by Rudy Wiebe
It was different in 1989. Not even the sterility of police photographs can hide the particular care with which Yvonne decorated her house. When they were taken on Saturday, 16 September, the long, narrow-leafed plants she had hung in planters in her living room were still there, and pictures were neatly arranged on the wall; when the Wayside Inn replaced its dance floor, she had salvaged enough of the best parquet squares for her and Dwa to cover the living-room and children’s bedroom floors with the very surface they had danced on the night they first met. Outside she planted shrubs along the sidewalk and expanded the vegetable garden around the garage, lined the walks with flowers.
“I felt I was rich,” she tells me; “a home, a husband, healthy children. No matter how terrible my problems seemed to me, I tried to share that.”
Her three children, aged seven, three, and two, played with everyone, and one day Dwa laughed as he counted fourteen little kids either running through the house or playing in the yard. One of the reasons they loved to play there was Yvonne’s games: she was strict, she had them clean up the messes they left, but often she made games out of the cleaning by hiding dimes or nickels around the room they were to tidy, or in the vines or roots of vegetables they were to bring in. Any money they found working was theirs to keep. She maintained her house and yard, watched them carefully; she never left her door unlocked when she was gone, never left her children unsupervised. And it made her happy, it rested her, she tells me, to see children happily at play.
And what do you do when your wider family—all of whom certainly don’t make you happy—arrive at your door? You open it.
On Tuesday, 12 September, early afternoon, her cousin Shirley Anne phoned. Yvonne was surprised: the last she’d heard of her, she was on the wagon and living near Toronto with her baby and nice Christian husband; now she was alone in Wetaskiwin and feeling really sick. The reason was obvious in Shirley Anne’s slurred voice, and Yvonne wouldn’t invite her over, but admitted she might have some “cure” in her house. In ten minutes there was Shirley Anne on the porch, alone, peering through the screened window in the door with nothing more than a shoulder purse; looking pitiful.
“O Yvonne,” she sighed into her beer, sitting at the kitchen table, “you have such a wonderful place! I can just … relax.”
By the look of her, Yvonne was certain Shirley Anne had been partying hard for a few days, but now, with an ear available and a beer in hand, she could spin out the version that she preferred: her heartless daughters had kicked her out when she got to Saskatoon, they were so cruel, right on the street, and she had to pawn her wedding ring to get money for a bus ticket to Wetaskiwin, and now her mother wasn’t in town and she didn’t know where she was, but at least she’d got little Sparky away from her cheating, two-timing husband and if she could just …
“What about Sparky?” Yvonne asked. “Where is she?”
“Oh, I left her at Darlene’s, in Thunder Bay. She wanted to take her so …”
Oh sure, Yvonne was thinking. Your sister really wants to take care of that poor little kid.
Yvonne: Sparky is the same age as my baby Suzie Q. A year ago Shirley Anne came to Wetaskiwin too, but that time she had little Sparky with her. I was sitting on the living-room floor, breastfeeding my baby, and Sparky lay flat on the cork kitchen floor, whimpering.
“She’s hungry,” I said to Shirley Anne. “There’s milk in the fridge; you can make her a bottle.”
But Shirley Anne was sucking beer. “She ain’t hungry,” she said, “she just does that.”
Baby ran everywhere, all day, but at eighteen months little Sparky could barely raise her large head. I knew her skull had been split once—family rumour insisted it was an accidental fall—but now she appeared healed and okay. She lay wherever she was placed, the fluffy hair on the back of her head worn off into a large bald circle; lying like a six-month-old. Suzie was in my arms, nursing, and I felt my heart stir; I wanted to give Sparky my other breast.
“She ain’t hungry,” Shirley Anne repeated. “She always cries for nothing; she just lays there, never even tries to help herself.”
I went to the fridge holding Baby and made up a bottle with one hand. “Here. Feed her.”
Shirley Anne stuck the bottle down and Sparky reached for it eagerly. But she had no strength to hold it: the bottle fell aside when Shirley Anne let go; the nipple pulled out of her mouth and she began to wail.
“See,” Shirley Anne said, “too lazy to even hold it.”
