Stolen Life

by Rudy Wiebe

  “That day Dad came home after tying one on and they were up high on their wall across the street, hollering. He got us kids out, lined us all up on the porch straight as Marines from tallest to shortest, and yelled in every direction, ‘You want to fight my kids, well, here they are, all of them. If you got any balls, stop yelling and hiding and c’mon out and fight. They’re waitin’!’

  “He walked around to every neighbour house, banged on doors which didn’t open, shouting, if they wanted something from us, come straighten it out once and for all in the middle of the street, just come out! Nobody did. Somebody phoned for the cops and they drove up, so Dad stood on our porch beside us and yelled at the neighbours, but no one would step off their property. So the cops did nothing and finally drove away while we stood there in a row. I was angry and humiliated and proud of my dad and us Marines, and ashamed and laughing and hating my family and excited and hating myself for everything and all at the same time. The Smith kids were up there, yelling, and then their parents came out and slapped them on the side of the head and told them to stop stirring up the Indians.”

  Yvonne laughs at a lighter memory. “A little later I got a baby doll. It was a clear, hot day and I took it out and danced around in a circle as I’d seen on TV, singing high and thumping the ground. And behold, believe it or not, it poured buckets! The Smith kids were scared, they believed I could curse them—and they behaved even worse to us whenever they could because now they were scared.”

  Earl’s death remains like a mountain divide in the collective memory of the entire family; at any moment of speech or writing Yvonne will swing to that time, detailed incidents leaping into consciousness.

  “After Earl got killed my family tried to get whole somehow. So we all drove in Earl’s van—he’d decorated it so carefully sixties style and he’d give me two bits to wash it inside and out, right down to the last speck of dust on the floormats before I got the quarter—the whole family drove down to the Bighole River to go fishing. It was spring run-off, the water dropping, everything was still a little flooded and the willow leaves just coming out along the water. The van had a powerful cassette deck and we started playing The Beatles, “Hey, Jude,” one of Earl’s favourites. Then Dad just stretched out in the back of the van with the tailgate open and cried and cried. When we drove back up to our house there was the Smith girl above us, yelling, ‘Indians on the warpath!’ They knew we were fighting to find out what had happened to Earl. The whole town knew the cops had killed him.”

  It would appear that Leon, at fifteen the oldest and seemingly the toughest of the remaining children, was as powerfully affected by his brother’s death as was Cecilia. Yvonne still cannot explain why, though she has puzzled about it for years.

  “Leon was in custody up north, at Swan River boot camp, or maybe he was at Pine Hills near Miles City when it happened,” she writes me. “They brought him home for the funeral. Sometimes I think there might have been some kind of connection between Earl’s death and Leon … perhaps that would explain why Mom became so obsessed with protecting Leon. Even to the point of selling me out, as it sometimes seemed to me—I don’t know—or maybe I already do know and just can’t remember enough to understand, but no one now, neither Mom nor Leon nor my sisters, will talk to me about this. Only Kathy says she believes I believe what I’m looking for is true—but then she cries, she won’t tell me what she remembers. Dad visits and supports me as he can, but he won’t, or just can’t, try to explain anything about this either.

  “What is to be done? I will remember within myself, and then I will say it. I have to, because as Jung writes, I must within my self ‘forge an ego that endures the truth.’

  “Here is one thing I remember. Leon made wonderful rope swings. In the woods in summer when we cut poles he’d climb in the tallest tree and tie a rope to a high branch over the ravine. As you swung away, you flew above our camp and out into the wide, deep space between mountains. After Earl’s death he always had a white rope hidden somewhere, fashioned in a hangman’s noose, and I always knew where it was, though I was never allowed to touch it. After the funeral Leon and I were on the porch at South Jackson. Mom had allowed him to sneak a beer and he was drinking it and crying; he was confused by Earl’s death. Then he told me to get the rope, so I ran and brought it.

