Stolen Life

by Rudy Wiebe

  “So I have to go to Cecilia, tell her. The girls are in the back seat. And I tell her Earl is dead. But she won’t believe me. She’s out of the car, we’re in the ditch, we’re on the shoulder of the railroad tracks, and she’s yelling and screaming. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to hold her, held her in my arms, and she couldn’t stop screaming. All the girls were out of the car crying, and I got down on my knees and held her for a long time, holding her, hugging her, begging her—No! Earl is not dead! Finally she was just crying that, over and over. I picked her up and carried her back to the car.

  “The patrolman was a good guy. He drove us to Butte in his patrol car. Cecilia sat in front, I sat in the back with the girls. We never said a word.”

  After a time he searches through the box on the coffee table, and finds what he is looking for. The picture of Earl in his coffin.

  “Hell of a thing,” he says. “Have to go and bury a beautiful boy like that.”

  “Twenty years old,” I say.

  We sit there together and cry, until we can talk again.

  Yvonne: Earl’s room in the Jackson Street house was closed. No one went in there. But I visited it every day, though not after dark. A small window from an alcove in the room opened onto the porch outside; they had let Leon come home from Swan River for the funeral and he and I sat there on the porch. The big sky was dark and beautiful, and he played his horn. “Taps,” and he said something about the mountains, the sound bounced back from them as if they sang, they cried when he played. At times Leon could be a bright, good person, when he wanted to be. But he couldn’t play much on the porch, he was crying because Earl was dead.

  One evening I asked Kathy to come with me into Earl’s room, and we saw where the light from the porch shone through the window, making a square of light on the alcove wall. Then the silhouette of a head appeared there, right on the wall in profile. It seemed to me it was Earl. I couldn’t hear anything, but he was talking to me, I know he was warning me about something. For a moment Kathy and I sat there as if watching a movie on the wall, then the lips of the shadow moved and Kathy jumped up, screaming. And I jumped up too. We both ran out and told Mom. She said, “Forget it, it was just the shadow of someone walking on the porch.”

  But I still believe it was Earl, because he was with me at various times for years after his death; I know. Even when I was living in Alberta.

  After he died I ran to Mom and told her, “Earl peeks at me when we drive to cut poles in the mountains. I hear what he thinks when we’re in the woods. When we were cutting firewood at Grandma’s on the rez, I felt something happen to him in Butte and it was true,” and Mom asks quickly, “Okay then, where do you see him?” So I show her next day, when we pass the place I look for him, but he’s not there and I get so excited I jump out of the car, “He’s playing hide-and-seek again!” I run through the trees, laughing, I’m so happy. His name is there on the cardboard tags he stuck on the trees so his friends from town could follow his trail to our work camp, he and I are playing tag between the trees and little ravines, and Mom is sitting in the car, yelling for me to come back. But I want her to come play too. “See, he’s so fast. See behind the next tree!” Finally she slaps me, “Stop it. Earl is gone and never coming back.” But as we drive away I see him and tell her, “You’re leaving Earl alone, I want to stay with him.” She has to stop and open a barbed-wired gate, and she’s crying. “There’s too many memories, too many places around Butte.” She stomps into the trees and rips off all the cardboard tags Earl made.

  “Okay,” she says then, “show me where.” And we search through the trees and brush. But there’s just the smell of pine and stripped bark and sticky gum, nothing. “See,” Mom says.

  So I point up. “He doesn’t want you to find him. He went up to the sky, but he’s here and he takes care of me; he always will.”

  Mom shoved me into the car. “No, you can’t see him. He’s gone.”

  4

  The Only Good Indian

  I have endless memories without faces. Random, separate memories with no story line, but sprinkled with possible truth.

  It was over, it was peaceful to lie buried after all I went through. The ground was cool on my body that had been on fire, it was silent. They were yelling at each other as they dug me out. I tried to rebury myself. Begging there to let me be.

  I asked for water. He was standing over me with water he poured it on the ground and offered me gasoline.

