Stolen Life (58 page)

Young? I think: at the time of the rape, Karen was thirty-three, Leon thirty-six.

Yvonne has explained a great deal to me of how her family works, its enormous capacity for evasion, and listening to Cecilia I see her account corroborated. Behind Cecilia’s defiant words to me I recognize her attempts to save her beloved Leon from the charges of sexual abuse that two of his sisters and a cousin have, after as long as twenty years, finally dared lay against him. Getting Karen drunk before her courtroom appearance did not prevent Leon’s case from going ahead, but I know Cecilia is trying stronger tactics on Yvonne. She told Yvonne a few months earlier that if she dropped her charges against Leon and he got out of jail, Leon would run for a seat on the Red Pheasant Band Council and when he got elected he’d get the band to support Yvonne with money and lawyers in her appeals of her life sentence. The band, she said, would help get her out of prison.

This seemed to me no believable plan of action. It sounded more like blackmail: if you lay off Leon, I’ll help you with your appeals. But help how? Keep Leon out of prison and he’ll be elected to band council? That sounds ludicrous to anyone who knows anything about reserve politics. Yvonne refused to play along with Cecilia’s suggestions, and on 6 April 1993 she went so far as to send a three-page personal letter to the Red Pheasant Council giving them a detailed history of Leon’s unretributed violence against his family members. She concluded: “My silence kept him safe in the past, but I will not be silenced ever again.”

Do I tell Cecilia I know any of this, in the few moments we see each other in the tiny waiting room of the North Battleford Courthouse? No. She is polite to me, speaking loudly about generalities I already know, but I sense she could as easily explode as she is, for the moment, civil. I ask her the most neutral question I can think of: how is she related to Big Bear? But she will explain nothing; by siding with Yvonne I have become, as Yvonne has told me, “the family enemy.”

I ask her about Yvonne. Cecilia’s very worried about Vonnie, from prison she is saying such things, writing such crazy letters—she does not mention the band letter directly—so many crazy things, some of it is hate mail. She tells me Vonnie’s White grandfather abused her, yes, and her White father too, but nothing else that girl says now ever happened, it’s just not true, and maybe all the drinking she’s done all her life, and drugs, and now that life sentence in jail, maybe she is crazy. Gone just plain crazy.

I could ask Cecilia: if her daughter Yvonne is “crazy,” why has she never once visited her in prison? Gone to talk face to face, offer her some comfort and help? Why this destructive, emotional blackmail for Leon’s sake?

I could ask, and maybe I should. But I simply don’t have the nerve, sitting there, her implacable face so close. Perhaps I’m too intimidated by all I know of this afflicted family where both social and personal violence perpetuate themselves like cancers, from one generation to the next until, in despair, they can only accuse each other of brutality and lies in a public court where any Canadian who cares to can come and listen and know of it.

And at least part of the reason for my silence is Big Bear. I am as White as the Treaty Six negotiators whom he confronted in 1876, and today, in these North Battleford courtrooms, I have seen the prophecy in Big Bear’s declaration to those government men:

“When I see you there is one thing that I dread: to feel the rope around my neck.”

A prophecy being fulfilled in Canadian courtrooms day after day, in dreadful ways not even he could have foreseen 120 years ago.

What I do tell Cecilia is that I’ve talked to Yvonne for days at a time, I have read thousands of pages of her letters and personal journals, and she not only reads but she also writes out analyses of large, difficult books of fiction, history, and psychology. I have worked with highly intelligent people at universities all my life and to me she appears to be not at all “crazy.” Her memories are bizarre, yes, and sometimes horrible and grotesque, but they are invariably consistent. She impresses me as a very intelligent woman who is daring for the first time to think through and understand what her life has truly been, and what has been done to her.

I see the expression on Cecilia’s face and I stop talking; we look at each other for a moment silently. I think: she has long ago chosen which child she will support absolutely—it seems she cannot support them all—and now she is as immovable as a mountain, a strength commensurate with everything I have grasped in almost four decades of thinking and researching and writing about Big Bear.

She is little more than a year older than I. We both know the sometimes overwhelming, inexpressible pain that can happen in families, pain from which our memories will never find an escape. But to simply deny it? Face to face in the small room, I am weak in the knowledge of all she has already endured, and must continue to endure.

