Stolen Life

by Rudy Wiebe

  There never was anything but big sky and mountains over our pink house on Butte’s east side, 1138 Madison. Now not only that house is gone, the whole street has disappeared. But the summer between two and three I remember short Madison Street and the wooden house painted pink. There is a yard and a fence, and after a rain the dirt cracks into little pieces and curls, and I pick up chunks of curled mud. My dad once said something about mud pies, so I try to bite into the mud he called pies. It’s really gritty, worse than peanut butter choking me up. I can’t do anything but cry. There is no roof in my mouth, and crying and choking to breathe makes the mud ooze over my lips, out of my nostrils. I can only run to Mom choking, blowing dirt in snotty bubbles, and crying.

  The picket fence is white; only the level grade of the railroad separates our yard from the enormous open pit of the Berkeley Mine that’s chewing down into the mountain above us. It is never dark in the house because at night the floodlights from the pit blaze over us, the machinery grinds. Twenty-four hours a day huge trucks, their tires higher than our car, growl past; we have to stop and wait for them to cross the street, and the house rumbles like an earthquake. They could squash us flat and not notice. Dad says a blast of their exhaust would fry an egg on the roof of the car. There are even bigger trucks deep down in the pit on the mountain; the noise never stops, hammering, grinding up the earth.

  I remember all the shift changes, the miners from both the pit and the shaft mines walking with their food buckets past our picket fence on the street. Suddenly the sirens roar, long, long, and every truck stops moving; there is a kind of calm, and suddenly a blast shakes the earth as if Butte Mountain has shivered, and shaken all the buildings and all the gallows frames of the shaft mines above us loose, and is going to slide them down on top of us. But then a huge cloud of dust from the pit billows into the sky, and the machinery starts again—it was only a dynamite blast in what is the deepest man-made hole in the world, Butte always brags—besides holding the world record of fourteen thousand miles of tunnels under its city limits. Every day the Berkeley Pit is getting bigger and bigger between us and the next line of mountains, chewing its way closer to the railroad and to us.

  Beside us there are a few two-storey houses. Mom tries to keep me away from the train, but sometimes I get up the embankment to the track and find the rocks with pretty gold bits—Dad laughs and says it’s “fool’s gold”—and silver flecks that fall off the ore cars. There are words like pictures on the cars, the curls of PACIFIC, the angles of ANACONDA, and the cars from the smelter where Mom sometimes works when Grandpa Louie babysits us have runnings down their sides as if they were crying from their one giant eye on top, yellow or white, depending on how recently it was overfilled. The engine will whistle as it approaches the street, and I wait and wait for it. I pull my arm up and down, and the engine driver waves at me; his arm goes pump, pump, and the whistle blows again. I love the caboose. I wait the whole train just to see the caboose, and sometimes the conductor throws a candy to me. It’s always hard; it lasts a long time because I can’t suck anything.

  There are black-and-white pictures of us six kids—Perry wasn’t born yet—at the Pink House. One in the kitchen with my tall brother Earl standing back almost in shadow, and Grandpa Louie’s round, bald head bent over us four sisters all in a row on chairs. Me with my little bare legs parted, sitting on Leon’s lap. And the other snap taken in the yard shows only us kids and the Butte landscape. We stand in a tight cluster so you can see the exact size of our ages, with the picket fence behind us, and beyond that the lines of the power poles and drainpipes and railroad disappearing into rows of piled-up dirt. A long conveyor belt sticks up over the tracks. And the bare, grey mountains along the top of the picture far away look like they were shovelled up together too.

  We four little Johnson girls in dresses stand at the front, each of us a year apart. Karen, the oldest, between seven and eight, who will be the first of us to be shacked up when she’s seventeen. Sharon, who we always call Minnie, grinning all her bright teeth, always Dad’s favourite child. Then Kathy, a year older than me, with her black, beautiful hair—she called herself the black sheep of the family—and finally me, the littlest, smiling so desperately, with my arms wrapped tight around my chest, holding myself together.

