Stolen Life

by Rudy Wiebe

  But she had gone out to play before she finished cleaning her room, which she knew she must do every day, and I yelled at her.

  She stopped, abruptly silent. I wanted to teach her something, I did not want to see her pain because discipline was in order; when I grew up a child had to be hit hard, immediately and quick to make it remember. I never treated my children that way, but as I yelled I watched her too and I saw the shine vanish from her face, her shoulders fall, her eyes so large with excitement grow small. She stood half-turned and silent, and my heart broke.

  She was me, the little girl who never spoke. Head down, not daring to look up. What was happening inside her? I understood more about her than she needed to explain. I squatted down to her.

  “Chantal, what’s the matter?”

  She looked at me and I could see tears gather in her eyes.

  “You hurt my feelings.”

  I opened my arms and she came to me. I sat on the kitchen floor and rocked her in my lap and sang Christmas carols to her because I didn’t know any lullabies, and we cried. After a while I pulled a chair close and lifted her up onto it and we had a long talk. I told her I often felt the same way when I was little, but no one would take me in their arms; this mom stuff was all new to me; but she had me, maybe she could teach me something. She should tell me every time I hurt her feelings and we would cuddle and talk about it. I never, ever wanted her to feel alone.

  We talked, and then she said she wanted to clean up her room. So we did that, and when we were done we had a quiet time together, and after that we drank pop and ate ice cream. I felt so much better; she had helped me more than I helped her.

  Little children are the purest gift of the Creator. The Elders say if you put your children first, you will do well.

  In 1973 Aunt Rita’s baby boy, Edward, was only fifteen months old and living with Mom and us four girls and Perry in an old house at Red Pheasant when Leon got out of Prince Albert Prison and came there. Within a week Leon was raping our cousin Darlene, Aunt Josephine’s second daughter. She was fourteen, and staying with us too, rather than with her older sister Shirley Anne and her two kids in Biggar, because Karen was close to her in age and she could go to school with us in Cando. Minnie was barely thirteen, but she was the one who took care of little Edward. She often stayed home from school, fed him, would get up at night and carry him into the living room to change his diaper and rock him to sleep when he woke up beside her crying. The first word Edward ever said was “Minnie!”; he crawled around the whole house calling: “Minnie, Minnie.” She was wonderful with children, she’s loved them all her life.

  Changing little Edward was when Minnie first saw Leon pull Darlene into his bedroom in the middle of the night. Kathy and I heard them too. He just went in and got her out of Karen’s room, which was next to ours, but he was so huge by then—seventeen and experienced from any number of jails—we listened and finally covered our heads because who was there to tell, who would protect us from him if we did? Mom was away driving a gravel truck on highway construction near Battleford, so who could dare say a word?

  Kathy’s baby boy, Billy, had just been born when, in July 1988, all us Johnsons—without Dad, of course—got together for a family reunion on Red Pheasant after Uncle Frank’s funeral. Mom and Kathy had persuaded me to come—I was afraid Leon would beat me for having Laura deported back to the United States while he was in prison—but Laura had returned to Canada and Mom volunteered to care for all the kids at Grandpa’s house—“Go, go, have a good time”—within sight of the old band hall where Leon lived when he wasn’t in custody. All of us Johnson kids were at the hall with our spouses, and Kathy had driven over from Manitoba, with her husband, Dan, even though their little Billy was only two months old. I cooked over an open fire and Grandpa John ate and drank with us, but the next day he wasn’t there when we had a keg party. Soon drunken fights broke out, and grew until finally everyone was scraping someone, all the men, except Dan, who had passed out, and all the women. I put Billy in a chesterfield chair on top of the big cutting table, all that was left of the upholstery business, so he wouldn’t get hurt or trampled. He lay there rolled up safe in his blankets, and Laura got into a fight with me, then Karen sided with Laura, and Kathy jumped me as well. I didn’t bother with them, I concentrated on Laura.

