Stolen Life (14 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
“I couldn’t do nothing with the car and all of a sudden this Montana Highway Patrol comes past, then squeals to a stop and backs up. I think they want to help, and the patrolman gets out and I say, ‘Good to see you!’ and he’s just stone-faced. ‘Your name Clarence Johnson? You got a son Keith Johnson?’—fucken hell, they always had his name wrong! Nobody called him nothing but Earl—they had it all over their radios. To find us.”
Clarence sits rigid, breathing so hard the air in the room seems to shudder. He gets up, goes back past his stove and through his bedroom into the kitchen, and after a time reappears with a pot of coffee. He offers me a cup, black, and then seats himself; drinks slowly, smokes.
“So I have to go to Cecilia, tell her. The girls are in the back seat. And I tell her Earl is dead. But she won’t believe me. She’s out of the car, we’re in the ditch, we’re on the shoulder of the railroad tracks, and she’s yelling and screaming. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to hold her, held her in my arms, and she couldn’t stop screaming. All the girls were out of the car crying, and I got down on my knees and held her for a long time, holding her, hugging her, begging her—No! Earl is not dead! Finally she was just crying that, over and over. I picked her up and carried her back to the car.
“The patrolman was a good guy. He drove us to Butte in his patrol car. Cecilia sat in front, I sat in the back with the girls. We never said a word.”
After a time he searches through the box on the coffee table, and finds what he is looking for. The picture of Earl in his coffin.
“Hell of a thing,” he says. “Have to go and bury a beautiful boy like that.”
“Twenty years old,” I say.
We sit there together and cry, until we can talk again.
Yvonne:
Earl’s room in the Jackson Street house was closed. No one went in there. But I visited it every day, though not after dark. A small window from an alcove in the room opened onto the porch outside; they had let Leon come home from Swan River for the funeral and he and I sat there on the porch. The big sky was dark and beautiful, and he played his horn. “Taps,” and he said something about the mountains, the sound bounced back from them as if they sang, they cried when he played. At times Leon could be a bright, good person, when he wanted to be. But he couldn’t play much on the porch, he was crying because Earl was dead.
One evening I asked Kathy to come with me into Earl’s room, and we saw where the light from the porch shone through the window, making a square of light on the alcove wall. Then the silhouette of a head appeared there, right on the wall in profile. It seemed to me it was Earl. I couldn’t hear anything, but he
was talking to me, I know he was warning me about something. For a moment Kathy and I sat there as if watching a movie on the wall, then the lips of the shadow moved and Kathy jumped up, screaming. And I jumped up too. We both ran out and told Mom. She said, “Forget it, it was just the shadow of someone walking on the porch.”
But I still believe it was Earl, because he was with me at various times for years after his death; I know. Even when I was living in Alberta.
After he died I ran to Mom and told her, “Earl peeks at me when we drive to cut poles in the mountains. I hear what he thinks when we’re in the woods. When we were cutting firewood at Grandma’s on the rez, I felt something happen to him in Butte and it was true,” and Mom asks quickly, “Okay then, where do you see him?” So I show her next day, when we pass the place I look for him, but he’s not there and I get so excited I jump out of the car, “He’s playing hide-and-seek again!” I run through the trees, laughing, I’m so happy. His name is there on the cardboard tags he stuck on the trees so his friends from town could follow his trail to our work camp, he and I are playing tag between the trees and little ravines, and Mom is sitting in the car, yelling for me to come back. But I want her to come play too. “See, he’s so fast. See behind the next tree!” Finally she slaps me, “Stop it. Earl is gone and never coming back.” But as we drive away I see him and tell her, “You’re leaving Earl alone, I want to stay with him.” She has to stop and open a barbed-wired gate, and she’s crying. “There’s too many memories, too many places around Butte.” She stomps into the trees and rips off all the cardboard tags Earl made.
“Okay,” she says then, “show me where.” And we search through the trees and brush. But there’s just the smell of pine and stripped bark and sticky gum, nothing. “See,” Mom says.
So I point up. “He doesn’t want you to find him. He went up to the sky, but he’s here and he takes care of me; he always will.”
Mom shoved me into the car. “No, you can’t see him. He’s gone.”
The Only Good IndianI have endless memories without faces. Random, separate memories with no story line, but sprinkled with possible truth.
It was over, it was peaceful to lie buried after all I went through. The ground was cool on my body that had been on fire, it was silent. They were yelling at each other as they dug me out. I tried to rebury myself. Begging there to let me be.
I asked for water. He was standing over me with water he poured it on the ground and offered me gasoline.
–Yvonne,
Journal
9, 11 April 1994
Yvonne:
I have read and made notes on Carl Jung’s
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
. In it he talks about the “natural mind”. He says such a mind sees and speaks absolutely straight and ruthless things “like a priestess in a bear’s cave.”
