Yellow Bird

by Sierra Crane Murdoch

  “Did he say anything about it being relatively flat until he got to that ravine?” Lissa asked. Her face was darkening, crinkling in the dry sun.

  “Yeah,” said Trudell. “It was flat, and he walked through some brush, and then he dropped down, and it just opened up, and he said, ‘This is the perfect spot.’ He’d never been out there before. That’s why I think it’s so odd that we can’t find it. I mean, how can they just walk off the road, and we can’t find that body? It’s so frustrating.”

  “So, you’re sure KC’s out here?” Rick said. “Like, he’s within a thousand feet?”

  “I wouldn’t say a thousand feet,” Trudell said. “But I’m confident he’s along this pass somewhere.”

  Trudell also wanted to show Lissa the site George had identified, so we returned south, parked, and followed him on foot down another ravine, steeper and less wooded. “George said he turned the truck around,” Trudell explained. “He saw them go behind a juniper, and that’s when he lost sight of them. It’s behind here.” He pointed to a tree. Trudell approached the tree, looked at the ground, and paused. At the base was a large hole. For a moment, Trudell seemed confused. Then he looked at Lissa. “How did you know it was here?” Lissa shrugged; Trudell sighed. Now he really seemed ready to go. “You know,” he said, “sometimes I was like, Why did I get involved with this? But I just knew from the beginning when I heard about the case from Mike Marchus that there was something to it. Everybody knew James did it. Everybody knew. It was just, How do you prove it? That’s what piqued my curiosity, the challenge of not letting him get away with it. I knew there were frustrating times, because I took the phone calls. ‘You’re moving so slow. Aren’t you guys going to do anything?’ And I told you guys, it takes time. If it had been easy, it would have been done a long time ago.”

  “Dude,” Rick said. He was wearing a fisherman’s hat and a T-shirt scrawled with the words VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN. “Everything that James chose not to feel in this life is going to hit him like a fucking ton of bricks in the next one. But knowing James is where he’s supposed to be, and KC is here, I will sleep at night.”

  Trudell nodded. “You guys did a great job keeping it on the forefront.” He glanced at Lissa again. “Those posters were brilliant.”

  “Look what we got in the end,” said Rick. “The justice system worked.”

  “It took a while to get there,” said Trudell.

  “A long-ass haul,” Lissa said.

  * * *

  —

  WE STAYED THE night, Lissa, Rick, and I, in a man camp that had emptied out since the bust. It cost ninety dollars to rent a trailer for a night. Rick, who had driven up from Wyoming, fell asleep early, while Lissa and I returned to the burial area.

  We drove with the windows down, letting in the cool, damp evening air and mosquitoes that bounced on the inside of the windshield. We parked a mile past the gate, and I followed Lissa on foot. Her steps were clumsy, quick. She hadn’t taken her medication that day, and her mind leapt across the landscape. “Is that spearmint?” I heard her say. And: “Some of these paths are growing over.” And: “Did you know a lot of Indians used to drive out here? My uncle Dennis came to hunt. I think with the oil they quit coming around.”

  I stumbled after her. Thunderheads had gathered on the northern horizon. The wild turnips were blooming.

  17

  Shauna

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2016, Lissa was invited to speak about citizen engagement in missing person cases at a Department of Justice conference in Atlanta, Georgia. She called me as soon as she received the invitation, sounding uncharacteristically nervous. Organizers of the conference had asked her to send a résumé so that they could compose a biography for the program, but Lissa had not made a résumé since college. “I was thinking, Where do stripper, bondswoman, drug dealer, and welder fit into this?” Lissa told me. “I said, ‘Can we skip the résumé?’ ” She asked if I would write the biography, and I agreed.

  It was her third speaking engagement. Her first had been at a gala for the North Dakota Human Rights Coalition, in Fargo. Obie accompanied her. “My mom bought me some nice clothes,” he told me. “We got there, and I was like, ‘Wow, you’re not my crowd.’ These people were high-class. This one chick had a totally white dress on. Her hair was well-conditioned.”

