Stolen Life (7 page)

Yvonne:
My sister Kathy, exactly a year older than me, understood me better than anyone, and she would sometimes talk for me. When Mom was fed up, she’d tell Kathy to play with me, get me out of the way. Or Dad would come in from work or
something and she’d yell at me, “There, go to him!” I guess Mom wanted Dad to feel what she had to put up with all the time; he never did anything, she said, he was never around, he was always out, drinking with his miner buddies, and even when he was home he did damn well nothing to help.

Mom felt she had too many kids, us four girls in a row every October from 1958 to 1961. She says now she was pregnant all the twenty years she was with Dad. I don’t know how that’s possible—there were four years between Earl and Leon, almost five years between me and Perry, who was last. She says she lost kids, but Dad says never; every one she had was born. Though the kind of man Dad is, how would he know? Mom never drank after she was pregnant with Earl until after Perry was born, and her life with Dad was tough. More than once she vowed to leave him, and once it was so bad between them, I remember when we lived in the big White House on Wyoming Street, she started a fire in the woodstove and burnt everything in the house she could; for hours, until after midnight.

She smashed and slashed the furniture. I was sitting quite happily on the floor in the kitchen and handing her breakable stuff from the cupboards—you don’t need to say a word to do that—as she smashed it in the sink and shoved what would burn into the stove. Dad had come home drunk, mocking her with “Leave, go ahead, I’m handsome, I can find a nice blonde girl to take your place,” and she worked herself into a certain state, she wouldn’t leave one stick of furniture for any blonde bitch! She barely paused while she threw stuff into the stove, flames leaping out at her. She could justify anything she did because there was always something Dad had pulled off first.

She met Dad at sixteen: by seventeen she was pregnant and she married Dad, and Earl was born when she was eighteen. She was herself a child, a beautiful one too. Perhaps she married because she was trying to escape being Indian, or because of the pregnancy. Dad was pulled to pieces at seventeen and put together as a U.S. Marine to kill Japanese soldiers, and Mom was reassembled into something else in a Roman Catholic Indian residential school—when two people like that get together,
what could they actually know about becoming and
being
a family? My dad did not recognize that he was the standard male chauvinist; for him, men do one thing and women another. His main way of doing things, as he always said, was work hard, pay the bills, put food on the table and clothing on our backs and a roof over our heads, but his place was not with the kids—that was woman’s work. The trouble was, there was often too little money because Dad drank so much, and so he and Mom always fought over who should have what responsibility for us. There were times when Mom felt we were burdens on her; often we’d hear her cry in her room at night.

“The reason I was so tough on you kids,” she says now, “was because there were so many of you to handle and care for. You had to toe the line, especially you four girls. I had to make sure you all behaved yourselves.”

Strangely enough, Dad tells me now that Mom never beat us; that she was always after him to do it. Has he just forgotten, or did neither of them know what the other did with the kids, nor care?

“I kept you girls in line all right,” Mom told me. “None of you got pregnant before you were twenty or married.”

Mom got along great when Dad wasn’t around and she had food for her kids, but when he came home at best he became like another kid, only bigger and with bigger demands. So things became more stressed. Often Dad would go out at night and get drunk, and then, in later years, after all the kids were born, in self-defence, first chance she got, Mom would take off and go do the same. I think at times both saw family as one of them being stuck with the kids while the other played and had fun. Drink became their only time out, and they could not drink together, no matter how they had decided not to fight, because after a few drinks all agreements went up in smoke. Dad might beat her up with his fists, but Mom’s pain was deep and alive, she knew how to hit with words. Dad could never keep up with verbal comebacks. She would twist and snake all over until he felt he could do nothing but bulldoze into her, and she’d fight back as best she could. Dad could fight and forget by blocking it out with
booze, but Mom would not let things lie, and both were so shoved into drunken violence all their lives that gradually, after years of living together, each new fight became little more than an extension of the last. And I saw us kids as burdens, both of them trying to get away from us, neither wanting us. So we all chose sides, sometimes siding with one and then the other; and, as the littlest, I had to be the most careful.

When I was very little it was still illegal for Indians to drink in Montana bars, and Mom says Dad used that as an excuse for not taking her out. So she was stuck alone in the house unless Dad brought the drinking party home. When birth control became better known, and drinking legal, Mom finally had some control over two parts of her life that were all-important to her. Her kids stopped with Perry at thirty-three, and she began to drink. As she said, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

Until Perry came along in 1966, I was the youngest, and unable to talk. In a way my eyes became my voice. I cried to make someone understand with my tears. But I could not. I would try to look in such a way that someone must pay attention—not just little Kathy, who had no more power to do things than I—but my looking sad rarely helped. Memories ring in my ears, names like “retarded,” “dumb shit,” “knothead,” “zombie.” I learned young that no one likes a sniveller, a whining kid. I hear now—Mom said it in a public courtroom—that I was spoiled at birth, given the “special treatment” of being fed with an eyedropper, my parents taking shifts to make sure I didn’t choke in my sleep—I had to sleep sitting up—and maybe that was true a bit before I could walk, but mostly I remember having to do what Dad calls “sucking the hind teat.” I learned very young to accept what I got; to hang my head, keep quiet, and hide behind my hair. I learned very fast about eye and body language, others’ as well as my own. Look, don’t talk; move, don’t speak.