by Rudy Wiebe
“Do you like to do that?”
“It’s got its moments. I support the sisters, especially the ones on B Range, who have tighter security. The prison here tried to keep them out of the Sisterhood because they were very solid together.”
“They try to stop them from joining, even if they are Native?”
“Staff said the B girls helped too many kill themselves. I worked long and hard as the chair. At one point, if I ducked out, the ’Hood would have folded. Everyone was hurting and the institution likes it that way.”
“But you kept it together?”
“I stayed out of cliques, to be neutral, so I had no friends, but I didn’t have enemies either. And we had Elders come in, and that helped. The Elders always talk of patience. I know that’s important, but I may begin to hate that word. ‘Have patience’—where’re you supposed to have it from? Patience mostly too is silent, and now I look for some understanding as I talk and explain what I remember.
“And I am sort of backwards, I guess—in my thirties and trying to grow into the world at last. How do you give birth to yourself at thirty-one? Too much life has already happened to me, and yet I still have to grow up into it. I’m okay with strangers passing through, but with someone day by day by day, I’m often too much.”
Yvonne: To this day I can’t breathe and talk at the same time. It took years of practice so I could control my breath right to speak easily. And I still can’t speak when wind is blowing hard, or raise my voice. I’ve perfected it now, but if I forget and hyperventilate, I lose my breath as if I’d run a hundred miles and I have to stop talking to retrack my breathing. Then my heart races. I’m so insecure with myself that often when I speak in public I have to fight panic. And then I can’t say a word without tears.
Learning to talk took years, the operations continuing even while I went to school. But long before I started school, things were already happening to me, I was suffering in some horrible way. I didn’t know what it was. I was often in brutal pain, and I remember once I went to Dad to try and tell him about it. He was sitting in the living room and I tugged at his sleeve and tried to explain how I had been hurt. He listened and I tried harder. He told me to speak up and I did; I could see his frustration and I tried to yell louder because I knew he was getting mad. Then I started to cry, which of course plugged me up. Dad called to Mom but she wouldn’t come, so he got up and grabbed me to take me to her in the kitchen. I didn’t want to go, I got more upset, I lost all my breath control; soon it came in hiccups, jerking, sucking deep into my throat. I swallowed and choked on gobs of stuff. I was about to puke with Dad dragging me into the kitchen. But Mom had dinner to get ready: Dad was there, let him deal with it.
Kathy and I understood each other, and at least we could cry together. At the Pink House, Leon, who was nine years old to my three, dug a hole in the yard and placed Kathy and me in it, then he got the hose and started filling it with water. We howled and our Big Brother came to the rescue. As usual, Earl beat Leon until he was shrieking—we always called him “Squeaky” because as a baby he never cried, he squeaked. Our family was all cut from the same cloth: survival of the strongest. And me the littlest of the litter.
Then we had to move out of the Pink House, and Leon—Squeaky—was mad. All around us near Madison were deserted houses filled with the broken junk of people who had had to move on, windowless houses disabled by vandals or kids playing at wreckers. Leon was always hunting, and often he brought things home to be used, but Dad would call him down for being a vulture off other people’s fall. How did he know they wouldn’t come back to get their stuff? When we were packing up in the Pink House, Leon went into one room with a sledgehammer and smashed holes in the walls big enough to crawl through.
I drove around with Mom to look for a place to rent—in 1965 there were lots of houses available in Butte. Mom found the White House on Wyoming, where the bells from the big Catholic church nearby always tolled at noon. It was the old, rich kind of house you see on TV in a show like Roots, built before the First War, all white with blue trimming, and a cement wall above the sidewalk around the front and side. The Pink House was small and cramped, but the White House was so huge we never had enough of anything to fill it, not even with furniture and seven kids. There were thirteen rooms and, when we moved in, furniture from the previous owners was piled in the centres of the rooms and covered by white sheets. We discovered some little nun dolls, which were given to me. I found out later that the house had once been a Catholic nunnery with paintings on the ceiling of every room but now stuccoed over. There were even narrow stairs; they seemed so secret to me, leading off the kitchen to the second floor and up under the roof. I remember every room. I loved the way that house was built.