Baby was finished; I set her down to run off and picked up Sparky and the bottle. The little girl drank the entire bottle, her thin, almost muscle-less body gulping, it seemed, as if in desperation. I laid her down on the table when she finished the bottle; I cuddled her gently in my hands. Shirley Anne came to the fridge, looking for another beer.
“Don’t touch her,” she said. “She doesn’t like to be touched.”
I stood up, grabbed Shirley Anne in both hands, and shoved her against the fridge so hard the door slammed.
“Don’t you ever—ever!”—I could barely control my voice—“be mean to a child in this house. And right now you’re out of here, I’m driving you back to your mom’s. Move!”
I shoved her towards the door, slopping beer and all; at that moment I hated her. I picked up Sparky—Shirley Anne was walking off the porch without her—and took her into the van and called for the kids. A small flood of them came running from the park across the corner of the street, always eager for a ride. Shirley Anne climbed into the front seat, nursing her beer; she made no gesture to hold Sparky. I belted the baby into the child’s seat bolted onto the floor.
I drove past a park where children were shouting, running, tumbling each other, and I couldn’t stand it. I stopped, unstrapped Sparky, and got out.
“C’mon,” I said to my kids scrambling out, “there’s swings. Let’s play.”
I carried Sparky after them, running into the park; I propped her in a small tire swing and pushed it a little. She smiled, then she giggled, and soon she was laughing; such a large, beautiful laugh I’d never heard from a child before. It was marvellous.
Shirley Anne sat in the van. Once she started it, as if she intended to take off, but I wouldn’t react so she began to lean on the horn, honking. Finally, she shut it down, got out, and walked across the street to where we were playing. She stood there, finishing her beer, then tossed the bottle among the noisy kids. There was a small cry from somewhere but that was all: the children were playing and Sparky was swinging gently, in small circles.
On 12 September, a quiet Tuesday afternoon in small city Alberta, the shrubs and poplar leaves along the straight streets are turning gold in the sunlight. The preschool children were in the yard outside, water splashing, glass clinking: they were cleaning what they’d collected in their bottle drive around town. Their haul was spread all over the grass, and Yvonne’s acquaintance Ernie Jensen—he worked only off and on, handyman stuff—came by, sniffing out a cure for what ailed him. Dwa had taken Chantal to Edmonton for a doctor’s appointment, but soon the older neighbourhood children would come from school and then the work would go really fast.
Shirley Anne was still talking, but with Ernie Jensen there Yvonne knew she could leave for a bit, make a trip to the pawnshop to be helpful and get him a cure—and herself a starter. She could see various straps peeking out from under Shirley Anne’s loose red-knit sweater; it looked as if she was wearing a large men’s undershirt and what seemed to be a body girdle—silly woman, at thirty-nine or forty, and all those tons of beer, to still think she could cinch her belly in.
And play sexy games with people. Just looking at Shirley Anne reminded Yvonne of how the women in her family competed for each other’s men, and it made her sick. They didn’t do it even for the sex; it was just to gain bragging rights on each other. Yvonne could feel Shirley Anne’s rambling talk “playing with her buttons”; it bothered her, it twisted her inside.
Shirley Anne said, with her usual e
dge, “You’re thin and boney, but I’m sure you keep Dwa warm on those cold nights. How much are you, one twenty, five ten?”
“He’s never complained,” Yvonne answered back, and then couldn’t resist. “Who knows what shape I’ll be in—when I’m old.”
“You’re always lucky,” Shirley Anne said snidely, “tall and slim, like your Dad, nothing like the Bear family.” She took another long swallow. “I’ve got a cheque here”—she was digging in her purse. “If you help me cash it, I’ll take the bus to Edmonton for a few days.”
She handed the slip to Yvonne; only fifty dollars, but it wasn’t made out to Shirley Anne—Yvonne had been stuck too often for countersigning NSF personal cheques, with the fee added.
“My bank won’t touch this. But I’ll lend you twenty, let’s go.”
