by Rudy Wiebe
Dad stands beside me, crying. A man who looks like a doctor bends over me. He opens my mouth. He says to anybody who is listening, “How do you sew up a tongue?”
5
That’s Right, Drive me to Winter
She does not know how to let anyone love her. Love is just a word someone says to get in your pants.
–Yvonne Johnson to Rudy Wiebe, 14 February 1993
IN THE KINGSTON PRISON FOR WOMEN, Yvonne’s memories have moved inevitably from the Johnsons’ brief Cadillac saga to her parents’ permanent split. I listen carefully, take fast notes as usual, but my mind seems imprinted with the prison tour we have made, the residue of her February letter, which explained P4W as a place where “in the span of eighteen months eight women succeeded in killing themselves, and another is in a coma for trying.” Even as I concentrate, jot words and sequences, the images of the antediluvian core of this place—the cell blocks—run like a continuous reel in the back of my mind.
Two and a half years from now a federally appointed judge will describe this place. Yvonne will introduce me to Brenda Morrison, one of the eight Native women strip-searched by the all-male Emergency Response Team on 26–27 April 1994; Brenda will send me a copy of Judge Louise Arbour’s Commission Inquiry into Certain Events at the Prison for Women in Kingston, and she will inscribe the book: “April 3, 1996 / To Rudy Wiebe / I give you this book to read with understanding.…”
Judge Arbour’s description of the prison is precise and damning:
… an old fashioned, dysfunctional labyrinth of claustrophobic and inadequate spaces holding 142 prisoners of all security levels, minimum through maximum. It has been described as “unfit for bears.” It is inadequate for living, working, eating, programming, recreation, and administration. Spaces are poorly ventilated and noisy … reached through narrow corridors, steep stairwells, and innumerable locked barriers.… Surrounded by an enormous wall … the building has the characteristics of a [male] maximum security institution.
“Unfit for bears”—how unwittingly apt for Yvonne, the great-great-granddaughter of Big Bear, and whose spiritual power comes from the Bear’s Spirit. In our tour of P4W, I had one glimpse through bars down one long range of fifty-four cells stacked in two tiers of twenty-seven stone cells, one above the other. Each cell is nine by six feet, and there are two of these tiered stone ranges, A and B, built back to back. Yvonne could take me no closer than a glimpse: there was no way the female guards grouped and staring at us grimly through the entrance bars would slide them open for us.
Yvonne’s “house” is in the Wing, which provides relatively better accommodation: fifty small rooms with tiny windowed doors, no bars or mesh except on the outer perimeters. She reached an agreement with the guard in the cubicle at the entrance to her narrow corridor, and then she asked me, “Please, don’t look to either side: the doors are open but people don’t like to be looked at.” So I controlled my curiosity, Yvonne called out, “Man on the floor!”, and I walked a step behind her, past doors, with my eyes straight ahead in the glaring bare light.
To her house. At the end of the corridor, just wide enough for a bed placed lengthwise under the small, curtained window. Tightly filled with the little she now has to live with: narrow clothes cupboard, a small table for a “kitchen,” another for writing piled with a typewriter and papers, her tape collection and a tiny TV received from an inmate who had served her time.
Yvonne leaves the door open as she points out her things; with both of us inside, there is just space to turn around without bumping into each other. Close outside the barred window is the corner of the stone wall. “I can turn out this light,” Yvonne says, “and with the door closed it’s a little darker. In prisons the lights are on twenty-four hours.”
“But … there’s so much noise.”
“You learn—your pillow is for on top of your head, not under.”
Whatever order and security existed in the Johnson family, whatever stability might have developed as the children grew into adults, any united family possibilities, however tenuous, disappeared with the split between Cecilia and Clarence. And what happened in the lawyer’s office between Yvonne and her parents—the decision she then made—still resonates deeply in her memories.
“All us kids—Leon, Karen, Minnie, Kathy, me, and Perry—were lined up on chairs outside, and I was called in last. Even Perry was called in before me. The lawyer was smiling across his big desk, Dad sat on one side and Mom on the other. That lawyer said nothing, so finally I asked him,
“ ‘Who’s going with Mom?’
