by Rudy Wiebe
An ironic name for us Bear-Johnsons, Wetaskiwin, “the place of peace … the hills where peace was made.” I found the meaning a few blocks from the apartments where I lived, a granite stone cairn with a marble slab explaining, one word in Cree, one in Blackfoot, and the rest in English:
Wetaskewin Spatinaw
erected July 1, 1927 in commemoration
of Treaty of Peace made in these Hills
Between the Blackfoot and the Cree Indians
1867
Perhaps our great-great-grandfather Big Bear helped negotiate that peace between his people and the Blackfoot: he never found any with the Canadian government. The buffalo haven’t existed here for over a hundred years, but it seems that even in the twentieth century my family are still nomadic hunters, in cars now and hunting Indian jobs, searching out relatives or friends who will help them or, as a last resort, hunting White welfare. And still trying to avoid the White law that rules everywhere, avoid its jails with their doors open like traps, waiting to slam shut on us.
Mom’s oldest sister Josephine lived in Wetaskiwin then, moving between her apartment in town and the Hobbema reserves south of town. The four Hobbema Cree Nations—whose total population is almost equal to that of Wetaskiwin itself—are the resource-wealthiest reserves in Canada; their oil royalties are so big that for a while, when a young person turned eighteen, they were given anywhere from eighteen to seventy thousand dollars in one lump. Often they headed straight for Auto Row in Wetaskiwin, where smooth car salesmen were waiting to sell them the biggest vehicle they could. At times they took up apartments in Wetaskiwin, and lived by moving back and forth between city and reserve; then the tensions between Natives and Whites often ran very high. The easy-going, partying life-style—some called it lawless living—of the Cree often bumped into the White members of the more than twenty churches and missions, many with strong fundamentalist Christian beliefs, who were the middle-class property and business owners of the city. After some years this lump payment was stopped: the social problems on the reserves became almost overwhelming, with accidental and suicide death rates among young people six times the national average.
Auntie Josephine had been moving back and forth between Wetaskiwin and the four reserves at Hobbema for a few years, and when I came into town I found a place in the Heritage Apartments, where one of Mom’s brothers and his common-law lived on the first floor, and her youngest sister Aunt Rita lived with Albert Yellowbird on the third. Rita was still very pretty, but not what she was when she lived with us in Butte—she told Mom she thought some jealous woman was doing Indian medicine on her to make her ugly quicker—but I thought it was more likely age and hard living. Minnie arrived soon after me, and through her I met a White man named Dale; I went to bed with him once and he moved right in on me, sponging off me. I didn’t know how to tell him to get lost.
I didn’t know how to lock the door on anyone; family was always bothering me. Soon it was Perry, which was not too bad, but then my cousin Shirley Anne—Aunt Josephine’s daughter; we hadn’t met for a long time—who was between shack-ups and had insurance money to blow, passed her two teenage girls off on me while she went to party until the money was gone. That was typical for her. I got along well enough with her girls then, especially the youngest, who liked school at that time. I stayed home, until one cold late January night I thought, what the hell, I’m going out—maybe then I’ll get enough guts to kick Dale out.
I took Chantal to a woman friend in the next apartment and called a cab. The cab driver who answered had given me a ride once before: it was Lyle Schmidt. He looked at me hard when I got into the front seat—I never did that in his cab again—and for all my street living I didn’t recognize what the look meant, but I remembered later.
“You want to go for a drink somewhere? All alone?” And he laughed, as phoney a laugh as I’ve ever heard. “There’s only two bars in this fucken town!” And he drove me to the farthest one. The Wayside Inn south on the highway, all of six minutes away. His radio was on loud, with Doc Hook singing “Penicillin Penny”:
They say she’s loved so many that she gives ’em all numbers …
She calls me one thousand and one.
I had a beer alone in the Wayside, relaxing, watching a video on the big bar screen. Then I noticed a man standing by my table. “Mind if I sit down?” he asked.
