Stolen Life (17 page)

In 1971, having lost their thirteen-room “White House” mansion after the nine-month miners’ strike in 1968, the Johnsons were living at 410 South Jackson Street. South Jackson was cut into the flank of Butte Mountain, and 410 was on the lower side of the street; on the other side the houses were built above eight-foot walls and could be reached only by narrow stairs cut into the cliff retained by cement or rock walls.

“Those houses towered over us,” Yvonne writes to me in a letter, “all the more reason for the Whites up there to look down on us. The Smith family lived across from us, and above. Their father was a cowboy who rode the rodeo circuit, and their two kids were our age. At first we got on all right, until one day my little brother Perry wouldn’t do what Shirley Smith wanted and she slapped him so hard she left her handprint on his bare back. Perry showed Leon, who went over and slapped Shirley’s face. She yelled, ‘Daddy, the Indian hit me!’ and the fight was on. It lasted as long as we lived there, and sometimes the cops were called; they’d have their friends over and view us Natives from their high perch. It was mostly yelling. Once Shirley, who was as old as Leon, got us all going, and Auntie Josephine came out and yelled so hard her false teeth came out and she had to push them back in before she could continue. It got worse after Earl died, and one day Dad got into it.

“He was usually pretty laid back about neighbours. ‘A bunch of yap traps, let ’em kick up the dust,’ he’d say to us, but finally I think he got tired of the racket and of us telling him how we were beat up. Because the attacks on us carried over into the school yard, the cop kids who all knew us said they were glad our brother was a good Indian now, he was a druggie anyway. We started to get scrawled notes at home, threatening; they even got to Mom because now they knew she was not only Indian but also a foreign Canadian one.

“ ‘Go home!’ they hollered at her, and she’d yell right back, ‘This is my home, and all my ancestors’.
You
go home, yellow-hair Custers!’

“Which just made it worse for us, because Dad was as blue-eyed and curly-yellow-haired as anyone could be—so us dark kids were obviously bastards or some kind of unnatural freaks. A fat man living
on the corner called us ‘Speckles!’ because we all had different skin tones, and I felt everyone pointed especially at me, my scarred lips and difficult speech.

“That day Dad came home after tying one on and they were up high on their wall across the street, hollering. He got us kids out, lined us all up on the porch straight as Marines from tallest to shortest, and yelled in every direction, ‘You want to fight my kids, well, here they are, all of them. If you got any balls, stop yelling and hiding and c’mon out and fight. They’re waitin’!’

“He walked around to every neighbour house, banged on doors which didn’t open, shouting, if they wanted something from us, come straighten it out once and for all in the middle of the street, just come out! Nobody did. Somebody phoned for the cops and they drove up, so Dad stood on our porch beside us and yelled at the neighbours, but no one would step off their property. So the cops did nothing and finally drove away while we stood there in a row. I was angry and humiliated and proud of my dad and us Marines, and ashamed and laughing and hating my family and excited and hating myself for everything and all at the same time. The Smith kids were up there, yelling, and then their parents came out and slapped them on the side of the head and told them to stop stirring up the Indians.”

Yvonne laughs at a lighter memory. “A little later I got a baby doll. It was a clear, hot day and I took it out and danced around in a circle as I’d seen on
TV
, singing high and thumping the ground. And behold, believe it or not, it poured buckets! The Smith kids were scared, they believed I could curse them—and they behaved even worse to us whenever they could because now they were scared.”

Earl’s death remains like a mountain divide in the collective memory of the entire family; at any moment of speech or writing Yvonne will swing to that time, detailed incidents leaping into consciousness.

“After Earl got killed my family tried to get whole somehow. So we all drove in Earl’s van—he’d decorated it so carefully sixties style and he’d give me two bits to wash it inside and out, right down to the last speck of dust on the floormats before I got the quarter—the whole family drove down to the Bighole River to go fishing. It was spring run-off, the water dropping, everything was still a little flooded and the willow leaves just coming out along the water. The van had a powerful cassette
deck and we started playing The Beatles, “Hey, Jude,” one of Earl’s favourites. Then Dad just stretched out in the back of the van with the tailgate open and cried and cried. When we drove back up to our house there was the Smith girl above us, yelling, ‘Indians on the warpath!’ They knew we were fighting to find out what had happened to Earl. The whole town knew the cops had killed him.”

