by Rudy Wiebe
And for once in her life Yvonne was fortunate: the presiding magistrate was District Judge Arnold Olsen, one of the few humane and incorruptibly honest officials Butte ever had. The initial charge laid against Frank was manslaughter, while Yvonne was charged with “driving a car without the owner’s consent.” At her trial in late February 1978, on her lawyer’s advice, she pleaded guilty.
Yvonne writes in her journal on Independence Day, 4 July 1993: “Leon always called me zombie. Even at five foot ten and sixteen I carried myself this way, silent, head bent down, not wanting to be forced to talk because I spoke with such difficulty despite all the operations. The roof of my mouth had been closed since Grade Four, but even that didn’t help enough. A bartender later told me, ‘You never smile, but you have a beautiful smile. Why don’t you smile?’ And I told him, ‘What for? I’ve got no reason to smile.’
“But I do have,” she continues in her journal. “The smile I have now was made possible by one good judge. Judge Olsen, you were one of the good things that happened in my life. You changed me, though you could not change the world in which I lived, and I thank you for trying anyhow. You have a special place in the good memories of my life.”
Olsen ordered Yvonne to stand and speak to the charge. She stood, but spoke so quietly he could not hear what she was saying. So he asked Clarence to bring her closer to the bench; she came, but she could project so poorly when frightened that the judge still did not understand. He asked what was wrong, and Clarence explained the double cleft palate at birth, the many operations Yvonne had already undergone, and the problems that obviously remained.
Arnold Olsen, who was the Butte district judge for the last fifteen years of his life, invariably wore a white-striped blue bowtie with his black robe. He was born in Butte, served two terms as state attorney general before being elected four times to the House of Representatives in Washington. Like Clarence, he was of Norwegian ancestry and had served four years in the war of the Pacific. “He knew our family, all we’d gone through,” Yvonne explains to me. “Leon had been in his court so often, he gave him break after break but it never helped much. He knew about our struggles concerning Earl’s death. And here I stood in front of him: barely sixteen, a man had died. I couldn’t run, facing him I couldn’t speak, my breath was so uncontrolled and choked, if I’d made a sound it would have come out a scream. I could only do what I did so often: cry.
“He looked at me thoughtfully, then he leaned forward and told me a story. He said a teenage boy was always in trouble, always showing up in his court for sentence until finally he found out that the boy had impaired hearing. So he sentenced him to an operation, that he have his hearing repaired. It had been done, and that boy never showed up in court again.
“Judge Olsen told me, ‘Yvonne, part of your sentence is that you, at State expense, receive the needed plastic surgery to your cleft palate, and dentistry for your teeth. I hereby order you to stay in Butte, to serve fifteen months’ probation, and your probation officer will escort you to all your medical appointments. If you don’t go, you’ll answer to me. Do you understand?’
“I understood all right. He told me, ‘I hope never to see you in this courtroom again.’
“And thank the Creator he never did,” Yvonne says. And the excitement of what happened to her then, what shaped her truly lovely smile now, her fluent, often overwhelming flow of speech, springs from her like electricity.
“The most skilled dentist in Butte started work immediately on dentures to fill the teeth spaces in my mouth, and the State brought in a plastic-surgery specialist to Silver Bow Hospital on Continental Drive. He examined me and said he wanted to try something radical. I don’t know where he came from, but he was the smartest, gentlest doctor I’ve ever met; all the nurses were in love with him he was so good. When I was on the operating table I suddenly came to. I was screaming for them not to give me a needle, it would kill me! They were holding me down and as they put another tube into my iv, I was gone. He told me after the operation they were having trouble with my heart, and if they had gone on as they were I might have died, but he’d caught it in time, I was on a heart monitor, just take it easy, everything’s okay. And it was.
“I had a full bottom lip like my dad; the doctor cut a triangular wedge out of that lip and inverted it, sewed it into the cleft he opened again in my upper lip. To supply my new upper lip with enough blood so it could heal together properly and not reject the insertion, he sewed the big vein from the bottom lip into the upper he had made and then sewed both lips together so I could not stretch them and break the temporary vein connection apart. Once it was healed and blood circulation established in the upper lip, he told me, he would separate my lips.