Dwayne Wenger. Long hair, stocky, a bit shorter than me, nice flared nose in a quiet face. His baggy jeans were his “uptown” clothes, but even they were speckled by the thousands of paint cans he must have opened—looking seventies hippy, like I remembered them—with muscular arms from all his painting, his shoulders squared back and eyes friendly, not cocky and condescending like most White guys on a pick-up. I thought, this one won’t be hard to handle if he gets out of line.
So he sat down and offered to buy me a drink, but I said, “No thanks.” I thought, I buy my own beer and owe him nothing. He sipped water at first—he said, “I want to sober up and not miss you!”—but after a bit he ordered beer too. I didn’t know then that he couldn’t stop himself drinking, that he sipped whisky steadily all day long while he worked. He wore work boots crazy with paint, and that screw held the rim of one sole together, and we talked. He liked nature, he’d gone to California after he finished high school to study to become a herbalist and he seemed so natural, genuinely happy-go-lucky and not at all snooty, like so many Whites in Wetaskiwin I despised, who hated the oil-rich Hobbema Cree, and sneered and treated them like dirt even while they exploited them for their businesses. Talking to me, Dwa seemed so straightforward and strangely innocent; not tricky or game-playing.
After a time I talked too. The P.A. was playing like crazy, and here was a stranger who didn’t push me, he listened. And I told him about the mountains in Montana where I was born and grew up. Butte, Montana, the Richest Hill on Earth as they called it, a mile high and a mile deep, really the asshole of the world, the stomping ground of the one and only Evel Knievel, who did show-off motorcycle wheelies in every parade and whom I detested, and how our house sat on the rim of the giant open-pit mine before it swallowed our lot and the house vanished, and how our family cut poles in the high timber when my brother Earl was still alive and I was little, I ran like a whisper under the branches of the pines. I could be so quiet: once I came up on a cougar stretched on a rock just below me, very close. I could have reached out and touched its bright skin, the muscles flexing under it like water. The cougar was watching my family work, and I did too—my mom and Leon and sisters piling brush, my dad and Earl placing the posts one by one onto our flat-deck truck. I told Dwayne Wenger all those things no one ever listened to, and I never could speak to anyone anyway, I was silent, especially with White men, but somehow this stranger invited words, so easy, and I felt natural, open, letting them run out. He sipped beer and listened.
I even told him how hard it was to deal with my life, that I couldn’t stand up to anyone, including Dale, whom I didn’t even like but who wouldn’t get out of my apartment, who thought we were shacked up. How I hated myself for not being able to get rid of him, teetering on a tightrope and this was my night out as protest. And then Dwayne got up and walked away, into the Men’s, and alone suddenly I felt ridiculous talking and talking like that.
In fact, I knew I was lucky he left when he did. I had been hinting enough, maybe I’d been about to blurt out how often I thought of killing myself.
When Dwayne came out, he stopped by another table. He bent over one of the men there and laughed, and the man looked around at me, smiled and laughed too. But then he came back, and sat down beside me again. His painty boot. He looked at me till I looked up.
“I was telling my buddy over there,” he said. “You’re the woman I’m going to marry.” And then, when I didn’t say anything, I didn’t know where to look, he said to my bent head, “Do you like to dance?”
They were playing “Jump” by Van Halen and we were dancing on the Wayside parquet dancing fl
oor. How I love to dance. He wasn’t shy; he liked to dance too, so light on his feet. Perry and Dale came into the bar and I told him, “The slim one’s my little brother, the other the guy I was telling you about.” After our dance we sat with them. Dwayne bought everyone a beer, then Dale ordered a complete tray and drank it all down, one after another, not even coming up for air. Dwayne sat across from me and we continued to talk. He understood what I thought of Dale and he passed me his phone number. Dwayne told me about the nice houses he painted, even the cells of the Wetaskiwin jail; he was inside everything with his brush and roller and drippy cans. But then Dale began to loll and sag and they were going to throw him out; it was really cold that night, so we hauled him out instead and headed for Heritage Apartments. We were in Dwayne’s painting van, a big, boxy 1961 Chevy, pretty cold, and the three of us sat up front while Dwayne drove and Dale rolled around, stretched out among the paint cans in the back.
