Stolen Life

by Rudy Wiebe

  At 943 Wyoming, the site of the Johnsons’ thirteen-room “White House,” is a vacant lot, its debris softly mounded under the winter’s snow. “The best house we ever had,” Clarence says sadly. “Big, wonderful house, big rooms with chandeliers and fourteen-foot ceilings. The mortgage was only seventy a month, but I couldn’t keep it up when I had my back operation and the miners went on strike. Two thousand miners lost their jobs after striking nine months in ’68. Stupid strike really; they closed the last shafts then. By then I’d lost it. It just stood empty for years, then it burned down.”

  He stares along the dip of the street spotted with occasional houses and warehouse buildings between long gaps white in the grey mountain light. “Lots of places burn down here. All the time. They’re empty, they’re vandalized, they burn.”

  South Jackson Street is scraped into the side of a hill, and the house at 410, the Johnsons’ next home, a kind of duplex fitted into the slope below, has been torn down. Space, dropping away. Every house Yvonne lived in in Butte is now nothing but space.

  Yvonne: I remember the evening in late October we moved out of our lovely White House it rained, thundered and stormed. From Jackson you could see the streets cut around the sloping hills long and shining wet, all strangely yellow, with metal posts gleaming as if they were fluorescent. Cars and trucks passed swishing, the water flowed up over the sidewalk after them, and I was afraid, but oddly I felt safe as well. The heavy rainstorm comforted me. Leaving the White House and everything that happened to me there was like walking away from one world, clean, into the other. Here maybe it would all be different. Here no one knew me, no one talked to me, no one seemed to see me. I was invisible. Safe.

  Clarence and I order steaks and fries in the M and M Bar and Cafe at 9 North Main, last of the original old-time (1891) eating places in Butte. In this high cavernous room, the right side is a long counter with stools, where the food you order is prepared on grills four feet from your face; the opposite side is a bar of the same length, and the back half of the building, veiled in smoke, a miasma of machines and tables where you can play live keno or poker machines twenty-four hours a day (a sign warns you: REMEMBER: all payments are in merchandise only). Clarence and I have to wait a while for two free stools at the food counter; there is no space whatever at the other bar, where half the crowd drinks standing up; all you need is six inches to lean an elbow and get one boot on the brass rail. And everyone knows Clarence Johnson; he seems to have worked in the mines and logged with most of the ancient, gnarled men there, and he can tell me as many strange stories about them as we have time for, eating huge steaks off thick china and drinking triple refills of coffee.

  Clarence admits that, oh yeah, he and Cecilia had “some pretty good fights.” Earl got “mixed up” in one, and “they got me down,” and Cecilia called the police. He was arrested, convicted, and fined thirty-five dollars for assault.

  “But I wasn’t giving no judge any money, I said I’d sit it out for two bucks a day in the county jail. Then she got a job at the Anaconda smelter and she came to jail and said she’d pay the fine, I should come home and take care of the kids. I said no, it was me got assaulted, I’d stay my time. So she brought the judge over, he told me he’d go easy on the fine. So I came out.”

  When we emerge into the sift of evening spring snow under streetlights, he will not go around the corner of Broadway to the abandoned Butte city-hall building. I’ve seen its refurbished, square clock tower over the roofs from my aged room in the once-majestic Finlen Hotel, and several times I’ve walked past its granite-arched windows. A trimly preserved four-storey stone building plus tower built (the tourist brochure explains) in 1890 for $37,000. Its upper floors once housed the mayor, the city courtroom, and all other civic offices, including city police headquarters. And the basement—sloping back down the alley below street level—contained the damp stone cells of the Butte City Jail.

  Clarence Johnson can only mutter curses. “They’ve made a restaurant with white tablecloths outa that jail.”

  At 12:20 p.m. on Wednesday, 5 May 1971, in the windowless prison corridor below the sidewalk at the base of that city-hall tower, twenty-year-old Keith Earl Johnson was found hanging from exposed plumbing pipes, a green garden hose wrapped twice around his neck.

