Stolen Life

by Rudy Wiebe

  Shirley Anne was cleaning, which was the Native way of saying thank you for hospitality, though she’d never done it before. This was for Dwa’s benefit, of course. And she was talking.

  “Does Vonnie always just lie in bed and make you make the kids’ breakfast?”

  But Dwa said nothing. He could block anyone with silence; especially Shirley Anne. Dwa came into the bedroom, kissed Yvonne, and left. Then she got up.

  In the kitchen she thanked Shirley Anne for cleaning. Dwa came back in, asked Yvonne to pick up a cheque owed him for painting, and then deliberately peered into the living room; past him Yvonne could see the burn suit Ernie wore lying crumpled on the floor. Ernie himself wasn’t on the foamy, he was asleep on the couch.

  Dwa grinned, going out again. “I wonder who wiped out Ernie.”

  Shirley Anne stood there, nonplussed, going red. She was stuttering something about Ernie being so drunk he must have taken his clothes off, but Dwa was gone and quickly Yvonne asked her, since she hadn’t used the twenty dollars yesterday, maybe she wanted to catch the noon bus to Edmonton today. And in a minute Shirley Anne was gone.

  James and Suzie trundled out into the yard to play, but before Yvonne could eat breakfast Ernie appeared, heading for the bathroom. He came out and found a beer in the fridge.

  “So,” Yvonne said, deadpan, “you got some last night, huh?”

  Ernie’s smile was relieved, and big, “If you’re anything like your cousin, whoa!” And he elaborated in detail how she’d pulled him up for a second time. Yvonne was astonished at his frankness, and then realized it was pride: maybe he was no handsome man, but he’d had his fun.

  He turned back into the living room—maybe get a bit more sleep—and amazingly, Yvonne found she actually had the house to herself. Five minutes to savour that, then Shirley Anne was at the door again, opening it. She carried her purse and two gallon jugs of Royal White Wine—the wino’s special—and no bus ticket to anywhere.

  The two small children were digging in the garden, grubbing out vegetables; when Chantal came home after school she would help them do the job properly. Shirley Anne sat drinking wine, denying she had slept with Ernie—no, she was a married woman, she’d never do that—and at the same time saying that all night she had dreamed Yvonne’s beautiful house was a Taj Mahal and Ernie a sheik—she’s got her “knights in shining armour” mixed up, Yvonne thought, but it’s her game, let her run it—and then elaborating again on how she had not, she had never, ever, even tried to sleep with Dwa. Yvonne knew Shirley Anne would have been happier if she had accused her of sleeping with Dwa than Yvonne knowing, as she did, that he had turned her down.

  Minute by inevitable minute, 13 September moved on.

  Thursday, 14 September 1989. The last day Yvonne Johnson would be free of the iron of criminal law. For literally years, as she wrote to me, “I only ran it over in the silence of my mind.”

  By the time she dared to speak her memories of that day, could try to order the facts of action and thought and impression and image into words, the weight of it filled notebooks, tapes, videos, pages upon pages of comments on the trial and appeal records.

  I have studied them, at length, and researched more—including, of course, the trial records—and to create a reasonable account of this day I can only draw out the absolutely necessary strands of details, sketch what seem to be the most crucial and inevitable scenes. What is clear to us both is that, until the very last minutes before midnight, nothing criminal at all need ever have happened.

  The first and most fundamental of the inevitabilities of that day was Shirley Anne in Yvonne’s house. Drinking, talking. She had claimed to have a computer course to register for in Edmonton, but she stayed, immovable.

  The second inevitability was Chuck Skwarok. He arrived at Yvonne’s house at two o’clock in his Hornet hatchback, alone. He said Erna had signed herself into the hospital; she had almost died from a grand-mal seizure while drinking.

  Yvonne was deeply disturbed. What had happened? Why? But Chuck explained nothing, just “She’s not doing too good,” and stood there as if expecting her to do something. The kids were hauling vegetables into the house, running water over them in the sink, and Yvonne had to supervise things. So Shirley Anne hauled Chuck into the living room with a beer.