Even with a few beers I didn’t know how to act around Dwayne Wenger. I was so attracted to him, the way he danced with me, I got a kick out of his paint polka-dots and the screw in his boot. And then we were driving under a streetlight and I saw his face clearly, a big man, sombre and serious, and I knew he was playing the game with me he’d started when he spoke to his friend at the other table, a love game, and I could sense he was absolutely serious about it when he said to me, though talking to Perry, “Can I kiss your sister?”
I wouldn’t have known what to answer. I felt no strength in myself, I was shy, giggly like a young girl—embarrassed almost—but I didn’t make a sound. I didn’t feel like saying anything, not yet.
But Perry answered; he wasn’t even eighteen yet, but serious as could be too. “What are you asking me?”
“I’m asking for a date with your sister.”
And Perry spoke carefully, as if he was explaining something very important, very exactly; I couldn’t believe he knew how to think or talk like that:
“I have to tell you something about my big sister. I can tell she likes you, and you should know this—Vonnie is a very romantic person.”
We all burst out laughing; we were kidding around, avoiding something special. I wanted to have a date—when in my life had I ever had a date?—and it all suddenly seemed too heavy and there was the Heritage and I had to get Chantal and my key from the babysitter and I was running around, and Dwayne Wenger hadn’t come up to the third floor with everyone else. I hadn’t said anything to him, but I was thinking of nothing else—what do I say to him? what?—and knowing if he listened I wanted to talk all night. I was running around, so busy with my sleepy baby, and Perry was laughing with stupid Dale—who was awake enough to laugh now—they must have just ditched Dwayne in the hall and he was too shy—I looked out the window to see if I could catch him, but on the street under the light was a space of blank snow. He was gone.
I was holding Chantal and staring around, dazed. Perry said, “Dale’ll sleep it off, I’m going,” and he was gone too.
A baby asleep and a drunken mooch in the next room snoring off a trayful of beer. Sit alone in an apartment, some sixties songs on the stereo, snow crawling across the little balcony outside: live for months, motionless, just deal with what comes minute by minute and don’t move, don’t think, avoid, avoid, and then one small, sudden, hurt and the pain that’s always waiting inside by the year kicks over into impossible. I always was so scared Mom was right, I was truly crazy, and how can a crazy woman raise a beautiful child? I instantly liked Dwa so much, but he’s gone and I’m still stuck with Dale—I thought, I’m a loser, I’ve left it too long.
In the bathroom cabinet were two large brown bottles of multicoloured pills. Shirley Anne’s girls must have lifted them from behind a drugstore counter. They looked as if there were enough. I slammed them all back, opened my throat and poured them down with a pitcher of water. The songs sounded far away, I was getting groggy … but I needed to see Chantal once more. I stood by her bed. I had survived my life without love … but I loved her. I was capable of love now, I knew it. I did not really want to die, because I did not want to let go of Chantal … but … I wanted to let the pills make the choice of life or death, let the pills decide—or God, if there is one … like a child with continual abuse, you lie and take it, knowing you will surely die, there’s too much brutality to live, and yet if you do survive once more you accept that outcome too, that’s the way life happens to happen, what could you do about it, maybe next time.
But I wanted my baby near me, whatever the pills or God or both decided. I picked her up, I would lie down carefully on the couch with her, I was slipping away and I would never drop her, no, but she fell and I tried to pick her up—my hands wouldn’t work, I couldn’t balance, I fell to the floor beside her, crying, and Chantal was awake, she knew something was wrong, she tried to help me up. I cradled her head, whispered, “Mommy loves you, it’s okay, Mommy.…”
But she started to scream. I lay with tears running over my face. I should have left her sleeping in her bed.
Dale stumbled out and saw me. He phoned Emergency; an ambulance came. I felt I was deep inside myself, like padded walls; perhaps I hung on by listening, and the ambulance attendant helped: he slung me over his shoulder and carried me out, swearing about stupid women, mothers, drunken Indians, why don’t they just go off in the bush and die like they do in the movies, or a car crash, oh no, I have to carry her sorry ass all the way down from the third floor!