  But then big, glowering Leon came in. He came in bulging macho and glared around, feeling so good, filling the doorway, and he saw Laura was back. He considers himself the guard-dog of the family, and the boss: if Mom isn’t there he decides what happens and sure as hell nobody fights unless he says, Go ahead.

  When I saw him I got away from Laura and my sisters and ran to him to explain. I didn’t know then that he’d kicked Laura out of his house, and that she’d just spent two weeks in Saskatoon with Karen, healing up and moaning about how horribly he abused her: I just knew he would certainly beat me to pulp for fighting with her. So I went to the door and got him away from the fighting in the hall. We went for a drive and I tried to explain to him why I had hit Laura. He slammed on the brakes. He has this way of going dark. He said, “You hit her?” I was in terror, and okay, he didn’t beat me up then; what he did was worse.

  My tears meant nothing. After he did everything he wanted, he laughed. “I always knew you liked it rough,” he said. He felt great.

  In such a situation, Dwa was no help. He always told me he was not a fighter, he didn’t like enemies, and I had seen him take bad beatings without fighting back. I had often loved this non-aggressiveness in him, but now, at the hall, he did not notice what was happening to me. I knew that, among the Johnsons, I was strictly on my own. So, a few months later Leon got to me right in our house in Wetaskiwin, and Dwa wasn’t there either, he was away cheating on me with some woman on the night of my birthday. It was Mom herself who drove Leon over, she was delivering furniture to Hobbema and she dropped Leon off with a twelve of beer and some cash—she didn’t remember it was my birthday—and left.

  I was desperately hoping Dwa would come home soon, but he didn’t. The kids were sleepy and I tried to keep them awake while drinking with Leon, but they were so little, they were falling asleep on the couch and I had to carry them to bed in their room off the living room. I kept saying Dwa will be right home, and then, thank God, a woman named Dora showed up; I kept her happy with booze so she wouldn’t leave. I should have remembered—for Leon, the more women the better.

  After a while I broke away from them, got into the bathroom, and locked the door. Crying. But then I realized my children were in the house, and I went out quick and sat in the doorway between kitchen and living room. That was the only way to get from the bedroom where they still were to the children’s room—past me.

  Finally Dora came out of the bedroom. She was dressed again; she said something and left the house. Then I heard Leon get off the bed. He came straight into the kitchen and took me back into my bedroom.

  I could not make Dwa understand; he simply would not let me tell him about what happened. I tried, but he thought it was all about him and his cheating, especially his cheating on my birthday. Men and their hopeless egos—okay, okay, I cheated, I’m really sorry but it happened—as if what actually happened to me didn’t matter. The first time Leon violated me in the bush during the family reunion because he would have beaten me helpless and done it anyway. But the second time was even worse: he did it in my own house. Because I had no protection in my own house. That’s what I wanted Dwa to see: I didn’t care about his cheating as much as that he was not there. If he had just been present it would not have happened.

  And once it happened a second time, with my kids sleeping in the next room, a pattern had been set as far as Leon was concerned: he’d use me as a regular thing whenever an opportunity arose or he could arrange it. I did try to stop him by telling him I’d tell Mom. Leon said he’d already told her because she’d asked him about me, and so he was already one up on me. I understood then that no one, not even Mom, cared; I was just
a daughter who willingly lets her brother fuck her.

  Leon came to Wetaskiwin again, very soon, and Dwa was, of course, working and I didn’t know what to do, so we drove out to Ma-me-o Beach with Minnie and her shack-up for the kids to swim. I was too terrified to do anything but the usual: drink. By evening he was ready to lock the kids out of the van and take me in there, but I couldn’t endure that, I sent them back home with Minnie—Leon didn’t care if she knew about us or not. I thought maybe he’d settle for oral sex, and after that I crawled back in the van, away from him while he drove back into town. All I remember is the loud gravel road, and vomiting. But then he parked and came at me again, six foot four and two hundred forty pounds, on top of me till I blacked out.