  Outside, the gentleness of a September day, trees gold and shedding. Yvonne could see children jumping in the leaves in the park across the street; her littlest ones were there and her heart gave a jolt, and suddenly she ran, she had to for ever be on watch for them every minute, every second, like a deer or caribou mother. The television news had been full of warnings about a man hanging around schools, of children disappearing for a few hours and then showing up again in the same place, and some talked about a man who had picked them up, fondled them while he played with himself, though apparently not more than that yet—she ran, perhaps someone was behind the school bushes watching John, or her blonde Baby jump and land in the leaves, her chubby legs waving out of her training panties and the frill of the embroidered dress she wanted to wear today—no, no man seemed to be watching: five children playing under the spruce and poplars, their small bodies unmolested.

  James was throwing leaves.… Baby was not there.

  If only a stare would stay frozen in the air.

  Baby! Ernie was in the garage, helping Yvonne out again, this time with the freezer, wiring laid bare, but it would soon—no, he hadn’t seen Suzie. Yvonne was tearing through the garden, into the house, every wild glance, nothing! But there was her baby. Safe in the living room, with Shirley Anne. And Chuck.

  The little girl stood rigid with her arms stiff, pushing herself away from Shirley Anne’s attempts to pull her close—but her pretty dress was bunched up, her panties down around her ankles. Shirley Anne and Chuck were looking at her.

  “Baby!” Yvonne said sharply. “Baby, what is it?”

  Shirley Anne, startled, snatched the panties up over Baby’s bottom. Yvonne could not even look at the adults; she just led the little girl into the kitchen. “What is it?” Trying to control her voice.

  And to her astonishment, Baby pulled down her panties again and pointed to the raspberry birthmark high on her leg. Yvonne turned back into the living room.

  “What’s going on?” she demanded.

  Shirley Anne said, “Nothing. I was just showing Chuck her birthmark.”

  Chuck shrugged; perhaps he was mildly embarrassed, but Yvonne couldn’t really look at him. “Don’t you ever do that again,” she said to her cousin and turned quickly back to the kitchen and settled her child’s clothes properly on her little body.

  “No, no,” she spoke carefully, trying to sound ordinary, “remember what we talked about: the only time you pull them down is to go pee-pee, only when you’re with me, or alone. Never with other people—not even James—remember? If you want to show your birthmark”—she pushed one side of the panties up a bit higher—“see, then they can see, okay?”

  The telephone rang; it was Erna at the hospital. Sounding pretty bad. Had her cheque come in? No. Could Yvonne bring her some cigarettes? Sure.

  Baby had run out with a swarm of vegetable diggers, and Chuck was coming out of the living room. Looking angry.

  “That was Erna,” Yvonne said to him. And she felt a chill through her: had she seen him—she was looking so hard at Baby, but out of the corner of her eye—had she seen him leering at her baby’s naked bottom?

  “Erna admitted she’s a drunk,” Chuck muttered. “She’s got no brains, and admits it. I can respect that about her. She’s trying to help herself anyways.”

  Dwa had the van, so Chuck drove Yvonne to a house Dwa had painted to pick up a cheque for his work, over $400. The IGA knew her well, and she cashed the cheque there when she bought groceries for supper and cigarettes, then they went to the liquor store and she bought a bottle of Southern Comfort as a special for Dwa, and more beer. In Erna’s room in the new red-brick hospital off Northmount Drive, she opened
the whisky and poured some into a Tupperware container, but Erna shook her head, no, she could only have cigarettes. They talked a bit, then Chuck drove Yvonne back through downtown, between the old false-front and brick businesses and the line of peaked grain elevators along the railroad track, back to her little house among the trees on the corner of the dead-end across from the park and Parkdale School.

  “I told you,” Chuck said suddenly, “I don’t like kids. And women are bitches, good for nothing but a fuck—but you’re different. I respect you. You have a mind, you’re not just a cunt.”

  Chuck bothered Yvonne. How could he not, saying such gross things? And from his tone and repetition really meaning them. Yet to her he was courteous, even opening the car door for her, which no one ever did.

  When she had first seen him standing outside the liquor store with two bags of heavy bottles, and she had remembered the teaching: if you see someone in need, help them, for some day you too will need help.

