Short fiction – "A Wing and a Prayer"

Preface

Ed Gillis loves books. As a retirement enterprise, he opened a small store selling books, a few record albums and some quirky odds and ends that people leave with him on consignment. It’s a small business in a small town, but is often a hub of activity for people who like “slow shopping” – maybe we should coin a new movement. Anyway, Ed’s Books and More, on Charlotte Street downtown Sydney, Cape Breton, wants to share the love of books and stories and has in recent years sponsored a short fiction competition. Writers and those aspiring submit their short story and an entry fee, a small jury reviews them, picks three winners, a couple of honourable mentions as well as a set aside for youngsters. All the entry fees go back to the top entries.

In my own retirement, after years of working with other people’s writing, I am devoting no small amount of time to my own. Among casting about to other competitions I entered a story in Ed’s short fiction competition this spring, and it won first prize. Yes, it’s a small prize, in a small contest, in a small town, but I couldn’t be more pleased with the feedback and to share it below. Thanks and congratulations to Ed for this culture-building initiative.

“A Wing and a Prayer” is fiction, a made-up story inspired by something overheard while socializing with other retired folks in the kitchen of the West Bay Road fire hall. I don’t actually remember what it entailed other than someone complaining about snowplowing. Fiction is magic like that – something clicks and your imagination takes flight.

This is one of a collection of stories I’m working on, all set in the fictional village called The Landing, in an otherwise real setting at the western end of Bras d’Or Lake, Cape Breton. The story, the people and their names are a fabrication, though some of the geography and place names – other than The Landing – are real. I aspire to having the collection published, if and when it proves good enough. I hope you'll take a few minutes to check it out (it's less than 2,000 words). Enjoy!

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“A Wing and a Prayer” (now including a few revisions, October 2018)

John Norman MacDonald is a human equivalent of a double-edged sword – at once the most praised and the most cursed man in two counties.

He has the heaviest foot but the lightest hands. He has the biggest truck and the littlest house, the biggest gut and the littlest mutt. He has the biggest mouth and the biggest heart. He’s a redneck and an artist. He works every day and never gets off his arse.

You might expect such a character to be known as “Tiny,” for nicknames are often opposites. But John Norman MacDonald is either known by that – John Norman MacDonald – or as Tim. And not because of his size – you know, as in Tiny Tim – and not just because of a month of emptied Tim Hortons cups on the dash of his backhoe. It’s Tim because he carries with him a donut seat cushion wherever he goes. Get it? Donut = Tim Hortons = Tim.

John Norman, Tim, is a gifted heavy equipment operator with an artistic side. A snow plow driver in winter, a backhoe operator in summer, a backyard mechanic in evenings and a musician on weekends. Thus, he has spent practically his whole life on his ass, and the donut seat cushion protects what’s left of it from torn seats, piano benches and church pews, not that Tim has spent much time in church. Being an entrepreneur and all, he never took much stock in church anyhow – he pretty much gets through life by the seat of his pants.

Not the engineer he could have been, not the fiddler he could have been; from jackhammer to felt hammer, Tim’s delicate touch at the controls and at the keys is a wonder to behold. He can thread-the-needle with a backhoe on a Saturday morning, and “strip-the-willow” at Glencoe on a Saturday night.

Got a hole to fill in? Call Tim. Need a percussionist to fill in? Call Tim.

He can play a tune on anything. Tim feels the rhythm. For a period of about four months every year, that’s a problem. Not a problem when he’s playing, it’s a problem when he’s plowing.

Like I said, Tim finds the rhythm and plays the tune – including behind the wheel. Chugging forty klicks up Cenotaph Road he’s humming “Neil Gow’s Lament”; whistling “The Blackthorn Strathspey” at sixty going down; at eighty, he’s leaving the village to “Sleepy Maggie.” Tim gets that snow plow singing and slinging along, the slush and snow fairly dancing off fence posts, mailboxes, highway signs and guardrails in syncopation punctuated here and there by the sickly ‘ping’ of gravel on a decrepit phone-service box. With the wing down, Tim can Highland fling the snow and ice clear to the treetops, from where it returns to earth as thunderous applause. If the wind is right, you can hear Tim’s playful plowing clear across the loch, depending on which side of the road he’s on. It’s a beauty to behold.

Some road noise can be irritating in the quiet of the library, the church or the school, and downright annoying when you are trying to have a serious conversation in the Carriage Works Café. But this is Cape Breton. People here tap their feet in time with church hymns and Christmas carols, so a proper sense of rhythm is respected. Here, the whine of snow tires is a tenor drone, chains are sleighbells.

A lesser being would have earned more than one black eye or broken bone in retaliation for decapitated mailboxes and missing highway signs, but John Norman MacDonald is the best damn accompanist in two counties. Not to be blasphemous or anything, Tim was God-like in his command of the keyboard on a Saturday night.

And let’s be serious. Who is going to say something negative to a burly backhoe operator who, if he so desired, could do serious damage to property, life and limb. Roadside destruction is simply part of winter in rural Cape Breton. Not that there is an urban Cape Breton. Snow life includes a dance between shovellers, snow blowers and snow plowers – a good natured test of stamina, usually.

But sometimes a man snaps – a man like now-retired reverend Red Beaton, formerly from Creignish. Time was, a priest could retire in the glebe house while a younger man moved in and took over the parish. Now-a-days, however, with the Church selling off real estate in atonement, retired priests are just like us – struggling to afford a little Cape Cod for themselves and their long-time “housekeepers.”

