Stolen Life (18 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
Yvonne pulls the peak of her cap lower in the lovely sunlight. If I concentrate on us walking together—as we never yet have—we are simply friends on an afternoon stroll; even the “sugar shacks,” as she calls the two small bungalows with their fences and tiny yards where inmates can stay for several days of privacy with visiting husbands and children, might be normal homes—all I need to do is glance past the massive wall leaning over them and consider the blue sky, the bright clouds moving by from where I know Lake Ontario has to be.
And I will especially remember the bent frame of the uncovered sweat lodge in the angle of wall off Sir John A. Macdonald Street—the street where I came walking that morning from my motel. And the large white teepee beside it; the Native Sisterhood holds circles there when Elders come.
Then we’re inside buildings, and every corridor and room is packed with people. Often I can recognize by their very posture a person’s position in this rigidly ordered world before their clothing confirms my surmise. The laundry room, the gym where assemblies are held, the kitchen and low-ceilinged dining area with cafeteria serving counter
and small, round tables. Here Yvonne often sits—she says she eats only three or four times a week, she’s never hungry for this food—in an angle of wall and window opening on an enclosure of indirect sunlight between buildings, reading.
“That’s my spot. If I’m there, everybody leaves me alone.”
Yvonne introduces me to dozens of people, including officials of the prison, who all look at me carefully; she is friendly, laughs and cracks jokes with fellow inmates, and soon I notice what a strain it is for her, all this necessary “easy” camaraderie. There is a cluster of women in the library; they’re obviously neither inmates nor officials and they seem large-eyed with incomprehension. Yvonne just shrugs, walks past towards the shelves, and shows me the worn paperback copy of
The Temptations of Big Bear
. That’s how she first found out I existed.
And later I will remember one Correctional Services Canada guard at the outside door, when we re-entered the main building. Her face was younger, prettier than those of most of the guards we met, but it too was getting heavy, loose under her styled blonde hair. Yvonne explained that often guard jobs in P4W run in Kingston families, many of whom are related: most have been working there for three or four generations. The city has an excellent university, but the people associated with the many Kingston prisons outnumber the university people two to one. And it seems I remember all the guards as broad, large women, as if their very work produced weight, perhaps demanded a necessity of obvious, oppressive heft.
When we are alone in the counselling room again, we sit in silence, the tape recorder off. Yvonne makes cigarettes—she has a nice little gadget that stuffs tobacco into filtered tubes—and neither of us wants to plunge into anything. So finally I remind her of the Cadillac.
Cecilia bought the brand-new navy Cadillac in the summer of 1972 from Paisley Motors in Butte, so much down and $300 a month. Driving a truck in the Berkeley Pit was guarantee for anything.
“She loved that car.” Yvonne is smiling. “Her dream-come-true, right up there, wide and low and sleek with Elvis. She parked it in front of our house on Jackson for the world to see.
“Mom showed us kids all the Caddy’s beautiful features, and laid down the rules: no playing with the power doors or windows, no fighting, no food or drink in the car. It was so big no one had to sit on anyone’s lap!
There wasn’t even a hump in the floor, and I found my place lying flat on the blue carpet. Everyone else fought to sit by the window but I could fit into the smallest space. All the dangling, kicking feet were no problem. I stretched out in the new smell; everything on the thick carpet and under the seat smelled so rich. I could easily lie on the floor stretched along, almost under, the back of the front seat; there were even little skirts to hide me, hidden and safe though in the centre of my family. Or there were padded armrests that pulled down out of the backs of the seats. I could sit there higher between everyone either back or front, watch the highway slip away under us, watch Mom set the cruise control.
“We drove around Butte, down every street, every road in Silver Bow County, showing it. Once Mom stopped in the country for a family pit stop. She disappeared into the woods and suddenly she yelled out; when we got to her she was digging a huge glass tank out from under the leaves. A glass aquarium, she said; it must have held a hundred gallons of water, but it could fit into the trunk easily and we hauled it home. There wasn’t a leak in it, the metal corners were sealed perfectly, so we polished it and she put it on a table by the front window and made sure the curtains were open so people walking past could see. Then she bought fish and plants and two turtles. We found interesting rocks and piled them up for the fish to swim through. I think it was the fanciest aquarium in Butte.
“We drove the Caddy east across Montana to Miles City to show Leon. Right out on the flat plains, south. Pine Hills School was a kind of boot camp for the worst teen and repeat offenders. I think it was either drugs or he had stolen a car that time, and we watched them play a baseball game. Bells rang and the boys came marching out like soldiers in white T-shirts and jeans. If they were old enough they could get out by volunteering for Vietnam, but Leon would never volunteer for that anyway, no Marine discipline for him. Driving out, for night we had a mattress folded up in the trunk; Mom and Dad slept on the mattress beside the road and we four girls slept soft and easy in the trunk with the lid open six inches. Little Perry slept inside the car. Mom had a rule: in our family boys and girls don’t sleep together no matter what their age.
