Stolen Life

by Rudy Wiebe

  I don’t recall much else. They then took me to the bedroom, and Leon, the man and three boys came in. Leon was happy to show off to his friends, I was something to him. The man told them to fuck me, they just stood there. Even Leon was quiet now. I think the boys felt sorry for me. The man went as far as to pull the boys’ pants down for them […]. But the boys jumped out of the window.

  Then the man grabbed Leon. He started to beat him and threw him on me and told him to fuck me. Leon acted as if he was. The guy told him to put it in me, and tried to put Leon’s cock into me. All the time Leon started to cry, and this guy told me to hug him, that’s Leon, but I could not, I was too weak.

  Finally Leon got mad, or the man got mad. He was now fighting Leon, he attacked him and I don’t know if he succeeded in raping Leon, but Leon was crying and they fought some more by the door and against the other wall, yelling. Leon had blood from his waist down, I don’t know if it was from me or from the attack done on him, or both.

  The man put a diaper on me to soak up my blood. I don’t know if I slept all day and into the night or into the next night. I could not move or talk, how could I talk, no one understood me anyhow […].

  The reason why I recall being two or three when the first attack happened was, when I recalled it, I phoned my oldest sister Karen to ask who that man was that lived with us in the Pink House. She asked why, and how come out of the blue, I recall something from so long ago? I told her he raped me. Then she said, at that time she was six and Leon eight, she said Earl beat this guy up and kicked him out, as he was Earl’s friend, he was about seventeen or eighteen at the most. Earl was in junior high, and he found out this guy would line all four of us girls in the yard on the swings, take our pants down and bend us over the swings and beat us bare-assed.

  He also tried to screw us, and I think at this time he had already raped me. Earl caught him trying the other girls and beat him for this […].

  I have a hard time writing officially, as you would wish. For the first time, I get a sense someone hears me, or wants to […].

  When I was first attacked, I could not speak to be understood, I did not know what happened to me, just pain and scared emotions and thoughts of pain recalled, I could not understand the yelling and beating I received, as it was not a spanking or regular punishment. I did not know I had a vagina or rectum, how was I to know what a penis or sex was? I knew nothing, let alone what they were doing to me. I reached for my brother [Leon] while I was in pain, and he could not, or was unable to, help me. Or worse, refused to. Or even worse, wanted to but did not know how. And could not. I often wonder, now, if the effect of it caused him to be as he is. Though this does not excuse him […].

  At that age I had nothing to compare, that act is all I had. You learn something because people tell you the story around it—well, this was not my case. I had no story. I registered what happened to me as pain, hate, bitterness, yelling, crying, mass confusion with no explanation […].

  I stayed in the room where they took me […]. This man would change me, and rinse it out in the toilet. Leon was six man [i.e., the person on watch] for all this. I tried a few times to go where my family was watching TV, but the man would grab me and put me back to bed. One time […] Mom took me aside, asked what was wrong and where did it hurt. She could not understand me, it made me cry more, I tried to show her how they hurt my feet by acting it out. And Kathy could not interpret, she was as little as I and I could not get her to understand what I could not understand […].

  My guess is I could not recall what happened to me because I did not know what is was at the time. And repeated abuse, with mental abuse revolving around fear of pain, caused me not to really remember. I do know I was safe when Leon started to go to jail, and reform schools, and finally prison.

  I wonder now, how could a family, especially a mother, not notice such torture of a small child? Maybe, for whatever reason, no one wanted to.

  I’d scream and scream, and tell Mom the shadows had come for me, I saw them move there! I pointed to the small area by the door: when I screamed the darkness curled behind clothes hanging on the coat rack and when Mom came into the room it slid out the door behind her. Mom turned on the light, moved the clothes around piled on the floor by the door and hanging on hangers, and I tried to say, “He ran out.” But she did not understand. She told me it was just lights moving outside, to stop crying, go to sleep. The nights blurred together. I was awakened again, and again, by the person returning in the night shadows, blending into all the darkness of the house. One night I saw a man bent over, doing something on the kitchen table! I went hysterical with screams, Mom come running. She said it was only one of the boys making a sandwich before going to sleep, shush, shush up, she had enough of me waking everybody in the middle of the night. You go to sleep, now!

