Stolen Life (8 page)

Yvonne:
To this day I can’t breathe and talk at the same time. It took years of practice so I could control my breath right to speak easily. And I still can’t speak when wind is blowing hard, or raise my voice. I’ve perfected it now, but if I forget and hyperventilate, I lose my breath as if I’d run a hundred miles and I have to stop talking to retrack my breathing. Then my heart races. I’m so insecure with myself that often when I speak in public I have to fight panic. And then I can’t say a word without tears.

Learning to talk took years, the operations continuing even while I went to school. But long before I started school, things
were already happening to me, I was suffering in some horrible way. I didn’t know what it was. I was often in brutal pain, and I remember once I went to Dad to try and tell him about it. He was sitting in the living room and I tugged at his sleeve and tried to explain how I had been hurt. He listened and I tried harder. He told me to speak up and I did; I could see his frustration and I tried to yell louder because I knew he was getting mad. Then I started to cry, which of course plugged me up. Dad called to Mom but she wouldn’t come, so he got up and grabbed me to take me to her in the kitchen. I didn’t want to go, I got more upset, I lost all my breath control; soon it came in hiccups, jerking, sucking deep into my throat. I swallowed and choked on gobs of stuff. I was about to puke with Dad dragging me into the kitchen. But Mom had dinner to get ready: Dad was there, let him deal with it.

Kathy and I understood each other, and at least we could cry together. At the Pink House, Leon, who was nine years old to my three, dug a hole in the yard and placed Kathy and me in it, then he got the hose and started filling it with water. We howled and our Big Brother came to the rescue. As usual, Earl beat Leon until he was shrieking—we always called him “Squeaky” because as a baby he never cried, he squeaked. Our family was all cut from the same cloth: survival of the strongest. And me the littlest of the litter.

Then we had to move out of the Pink House, and Leon—Squeaky—was mad. All around us near Madison were deserted houses filled with the broken junk of people who had had to move on, windowless houses disabled by vandals or kids playing at wreckers. Leon was always hunting, and often he brought things home to be used, but Dad would call him down for being a vulture off other people’s fall. How did he know they wouldn’t come back to get their stuff? When we were packing up in the Pink House, Leon went into one room with a sledgehammer and smashed holes in the walls big enough to crawl through.

I drove around with Mom to look for a place to rent—in 1965 there were lots of houses available in Butte. Mom found the White House on Wyoming, where the bells from the big
Catholic church nearby always tolled at noon. It was the old, rich kind of house you see on
TV
in a show like
Roots
, built before the First War, all white with blue trimming, and a cement wall above the sidewalk around the front and side. The Pink House was small and cramped, but the White House was so huge we never had enough of anything to fill it, not even with furniture and seven kids. There were thirteen rooms and, when we moved in, furniture from the previous owners was piled in the centres of the rooms and covered by white sheets. We discovered some little nun dolls, which were given to me. I found out later that the house had once been a Catholic nunnery with paintings on the ceiling of every room but now stuccoed over. There were even narrow stairs; they seemed so
secret
to me, leading off the kitchen to the second floor and up under the roof. I remember every room. I loved the way that house was built.

When you entered you saw a wide, winding staircase going up. On the left was a small area; Mom laughed and called it the parlour, where one day our boyfriends could wait for us when they came for dates—as if that ever happened. On the right was the living room and the connecting dining room, with a long chandelier. My parents’ room was off this one, its ceiling blue and painted full of stars, with a door to a small porch, and one window facing south.

My father put a woodstove in one big east room, but Mom hated it. She said it messed up the place with wood and smoke, just like any old cabin—perhaps it reminded her of the rez. In the kitchen was my favourite spot: there was a cupboard with a shelf all around it. That was where I played. I’d place all the spices and stuff Mom had there carefully on the floor and then I’d ride round and round the shelf with my cars. Most of the time I got everything put back before she caught me, but sometimes not.

From the kitchen the secret stairs of red hardwood climbed up to the wide hall on the second floor. At the top there you could see the doors to every room. On the immediate left the hall led back past the stair railing to the bathroom, and inside it
a small door opened into a mystery room above the back stairs. That room was always scary for me, its slanted roof and the odd noises you could hear there. The big room on the left of the stair landing Kathy and I shared. It was as large as the room underneath it, hardwood flooring and a huge closet to stash all our stuff when we were supposed to clean up. It also had a door that opened out onto the flat roof of the freezer room. There was no railing around the roof, and out there I thought then I could see everything over all the houses and hills of Butte.

Karen and Minnie’s room was directly across the hall from us. There was a hall linen closet, then the front stairs, and Leon’s room in the front corner, with Earl’s room on the other corner, next to ours.

No one was allowed in Earl’s room. I would sit on the floor and see the light under his door. His room was full of records, and when he was there my feet could feel his music coming through the floor.

He had a lovely old floor radio-record player with a little cupboard in it. Once I did sneak into his room to look around, but I heard him coming and I hid in that small cupboard. He came in but did not stay long; he was a young man and always moving. I loved how his room was shaped, the ceilings and walls curved to fit around the round window. Perhaps there was a sitting ledge on the window, I can’t remember, but his room was mysterious and all the more exciting for me. I looked at the pictures on his album covers; he had a lot, especially of The Beatles. When I was in his room, it was silent and distant, just like he was.

I remember Earl only as a young man. He seemed tall, quiet, gentle to me. He kept himself very neat; he even had a cup only he could drink from. He seemed to be with us and yet not; he seemed never to be at home or, if he was, he did not want to be there. When Dad could no longer work in the mines, and in the summer, when our family came back from logging up in the mountains, he would ride on the load of logs we brought back and, while we were still moving, he’d jump off the truck at the corner of the house and grab the stop sign, whirl himself around it, and race inside to be the first in the tub.

Once Earl found a hurt pigeon and brought it home. He built a perch for it on the clothes-line post, and soon he had lots of pigeons. He attended Butte High School after we moved to the White House, and I would watch him walk away up the street towards it, high on the hill. Then I waited for him to come home. I was only allowed to go to the end of the block to wait.

I was walking to meet him, the sun low in the west on a very hot day, the tall houses shading the sidewalk. I was carrying the most beautiful doll I ever had. My mom bought it at an auction, where I sometimes went with her, the auctioneer just rattling away
gimmme gimme two bits, two bits to the dollar, sold!
This baby doll was even more beautiful than my nun dolls, head and hands and legs made of china, with patent shoes, long hair, and a soft stuffed body under a frilly dress. When Mom brought it home, I cried and cried to have this doll she wanted to keep for herself. I loved it so much I kept after her, I would not give up, never, until she finally made a deal: if I gave my nun dolls to my sisters, I could have the baby doll. Well, that day I was walking up the shaded sidewalk with it when I tripped over a crack, and fell. The doll’s head broke, and so did my heart.

Earl came down the hill and bent down beside me as I sat there crying, tears streaming over my face. I tried to make him understand—please, to fix it, these smashed pieces, fix it! Finally he just said, “Vonnie, no one can fix it. It’s gone.”

He helped me pick up every bit of it, but he was right. The beautiful baby doll was gone. I tried to get the nun dolls back, but they were gone too. I don’t know what became of them.