Stolen Life (57 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
This isn’t a good place to meet anyone; especially not me her Bear family. For she’s warned me: “They all know I’m writing a book with you. You’re the enemy, so be careful.”
Leon’s trial is scheduled for Courtroom B at 9:30. I look in, it’s small and empty; a place to get away from the crowd, but I want to see all the prisoners arrive. Perhaps I can recognize Leon. But Yvonne has given me no clear picture of him, and there are too many large men with black hair being paraded by, too fast.
It’s easier to identify Cecilia when she comes up the stairs with a group of younger women. She is short, broad, black hair parted and pulled back from her round, classic handsome Cree woman’s face: a visible descendant of Chief Big Bear, solid and formidable as a rock. She glances past me, I’m just another person standing around; I hear her talk to her small circle but cannot decipher what she is saying. She and her companions seem nervous, but familiar with all the courthouse facilities.
After 10:30 the crowd is considerably thinned; Cecilia and a slim woman barely bigger than a child—that must be Laura, Leon’s wife—sit in the tiny visitors’ alcove off the lobby between the courtrooms. I still haven’t introduced myself when three men come down the corridor: a younger and an older
RCMP
officer, both almost as burly as the handcuffed man they lead between them: this is Leon. Tall, pale skin, good-looking with swept-back, wavy black hair, clean shaven, in a new white-striped shirt, new Lee jeans, and white socks and Brooks shoes. Yvonne has told me it’s tradition: Cecilia always buys Leon new clothes for every court appearance. Despite his shackles he advances with easy confidence, nods to the women waiting for him, a slight grin twitching his lips; Laura gets up and follows close behind. Leon is very big, and even handsomer in profile, despite a double chin. He wears no belt, and his jeans are a bit loose—he may have lost his paunch in jail—to shift them up he must use both cuffed hands.
The trial cannot begin with Karen Sinclair’s testimony: Crown Prosecutor James Taylor spoke to her yesterday, after she arrived from Winnipeg, and there was no sign then that she was under the influence of alcohol, but this morning she was tested at 100 milligrams. Several hours will help, and the judge decides to begin with the testimony of witness Phyllis Stevenson.
While the court takes a short break to locate Ms. Stevenson, Laura returns to the lobby and reports to Cecilia, who has remained outside. The younger police officer talks to Cecilia as well, and after a moment she looks up at me, steadily. So I go to her in the crowd.
“Hello, are you Mrs. Cecilia Knight?”
“Yes.”
“I’m very glad to meet you. I’m Rudy Wiebe, I’m a friend of your daughter Vonnie. I’ve visited her in Kingston.”
She has already deduced who I am. And it is obvious that mentioning Yvonne’s familiar family name and my friendly visits to P4W doesn’t help; she suspects I know she has never gone to visit Yvonne in prison, though under the Correctional Services Canada visitation program she has been offered an airline ticket every year.
She confronts me quickly: “You the guy that’s helping her write a book?”
“We’ve talked about that, yes.”
Everyone, including the
RCMP
constables, is watching us, listening. Her heavy eyebrows clench over her intense black eyes.
“You write anything about our family”—she gestures at the closed courtroom door—“you’ll answer to me.”
Later this afternoon, after I have met Karen and listened to her testify, I will tell Cecilia: “Yvonne’s life story is her own. No one, not even you, can forbid her to tell it the way she remembers and knows it to be.”
But now, at her direct challenge, I can’t find a single word—what did I expect? But in front of all these witnesses?—and she turns, walks back into the visitors’ cubicle.
“The Provincial Court of Saskatchewan at North Battleford; October 18, 1993: In the matter of Her Majesty the Queen versus Leon Ray Johnson, who stands charged that between the 1
st
day of May, 1992, and the 1
st
day July, 1992, at Red Pheasant Indian Reserve in Saskatchewan, he did commit a sexual assault on Karen Sue Sinclair. That she is his sister is admitted.”
Witness Phyllis Stevenson
[from her court testimony and cross-examination]:
Karen Sinclair is married to my brother. We started getting close because we confided in each other, my husband was abusing me and my brother tries to control Karen by scaring her—she gets scared easily. Last year we were living in Winnipeg, I was separated from my husband then, and Karen wanted me to meet her relatives in Saskatchewan. [Phyllis tells the familiar story about an all-night party at Leon’s house with lots of twelve-packs available. At one point] I went upstairs to the washroom, when I came back Leon pushed me and I was scared. He sort of shoved me aside, on my arm, he didn’t say anything but I was scared, I went outside and sat in the bushes behind the house. It was somewhere after midnight and I was wondering how I’d get home. Then Laura, Leon’s wife called me, so I went back in the house […]. Laura said Leon and Karen were in the basement and I was going to go down there but she said I shouldn’t go, eh, I shouldn’t bother. So I went out […] and sat in the car. I locked all the doors and fell asleep. Then Karen came out, she was in a really big hurry […]. We drove to North Battleford. Her eyes were all red, and she picked up some Visine for her eyes and we stopped at McDonalds, [her daughter] wanted to eat, and when she was out of earshot Karen started to cry. She wouldn’t tell me immediately what was wrong, but finally she just said that Leon was on top of her and she pushed him off and she didn’t elaborate. She started to get hysterical, so I just comforted her. I held her in my arms and she cried on my shoulder.
