Stolen Life

by Rudy Wiebe

  I said I wouldn’t let her go alone, and the woman just laughed. “Those guys? You fucked them yourself, every one of them—remember the party in the green house on Pacific?”

  The guys were braying at me from their table, and somehow I knew it was true, I just couldn’t remember. She controlled them in her house and she’d watched them do it. I was enraged, I called her on it then and there, but the bouncer knew I’d clean her clock and pushed me out before I could do it. I put the young girl in a taxi and I swore revenge on each of them, as long as it would take. I beat up two of those fuckers, sitting and laughing at me, later that night when they left the bar, and then I waited till closing time and I got the pimp herself coming out. I have never beaten anyone that badly, but this was a different level of fight and rage: she had won my trust and set me up to be gang-raped, and then she bragged about it.

  It seems to me now I beat her with all the pain and fear and misery for all those people who had violated me and whom I could never catch. Rage for ever bottled and screwed up tight inside me, acts blacked out, or unremembered, but nevertheless still, for ever, there.

  We were off the sidewalk, fighting between parked cars, down on the pavement, and I heard someone shout, “A bus is coming!” I kept hammering her when I heard the swish of the bus, the light gleam on the shiny nuts of the big duels passing two inches from my face. Then someone kicked me in the face and I was out cold. I never saw that woman or those men again.

  Only men can rape and hurt you the way they do but, worse still, sometimes women help them.

  Rape and fight, I guess they go together like blood and miscarriage. I found out the rape had made me pregnant when I lost the foetus after another beating, this time from the brother of a man Mom wanted me to live with. Calvin didn’t like anyone around, anyone to notice what he was doing while she was at work. When Perry came from Butte to live with us in Winnipeg, one of the first things he told me was he woke up to find Calvin peeking under his blankets; in no time Perry was gone, Mom gave him up to the Seven Oaks Home for troubled children. By age sixteen (1982), he was in Stony Mountain Prison for armed robbery; I don’t think he knew his great-great-grandfather Big Bear was in a small cell there in 1885. And I was on the street more than ever. I never told anyone about my miscarriage.

  And yet I tried, I tried. I got day-labour jobs. I was raped again and laid charges and the guy got three years and then walked on appeal for “lack of evidence”; I got arrested for public mischief, ordered to pay a $600 fine. Things were getting worse on the street for me. I got the drunken idea to steal a car and drive to Butte to live with Dad again, but I blacked out and had a severe accident. I was in jail a second time the day John Lennon was shot. I knew I was on the suicide road; I knew as certainly as every beer I swallowed that life on skid row is a slow, sure death. But even in that hopelessness I had a longing to live. I was barely nineteen, and I got away from the endless “parties” in the flophouse by committing myself to a dry-out centre; I tried the Pritchard House for further treatment and attended dry AA socials. I’d been basically sober and working at Swifts Meats when I met Fred at an AA social at the Native Friendship Centre.

  Fred Ferguson was an Ojibwa, single, a hard-rock miner just come into town from Wawa, Ontario, and living on unemployment insurance. A big man, good-looking, he seemed solid and safe, so I asked him if I could move in with him and he said, “Sure.” We went to bed that night and we were together.

  And I was truly lost.

  Mom liked Fred. “He’s the best you’ll get,” she said, “a working man who sobers you up.” So I tried. I got a job in a scrap yard and played the wife, gave Fred what—as I began to find out—his warped sexuality desired. I met him in winter; by summer 1981 he had a job as blast-hole driller with the Eldorado Company in Uranium City, Saskatchewan, and when they flew us up there I realized he had me completely under his control. Uranium City is on the north shore of Lake Athabasca, so far north you can see the Northwest Territories border: the only way in or out was by company plane, and then only if the Eldorado employee gives permission—which Fred never would. I wasn’t there a week and I knew I needed to get out. Going there with him was a brutal mistake.