  I hated to go to bed, to have to try to sleep. Shadows visited our girls’ room, shadows that breathed, that made sounds, shadows I could feel touch me. I hated closets, clothes hanging on walls; breathing shadows came out of them.

  In prison most women understand my story; it’s so much their own. But when visitors come here to perform a play for us, the actors are so caring and filled with excitement, they carry such personality and energy of life that everyone is seduced to smile and laugh at abuse they themselves wear in their bodies being performed on stage in front of them. At one point in a play they put on for us the devil tells the pimp to beat the hooker and rape her: the audience in the prison auditorium went crazy with laughter, yelling at the actor, “Go for it, go, go!” First I felt anger, then tears; and when the Good Spirit stepped in to help the woman, I wept for her, her violation, her helplessness. But I also cried for the women here, laughing till they cried at her pain. After everything they themselves have to live with.

  There is such evil concentrated in this place. How can anyone, ever, become better if she’s walled up in here? What do plays and colour TV matter if you’re in hell?

  My thoughts tell me the warden knows there is a possibility I will take my life, and she’s having me closely watched. But if people really want to die, they find a way. An Indian man in Edmonton Remand did it by shoving toilet paper down his windpipe; a girl there hanged herself from her sink, just sat there forcing herself to bend over till she was dead. One prisoner asked the judge for psychiatric help but the judge said no and the prisoner slashed his own throat right there in the courtroom. In P4W we lost eight women in eighteen months by hanging; one died a year and half after she did it, she was on life support all that time. Slashing is very common, so easy, I was almost tempted to do it the other day. I’d thought my husband being near me would help, but sometimes I don’t know. I seem destined to die alone. No one here to trust or believe.

  My mother insists nothing like this ever happened to me as a baby. I was abused, yes—but by the White side of my family. The two Johnsons: first my grandfather Louis and later my father, Clarence. That’s where all my horrible memories come from. The ones that are true, she says.

  Mom is Cree, yes, and I love her for that. It is the core of the person I am now and when I’m in the sweat lodge, which stands in the tight corner where the prison walls meet, the Mother Earth and the Creator come there, they are there to cleanse me. But I want her to face the fact that her oldest living son, whom she loves and gives everything to, every penny she has, even if he smashes her houses to pieces with an axe, that the “Squeaky” she loves is sick; to face the fact that she considered her four daughters, Karen, Minnie, Kathy, Vonnie, nothing but bad problems, that she treated us not like the babies we were but as if she thought we could be naturally born whores.

  I remember when I was no more than five her warning to us, over and over:

  “Girls, be on guard! Don’t hug your dad, never your brothers, your male cousins, or uncles, or grandpas. If you do you’re asking for it, it’s your own fault. Never hold hands with any male, stay away from all boys, protect yourself by crowding together, by hiding in corners, neve
r pump yourself high on the swing because a male might see your panties; leap frog is too sexy, sitting with your legs uncrossed is just asking for it.”

  Asking for what? Mom never explained. Once she caught Kathy and me, we were five and four then, playing house naked. She beat us till the belt broke and she was hitting Kathy with the buckle. Didn’t she realize someone had taught us to play that way?

  When Grandpa Louie would babysit Kathy and me, we played house. And it was always nap or bedtime; it was always time to take off all our clothes, time to lie down on the blanket and put our heads on our little pillows and sleep with our legs spread out wide. Or he would let us play in the dirt or mud as much as we wanted, and then he’d say suddenly, “Okay, time for a bath,” and bathe us, a long time, laughing and playing with us in the water. Mom is always yelling, punishing us, Dad is never around, but to Grandpa Louie we’re special, he lets us play, he hugs us warm and gives us candy. He loves us.