Crown Prosecutor James Taylor: Did Karen want to report it to the police or not?
Answer: She did, and I told her not to because—because her mother had recently had a heart attack and I didn’t think it would—I told her they should discuss it amongst themselves in the family before they went—before she went ahead and did this, like.
Karen enters the courtroom at 2:30 and walks, without looking to either side, directly into the witness box. When she looks up, she sees me sitting at the elbow of the policeman guarding Leon, and she smiles at me—a first from a Johnson other than Yvonne. Her dark brown hair is tied back from her pale, rather drawn face; a small, trim woman in black jeans and shirt. And handsome like all her siblings I have seen: physically, the Creator has truly been kind to this family.
Karen tells another familiar story, of years of enduring violent physical attacks by Leon, and of sexual advances—which, unlike Yvonne, she says she could rebuff. And then, the night of the party,
we were drinking, smoking, talking. To be honest with you, I got loaded […]. I drank till I blacked out, the last thing I remember is sleeping downstairs, next thing was being woke up on the living room couch, upstairs. Leon on top of me. He had ahold of my hips and was bringing my hips to him and his body was on top of me. He was very very heavy, I could hardly breathe.
Crown Prosecutor Taylor: And what was Leon doing?
Answer: He was having intercourse with me.
Crown Prosecutor: What did you do?
Answer: My exact words were, “Get the fuck off me,” and I was pushing, with both hands against his chest. He got off of me, pulled up his pants, sat down on the couch that was next to the couch I was on. And I looked for my pants and pantie, I was holding my shirt like this and my bra was still on but I couldn’t find the rest […].
Counsel for the Defence Mignealt: You don’t know whether you were the aggressor in having him have intercourse with you?
Answer: I know myself, no, I was not. I never said anything, I didn’t want anybody to find out and then my husband went and got drunk and blabbed it all over the place. It was something I just wanted to keep to myself and not nobody know, but everybody knows now.
Counsel for the Defence: I understand the Winnipeg police came to you because of a statement your sister Yvonne made against Leon. Did you see the statement?
Answer: I saw it. There was a very thick one sitting on the police table. I did not read it. The officer asked me if I wanted to charge Leon and without hesitation I told him, “Yes.”
Counsel for the Defence: You say you didn’t read Yvonne’s statement, but were you aware of its contents?
Answer: Yes. I didn’t have to read it, because Yvonne told me.
Crown Prosecutor: Karen, as you were growing up, living with all your brothers and sisters, during those times did you have any suspicions about anything happening between Leon and Yvonne of a sexual nature?
Answer: Yes.
Crown Prosecutor: Did you ever see anything?
Answer: No, not actually seen it. [But] I was pretty sure, yeah, the suspicions were very strong, yes, yes.
Cecilia never enters the courtroom. During a brief recess in the afternoon I see her alone in the visitors’ alcove and quickly, gathering my nerve, I go to the door and ask her if I can come in, sit down. Her greeting is non-committal, she’s obviously thinking of something else, so I sit down.
Over noon I have had lunch with Jim Taylor. He is a stocky, oddly gentle man for what I still think of as the necessarily aggressive profession of Crown Prosecutor; he’s been doing it for many years, and not much that happens in or out of a courtroom surprises him. He told me that it was Cecilia and Minnie who had been drinking with Karen in her hotel room till four in the morning; it was he who put her in a cell for four hours to make sure she would be sober enough by the afternoon to testify.
But now, Cecilia is explaining to me how persecuted Leon is. She is full of defences for him: it all happened when he was a kid, everyone does stupid things when they’re young, the police have got it in for him, they just want to throw away the key on him for life. She says nothing about Karen, or why she would lay such a personally painful charge against her own brother, though it seems to me she must know
every detail of it—it happened only sixteen months ago. Rather, she tells me without prompting that she was in Winnipeg babysitting as usual at the time the alleged offence took place; that when she was young her brothers tried to do things to her too but they sure as hell never got anywhere.