old at the time. He went off drinking a dozen beers 33 kilometres away in North West River, and when he returned to the trailer home he shared with 67-year-old Stan, he found the old man’s “chatter” intensely irritating.

“… I got up and I took the knife,” Ivany told police the following day, in a videotaped re-enactment that was entered into the court record. “It was the knife that I used to make the sandwich and that a came over here and he kept at it and I told him to shut up or whatever and I said he was gettin’ on me nerves and so he shut up for a second and a then a so I was sat down there having smokin’ a cigarette and he said something else, I don’t know what it was and I just jumped up and just kind of stabbed him when he was sittin’ right there.”

The court record notes laconically “the knife was thrust into the deceased’s back and caused his death.”

When I was 26, a coastal voyage in North Labrador, on the old steamer Hopedale, came as a shocking experience

I don’t know what Stan was up to in 1988, but I certainly remember encountering him in September 1982, on the 952-mile coastal run from Goose up to Nain and back, on the old 1106-ton CN Marine vessel Hopedale. He was a nasty piece of work – no doubt about it.

As a budding writer, I thought a Labrador cruise would make for interesting stories, and so I brought a diary along, and began filling it. Two RCMP constables had taken a cabin, at CN Marine’s request, in order to keep an eye on the regular binge-drinking and violence on the ship. I was sharing a cabin with Bill Saunders, who worked at the Goose Air Base and told me his employer sent him on an all-expenses-paid trip along the coast once a year. He had eighteen children, and was good company.

Stan occupied the cabin next door. I met him, as we lay at anchorage off Makkovik. We switched back and forth between English and Polish, a language I had picked up.

Short, fat and balding, his flesh was strangely white, bloated and sweaty. He punctuated every sentence with swearing. He struck me as totally washed-out and not to be trusted. Actually, I was about to learn I had a ringside seat at the mega-disaster Stan was organizing on board the Hopedale.

“I always make a profit on these coastal trips,” he said, cryptically, offering me a Scotch from a huge stash of alcohol he kept in his cabin. “I go up to Nain about five times a year.”

He told me about his life in Nowy Sącz, a little town in the mountains of southern Poland; the women he had loved; how much he missed Longueuil, a Montreal suburb where he had lived after the war. With a sneer in his voice, he told me he was now “the f***ing barber in Goose Bay, I have the monopoly of the base, cutting the hair of 300 US servicemen each time, at 60 cents a shot.”

An Inuk appeared in the doorway, trying to sell labradorite. “Znam go (I know him). Jest cały czas piany (He’s always drunk). You f*** off, you f***ing bastard.”

When we eventually sailed from Makkovik, a pod of Minke whales kept us company for awhile. Further out to sea, bluish-grey icebergs in many shapes drifted southwards. At Hopedale, the passengers stayed on deck in the crisp evening air, admiring a spectacular display of Northern Lights. “Where are you from?” I asked a young Inuk boy standing at the ship’s rail. “Jupiter,” he giggled. “Well I am from the Moon, and will be heading back there shortly.”

It was in Hopedale that I learned from the Moravian pastor, the Reverend John Case, how difficult it was for aboriginal people on the coast to buy alcohol, or even the yeast they needed to make their own home brew. Everything was supposed to be subject to rigorous controls.

Stan was throwing ever wilder parties. These drunken gatherings occasionally spilled out into the corridor. Stan drank regularly with a clerk from Goose named Larry, but once they got going, they began shouting at each other.

“You shit! You son of a bitch!” shouted Stan. “F*** off you bastard.”

When my cabin mate, Bill Saunders, tried to restore peace, Stan swore at him as well. Bill told me Stan was a complete good-for-nothing. The two men obviously knew each other and bore a mutual hatred.

The Hopedale called in northern aboriginal villages. The bootlegger on board seemed to operate with impunity.

There was a steady procession of young Inuit women in front of Stan’s cabin. I remember an Inuk girl from Nain, wearing a plastic necklace of fake diamonds, who flashed a movie-star smile a few times. She seemed to hallucinate sometimes, and for no apparent reason would stare into space crying “No no no!” She had some sort of a relationship with one of the ship’s cooks, named Gene, and she would sob about their love.

At Davis Inlet, three young Innu, or as people used to say then, Naskapis, got on board: a boy, his sister and their cousin. They were making the short trip up to Nain and back. They were shy and felt completely alone in a sea of Inuit passengers. The boy taught me a few words in Innu-aimun, such as atik (caribou), musk (bear), menike (wolf), uapush (rabbit) and tanétin (how are you). He seemed surprised a white person like me could show any interest in his language.

Once we tied up at the dock at Nain, it finally donned on me how Stan made a profit on each trip. He stood in his cabin, stripped to the waste, sweating profusely, as a dozen hunters huddled around him, laughing boisterously and drinking. Stan looked more like the last white lord of the colonies. He dominated the situation and no longer seemed like a half-rate drunken barber condemned to work in a little town he hated.

