by Rudy Wiebe
“I loved that story so much,” she tells me. “The spider, the pig, everything—it was the only time I wanted to go to school, and once I was drawing a spiderweb on my desk, ink on wood, and the teacher saw me and was furious. She demanded I repeat what she had just read. I was so excited I stood up and talked! I quoted the book back to her, almost word for word from the beginning, and she was so stunned at my memory and talking aloud she just said, ‘All right, all right, sit, sit,’ and didn’t punish me.”
Grade Six mostly in McKinley, Grades Seven and Eight moving back and forth between Manitoba and West Butte Junior High, who knows how often; it seems she may have spent two years in Grade Eight until she refused to go to school any longer; she failed at least once. She was always outstanding in physical education (Clarence shows me a certificate of award for P.E. Volleyball she received on 25 May 1973), and good to very good in art and music, but her academic record in her first five grades was consistently “unsatisfactory” and “needing improvement.”
“I flunked Grade Eight at West Butte Junior High,” she tells me, “and I quit.”
She failed in spring 1976; it seems she tried again in fall, but quit for good early in January 1977, shortly after she turned fifteen. Just stopped going. In the meantime she had lived on the road between her mother, who moved over three Prairie provinces looking for work wherever she could find it, and her stay-put father. When she was in Butte she tried to stay out of her father’s way, not attract his attention. “He never talked to me anyway,” she says. “We never talked about what our life, our family was about, why we lived like this and what we kids could actually do to change it. ‘Go to school,’ ‘Get a job’—that was it, orders, arbitrary orders but never a conversation about choices, about what might be possible. He ate at home and went out to drink. He drank to get drunk.
“There was something about me as a beginning teenager that somehow warned me: hang on, don’t call attention to yourself, you can’t do anything anyway, just adapt, do what any available adult does; hang on.
“Everyone told me I was stupid anyway. I’d flunked Grade One, then I flunked Grade Eight—I must be like they said, stupid, and probably crazy too. No family around, eat whatever you can find or pick up in homes where I baby sat. There’s usually something in Dad’s fridge when he’s away or asleep. Or you go into a bar. Butte bartenders never bother with your ID if you’re tall and sit quiet and drink. You can always get a pizza there, pickled eggs, some bar food. That’s where I learned to manage on three or four meals a week. And I always had a place to sleep. Either I’d babysit somewhere and sleep over, or I’d sneak into the house basement when Dad locked the door on me—he didn’t like what he thought I was doing; I was alone with him and only fifteen, sixteen; he might have talked to me about it beyond an occasional yell, but he didn’t—and after I couldn’t trust him, I lived like a mole in his basement. There was only one way into it, a big thick door Dad never knew I had a key to. I was small and flexible, and I could withstand great pain. Even if I had to cut or bend myself to fit some place, I did. I’ve had to stay some place so long, my body formed into that small space and when I finally could leave I had to force myself out and let my body unfold itself in its own time.
“When I came into the basement I would look at the woodstove, to see if it was stoked for evening. If it was, I’d sleep stretched out on my pile of rags; if not, I’d hide in a hole like a small tunnel. When Dad wasn’t home I’d dig the hole bigger at least to curl up in, and over time maybe stretch out. If I was willing to sleep balled up, it was in this hole tunnel. All the time he thought I was running the streets, I was mostly there.
“Just stay alive, hang on. Dad never knew where I was. Nor, it seemed sometimes, cared: he was too busy drinking, trying not to remember much, looking for some kind of happiness, you know, just getting past one day into another.
“But he was always a laugher too, always. Every one of us kids learned that from him. In the next minute telling a crazy story and all of us laughing so loud our ears hammered. And ‘stop feeling sorry for yourself’: he and Mom agreed on that, absolutely. But he never paid her even the one dollar a year he promised her for child support.”
How could this happen?