“I was mute again, I could only moan sounds in my throat. But now there was hope.”
For weeks, first in the hospital and then at home, Yvonne could take in food only through a straw which fit into the small hole left for that purpose on the right side of her sewn-shut mouth. We sat together in P4W and laughed about her stories of the great smell of food drifting along the corridors, of being given another patient’s meal by accident and sliding threads of chicken through that tiny hole until an entire breast had vanished; and the consternation of the nurses and doctor, whose major concern seemed to be not her hunger but how to avoid infection. But Yvonne was a quick, healthy healer. She even smoked, which was absolutely forbidden, but she managed it with tiny pencil cigarettes she rolled from butts she collected in the hospital. The fire escape was good for that—no smell on the ward—but once the emergency exit locked behind her and she had to climb round to the senior citizens’ ward and walk as if in erect, stately unawareness between the long rows of beds, clutching her hospital gown tightly behind her to cover her bottom. When she went home she cooked herself noodles, inserted and swallowed them one by one.
“One month, two, maybe three months, more operations under circles of blazing lights,” Yvonne tells me. “Inner-jaw carving, whole rows of teeth anchored to the ones I already had. I used to snip and pull at my stitches as they healed out. When I went in, they froze me and took out the rest, cut the blood connection from the bottom to the top lip. I had always wondered what I would look like if I had been born like my sisters, who were all so pretty, my brothers so handsome—where was the beauty of my inheritance for me? And the radical surgery worked, the doctor knew how to do it all, exactly: the vein established itself and despite the obsessive things I did I got no deforming infections, and now some people tell me I’m pretty. Judge Olsen ordered the dentists and that incredible doctor at State expense to work on me all that time; no one but a multimillionaire or a rock star could have afforded it. The surgeon was so proud of me and his architecture, six hundred and seventy-six stitches!
“At last, I could speak.”
There are questions I should have asked Clarence Johnson about why, in 1977 and 1978, Yvonne had such a difficult, ugly life while trying to live with him in Butte. It is clear that much of the time she lived in the dirt cellar under the house; she attempted several suicides; she ran away twice, the first time in the early summer of 1977, when she lived hand to mouth and wandered across twenty states, wherever her temporary friends would take her. Clarence did not even explain why he hadn’t notified the police when Yvonne disappeared; if I were to be generous now, I’d say he had forgotten to tell me. Yvonne thinks that her mother did come to Butte while she was gone, worried about her, but as far as she knows her parents did nothing. Cecilia returned to Canada and they filed no “Missing Person” statement; perhaps they were afraid that, if they reported it, the Butte cops would make sure Yvonne stayed missing for good.
What Clarence did tell me—he has a good memory for money-was that Greyhound had a special on that summer. For seventy-five dollars you could travel one way anywhere in the United States; when he heard Yvonne was in Indianapolis, he sent her that ticket to come home.
Yvonne tells me she was back in Butte by late September 1977, an
d tried to overdose on pills again, but it didn’t work. She turned sixteen on 4 October, so she was no longer legally required to attend school; a volunteer organization called Teen Challenge tried to help her: twice a week a neat woman with styled hair took her swimming at an indoor pool. Two hours a week, but there were 166 hours left to live. She was looking for possible work beyond random babysitting when Clarence told her that Grandpa “Fightin’ Louie” Johnson was confined to a retirement home. He was 101 years old, and Yvonne felt sorry for him. At the same time, she realized he might help her to a different life.
Clarence shows me a picture of his bald, ancient father with a smiling woman of about twenty leaning against him, she with a cute baby on her knee. At the age of ninety-three, “Fightin’ Louie” had declared he was the father of the baby, the young woman said that yes, he was, and so Blaine County gave her both child support and welfare. By 1977 Louie was still the independent individualist he had always been: whenever he could possibly get out of the senior citizens’ home, he’d run away. Several times the Montana Patrol found him two miles out on the shoulder of the highway, bobbing doggedly along with his walker, heading for the town of Chinook. In late October 1977, public health services, not knowing what else to do, had him living in a hotel room. Yvonne volunteered to care for the old man.
