Stolen Life (6 page)

Yvonne:
I’m a baby, less than two, and I’ve been laid down for a nap. I’m looking through the bars of my crib, through the small square panes of the window, and there’s a bell-shaped window in the house next door. Years later my sister Kathy and I play hookey from school and we’re in an empty lot on busy Montana Street, just weeds wide open to the sky, and I feel it: I’ve been here; our first brick house stood here once. A sagging garage at the back is all that’s left on the lot, and there’s the name
L-E-O-N
painted on the door. My brother’s name, with the E backwards, the way he often wrote it.

I looked up then and yes, there was the bell-shaped window that got hid in my memories. And on the corner the gas station, still there, where the orange balls jumped around on the side of the pump when Dad gassed up. Leon once started a fire there, and another time the gas station had a fire on its own without Leon’s help.

That’s the first house I remember, red brick on Montana, Butte’s main street, coming wide and straight down the mountain through town, with shaft mines and frames sticking up all over between the houses and buildings. Parades come marching, down past the front of our house, and candy wrapped in paper scatters behind the booming bands. If I can get into the street I can pick it up and shove it into my mouth and let it melt,
sweeter than sugar. The front steps give me slivers. I have to go down on my hands and knees backwards, I’m so little.

There never was anything but big sky and mountains over our pink house on Butte’s east side, 1138 Madison. Now not only that house is gone, the whole street has disappeared. But the summer between two and three I remember short Madison Street and the wooden house painted pink. There is a yard and a fence, and after a rain the dirt cracks into little pieces and curls, and I pick up chunks of curled mud. My dad once said something about mud pies, so I try to bite into the mud he called pies. It’s really gritty, worse than peanut butter choking me up. I can’t do anything but cry. There is no roof in my mouth, and crying and choking to breathe makes the mud ooze over my lips, out of my nostrils. I can only run to Mom choking, blowing dirt in snotty bubbles, and crying.

The picket fence is white; only the level grade of the railroad separates our yard from the enormous open pit of the Berkeley Mine that’s chewing down into the mountain above us. It is never dark in the house because at night the floodlights from the pit blaze over us, the machinery grinds. Twenty-four hours a day huge trucks, their tires higher than our car, growl past; we have to stop and wait for them to cross the street, and the house rumbles like an earthquake. They could squash us flat and not notice. Dad says a blast of their exhaust would fry an egg on the roof of the car. There are even bigger trucks deep down in the pit on the mountain; the noise never stops, hammering, grinding up the earth.

I remember all the shift changes, the miners from both the pit and the shaft mines walking with their food buckets past our picket fence on the street. Suddenly the sirens roar, long, long, and every truck stops moving; there is a kind of calm, and suddenly a blast shakes the earth as if Butte Mountain has shivered, and shaken all the buildings and all the gallows frames of the shaft mines above us loose, and is going to slide them down on top of us. But then a huge cloud of dust from the pit billows into the sky, and the machinery starts again—it was only a dynamite blast in what is the deepest man-made hole in the world, Butte
always brags—besides holding the world record of fourteen thousand miles of tunnels under its city limits. Every day the Berkeley Pit is getting bigger and bigger between us and the next line of mountains, chewing its way closer to the railroad and to us.

Beside us there are a few two-storey houses. Mom tries to keep me away from the train, but sometimes I get up the embankment to the track and find the rocks with pretty gold bits—Dad laughs and says it’s “fool’s gold”—and silver flecks that fall off the ore cars. There are words like pictures on the cars, the curls of PACIFIC, the angles of ANACONDA, and the cars from the smelter where Mom sometimes works when Grandpa Louie babysits us have runnings down their sides as if they were crying from their one giant eye on top, yellow or white, depending on how recently it was overfilled. The engine will whistle as it approaches the street, and I wait and wait for it. I pull my arm up and down, and the engine driver waves at me; his arm goes pump, pump, and the whistle blows again. I love the caboose. I wait the whole train just to see the caboose, and sometimes the conductor throws a candy to me. It’s always hard; it lasts a long time because I can’t suck anything.