  Lissa spoke, and then, to her surprise, the Coalition honored her with its annual Arc of Justice Award. “I wasn’t going to stay,” she recalled, “but a woman said, ‘You know, Lissa, we’d really like you to stay and eat.’ Obie grabbed a plate and said, ‘Come on, Mom.’ He made me stay. We were eating, and they were giving awards. They said my name, and Obie’s like, ‘Hell, yeah!’ And—oh my God, this kid—he was hitting me on the back. ‘You go, Mom!’ I was sitting there in shock. He said, ‘Get up! Get up!’ ”

  “She was crying,” Obie said. “I was like, Wow, my mom really likes what she does. Then the newspaper wrote an article, and in the picture I was kneeling next to her. My teachers were like, ‘Is that your mom? Tell her to keep it up.’ ”

  When Lissa told me about the award, I knew she was proud. Still, I wondered if she wished investigators had in some way recognized her effort as well. I asked her one night while we were sitting in the apartment. It was February 2017—seven months since Trudell showed Lissa the burial area.

  “I think I’m just used to it,” she said. “I mean, if it was all about getting a pat on the back, then that sort of person would have expectations that someone would respect what they had to say. Do you think a person used to that entitlement would still be looking for a body five years later? I don’t have to have those pats on the back to go where I go. I don’t need that from anybody. I’ve learned not to need what a lot of people get.”

  “You can’t think of any time in your life that you’ve wished for affirmation?” I asked.

  Lissa thought for a while. “One of the times would be with Shauna after I was paroled,” she said. “I remember her sitting on that couch right there, holding a new baby, crying, saying, ‘What am I going to do? I can’t get a job.’ I said, ‘First you need to have faith.’ I told her the mustard seed story”—from the Gospel of Matthew, about how “the Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field,” which grew so large “that the birds of the air come and lodge in its branches.” Shauna had not been convinced. Since her dismissed charges had lingered on her record, no one seemed to want to hire her. “I said, ‘You explain. You humble yourself,’ ” Lissa recalled, “and she did, and when she got a job, she said, ‘They got tuition reimbursement.’ ‘Well, you better get in school part time, because it’s free money.’ And now look at her. That would be one time. She won’t give it to me, and that’s fine. I give it to me just by watching her.”

  “She told me that story,” I said.

  Lissa laughed. She didn’t believe me, but it was true. I had it recorded.

  * * *

  —

  THEIR RECONCILIATION HAD begun one night the previous summer. Three years after Shauna stopped talking to her mother, she sent Lissa a string of messages:

  Sometimes it’s important that children know and accept that they can never love as much as their parents love them. I now know. You have those moments thinking, ‘I’m NEVER going to be like her.’ Then you become just like her. I have a daughter that I’ve tried to be the best mom to, all for her to resent me at times. I looked at an old conversation you wrote years ago (obviously). No response or acknowledgment on my part as you poured your heart out. How horrible that must’ve felt. I’m so sorry for that.

  When Lissa saw the messages, she cried. “It’s okay,” she replied. “I saw you read it and knew someday you would reflect on that. I prayed for it, sun danced over it for many years now and prayers answered! It was and always will be okay!…I love you guys so much!”

  That summe
r and fall, Lissa did not search for KC. In August, a video circulated online showing dozens of tribal members from the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, three hours south of Fort Berthold, in a peaceful confrontation with police. They had gathered to stop the construction of a pipeline that would transport oil from the Bakken to a terminal in Iowa, cutting across the Missouri River north of their reservation. The company building the pipeline originally planned to cross the river above Bismarck, but the city protested, and although the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe opposed the new route, the company ignored its complaint. A group of Standing Rock and Cheyenne River youth ran more than five hundred miles to deliver a petition to the Army Corps office in Omaha, Nebraska, and when the colonel refused to see them, they ran to the White House in Washington, D.C. On July 26, 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed a complaint in federal court. Three weeks later was the peaceful confrontation with police, during which the tribal chairman, David Archambault, was arrested. In the weeks that followed, delegations from hundreds of tribes, including the MHA Nation, appeared at Standing Rock in solidarity, and thousands of Native Americans from around the country joined, erecting an encampment not far from the pipeline construction site. Soon it was the largest demonstration for Native American rights since the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. Lissa went every Friday after work. She built two snug wooden shelters outfitted with cots, heaters, and racks to hang clothing on, where several Yellow Birds joined her. Irene and Madeleine would not stay the night but delivered donations to the encampment. I visited a few times, as did Rick Arey, who would happen to be there with Lissa on the day that the pipeline company’s security sicced dogs on demonstrators.