  So she offered him a ride then and he gladly accepted. He tried to climb into the bucket seat of her Dodge van, but her Baby was already sitting there, so he had to pick her up to sit down. And then he held her far away from him, as if she might contaminate him. She asked him what was the matter.

  “I don’t like kids,” Chuck said.

  “Why not?”

  “I like them better if they’re someone else’s,” he said. Which she found odd: her Baby was “someone else’s.” “Me and kids just clash.”

  He passed the little girl over to Yvonne, and she sat on her lap, helping her drive.

  Yvonne dropped Chuck in front of a bungalow; she didn’t even notice the address.

  “That was my only meeting before with him,” Yvonne wrote later.

  But now, Erna had walked into her house with him, and the same night had to commit herself to the hospital.

  It appears to me, now, that Chuck was much better acquainted with Yvonne’s house than she realized. It was not until four months later, at the preliminary inquiry into Chuck Skwarok’s death, that Yvonne heard that late the night before, 13 September—or the fourteenth, as perhaps it was already past midnight—Chuck and his cousin Lewis Bonham had driven around looking for a party, any party. Bonham testified that Chuck had been certain that there’d be one at Yvonne’s, but when they got there the house was dark. Chuck stopped anyway, got out, and went up to try the porch door. It was open—Yvonne says that’s impossible, they were at home, and at night she always locked the door—but Chuck didn’t go in. Instead, Bonham testified, he came back down the porch steps, stopped, looked around, and then opened his pants and pissed against the spruce tree.

  Yvonne knew nothing of this when Chuck took her home from visiting Erna at the hospital. She simply thanked him as she got out; he grunted, said again he’d come by later “when the men were home,” and then his old hatchback grumbled away.

  Shirley Anne was watching them, sitting on the porch steps. She looked angry. And coming up the walk with her shopping bags, Yvonne was suddenly, startlingly, aware of silence.

  “Where are the kids?”

  Shirley Anne took her own sweet time answering, and Yvonne strode up to her.

  “Hey? Where?”

  “I sent all them brats packing, and yours,” she shrugged her shoulders, “are in the basement.”

  “What!”

  “I locked them in there to protect them.”

  “Protect them from what?”

  “From your ‘friend’ Chuck Skwarok! I thought he might sneak back here and kidnap one of them.”

  Yvonne exploded: “What are you talking about? I barely know him, he just drove me to see Erna.”

  “You oughta know him better. He could have kicked you out anyway, easy. What could you do, big bugger like that?”

  “What do you know?” Yvonne was bent towards her, suddenly terrified.

  Shirley Anne’s lips twitched in that self-satisfied, catty expression she had when she was certain of her knowledge and of another’s fear.

  “He told me,” Shirley Anne said.

  “Told you what!”

  “He told me this when all the kids were running around, back and forth,” Shirley Anne declared, drawing it out. “He was looking at them kinda funny; he said they had nice buns, and then, just out of the blue, he told me, ‘My wife charged me for molesting my little girl.’ And he was looking at one of the kids kinda funny when he says this, and I says, ‘Well, did you?’ And he told me the whole thing.”

  Yvonne’s breath caught in her throat, her mind racing … but it was too much, she couldn’t believe Shirley Anne, her smug, fat face.

  “Yeah, right.” She picked up her groceries. “A strange guy who doesn’t even know you is going to spill his guts to you about molesting his own kid—yeah, right.”

  “Yeah, really, he did!”

  Yvonne just walked into the house.

  Yvonne recognizes now, whenever she talks and writes to me about that day, that what she did after Shirley Anne’s statement makes little logical sense. She tried to hide it from her cousin, but she was shocked beyond belief: the man she had been driving around with, who had sat in her house, watching her children, had actually once held—no. She couldn’t face that, she wanted to avoid it, she had to feel better. So she got busy.

  She brought the kids up out of the basement, where they’d been playing on the slide she’d built them for winter days. They promised not to leave the yard. She wanted desperately to feel better, so she got out the Tupperware container of whisky Erna wouldn’t accept and sat at the kitchen table. The more she drank, the easier she felt and the less she cared about her cousin’s yapping.