  Though sometimes he did strange things, especially when he and I were alone. Sometimes I was frightened of him because he was so ugly and hairy down there, but he had a handkerchief with a hole in it and he would stick his cock through the hole to hide his scariness and then I’d have to take off my panties and he would show me how to sit on the floor, or lie down flat with my skirt high and legs spread exactly the way he’d tell me. Then he’d put my panties over his face or on his head, or peek through the legs, and he looked so funny we’d both laugh, him playing with them. He’d give me candies while he held the panties and the handkerchief in place, till finally he’d stop and place his shaking foot between my legs and pull at himself while I lay there on my back with candy melting in my mouth.

  Even so, sometimes I would become very frightened, or suddenly scared, and I would get up to run out.

  But I know the lock on the door was too high for me to reach, I could never get out. And he would laugh and soothe me in his lap with his big hands, and give me more candy.

  Strange but true, my abusers have often been my protectors. Grandpa could sometimes talk Mom out of hitting or punishing me. I know he was protecting me for himself, the way Leon did when he fought the boys in the school yard or on the street in Butte so they’d stay away from me. And so, in a strange way, I loved them both, then: what else did I have? I thought they gave me more attention and care and love than either of my parents.

  Now no one of my family can get at me; but there is also no escape for me from the silence of prison. Is it that that’s forced these memories out? Where is it all coming from?

  I must continue to exist. To find out why I remember.

  On 19 December 1992, Detective Linda Billings in Edmonton sent Yvonne’s witness statement against Leon to the RCMP in North Battleford “for follow-up.” During the same time, Karen in Winnipeg filed a charge of sexual assault against Leon as well. So did their sister Minnie, then in North Battleford, but before the police could include her accusations in a formal charge, Yvonne wrote me, “Minnie pulled hers back, scared I guess.” She would not sign it. In Thunder Bay their cousin, Shirley Anne Salmon’s half-sister Darlene Jacques (née Bear), also filed formal charges about a series of rapes Leon committed on her when she was fourteen.

  Eight months later, on 30 August 1993, two RCMP officers “attended”—as they put it—Yvonne in Kingston to investigate further the matter of the “Leon Ray Johnson Sexual Assault.” In a three-hour interview Yvonne repeated, with more detail, what she had written originally, both about the first attack on her “by Leon and other parties” when she was a baby in Montana, and Leon’s rape of her cousin Darlene at Red Pheasant “around the years ’74 or ’75 in the house where my mom lives now,” and also Leon’s various sexual attacks on Yvonne while she was living in Wetaskiwin in the eighties. The five-page signed statement, witnessed by constables Pender and Viens, concludes “… to the best of my knowledge … these are the only attacks I recall on myself [by Leon] in Canada.”

  The Canadian legal system now took its ordered course, with Crown Prosecutor James Taylor in North Battleford building Yvonne’s and Karen’s and Darlene’s cases against Leon for all the acts he had perpetrated in Saskatchewan. Yvonne felt his violence within the family had to be forced into the open, and if the family refused to discuss it, then it would have to be exposed in a public court of law, but she felt no satisfaction about what was happening. She was torn by her feelings about her brother, whom she loved, and still loves. Whom she hated and cannot help but hate. She wrote to me:

  Brian Beresh, when I talked to him about this at my appeal, told me a court of law was no place to heal. He says if this case ever goes to court, Leon’s lawyer will eat me alive. And I know, my whole family will blame me for taking a stand. But I have started it and I will say what has to be said, and if it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, then so be it. At the least, it has been spoken.

  And I’ve given it all over to the Creator. That’s what the Elder told me when we went into the sweat lodge: “Let Leon go. Give him over to the Creator.”

  13

  If I Don’t Beat You up, You’ll Sleep With Me?

  I told one cop I wish I was a split personality, I’d send one of them to court in my place.

  –Yvonne, letter from North Battleford cells,

  20–25 June 1995

  ON SUNDAY, 17 October 1993, I drive from Edmonton to Saskatchewan to meet for the first time members of Yvonne’s family. Karen’s courage to face her brother has held: Leon will go on trial in North Battleford the next day. I have talked on the phone to her at her home in Winnipeg, and she has agreed that I attend.