  Because Fred now has money, he starts to go out a lot, drink, smoke dope, and becomes stingier than ever. I’m so lonely I become a born-again Christian, and I try to become the perfect submissive little wife. I’m terrified of getting thrown out, and there is no one, anywhere, for me to go to. He calls me slut, whore, drunken Indian. Every two bits of cash I get for groceries I have to justify with a store receipt; I can’t stash a penny for an eventual getaway. He monitors my phone calls and tells me stories of how he tricked both his little niece and nephew into playing games with him by having them believe his cock was what he called “monkey.” On Hallowe’en I go out to a tame costume party, and when I come back our apartment door is locked, a new deadbolt inside; he won’t let me in. I sleep on the inside steps of the building, and in the morning he finally opens the door when I agree to his warped sexual demands.

  I tried to fulfil my obligations as wife and house mate, I was fully committed to that, but I didn’t count on abuse. Now I endured him, the way women have to. When I despaired I’d often bump against the thought “It’s just you, Yvonne. Forget it. What can someone like you expect?” We had been together eleven months, but with all my born-again trying I was more than ever alone; I was sober, but Fred said my religion would not keep me sober long. I began to pray and pray for a child. One night as I fell asleep alone again I dared something. I said out loud, “Okay then, God, if you think I’ll make a good mother, give me the gift of a child to love. So I too can find love.” And I never prayed about it again.

  What I knew about sex was: do as you’re told or lie like a log; take it, perform. What I knew about having a baby was nothing. In December my breasts became sore and swollen, and when I stood in front of the mirror I laughed. Hey, I’m filling out at last! Fred and I went to the hospital for tests, and I asked the nurse, “Has the rabbit died already?”—I’d read something about that, somewhere long ago. She laughed and told me nobody did anything like that any more.

  I had promised myself and Earl that, when I was his age, twenty, I too would be dead. But now I was barely twenty and I knew I was pregnant. After all I’d been through, a baby seemed impossible, but there really was another life growing inside me, and it wanted to live. I truly did not understand how I had survived so long on the skids. I drank and fought out of hopelessness and no one in my life had ever asked me for a date. I never met any love like I saw in movies, so gentle and happy and kissing, or had any idea how it could exist in the world I lived in—and yet I had a new life growing inside me. I could not understand, but I knew it was there and I loved it; as I knew it would love me.

  But Fred became worse than ever. Growing bigger, grossly fat, he drank harder and his pounding sex disgusted me. It seemed he was smearing my unborn baby with filth, and sometimes I’d protect her by giving him the warped sex he wanted. I’d bury my face in a pillow and cry, and he was so twisted he thought I liked it.

  I neither drank nor smoked dope once I knew I was pregnant, and my beautiful little Chantal was born on 9 September 1982, in the Winnipeg Women’s Pavilion. We were there because, the winter before, Eldorado Mine with all of Uranium City had shut down, a disaster for thousands of people, but Fred would have lost his job anyway: too many days off drunk. And with his record they could not place him, as they did many miners, at any other mine in the world, so we were in Winnipeg unemployed when Chantal was born. But Mom was there at the birth, and after she came to see us. I hadn’t seen her tears for a long time.

  “All the pain she’ll have to suffer,” she whispered, “her face like that.”

  My first child, my own tiny raz-ma-taz baby. All of Mom’s pain resurfaced while she counted fingers and toes, crying as if she actually understood, at least for a moment, what it was like to live as I had, hiding my face all my life—fo
r there was the cleft in the tiny lip, my inheritance from her mother through her which I had now passed on to her granddaughter. Burden or gift? And Fred cried too. At first he could barely stand to look at her. But the head nurse at the hospital was wonderful. She said there was proper medical attention now, it would be fixed perfectly.