  Then, one day, Shauna visited as well. Lissa sent me a black-and-white photograph she took that weekend: her daughter against a backdrop of snow and smoke rising from a circle of tipis. Shauna was flanked by her children, clutching a swaddled baby, staring stoically into the camera.

  I visited Shauna that same winter at her house in Eagan, Minnesota, just south of Minneapolis. I arrived on a Monday evening. One of her sons answered the door and led me up a flight of stairs into a living room furnished with a plush couch and a television mounted over a fireplace. A playpen blocked the entry to keep her youngest child, a year old, from escaping. Shauna did not rise when I came in. She was seated on the couch with a laptop, her hair knotted above her neck. She wore soft black pants, the pockets turned out. “I have to finish something for work,” she said, so I sat quietly until she was done.

  We were the same age, twenty-nine, born five days apart. Her face was shaped like her mother’s—wide with high cheekbones, full lips, and a small chin—but in other ways she seemed different. When she spoke, her words were calm, measured, and when she listened, she pressed her lips together, as if her mouth were a small cage.

  “I had to do my own healing to move on,” Shauna told me. “Now I’m trying to look at my situation through my own kids. My kids always ask me, ‘Have you told her you love her? Have you talked to her lately?’ It means a lot to them. I don’t want them to think it’s okay to hold on to those resentments, because I don’t want them to do that to me. Even if it’s a surface-level relationship with my mom, anything is better than nothing. I feel better now. I feel like I have more control over myself, over what I’m willing to enjoy or when enough is enough and I can walk away.”

  The baby cried sharply, and Shauna lifted her, rose from the couch, and lowered to her knees. In one swift movement, she removed an old diaper and slipped on a new one. “We don’t really talk about personal stuff yet,” she continued. “It’s, check in, check out. The hardest things we talk about are parenting—the struggles I have with my kids and how she feels guilt for that.”

  “She says she feels guilty?” I asked.

  Shauna nodded. “I used to take care of my brothers a lot while she worked several jobs to try to make ends meet, and once in a while I’d come home to a letter on the table and a couple of brand-new CDs. There were times like that when she showed appreciation. But other times I’d find a letter after something bad happened. She’d try to talk about her addiction, and I’d be like, ‘What you did was wrong. I don’t care what your excuse is.’ I tried not to get emotionally attached to her words. I felt loved, but I also felt that she was dependent on me, and I didn’t really have a choice in that matter.”

  She rose from the floor. “Do you want dinner?” she said, and I followed her into the kitchen and sat at a tall wooden table. Her oldest son was doing homework. He was ten, born on the day Lissa was arrested in Bismarck. I knew this because I had read it in the transcript of the testimony Shauna gave in her mother’s defense:

  Q: How old are you?

  A: Nineteen.

  Q: Do you know the lady next to me at this table?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Who is she?

  A: My mom.

  Had I only read the testimony, I might have assumed Shauna hoped to spare her mother from prison, but Lissa had suggested otherwise: It was Shauna, she told me, who put her there, on trial, in the first place.