  The boys stand behind us, Leon between Karen and me and shoulder high to a tall boy Dad says lived with us a lot then, his family was broken up; and beside him, tallest of all, my handsome brother Earl. He’s going on fifteen, smiling, his heavy hair greased down in a curl on the right side of his face—he spent a lot of time getting the flip in his hair just so before he left for school—leaning forward a little like a Cree peering at you, his hands behind his back, and wearing a white T-shirt with a dark horizontal band. It looks like a wide rope cinched tight around his chest.

  “I always loved Earl, my big brother,” Yvonne told me the first time we met.

  She was staring at the blank cupboard door of the interview room. We had been talking for several hours, pausing only to go out and refill our coffee mugs from the machine near the Psychology Supervisor’s window. It struck me that, however oppressive a prison might be, it was an excellent place for a long conversation: once arrangements had been officially made that you were to have a private visit, no one would interrupt you.

  “The whole family loved him so much,” she continued, “though Leon now sometimes says Earl was mean to him, that he beat him. I do know things would have turned out different if he was alive, though for better or worse I can’t decide. I promised him that, like him, before I was twenty I’d be dead. Too bad I never kept that promise.”

  Yvonne: At the Pink House on Madison I am in a high chair. There’s a creek or some flow of water running outside the kitchen door, I can hear it, and beyond that a rusty fence, willow bushes, the junk of rusted washing machines. The house suddenly shakes after the siren sounds. I’m shorter than the kitchen table and I have to climb up to get onto the living-room couch. The couch and chair have a hard cover, rough with a design like leaves.

  The counters in the kitchen were higher than the table, and there was something on the counter I always wanted. I think it was a cookie jar. It’s on the tip of my memory, but I can’t quite recall it—I always think if I was out and saw one, I would know it and buy it.

  Mom could never understand me. I would try and talk, but she was always so busy—so many kids—and she never had time to figure me out. Sometimes she’d just sit and cry, “What do you want? I don’t know what you’re saying, I can’t do anything.” So I’d wind up shutting up, or crying. If I got mad and screamed in frustration, I’d get hit.

  My basic problem was the way I was born; in the centre of my face, where my nose, top lip, gums, and roof of my mouth should have been, there was only folded tissue that left a gap in my upper mouth. Even my teeth and inner-mouth bones were affected by this severe deformity. I’ve now had endless reconstructive surgery, but I still wonder what I would look like if I’d been born like my sisters, all so neatly beautiful, and my brothers, so handsome as well. I think our family beauty comes from mixing two different bloods, dark Cree and blond Norwegian, but I’m told I inherited the genetic problem of my mother’s family. Grandma Flora had a single cleft palate: she had a split in her nose, lip, and the roof of her mouth, and she never had any skilled surgery. They were reserve Indians, and someone just sewed her top lip and the right flare of her nose together. She had to live with an open palate till she died, over eighty years old, June 1986.

  Even if I could, I don’t want to remember all the endless operations I’ve had on my face from birth. O God, how I hate needles—more than all that cutting and patching of reconstructive plastic surgery. And so, as I grew, my mom could not understand me. To make me stop pestering her, she’d give me things, to buy me off sort of, but I was persistent. I’d cry and pull on her dress. I’ve felt the sting of her frustrations all my life, and I admit it was hard for her. She’d run from one item in the kitch
en to the next, pointing. “You want this? This?” She’d open the cupboards. “Is it this?”

  I’d shake my head, “Yes,” “No,” but often it wasn’t such a “yes-no” thing and I’d let her buy me off; or I’d be left to cry until I stopped. Walk away with my head down and shoulders sagging, alone. It was like being deaf but still hearing, speaking but speechless—it was there, heaping up inside me. I could not ask questions, just puzzle everything around inside my head, dreaming it, bouncing it back and forth, without any guidance to help me understand. So I learned by instinct, by watching to see and recognize what others don’t, to judge myself by taking chances. To depend only on myself. There was no one else.

  My mind was my best, really my only, companion. But I think that then, on a deeper level, my spirit already knew and understood how much I was being hurt. The impact I wore in silence, and shed in tears.