  “The cops said it was suicide, but, Je-e-sus, I’ve never believed that. Not for one fucken minute.”

  Yvonne: We are at Red Pheasant. I am in Saskatchewan bush helping Grandma Flora’s brother gather firewood, and Karen is there too, when I glance up and look into his eyes. He is lifting his axe to chop a log on an old sawhorse, and suddenly, out of nowhere, I am knocked back on my seat, I don’t know how. I sit in the brush and early spring grass a little stunned while they both look at me, and I say out loud, “Earl.” And I start to cry.

  Karen grabs her chest and screams, “Earl! Earl!” and runs screaming towards the house. We pack immediately, all us girls are there, and start for Butte. I lie on the back ledge of the car—I can get into the smallest places—all glass over me and a full moon. I can see deeper than the stars. But after nine hours the car breaks down just past Great Falls, and Mom tries to call Earl at our house on Jackson Street. There is no answer. Then the Montana patrol car spots us, stops, and the cops inside gesture for Dad to come over. He walks along the edge of the highway towards them very slowly.

  The people and events surrounding the death of Yvonne’s oldest brother in the dead-end corner of Butte’s city jail are tangled even more than sudden death usually is. What exactly are the facts of what happened? Who did, who saw, what? If someone had been accused and arrested, if a trial had been possible with enough clever lawyers paid huge fees to ask questions, the data would certainly have piled up for months. But of course Clarence Johnson and Cecilia Bear Johnson had no money, and no one was ever brought to trial for anything. Though they tried.

  As it was, the further I searched into Earl’s death a quarter-century later, the more convoluted the possible story became and the more I had to settle for the barest probable sequence of facts.

  The day after Earl’s death the front page of Butte’s daily newspaper, The Montana Standard—“Good Morning, It’s Thursday, May 6, 1971”—headlined pictures and articles of three thousand demonstrators in Washington protesting the Vietnam War. But its largest, top headline read: “CITY CLOSING JAIL TODAY.” The article began:

  The city jail will be closed today until further notice.

  Mayor Mike Micone and the city council ordered the closure at a regular council meeting Wednesday night.

  All prisoners at the jail will be transferred to the Silver Bow County jail.

  The closure apparently stemmed from a suicide which occurred in the city jail Wednesday, although Micone two weeks previously made negotiation attempts … to house city prisoners at the county jail.

  As it went on to detail other council matters, the newspaper article had an insert: “Related story on page 12.” The complete text on that page read:

  Young man takes life in jail

  Keith Earl Johnson, 20, of Butte, a bakery worker formerly employed with his parents as a timber cutter, was found dead Wednesday in the city jail.

  His body was suspended by a watering hose from an overhead pipe.

  Acting Police Chief Bob Russell said it was suicide. Coroner Leo Jacobsen, called to the jail, said he will decide later about calling an inquest.

  In Johnson’s effects held by police for safekeeping was more than $1300, including some $80 in cash. The rest was in large federal checks and two other checks for work for the baking company here. The job checks were dated April 24 and May 1.

  The police reports show Johnson came to the police station about 1 a. m. Wednesday. He was booked for intoxication and also for possible mental examination. The report said Johnson claimed he had been using the drug mescaline and had been “out of my mind for five days.”

  He slept by himself in a cell, officers said, until it came time for him to appea
r in police court at 10 a.m. on the drunk charge. He pleaded guilty, but with all that money held downstairs, he refused to pay the fine. He told Judge John Selon he would serve out the penalty at the rate of $10 per day.

  Meanwhile, the jailer assigned him and another trusty to sloshing down the main corridor of the jail and washing out the cells, one of which contained three men who came to court later in the day.

  About 11 a.m., Johnson asked the jailer to send him a military recruiter because he wanted to join the service. A Marine Corps recruiting officer arrived and talked some minutes with Johnson, who was reportedly advised “you get out of this and then we can talk later about enlisting.”

  Johnson’s fellow-trusty missed him for a while after the recruiter left, so he went looking. He found the body, and summoned help. Various officers raced into the jail, and Johnson was lowered to the floor. A three-man resuscitator crew from the fire department could get no response, and the coroner came.