  “Yeah, not that she was doing or selling drugs of her own accord,” Shauna said, rolling her eyes, when I mentioned this to her. But what her mother had said was partly true. Though Shauna had never seen Lissa use drugs, in the summer of 2005, when Shauna was almost eighteen, she began to notice new signs: needles and other paraphernalia scattered around the house, her mother disappeared into a bedroom. “I was trying to keep some order, but I could see the transition,” Shauna said. “My mom became very aggressive. My grandma would commit her, and my mom’s smart, so she would get through to people that she didn’t need treatment, and they’d let her go. There was no helping her. She could con her way out of everything.” Shauna told Irene what she had been seeing, and Irene told the police.

  Shauna placed a warm sausage on a plate and set the plate in front of me. “Sweet tea?” she said. She strapped the baby in a high chair and called for her other children.

  “We went through some really bad times,” she said. “I don’t let that dictate how I live my life, but I look at it as missed opportunities. That’s what I hold on to. You missed it. There were critical moments that could have changed any of us.”

  “What kind of mom were you wishing for?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know, the typical sit at home and cook dinner and wash your laundry and iron your clothes and take you to school and show up at conferences. The PTA mom. Whatever they show on TV. Who doesn’t want that mom? But as I grew up I realized I learned a lot of things that not a lot of other people learned because of the struggles that I went through. No matter what, I’m still okay today. I have to give that credit to her. In the worst of times, she still made sure that we had somewhere to sleep. She still made sure we ate. We may have gone without a mom, but we didn’t go without our other needs. I value that. I feel like it gave me strength and resilience in the end, and that’s why I’m at where I’m at today, and I’m okay with where I’m at.”

  Shauna collected the dishes from the table and rose to wash them in the sink. “I grew up with somebody that I really didn’t know,” she said. “I didn’t have the desire to know. All I saw was an absent parent. Now I want to know. Who is she? What are her passions? Why? I don’t know a lot about her past. I think it’s been a long journey for her. I think there’s a lot more darkness than she’s revealed. Things that she just feels aren’t worth resurfacing. I don’t know if it’s being neglected, being lonely, or somebody hurt her. I just think she’s been through a lot. I think she wants to move on. I think that’s why she tries to make that impact on other people.”

  Shauna smiled, her lips closed tight, her eyes intent and blinking. I could not tell what she was feeling. I asked if she ever cried, and she laughed, rinsed another dish. “It takes a lot to make me cry,” she said. “I used to when I was younger. You could look at me funny and I would cry, but
I think I learned that crying gets you nowhere. I don’t really cry anymore, maybe once every five years. My grandma’s like that, too.”

  I had seen Irene cry once. It had been the first night we met, in a restaurant in Minot. She was telling me about one of Lissa’s arrests. After the arrest, Irene had attended a pretrial hearing at which she approached Lissa’s boyfriend in a hallway outside the courtroom. She grabbed him by the arm. If anything ever happens to my daughter, I’m coming after you, she had said. As Irene told me this story, she had begun to cry. “I really was going to,” she said. “I was so afraid. I was so afraid she was going to die.”

  I told this story to Shauna. The baby squealed, and Shauna rose to lift her daughter from the high chair, pressing her to her hip. “I’m surprised,” she said. She, too, had seen Irene cry only once. “We were talking about the things my brother went through in foster care,” Shauna explained. “Our foster mother used to pick up my brother and throw him like a ball into the wall. She used to hold his head under toilet water, to the point of him almost giving up. We’d sit at the dinner table, and he had a speech impediment, so he couldn’t speak clearly. If he couldn’t say the word she wanted him to say, she wouldn’t give him food. I felt really guilty, because I was in second grade, and I would have to leave him when I went to school. And being so conditioned—don’t talk, don’t tell, don’t trust anybody, keep a secret—I never said anything, and so I carry a lot of that guilt. And those are only the things that I saw. There’s no telling what I didn’t see when I wasn’t there. It’s really hard for me to think about a lot of the things he went through. I look at him sometimes, and I’m just like, Could I have saved you? What more could I have done? I was old enough to convey that to somebody, and I didn’t.” When a foster father later molested Shauna, she had not said anything about this either, reasoning that at least her brother was safe.