  The P.A. intercom in P4W—Yvonne calls it the “prisoner address” system, always squawking demands about something—has just warned everyone that afternoon count is coming up and she must go to her cell, but Yvonne keeps talking.

  “Shouldn’t you be in …?” I gesture, not yet knowing how to say “cell” to her, wherever it may be down corridors, beyond bars and guards, behind bullet-proof glass, somewhere a labyrinth away from this room that feels like it’s underground, cut down deep into Kingston’s famous limestone. I think, that must be why they built all these jails here: for greater security, they bury the prisoners in limestone.

  “My house, you mean?” She lights another cigarette. “I call it my ‘house’—no, it’s okay, Psychology keeps them informed. They know exactly where I am.”

  “Exactly where I am too, eh?”

  “Especially you—no way they can let men roam loose in here.”

  “I might get lost.”

  “Yeah, and with all these man-hungry women around, hey …”

  We laugh. It’s not really funny, but there is an ironic tone we instinctively know we must maintain about certain things here if we hope to continue. And Yvonne is talking; truly talking. Sometimes it has to come from behind the black curtain of her hair, but she talks; her amazing, unstoppable, now utterable words trigger one memory after another and she follows that spoor like a track leading deeper and deeper into a dark forest:

  “My grandma Flora died with her palate as open as it was at birth. I can’t understand how she could live that way for eighty years, and eat. Once she and Mom were drinking and I saw her wearing lipstick. It shocked me. She never wore any make-up that I saw, though Mom once said Grandma had one wish, to wear lipstick, but as a traditional woman she never did.

  “But whoever put it on her this one time had not tried to reshape her mouth—when I put make-up on, I make my face appear normal—the lipstick just followed the deformity of her lip. Deep red; she sat there obviously drunk, and it made her look worse, so sad. Perhaps Mom was looking at her mother with pity, as she must look at me, but why put it on like that? I went to Grandma and asked, ‘Do you want this on?’ but she didn’t answer. So I rubbed it off, every bit.”

  “But sometimes,” I say, “you wear it yourself?”

  Yvonne’s lips twitch in an ironic grin, and with a slight shift her face behind her long hair is more hidden.

  “I know all about disguise,” she says. “It’s a wonder what I can do to myself with some Cover Girl, lip liner, and lipstick. But if you get close, you can see I’m wearing too much make-up. And it all bothers me still—when I saw Grandma like that, with lipstick and … there are lots of reasons I don’t want people close to me. My lip is only one.”

  Yvonne: My sister Kathy, exactly a year older than me, understood me better than anyone, and she would sometimes talk for me. When Mom was fed up, she’d tell Kathy to play with me, get me out of the way. Or Dad would come in from work or something and she’d yell at me, “There, go to him!” I guess Mom wanted Dad to feel what she had to put up with all the time; he never did anything, she said, he was never around, he was always out, drinking with his miner buddies, and even when he was home he did damn well nothing to help.

  Mom felt she had too many kids, us four girls in a row every October from 1958 to 1961. She says now she was pregnant all the twenty years she was with Dad. I don’t know how that’s possible—there were four years between Earl and Leon, almost five years between me and Perry, who was last. She says she lost kids, but Dad says never; every one she had was born. Though the kind of man Dad is, how would he know? Mom never drank after she was pregnant with Earl until after Perry was born, and her life with Dad was tough. More than once she vowed to leave him, and once it was so bad between them, I remember when we lived in the big White House on Wyoming Street, she started a fire in the woodstove and burnt everything in the house she could; for hours, until after midnight.

  She smashed and slashed the furniture. I was sitting quite happily on the floor in the kitchen and handing her breakable stuff from the cupboards—you don’t need to say a word to do that—as she smashed it in the sink and shoved what would burn into the stove. Dad had come home drunk, mocking her with “Leave, go ahead, I’m handsome, I can find a nice blonde girl to take your place,” and she worked herself into a certain state, she wouldn’t leave one stick of furniture for any blonde bitch! She barely paused while she threw stuff into the stove, flames leaping out at her. She could justify anything she did because there was always something Dad had pulled off first.

