Stolen Life

by Rudy Wiebe

  Nevertheless, inside the comfort of our little house and bed, I found the nightmares were like a continual video being replayed over and over, the grotesque reality of my life winding on, without end.

  And when I was without Dwa they were worse.

  With Dwa in prison my life started to rock; the vultures of my family moved in. I could not keep them away, I could not lock the door of the house and not answer when I knew they were out there because they would peek in the windows to see me and gossip among themselves, or more likely they’d break in and there I would be—why hadn’t I opened the door? What was the matter with me? Too high and mighty, eh, with my man in jail for impaired like everybody else? Even the aunt I liked best came around with a guy—she was “marking him in,” as they say. She passed out drunk on my bed and left me, pregnant as I was, with this strange man in the house. I finally escorted him out the door with the help of an unloaded rifle.

  My cousin Shirley Anne and her two teenage daughters were the worst. I was suffering terrible loneliness. Before Dwa got sent off, we went to a reunion in his home town of Swan Hills and he cheated on me with two girls from his past. Now Shirley Anne moved in on me. Her oldest daughter was shacked up, and when the youngest said she wanted to live with me to go to school, Shirley Anne was afraid she’d be cut from welfare. I said yes to her daughter because I wanted to help her, but Shirley Anne and my aunt threatened to report me to the cops as an unfit mother who shouldn’t be getting any support, whose kids should be taken away. That was a standard tactic: control each other by reporting on each other to Social Services. Welfare revenge, I call it.

  I was pregnant and desperate about Chantal and James. I couldn’t take it, so I let Shirley Anne’s daughter go. I locked up the house, put the two kids in the van, and headed south across the border to Dad in Butte.

  Leon was back in prison, so I was safe from him, though he threatened me from there through Mom about Dwa having tried to sleep with his woman when she visited us in Canada. I knew that was a lie. Then Mom called me from Wetaskiwin and told me the news, all in one breath:

  “Your house is broken into and everything’s smashed and you got robbed, but I checked your mail and you got a cheque and I want the cash for the van you never finished paying me for, and I nailed your house door shut.”

  Dad came back with me to Wetaskiwin and we fixed up the damage. He stayed for a while. We visited Dwa, and I got him home on passes, and finally they released him to me on probation.

  My father and Dwa did not get started well. “It’s a hell of a thing,” Dad said to me. “A man meets his son-in-law for the first time in jail.”

  Once before, when I couldn’t take Dwa’s alcoholism any more and I thought of leaving him, I phoned Dad to come help me move back to Montana. I was at my wit’s end, and Dad was always fixed in one place there at the end of his telephone in his little seventy-year-old house shoved full of stuff, with Earl’s old van still inside the rotten garage and our rusty logging truck with its cable and pulley on the tripod hoist parked behind the fence in the yard. He said he’d come to get me and my kids, but I’d owe him. At the time I thought he was talking about work, but he wasn’t.

  I didn’t have to go then, but later he asked me, “What did you think I meant, work? What work do I need?”

  I said I thought he meant clean up his place. It was like a porcupine’s den, a dark hole where the dirt and droppings the old guy leaves behind trail into his sleeping area.

  “Work, hell. I knew what you’re doing, no matter where you live and how many common-law husbands and kids you have. I’m a man and men need it in bed, you knew that.”

  I was always his daughter whom he loved, but, no matter how I lived, it seemed that to him I was also a whore. How to understand that? Though I should have known: that was the way he himself lived. Sometimes when we visited him he’d be sitting in his dark house, blinds shut and TV on, with one of two Butte sisters who traded off on him in his bed. If he was on a binge, he’d sit with them in his lap in his mouldering chair, smiling, sucking a thin black cigar. But at the time I called him I had forced from my memory what he did to me at sixteen, when I was hurt and made the mistake of coming to him for comfort.

