Stolen Life (12 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
“But Earl was careful, and real steady. Vietnam was going on then, worse and worse, and they needed men. He wanted to be a Marine. And he’d’ve been a good one. I named him after my big brother Earl, who was a Marine too, killed when the Japanese run over the Philippines in ’42. He was killed on the Bataan Death March.”
After a moment he can continue. He explains that early in 1971 Leon was “always getting into trouble.” In a junior-high class he and other boys tried to make Molotov cocktails and one boy had got dreadfully burnt when it exploded; then he stole a car at Dillon and, though police charges were dropped when Clarence paid for fixing it, Leon’s growing list of misdemeanours finally caught up with him and he was sent to the Swan River, Montana, boys’ boot camp. And then, at the end of April, Cecilia and Clarence suddenly decided to go north to the Red Pheasant Reserve.
Clarence offers no reason for this trip to Saskatchewan. Yvonne tells me she still cannot understand why they made that ten- to twelve-hour drive north when there was no school break for the four girls. It must have been a “spur of the moment” decision, but just before they left she remembers Earl was trying to explain something to Clarence and he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—understand what Earl meant. They argued until Earl got up, furious, and stormed out of the house; within an hour, parents and all four girls were heading for Canada.
They left, and Earl remained behind to cram for his Grade Twelve final exams at Butte High School; his graduation was to be on 6 May. At age eighteen he had dropped out of school and left home, worked at various garage jobs and bought his ’55 Chevy panel truck, but in the fall of 1970 he had come back: “Can I live at home and go to school?” So now, besides studying, he worked every day at Eddy’s Bakery; his girlfriend at this time was Susan Samuel.
Clarence says he was unemployed because of the closed mines and problems following his drastic back operations: the family was living on Cecilia’s part-time work in a restaurant and his small military pension. “I arranged with a bartender at the Montana Bar, when the cheques came in, Earl should go there to cash them right away. And phone me, in Canada, that they were in.”
“Well,” I say, having puzzled over the newspaper stories and coroner’s forty-seven-page “Inquest into the Death of …” report half the previous night, “the police say Earl had cheques in his pocket.”
“Yeah, he had them.”
“And he cashed something at the Montana Bar; he had a receipt.”
“He had a bar cash slip for $140, and $86 cash.”
“From that cheque?”
“I guess so. He hadn’t cashed his own small cheques from Eddy’s.”
“So why did he go to the police station? Didn’t he know you were coming back soon? Why didn’t he just call you in Canada?”
“His graduation was May sixth. Cecilia wanted to be back.…”
“So why go to the cops, at one o’clock in the morning?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he drank a bit and got mixed up. Or maybe they lied, he didn’t go to them at all, maybe they just hauled him in.”
“They say he wasn’t staggering. The coroner says there was no alcohol in his blood.”
“Hell, whatever reason, they always need money, City Hall. The cops just do a sweep, pick guys up at the door of a bar, you pay your five-dollar fine and you’re free. They’ll maybe pick up the same guy five, six times in one night. If you haven’t got five bucks, they shove you in a cruiser and throw you in jail overnight for ten, twenty bucks, and costs. Hell, I’ve seen them shove ten guys into the back seat of a cruiser and as fast as they shoved them in one side they were crawling right out the open door on the other. Just depends how much money they were told to get.”
We go through the transcript of the coroner’s inquest together. The police despatcher, Dan Lloyd Hollis, testified that shortly after midnight on the morning of 5 May, Earl
came to the station looking for his mother and father. He wanted to know if they were there. I said they weren’t. I didn’t really understand what he meant at the time. I asked him if they were booked or if they were in jail. He said, “No … they were in Canada.” By that time I could tell that he had been drinking and I could smell the alcohol. So I called in a car. Officer Graham took over.
“I always thought Michael Graham was okay, but now I don’t know,” Clarence says. “I knew him; he brought some of our kids home
sometimes. He told me how bad he felt too, at the funeral. But now I don’t know.”
Graham testified that Earl smelled strongly of alcohol, though he was not staggering. Earl trusted him, Graham said, and had told him he had purchased mescaline in Spokane three weeks earlier and sold it in Butte. He had taken about five hits and now had been drinking for two or three days. Graham also testified Earl started to talk about how he feared someone and that he wanted to join the U.S. military. When Graham suggested he would take him to the hospital, Earl said, “No, I just want to stay in jail. I think that’s the best place for me.” But could he have something to eat? Graham said Earl showed them how to start his van by hot-wiring it so they could park it in the police garage. He bought Earl several cheeseburgers and then booked him into jail on a drunk charge.
I ask Clarence, “Didn’t Earl have a key to his van?”
“Sure he did. It was his pride and joy, that van. I’ve still got it parked in my garage right here.”
“Does it have keys?”
“Not now. I don’t know what the cops did to it, or why.”
Earl, Police Officer Michael Graham stated under oath, showed no sign of depression. In fact he offered to take care of a noisy drunk, Kenneth Kasolomon, whose cell he had to share. But he had seemed worried about the money he’d spent drinking, “that his dad would be mad at him.” Also “that he had some young lady in trouble,” and that “someone was in town and he was afraid he was going to kill him.” Twice Graham stated: “He wanted to be in jail. [He said] he was better off in jail.”
Clarence leans back, away from the yellowing inquest sheets now twenty-four years old. He has relit his small black cigars again and again, whenever he was aware they had died in his mouth, one after the other; he clicked off the
TV
set long ago. He removes his bent glasses and slowly wipes his eyes.