  Mom was having her own difficulties. She had an excellent job at Bristol Aerospace, but she had had to recognize Calvin’s real nature when he ran back to a male lover in Toronto. Fred was beating me as soon as I came home from the hospital—we moved in with his mother for a time, though once I fled to a house for battered women and tried to get Fred arrested—but in the end I went with him to Elliot Lake, Ontario, on the promise he got of a job in the gold mine there. Dead loss that too; he was nothing but a drunk wife-beater now. I found a job training for high-school janitor, but Fred bitched so much about babysitting I got worried for Chantal and finally I gave up and moved back to Winnipeg. He followed me, beat me up again, and then kidnapped her to try and make me come back to him—a real smart persuader, that one—and his family sided with him. The cops’ behaviour was typical: waste time, refuse to accept my charges against him. Chantal was only eight months but already walking, and after two weeks Fred finally gave her back to me because he couldn’t feed her properly, and besides, she was too much trouble to care for all day long. I was living with Mom and wanted out of Winnipeg desperately, and so did she. She had gone to visit her sisters in Alberta, and when she came back she said we should both go to Wetaskiwin, where her sister Rita and her husband, Albert Yellowbird, had started a construction company; they’d give us jobs. So just before Christmas 1983, Karen and her husband drove me and Chantal with all of Mom’s stuff out of Winnipeg. I had to sell what bit of furniture I had left after two years of enduring Fred to pay the expenses.

  Wetaskiwin is little more than five kilometres away from the northern border of the four Cree Nation reserves at Hobbema. This Wetaskiwin job turned out to be bullshit, of course. Albert had gotten a big oil payment from his band at Hobbema, but his construction company came to nothing. Nevertheless it was the best move for me: I was away from the big-city skid, and for four months I was completely independent, which had never happened to me before. Mom lived across town; I ran my own life in a decent apartment on welfare, taking care of Chantal.

  It was wonderful. I played with her all day, every day; I never touched a drink; I never even went out, except to buy groceries down the street from Heritage Apartments. The Alberta winter wasn’t much like Winnipeg’s; chinooks came at the strangest times and the cold and snow melted away. Perry came to live with Mom, and sometimes he’d come over. He was so easygoing and handsome that women—usually older ones—fell for him quickly. His life was sleep, eat, screw, but no problem for me. He never tried to beat me or sass back.

  Playing with Chantal was my life. We sat on the floor, and I dressed her up a dozen different ways every day, combinations of undershirts and dresses and frilly panties and socks and little button shirts and T-shirts and pants, and hats and fancy little coats too—there’s so much to get at a Goodwill Store, every style you can imagine, and you can wash and trade them back in so easily. I never knew such a quiet, good world could be possible with a living child totally dependent on you alone. I never thought about drinking. Teaching Chantal how to eat and potty training and telling her stories, anything I remembered or could make up, and singing all the songs I liked, dancing, showing her the round spaces between her toes, how her hair tangled and all the patterns it could be combed or braided into, playing, everything you can do with a child is play if you love her, are gentle, and care enough.

  Then, in late January 1984, I met Dwayne Wenger and we fell in love. Soon after, Leon got out of prison and appeared from Montana, and of course he moved in on me—you can’t lock out family, at least this Johnson can’t—he knew no one in Wetaskiwin. Within a few days he asked me if I would sleep with him. Amazing: he didn’t just grab and force me, he actually asked.

  I told him, “You’ve got two loves badly mixed up here, sister and lover.”

  “Other sisters do it,” he said. “Why not you?”

  I was shocked. I didn’t dare ask who, I didn’t know what to do except clutch Chantal—was he lying to get me, or telling the truth? Nevertheless he left me alone—but for how long? I couldn’t risk it with him waking up and prowling around any time of the day or night, and so one day I left the apartment to him and moved in with Dwa. Only temporarily, I said. I told him why I feared Leon, but he said he didn’t want to talk about it.

  But when the apartment rent I had paid ran out, Leon moved into Dwa’s garage. I cleaned up the mess he left in the apartment to get my deposit back and fled for help to Mom, who was then in Winnipeg. Frying pan to fire: I got raped by that slimy pig she was living with. In her own bed. I don’t know how I came to be left alone with him or why I was so weak, but I was wearing Mom’s big nightgown and I remember I had no strength to fight him. I tried to protect Chantal curled and sleeping against my stomach and he just put her on the floor and then sexually brutalized me. All I could do was cry as quietly as possible, take it not to wake my baby.

  What’s so special about my ugly body, men forcing themselves into every opening in it—why don’t they just slash open my belly and wash their face in my guts as I die in one piece. At least I’d know it was final. But no, they ram themselves into me and defile my life for ever.