  –Yvonne, Journal 9, 11 April 1994

  Yvonne: I have read and made notes on Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. In it he talks about the “natural mind”. He says such a mind sees and speaks absolutely straight and ruthless things “like a priestess in a bear’s cave.”

  He is speaking about me. I recognize my mind in what he writes. I’m of Cree/Norwegian ancestry, born and raised on Western mountains and plains, and my mind—as Jung describes it—is like a natural spring welling out of the earth, “and brings with it the peculiar wisdom of nature.” This “archaic” kind of gift sees and remembers so much that in a group of educated people with their systematic, often formula ways of White learning, I seem to be stupid. I was the youngest girl in the hard-working world of a miner’s family, and—not to speak of the racial hatred I felt even before I went to school, Butte society was created and controlled by Whites and one look was enough to see I wasn’t White—for years it was physically impossible for me to speak clearly. I was forced to become a watcher and listener, with all my concentration fixed on surviving, and in my present memories of me then, every action was shaped by that absolute need to defend myself, somehow, in a world where I had no words, protect myself from the yellings and punishments of having always—there was never any getting around it—done something wrong.

  Was my wordlessness then the reason I remember enduring so much hopeless misery? Did I only get attention when I was somehow in trouble, usually backhanded or slapped or knocked down before I was aware of what I had, or had not, really done? It seems that way. For me to acquire the words with which I could explain myself to all the powerful people around me never seemed more than a vague possibility of endless slowness; it took years for the words with which I could explain or defend myself to be gradually, and with great pain, carved and sewn into my face. I had few communicating sounds. For me, living was a long, silent secret where the very act of breathing already made me guilty of something. I did not like to hear myself breathe; it was so loud, so noticeable.

  But born as I was, I had to be aware of my breath moving through the unclosed spaces of my nose and mouth. In fact, breathing became a private thing that boded no good—the low, heavy breathing of another person was a sure sign of pending pain and violence. I knew that if I could hear them breathe, they certainly could hear me—but I had to breathe!—so stay away, keep your distance, never sit with your legs apart, never forget to wear long pants under your dress or they’ll see your panties if you forget yourself and play as a child will play, never talk back, never, ever look them in the eye but listen to every sound, watch, be always alert and ready to outmanoeuvre danger before it’s close enough to catch you.

  But even more difficult, since my abusers were often members of my family or people living with us—Kathy told me once that Dad should never have allowed so many different boys and men to stay at our house while working with us at logging—there was usually no place to really run or hide; eventually a child has to surface in the home where it lives. All I could do was try to know the events of the day in the house, watch if a growing sense of argument or anger or violence was developing, and be ready to make some kind of distance from it for myself; wherever I was in the house, to know where, to know how I could disappear. Try.

  This was my childhood: the world even in my home is uncontrollable and can at any moment burst into violence. I can only react. If I do get caught, I was either careless or asking for it. I am always guilty.

  When did this happen? How?

&n
bsp; I know I was in Earl’s room in the White House. Once when something was pulled down over my head. I was forced facedown on the bed. A pillowcase or something so I couldn’t see who it was, but I did see: dark hair, a rip in a T-shirt. I was enticed into his room and it happened on the bed, not Earl’s bed but the other one in there. I was being kissed, but it wasn’t Earl and I couldn’t breathe since I breathe through my mouth, and this boy—man—was suffocating me, and then there was a sudden great pain, with wetness on me, running down. My face was shoved down into the bed, I was placed on my hands and knees, and his voice telling me things I could not understand, then movements, pressure, something sliding, then pressure again.

  And a terrible ripping pain, and wetness. I tried to scream, to tear myself away, but I was grabbed, twisted back onto my face again, with more ripping. My face was mashed into the mattress, an arm came around my hip and stomach, my body was flying, only my face in the mattress and I could not suck in air to scream, my legs, arms kicking, batting in nothing but air! I would be dead, pain was cutting me in half and I was choking, I would be dead, and he made a long, screaming groan, wet ran all over me. He fell down on top of me on the bed.

