Stolen Life (36 page)

Shirley Anne was an old hand at family feuds about men. Though she herself was never as pretty as Aunt Rita, she was a few years younger, and for a while in Butte they competed in a vicious game of screwing as many of each other’s men as they could and screwing each other up at the same time. Family
gossip of course would follow, and yelling matches and fights; sometimes painful, hair-pulling brawls when they were badly drunk.

In fact, for a time my sister Minnie made that competition a threesome with her cousin and her aunt. She was the youngest by far, physically the strongest, and so aggressive she didn’t give a damn. She’d go for the jugular: “Yeah, I did it,” she’d tell them, “and this is why. You want to make something out of it? Then let’s settle it right here and now.” But Shirley Anne and Rita knew Minnie could whip both of them, so they stuck to vicious talk, telling Mom all the ugly stuff Minnie had supposedly done, but Minnie never cared about that. Talk shmalk—she dealt with life by shutting down her feelings: if she wore her shame for the world to see, as she did, then why should she justify her actions to anyone?

I could not, I dared not, shut down like Minnie—though she could have taught me how, and sometimes I longed for it—because I had children to protect as she did not.

After Dwa fought me when I was carrying Susan, he also cheated on me; so I went out and got deliberately drunk. Then I felt so bad, I went home and put a knife on the table between us.

“You filthied my child,” I told him. “You slept with another woman and came home and slept with me. You shared my pure unborn baby with the whore you fucked. How dare you! And you just sit there, say nothing. Why don’t you just grab that knife and kill us both, as you already have. I hate you.”

And finally he said something. “Why do you hate me?”

“You made me love you. I never wanted to love anyone, look where it gets you.”

And that was it; he wouldn’t talk. There was no way I would have another child with him, so when my Suzie Q was a year old I got my tubes tied. He said nothing, always away working. Escape by working is more like it. Stay away and call it work.

At home I tried to keep the inevitable drinking bouts quiet enough so the kids wouldn’t wake up. But when I went out to drink, which I did whenever I could after my last baby was born, all hell happened to me. The echoes of my life on Winnipeg’s
skid came back strongest then, and I realized that for some reason, despite my little family, I was still trying to be the solitary loner I had been there, to become a person without shame, guilt, or pain—not even to feel anger or hate. To just live for this moment. Be empty.

And I could not understand why I felt that way. When drunk I got into fights, and after a while I wouldn’t even bother to wrestle anyone. I’d just go straight at them and take them down. Wetaskiwin, “a place where peace is made”—in that town I fought a lot and never lost a fight, was never gang-piled, never suffered a blackout. I had a camperized van, and if I got too wasted while out by myself, I’d lock myself in and sleep it off. It got so bad my van became known as a party house on wheels, and by the early summer of 1989 people had reason to fear me: “Take-no-shit Johnson.”

Except my kids. They kept me alive: inside myself I was an empty space, all I kept intact was “Don’t you dare touch my kids.”

Dwa and I were killing each other slowly and we knew it. Something was building up, it was inevitable, and in fall 1988 he went north to Yellowknife on a job and just stayed there that winter till spring break-up. Moved in with a girlfriend he found. In Wetaskiwin I had the kids—he talked to them sometimes on the phone—and the house, did odd jobs, went on welfare, and it was dreadful. We couldn’t live together, but we couldn’t live without each other either.

Other than Dwa, the largest part of my gathering disaster was Leon. I knew what I had to fear from him when he came to visit, but I also felt that with him my children were in particular danger, though I did not quite know how. I remembered that when he was small and started to steal in Butte he began to wet his bed at night, and now he always slept with a light on: how was that dangerous? I could not fathom my fears, but I tried to turn them inside out, as it were expose them by doing the opposite to what
I feared. Once, when Chantal was about five—the summer after Susan was born, 1987—she came running into the kitchen, waving her arms, “Mommy, Mommy,” she wanted so badly to tell me something.

