On Wednesday, September 2nd, 1998, an international flight carrying 229 souls crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia. There were no survivors. By Friday, Sept 4th, thousands of dismembered body parts had come through Dr. John Butt’s makeshift morgue in Hangar B at the Shearwater military base. The Chief Medical Examiner faced the most challenging and grisly task of his career. Five years prior to the plane crash, John had lost his prestigious job as Alberta’s Chief Medical Examiner. After 14 years of marriage, John began to think of himself as gay, but remained closeted professionally. Then, after serving a handful of years as Nova Scotia’s Chief Medical Examiner, the devastating crash in Nova Scotia cracked his carefully constructed façade. Fifteen Thousand Pieces explores one man’s journey to accept his true nature and find his place in the world. Chapters alternate between the fast-paced story of the crash, and the history of the man in the making. It is both fast-paced and introspective; gruesome and touching. Ultimately, it is the story of how death teaches us to live.
September 2nd, 1998
The phone on the bedside table rings minutes before 11 p.m. on a rainy Wednesday night. It’s a woman from his office.
“I’ve just had a call from the Halifax Rescue Coordination Centre. A plane’s gone down somewhere off the Aspotogan Peninsula.”
Dr. John Butt, Nova Scotia’s Chief Medical Examiner (ME), and his two dogs are ready for bed. Deputy and Ben, golden retrievers, flank their master, ready for the night’s watch.
“What is it?” He knows what she’s going to say—a small craft, or a local carrier flight.
“It’s an international flight. It’s Swissair.”
The information doesn’t go straight to the action center in his brain. His plausibility muscle bats away the news so his mind has a minute to rev the mental engines.
“I think there’s some room for double checking on this.”
Dr. Butt, a forensic pathologist with over thirty years of experience, lives across the bay from the peninsula, about half an hour’s drive from his office in Halifax where he leads the medically focused aspects of Nova Scotia’s death investigations.
He’d only returned home a short time ago, after a long day in court, two hours away in New Glasgow. His testimony had been postponed and the impatient doctor was forced to wait on the sidelines for his turn to give evidence of murder. The victim, a cab driver, had been strangled with a ligature placed from behind, and asphyxiated. It was an upsetting case; a deadly robbery that netted the two young assailants a handful of loose change. The Chief ME was determined to have his moment on the stand for the poor man, despite the waiting game.
As he drove home, a dark sky overtook the milky twilight. On grey fall days in Nova Scotia, the clouds crouch low over the rocky coastline, as if conspiring with the sea to swallow houses and towns. It’s a different feeling than the expansive semi-circle sky of John’s hometown in Alberta, where the air is dry and the land gently dips and rises toward the far-flung horizon. The people here, they’re different too.
His office calls back. It’s confirmed. A Swissair commercial plane has gone down off the Aspotogan Peninsula.
John’s internal alarm sounds, igniting the flow of adrenaline through limbs and vital organs. The buzzing won’t be far behind. At sixty-three, and after three decades of work in his field, John is no stranger to large-scale disasters. An international flight carrying possibly hundreds of people is proving difficult to imagine. How? Where? Why? The panic in his belly threatens, spreading its searing fingers, pushing blood from vital organs to the extremities, flushing his face and scattering his thoughts.
John drags a suitcase out of the walk-in closet and throws it open on the bed. He moves back and forth between his clothes and the bag, a repetitive motion to occupy the alarming thoughts while his brain works to find the logical next steps. I should be back in a day or three, he thinks, trying to compile a mental list of what one needs when heading off to deal with an international disaster.
Jan and Geoff, John’s best friends in Nova Scotia, live across the road. In a few days, when John runs out of clean clothes, he’ll ask Jan to bring him more. John, always dapper in his dress, gives her a list—the grey suit, the blue shirt with French cuffs, the soft yellow tie. But Jan is colour blind and her choices are mismatched attempts to follow his instructions. In the years to come, they will laugh at her fumbles, laugh at how John struggled to put together a sombre but stylish outfit to address the families or the television cameras. The laughter will help them remember, and forget.
It takes him half an hour to gather his thoughts and finally zip the suitcase closed. By this time, the horrific news has travelled a circuitous route through his defence mechanisms and become true. He must keep his thoughts orderly and make the adrenaline work in his favour to stay ahead of the emotions. He never wants to hear that dreaded buzzing sound in his head again.
The dogs need minding. He calls his other neighbours, Frank and Shirley, a friendly couple just down the road. Shirley answers the phone, even though it’s after 11 p.m. Of course they’ll take the dogs, she tells him, don’t worry about it one bit. She soothes his jagged nerves with her reassuring voice.
With Jan and Geoff across the road, plus Frank and Shirley close by, John feels reasonably content in his seaside saltbox. Their three houses sit atop a small spit of land across the bay from the Aspotogan Peninsula. John’s picture window overlooks St. Margaret’s Bay and the arm of land that hugs the opposite shoreline. Had the neighbours been scrutinizing the dark sky that night in the minutes before impact, they might have seen the doomed aircraft on its final trajectory into the ocean.
John loads the car with his carefully packed bags. The sky is overcast and a thin rain blackens the pavement. The air smells of moldering leaves and wet stone. At the end of the driveway, he turns left onto Norvista Lane, away from his friends and beloved dogs. The drive to the main road leading to the city is hilly and narrow with twists and turns that trace the shape of the landscape. Scrubby underbrush and thin trees cling to the shoulders of the pavement. At the intersection of the coastal country road and the highway, he wonders which way to go. The instinct to head toward the crash site, where he imagines soon-to-be heroes are charging to the rescue, pulls at John. But what help could he give there? And where? I don’t even know where the bloody thing went down! Better to be sensible, he decides, and turns the car toward town, his office, and the disaster manual he wrote years ago.
CBC Award-winning author Gina Leola Woolsey tugs at your heartstrings with written portraits of people striving to find love, self-acceptance, and belonging in an ever-changing world. She left her corporate career mid-life to pursue an education in creative writing, earning a BFA from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from the University of King’s College. She lives wherever the narrative takes her. Currently, her time is split between small-town Alberta, downtown Montreal, and her hometown of Vancouver.
- Publisher : Guernica Editions (Sept. 1 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 300 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1771838116
- ISBN-13 : 978-1771838115