But before they could get the kids together and leave—the bus depot was only four blocks away—Erna Brown was at the door; with her was a big, heavy-set guy in his mid-thirties. It took a moment for Yvonne to recognize him: Charles “Chuck” Skwarok.
Then she remembered Chuck was the man she had once given a lift home from the liquor store. Apparently he was now Erna’s friend—good, she needed all the friendship she could get. Yvonne had met her a few weeks before through another woman, and when she persuaded her out of her desperate shyness, she heard a long, sad story. Erna needed to drink, she couldn’t live without it, and had often been violated while passed out. She could barely walk; her leg was crippled from once trying to escape abuse by jumping out of a car going sixty miles an hour. Now the family she was staying with was ripping off her disability cheques; Yvonne offered her her house address to receive mail, and Erna slept a few nights on her living-room couch, safe, where no man could get at her. But soon she went away, and here she was, back, with maybe a decent man, not too badly drunk yet though it was already mid-afternoon. Maybe she’d have a bit of luck.
As Yvonne tells me four years later in the Kingston Prison for Women: “I had no idea the ultimate disaster of my sinking life had walked in.”
She and I sit together in the windowless counselling room at P4W and often she remembers aloud, returns to the events of those three days in September 1989. But there is always a certain point she cannot pass—not necessarily the same each time—a point where she will say, “This is too hard.… I can’t talk about this.”
Sometimes when Yvonne says this she is huddled back in the upholstered chair, her arms hugging her knees tight against her body. And all I can respond is, “Okay … okay … say what you can.”
Shirley Anne was “all over Chuck, bingo, just like that,” batting her eyes, giggling, flaunting her “cock-teaser” tone right in front of Erna, who had limped in to ask if a cheque had arrived yet. She looked deeply depressed even before she knew none had. And Chuck said almost nothing; he simply ignored Shirley Anne’s looniness.
Outside Ernie Jensen’s young friend Brandy had come to help the kids load their bottles into a van; Brandy was the ex-boyfriend of one of Shirley Anne’s daughters, and now her behaviour became even more drunkenly bizarre. She said that she’d once had an orgy with those two guys out there, what a pa-arty! When Brandy came in to say hello, she snuggled up to him and tugged at his belt buckle and the zipper on his pants, trying to persuade him—“C’mon, pull it out.” But he avoided her, and Chuck simply looked more disgusted. He gestured to Erna and said he’d come back later when the men were around, and they all disappeared one after the other.
“There’s still time for the bus,” Yvonne remembered. She dug into her jeans and gave Shirley Anne a twenty-dollar bill with profound relief. “It won’t have left yet.”
She had the kids in the van and they were rolling for the bus depot when the motor started sputtering. Out of gas. Wetaskiwin Motors was right there, so she wheeled in, but she couldn’t coast far enough; everyone jumped out and pushed, Yvonne steering through the open window and little James kneeling on the driver’s seat and steering, too, for all he was worth. The attendant saw them and came to help, and together they got it to a pump.
“I guess we missed the bus,” Shirley Anne said.
Yeah, Yvonne thought, my usual dumb luck.
She drove to the grocery store, bought food, and then stopped at the liquor store for a few twelves of beer and headed back. She cooked supper for the kids, who were running in and out as freely as they always did. A bit later Ernie Jensen was there again, and they sat in the living room, having beers. Immediately Shirley Anne began her usual games with him.
Yvonne had known Ernest Egon Jensen for less than a year, and considered him quiet and decent; later, on the trial transcript, she wrote in a note about him: “He is a good gentleman, and a good heart.” He was a smallish man in his early thirties, separated from his wife and son, his parents dead, his younger brother in jail somewhere, and he himself had been badly burned in a car accident to the point of being visibly scarred and crippled. He’d been at the house a few times before to sit, talk, have a beer, and when Yvonne bought a second-hand stove, he hooked it up properly for her, despite his mutilated hands.
Ernie took Shirley Anne’s games in good humour; Yvonne could see he might be interested in her.
“His life must have been lonely enough. He was no prize catch,” Yvonne told me in P4W. “I had no idea of his personality besides how quiet and decent he was to me. A few times he complimented me on how well I treated my kids. He knew enough about that, he said, he’d been in plenty of foster homes.”