So it was for Fr. Red Beaton. But, accustomed to having things done for him by parishioners seeking indulgences, Fr. Red, was having difficulty adjusting his expectations to his surroundings. He was used to a modicum of deference and everyone’s lack of respect for the speed limit around his newly acquired resting place was – well, let’s just say Tim’s God-like command of the winter roads was less than holy in the eyes of Fr. Red. He regarded music and dancing with some suspicion, and to him, Tim’s snow plow symphony was the heavy equipment equivalent of the devil’s music.

With neither sense of humour, nor sense of rhythm, and after umpteen years in the pulpit in the fruitless pursuit of balancing good and evil, Fr. Red was in retirement wholly lacking in charity. His first winter on this side of the island, was a fairly easy one – more rain than snow, and less wind, so less drifting. Fr. Red’s meticulous manual clearing worked just fine and, despite their clucking of tongues and shaking of heads, he ignored local advice that he should invest in a gas-powered snow blower.

The next winter was one for the books – positively Biblical. I’m sure Fr. Red thought that hell had indeed frozen over, and him along with it. But Fr. Red feared little less than God and the bishop, much less the weather and, as his “housekeeper” watched from the front window, he often defied the elements to clear the demon snow during the height of a storm. Tim, of course, was in his element in such conditions, and by January he was already halfway to plowing through a new tune. Tone deaf Fr. Red couldn’t get the hang of the tune or the timing. It’s a good thing that lightning storms are a rarity in winter, for Fr. Red might have been struck dead through his upraised aluminum snow shovel as he gestured in Tim’s rear-views in a manner unbecoming a man of the cloth.

It’s not that Tim is the unholy sort, or mean-spirited. He just does his job with a flourish. The priest might have respected that, for he was known for his own flourishes in the pulpit, but he went over to the dark side that winter. If he couldn’t count on Tim seeing the light on his own, he would teach him a lesson.

On the advice of his neighbours – good people who truly understand how things work around here – he could not call on Tim’s bosses to change Tim’s tune. Not waiting for a sign from above, Fr. Red created one of his own, one that Tim, and other speeders, could understand. On a mild day between snow storms – one of those days when the consistency of the snow changes from powdery to sticky – and with the help of his “housekeeper,” Fr. Red built a substantial snowman, right beside the road and at the end of the long row of tall, perfectly spaced red pines to the left of his driveway.

They dressed the snow-priest in an old cassock, topped with a wide-brimmed felt hat. An oversized placard on a long stake had a glaring message for all speeders, cars and plows alike: “For God’s Sake – Slow Down!”

It did not snow for a few days, so it came as a bit of a surprise when the unmistakable beat of an approaching snow plow cum music machine penetrated Fr. Red’s living room where he was settled in for a quiet evening of television. He had failed to take into account two fateful factors: Tim’s dedication to his job, and falling temperatures.

Tim was out pushing back the snow banks to make way for a forecasted storm. The extra shift was a blessing, for winter was rapidly coming to an end and he really wanted to finish a new set of tunes he’d been working on. Lost in his musical reverie, he accelerated toward Fr. Red’s towering perfectly-spaced Caledonia pine trees with anticipation, where his truck’s massive plow wing would surely thump out the transition from slow air to Strathspey, like the quickening feet of an experienced audience.

Out of the darkness sprang Fr. Red’s cloaked snow priest and its glaring invective.

“Jesus!” Tim instinctively yanked hard on the wheel to miss the figure, bringing the tip of the wing in exaggerated acceleration to catch the snow priest square in the midriff. Believe it or not, the mass of the now-frozen-solid structure actually caused the entire truck to snap around, like a guard dog at the end of a long chain, and, despite Tim’s expertise, head straight up Fr. Red’s driveway, charging at the fear-frozen figure of the old priest, snow shovel raised in self-defence.

Having heard the plow in the distance, and wanting to clean up whatever bit of snow would be left behind, Fr. Red had donned the full-length black overcoat hanging beside his back door, pulled on a black, wide-brimmed hat, and stepped out onto the stoop, grabbing his snow shovel as he passed.

On reaching the driveway, he was confronted by two gigantic fireballs from hell bearing down on him with an un-Godly roar, the truck’s glaring headlights high atop the grinning steel plow sparking off his expensive asphalt. Inside the cab of the truck, Tim had yet to regain his composure when he spotted the priest in his headlights, shovel upraised like the one he had already struck. There was, he understandably thought, a posse of snow-priests come to life to haunt him into atonement. And, in the glow of the living room window dead ahead, the silhouette of the “housekeeper” throwing back the curtains in that instant appeared to Tim as a conjurer invoking an incantation.

Tim jumped on the brake pedal with both feet for maximum effect, which lifted him off his seat, freeing his special cushion, which – following the laws of inertia – promptly left the seat and landed at his feet. Almost stopped, Tim slammed ’er into reverse. Without the cushion, Tim was a full six inches lower in his seat, making his rear-views of little use and, wing still extended, the plow backhanded what was left of the snow priest on the way out for good measure. Tim held on for dear life as the truck – still in reverse – hightailed it blindly down Cenotaph Road, back-up beeper keeping time with his pounding heart.

It was a blessing for both Fr. Red and John Norman that there were no storms requiring snow removal for several more days, for they’d no desire to come into contact with one another, possibly reliving their respective traumas.

Fr. Red did knuckle under and buy a gas-powered snow blower when they went on sale that spring, and Tim did finish his tune. When he and the boys played it in a set for the first time in public a few Saturdays ago, he was really pleased with the response. The set starts with “The Cenotaph Air,” followed by “The Pine Trees Strathspey” and, finally, “The Reverse Reel.”

“That’s a new set,” smiled one of the breathless dancers afterward, “what d’ya call it?”

“A Wing and a Prayer, Buddy,” Tim reflected from atop his favourite cushion, “A Wing and a Prayer.”

Fin