  The guy jumped off when he heard Mom coming; he ran out the back door, having stolen what he could never beat out of me. Mom came in and pulled down my nightgown. I tried to reach her, but my body would not work. I could only try to hold on to her, crying, “It was him, kill him!” Finally I fell asleep and woke to Chantal screaming under the bed. The house was empty. I got her sleeping again and took a bath. I asked Mom for a hundred dollars to leave. Yes, go, you’re better off in Wetaskiwin.

  When I got back from Winnipeg, Dwa and I agreed to live together. He was a new man in my experience: he ran his own small painting business; he had a house with a mortgage; he seemed a responsible, gentle, steady workaholic with a kind of easy stillness about him. His house even had a lot with space for a garden. Best of all, he adored Chantal, and she him. It was time for me, as Dad would say, to bite the bullet of the working class. Bite the bullet and shit out the shells.

  I didn’t want to recognize it then, but Dwa was also an alcoholic.

  7

  Wetaskiwin: The Place Where Peace Is Made

  Neurasthenia: a neurotic state marked by tension and malaise. Neurosis: a functional nervous disorder without demonstrable physical lesions. Neurotic: relating to being or being affected with a neurosis.…

  I would say I suffer from forms of neurasthenia. I would say I am neurotic, but at different levels, usually triggered by neurosis itself. But more on a mental level because of past abuse … relapses into mental anguish and body memories channelled into mental confusion, which in effect cause physical reactions to the nervous system, where all physical, mental, spiritual [faculties] can’t have up-front knowledge to recognize what in effect is happening. Where memories and emotions arise. Yet [my] mental and physical [faculties] couldn’t co-exist then to recognize what was happening. But now I do. I see for the first time in my life, to understand. I am not crazy. I must ponder this idea more.… I was defeated before I recognized it. But now I can put a name to it, to attempt to explain it now. It is not incurable. I can cure myself, since I have a reason that caused it. So if I deal with the reason, then I can work to make the problem go away.

  –Yvonne, Journal 13, 11 November 1994

  WETASKIWIN, a small city of 10,000 people, fifty kilometres south of Edmonton. Growing in a land of milk and oil. Everywhere you drive in your pick-up—whether on the rolling land to the east dotted with poplar coppice and lakes, or to the west where the roads rise to hills and long ridges to the point where, on a clear day, you can discover the thin jagged line of the Rocky Mountains on the s
outhwestern horizon 150 kilometres away—everywhere the round domes of dairy silos sprout, the waste gas flares burn, the iron donkeys sink and heave to suck up oil. Sometimes, from any rise in the road, you see three or four small churches at once—Baptist, Ukranian Orthodox or Catholic, Lutheran, Roman Catholic—with the unique crosses of their cemeteries spread out beside them. The straight section lines of cultivated land are scrawled over by creeks cutting down to the North Saskatchewan River—Pipestone, Conjuring, Strawberry—or blotted by blue lakes—Wizard, Ma-me-o, Dried Meat, Pigeon, Bittern. And everywhere the rich farmsteads spread beyond their shelter belts with cattle feedlots, ranks of pig and chicken barns, machinery sheds, and grain-storage bins. The soil here, created by ancient forests, by glacial retreat, advance, and then another retreat, is black and deep; able to grow any grain or hay under the long, brilliant, northern summer sun.

  Dwayne Joseph Wenger, my workaholic common-law, the best man ever in my life. My grandma Flora once called him “the White Indian,” and Grandpa John liked him too, they became quiet friends. The first time I saw him, even before I said a word, I noticed a screw in his boot holding the sole in place and I knew he was like me, neither rich nor stuck-up but nevertheless with some decent pride in himself, so I looked away so as not to embarrass him.

  Mom was back in Winnipeg, working for Bristol Aerospace, and I was living with Chantal alone in Wetaskiwin. Chantal, my little raz-ma-taz baby. When I was free to care for her properly by myself, away from her father’s interference and brutality, she gave me more happiness than I could have imagined.