“ ‘So far,’ he said, ‘they’re all going with her.’
“Well, I knew Leon would for sure and Karen figured, and Minnie, but—’Even Kathy and Perry?’
“ ‘Yes.’
“ ‘Who’s staying with Dad?’
“ ‘Nobody.’
“I thought Mom looked cocky, like she does when she wins—despite her obvious pain of this pulling apart. Dad sat bent forward on his elbows, then he threw back his shoulders and head, brushed his curls flat on his head like he always does with his right hand, and stared straight ahead, stiff as a Marine.
“Oh, I remembered the pictures of Mom, so beautiful when she was sixteen. Slender and stunning with her olive skin, black eyes, and long black hair—every Indian in Great Falls must have been nuts about her. I’m sure there was plenty of growing-up to do after nothing but priests and nuns and five prayers every day and seven on Sunday. She knew exactly what she wanted: she married a tall, blue-eyed, curly-blond American ex-Marine. And a short time later she took him back to Canada with her—to the Thunderchild Residential School as they had named it, though Chief Thunderchild had never allowed anyone to baptize him—the school she had survived and somehow gotten out of at age fourteen just before it burned down to its very foundations in a fire of unknown origin (but it still continued, of course—the Roman Catholic church can never permit a fire, no matter how big, to wipe out its program), and with her big White American husband standing beside her Cecilia told the priests and nuns she was taking every one of her younger brothers and sisters away: Richard, Evelyn, Rita, Roy: she was married, she was of age, she had a home in Montana, and she would be their guardian—her family needed no residential school, she would take care of them.”
And Clarence in his Butte house shows me the pictures of the beautiful teenage Cecilia he met in a bar in Great Falls; who married him in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in late 1950. Earl was born in January 1951.
“Yeah,” Clarence continues, “and besides that we had all her younger brothers and sisters in Butte, different ones at different times in the fifties, till they got bigger, before our girls were born. I helped raise those kids, all except Josephine, the oldest. I worked in the mines—hell that was work, those narrow shafts, and deep!—and brought in the money and she cooked and cared for them. Once when they hauled her little brother Roy off to a foster home she went after them and said, ‘Where’s my boy, where’ve you got my kid?’ and she took him away from them, right out of their car. Even after they were grown up they’d come here when they got in trouble, or me and her’d haul them back across the line to Saskatchewan because their parents were living together on Red Pheasant again. We raised those kids with Earl and Leon in the fifties, and their kids were here often enough too. Ask them, there’s dozens, they always knew there’s a place here.”
Yvonne tells me, “I told that lawyer, ‘I want to stay with my dad.’ ”
I ask her, “Why did you do that?”
She answers quickly, “I love Dad. I felt sorry for him, all alone.” And after a pause, she continues thoughtfully in her resolute, self-searching way. “He looked so crushed … but not just that. I thought if I was an only child, if he only had me, I’d get everything. Huh!” She laughs sardonically. “I should have known all I was going to hear from him was, ‘I can’t afford it.’ ”
The Caddy was gone—repossessed and hauled away—and Cecilia had a Ford pick-up tru
ck, black and so old the floorboards of the box were wood with steel bracing. She packed everything she could into it, piled high, tied down under canvas. Clarence had the flat-bed logging truck, and he and Yvonne followed the pick-up. There was some delay about how many children the Americans would let Cecilia take with her—and then her truck wouldn’t start. Clarence had to push it to the top of a hill to start it rolling down across the border into Canada.
In Butte, Yvonne had to face the little bigots of Webster-Garfield School alone. Though she had missed twelve of forty-five days of school in the previous quarter, her performance in every subject was simply checked as “S”—satisfactory—and at the end of May 1973 she was promoted into Grade Six. It was the last year she would receive a regular report card.