When you entered you saw a wide, winding staircase going up. On the left was a small area; Mom laughed and called it the parlour, where one day our boyfriends could wait for us when they came for dates—as if that ever happened. On the right was the living room and the connecting dining room, with a long chandelier. My parents’ room was off this one, its ceiling blue and painted full of stars, with a door to a small porch, and one window facing south.
My father put a woodstove in one big east room, but Mom hated it. She said it messed up the place with wood and smoke, just like any old cabin—perhaps it reminded her of the rez. In the kitchen was my favourite spot: there was a cupboard with a shelf all around it. That was where I played. I’d place all the spices and stuff Mom had there carefully on the floor and then I’d ride round and round the shelf with my cars. Most of the time I got everything put back before she caught me, but sometimes not.
From the kitchen the secret stairs of red hardwood climbed up to the wide hall on the second floor. At the top there you could see the doors to every room. On the immediate left the hall led back past the stair railing to the bathroom, and inside it a small door opened into a mystery room above the back stairs. That room was always scary for me, its slanted roof and the odd noises you could hear there. The big room on the left of the stair landing Kathy and I shared. It was as large as the room underneath it, hardwood flooring and a huge closet to stash all our stuff when we were supposed to clean up. It also had a door that opened out onto the flat roof of the freezer room. There was no railing around the roof, and out there I thought then I could see everything over all the houses and hills of Butte.
Karen and Minnie’s room was directly across the hall from us. There was a hall linen closet, then the front stairs, and Leon’s room in the front corner, with Earl’s room on the other corner, next to ours.
No one was allowed in Earl’s room. I would sit on the floor and see the light under his door. His room was full of records, and when he was there my feet could feel his music coming through the floor.
He had a lovely old floor radio-record player with a little cupboard in it. Once I did sneak into his room to look around, but I heard him coming and I hid in that small cupboard. He came in but did not stay long; he was a young man and always moving. I loved how his room was shaped, the ceilings and walls curved to fit around the round window. Perhaps there was a sitting ledge on the window, I can’t remember, but his room was mysterious and all the more exciting for me. I looked at the pictures on his album covers; he had a lot, especially of The Beatles. When I was in his room, it was silent and distant, just like he was.
I remember Earl only as a young man. He seemed tall, quiet, gentle to me. He kept himself very neat; he even had a cup only he could drink from. He seemed to be with us and yet not; he seemed never to be at home or, if he was, he did not want to be there. When Dad could no longer work in the mines, and in the summer, when our family came back from logging up in the mountains, he would ride on the load of logs we brought back and, while we were still moving, he’d jump off the truck at the corner of the house and grab the stop sign, whirl himself around it, and race inside to be the first in the tub.
Once Earl found a hurt pigeon and brought it home. He built a perch for
it on the clothes-line post, and soon he had lots of pigeons. He attended Butte High School after we moved to the White House, and I would watch him walk away up the street towards it, high on the hill. Then I waited for him to come home. I was only allowed to go to the end of the block to wait.
I was walking to meet him, the sun low in the west on a very hot day, the tall houses shading the sidewalk. I was carrying the most beautiful doll I ever had. My mom bought it at an auction, where I sometimes went with her, the auctioneer just rattling away gimmme gimme two bits, two bits to the dollar, sold! This baby doll was even more beautiful than my nun dolls, head and hands and legs made of china, with patent shoes, long hair, and a soft stuffed body under a frilly dress. When Mom brought it home, I cried and cried to have this doll she wanted to keep for herself. I loved it so much I kept after her, I would not give up, never, until she finally made a deal: if I gave my nun dolls to my sisters, I could have the baby doll. Well, that day I was walking up the shaded sidewalk with it when I tripped over a crack, and fell. The doll’s head broke, and so did my heart.