  Seven months later, on 11 May 1994, I’ll be driving the same highway to the preliminary inquiry into Yvonne’s charges against Leon for similar offences: several counts of sexual assault and incest, plus assault causing bodily harm. And Yvonne’s cousin Darlene (Bear) Jacques will be in court then too, charging Leon with a series of rapes committed twenty years before.

  Leon has been arrested on Karen’s charges and is being held for trial in prison at Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. The year 1993 is the first time a member of his family has taken him to court for sexual assault, as the former “rape” is now called in the Canadian Criminal Code. And it is Yvonne, his youngest sister, who has begun all this.

  Four hundred and seven kilometres of cruise-control highway for me to think. The long rolling land of the North Saskatchewan River plain is superbly different, fall and spring, but I know the two courtrooms in North Battleford will look and smell exactly the same. On my first trip, just east of Edmonton scattered buffalo graze along the highway in Elk Island National Park, they bulk black as moving mounds among the bare poplars or willow brush; as obliviously concentrated within themselves here in the bush and swamps and meadows of the Beaver Hills as they must have been for Big Bear and his hunters 120 years ago. But now they are enclosed in a steel-mesh fence. Brilliant fall weather, and a few yellow combines still gobbling up the endless swaths of grain that diagram the fields on either side.

  I hear the spaceship Columbia is about to launch itself into space; I am told that in less than a minute after lift-off it will be travelling 3,300 miles per hour over the Atlantic Ocean and into the void of the solar system.

  From Kingston, Yvonne has sent me pictures of her family—individuals and groups of Johnsons at various times and places. They all seem to be tall, broad, impressively handsome people, or, Vonnie laughs, an unbeatable—that’s a good one!—combination of Cree warrior and Norse Viking. But what does a woman look like who must, finally, accuse her brother of violent incest? What does the brother look like? What do they say? If the machinery of law pushes them into the same room, where do they look?

  On a long field sloping south towards the Cree reserves across the Battle River and Cutknife Hill, I see a coyote loping through the grain stubble. Coyote, apparently ignoring me but travelling steadily in the direction I am going. If I saw two of them, I would turn around and drive back home, fast, but with only on
e I think I should have a fifty-fifty chance that the trick Coyote plays on me will be a lucky one. The blunt steeple of the Delmas Roman Catholic Church appears over distant bends of the highway—will that counterbalance Coyote or, more likely, egg him on to something more tricksterish?

  Beside the church, behind a straggly caragana hedge, I see the low, crumpled concrete foundation of a large building: the Thunderchild Residential School stood here, so powerful it sucked every Indian child from the reserves assigned by the government to the Roman Catholic Church (the “Anglican reserve” children had to go to Anglican schools) behind its iron fence. I have seen pictures of it; it burned down—cause unknown and never discovered—in 1948 and prairie wind still plays over the empty space. Cecilia Bear remembers that school only too well. At the inquiry in May she will tell the court, “I was born in a tent in Red Pheasant and my parents split up—I was raised in Delmas Convent. I left there when I was thirteen [1945–46]. Went to my folks in Alberta, they were together again, my father worked there.”

  I try to imagine Cecilia—whose picture as a grandmother I have seen—Cecilia a child running in this school yard that is now shorn, unmarked grass. More likely she’d be working in the garden, or in the kitchen, less likely standing at a window and looking south to her home, mother and father miles away. The boys were let out of school to go home for spring and fall work sometimes, but the girls stayed there year-round; how often did their parents come to see them? Were they permitted to? The worst years of the Depression and the war: those parents found some comfort in the thought that, whatever else it did, at least the Church wouldn’t let their children starve to death.

  I first see Cecilia Bear Knight (the last name comes from a brief marriage that didn’t work out), age sixty-one, in the small lobby between Courtroom A and B in the North Battleford Courthouse.