“The nurse in Chinook,” Yvonne explains to me, “found us an apartment and I went up and moved in. It was one large room with cooking facilities on one side, and on other side my bed was separated from his by two chests of drawers. We shared the bathroom with the woman next door, a former madam of the local whorehouse, Grandpa told me—no messing with her. And taking care of him was no big deal: all he wanted me to do was get him to the bar. As soon as the bar opened, every day.
“He had a buddy there as regular as he, and they played checkers. His old buddy was blind and Grandpa’d try to out-cheat him in checker cheats. They’d sit with a twenty-sixer of whisky on the table and play all day. They must have been alcohol-preserved, and cheating, more than checkers, was the going game between them, blind or not. I’d play pool by myself, and occasionally Grandpa would sneak a shot of whisky into my pop. One day a cowboy hat called Wilt showed up, he talked and laughed with the old men. Grandpa told him to marry me.
“I went to a movie with him, but I didn’t like him much. He held my hand crooked the whole evening; it was painful and I didn’t know how to tell him. Grandpa questioned me when I picked him up at the bar, said he’d fix me up to marry this guy, but I said nothing. In bed Grandpa drifted off into some nightmare—he drank steadily but never appeared drunk. He always had a big bottle in the apartment and the only way I could stop him drinking was to place it too high for him to reach—remembering a nightmare long past, either reality or dream: ‘I didn’t shoot that man. It was a fair fight, fair and square.’
“Grandpa Louie didn’t like the handsome Native cowboy who started to play pool with me, but the two of us started visiting anyway. After a while I brought him home. Grandpa thought it was the hat he wanted me to marry, but when I told him it was my Native friend, he hit the roof! He called me bitch, whore, Indian squaw; he swiped his cane at me and I begged him, ‘Grandpa, don’t do this to me.’ I got down on my knees: ‘Please, please.’ But he slammed me with the cane and I swore, ‘That’s enough!’ I grabbed the neck of his whisky bottle off the table just as he called me something else horrible and swung that around at him. If I’d hit him I’d have split his skull. I intended to miss, I just wanted to scare him, but he wouldn’t scare, and in the mêlée I backhanded him, knocked him sideways onto his bed. Fuck this, I thought, I’m outa here—run, my usual way of handling a problem—I tucked the blankets under tight so he couldn’t fall out and hurt himself; he kept on yelling and spitting, and I left. I went to the Elks’ bar and told them Louie wanted a twenty-sixer. They gave it to me, but I couldn’t open it in the bar. I played a few games, walked out, cried, felt angry and useless, and ashamed. Then I went back.
“He was still yelling murder. I gave him some whisky, but he wouldn’t calm down. He swore he wanted to move into a flophouse with his buddy where no bitch would tie him up. I called the nurse. I begged him again, but he kept cursing me, and when the nurse finally came towards morning to help patch things up, he just jerked his hand away from me. So the nurse called an ambulance to take him back to the home. And then, in front of the nurse and the two attendants carrying him out, he called me a fucken whore who’d sleep with any bastard that got his hands up between my legs. I couldn’t stand any more, a whole night of being yelled at.
“ ‘If I’m a whore,’ I screamed, ‘you’re the one who taught me, you did it first!’
“ ‘You little bitch, you wanted it.’
“ ‘I was four years old! I wanted it? You were ninety!’
Yvonne shakes her head as she tells me this; her voice is barely audible as this memory rasps over her raw remembering. She has not yet described how Grandpa Johnson fits into the long abuse of her childhood, but I know she will, eventually.
“We were both howling by then, the men carrying him out the door into three feet of winter snow, belted to the stretcher and everyone in the apartment house watching and listening. I put the cowboy hat he always wore on his head. I bent down and told him I loved him, and I kissed his cheek, I felt so dreadful. He’d loved having me care for him, wash and shave him, give him enemas and bathe him all over, help him onto the toilet, feed him, take urine and stool samples, tuck him in at night, everything, and now when I kissed him he head-butted me! ‘Fightin’ Louie’ Johnson all right. He liked me spunky, but on his terms.”