“We drove to Red Pheasant, Saskatchewan, too, to show the car to all our Canadian relations. Heading through the mountains for Great Falls, we found a stretch of four-lane: Interstate Fifteen had just been
finished out of Boulder to Great Falls, and there Mom put the Caddy on cruise. All us Johnson Indians passing every car in sight, even the souped-up specials trying out the wide new concrete looked like they were standing still, whooooo! and us kids yelling, ‘Get a horse, look out!’ a Caddy slick blue lightning passing in the passing lane.”
When did this happen? How?
Why did the Creator give me these intricate memories, this photographic mind, and yet allows me only bits and pieces of my past? So many tiny, exact snapshots branded on me. Why can’t I see who the person was?
Somewhere, sometimes, there is the black-haired boy, and also a silver-haired man in a big car. He is often kind and gentle with me. He lives in the big yellow house across from a church. In the front part of his house live his wife and a daughter who both walk around dressed like Shirley Temple. The black-haired boy and Leon—yes … it’s Leon—take me to the front door, but the man is mad; he orders them never to bring me there, only to the apartment connected at the back. Butte policemen come to that door all the time, wearing their uniforms and bulging guns on their hips. A large camera is set up in the hall of the apartment, and as I stand there alone I smell a funny smell, strange like smoke I have never smelled before.
Kathy is not there. All summer I never travel on the bus with Kathy to her summer classes at the old Washington School, that’s where she goes, and every morning Mom takes me to an old woman who is supposed to be my summer school tutor.
But the old woman dresses me like Shirley Temple and leads me out through her back yard to the apartment door. The silver-haired man can do anything he pleases; even big policemen come, or leave, when he glances at them. And he has chosen me, he says he likes me.
The window in his bedroom faces into the sun; it is covered with white fluffy curtains, as is his large bed. The floor is soft
white carpet, I am alone in the bedroom with him. He is wearing his white suit and he tells me to dance. But I am shy. I stand and begin to cry and he asks me if I like the pretty room, all the pretty things in it, and I nod my head. He asks if I like the silver hairbrush with all curly engraving. I nod, and he says I have nice hair and I can brush it if I wish. He gets the brush from the dresser and draws it gently down my hair.
He asks, “Why do you cry? Can you talk?”
And I nod, yes, with my back to him as he brushes. He is sitting on the edge of the bed.
“No one will hurt you,” he says, “not any more. I won’t let them.”
He turns me and asks if I like to dance and I nod my head; he puts on music and tells me to dance for him then. I won’t look out from under my hair, but he coaxes me to dance. Then he tells me to take off my dress and I am suddenly terrified. I stop, head down. I begin to cry again silently behind my hair.
“You poor thing,” he says, and takes me in his arms and pulls me to sit beside him on the bed. “You’ll be my little girl now.… I won’t let … anyone hurt you.… I’ve chosen you.… I’ll take care of you.… You’re mine.”
He lays me back on the bed. I turn to stone.
When did this happen? How?
I am standing beside Leon in our living room. He has just brought me back and he gives Mom some money and she is angry. She throws the whole wad of bills into the woodstove, and Leon quickly grabs into the fire and pulls it out again and runs away, crying in his little squeaks. Maybe he burned himself. Mom jerks the presents I hold away from me, a white jacket and hat to keep me warm, and into the stove they go. But she keeps a beautiful plaid skirt and fur muff; she gives them to Karen to wear to the Catholic junior high, where she goes and gets very good marks. I stay in the house, but some days later I
hear a noise. I peek out and see older boys carrying Karen. She is wearing the plaid skirt. They bring her into the room, Kathy and I sleep in the bunk bed because we have both started to wet our beds again at night, and they lay Karen on the double bed where she sleeps with Minnie.
She is bleeding. Is she bleeding because she was hurt or because her periods have started?
Nineteen seventy-two was a presidential-election year, a good time to exert political pressure. The incumbent president, Richard Nixon, and Senator George McGovern were both running hard. It was while the campaigns heated up in the middle of October that Cecilia, after three and a half months of work, quit her job at the Berkeley Pit. She also gave up a chance to have a movie made about her—the first woman, first Native, mother with six kids and a disabled miner husband, driving a 100-ton pit truck—and turned her Caddy east on Montana Highway Ten, heading for South Dakota. She was responding to the American Indian Movement’s call to join their “Trail of Broken Treaties” caravan and move on Washington.
Over a year before that trek took place, Clarence tells me, when several
AIM
members came to Butte at Cecilia’s invitation and heard the details of Earl’s death, the leader of the group had told the Johnsons this was exactly what the new Indian movement was about: to seek redress for the continued wanton killing, the persistent, prejudicial violation of the human rights of Indians in the United States. For several days, the leader tried to contact the Butte police and the mayor, but when he identified himself as being from
AIM
he could never arrange an appointment; instead he received anonymous, threatening calls at his hotel.