“In June, after school, Dad took me north to Taber, Alberta,” Yvonne tells me. “Mom and our whole family was working there, hoeing sugar beets. Her oldest sister, Auntie Josephine, was there too, and her oldest daughter, Shirley Anne, who was shacked up with a White guy——”
Yvonne breaks off; she rises to her feet, picks up our coffee cups, and goes out quickly. When she comes back, her cap is pulled down low over her grim face; we drink barely warm coffee.
Finally I ask, “What’s the matter?”
“Oh, nothing …” she begins, but she’s too honest to deny herself. “Shirley Anne.” And I know: accused with Yvonne in the murder, she actually served only a year for aggravated assault. “I can’t mention her,” she murmurs. “I get upset.”
Then she adds in a rush, “She’d lived with us quite often in Butte before. I remember Shirley Anne when I was little in the White House: she’s ten years older than me. I would watch Shirley Anne, I didn’t know anything about her then, or what she was doing, I was a little kid, and she’d spend all morning putting on make-up, taking it off, putting it on, and most of the afternoon too, and then she’d go out for the evening. That’s all she did.”
She sits there, pulled together and small in her chair. After a while I remind her, “You were talking about thinning beets in Taber. That June, after the separation.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I … we were in Alberta all summer, and I went with Mom to Red Pheasant when we were through. Dad didn’t thin any beets. He dropped me off and drove back to Butte. He was alone until I got sent to him again, I think it was after getting in a fight in school in Saskatchewan that fall.”
When did this happen? How?
I am small and I’m being taken—stolen away?—into Canada, Mom is taking me. Leon has escaped from Swan River Reformatory or maybe it’s Miles City, and he has to get over the border into Canada too, and Dad can never buck Mom once she’s made up her mind, but he warns her: nothing happens to Vonnie. And she agrees, Yes yes, Vonnie will get to Red Pheasant safe and sound.
Leon is sitting on the hood of the car with a flashlight, Mom is driving very slowly, carefully, down a dirt trail. She avoids, she follows the high running lights of semi-trailers, but we’re barely moving, she crawls along, concentrating ahead so hard her big chest pushes against the wheel, she has to stay within sight of the top row of tiny lights but the huge truck churns so much dust or when it dips into a hollow she can mostly see nothing, the flashlight is caught like a broken pencil in the rolling dust of darkness. A huge black shape sits in front of us, Leon.
The car is stopped. Outside the open windows the grey line of land rises into a double-hump of immense, high hills, I cannot tell how far away. There are stars and the twitchy sounds of sweet summer grass singing. The car motor clicks, clicks when Mom switches it off. The dash lights cut sharp shadows on her face; she looks angular like Big Bear in the photograph taken in jail almost a hundred years ago where he seems to be staring into the sun forever. We are driving to my grandma’s place in Canada. Grandpa John will be there and he’ll say nothing to me, but Grandma Flora will, in Cree, which I do not understand but I know anyway.
The yellow car lights feel carefully along the endless gravel road going north. For days and nights I am going to sleep on the floor in that corner of Grandma’s grey house behind her warm woodstove. She will do ceremonies on me to help me forget.
In the counselling room inside P4W Yvonne explains to me:
“Dad’s a binge drinker: he’ll sober up for months and then he’ll drink for months. After they split up, for a long time he drank more than ever. He’d sit and cry in his drunkenness. For a while Perry was brought back to live with us and I watched him.”
“Didn’t you have to go to school?” I ask. “You were in … what … Grade Six?”
“Dad didn’t work steady, he was on the small pensions he has now—I can’t remember, not much. But I know Elvis Presley had a song out then, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Please Don’t Cry.’ A man who was in the war with him would be there, drinking too, and he’d razz Dad:
“ ‘That time, your Indian woman sure hung a licken on you!’
“ ‘Yeah,’ Dad would say, ‘but my back was broke then.’
“ ‘Sure sure, and the next thing you’ll say you was dead drunk too!’
“ ‘Hell, you gotta stop the pain somehow!’
“They’d drink and talk about the gruesome stuff they saw in the war, competing with each other. Dad said he saw a man blown in half, and the jungle grew so fast, the next day grass was growing through his guts and out of his asshole.”