  Why was he doing this to me, this horrible pain? What was it? I was crushed under him, but I could gasp and breathe, at last, there was blood all over me, and him, even his T-shirt. I tried to scream and he smothered me against himself, began to wipe at the blood, he talked fast, whispering, laid me on my side and rubbed me, told me we shared a deep secret, the secret that we loved each other, I was his love and own.

  I cannot see who it was, not quite—a dark-haired boy, a torn T-shirt. I was so little and so terrified of those horrible pains ripping through my body, choking. There was no one to tell. No one was in the White House. I did not know why I hurt so much; I hadn’t fallen down and scraped myself to go and show Mom. This boy must have been left to take care of me.

  When he was finished he lay down and fondled me, he said the worst was over, I would stop bleeding, and soon I would like this. It was our secret and I would like everything he did, soon. I was his love for ever because he had had me first.

  He would teach me how to french-kiss—see, this is how you do it. He stuck his tongue in my mouth. I had no roof there yet, so this happened before Grade Four. I had cried so much and I was crying again, mucous flowed from my nose as if I were bleeding there too.

  I remember this. When did it happen?

  As Yvonne and I struggle together with notebooks, letters, public records, and phone calls to find some order of chronology and fact in her past life, we need to begin again—she sees so much of her life, and consequently memory, as contained in the circle of repetition—we must begin again with her childhood place: Butte, Montana.

  Perhaps, better, it should be thought of as Butte, America, the way the Irish workers named it, the hundreds who came there first attracted by the gold and silver along the rivers and then the thousands who arrived to dominate and develop the incredible mountain of copper on which they found themselves. Butte was “American West” only in its location and weather: in reality it was unique to Montana as a mining and industrial island surrounded by trees, a city of mines and smelters sprawling over the top of a 6,400-foot mountain and dominated by industrial tycoons and labour unions and strikes. Historian Joseph Kinsey Howard called it “the black heart of Montana, feared and distrusted”; novelist Ivan Doig found it both marvellous that “in all this wide Montana landscape [there was] a city where shifts of men tunneled like gophers,” and at the same time ominous: it made people “apprehensive, actually a little scared about Butte … something spooky about a place that lived by eating its own guts.”

  And eating its own people, as Yvonne found growing up into her silent awareness of Butte in the sixties and seventies, through criminal police networks and largely corrupt government bureaucracies. The copper glory of “the richest hill on earth” had by then been eviscerated, and even the steady drudgery of underground mining that first brought ex-Marine Clarence Johnson there in 1946 was no more. The mines destroyed his back: in 1969 almost two inches of his spine was removed and he was left permanently disabled, though he continued the independent work he had already begun earlier with his family, cutting poles in the mountain forests.

  But for Yvonne, growing up in Butte was like living in a time warp: all the feelings of the forties, fifties, even the twenties, remained. Most travel was still done by train, for the highway remained a narrow, twisting track around the mountains; miners continued to answer the sirens that signalled shift changes in the few mines still operating. There were ranchers also, and farmers, a few loggers, the lingering stink of gangsters and snoopy, aggressive cops who were often thought of as—and were—one and the same. There were clusters of city for Irish, Italians, Germans, Chinese—but no place for Natives to claim, like skid row in Winnipeg—with bars for miners, saloons for cowboys, taverns for businessmen on every city block filled with regular drinkers, no bouncers anywhere but plenty of drunks, often old men disfigured and worn by drudgery—and sometimes in the company of battered women—as well as old cowboys still sitting at poker tables, gambling in the wide-open saloons.

  Most of these people, she recalls, still thought of themselves as original frontiersmen; for them, Indians remained wagon-burners and wild banshees; for them, the only good Indian was a dead one. Oddly enough, her grandfather “Fightin’ Louie” Johnson was among the very oldest of these old-time cowboys. He was born in Minnesota on 15 April 1876, came to Montana when his parents homesteaded near Ulm, and insisted he had ridden for years in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show—which is possible since that touring “cowboy and Indian” circus continued almost until Bill Cody died in 1917. Grandpa Louie also claimed he had worked for the rancher whose land south of Havre was in 1916 turned over to the refugee Cree from Canada’s 1885 war and became the present Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation. The leader of those Cree, who finally got that land for his people after thirty years of negotiations, was Little Bear, better known in history as Imasees, the oldest living son of the Cree chief Big Bear, Yvonne’s great-great-grandfather.

