Stolen Life (20 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
When did this happen? How?
The black-haired boy and his friends don’t come to get me any more, but I’m at the municipal swimming pool. I’m locked in the house otherwise and not allowed to go out anywhere else, but a boy comes who says he knows Earl, Earl told him to get me, so I go with him. There is construction on the road by the pool, traffic is piled up and I’m in my swimming suit so it must be summer, and I’m in the front seat of a logging truck and I see Earl coming in our logging truck and I shout, Here I am, Earl!
But the boy driving the truck throws me on the floorboards. I’m hauled out under a bridge where there are cars, someone is beating me, shouting. When I’m conscious again I’ve been placed on a sawmill belt that carries the bark from the logs up to the top of the trash cone that smokes all the time, it’s always on fire, but I fall off before I’m carried to the top and crash on hard ground. The burner is rumbling so hard the earth shivers, and I scream and scream. They won’t leave me alone, they yank me around, they’re fighting among themselves, quarrelling, mad, and then a boy appears at the top of a cliff and yells down at us,
Her brother’s coming!
An older man has me in a small black car. He’s driving as if he’s insane, roaring through town, running corners and red lights. I see Earl in our logging truck right behind us. We shoot into a narrow street. Then I’m on the floor, plastered against the door of the car, as the old man speeds up, tries to hold the car on four wheels going around a big curve, tires squealing, but as the street straightens suddenly the car hits the curb, whips back and forth and smashes into a pole beside a gas station. The attendant comes running out, sees me all bloody, and the driver slumped over the wheel gasping and he jumps in and drives the crumpled car to Silver Bow Hospital; it’s just a few blocks away.
At the Emergency entrance, they pull the driver out onto a stretcher fast. Earl arrives in the truck, slams on brakes, and
jumps out. He runs straight for the stretcher and starts hammering at the old man while the orderlies try to wrestle him away. Earl’s screaming, Where’s my sister? What’d you do to my little sister! A nurse looks in the car, sees me, and shrieks,
Here’s another one!
They lift me carefully out and onto a gurney. Earl is cursing, trying to tear himself loose from the orderlies to get to me, but they’re too many for him. I hear the glass on the emergency door smash. Earl still fighting to reach me.
I am in a green room full of glass shelves. Mom is beside me, and then Dad is there too and he’s going crazy at me all bloody, I’m gonna fucken kill the guy that did this! Mom walks around me and grabs him. Be quiet! she says and they’re wrestling against the big glass window so hard I can hear his back-support girdle creak; he cries out in pain. We’ll take care of it, she tells him, just shut up here, shut up.
Dad stands beside me, crying. A man who looks like a doctor bends over me. He opens my mouth. He says to anybody who is listening, “How do you sew up a tongue?”
That’s Right, Drive me to WinterShe does not know how to let anyone love her. Love is just a word someone says to get in your pants.
–Yvonne Johnson to Rudy Wiebe, 14 February 1993
I
N THE KINGSTON PRISON FOR WOMEN
, Yvonne’s memories have moved inevitably from the Johnsons’ brief Cadillac saga to her parents’ permanent split. I listen carefully, take fast notes as usual, but my mind seems imprinted with the prison tour we have made, the residue of her February letter, which explained P4W as a place where “in the span of eighteen months eight women succeeded in killing themselves, and another is in a coma for trying.” Even as I concentrate, jot words and sequences, the images of the antediluvian core of this place—the cell blocks—run like a continuous reel in the back of my mind.
Two and a half years from now a federally appointed judge will describe this place. Yvonne will introduce me to Brenda Morrison, one of the eight Native women strip-searched by the all-male Emergency Response Team on 26–27 April 1994; Brenda will send me a copy of Judge Louise Arbour’s
Commission Inquiry into Certain Events at the Prison for Women in Kingston
, and she will inscribe the book: “April 3, 1996 / To Rudy Wiebe / I give you this book to read with understanding.…”
Judge Arbour’s description of the prison is precise and damning:
… an old fashioned, dysfunctional labyrinth of claustrophobic and inadequate spaces holding 142 prisoners of all security levels, minimum through maximum. It has been described as “unfit for bears.” It is inadequate for living, working, eating, programming, recreation, and administration. Spaces are poorly ventilated and noisy … reached through narrow corridors, steep stairwells, and innumerable locked barriers.… Surrounded by an enormous
wall … the building has the characteristics of a [male] maximum security institution.
“Unfit for bears”—how unwittingly apt for Yvonne, the great-great-granddaughter of Big Bear, and whose spiritual power comes from the Bear’s Spirit. In our tour of P4W, I had one glimpse through bars down one long range of fifty-four cells stacked in two tiers of twenty-seven stone cells, one above the other. Each cell is nine by six feet, and there are two of these tiered stone ranges, A and B, built back to back. Yvonne could take me no closer than a glimpse: there was no way the female guards grouped and staring at us grimly through the entrance bars would slide them open for us.