  My White father and grandfather abused me, but my Cree grandfather, John Bear, never touched me. He was very quiet, a dark, lean man in denim work clothes and broad-brimmed hat, a silent sadness carved on his sharp face. As if he was never inside a building, always the open air, in the poplar bush and clearings, like Allan Sapp of Red Pheasant painted him. I saw that picture once in a magazine, a beautiful painting like a crystal; the winter air hangs in hoar frost over the trees and sky and horses and the long load of poplars he has cut to haul home to Grandma on his sled for firewood. Grandpa John sits deep in the snow beside a tiny fire, drinking tea from a small, black pail.

  Grandpa John Bear was a quiet man. He spoke very little when he came to Butte, or when we visited them in Red Pheasant: he rarely spoke English at all. When I was alone with them on the reserve, he left me undisturbed with Grandma Flora; he never so much as looked directly at me that I can remember. He must have known how deeply troubled I was as a child—he understood when Leon was hurting his grandchild Darlene, Aunt Josephine’s second daughter, and took her out of our house—but he left me to Grandma’s care. I love his memory for that, and also because I know he loved Earl. Dad has a framed snapshot under glass on the wall above his TV: Grandpa John and Earl together, head and shoulders only, their faces leaning close together. Beautiful of them both.

  When Grandpa and Grandma Bear came from Red Pheasant to Butte for Earl’s funeral—Great-Grandma Baptiste, Kokhum, was 108 years old and couldn’t come—I don’t remember Grandpa John saying a word, even in Cree. He only cried when he thought no one was watching him.

  My first memory of my grandparents was visiting them in Idaho before I went to school. Grandma had dried meat hanging from the eavestroughs all around the house where they lived. We kids were not around the grown-ups, they talked in Cree, but we worked with them in the potato fields and huge hayfields. I sat on a bale and found a Wizard of Oz comic book left there by the boss’s children. We were so poor: my great-grandma was born when the Whites came west in Canada, my grandma was that first generation born on reserves, my mom was taken into residential school, and I was born into the in-between Indian-White world where you do year-around labouring jobs and the Indians leave their reserves for the slave labour the different seasons need: hay, fencing, potatoes, vegetables in Idaho, or sugar beets in southern Alberta.

  Grandma said Indians had no concept of “poor” before the Whites came; the Whites created poverty. When our grandparents stayed with us in Butte they would go to the dump and find lots of good things people throw away; once we loaded Earl’s van to the roof with useful things, all the grown-ups got the best places to sit and we kids squeezed in wherever we could and we headed north for Red Pheasant. I was stretched on top of two mattresses, sleeping, and all pit stops were regular as clockwork, boys piss on one side, girls on the other. The food was Klik or baloney sandwiches, drinks Kool-Aid or water in a plastic jug, and you never said a word of complaint. If you cried, Mom’d give you one warning, “When we get home, I’ll really give you something to cry about,” because she was very sensitive about how we behaved around her Cree parents. Indian children are supposed to be quiet, well behaved, and say nothing to their elders, but we kids often behaved White, and Grandma Flora especially didn’t like that. So Mom, to please her mother—as I now long to please mine—wanted us to be quiet and perfect.

  My grandma turned away from anything Whites considered riches, but the religious jail my mother grew up in—residential school—taught Mom to want things. She could not deny that, while her mother wouldn’t acknowledge that property even existed and lived as best she knew how, coping physically and living spiritually. Whatever spiritual gifts Grandma saw in me—and she did—she knew they had to be brought out from under, she had to undo all tha
t my White life had forced onto me.

  I saw Grandpa John’s tears one other time, long after Earl’s funeral. The summer of 1985—centennial year of the Canadian Indian and Métis rebellion—when Mom brought him and Grandma to Wetaskiwin and I took Chantal and we drove southeast over the prairie to Sounding Lake, Alberta. A large shallow lake, the edge of its water had dried back so far from its original stony banks that only a dot of blue was left glittering in the distance, and the cattle grazing on the fenced flats were tiny blotches in an immense spread of green.