There are black-and-white pictures of us six kids—Perry wasn’t born yet—at the Pink House. One in the kitchen with my tall brother Earl standing back almost in shadow, and Grandpa Louie’s round, bald head bent over us four sisters all in a row on chairs. Me with my little bare legs parted, sitting on Leon’s lap. And the other snap taken in the yard shows only us kids and the Butte landscape. We stand in a tight cluster so you can see the exact size of our ages, with the picket fence behind us, and beyond that the lines of the power poles and drainpipes and railroad disappearing into rows of piled-up dirt. A long conveyor belt sticks up over the tracks. And the bare, grey mountains along the top of the picture far away look like they were shovelled up together too.

We four little Johnson girls in dresses stand at the front, each of us a year apart. Karen, the oldest, between seven and eight, who will be the first of us to be shacked up when she’s seventeen. Sharon, who we always call Minnie, grinning all her bright
teeth, always Dad’s favourite child. Then Kathy, a year older than me, with her black, beautiful hair—she called herself the black sheep of the family—and finally me, the littlest, smiling so desperately, with my arms wrapped tight around my chest, holding myself together.

The boys stand behind us, Leon between Karen and me and shoulder high to a tall boy Dad says lived with us a lot then, his family was broken up; and beside him, tallest of all, my handsome brother Earl. He’s going on fifteen, smiling, his heavy hair greased down in a curl on the right side of his face—he spent a lot of time getting the flip in his hair just so before he left for school—leaning forward a little like a Cree peering at you, his hands behind his back, and wearing a white T-shirt with a dark horizontal band. It looks like a wide rope cinched tight around his chest.

Yvonne:
At the Pink House on Madison I am in a high chair. There’s a creek or some flow of water running outside the kitchen
door, I can hear it, and beyond that a rusty fence, willow bushes, the junk of rusted washing machines. The house suddenly shakes after the siren sounds. I’m shorter than the kitchen table and I have to climb up to get onto the living-room couch. The couch and chair have a hard cover, rough with a design like leaves.

The counters in the kitchen were higher than the table, and there was something on the counter I always wanted. I think it was a cookie jar. It’s on the tip of my memory, but I can’t quite recall it—I always think if I was out and saw one, I would know it and buy it.

Mom could never understand me. I would try and talk, but she was always so busy—so many kids—and she never had time to figure me out. Sometimes she’d just sit and cry, “What do you want? I don’t know what you’re saying, I can’t do anything.” So I’d wind up shutting up, or crying. If I got mad and screamed in frustration, I’d get hit.

My basic problem was the way I was born; in the centre of my face, where my nose, top lip, gums, and roof of my mouth should have been, there was only folded tissue that left a gap in my upper mouth. Even my teeth and inner-mouth bones were affected by this severe deformity. I’ve now had endless reconstructive surgery, but I still wonder what I would look like if I’d been born like my sisters, all so neatly beautiful, and my brothers, so handsome as well. I think our family beauty comes from mixing two different bloods, dark Cree and blond Norwegian, but I’m told I inherited the genetic problem of my mother’s family. Grandma Flora had a single cleft palate: she had a split in her nose, lip, and the roof of her mouth, and she never had any skilled surgery. They were reserve Indians, and someone just sewed her top lip and the right flare of her nose together. She had to live with an open palate till she died, over eighty years old, June 1986.

Even if I could, I don’t want to remember all the endless operations I’ve had on my face from birth. O God, how I hate needles—more than all that cutting and patching of reconstructive plastic surgery. And so, as I grew, my mom could not understand me. To make me stop pestering her, she’d give me things,
to buy me off sort of, but I was persistent. I’d cry and pull on her dress. I’ve felt the sting of her frustrations all my life, and I admit it was hard for her. She’d run from one item in the kitchen to the next, pointing. “You want this? This?” She’d open the cupboards. “Is it this?”

I’d shake my head, “Yes,” “No,” but often it wasn’t such a “yes-no” thing and I’d let her buy me off; or I’d be left to cry until I stopped. Walk away with my head down and shoulders sagging, alone. It was like being deaf but still hearing, speaking but speechless—it was there, heaping up inside me. I could not ask questions, just puzzle everything around inside my head, dreaming it, bouncing it back and forth, without any guidance to help me understand. So I learned by instinct, by watching to see and recognize what others don’t, to judge myself by taking chances. To depend only on myself. There was no one else.

My mind was my best, really my only, companion. But I think that then, on a deeper level, my spirit already knew and understood how much I was being hurt. The impact I wore in silence, and shed in tears.