It would appear that Leon, at fifteen the oldest and seemingly the toughest of the remaining children, was as powerfully affected by his brother’s death as was Cecilia. Yvonne still cannot explain why, though she has puzzled about it for years.

“Leon was in custody up north, at Swan River boot camp, or maybe he was at Pine Hills near Miles City when it happened,” she writes me. “They brought him home for the funeral. Sometimes I think there might have been some kind of connection between Earl’s death and Leon … perhaps that would explain why Mom became so obsessed with protecting Leon. Even to the point of selling me out, as it sometimes seemed to me—I don’t know—or maybe I already do know and just can’t remember enough to understand, but no one now, neither Mom nor Leon nor my sisters, will talk to me about this. Only Kathy says she believes I believe what I’m looking for is true—but then she cries, she won’t tell me what she remembers. Dad visits and supports me as he can, but he won’t, or just can’t, try to explain anything about this either.

“What is to be done? I will remember within myself, and then I will say it. I have to, because as Jung writes, I must within my self ‘forge an ego that endures the truth.’

“Here is one thing I remember. Leon made wonderful rope swings. In the woods in summer when we cut poles he’d climb in the tallest tree and tie a rope to a high branch over the ravine. As you swung away, you flew above our camp and out into the wide, deep space between mountains. After Earl’s death he always had a white rope hidden somewhere, fashioned in a hangman’s noose, and I always knew where it was, though I was never allowed to touch it. After the funeral Leon and I were on the porch at South Jackson. Mom had allowed him to sneak a beer and he was drinking it and crying; he was confused by Earl’s death. Then he told me to get the rope, so I ran and brought it.

“Leon had a plan, and I was part of it. Little did I understand. He tied the noose over a two-by-four on the porch roof, then brought a
chair from his room and stood on it. He placed his head in the noose, very carefully, testing it out, it seemed, but I did not know what was going on. He told me he was building another swing and I could sit on his feet, use them as a seat and swing on him. So he put himself in the noose with his horn in his hand, then he stepped up on the chair and had me sit on his shoes and wrap my legs tight around his ankles and my arms tight around his legs. He played ‘Taps’ all the way through, and then he jumped off the chair with me sitting tight on his feet.

“Somehow I fell off. I think Leon shook me loose when he kicked all around. He tried to swing to the porch railing, but he whipped back and smashed the window in the room he and Earl had shared. He could not reach anything in his panic. I stood there, not knowing what was going on. Leon slowed and soon he wasn’t kicking, he was grabbing his neck and his face looked really strange, his eyes bulged out scared. I could not get past while he was kicking. I got down on my knees when he slowed down, and belly-crawled under him. I went and told Dad and Mom, ‘Leon broke the window.’ I couldn’t explain to them what was going on, and I ran back to Leon, his arms were now hanging, and just swaying. I tried to put the chair back, I tried to talk to him, and finally Dad was there.

“Dad yelled, he wrapped his arms around Leon and lifted him, and Mom came too. They cut him down. I told them Leon had told me he was making a swing, I should ride on his shoes but he kicked me off and broke the window.

“Leon came round and slashed himself through his wrist tendons with a dog-food lid from the garbage can. He was so angry from that pain he smashed his arm through another window. They took him away then and stitched him up. There was blood splashed on the porch and all over me.”

When I visit Yvonne in Kingston for a second time in September 1993, she says she has arranged for me to see the Prison for Women—“Whatever isn’t classified!”—so I’ll have some idea of where she must live.

We go out through the Psychology Office into the yard, between stone and wood and metal buildings crowded behind eighteen-foot-high stone walls. There are no gun towers anywhere. “Don’t need them for women,” Yvonne says. “But all kinds of stuff comes over the wall.”

“What!”

“Tossed over, connections outside—drugs, tobacco, booze, tapes, anything. And you better get your times co-ordinated, exactly. If someone inside beats you to it, it’s gone!”

“You could hardly complain to the guards!”