All the Inuit children of Nain were eating sheets of pink cotton candy, and running around the dock. Some daring boys of about ten years of age were climbing stacks of cardboard boxes on the dock, and they flung around small square pieces of cardboard at each other. Another group of Inuit children were fascinated by a cage with white hens inside, and when they began to tease the chickens, poking their fingers through the mesh, an older man angrily waved them away.

Then it was time to leave. Large shanks of caribou and boxes of fresh Atlantic salmon were slung into the hold for Stan, just as the gangway was hauled in. I could hear Gene the cook calling out to the Inuk girl he had just left on the dock, telling her it was finished between them.

That’s when the trouble started. By now, Stan had got about 20 people really drunk. The corridor by my cabin had become a war zone. The RCMP locked a young Inuk in handcuffs and took him to their cabin. Stan, feeling under pressure, suddenly accused Larry of stealing two of his rum bottles. The Mounties took two hours of testimony from Stan, Larry and a young Inuk witness. A crowd of Inuit children watched in fascination as the RCMP went into Larry’s cabin, brought out two empty bottles as if they were valuable pieces of evidence, and then retired to their cabin and typed up a report.

I tried to have a word with one of the Mounties, but all he could say was: “Don’t be smart with me! If you don’t like the job that I’m doing, that’s your tough luck. I’m on this ship because I have a job to do, and I am going to do it no matter what. Nobody is going to prevent me from doing what needs to be done. Now I’ve just arrested that man there because he was getting into a fight. And there is an accusation of theft on board. And I am going to lay charges. We have a pretty serious situation on board.”

How strange, I felt, that the RCMP should have a low tolerance of aboriginals under the influence, whereas Stan – the root of all the problems – was openly trading hard liquor for a few thousand dollars worth of caribou and salmon.

Somehow, I imagined things would quiet down. That was my mistake. Stan soon brought the two Naskapi girls into his cabin, drinking with the cabin door wide open. They gave me that “just-go-away” look – they wanted to have a good time, enjoying beer with an older man.

I turned to Stan. “Sytacja jest straszna (the situation is terrible)! To jest świństwo (this is absolutely disgusting)! Wszyscy piją zadużo (Everyone is drinking too much)!”

With his crazed, bloodshot eyes he looked up at me, and said simply “Tak jest (that’s the way it is)!”

He seemed to admit he was disgusting. At least that was something.

After half an hour, I met the two girls in the lounge. The RCMP had kicked them out of Stan’s cabin, for drinking under-age, and now they were crying, their long black hair in sweaty strands across their lowered faces. “What will my parents think? They don’t drink at all! You don’t like to see me like this, do you? What will my boyfriend think? He doesn’t like me to drink. I’ve never been drunk before. Now we’re going to get into a lot of trouble. I have two kids. I had them when I went with a Newfie. They’re white kids and everybody in Davis Inlet calls them ‘Newfies.’ My mother looks after them….”

The bootlegger had power over people who could not easily obtain alcohol on their own

Both girls cowered all the way back into Davis Inlet. Sheepishly, they emerged from the lounge, and confronted their scowling parents.

When I ran into Stan later, he was absent-mindedly dropping ashes from his smoking cigarette into his steaming coffee. His face was swollen, his eyes ready to pop out of his face. He smoothed back his thinning white hair, and all he could say was “Oj Boże (My God)!”

I finally caught up with one of the RCMP constables, and tried to find out his view of Stan’s bootlegging and orgies on the Hopedale. He told me Stan had brought on this voyage alone: 24 x 40 oz. bottles of rum, 120 bottles of beer, and a few bottles of Scotch. This was obviously not for Stan’s personal consumption. He was encouraging aboriginal dependence on alcohol; buying massive amounts of caribou and salmon with it, for resale at a profit in Goose; messing with minor-age girls; and offering a terrible example to very young children.

When the Mountie told me it was legal to barter for caribou, but illegal to buy it outright with cash, I felt he was turning a blind eye on Stan. The case was obviously closed now, since charges had been dropped and the missing rum bottles found. The constable apologized for being so rough with me. He only had a few days left until his retirement from the force, and after 30 years’ service, he was going to become a forest ranger.

I hailed a cab once we arrived at the Goose dock. Stan, calling out to all the saints in Polish, barged into the car, collapsed on the back seat, and had the nerve to insist we stop for a case of beer along the way. I wondered whether he rested up between orgies.

A few years after my coastal trip, the Hopedale burned at the wharf, and was then towed out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and deliberately scuttled.

On a second trip to Labrador, I heard that Stan Pyrc continued to prosper. Until 1988, that is, when he was knifed in the back by a young man sharing his trailer. During the appeal hearing, Darrell Francis Ivany’s defence lawyer maintained his client had been provoked: therefore Ivany deserved to be acquitted. But the Newfoundland Supreme Court upheld Ivany’s second-degree murder conviction.

The voyage gave me an eyeful of selective justice.