But she had gone out to play before she finished cleaning her room, which she knew she must do every day, and I yelled at her.

She stopped, abruptly silent. I wanted to teach her something, I did not want to see her pain because discipline was in order; when I grew up a child had to be hit hard, immediately and quick to make it remember. I never treated my children that way, but as I yelled I watched her too and I saw the shine vanish from her face, her shoulders fall, her eyes so large with excitement grow small. She stood half-turned and silent, and my heart broke.

She was me, the little girl who never spoke. Head down, not daring to look up. What was happening inside her? I understood more about her than she needed to explain. I squatted down to her.

“Chantal, what’s the matter?”

She looked at me and I could see tears gather in her eyes.

“You hurt my feelings.”

I opened my arms and she came to me. I sat on the kitchen floor and rocked her in my lap and sang Christmas carols to her because I didn’t know any lullabies, and we cried. After a while I pulled a chair close and lifted her up onto it and we had a long talk. I told her I often felt the same way when I was little, but no one would take me in their arms; this mom stuff was all new to me; but she had me, maybe she could teach me something. She should tell me every time I hurt her feelings and we would cuddle and talk about it. I never, ever wanted her to feel alone.

We talked, and then she said she wanted to clean up her room. So we did that, and when we were done we had a quiet time together, and after that we drank pop and ate ice cream. I felt so much better; she had helped me more than I helped her.

Little children are the purest gift of the Creator. The Elders say if you put your children first, you will do well.

In 1973 Aunt Rita’s baby boy, Edward, was only fifteen months old and living with Mom and us four girls and Perry in an old house at Red Pheasant when Leon got out of Prince Albert Prison and came there. Within a week Leon was raping our cousin Darlene, Aunt Josephine’s second daughter. She was fourteen, and staying with us too, rather than with her older sister Shirley Anne and her two kids in Biggar, because Karen was close to her in age and she could go to school with us in Cando. Minnie was barely thirteen, but she was the one who took care of little Edward. She often stayed home from school, fed him, would get up at night and carry him into the living room to change his diaper and rock him to sleep when he woke up beside her crying. The first word Edward ever said was “Minnie!”; he crawled around the whole house calling: “Minnie, Minnie.” She was wonderful with children, she’s loved them all her life.

Changing little Edward was when Minnie first saw Leon pull Darlene into his bedroom in the middle of the night. Kathy and I heard them too. He just went in and got her out of Karen’s room, which was next to ours, but he was so huge by then—seventeen and experienced from any number of jails—we listened and finally covered our heads because who was there to tell, who would protect us from him if we did? Mom was away driving a gravel truck on highway construction near Battleford, so who could dare say a word?

Kathy’s baby boy, Billy, had just been born when, in July 1988, all us Johnsons—without Dad, of course—got together for a family reunion on Red Pheasant after Uncle Frank’s funeral. Mom and Kathy had persuaded me to come—I was afraid Leon would beat me for having Laura deported back to the United States while he was in prison—but Laura had returned to Canada and Mom volunteered to care for all the kids at Grandpa’s house—“Go, go, have a good time”—within sight of the old band hall where Leon lived when he wasn’t in custody. All of us Johnson kids were at the hall with our spouses, and Kathy had driven over from Manitoba, with her husband, Dan, even though their little Billy was only two months old. I cooked over an open fire and Grandpa John ate and drank with us, but the
next day he wasn’t there when we had a keg party. Soon drunken fights broke out, and grew until finally everyone was scraping someone, all the men, except Dan, who had passed out, and all the women. I put Billy in a chesterfield chair on top of the big cutting table, all that was left of the upholstery business, so he wouldn’t get hurt or trampled. He lay there rolled up safe in his blankets, and Laura got into a fight with me, then Karen sided with Laura, and Kathy jumped me as well. I didn’t bother with them, I concentrated on Laura.