  “Leon had a plan, and I was part of it. Little did I understand. He tied the noose over a two-by-four on the porch roof, then brought a chair from his room and stood on it. He placed his head in the noose, very carefully, testing it out, it seemed, but I did not know what was going on. He told me he was building another swing and I could sit on his feet, use them as a seat and swing on him. So he put himself in the noose with his horn in his hand, then he stepped up on the chair and had me sit on his shoes and wrap my legs tight around his ankles and my arms tight around his legs. He played ‘Taps’ all the way through, and then he jumped off the chair with me sitting tight on his feet.

  “Somehow I fell off. I think Leon shook me loose when he kicked all around. He tried to swing to the porch railing, but he whipped back and smashed the window in the room he and Earl had shared. He could not reach anything in his panic. I stood there, not knowing what was going on. Leon slowed and soon he wasn’t kicking, he was grabbing his neck and his face looked really strange, his eyes bulged out scared. I could not get past while he was kicking. I got down on my knees when he slowed down, and belly-crawled under him. I went and told Dad and Mom, ‘Leon broke the window.’ I couldn’t explain to them what was going on, and I ran back to Leon, his arms were now hanging, and just swaying. I tried to put the chair back, I tried to talk to him, and finally Dad was there.

  “Dad yelled, he wrapped his arms around Leon and lifted him, and Mom came too. They cut him down. I told them Leon had told me he was making a swing, I should ride on his shoes but he kicked me off and broke the window.

  “Leon came round and slashed himself through his wrist tendons with a dog-food lid from the garbage can. He was so angry from that pain he smashed his arm through another window. They took him away then and stitched him up. There was blood splashed on the porch and all over me.”

  When did this happen? How?

  I am playing in the sand lot across the alley on Jackson Street. It may be a Saturday or during a long summer. A little girl is with me; she is silently playing in the sand too, making a nice road away from my castle, and so she is a friend. And a teenager, a quiet, black-haired boy, is suddenly there with two pops, the bottles already open, offering us each a cool drink because it’s so hot in the sun and we are thirsty, aren’t we thirsty?

  I don’t get many goodies. With seven kids at home we’re told to be thankful for food and clothing and a bed to sleep in and a roof over our heads. Everything sweet is rationed. I’ll always get a share, sure, but it will be the smallest, even though, if we don’t share properly, Mom will adjust the problem fast enough, we’ll all get it, or have to kneel on the floor for hours either with our arms folded or held out wide like the crucified Jesus. But here’s a bottle all to myself, there’s another one for my friend. So I permit myself to take it, and she does too. We sit in the sand lot, pop bubbling sweet into my mouth.

  It’s hot in the sun, it’s nice to drink something strange and cool and sweet, and I’m getting a little sleepy and the buildings swim, sounds flip somersaults, and a man is there, hunching down beside the black-haired boy. The man says, Your mommy wants you; nap, it’s time for, and he picks up the little girl’s hand and he carries her away. The sun is putting me to sleep too. The sand is warm and there are pieces and bits of what may be pictures passing in front of me—very strange faces, I’ve never seen them before, a very large room. I cannot make a sound or even move. Faces look distorted and wriggling, changing like TV cartoons and sometimes so close I want to scream. But I can’t, I can’t hear, I can’t move, I’ve never seen a grown-up body without clothes before. Other children are there, sounds twisting here, and gone, and here again, and somebody is
puking over me, bleeding. Where are the clothes? It’s so slick and icky I could puke too. I’m being felt all over, terrible hands, pains, this is not a beating, not a slap, but it hurts, I can’t run, or move, it hurts.

  And I wake up in my own bed, our house. Mom is bent over me. She is pulling off my clothes, they are covered with blood and she is screaming, Where are you hurt?, holding clothes at my face and I can’t say anything, or sit up. I fall over limp, I can’t hold myself. I hurt as if my legs have been torn apart, my head smashed, but how can I say what I don’t know? Now I’m in my bed, I’m home, I want to sleep, it’s night time, where did all the day go? My head feels light, like smoke churning over my heavy body, and my mother is screaming. Searching my body for where it has been opened for blood.

  When I visit Yvonne in Kingston for a second time in September 1993, she says she has arranged for me to see the Prison for Women—“Whatever isn’t classified!”—so I’ll have some idea of where she must live.

