Stolen Life (10 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
| Answer: | I lost my son, Earl, in City Jail in Butte, Montana. That was in 1971 when I lost my son … |
| Question: | You seem to recall that date quite clearly, is that true? |
| Answer: | It’s always on my mind. |
| | – Cecilia Knight (formerly Johnson), North Battleford courtroom, 20 June 1995 |
I
FIRST STARTED WORKING
in Butte when I left the Marines, in 1946,” Clarence Johnson tells me. “There was always a job in Butte then, if you were a miner. I worked underground up to a mile down—shaftwork, staking, shovelling, anything miners do. My back didn’t bother me in those days.”
He laughs, a tall, still slim, old and mellowed man remembering how strong he was then, twenty-two years old and a four-year Marine veteran, survivor of some of the most hideous fighting in the Pacific war against the Japanese. He sits facing the
TV
set in a chair worn down around his body, the blinds of the entire small house drawn all day, the gatherings, the accidental arrivals, the hoardings of a lifetime piled everywhere on floor and furniture, toppling out of boxes, suspended on walls. He tells me he intended to vacuum his house after we agreed on the phone that I would drive down from Edmonton to talk to him about Yvonne, but he didn’t quite get around to it. In fact, he guffaws enormously at his own joke, he hasn’t got around to it for three years now! From what I can see, and feel under my feet, it may be a good deal longer than that.
Clarence’s long bushy white hair is brushed back over his head; his glasses rest on his large ears. The
TV
set mutters on while he remembers and remembers.
“I was working on the Cabinet Gorge Dam that summer, 1961, but I got laid off, living in Kalispell by October, and we thought”—he laughs a huge double laugh—“we’ll have the baby at home, it costs so much, but at the last minute we thought, Whoa, this won’t work, and we chickened out and jumped in the pick-up for the hospital. Kathy was barely a year, she was sitting on the floorboards and Cecilia’s water broke while I was driving like crazy and poured over Kathy’s head. She
was howling, half drowned! At the hospital they come running out with the wheelchair for Cecilia, and I took Kathy into the bathroom to clean up the mess. Yvonne was born easily after all that, but it turned out real lucky we brought her there.
“The doctor came out. I was holding Kathy, all cleaned up, and he said the baby’s fine, healthy but there’s a problem, it’s pretty bad. He wouldn’t say what, so finally I yelled at him, ‘I don’t give a damn if she has two heads, I want to see her! She’s my child and I want her!’ So he took me in and the nurse showed her to me, and then to Cecilia too. God, it was pretty bad; double cleft lip and palate, the doctor called it. There was just blood in the middle of her face; he had had to clean it out before he could make her breathe.”
He finds a box, knowing exactly where in the room’s chaos, and shuffles in it until he tilts towards me, one by one, the clinic pictures of Yvonne’s tiny face. A month after birth, eyes squeezed shut above the unrecognizable centre of a tiny countenance, labelled on the back, “Uncorrected.” Then, six months later, “Beginning Correction,” after the first surgery. The long, excruciating “correction” of a “mistake”—made by whom?—the unaware irony of medical terms. Then Clarence offers a pale picture taken July 1964, two and a half years later, of the same deep cleft, though nostrils and lips are beginning to find shape.
“I want you to see what she’s gone through,” Clarence tells me. I get up, raise the blinds behind the couch so the sunlight streams in, sit down, and take off my glasses. And look more closely. Doctors trying to make a baby’s face. It would seem a lifetime of “mistake correcting” will be needed, provided the lifetime is long enough.
“When we took her back to the doctor the first time for a check-up and Cecilia opened the blanket, the nurse just jerked back. But the doctor was very good about it; he talked to us all the time, he said for sure it could be fixed. All our other kids were fine, but it was heredity. Cecilia’s mother had it, and now Vonnie’s oldest too, when she was born, but with a single cleft lip and palate, not double. Oh, Vonnie.…”
Clarence grinds the small cigar he chain-smokes into the heaping ashtray, wipes his blue eyes while staring at the
TV
screen talking brightly of firefighter camaraderie in the dark room.
“Jesus, I felt sorry for that girl. She had a rough old life. The Crippled Children’s Society paid for most of the operations for years, and
when she was in her teens an expert come and did plastic surgery with her lips sewed together—she shoved her food through a little hole—to build up her upper lip. Eat stuff and it would come out of her nose. They had to take her thyroid out, she’ll be on pills the rest of her life, but after a while the poor kid was terrified of needles. She’d be crying all the way to Helena, three hours. She’d take the operations, just, ‘I don’t want no needles!’ I’d have to talk her down, into it again. Cecilia had a hard time, but she loves all those kids. I love my kids. I think she loved Vonnie even more for the way she was born.”