Earl came down the hill and bent down beside me as I sat there crying, tears streaming over my face. I tried to make him understand—please, to fix it, these smashed pieces, fix it! Finally he just said, “Vonnie, no one can fix it. It’s gone.”
He helped me pick up every bit of it, but he was right. The beautiful baby doll was gone. I tried to get the nun dolls back, but they were gone too. I don’t know what became of them.
Throughout the summer of 1993, Yvonne sends me more journals from the Prison for Women in Kingston, sometimes via counsellors who help me understand how Yvonne is living her imprisonment. They are all deeply concerned: Vonnie is walking a very narrow edge. One counsellor, Janice Robinson of Vancouver, whose family is of the traditional chieftainships of the Tsimshian people, sends me several journals with a note:
“I am sincerely honoured to have Yvonne as a friend. She is unaware of her specialness. I am, and have profound respect for her.”
On 22 July, Janice calls me and we talk for almost two hours on the phone. She has just completed teaching a course on substance abuse in P4W, and her voice is close to weeping. “I don’t know how long Vonnie can hang in there.… She may not be with us much longer.”
Yvonne is near physical collapse from pain and infection problems related to her last natural, now decaying, teeth: Kingston is not giving her the proper dental care. But, beyond that, she is remembering so much of her past, and it is disturbing her more and more. Writing it down seems to bring more memories to the surface, but the effect is contradictory: even as writing helps her to utter the past out of herself, it overwhelms and depresses her. There are times when she addresses me directly in the journals:
“Rudy, I cannot dig any deeper! I will go crazy.” Or: “Rudy, I don’t know what to do, I’ve got memories that will blow you away.” In her very first journal, begun in May 1991, a few weeks after she was taken to Kingston and a year and a half before she contacted me, she states, “I wish I could write my life-story book. Maybe then and only then will my life be revealed, and it might help the next abused and hurting person whom the world judges and condemns as already dead. But this dead person, me, is not beyond help. Maybe in death I’ll be of some use.”
Janice says to me, “She’s not capable of writing a publishable book, and never in P4W. It’s such a dreadful place, games inside games, and she’s doing ‘The Bitch’ as they call it—Life Twenty-five. When they come out they’re less able to function than when they went in. There’s abuse right in prison, between inmates, between guards and inmates—they’ll take you to an appointment if you agree to sex, it’s …”
She explains that Karla Homolka has just been brought into P4W; she is kept in the prison clinic and under such tight security that all inmate appointments have been cancelled indefinitely.
“For one woman they bugger up the health care of two hundred women?”
“Homolka’s on every newscast,” she says. “When Corrections Canada get paranoid, they can do some really cruel things.”
“I find it really hard,” I admit to her. “Sometimes, I feel so stupid, but I can’t help it, it’s tough just to walk into that place. If Vonnie wasn’t so incredible I’d—you teach courses; how do you deal with P4W?”
“To tell you the truth,” Janice says, “I pray a lot.”
And she encourages me, strongly, to keep helping Yvonne write. “In certain ways she doesn’t grasp the magnitude of her own story. People who are abused are ashamed of what happened to them. There’s never been such a story out of P4W; dozens of women have died going in there, and it’s closing soon. A kind of memorial, it needs a book.”
I know about writing certain kinds of books, but I know I know nothing about the one this will have to be.
She adds, into my silence, “You can’t tell what impact it would have. Vonnie is ready to discount her shame, to do it.”
“Look,” I say, “I’m an aging, professional man, exactly the kind of ‘powerful White’ who’s so often created problems for her. Isn’t there someone else who should work with her, a woman, a Native writer? …”
She tells me quietly, “Vonnie trusts you. Honesty is the key for her, no bullshit, no avoiding. When you’re in her shoes, maybe a White male is safer to trust than a Native.”
