Stolen Life (21 page)

In Butte, Yvonne had to face the little bigots of Webster-Garfield School alone. Though she had missed twelve of forty-five days of school in the previous quarter, her performance in every subject was simply checked as “S”—satisfactory—and at the end of May 1973 she was promoted into Grade Six. It was the last year she would receive a regular report card.

“In June, after school, Dad took me north to Taber, Alberta,” Yvonne tells me. “Mom and our whole family was working there, hoeing sugar beets. Her oldest sister, Auntie Josephine, was there too, and her oldest daughter, Shirley Anne, who was shacked up with a White guy——”

Yvonne breaks off; she rises to her feet, picks up our coffee cups, and goes out quickly. When she comes back, her cap is pulled down low over her grim face; we drink barely warm coffee.

Finally I ask, “What’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing …” she begins, but she’s too honest to deny herself. “Shirley Anne.” And I know: accused with Yvonne in the murder, she actually served only a year for aggravated assault. “I can’t mention her,” she murmurs. “I get upset.”

Then she adds in a rush, “She’d lived with us quite often in Butte before. I remember Shirley Anne when I was little in the White House: she’s ten years older than me. I would watch Shirley Anne, I didn’t know anything about her then, or what she was doing, I was a little kid, and she’d spend all morning putting on make-up, taking it off, putting it on, and most of the afternoon too, and then she’d go out for the evening. That’s all she did.”

She sits there, pulled together and small in her chair. After a while I remind her, “You were talking about thinning beets in Taber. That June, after the separation.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I … we were in Alberta all summer, and I went with Mom to Red Pheasant when we were through. Dad didn’t thin any beets. He dropped me off and drove back to Butte. He was alone until I got sent to him again, I think it was after getting in a fight in school in Saskatchewan that fall.”

In the counselling room inside P4W Yvonne explains to me:

“Dad’s a binge drinker: he’ll sober up for months and then he’ll drink for months. After they split up, for a long time he drank more than ever. He’d sit and cry in his drunkenness. For a while Perry was brought back to live with us and I watched him.”

“Didn’t you have to go to school?” I ask. “You were in … what … Grade Six?”

“Dad didn’t work steady, he was on the small pensions he has now—I can’t remember, not much. But I know Elvis Presley had a song out then, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Please Don’t Cry.’ A man who was in the war with him would be there, drinking too, and he’d razz Dad:

“ ‘That time, your Indian woman sure hung a licken on you!’

“ ‘Yeah,’ Dad would say, ‘but my back was broke then.’

“ ‘Sure sure, and the next thing you’ll say you was dead drunk too!’

“ ‘Hell, you gotta stop the pain somehow!’

“They’d drink and talk about the gruesome stuff they saw in the war, competing with each other. Dad said he saw a man blown in half, and the jungle grew so fast, the next day grass was growing through his guts and out of his asshole.”

Twelve-year-old Yvonne cooked what she could: “Spaghetti, beans and wieners, beans from a can, pancakes that turned out to be five-pounders, a lot of peanut butter and bread. Dad went out on his drinking sprees. During one of my stays in Canada someone gave Dad two dogs, Prince and Princess, and he’d moan they were all he had, all that loved him—and I was sitting there. I stayed, and he drank till he passed out, pitying himself, and never offered me a touch of comfort. It was just as well I guess; a man’s touch was never anything but dangerous.”

I have brought copies of various papers with me from Butte, and together Yvonne and I try to puzzle some order into the records of her life between 1973 and 1978. There are almost no objective data to guide us. Even Clarence’s cardboard box held only a few dated disciplinary notes:

Clarence has no report cards beyond Grade Five, May 1973. Yvonne has memories of a school-yard fight in Cando, Saskatchewan (where she would have gone with her sisters by bus while they lived on Red Pheasant Reserve), and getting her mouth damaged and being sent back to Butte for the continuing operations paid for there by the U.S. Crippled Children’s Fund; of a time in junior high in Bell School, Winnipeg (Cecilia had gone there to work), where she mostly played hookey in the girls’ room; of a school in Leaf Rapids in far northern Manitoba where she “fell in love.” It may be that in spring, 1974, after they left Leaf Rapids, both she and Kathy returned to stay with Clarence in Butte; she is certain she refused to return to Webster-Garfield alone and was sent to McKinley School, which she remembers as much quieter for her.

Clarence tries to explain to me the endless movements of children between wherever Cecilia was working in Canada and himself stationary in Butte:

“Vonnie lived with me for quite a while, and so did Kathy sometimes. Perry was with me a lot as a little guy, when Cecilia was working somewhere. But Karen and Minnie never came back here for long; they’d show up one day and then be gone before I knew it. All the kids back and forth. Once the four girls were here together. By then Cecilia couldn’t do nothing much with them either, and I was sitting here, and them asking each other, ‘You going back to Mom?’ They couldn’t agree. They’d go uptown to the bars, and next day they’re off, all back up to Canada.