A cop car brakes beside me and I run—they killed my brother, they can kill me—run to a house, banging on the door, and I scramble in as it opens. I try to hide under the dining-room table, its lovely lace cloth hangs down to the ground, but cops are at the door. They come in and drag me out, clamping their big hands over my screams. I’m in a padded cell in the uptown police station by the courthouse. Take off your clothes, they order; there are perhaps six or seven uniforms around me in a semicircle. I hunch together, crying. One uniform says, I don’t want no part of this, and two of them leave. I’m curled naked in the corner of the padded cell, and they give me coffee. When I wake up groggy, I’m all wet, as if I’ve been hosed down to clean me; my hair seems glued to the floor. The matron covers me with an itchy blanket and she leads me out of the padded cell upstairs to another cell. It has beds, and a cop looks at me through the trap-flap in the steel door and I scream out the second-floor window at people on the street, Get my dad, Clarence Johnson, 410 South Jackson! A man is listening to me, but a needle is poked into my arm and, when I come to again, I wrap myself in the blanket and the cell door is unlocked and I run. Somebody yells, Hey, she’s loose! but I’m outside, running down the street till the dope kicks in again; I’m falling on the sidewalk, people try to grab me; I’m running through a barrier into the bus depot; I curl together on the moving baggage belt so I’ll disappear into the black hole with it. Then my father is there, picking me up; he carries me wrapped in the blanket into our house.
I am lying on the couch, and Dad is giving me shit for whoring around and who knows what else. So I show him what they did. His thick lips mumble curses steadily as he touches the belt marks whipped across my chest, around each thigh. I cry, cry; he rubs my head and his own head in rage and frustration as he checks me all over so gently and begins to cry with me. Then he shoves me back onto the couch, opens his pants, pushes himself down on me.
I can’t breathe. My mouth is stretched open, my head twisted, my nose bent against the back of the couch so I don’t have to see, though I have to hear him on top of me. The little cowboys woven into the couch covering are against my eyes, so close they’re just blotches.
Dad is crying, sobbing out loud and begging forgiveness, he’s sorry, so sorry, he got carried away, but I can get up and I run. Our neighbour finds me curled under his big tree. He takes me into his house, but when he says Police I slip away and back into our basement. I sleep and sleep. When I wake up I wait for Dad to leave, and then I climb up into the bathroom and lock the door. I’m covered by gentle water, as hot as I can stand, then Dad comes back before I’m out and I find him sitting with his gun. I think he’s going to shoot himself. We struggle. The gun goes off and blasts a hole in the wall behind him.
When I call Clarence and, in the course of our conversation, ask him whether he ever fought physically with Yvonne, he admits he did. Once, when he found her with a “boy in the back room, I went in there and threw him out.” But he denies, categorically, any sexual assault on her. “I spanked the kids some, sure, and I fought with Earl the one time, but there was no sexual assault. No way, nothing like that. I kissed them goodnight, I never penetrated any of them.”
Yvonne: The police say when a girl turns sixteen Montana law requires that all her juvenile court and police records—sixteen and under?—be sealed for ever. But you can’t seal memories for ever. To me they sometimes seem more like nightmares, but it is broad daylight. I am not asleep.
I know I tried to kill myself once with the gas stove and Dad found me after I was unconscious, but not far enough to force him to take me to the hospital. Twice he finds me passed out on his bed, holding his gun—I don’t know how I got there. Leon is out of jail and back in Butte and shacked up with Liz Green, who’
s got one child so she can get welfare easily and live on her own. Finally I move in with Ellie Waite’s family, but her mom kicks me out when Ellie and I go joy-riding in her car, and then one evening I meet her cousin Ed, who’s just passing through. He’s from California with some hillbillies in a blue car, and a biker and his wife travel with him. They’re really decent, and one of them, Denny, says to me, You’re a good kid, Indian. Where you’re not welcome, I’m not welcome either. You want to light out west, California?
So we all pile into the blue car and go.
Denny and his wife drive, and another guy, Sammy, is such a fabulous talker he cons a man we meet in a parking lot out of his shorts, and then his false teeth too! They laugh like crazy on the road, but I’m quiet. The car leans into winding curves along valleys and between mountains. Ed won’t take me over any state border, he tells me. “If you want to go, walk across by yourself.”