  Earl had appeared in the Standard before. On 24 May 1963, there was a front-page picture of him as a twelve-year-old, balancing, arms wide, on a wooden Anaconda cable drum. He is laughing open-mouthed. The caption declares:

  Rolling Along A rolling cable drum is the fun vehicle for Earl Johnson, 12, of 1328 Madison. It takes the skill of a log-roller, but many boys have mastered the new fad and found it much more exciting than skate boarding, they report.

  “He was no suicide kid,” Clarence tells me as we examine the papers, the boxes, the hard black strands of his memory in his dark house. Outside I know the old city houses marooned among vacant lots are flaming snow, brilliant in sunlight.

  “Earl turned twenty in January 1971. He was big, over six feet, a hundred and sixty-seventy pounds; he was always so steady. Leon’s always been crazy, I can’t understand why he behaves the way he does, though he’s a pretty good worker if you can get him to work—Leon hurts himself, he’s nuts, he never hurt nobody as much as himself. At sixteen he’d just steal a car, get in a speed chase with police, finally get forced over by his tires being shot out, and he’d smash the windshield with his fist, slash his arm all to hell, just nuts—sometimes, when I look Leon in the eye I see nothing. All the way to the back of his head—nothing there.

  “But Earl was careful, and real steady. Vietnam was going on then, worse and worse, and they needed men. He wanted to be a Marine. And he’d’ve been a good one. I named him after my big brother Earl, who was a Marine too, killed when the Japanese run over the Philippines in ’42. He was killed on the Bataan Death March.”

  After a moment he can continue. He explains that early in 1971 Leon was “always getting into trouble.” In a junior-high class he and other boys tried to make Molotov cocktails and one boy had got dreadfully burnt when it exploded; then he stole a car at Dillon and, though police charges were dropped when Clarence paid for fixing it, Leon’s growing list of misdemeanours finally caught up with him and he was sent to the Swan River, Montana, boys’ boot camp. And then, at the end of April, Cecilia and Clarence suddenly decided to go north to the Red Pheasant Reserve.

  Clarence offers no reason for this trip to Saskatchewan. Yvonne tells me she still cannot understand why they made that ten- to twelve-hour drive north when there was no school break for the four girls. It must have been a “spur of the moment” decision, but just before they left she remembers Earl was trying to explain something to Clarence and he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—understand what Earl meant. They argued until Earl got up, furious, and stormed out of the house; within an hour, parents and all four girls were heading for Canada.

  They left, and Earl remained behind to cram for his Grade Twelve final exams at Butte High School; his graduation was to be on 6 May. At age eighteen he had dropped out of school and left home, worked at various garage jobs and bought his ’55 Chevy panel truck, but in the fall of 1970 he had come back: “Can I live at home and go to school?” So now, besides studying, he worked every day at Eddy’s Bakery; his girlfriend at this time was Susan Samuel.

  Clarence says he was unemployed because of the closed mines and problems following his drastic back operations: the family was living on Cecilia’s part-time work in a restaurant and his small military pension. “I arranged with a bartender at the Montana Bar, when the cheques came in, Earl should go there to cash them right away. And phone me, in Canada, that they were in.”

  “Well,” I say, having puzzled over the newspaper stories and coroner’s forty-seven-page “Inquest into the Death of …” report half the previous night, “the police say Earl had cheques in his pocket.”

  “Yeah, he had them.”

  “And he cashed something at the Montana Bar; he had a receipt.”

  “He had a bar cash slip for $140, and $86 cash.”

  “From that cheque?”

  “I guess so. He hadn’t cashed his own small cheques from Eddy’s.”

  “So why did he go to the police station? Didn’t he know you were coming back soon? Why didn’t he just call you in Canada?”

  “His graduation was May sixth. Cecilia wanted to be back.…”

  “So why go to the cops, at one o’clock in the morning?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he drank a bit and got mixed up. Or maybe they lied, he didn’t go to them at all, maybe they just hauled him in.”