And I feel relieved—even as I feel shame at my relief—when she gets up abruptly, walks past me, disappears into the crowded lobby.

Accused Leon Johnson

[condensed from his court testimony and cross-examination]:

All day I sat in court, watching, taking notes. I tried at first to be inconspicuous, but that was impossible in small Courtroom B, where the single row of chairs for spectators is not more than a metre behind the two desks where the accused and his defence lawyer sit on the left, and the Crown Prosecutor on the right, facing the judge. I had to sit beside the
RCMP
officer who brought Leon in, shackled, and stationed himself directly behind him throughout the trial. Sitting at his red-serge elbow I was, presumably, physically safe.

His Honour Judge D.M. Arnot looked at me immediately, “Are you with the press, sir?” I shook my head. “No, very good.” and since then he has ignored me.

So has everyone else; I’ve become conveniently invisible. I’ve watched Leon listen as the lawyers ponderously dug up details of his brutality against his sister and relatives, watched his thick handcuffed hands with large knobbly knuckles probably broken in innumerable fights, watched him staring around in defiance, sometimes even cockiness, or on occasion with head bent and profiled face expressionless, only his foot and thumbs twitching slightly. And I wondered: is there such a thing as a courtroom ego? To have one’s most trivial actions examined so minutely, almost iconically, within one of the few ritualized procedures left in our society—the courtroom trial? Does Leon ever think: I bust one cop-car window, I fuck one drunken bitch, and I get all these big shots just a-hopping—hey! Look at me! I’m big news. I keep them in fancy cars and slick women.

And Karen recovering from a binge, for three hours in the witness chair, her rigid, painful emotion as the cross-examination questions intensify, right to the legal-aid defence lawyer’s grotesque demand that
she state the size of her bra. She is at the most painful moment of memory, she has just told him she became conscious of being crushed under the huge body of her brother, she finds herself naked except for T-shirt and bra—and K.M. Mignealt demands to know both inch and cup size. And then he makes her repeat it. As Yvonne will note when she reads the trial transcript: “A typical stupid male who has a position in the legal system to defile the victim.”

But Karen gives the data again, flat and clear. It is Crown Prosecutor Taylor who finds the breaking emotion in her: when she admits it was her abusive husband’s drunken, public blabbing about her assault that hurt her most deeply. And then, surprisingly, in what until then has been a kind of mechanical excavation of harrowing personal experience, it is the policeman beside me who gives her the only gesture of courtroom kindness: he gets up and offers her a tissue to wipe her tears. And she accepts it.

I had understood that the defence lawyer was hesitating about having Leon take the stand, but there he is, talking willingly. In fact, after the first few questions he just rolls on without question, of his own accord. It seems to me he savours the sound of his own story, as only he can tell it, though his answers to the Prosecutor’s cross-examination quickly drop to monosyllables. But he sticks to his position, and he has no idea why his sister would accuse him of such an act.

All of which elicits from Jim Taylor the comment: “I didn’t know Leon Johnson was such an exemplary guy, or I wouldn’t have prosecuted him.”

And Cecilia Knight. She has sat all day in the tiny visitors’ alcove across from Courtroom B, never entered to hear a single word either of her children had to say; waiting for it all to be finally over. She asks from the doorway, just before the judge adjourns the court, “Can I come in now, without hearing something bad?”

The judge states he will pronounce his verdict two days from now. And Cecilia turns, leaves immediately. Leon’s eyes follow her; from the angle where I sit I can’t tell whether he has ever looked at Karen, but I don’t think she glanced at him even once. I go out, outside into the breathable air of the sunny fall parking lot.

After a few minutes I see the judge emerge, get into a blue Mercedes 450, and drive away. Then Cecilia and Laura appear at the public
doors, talking to Karen, who gets into the back seat of a worn, white station wagon with them. Cecilia drives it out of the lot, down a North Battleford street, between tall trees now stripped of their leaves. She stops opposite a bungalow; Laura goes in, comes out with a small swarm of children carrying duffle bags. They crowd into the seat beside Karen, spill back over into the baggage space. Slowly the station wagon pulls away, turns left at the first corner, then left again. Cecilia driving out of the city, towards the river bridges, south towards Red Pheasant Reserve.

[From the judgement of His Honour Judge D.M. Arnott on 21 October 1993]