So I walk across. I’m fifteen, I can take care of myself, and they wait in the car for me on the other side. The trailer in La Puente, California, where I’m left, is infested with cockroaches and for a while I babysit for a woman who’s shacking up with her own brother and she gives me something to eat sometimes, but then the brother tries a heavy run on me and I move under the trailer for a while. Nobody knows I’m there.
One day Sammy and Ed find me under there and they say this is no good, they should never have brought me. They decide they’ll take me back home to Butte after we go to Indianapolis, Indiana. I have no idea how far that is, but Ed and I have a bet going: he sings a line from a song and I sing the next, and I always win, until one day he sings an Elvis song I’ve never heard and he finally wins his bet. Denny and his wife are gone; there are three other people travelling with us and we live by Sammy’s “artistry” as he calls it—hotels, fast-food places. We never steal or rip anyone off; sometimes Elaine, a girl travelling with us, turns a trick, but I don’t, nor am I asked to. I see Death Valley, the Houston Astrodome, Knotts Berry Farm with the biggest roller-coaster in the world; we travel old Number 66 till it connects to the new Interstate outside St. Louis. I see the San Francisco bridge from a distance, the island of Alcatraz, and the Grand Canyon. I walk on the beach where they shot Jaws, though I don’t touch the water; and we cross the wide Missouri, coming all the way from Montana, at St. Louis.
Ed’s family lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, all hillbillies now in the big city. We’re on our way back to Butte, the long way round, but we’ll get there, and we’re having a farewell party in a park and I’ve never drunk much, though all of them are winos, but now I drink and start to feel good. Elaine goes off with someone into the car, and a guy, Red, is talking to me. I want to have a boyfriend, I’ve never had one, and I like him. I try to talk to him, all giggly with wine, and Red pours wine down my legs. I’m wearing shorts and I go quiet, I let it happen.
Red and I are in the car when the guy who took Elaine there tries to get in too and I jump out the other side. It’s Red’s friend, but Red promises me the moon and the stars and I decide to stay with him, so Sammy and Ed leave without me, heading west I think. We never meet again. I live in one house, then another, and Red’s friend tries to force himself on me again and Red says, okay, that’s it, I’ll get rid of him and when I do, I’ll come back for you. He drops me off outside a bar and I never see him again either.
I hang around a few days, shoplift a few cans of ravioli and spaghetti and eat them cold. I sleep huddled in parked cars when I can find a door open, but finally I beg a dime outside a bar and call the cops on myself. In the big Missing Persons Bureau the walls are literally papered over with missing people; the summer of ’77, it looks like a thousand pictures of bodies of all races and ages and sex reported missing or Jane and John Does they’ve found dead. Who am I? I give them my name, and Dad’s, and our address in Butte, but they say they have no interstate police reports of me missing. They place me in a building with steel mesh for windows and three chains locked across the mesh on the steel door. I’m there seven days with over three hundred girls. I’ve never been near Black girls before—there was only one Black family in Butte—and one of the hundreds in here whose pale grey skin is scarred into ridges because her mother tried to disappear her by burning threatens to kill me. But then Dad sends money and they put me on a bus for Montana. It took so long because no authority could verify I was missing.
Dad says he always knew I was alive—I don’t know how and he never explains—and here I was back in the tilted house on Jackson Street. I tell him I’ll pay back the bus fare as soon as I have it and he just says, fine, fine. I move into the far side of the house, barricade the door to the one room I need, and go in and out through the back door on my side of the house; his side has the only bathroom, but I won’t use it unless he’s out. It’s only fall; at night I can easily do whatever I need to outside in the dirt yard with its lilac bushes.
I know when this happened.
When I was back in Butte, the night I felt I must get Dad out of the White Spot Bar.
He’s driven the logging truck he’ll never get rid of uptown again. The night before, he came home and drove it right up on the sidewalk and almost crashed into our house. This time he’s left the keys in the truck parked by the White Spot, so I stash them under the seat and go in after him. There’s a girl in jeans—so tight, if she had a quarter in her back pocket you could tell if it was heads or tails—sitting on a stool with her booted feet up on the bar, crying to the song, “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.” Dad heads for her, he buys her a beer. He can’t kill himself or anyone else without keys, so I go out.