“Leon … he was back and forth as he liked when he wasn’t in jail either here or there, often running from one country or the next ’cause he was in trouble. In Butte I’d know all about him from the papers: he’d live with a girl and was in the papers every week, drunk or smashing something, paying a fine or slopping out the jail to work it off. He’s never worked except in jail, he can’t work: he lives off the girl, Welfare,
and thinks he’s so smart and strong he’s the ultimate of all creation—he actually talks like that. He must have six, seven kids at least, and I can’t let him into my house any more: he’ll just take what he wants and if I tried to stop him he’d break my back. When he shows up now I talk to him on the porch; if he wants to come in, I tell him I’ll call the police. He laughs or swears, but he never gives me any trouble that way.”

Yvonne tells me school had never helped her learn much of anything except how to disappear. And how to fight, although as she grew older the speech-therapy classes they gave her and the continued plastic surgery aided her a little in coming out of her silence. She had taught herself to read by breaking words into parts and pronouncing them in her head, following the model of speech therapy, and during Grade Six in McKinley School her teacher “didn’t bug me”—which meant he ignored her if she caused him no trouble—and she would go to the library and read on the machines where the text would be illumined for a brief time, and you read it and then tried to answer the questions that followed. It became a game: she practised setting the light for shorter and shorter periods until she could answer correctly as fast as the reader could be set. She read half
The Godfather
and other books she found interesting. There had never been any books at home, except for a set of Bible-story books that her mother bought from a travelling salesman. The only time she spoke up in grade school, it was because she loved
Charlotte’s Web
. One entire winter she never played hookey in the afternoon because the teacher was reading that book aloud to the class.

“I loved that story so much,” she tells me. “The spider, the pig, everything—it was the only time I wanted to go to school, and once I was drawing a spiderweb on my desk, ink on wood, and the teacher saw me and was furious. She demanded I repeat what she had just read. I was so excited I stood up and talked! I quoted the book back to her, almost word for word from the beginning, and she was so stunned at my memory and talking aloud she just said, ‘All right, all right, sit, sit,’ and didn’t punish me.”

Grade Six mostly in McKinley, Grades Seven and Eight moving back and forth between Manitoba and West Butte Junior High, who knows how often; it seems she may have spent two years in Grade Eight until she refused to go to school any longer; she failed at least
once. She was always outstanding in physical education (Clarence shows me a certificate of award for
P.E
. Volleyball she received on 25 May 1973), and good to very good in art and music, but her academic record in her first five grades was consistently “unsatisfactory” and “needing improvement.”

“I flunked Grade Eight at West Butte Junior High,” she tells me, “and I quit.”

She failed in spring 1976; it seems she tried again in fall, but quit for good early in January 1977, shortly after she turned fifteen. Just stopped going. In the meantime she had lived on the road between her mother, who moved over three Prairie provinces looking for work wherever she could find it, and her stay-put father. When she was in Butte she tried to stay out of her father’s way, not attract his attention. “He never talked to me anyway,” she says. “We never talked about what our life, our family was about, why we lived like this and what we kids could actually do to change it. ‘Go to school,’ ‘Get a job’—that was it, orders, arbitrary orders but never a conversation about choices, about what might be possible. He ate at home and went out to drink. He drank to get drunk.

“There was something about me as a beginning teenager that somehow warned me: hang on, don’t call attention to yourself, you can’t do anything anyway, just adapt, do what any available adult does; hang on.

“Everyone told me I was stupid anyway. I’d flunked Grade One, then I flunked Grade Eight—I must be like they said, stupid, and probably crazy too. No family around, eat whatever you can find or pick up in homes where I baby sat. There’s usually something in Dad’s fridge when he’s away or asleep. Or you go into a bar. Butte bartenders never bother with your
ID
if you’re tall and sit quiet and drink. You can always get a pizza there, pickled eggs, some bar food. That’s where I learned to manage on three or four meals a week. And I always had a place to sleep. Either I’d babysit somewhere and sleep over, or I’d sneak into the house basement when Dad locked the door on me—he didn’t like what he thought I was doing; I was alone with him and only fifteen, sixteen; he might have talked to me about it beyond an occasional yell, but he didn’t—and after I couldn’t trust him, I lived like a mole in his basement. There was only one way into it, a big thick door Dad never knew I had a key to. I was small and flexible, and I could withstand
great pain. Even if I had to cut or bend myself to fit some place, I did. I’ve had to stay some place so long, my body formed into that small space and when I finally could leave I had to force myself out and let my body unfold itself in its own time.