Beyond his head, the top picture of six hanging on the wall, framed under glass, is a head-and-shoulders photograph of Earl and his maternal grandfather, John Bear. A beautiful picture of young and old, so light, so dark; faces leaning close to each other that seem to exhibit no resemblance whatever.
“If we’d stayed together, as a family,” Clarence says bitterly, “we could’ve done something about Earl, dead like that. That’s the reason I
stayed here, why I can’t leave Butte, why I kept on this case. Not so much now, but I did for a long time. You can’t run away from something like that.”
Yvonne:
Mom and Dad never understood family in the same way. Mom always said Dad never really wanted her family members around. But they didn’t come just to visit; they’d move in with
their
whole families, the way Cree sometimes do, and stay for a while, and when they did, they expected Mom and Dad to do all sorts of things for them. And Mom wanted to do it—after all, she was proud to have married White, though she didn’t want her family to think she was too high and mighty White now—whenever they showed up in Butte without warning, though I know they did things for us as well when we went north to the reserve. They’d talk in Cree to each other, and Dad thought they were talking about him and finally he’d yell, “Jesus H. Christ! At least talk English when you’re at my table eating my food in my house!”
They’d sometimes load up with all kinds of things before they left, with or without anyone knowing, least of all Dad. Mom didn’t mind; for her it was always elders and grown-ups first, and at times I went hungry while watching my aunts and uncles stuff their faces. Then we were told to be quiet and respect our elders and guests—the Creator would reward us.
Mom just loved to show off her big house to her brothers and sisters. But I guess Dad thought they were freeloaders.
“Do you think it’s true?” I ask Clarence. “Earl went to the police for protection because he thought someone in Butte wanted to kill him? Why would he think that?”
But Clarence answers his own question, not mine; his voice stiff with hate: “It was those three cops, John Sullivan, Mickey Sullivan, Moon LaBreche—they’re the ones.”
Checking the inquest transcript, I realize those three provided all the information about what happened to Earl while he was held in jail.
Lieutenant John T. Sullivan “just happened to walk in the [police station] door” when Earl first came in, and after his arrest Sullivan began the questioning about drugs; Detective Mickey Sullivan further questioned Earl about drugs for over an hour next morning before he was sent up to the judge for sentencing at 10 a.m.; Officer Clarence D. “Moon” LaBreche was half a block from the jail and answered the alarm raised about 12:30 p.m. by the trusty Harold Dishman. LaBreche ran down the stairs, along the corridor, and, as he testified under oath later, he “observed [Mr. Johnson] hanging from the hose around the corner of the jail there. He was approximately two and a half feet off the ground.… I took out my pocketknife and we cut the hose and he fell to the ground.”
“Those three cops,” Clarence continues, “were the biggest crooks in Butte. John T. and Mickey set Earl up, questioning him about drugs, then Moon makes sure he gets there first to the body. All three of
them
were involved with drugs themselves, I think they had a whole ring going. That’s why they started this talk about mescaline, about Earl being doped out of his mind. Three weeks before, he was at home, we were there, he never took off to Spokane or anywhere, he was cramming, he was trying to pass his Grade Twelve exams! Where would he have time to run all the way to Washington and get drugs? I know it, Earl stayed away from drugs.”
“But studying or not,” I push him, “it seems after midnight on the Wednesday Earl was drunk. Everybody smelled it. They put him in a cell.”
“The autopsy says nothing about drugs or booze in his system.”
“That’s noon the next day. That could’ve cleared up by then, eh?”
“The night before it’s the cops’ word—nothing else, just cops!”
“What about the guy in the cells, Dishman. Didn’t he see him drunk?”
“I knew Harold Dishman, he had worked for me logging in summer. In jail a trusty damn well says what the cops tell him or he’s toast. Anyways, he told me he never talked to Earl till next morning, just saw him get locked up at night.”
“What about the Marine recruiter, Burgess?”
“Burgess only saw Earl the once, after the city judge sentenced him for drunkenness, after eleven o’clock.”
“Well”—I’m scanning the report as we talk—“Graham says that, at one in the morning, when he locked him up, Earl offered to watch the guy he was locked in with, who was getting sick—so Earl couldn’t have been drunk that bad, eh?”
Clarence sits bent, his chair moulded around him, staring somewhere into that past. “Mostly I don’t think he was drunk at all. He was set up.”
Nevertheless the events remain confusing, if not contradictory. Clearly Clarence’s aging memory has a lot of self-justification to protect, so I push him, as mildly as I can,
“But that Marine, Burgess, wouldn’t be in on any cop set-up, and he says Earl insisted he wanted to join the Marines right away, walk out of jail, join up and leave, today. Burgess says Earl was very disappointed when he told him he had to get his conviction for drunkenness cleared up first, okay, maybe waived by Friday—only two days—but definitely cleared up before he can go. So maybe Earl was scared. Maybe not drugs—but what? He’ll graduate tomorrow, May 6, sure, but that’s just a ceremony and he can’t attend anyway if he’s in jail, refusing to pay a small fine. And he won’t finish his high-school final exams before the end of May—so why does he need protection in his home town? Why all of a sudden does Vietnam look better than Butte?”
When I first came into his house two days before, Clarence guffawed loud and long as he offered me one of his patented throwaways: “I wish I was as smart as I’m good-looking, then I’d have figured all this family stuff out by now!” But it seems to me that, self-justifying or not, in the twenty-four years since Earl’s death he must have thought of almost every possible angle, again and again. He answers me now.