  “Ni-pi-kap-hit-i-kwek” Grandpa named it in Cree when we drove over the rolling brush hills and saw it far away below us. Sounding Water. The aboriginal people of the prairie say that this is the place where the buffalo were born; here they came out of the depths of the water, and the underground sound of their birth rumbled through the earth as they emerged. They say it still does sometimes, though I did not hear it when we camped there. Grandma Flora made our campfire beside the Cree burial ground on what was once the edge of the lake.

  In 1883 our ancestor Big Bear wanted to claim the land for his reserve at this sacred place.

  I knew nothing then about Big Bear except that he was my great-great-grandfather, but I know now that, after the buffalo were all killed in Canada and starvation had forced him to sign Treaty Six, he and his people travelled here past Sounding Lake, coming north from the Cypress Hills as the Canadian government demanded, in June 1883. Maybe it came to Big Bear and his people then that, if they could live at this sacred place, the Great Spirit would give them the living gift of the buffalo back again; if they could settle here, the buffalo would be born again, they would be able to hunt them properly once more, and so live again. But the government imprisoned and killed Big Bear with sickness before he ever got his land negotiated; over a hundred years and we, Big Bear’s direct descendants, still had no land. They say there are over six hundred of us now in Canada and more in the United States.

  Where we camped that night, we were looking at what had once been a lake. A three-strand barbed-wire fence, a straight line across it and out of sight, white cattle grazing. Dried up. No sounding water, no buffalo.

  A few steps from the burial ground stood a stone cairn erected by the government. The writing on it remembered a North-West Mounted Policeman who died while on duty, but it said nothing about the Cree graves, nor the Treaty Six payment that took place here in 1878, and the long debate between Big Bear and the governor. It was on this spot he tried to negotiate better terms for the huge land all the Cree chiefs had given away by “touching the pen.” Land fed you, Big Bear told that White moneyman; it was not like bits of government paper the wind could blow away, or water rot. But the governor would change nothing, and so Big Bear and his people left Sounding Lake and followed the buffalo south into Montana. Living there only four years while the lake here started drying up; no more buffalo were being born.

  When the sun sank behind the hills along the far shore, I heard coyotes howl; Chantal shivered as I held her, listening. Their long, scattered calls answering each other from everywhere around us sounded so strange, such sad laughter. The sky was dark and clear, the stars like icicles, and Grandma Flora in the brush of the hills sang her ceremonies. Grandpa John sat looking into the wolf-willow fire.

  The next morning, Mom said she was going to find out once and for all who had this land. It should belong to Big Bear’s children, no one else. So she and Grandpa drove to the nearest town, Consort, and nobody there could, or would, tell them anything, so she drove on to Coronation, and they had land records but were even worse to them, so by the time they got back to us on the shore above the dry lake, Mom was so angry she could barely speak. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police was right behind her, two uniforms in a cruiser called by the rancher who said the land was his, the cattle were his, I guess everything as far as he wanted to see in all directions was his, and the uniforms told us so. This was leased Crown land, whatever that means to crowned Queen Elizabeth II, and if we weren’t off it in twenty-four hours—Cree Indians and relatives of Big Bear or whatever we were, it didn’t matter—they’d come back to remove us forcibly.

  I watched this happen. My “little big man” James was growing inside me, and I held Chantal tight against my stomach as he moved there so we all together would see this, and remember.

  Grandpa John stood without a word. Grandma Flora had started to pack up as soon as she saw the cars coming over the hills.

  Mom shouted at the cops as they got into their car, “We don’t need no twenty-four hours, we can leave in fifteen minutes! But when we get the land back, we won’t give you one minute to clear out!”

  They were turning their car around, gesturing for her to calm herself. But she kept on: “And you’ve got the gall to bury this bastard in our burial ground, build him a stone statue—when we get it back he’s coming out. I’ll grab his boney ankle and throw his bones over the hills!”

  The thick rancher was glaring out of his pick-up. “Oh yeah?” he growled. “And I’m gonna dig up your goddam burial ground and crush every bone I find into bonemeal to feed my cattle!”

  The cops waved him away, and he spun around and both drove off as Mom cursed them. Grandpa John was leaning against our truck, hunched against its rear-view mirror, crying.