  When I tell her this history, Yvonne recalls, “We drove that narrow old highway through Ulm, Great Falls, Box Elder, Havre so often across the plains to Red Pheasant in Saskatchewan. Mom once mentioned having possible relations at Rocky Boy, but I don’t remember ever visiting anyone there.”

  The time warp came from Butte itself and the old people who never left: lots of cheap houses for men, like her father, to live in on tiny war and mining pensions; and also from the town dying: eventually all the mines closed, though their rusting headframes still bristled between houses all over the mountain like the erect skeletons of an extinct form of life. By 1982 even the enormous Berkeley Pit stopped devouring the central business district of Butte and could do no more than slowly collect itself into an acidic lake.

  But in a strange way “Fightin’ Louie” was proud of his mixed-blood grandchildren growing up in a Butte that never had any Blacks and only one Chinese café, that detested the faintest evidence of Native skin or long, braided hair; where children yelled “You’re savages! Your ancestors killed my grandparents and Custer!” across school yards. Yvonne thinks that sometimes Louie’s old age loosened his mind into the romantic Wild West notion that they were the Indians who could still, whooping and hollering, knock the shit out of any White cowboy—fists or guns—even though he always considered himself one of the cowboys. When one night a cross was burned in the Johnsons’ White House yard, with yells of “Prairie niggers!” his advice was, “You all stick together, you fight together, every kid covers the other kid’s back, you can lick ’em.”

  Grandpa Louie was ninety-five years old when he attended the funeral of the grandson he most admired, his finest “warrior.” Earl, just twenty years old, laid out in a coffin with his hands folded over his chest, on Saturday, 8 May 1971, for the Mass of the Resurrection celebrated at nine o’clock in St. Patrick’s,
the oldest Roman Catholic church in Butte. A warrior who had lost to the cowboys of the city’s police. In her despair and rage, Cecilia had Earl’s coffin driven from the city in a long procession of vehicles around the shoulder of Big Butte and miles away to the Sunset Memorial Gardens in the fields near the hamlet of Opportunity. Very near Warm Springs, Montana, where she herself would be soon enough, when she committed herself into the psychiatric care of the Montana State Hospital.

  Yvonne: People call us half-breeds in Butte, but they see Grandpa and Grandma Bear and all our relations together from Canada following the coffin and everyone knows we’re really just Indians. When we walk down the street, kids sniff the air and yell to each other, “Indians on the warpath! Redskins coming!” Leon is skinny but tough; he’s always our fighter and protector, just threatening someone with his name is enough to get rid of them. Then they cover their nose and run, yelling, “Johnson germs, you’ll get contaminated from Johnson germs!” But at least they aren’t physically beating us up.

  Or they stick out their lips at me, mumbling, talking funny as they run away. I try to yell back at them, but I can’t shout words very loudly and they scream at me about my scars, my lips, “Your mom’s nothing but a whore, that’s why you’re deformed, you pud-lip freak.” Or, “You got your mouth sucking your brother’s cock, you freak of nature.”

  When I visited Clarence Johnson in Butte he showed me a picture of Cecilia sitting on a bed beside him in 1971. Her body and slender legs seeming to hang, hooked onto the edge of the bed, both of them slack and staring down at the floor.

  “She would just sit, never talked; she cried and cried. Yeah, your mind wants to forget the bad things.” Clarence remembers a fellow Marine saying that to him about the American landing on Tarawa in 1943, where the world ended for 2,700 of their 6,000 buddies and for the 4,500 Japanese soldiers they wiped out; only 17 Japanese survived. “But I can’t forget this—us sitting there. It’s the mental hospital at Warm Springs.”