  We go out through the Psychology Office into the yard, between stone and wood and metal buildings crowded behind eighteen-foot-high stone walls. There are no gun towers anywhere. “Don’t need them for women,” Yvonne says. “But all kinds of stuff comes over the wall.”

  “What!”

  “Tossed over, connections outside—drugs, tobacco, booze, tapes, anything. And you better get your times co-ordinated, exactly. If someone inside beats you to it, it’s gone!”

  “You could hardly complain to the guards!”

  Yvonne pulls the peak of her cap lower in the lovely sunlight. If I concentrate on us walking together—as we never yet have—we are simply friends on an afternoon stroll; even the “sugar shacks,” as she calls the two small bungalows with their fences and tiny yards where inmates can stay for several days of privacy with visiting husbands and children, might be normal homes—all I need to do is glance past the massive wall leaning over them and consider the blue sky, the bright clouds moving by from where I know Lake Ontario has to be.

  And I will especially remember the bent frame of the uncovered sweat lodge in the angle of wall off Sir John A. Macdonald Street—the street where I came walking that morning from my motel. And the large white teepee beside it; the Native Sisterhood holds circles there when Elders come.

  Then we’re inside buildings, and every corridor and room is packed with people. Often I can recognize by their very posture a person’s position in this rigidly ordered world before their clothing confirms my surmise. The laundry room, the gym where assemblies are held, the kitchen and low-ceilinged dining area with cafeteria serving counter and small, round tables. Here Yvonne often sits—she says she eats only three or four times a week, she’s never hungry for this food—in an angle of wall and window opening on an enclosure of indirect sunlight between buildings, reading.

  “That’s my spot. If I’m there, everybody leaves me alone.”

  Yvonne introduces me to dozens of people, including officials of the prison, who all look at me carefully; she is friendly, laughs and cracks jokes with fellow inmates, and soon I notice what a strain it is for her, all this necessary “easy” camaraderie. There is a cluster of women in the library; they’re obviously neither inmates nor officials and they seem large-eyed with incomprehension. Yvonne just shrugs, walks past towards the shelves, and shows me the worn paperback copy of The Temptations of Big Bear. That’s how she first found out I existed.

  And later I will remember one Correctional Services Canada guard at the outside door, when we re-entered the main building. Her face was younger, prettier than those of most of the guards we met, but it too was getting heavy, loose under her styled blonde hair. Yvonne explained that often guard jobs in P4W run in Kingston families, many of whom are related: most have been working there for three or four generations. The city has an excellent university, but the people associated with the many Kingston prisons outnumber the university people two to one. And it seems I remember all the guards as broad, large women, as if their very work produced weight, perhaps demanded a necessity of obvious, oppressive heft.

  When we are alone in the counselling room again, we sit in silence, the tape recorder off. Yvonne makes cigarettes—she has a nice little gadget that stuffs tobacco into filtered tubes—and neither of us wants to plunge into anything. So finally I remind her of the Cadillac.

  Cecilia bought the brand-new navy Cadillac in the summer of 1972 from Paisley Motors in Butte, so much down and $300 a month. Driving a truck in the Berkeley Pit was guarantee for anything.

  “She loved that car.” Yvonne is smiling. “Her dream-come-true, right up there, wide and low and sleek with Elvis. She parked it in front of our house on Jackson for the world to see.

  “Mom showed us kids all the Caddy’s beautiful features, and laid down the rules: no playing with the power doors or windows, no fighting, no food or drink in the car. It was so big no one had to sit on anyone’s lap! There wasn’t even a hump in the floor, and I found my place lying flat on the blue carpet. Everyone else fought to sit by the window but I could fit into the smallest space. All the dangling, kicking feet were no problem. I stretched out in the new smell; everything on the thick carpet and under the seat smelled so rich. I could easily lie on the floor stretched along, almost under, the back of the front seat; there were even little skirts to hide me, hidden and safe though in the centre of my family. Or there were padded armrests that pulled down out of the backs of the seats. I could sit there higher between everyone either back or front, watch the highway slip away under us, watch Mom set the cruise control.