He is speaking about me. I recognize my mind in what he writes. I’m of Cree/Norwegian ancestry, born and raised on Western mountains and plains, and my mind—as Jung describes it—is like a natural spring welling out of the earth, “and brings with it the peculiar wisdom of nature.” This “archaic” kind of gift sees and remembers so much that in a group of educated people with their systematic, often formula ways of White learning, I seem to be stupid. I was the youngest girl in the hard-working world of a miner’s family, and—not to speak of the racial hatred I felt even before I went to school, Butte society was created and controlled by Whites and one look was enough to see I wasn’t White—for years it was physically impossible for me to speak clearly. I was forced to become a watcher and listener, with all my concentration fixed on surviving, and in my present memories of me then, every action was shaped by that absolute need to defend myself, somehow, in a world where I had no words, protect myself from the yellings and punishments of having always—there was never any getting around it—done something wrong.
Was my wordlessness then the reason I remember enduring so much hopeless misery? Did I only get attention when I was somehow in trouble, usually backhanded or slapped or knocked down before I was aware of what I had, or had not, really done? It seems that way. For me to acquire the words with which I could
explain myself to all the powerful people around me never seemed more than a vague possibility of endless slowness; it took years for the words with which I could explain or defend myself to be gradually, and with great pain, carved and sewn into my face. I had few communicating sounds. For me, living was a long, silent secret where the very act of breathing already made me guilty of something. I did not like to hear myself breathe; it was so loud, so noticeable.
But born as I was, I had to be aware of my breath moving through the unclosed spaces of my nose and mouth. In fact, breathing became a private thing that boded no good—the low, heavy breathing of another person was a sure sign of pending pain and violence. I knew that if I could hear them breathe, they certainly could hear me—but I had to breathe!—so stay away, keep your distance, never sit with your legs apart, never forget to wear long pants under your dress or they’ll see your panties if you forget yourself and play as a child will play, never talk back, never, ever look them in the eye but listen to every sound, watch, be always alert and ready to outmanoeuvre danger before it’s close enough to catch you.
But even more difficult, since my abusers were often members of my family or people living with us—Kathy told me once that Dad should never have allowed so many different boys and men to stay at our house while working with us at logging—there was usually no place to really run or hide; eventually a child has to surface in the home where it lives. All I could do was try to know the events of the day in the house, watch if a growing sense of argument or anger or violence was developing, and be ready to make some kind of distance from it for myself; wherever I was in the house, to know where, to know how I could disappear. Try.
This was my childhood: the world even in my home is uncontrollable and can at any moment burst into violence. I can only react. If I do get caught, I was either careless or asking for it. I am always guilty.
When did this happen? How?
I know I was in Earl’s room in the White House. Once when something was pulled down over my head. I was forced facedown on the bed. A pillowcase or something so I couldn’t see who it was, but I did see: dark hair, a rip in a T-shirt. I was enticed into his room and it happened on the bed, not Earl’s bed but the other one in there. I was being kissed, but it wasn’t Earl and I couldn’t breathe since I breathe through my mouth, and this boy—man—was suffocating me, and then there was a sudden great pain, with wetness on me, running down. My face was shoved down into the bed, I was placed on my hands and knees, and his voice telling me things I could not understand, then movements, pressure, something sliding, then pressure again.
And a terrible ripping pain, and wetness. I tried to scream, to tear myself away, but I was grabbed, twisted back onto my face again, with more ripping. My face was mashed into the mattress, an arm came around my hip and stomach, my body was flying, only my face in the mattress and I could not suck in air to scream, my legs, arms kicking, batting in nothing but air! I would be dead, pain was cutting me in half and I was choking, I would be dead, and he made a long, screaming groan, wet ran all over me. He fell down on top of me on the bed.
Why was he doing this to me, this horrible pain? What was it? I was crushed under him, but I could gasp and breathe, at last, there was blood all over me, and him, even his T-shirt. I tried to scream and he smothered me against himself, began to wipe at the blood, he talked fast, whispering, laid me on my side and rubbed me, told me we shared a deep secret, the secret that we loved each other, I was his love and own.
I cannot see who it was, not quite—a dark-haired boy, a torn T-shirt. I was so little and so terrified of those horrible pains ripping through my body, choking. There was no one to tell. No one was in the White House. I did not know why I hurt so much; I hadn’t fallen down and scraped myself to go and show Mom. This boy must have been left to take care of me.
When he was finished he lay down and fondled me, he said the worst was over, I would stop bleeding, and soon I would like this. It was our secret and I would like everything he did, soon. I was his love for ever because he had had me first.
He would teach me how to french-kiss—see, this is how you do it. He stuck his tongue in my mouth. I had no roof there yet, so this happened before Grade Four. I had cried so much and I was crying again, mucous flowed from my nose as if I were bleeding there too.
I remember this. When did it happen?