  The two vehicles crawled away up the trail over the hills between wolf-willow in a long drift of dust. And, suddenly, rain began to fall on us. The sky was clear blue, the sun was shining, and rain fell like light falling. I went to comfort Grandpa, and it was so quiet we all listened—Grandma, Grandpa, Mom, Chantal, me—and we felt the Great Spirit blessing of rain run down our faces, and listened to it drop on the sandy ground that had once been hidden by the sacred water of Sounding Lake.

  “It’ll be all right,” I said to Grandpa John. “The spirits see us, and they’re crying too.”

  8

  Down into Disaster

  A dream I dreamed just before Grandma Flora died:

  Earl is lying flat in his coffin. Suddenly his eyes open and they are solid black, empty. He sits up in one smooth move and he looks at me. I am afraid, I have never seen him dead in my dreams before. He looks so evil, I run across grass to Grandma Flora sitting between two men in robes. She says nothing. Earl is coming and she points to stone steps. I walk up the steps, and Chantal is there, playing jacks. She is so happy; behind her is a confessional booth. I can see Earl’s feet under the curtain, and a pool of urine is spreading from his feet towards Chantal. I grab her and run back to Grandma. She is nailed to the branches of a tree, her arms spread as if she is crucified.

  –Yvonne Johnson, December 1997

  ALWAYS IN MY LIFE there was Leon.

  Mom and Dad’s first child, Earl, had such a strong, healthy personality it seemed he would be everything to everyone; both the Bears and the Johnsons loved him. And when he was killed by Butte police, he became our martyr. Leon, the second son, could not shoulder such a burden, and all Dad knew was to try to beat what he thought was good character into him. But by 1971 Leon learned to protect himself from every family expectation by being for ever in trouble with the police, whose external rules he always knew exactly how to violate if he wanted to, get arrested, and be beyond any possible responsibility. Sometimes he behaved as if he had no brain whatever: he’d be barely out of jail and he’d steal a car and drive it home, leave it standing in front of the house, make no attempt to hide what he had done, and next day he’d be arrested and fight the police and be in jail again. Inside, he was a model inmate.

  And I, the last of the girls. The family story now is that, beginning with having to be held upright to sleep and fed by eyedropper, I was always protected and spoiled. Since I could only cry, everyone tried to please me. That’s the family story; and maybe there’s some truth in it, but I do not remember it that way. I remember clearly the many times I felt family love as a child, yes, but if my mother now stands in a public courtroom and calls that love “spoiling Vonnie”—as she
has done—then she is betraying even the love she gave me as a child into a testimony to protect Leon.

  For I remember also, very clearly, being used by everyone for whatever purpose they pleased, and all the more easily because I could not explain what was being done to me.

  Used most by Leon. Though he was my protector too, especially when I was little. In school he saved me from some brutality, and when I had to run from Dad I lived with him in Butte and that worked because at the time he had plenty of women to keep him happy. He protected me from others almost as if I were his property—but he never protected me from himself.

  Living with Chantal in Wetaskiwin and starting to date Dwa, I somehow felt strong enough to suggest he should come to Canada. I had not really known him for over five years and I thought perhaps a change of country, a job, could break him out of his hopeless crime cycles. But prison had done to him what it does, and as soon as he arrived I knew he was more aggressively Leon than ever. He seemed to have no conscience, no concept of right or wrong or decency, leave alone kindness: he knew no women in Wetaskiwin, so he simply asked me to sleep with him. A sister was less to him than a whore because he wouldn’t have to pay her. He told me all the years he was in prison he thought about me, and in his mind compared all his sisters. At the time he did leave me alone when I said no, but I moved in with Dwa; I could see disaster looming over me like his huge body.

  And when the rent I’d paid on the apartment ran out, he followed me, made himself a space to sleep in the garage outside our back door, where Dwa stored his painting stuff. And then he wouldn’t work any more; he claimed at one point Dwa ripped him off in pay and so he did nothing; he lived off us.