Twelve-year-old Yvonne cooked what she could: “Spaghetti, beans and wieners, beans from a can, pancakes that turned out to be five-pounders, a lot of peanut butter and bread. Dad went out on his drinking sprees. During one of my stays in Canada someone gave Dad two dogs, Prince and Princess, and he’d moan they were all he had, all that loved him—and I was sitting there. I stayed, and he drank till he passed out, pitying himself, and never offered me a touch of comfort. It was just as well I guess; a man’s touch was never anything but dangerous.”
I have brought copies of various papers with me from Butte, and together Yvonne and I try to puzzle some order into the records of her life between 1973 and 1978. There are almost no objective data to guide us. Even Clarence’s cardboard box held only a few dated disciplinary notes:
West Junior High School: Yvonne suspended one week for smoking, [signed] George Foley, January 6, 1975
West Junior High School: Yvonne involved in a fight within the classroom, [signed] R. Kuecks, 1–17–75
West Junior High School: Yvonne suspended for two days for skipping classes, [signed] Miss E. Nixon, Jan. 6, 1977
Clarence has no report cards beyond Grade Five, May 1973. Yvonne has memories of a school-yard fight in Cando, Saskatchewan (where she would have gone with her sisters by bus while they lived on Red Pheasant Reserve), and getting her mouth damaged and being sent back to Butte for the continuing operations paid for there by the U.S. Crippled Children’s Fund; of a time in junior high in Bell School, Winnipeg (Cecilia had gone there to work), where she mostly played hookey in the girls’ room; of a school in Leaf Rapids in far northern Manitoba where she “fell in love.” It may be that in spring, 1974, after they left Leaf Rapids, both she and Kathy returned to stay with Clarence in Butte; she is certain she refused to return to Webster-Garfield alone and was sent to McKinley School, which she remembers as much quieter for her.
Clarence tries to explain to me the endless movements of children between wherever Cecilia was working in Canada and himself stationary in Butte:
“Vonnie lived with me for quite a while, and so did Kathy sometimes. Perry was with me a lot as a little guy, when Cecilia was working somewhere. But Karen and Minnie never came back here for long; they’d show up one day and then be gone before I knew it. All the kids back and forth. Once the four girls were here together. By then Cecilia couldn’t do nothing much with them either, and I was sitting here, and them asking each other, ‘You going back to Mom?’ They couldn’t agree. They’d go uptown to the bars, and next day they’re off, all back up to Canada.
“Leon … he was back and forth as he liked when he wasn�
��t in jail either here or there, often running from one country or the next ’cause he was in trouble. In Butte I’d know all about him from the papers: he’d live with a girl and was in the papers every week, drunk or smashing something, paying a fine or slopping out the jail to work it off. He’s never worked except in jail, he can’t work: he lives off the girl, Welfare, and thinks he’s so smart and strong he’s the ultimate of all creation—he actually talks like that. He must have six, seven kids at least, and I can’t let him into my house any more: he’ll just take what he wants and if I tried to stop him he’d break my back. When he shows up now I talk to him on the porch; if he wants to come in, I tell him I’ll call the police. He laughs or swears, but he never gives me any trouble that way.”
Yvonne tells me school had never helped her learn much of anything except how to disappear. And how to fight, although as she grew older the speech-therapy classes they gave her and the continued plastic surgery aided her a little in coming out of her silence. She had taught herself to read by breaking words into parts and pronouncing them in her head, following the model of speech therapy, and during Grade Six in McKinley School her teacher “didn’t bug me”—which meant he ignored her if she caused him no trouble—and she would go to the library and read on the machines where the text would be illumined for a brief time, and you read it and then tried to answer the questions that followed. It became a game: she practised setting the light for shorter and shorter periods until she could answer correctly as fast as the reader could be set. She read half The Godfather and other books she found interesting. There had never been any books at home, except for a set of Bible-story books that her mother bought from a travelling salesman. The only time she spoke up in grade school, it was because she loved Charlotte’s Web. One entire winter she never played hookey in the afternoon because the teacher was reading that book aloud to the class.