Still, I hesitate. But on 12 August 1993 Yvonne phones me, sick and distraught, to inform me she has just heard that the Appeal Court of Alberta has disallowed her appeal of her first-degree-murder charge on all counts. Unanimous negative ruling by all three judges. It seems we must write her story—from her present perspective, in prison.
After the devastating rejection of her appeal, the hardcover notebooks multiply. She can write day or night in the relatively unsearched privacy of her cell in the Wing—which has bars on the outside windows but not on the door. Her handwritten journals have already become several thousand pages of present and memory—“separate, lone memories, individual acts, but seemingly connected, I’m like a conductor, not a human being. Do I really want to know, and what am I to do with them?”—her awareness flowing through time and endless people and places as unstructured as the questing mind flows, journals more crucial than anything she has yet discovered to somehow help her dare recall the details of her tormented life.
Yvonne: Mom liked the White House partly because the Catholic church was so close. Dad would not let her go to mass—he said religion was a just a way to suck money out of you—but there she could sometimes sneak away to talk to the priest.
The first Christmas I remember, the tree in the White House was set up in the beautiful room with the chandelier, next to my parents’ bedroom. It had a fireplace of wood, but the fire was actually fake, with only a bulb inside it to turn on. I asked Mom why there was no fire and she said she didn’t want to torch Santa when he came down the chimney.
I tried to figure out how Santa would get down the tiny chimney. Mom said, “He puts his finger to his nose and he becomes so small and skinny, he can come right through.” I strained my little mind trying to see him. She also put up a manger set, which I stared at a lot, the sheep and the big star. My favourite was the Baby Jesus. Sometimes I would sneak him away when I had to go to bed, but most of the time I’d put him back again because the others would miss him. Like his mom and dad, looking there and suddenly nothing in their manger! I wrapped six pennies for Mom and Dad, but the night before I took the pennies to bed with me one more time. The next morning we kids all got up and I ran down to place my gift under the tree. I think our parents had had a drunk the night before and they had locked their door, so we started opening our stuff. We had all received toy instruments like drums or pipes, and we started to dance and sing, yelling around, beating or blowing our instruments, we didn’t know how to play them, until we formed a parade and danced through the big house, up one stairs and down the other, snaking through rooms and under tables, one behind the other. We heard Dad yell far away, but
we just giggled and kept on, working ourselves into a frenzy until he was right over us. A lot of yelling, a few side kicks to the ass or a hit and a shove on the back of the head, and we had to clean up the mess; Christmas was over before it got started.
But my penny present was still under the tree, so I took it and gave it to Mom and Dad while they lay in bed. Then Mom got up, went to the kitchen, and started to cook, like always.
One Christmas, Leon got a chemistry set, so he mixed things together at random and made Kathy and me drink it, no matter how terrible it tasted. He said it was like the mad doctor in the movies, and we were his helpers, we had to. He always had some story to fool us into doing what he wanted. The set was soon taken away from him. Another time he got a bow-and-arrow outfit, but Earl broke it when he caught him shooting at us as we tried to run away.
The two boys were the oldest in the family, and for a short while Mom let them babysit; she said no one but our family would babysit us, such wild kids with no manners. When Karen was a bit older she had to do it, and then Karen also got the authority to discipline us. Karen and Minnie would gang up on Kathy and me, and make us keep the house clean and neat. Leon was big by then, and I think that, to protect herself from Leon, Karen forfeited us two smallest girls to him for whatever dangerous games he wanted to play; she only reported him to Mom when he hurt her. Leon would protect us, both from Karen’s demands and from Mom and Dad, if we did what he wanted.
It seems to me now Earl hardly ever spoke to me or Kathy. But he helped us, he stopped Leon from rolling us two down the big stairs in a blanket just to see how we’d bump and scream. Another time Earl yelled at us for dropping our pants and racing down the hall to the toilet to see who could pee first. He was coming out as we crashed to get in, and he warned us to always go inside first, then lock the door, before we pulled our pants down.