Frank Shurtliffe appears suddenly on the sidewalk. I know him, we talk. Someone comes out of the bar; he’s dressed well and more or less stays on his feet.
Hey, you guys, y’know where there’s any pot?
He holds a bottle, and a roll of money in his fist thick as a thick cigar. I say, Maybe I do and maybe I don’t, and he swears he’s no cop, shit, he’s been drinking for days, does he look like a cop? I turn away, but he’s clinking keys. Car keys.
A beautiful wide car, automatic. I’ve never driven more than a tractor baling hay. Frank doesn’t say anything, so I say, Okay, let’s see what we can find. Frank gets in the front too.
In the car, the owner—he’s in the middle—tilts against me and tells me what to do. I can reach the pedals easy, my legs are as long as his, and I drive. The car floats like the Caddy. We drive to a guy we know, but he doesn’t have anything, nothing; he’s mad at me for asking, and who-knows-who sitting out in the car. The car owner tells me his name is Douglas Barber and he’s much older than I thought, maybe fiftysomething, but he tells us if there’s no pot he wants a party; hell, winter is the best time to drink and party, drive him to a party. Frank looks at me behind the wheel and says, Sure, why not? My experience of a party is, I tag along, so the party just continues in the car.
It’s cold, night, our unfound party stops where snow covers a field and a barbed-wire fence and the forest on a mountain—is this where every summer our family came to cut poles? There’s a snowdrift higher than the car, the hood of the car must be shoved into it, the motor roars but the big car won’t budge. Forward … reverse … nothing. Snow is piled halfway up the trunks of the tall lodgepole pines, ice drips glistening from the spikes of the barbed fence. There is a wind, starting to howl like a pack of hounds. A door is open, oh, I’m so cold, I feel like I’m sitting in a meat locker, the steering wheel a ring of ice. I can hear yells, maybe the sounds of hitting, but I don’t look out. Inside the car it is black; outside, the world turns grey, the greyness of open sky and driving snow and the dark, spiked wall of trees drifts everything into shadow. Even my hand in front of my face is grey, shimmering; it’s freezing as I move it to cover my eyes. I can’t see, or feel my own flesh touch my skin. The wind groans, kicks up snow devils; ice wipes over my face; I’m shuddering.
Frank gets into the car behind the wheel and slams the door. Where’s Doug? I ask.
He gestures outside, somewhere. We wait for Doug, but he doesn’t come. We wait longer, I think I’ll see him any minute in the car lights, they’re so bright over the drifts of snow. Suddenly I know these trees, and this field; it was here we once found an eagle hanging on the wire—but that was summer and Earl isn’t here. It was here Mom cried, and said I couldn’t play with Earl any more. He is in heaven and won’t be back. I recognize this beautiful silver place—it’s so grey, and cold, and horribly ugly. I want to go home. Please, to Mom. Drive me to Mom.
Where’s she?
At Grandma Flora’s.
Frank’s smoking. Finally he gives me a cigarette too.
Where’s she at?
Maybe Taber. In Canada. Please … that’s where we thin beets.
It’s snowing fucken December.
Yeah, in winter Mom’s in Winnipeg, yeah. That’s right, drive me to winter.
Yvonne: Frank drove me to a motel in Boulder, Montana. After he fell asleep, I took the keys and drove back to Butte alone. I left the car with the keys inside parked in front of the cop shop and walked home. By then it was early morning.
Yvonne tells me the Barber story detail by steady detail. When the police came to the house a few days later to ask her why she’d been seen driving a car whose owner was missing, she lied at first. She said she just wound up with the car after the owner left a party. When the police came to the house a second time, she tried to run away, but was caught, and then she took her father and the police to the spot where she had last seen Douglas Barber, where Frank eventually got the car turned around. The police began their search in snowmobiles while Yvonne was returned home and ordered not to leave town. Barber was the son of a well-to-do Butte family; his body was found and ruled dead by reason of hypothermia; on 5 January 1978, charges were laid against Frank Shurtliffe and Yvonne.