Yvonne sighs, looks at me. “One stubborn Johnson against another stubborn one—a hopeless idea, I guess. Like most of my ideas. I’ve never had any luck. Seven months later he was dead.”
A slight twitch plays at the corner of her mouth; I’ve noticed it before when she refuses to break despite memories too painful to speak of. “He died because he fell, crashed down the staircase in the old folks’ home in his wheelchair. Dad figured the nurses couldn’t stand him any more and gave him a nudge.
“Or maybe he cashed himself in. I think only he himself could finish off Fightin’ Louie.”
Yvonne: Back in Butte again, late fall of ’77, and my life is worse, though Teen Challenge is still trying. I’m always hungry. If I smoke shit I can pretend I float away. A guy will offer me honey oil and disappear with me into one of the many empty houses of Butte. We can vanish into the shadows as Doris Day sings the hit song at that time—“Che sera, sera, Whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see”—just learn not to block punches with your face. I’m sick to death and Dad is swearing at me for overdosing again and all the hospital bills. Ellie Waite is in the hospital bed beside me, isn’t she living with Leon? No, but she’ll soon be pregnant by him.
In mid-January the nice head of Teen Challenge visits me, rolling out paper to show me like a scroll. He’s laughing, he’s so proud. They finally got me accepted for a Job Corps program in Nevada, even though I’m barely sixteen. And I have to tell him I can’t leave Butte because I’m court-ordered not to leave town; my trial’s at the end of February. He can’t believe it; he’s walking away, shaking his head, and I stand watching until the falling snow fills his boot prints.
The older guys in the County Education Program [CEP] for adults, where the courts place me, are my drinking buddies. I’m the quick-reaction Fooseball Champion of the World there. We get ninety bucks every two weeks if we don’t miss classes. So we’re there every day, and one evening we go for a drink to a bar where cops show up in uniform but leave their revolvers in their holsters locked in the trunks of their cruisers, and the bartender takes a picture of customers for his collection. Elvis Presley is dead and Leon is separated from Liz Green, though sometimes I take care of the baby she has by Leon. I’ve just been paid by CEP, so I order bottles of whisky—I don’t drink anything else yet, and I never get stoned or high for the sake of it; I do it to
relax—and a few cases of beer for the others (I haven’t learned to drink beer myself) and also a few pizzas to eat. The bartender locks up the bar and we drink by the light of the neon signs shining all over the walls. There’s a girl in the basement doing tricks, but I’ll never do that. My partner won’t wake up and I can’t leave him. I’m being rolled down the stairs, flashbulbs are going off, I’m locked in a place where they stack the booze. I scream enough till they get tired of that and open the door and peel me off the mesh, get me up out of there. I’m sitting on a bar stool, my head is so heavy I have to rest it on the level gleam of the bar; it’s wet, so cool. A Spanish guy from CEP is there, and the redhead who I thought was my friend—for the first time in my life I black out.
When I come to, I don’t know anything; it’s never happened to me before and I’m really scared. But I do know, instantly, I’ve been raped. I don’t know how often, or by whom, but it has certainly happened. I know this took place because I drank too much, and I lost control, but I’ve never blacked out before, how … my head is still down on the bar, I’m sitting on the Spanish guy’s lap and I’m being moved back and forth; he may be causing it, the moving. I burn inside like white steel and I try to stand up as he stays on the stool and I can barely move, he’s trying to pull his pants together. I go through the bartender’s pockets for keys to open the door. He’s passed out on the floor. There’s a hairy cop I know as Mike stretched out on the bar with his official shirt and official belt buckle hanging wide open. He tells me without moving his head he was just holding me on the barstool, that I kept falling back and hitting my head on the jukebox.
I can’t walk steadily, I can’t get the deadbolt of the door open, and finally the redhead is up. We manage the door somehow and it’s bright daylight out there; we can see to stagger home. We make it to the house, into my room, and we konk out. I awake burning and I have to pee and I discover to my surprise that I’m naked.