They wouldn’t take Dale along. The nurse called him so stupid—he had put on his own jacket and brought Chantal out in her night clothes—and what was an Indian woman doing with a guy like that anyway, trying to pass her baby off as White? I could see the lights flashing as the ambulance rolled and cornered, and a silly song did too: “When they come to take you down, when they bring that wagon ’round … and drag your poor body down … please forget you know my name, my darling Sugaree …” whining around corners, the nurses in Emergency rolling me out of the cold on a gurney, sarcastic and joking:
Woman: “Another Indian trying to kill herself?”
Man: “Too drunk to do it right, she’s just a mess.”
Woman (laughing): “So what do we do with her?”
Man: “I guess our civic duty.”
They all laughed, the man giving them more punchlines about Indians—their Emergency got so many damaged and dead people from the Hobbema reserves we’d become a joke—the women laughing at his cracks. An older nurse was working on me, she tried to get me to drink something black and foul and ordered a tube, when another nurse came and said that stupid guy was in the next room with the baby, raising hell.
And I heard Chantal cry. With that peculiar sound of baby desperation; she had never had to cry that way before. I was stretched out with a will to die, but her screams called for me. I whispered, “I want my baby, please …”
One nurse said, “She’s coming in and out,” and the other one working on me was more sarcastic than ever, “… her kid’s screaming and she lying here, useless woman …”
Now I just wanted to get Chantal and leave, all their insults—doing their “civic duty” on me while their self-righteousness chopped me in pieces. And as always my defence was offence; my arm shot out and grabbed the nurse by the throat, and she hit me in the chest, trying to make me let go. I had just one hand on her; I was lying motionless in too much pain to move. They were keeping the shell of my life alive and insulting my spirit, and another nurse ran up swearing about dumb Indians, so I let go the first and punched her in the mouth. Then the male nurse jumped on my stomach, hit me in the jaw, and pinned my arms until the nurses got my arms and knees strapped down. Chantal was wailing so close, and I was finished, limp as meat. Completely strapped flat, I broke down and cried.
The head nurse was gentle. “You never know how much they can hear.” She was wiping my face.
I wanted desperately to help my baby and they worked on me spewing words as if I was a plank—Do we really have to do this? Y
ou help these people and they choke you, punch you in the face—but finally the head nurse said if I calmed down they’d bring the baby, and then Dale brought Chantal to me. They unstrapped one arm so I could hold her. She stopped sobbing, she crawled onto me, hugging me, and I knew I had to live. I was whispering to her, “Mommy loves you. It’s okay, it’s okay sweetheart, Mommy loves you.”
Touching her, I felt overwhelming shame and guilt. I told Dale to take her to my aunt at the Heritage, and I swallowed their tube then, right down into my stomach. I passed out when the pumping started and came to in a hospital bed with my whole body ringing the way it does from an overdose. Pills creep up on you, they take too long and you can get stopped and be dragged back with your body ringing your self into life again like a thousand tiny church bells. Better to use a gun quick—and for sure.
My mother came with Aunt Josephine—Mom had driven back from Winnipeg to pick up her stuff, so now she was here on time to report to the whole family about my suicide attempt. They came to the hospital to see me loaded with tubes. But the two barely spoke to me; they always talked Cree to each other so we kids wouldn’t understand them, and since in our family kids don’t talk to their elders unless spoken to—Mom says that’s the Native way—it didn’t much matter. However, all their lives my mother and her sister have played a kind of cruel game, a competition about who’s tougher in punishing their kids. Josephine has two daughters and a son, and in front of Mom she always calls Shirley Anne and Darlene down unbelievably—never Carl of course; sons are always perfect, especially only sons. So now to prove how strict she was, Mom really got into me. In English, running up one side of me and down the other, irresponsible, stupid, thick numbskull, nuts, crazy, slicing me into slivers—why o why didn’t I speak Cree? It has no vocabulary for abuse like this—while Aunt Josephine listened carefully, nodding, and I had to take it. You don’t talk back to your mother.