  She met Dad at sixteen: by seventeen she was pregnant and she married Dad, and Earl was born when she was eighteen. She was herself a child, a beautiful one too. Perhaps she married because she was trying to escape being Indian, or because of the pregnancy. Dad was pulled to pieces at seventeen and put together as a U.S. Marine to kill Japanese soldiers, and Mom was reassembled into something else in a Roman Catholic Indian residential school—when two people like that get together, what could they actually know about becoming and being a family? My dad did not recognize that he was the standard male chauvinist; for him, men do one thing and women another. His main way of doing things, as he always said, was work hard, pay the bills, put food on the table and clothing on our backs and a roof over our heads, but his place was not with the kids—that was woman’s work. The trouble was, there was often too little money because Dad drank so much, and so he and Mom always fought over who should have what responsibility for us. There were times when Mom felt we were burdens on her; often we’d hear her cry in her room at night.

  “The reason I was so tough on you kids,” she says now, “was because there were so many of you to handle and care for. You had to toe the line, especially you four girls. I had to make sure you all behaved yourselves.”

  Strangely enough, Dad tells me now that Mom never beat us; that she was always after him to do it. Has he just forgotten, or did neither of them know what the other did with the kids, nor care?

  “I kept you girls in line all right,” Mom told me. “None of you got pregnant before you were twenty or married.”

  Mom got along great when Dad wasn’t around and she had food for her kids, but when he came home at best he became like another kid, only bigger and with bigger demands. So things became more stressed. Often Dad would go out at night and get drunk, and then, in later years, after all the kids were born, in self-defence, first chance she got, Mom would take off and go do the same. I think at times both saw family as one of them being stuck with the kids while the other played and had fun. Drink became their only time out, and they could not drink together, no matter how they had decided not to fight, because after a few drinks all agreements went up in smoke. Dad might beat her up with his fists, but Mom’s pain was deep and alive, she knew how to hit with words. Dad could never keep up with verbal comebacks. She would twist and snake all over until he felt he could do nothing but bulldoze into her, and she’d fight back as best she could. Dad could fight and forget by blocking it out with booze, but Mom would not let things lie, and both were so shoved into drunken violen
ce all their lives that gradually, after years of living together, each new fight became little more than an extension of the last. And I saw us kids as burdens, both of them trying to get away from us, neither wanting us. So we all chose sides, sometimes siding with one and then the other; and, as the littlest, I had to be the most careful.

  When I was very little it was still illegal for Indians to drink in Montana bars, and Mom says Dad used that as an excuse for not taking her out. So she was stuck alone in the house unless Dad brought the drinking party home. When birth control became better known, and drinking legal, Mom finally had some control over two parts of her life that were all-important to her. Her kids stopped with Perry at thirty-three, and she began to drink. As she said, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

  Until Perry came along in 1966, I was the youngest, and unable to talk. In a way my eyes became my voice. I cried to make someone understand with my tears. But I could not. I would try to look in such a way that someone must pay attention—not just little Kathy, who had no more power to do things than I—but my looking sad rarely helped. Memories ring in my ears, names like “retarded,” “dumb shit,” “knothead,” “zombie.” I learned young that no one likes a sniveller, a whining kid. I hear now—Mom said it in a public courtroom—that I was spoiled at birth, given the “special treatment” of being fed with an eyedropper, my parents taking shifts to make sure I didn’t choke in my sleep—I had to sleep sitting up—and maybe that was true a bit before I could walk, but mostly I remember having to do what Dad calls “sucking the hind teat.” I learned very young to accept what I got; to hang my head, keep quiet, and hide behind my hair. I learned very fast about eye and body language, others’ as well as my own. Look, don’t talk; move, don’t speak.

  “We’ve got a strong Native Sisterhood organized here,” Yvonne tells me. “Sometimes a quarter of the women in here are Native,” she adds with her edge of grim irony, “so we always have lots of members. They allow us to sing on the drum, and Elders to come. We’ve even been able to built a sweat lodge in a corner of the grounds. I’m chairperson of the ’Hood right now.”