Yvonne’s “house” is in the Wing, which provides relatively better accommodation: fifty small rooms with tiny windowed doors, no bars or mesh except on the outer perimeters. She reached an agreement with the guard in the cubicle at the entrance to her narrow corridor, and then she asked me, “Please, don’t look to either side: the doors are open but people don’t like to be looked at.” So I controlled my curiosity, Yvonne called out, “Man on the floor!”, and I walked a step behind her, past doors, with my eyes straight ahead in the glaring bare light.
To her house. At the end of the corridor, just wide enough for a bed placed lengthwise under the small, curtained window. Tightly filled with the little she now has to live with: narrow clothes cupboard, a small table for a “kitchen,” another for writing piled with a typewriter and papers, her tape collection and a tiny
TV
received from an inmate who had served her time.
Yvonne leaves the door open as she points out her things; with both of us inside, there is just space to turn around without bumping into each other. Close outside the barred window is the corner of the stone wall. “I can turn out this light,” Yvonne says, “and with the door closed it’s a little darker. In prisons the lights are on twenty-four hours.”
“But … there’s so much noise.”
“You learn—your pillow is for on top of your head, not under.”
Whatever order and security existed in the Johnson family, whatever stability might have developed as the children grew into adults, any united family possibilities, however tenuous, disappeared with the split between Cecilia and Clarence. And what happened in the lawyer’s office between Yvonne and her parents—the decision she then made—still resonates deeply in her memories.
“All us kids—Leon, Karen, Minnie, Kathy, me, and Perry—were lined up on chairs outside, and I was called in last. Even Perry was called in before me. The lawyer was smiling across his big desk, Dad sat on one side and Mom on the other. That lawyer said nothing, so finally I asked him,
“ ‘Who’s going with Mom?’
“ ‘So far,’ he said, ‘they’re all going with her.’
“Well, I knew Leon would for sure and Karen figured, and Minnie, but—’Even Kathy and Perry?’
“ ‘Yes.’
“ ‘Who’s staying with Dad?’
“ ‘Nobody.’
“I thought Mom looked cocky, like she does when she wins—despite her obvious pain of this pulling apart. Dad sat bent forward on his elbows, then he threw back his shoulders and head, brushed his curls flat on his head like he always does with his right hand, and stared straight ahead, stiff as a Marine.
“Oh, I remembered the pictures of Mom, so beautiful when she was sixteen. Slender and stunning with her olive skin, black eyes, and long black hair—every Indian in Great Falls must have been nuts about her. I’m sure there was plenty of growing-up to do after nothing but priests and nuns and five prayers every day and seven on Sunday. She knew exactly what she wanted: she married a tall, blue-eyed, curly-blond American ex-Marine. And a short time later she took him back to Canada with her—to the Thunderchild Residential School as they had named it, though Chief Thunderchild had never allowed anyone to baptize him—the school she had survived and somehow gotten out of at age fourteen just before it burned down to its very foundations in a fire of unknown origin (but it still continued, of course—the Roman Catholic church can never permit a fire, no matter how big, to wipe out its program), and with her big White American husband standing
beside her Cecilia told the priests and nuns she was taking every one of her younger brothers and sisters away: Richard, Evelyn, Rita, Roy: she was married, she was of age, she had a home in Montana, and she would be their guardian—her family needed no residential school, she would take care of them.”
And Clarence in his Butte house shows me the pictures of the beautiful teenage Cecilia he met in a bar in Great Falls; who married him in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in late 1950. Earl was born in January 1951.
“Yeah,” Clarence continues, “and besides that we had all her younger brothers and sisters in Butte, different ones at different times in the fifties, till they got bigger, before our girls were born. I helped raise those kids, all except Josephine, the oldest. I worked in the mines—hell that was work, those narrow shafts, and deep!—and brought in the money and she cooked and cared for them. Once when they hauled her little brother Roy off to a foster home she went after them and said, ‘Where’s my boy, where’ve you got my kid?’ and she took him away from them, right out of their car. Even after they were grown up they’d come here when they got in trouble, or me and her’d haul them back across the line to Saskatchewan because their parents were living together on Red Pheasant again. We raised those kids with Earl and Leon in the fifties, and their kids were here often enough too. Ask them, there’s dozens, they always knew there’s a place here.”
Yvonne tells me, “I told that lawyer, ‘I want to stay with my dad.’ ”
I ask her, “Why did you do that?”
She answers quickly, “I love Dad. I felt sorry for him, all alone.” And after a pause, she continues thoughtfully in her resolute, self-searching way. “He looked so crushed … but not just that. I thought if I was an only child, if he only had me, I’d get everything. Huh!” She laughs sardonically. “I should have known all I was going to hear from him was, ‘I can’t afford it.’ ”
The Caddy was gone—repossessed and hauled away—and Cecilia had a Ford pick-up truck, black and so old the floorboards of the box were wood with steel bracing. She packed everything she could into it, piled high, tied down under canvas. Clarence had the flat-bed logging truck, and he and Yvonne followed the pick-up. There was some delay about how many children the Americans would let Cecilia take with
her—and then her truck wouldn’t start. Clarence had to push it to the top of a hill to start it rolling down across the border into Canada.