He appears to believe that beyond any possible question; all the confirmations and contradictions of memory, father and daughter. In any case, hard, rough times were about all Clarence and Cecilia and their family ever knew.
Yvonne:
Every summer in the late sixties, our whole family went logging. Mom was always telling Dad he worked us too hard, but we had to make money because the mines were so bad. Sometimes we camped near the place in the woods where we had a permit to cut poles, and I remember the white canvas so wide over me, moving, the whole tent breathing, mountain air. I was so little I stood on the seat of our small truck, holding onto the top when we bounced down the rutted track. And I’d get my fingers slammed between the seat and the cab on the bounce.
Driving up into the woods was bumpy; coming back down, the road seemed smoothed out by the weight of the load. I’d sit in Mom’s lap, and when I was bigger and could stay awake I’d stand on the floor sometimes, or kneel on the seat. I loved to watch the rivers and trees and cliffs all around the crooked road, the world opening up deep for a minute and then shut away like an eye closing, to open again quick over a valley way down. I learned to watch for branches, one might whip my face as it passed and I’d cry. I enjoyed watching tall trees come at me and then do that funny thing of disappearing behind through the mirror ahead.
And when Mom didn’t notice, I’d spit. This was really hard because I couldn’t pucker my lips or collect air as I would have if
there had been a top to my mouth. Usually all I managed was to blow bubbles out of my nose. But I was stubborn even then when I really wanted something, and I practised and practised what would be so easy for any ordinary kid—to hang out of the truck window in the rushing air and try to gather a big gob of spit together into the tip of my mouth behind my lips and let it fly out just right, sail round and full and aimed so exactly to carry on the wind and bounce big off the back duals. And, finally, I did it!
Even under a grey March sky, Butte, Montana, seems to me to be greener than a mining town like Sudbury, Ontario, at the height of summer. Perhaps that’s because by 1995 small spruce are again sprouting everywhere on the hills. Before coming to talk with Clarence in his small cottage, I had searched for some facts about this place which began as a gold camp in the 1860s, until digging miners discovered something even more valuable than placer gold along the creeks: an immense mountain of copper. One book explained:
Tough as the town was, the Company was tougher. While some said that Butte
was
the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, everybody knew Anaconda … [to be] one of the most massive mining companies in the world: an operation grandiose enough to have a “500 year plan.”
… The decline of the Butte labor force before 1955 was due as much to mines “playing out” as to mechanization.… The miners were digging farther and farther into the ground for lower-grade ore.… To avoid turning Butte into another western ghost town, a profitable method of mining had to be used. With low-grade ore that meant strip mining, but in Butte the ore lay immediately below the city.
[So] in 1955, the Berkeley Pit began to consume Butte.… By the time it was abandoned in 1982, the pit contained 2,500 miles of road.
“Our Pink House on Madison was a good house,” Clarence tells me as we drive to look for the different places where the Johnson family once lived. An overnight spring snowfall has transformed all the contours of this strange, half-dead but lively city into a white, almost shocking, beauty. “But we had to move, the pit was digging closer.”
“Wasn’t the noise bad, round-the-clock shifts? The lights all the time?”
He thinks about that, and answers like the worker he was most of his life, “Yeah … it was cheap, really well built.”
In 1995 the Berkeley Pit, like much of the rest of Butte, has become a tourist attraction behind high wire fences; and of course the pit’s Visitors’ Center is not open in March. Clarence and I stare between wires down the low tunnel through the railroad embankment to where the tiny arch of light opens onto that immense excavation which we cannot see; an exhumation of wealth and greed clawed 1,800 feet into the earth, too enormous ever to refill. Above the embankment the gigantic staircase of the pit’s northeast wall, veined by snow, is carved to the top of the mountain.
I imagine streets, houses, people displaced, consumed, disappearing into that hole. The pictures I have seen, and the distant view I will soon have from the street leading up to the town of Walkerville above the pit, reveal an irregular, Stygian black lake: when the mine stopped pumping, rain and groundwater began to gather in the bottom of abandoned excavation. That gathering continues unstoppably, and it is now the deepest body of water in Montana, an incomprehensible reservoir of acidic solution rising slowly, steadily, year by year, until it will eventually find its particular level. If it doesn’t overflow. And the Pink House where Vonnie’s first memories emerge is suspended somewhere in the invisible air over that black lake, an infected space for memory only. But as indelible as poison to her.