  Even at Grandpa John’s funeral in January 1989, he tried to get me—no respect for the dead, not him. He threw me into the bathtub and almost crippled me, but I managed to escape because there were too many people around. And then he got arrested and I was safe from him: he was locked away in prison.

  But the problem was I could tell no one. I could not tell Dwa, not the complexity and tangle of what was happening to me. All he could see was, “Okay, I cheated—so you cheat and we’re even.” He could not understand that I forgave his minor transgressions, I just could not forgive my own.

  When we were charged with murder and finally met again, flanked by cops and chained, in the lobby of the Wetaskiwin Courthouse, Dwa told me what he had told me before, “Vonnie, I thought I could just love your pain away.”

  Even as our world was grinding down into disaster, he taught me how to cry. Not just alone and in pain but for a certain kind of release. That last summer became one horrible blur of drinking, fighting, and sex that filled my wasted days and nights. I’d stumble home and Dwa wouldn’t question me. “You make me love you,” I’d yell at him, and he’d mutter, half-asleep, “Hey, isn’t that good?” and all I could answer was “No. No. I’m not supposed to love anyone but my kids.”

  He was that special, he taught me it was okay to cry and he’d pull me tight and tell me, “ ‘Let it go, let it go.”

  I was always worried I’d go completely insane, the big guys in white would come and tie me into their long-sleeved jacket and haul me down the highway to Ponoka. Once I started to scream; a deep gutteral scream; it tore out of me endlessly and it overwhelmed Dwa—he fell back looking so terrified I forced myself to stop. I didn’t dare let go that deeply again. I just tried to shut down: let guys use me while thinking I used them more, a kind of sexless, feelingless, drunken fuck that seemed necessary to perform even when neither of us felt anything, having someone else involved in a strange hope that always failed to manifest itself; instead, just do it and get away fast.

  But then everything changed because a relative by marriage raped me. Again in my house, again with Dwa gone—in my basement where I’d gone to get away, and fell asleep. I screamed the bastard out of the house, and I felt so vile and dirty I ran a shower—but I couldn’t handle another secret. I drove to the town RCMP and reported I’d been raped. The police took me to the hospital, and the doctor who examined me was the same one who delivered my Suzie Q. I was so horribly ashamed, I could barely cry. I’d washed and that was bad for evidence, and I just could not tell him I’d been anally raped. I was hoping he’d find the bruise I felt inside my vagina, against my pelvis, but he only found traces of possible evidence in my underwear. Not enough, the police said, to get a conviction. The best they could do was take my statement, to place in my relative’s file.

  Brutalizing me in my home wasn’t enough for this swine; a few days later he had to brag about it to Dwa in the Riggers Bar. Dwa came home furious.

  “It wasn’t sex,” I cried, “it was rape! I was drunk and asleep and I woke up screaming. He had something stuck in my vagina and doing anal rape!”

  Dwa yelled, “You never felt that? To wake up?”

  “The pain woke me up!”

  “Was his cock so small you didn’t feel that to wake up?”

  “I woke up! And yeah, his cock’s small, if you want to know, it’s that small.”

  “And you think I’m a wimp because I don’t beat him up?”

  “You don’t have to, I can beat him up myself! But you’re never here when I need you.”

  “And you think I’m a wimp.”

  “Okay! If you think you’re a wimp, maybe you are. You just think about yourself, you’re mad because some asshole tells you, ‘I fucked your wife,’ and you don’t care how hurt I was, you just want to know his size. Well, fuck you! I’m never telling you anything again!”

  We could not talk about the rape or any other problem I had. My nightmares became more grotesque, beyond anything either of us could deal with, especially in August when Dad sent me the newspaper about the crooked Butte cops; I remembered them all, every one. That last summer, whenever Dwa was home he’d go off and drink or toke with his buddies and just come back to the house to crash. I began to see anger building in him and I was afraid. I hid on him when he came into the house, knocking things around, but he found me. He seemed to be coming after me in a rage and I was so scared I jumped up and knocked him across the room.

  “Bastard, you’d beat up your wife, but not the guy who spreads lies about her!”