  “They say he wasn’t staggering. The coroner says there was no alcohol in his blood.”

  “Hell, whatever reason, they always need money, City Hall. The cops just do a sweep, pick guys up at the door of a bar, you pay your five-dollar fine and you’re free. They’ll maybe pick up the same guy five, six times in one night. If you haven’t got five bucks, they shove you in a cruiser and throw you in jail overnight for ten, twenty bucks, and costs. Hell, I’ve seen them shove ten guys into the back seat of a cruiser and as fast as they shoved them in one side they were crawling right out the open door on the other. Just depends how much money they were told to get.”

  We go through the transcript of the coroner’s inquest together. The police despatcher, Dan Lloyd Hollis, testified that shortly after midnight on the morning of 5 May, Earl

  came to the station looking for his mother and father. He wanted to know if they were there. I said they weren’t. I didn’t really understand what he meant at the time. I asked him if they were booked or if they were in jail. He said, “No … they were in Canada.” By that time I could tell that he had been drinking and I could smell the alcohol. So I called in a car. Officer Graham took over.

  “I always thought Michael Graham was okay, but now I don’t know,” Clarence says. “I knew him; he brought some of our kids home sometimes. He told me how bad he felt too, at the funeral. But now I don’t know.”

  Graham testified that Earl smelled strongly of alcohol, though he was not staggering. Earl trusted him, Graham said, and had told him he had purchased mescaline in Spokane three weeks earlier and sold it in Butte. He had taken about five hits and now had been drinking for two or three days. Graham also testified Earl started to talk about how he feared someone and that he wanted to join the U.S. military. When Graham suggested he would take him to the hospital, Earl said, “No, I just want to stay in jail. I think that’s the best place for me.” But could he have something to eat? Graham said Earl showed them how to start his van by hot-wiring it so they could park it in the police garage. He bought Earl several cheeseburgers and then booked him into jail on a drunk charge.

  I ask Clarence, “Didn’t Earl have a key to his van?”

  “Sure he did. It was his pride and joy, that van. I’ve still got it parked in my garage right here.”

  “Does it have keys?”

  “Not now. I don’t know what the cops did to it, or why.”

  Earl, Police Officer Michael Graham stated under oath, showed no sign of depression. In fact he offered to take care of a noisy drunk, Kenneth Kasolomon, whose cell he had to share. But he had seemed worried about the money he’d spent drinking, “that his dad would be mad at him.” Also “that he had
some young lady in trouble,” and that “someone was in town and he was afraid he was going to kill him.” Twice Graham stated: “He wanted to be in jail. [He said] he was better off in jail.”

  Clarence leans back, away from the yellowing inquest sheets now twenty-four years old. He has relit his small black cigars again and again, whenever he was aware they had died in his mouth, one after the other; he clicked off the TV set long ago. He removes his bent glasses and slowly wipes his eyes.

  Beyond his head, the top picture of six hanging on the wall, framed under glass, is a head-and-shoulders photograph of Earl and his maternal grandfather, John Bear. A beautiful picture of young and old, so light, so dark; faces leaning close to each other that seem to exhibit no resemblance whatever.

  “If we’d stayed together, as a family,” Clarence says bitterly, “we could’ve done something about Earl, dead like that. That’s the reason I stayed here, why I can’t leave Butte, why I kept on this case. Not so much now, but I did for a long time. You can’t run away from something like that.”

  Yvonne: Mom and Dad never understood family in the same way. Mom always said Dad never really wanted her family members around. But they didn’t come just to visit; they’d move in with their whole families, the way Cree sometimes do, and stay for a while, and when they did, they expected Mom and Dad to do all sorts of things for them. And Mom wanted to do it—after all, she was proud to have married White, though she didn’t want her family to think she was too high and mighty White now—whenever they showed up in Butte without warning, though I know they did things for us as well when we went north to the reserve. They’d talk in Cree to each other, and Dad thought they were talking about him and finally he’d yell, “Jesus H. Christ! At least talk English when you’re at my table eating my food in my house!”