Yvonne had never seen Ernie in a group of men, how manic he could become when surrounded by what he experienced as the heavy demands of masculinity. Nor did she know he had a long history of violence, or that he had been in prison several times for assault and being impaired.
Ernie Jensen: [from a “cell shot” taped by RCMP undercover constable Harvey Jones in the cell with Jensen and Dwayne Wenger in Wetaskiwin, Alberta, on Monday, 18 September 1989]:
I was seventeen years old and this guy was beating the fuck out of me so I fought back, and give it to him and I got my finger in his eye, that hurts, eh, so I thought, you cocksucker, I’ll show you. I got my finger right in there and fucken got him to his knees.
Then I says, “I want you to say you’re sorry.”
“I’m sorry, Ernie! I’m sorry!”
“I want you to say ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Jensen.’ ”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Jensen!”
Then these two cops smashed his head against the garage wall … [me] against the drunk-tank door, just fucken wham! and knocked me right out. Then they took me to court for that, they wouldn’t give me a lawyer, there was only that court reporter, the Crown, the cops, the three cops testifying that I was trying to escape [from jail] and I fought. And the judge give me an extra year for that. [And later they bring me] back, and whoever’s the boss he says, “I’m sorry,” he apologizes. And I say, “Yeah, lot of good that does me, put me in fucken jail for a year, you cocksuckers.”
[That first time] they said, “You either leave town or we’re gonna put you in jail.” I said, “Where the fuck am I gonna go, I live with my parents.” I says, “No fucken clue where to go.” So they put me in jail and she [my mother] died while I was in there, it just ripped her […].
And then, what the fuck, I was on either the last week of my parole or just finished it, then I caught her [my old lady] in bed with this guy. Another three years.
A warm evening, 12 September. Dwa sat in his white shorts in the living-room sofa chair with a beer. Chantal’s visit to the doctor had been okay, and all the kids were bathed and asleep on their mattresses in their room off the living room. Shirley Anne sat beside Ernie on the couch, talking, but now talking only to Dwa.
She had often seen him playing dolls with the little girls, sitting on the floor—no Native man they knew would do that—and so Shirley Anne tried to play small with the children too and hug them when he was around as if she truly loved them, to impress him with her tender motherliness. But all she m
anaged was to scare them and annoy him. When he saw her there when he returned from Edmonton, he’d asked Yvonne in an undertone: “Why do you even open the door?”
He wouldn’t, of course, say anything to Shirley Anne himself; he had no confrontational bone in his body, but this late in the evening he could avoid her clumsy, drunken attempts at sexy play now that the children were asleep.
“I’m bushed, I’m hitting the sack.”
And Yvonne, exhausted and wiped on beer, followed his cue fast, her mind strung out by too much Shirley Anne drone all day. She said they could both stay for the night, she had lots of sheets, she’d just make a bed for Shirley Anne on the couch and one for Ernie on a foamy on the floor, no problem at all.
No sooner were she and Dwa in bed in their room beside the bathroom in the short hall off the kitchen than they heard whispering from the living room. They nudged each other, listened; soon the noises, the sliding sheets, the mutterings were obvious enough. Yvonne and Dwa laughed a little together and Dwa said, “Hey, maybe Ernie’s getting some tonight,” and Yvonne turned to him and he put his heavy arm around her and fell asleep. He always smelled the same: paint, beer, an irrefutable base of rye whisky; a bottle of Southern Comfort to sip steadily, just a bit, but steadily, keeping the world nicely balanced, mostly level. His wide body, muscles thick as trees.
Yvonne slept.
Wednesday, 13 September 1989. Yvonne lay in bed, listening. Dwa was out so late most evenings that morning had become his time with the children: Chantal getting ready for school, and then James too, were playing their game of finding animal shapes in the pancake batter Dwa ladled into the pan. But someone else was in the kitchen too, bustling around—Shirley Anne. Up early to impress Dwa. Or maybe she’d fallen asleep with Ernie on the floor and didn’t want Dwa to find her. Who cared?