  “We drove around Butte, down every street, every road in Silver Bow County, showing it. Once Mom stopped in the country for a family pit stop. She disappeared into the woods and suddenly she yelled out; when we got to her she was digging a huge glass tank out from under the leaves. A glass aquarium, she said; it must have held a hundred gallons of water, but it could fit into the trunk easily and we hauled it home. There wasn’t a leak in it, the metal corners were sealed perfectly, so we polished it and she put it on a table by the front window and made sure the curtains were open so people walking past could see. Then she bought fish and plants and two turtles. We found interesting rocks and piled them up for the fish to swim through. I think it was the fanciest aquarium in Butte.

  “We drove the Caddy east across Montana to Miles City to show Leon. Right out on the flat plains, south. Pine Hills School was a kind of boot camp for the worst teen and repeat offenders. I think it was either drugs or he had stolen a car that time, and we watched them play a baseball game. Bells rang and the boys came marching out like soldiers in white T-shirts and jeans. If they were old enough they could get out by volunteering for Vietnam, but Leon would never volunteer for that anyway, no Marine discipline for him. Driving out, for night we had a mattress folded up in the trunk; Mom and Dad slept on the mattress beside the road and we four girls slept soft and easy in the trunk with the lid open six inches. Little Perry slept inside the car. Mom had a rule: in our family boys and girls don’t sleep together no matter what their age.

  “We drove to Red Pheasant, Saskatchewan, too, to show the car to all our Canadian relations. Heading through the mountains for Great Falls, we found a stretch of four-lane: Interstate Fifteen had just been finished out of Boulder to Great Falls, and there Mom put the Caddy on cruise. All us Johnson Indians passing every car in sight, even the souped-up specials trying out the wide new concrete looked like they were standing still, whooooo! and us kids yelling, ‘Get a horse, look out!’ a Caddy slick blue lightning passing in the passing lane.”

  When did this happen? How?

  Why did the Creator give me these intricate memories, this photographic mind, and yet allows me only bits and pieces of my past? So many tiny, exact snapshots branded on me. Why can’t I see who the person was?

  Somewhere, sometimes, there is the black-haired boy, and also a silver-haired man in a big car. He is often kind and gentle with me. He lives in the big yellow house across from a chur
ch. In the front part of his house live his wife and a daughter who both walk around dressed like Shirley Temple. The black-haired boy and Leon—yes … it’s Leon—take me to the front door, but the man is mad; he orders them never to bring me there, only to the apartment connected at the back. Butte policemen come to that door all the time, wearing their uniforms and bulging guns on their hips. A large camera is set up in the hall of the apartment, and as I stand there alone I smell a funny smell, strange like smoke I have never smelled before.

  Kathy is not there. All summer I never travel on the bus with Kathy to her summer classes at the old Washington School, that’s where she goes, and every morning Mom takes me to an old woman who is supposed to be my summer school tutor.

  But the old woman dresses me like Shirley Temple and leads me out through her back yard to the apartment door. The silver-haired man can do anything he pleases; even big policemen come, or leave, when he glances at them. And he has chosen me, he says he likes me.

  The window in his bedroom faces into the sun; it is covered with white fluffy curtains, as is his large bed. The floor is soft white carpet, I am alone in the bedroom with him. He is wearing his white suit and he tells me to dance. But I am shy. I stand and begin to cry and he asks me if I like the pretty room, all the pretty things in it, and I nod my head. He asks if I like the silver hairbrush with all curly engraving. I nod, and he says I have nice hair and I can brush it if I wish. He gets the brush from the dresser and draws it gently down my hair.

  He asks, “Why do you cry? Can you talk?”

  And I nod, yes, with my back to him as he brushes. He is sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “No one will hurt you,” he says, “not any more. I won’t let them.”

  He turns me and asks if I like to dance and I nod my head; he puts on music and tells me to dance for him then. I won’t look out from under my hair, but he coaxes me to dance. Then he tells me to take off my dress and I am suddenly terrified. I stop, head down. I begin to cry again silently behind my hair.