  But Shirley Anne kept picking, picking at any possible fear, reminding her that Chuck had said he’d be over later, “when the men were home.”

  “So if he’s after kids,” Yvonne countered, logically enough, “why does he want the boys to be here?”

  Once Baby ran in and showed Yvonne her raspberry, just the way Yvonne had told her too—that’s right, good girl!—and Shirley Anne rolled right on:

  “Just imagine,” she said, “your little blonde Baby in diapers, her little finger curling around his finger as he leads her to the bedroom, she’s so trusting, you’ve protected her so good, he’s laying her on the bed, he slips her diapers down, and then he’s squatting down, smiling, spreading her little legs, wide, his big fingers spreading her little lips open like——”

  “O shut up,” Yvonne interrupted harshly, not daring to reveal her deep reaction. She had to be big and tough; no stupid cousin would play with her mind. “Lay off that shit.”

  With every swallow of smooth Southern Comfort, the power of her foreboding dulled. Shirley Anne was playing her; the whole basis of a child molester’s life is secrecy; if he really was one he’d never admit it. Chuck was big, White, handsome, no mousy beat-up Ernie—Shirley Anne was trying to use Baby to get him, and he just left her sitting while he drove off to see poor Erna. Yvonne hated herself for thinking this; she detested herself even as she detested Shirley Anne for sitting there, soused, making her think it.

  Chantal appeared with carrots, Baby and James trudging behind. They wanted supper. Yvonne had bought meat and they had all that good garden stuff. And Ernie was still working on the freezer in the garage; he’d be hungry too. Cook, get up and cook.

  When Ernie came in, Shirley Anne had someone else to tell. He got very disturbed too—that goof said that?—and Yvonne could see Shirley Anne loved it. She knew something dirty, she was the centre of attention.

  “Yeah, and when he comes,” Shirley Anne said, “I’ll tell him right to his face in front of you guys, what he told me. I’m not lying.”

  Shirley Anne Salmon: [from the statement given by “Remanded Prisoner—Charged Murder” to RCMP at the Red Deer, Alberta, Remand Centre on 30 August 1990. The two-page text is signed by Salmon and witnessed by “J.R. Bradley, Cpl.”]:

  [Bradley]: Shirley, what you tell me, must be the truth and wha
tever you say, will not be used against you in any criminal, judicial proceedings. Do you understand this?

  [Salmon]: Yes […]. I was so devastated over the loss of my husband. I came to Edmonton to start over. I was really devastated. I stopped in Saskatoon to visit my daughter and grandchildren. My daughter got mad at me and kicked me out. I got to Edmonton and wanted to be with my mother. I couldn’t tell Yvonne because she’d make fun of me. I was so alone. I decided to go straight to Wetaskiwin to see my mom. I got there Tuesday morning, got some money, and started looking for my mother and a place to stay. The only person I knew was Yvonne and I had avoided her because they were always drinking there. I went to Yvonne’s, as it was a place for me to wait until maybe my mother came home.

  This turned into a three-day drunk. On Thursday morning 14 September I wanted to leave. I went to the liquor store to get two and a half gallons of wine. Both Yvonne and I had hangovers.…

  [from “Interview—Cpl. J.R. Bradley with Shirley Anne Salmon at the Red Deer Remand Centre 90 Aug 19, 1234 hrs.” This witness statement has seventy-three pages, signed.]

  Salmon: I didn’t feel like sleeping outside like I did the night before [so I went to Yvonne’s.…] And I admit I’ve always been scared of Yvonne. Not only that, she’s always been kinda jealous of her husband and me, eh. Nothing happened. She’s jealous of my mother. See my mother’s sixty years old and she’s always been like that, and uh …

  Bradley: So when Yvonne says, jump …

  Salmon: Uh-huh.

  Bradley: You jump.

  Salmon: Yeah. Sort of, sort of.

  Bradley: Yeah.

  Salmon: So did the boys […]. Dwayne, you know, he was, he was always scared of Yvonne.…

  Bradley: Well, why did it go as far as it did?