But then big, glowering Leon came in. He came in bulging macho and glared around, feeling so good, filling the doorway, and he saw Laura was back. He considers himself the guard-dog of the family, and the boss: if Mom isn’t there he decides what happens and sure as hell nobody fights unless he says, Go ahead.

When I saw him I got away from Laura and my sisters and ran to him to explain. I didn’t know then that he’d kicked Laura out of his house, and that she’d just spent two weeks in Saskatoon with Karen, healing up and moaning about how horribly he abused her: I just knew he would certainly beat me to pulp for fighting with her. So I went to the door and got him away from the fighting in the hall. We went for a drive and I tried to explain to him why I had hit Laura. He slammed on the brakes. He has this way of going dark. He said, “You hit her?” I was in terror, and okay, he didn’t beat me up then; what he did was worse.

My tears meant nothing. After he did everything he wanted, he laughed. “I always knew you liked it rough,” he said. He felt great.

In such a situation, Dwa was no help. He always told me he was not a fighter, he didn’t like enemies, and I had seen him take bad beatings without fighting back. I had often loved this non-aggressiveness in him, but now, at the hall, he did not notice what was happening to me. I knew that, among the Johnsons, I was strictly on my own. So, a few months later Leon got to me right in our house in Wetaskiwin, and Dwa wasn’t there either, he was away cheating on me with some woman on the night of my birthday. It was Mom herself who drove Leon over,
she was delivering furniture to Hobbema and she dropped Leon off with a twelve of beer and some cash—she didn’t remember it was my birthday—and left.

I was desperately hoping Dwa would come home soon, but he didn’t. The kids were sleepy and I tried to keep them awake while drinking with Leon, but they were so little, they were falling asleep on the couch and I had to carry them to bed in their room off the living room. I kept saying Dwa will be right home, and then, thank God, a woman named Dora showed up; I kept her happy with booze so she wouldn’t leave. I should have remembered—for Leon, the more women the better.

After a while I broke away from them, got into the bathroom, and locked the door. Crying. But then I realized my children were in the house, and I went out quick and sat in the doorway between kitchen and living room. That was the only way to get from the bedroom where they still were to the children’s room—past me.

Finally Dora came out of the bedroom. She was dressed again; she said something and left the house. Then I heard Leon get off the bed. He came straight into the kitchen and took me back into my bedroom.

I could not make Dwa understand; he simply would not let me tell him about what happened. I tried, but he thought it was all about him and his cheating, especially his cheating on my birthday. Men and their hopeless egos—okay, okay, I cheated, I’m really sorry but it happened—as if what actually happened to
me
didn’t matter. The first time Leon violated me in the bush during the family reunion because he would have beaten me helpless and done it anyway. But the second time was even worse: he did it in my own house. Because I had no protection
in my own house
. That’s what I wanted Dwa to see: I didn’t care about his cheating as much as that
he was not there
. If he had just been present it would not have happened.

And once it happened a second time, with my kids sleeping in the next room, a pattern had been set as far as Leon was concerned: he’d use me as a regular thing whenever an opportunity arose or he could arrange it. I did try to stop him by telling him
I’d tell Mom. Leon said he’d already told her because she’d asked him about me, and so he was already one up on me. I understood then that no one, not even Mom, cared; I was just a daughter who willingly lets her brother fuck her.

Leon came to Wetaskiwin again, very soon, and Dwa was, of course, working and I didn’t know what to do, so we drove out to Ma-me-o Beach with Minnie and her shack-up for the kids to swim. I was too terrified to do anything but the usual: drink. By evening he was ready to lock the kids out of the van and take me in there, but I couldn’t endure that, I sent them back home with Minnie—Leon didn’t care if she knew about us or not. I thought maybe he’d settle for oral sex, and after that I crawled back in the van, away from him while he drove back into town. All I remember is the loud gravel road, and vomiting. But then he parked and came at me again, six foot four and two hundred forty pounds, on top of me till I blacked out.