  He lay a minute, surprised; if I’d done that to Leon, no matter how drunk, my head would already have been smashed against the wall. But Dwa just slowly got up. “You think I’m an asshole, right?”

  And he pulled his penis out of his pants. “It’s all because of this, eh? A dirty prick.”

  And he began to slap his penis. “You want to hurt a man, hurt me. This is the way to hit me, see, like this, like this!”

  He was punching himself out, pounding at himself, he really did want to help me so much—and he wanted to know nothing.

  All I could do was hug him, stop him. We were hurting each other so badly: if he couldn’t handle a rape, how could I tell him anything about Leon or my nightmares? I remained silent, and I held that against him. He would take me in his arms when the nightmares hit and flung me around the bed; he’d wake me by holding me until my shuddering stopped and I knew where I was and could say whatever to reassure him, “I’m okay now … I’m okay.”

  He couldn’t handle anything I actually was, not really. Except the bit of me that was a mother and working as hard as he, and easy, simple sex in bed and drink a bit, steady, don’t you overdo it like me, make sure there’s always enough money around to keep us going. And I tried. I had tried as hard as I could at the beginning to be the perfect mother, lover, wife, housekeeper, and business partner.

  But my past was too much for us both. And I knew the nightmares were not that, nor were they dreams. They were memories; there were more of them alive in my head when I was awake.

  Now when my relatives arrived, Dwa turned completely quiet. Barely a word, and soon none of them came unless he wasn’t home.

  All except Shirley Anne, who wanted him for herself. He didn’t even like her. “Why don’t you kick her out?” he asked me. Some time before our arrest she tried to get him to sleep with her and he laughed her off. When I asked her about it, she denied it. But Dwa told me, she was sitting behind me, shaking her head at him with her finger on her mouth so bloody-red with the lipstick she always keeps fresh. Dwa didn’t care about her signals. He told me right in front of her.

  A few minutes before I had taken a colour picture of her trying to flirt with him. There he is, his grey duck-billed cap and long, flared nose as he looks out of his van window at her open mouth talking, talking, looking like such a wonderful person with her brown-red hair neatly curled, and sweating a little. Behind Dwa on the seat, in the shadow of the van, stand our blond James and baby Suzie Q; her hands up around her mouth and little bare belly curved over her shorts. They’re watching Shirley Anne too. They were usually frightened of her and would run to me when she tried to pick them up. But they were fine at that moment, Dwa was between her and them.

 
Chantal was three when James was born in December 1985, and six months later Grandma Flora Bear died. Susan was born February 1987, and Grandpa John Bear died in January 1989. The deaths of my grandparents, especially Grandma’s, were far more significant to me and my children than I then recognized. I was falling apart—for reasons deep beyond my own understanding.

  9

  Three Days in September 1989

  Before my arrest, a lot of shit happened to me. If I had not been put in prison for this charge, I would most likely [have] been in [prison at] some point thereafter, if I never got helped. Or dead by suicide. My love for my kids kept me barely touching ground when I was just hanging onto existence and reality […]. I felt evil, nasty, and dirty and lost […]. I gave up trying to feel, except with my babies, I took to being so overly protective. Yet I still drank, I knew I was losing ground fast […]. Never in my whole life [have] I been to such a low level, with no will, striving, dreams, or hope […]. It truly was the most dead time in my life.

  –Yvonne, Journal 13, 11 November 1994

  FOR YVONNE, a house was a place to care for, to try to make beautiful for living. When, in August 1996, I park my car and again study the house where she once lived on the southeast corner of 43rd Avenue and 53A Street, Wetaskiwin, I see the trees, shrubs, the rows of raspberries she planted; but they are all untended, wildly overgrown in ragged grass gone to seed and volunteer saplings; pickets broken, missing in the fence; grey plaster on the walls fallen out in blotches; at one corner of the house a wooden barrel cut in half is filled with black rainwater. The Realty World FOR SALE sign appears to have been leaning there for several seasons.