Stolen Life (23 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
I know when this happened
.
When I was back in Butte, the night I felt I must get Dad out of the White Spot Bar.
He’s driven the logging truck he’ll never get rid of uptown again. The night before, he came home and drove it right up on the sidewalk and almost crashed into our house. This time he’s left the keys in the truck parked by the White Spot, so I stash them under the seat and go in after him. There’s a girl in jeans—so tight, if she had a quarter in her back pocket you could tell if it was heads or tails—sitting on a stool with her booted feet up on the bar, crying to the song, “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.” Dad heads for her, he buys her a beer. He can’t kill himself or anyone else without keys, so I go out.
Frank Shurtliffe appears suddenly on the sidewalk. I know him, we talk. Someone comes out of the bar; he’s dressed well and more or less stays on his feet.
Hey, you guys, y’know where there’s any pot?
He holds a bottle, and a roll of money in his fist thick as a thick cigar. I say, Maybe I do and maybe I don’t, and he swears he’s no cop, shit, he’s been drinking for days, does he look like a cop? I turn away, but he’s clinking keys. Car keys.
A beautiful wide car, automatic. I’ve never driven more than a tractor baling hay. Frank doesn’t say anything, so I say, Okay, let’s see what we can find. Frank gets in the front too.
In the car, the owner—he’s in the middle—tilts against me and tells me what to do. I can reach the pedals easy, my legs are as long as his, and I drive. The car floats like the Caddy. We drive to a guy we know, but he doesn’t have anything, nothing; he’s mad at me for asking, and who-knows-who sitting out in the car. The car owner tells me his name is Douglas Barber and he’s much older than I thought, maybe fiftysomething, but he tells
us if there’s no pot he wants a party; hell, winter is the best time to drink and party, drive him to a party. Frank looks at me behind the wheel and says, Sure, why not? My experience of a party is, I tag along, so the party just continues in the car.
It’s cold, night, our unfound party stops where snow covers a field and a barbed-wire fence and the forest on a mountain—is this where every summer our family came to cut poles? There’s a snowdrift higher than the car, the hood of the car must be shoved into it, the motor roars but the big car won’t budge. Forward … reverse … nothing. Snow is piled halfway up the trunks of the tall lodgepole pines, ice drips glistening from the spikes of the barbed fence. There is a wind, starting to howl like a pack of hounds. A door is open, oh, I’m so cold, I feel like I’m sitting in a meat locker, the steering wheel a ring of ice. I can hear yells, maybe the sounds of hitting, but I don’t look out. Inside the car it is black; outside, the world turns grey, the greyness of open sky and driving snow and the dark, spiked wall of trees drifts everything into shadow. Even my hand in front of my face is grey, shimmering; it’s freezing as I move it to cover my eyes. I can’t see, or feel my own flesh touch my skin. The wind groans, kicks up snow devils; ice wipes over my face; I’m shuddering.
Frank gets into the car behind the wheel and slams the door. Where’s Doug? I ask. He gestures outside, somewhere. We wait for Doug, but he doesn’t come. We wait longer, I think I’ll see him any minute in the car lights, they’re so bright over the drifts of snow. Suddenly I know these trees, and this field; it was here we once found an eagle hanging on the wire—but that was summer and Earl isn’t here. It was here Mom cried, and said I couldn’t play with Earl any more. He is in heaven and won’t be back. I recognize this beautiful silver place—it’s so grey, and cold, and horribly ugly. I want to go home. Please, to Mom. Drive me to Mom.
Where’s she?
At Grandma Flora’s.
Frank’s smoking. Finally he gives me a cigarette too.
Where’s she at?
Maybe Taber. In Canada. Please … that’s where we thin beets.
It’s snowing fucken December.
Yeah, in winter Mom’s in Winnipeg, yeah. That’s right, drive me to winter.
Yvonne:
Frank drove me to a motel in Boulder, Montana. After he fell asleep, I took the keys and drove back to Butte alone. I left the car with the keys inside parked in front of the cop shop and walked home. By then it was early morning.
Yvonne tells me the Barber story detail by steady detail. When the police came to the house a few days later to ask her why she’d been seen driving a car whose owner was missing, she lied at first. She said she just wound up with the car after the owner left a party. When the police came to the house a second time, she tried to run away, but was caught, and then she took her father and the police to the spot where she had last seen Douglas Barber, where Frank eventually got the car turned around. The police began their search in snowmobiles while Yvonne was returned home and ordered not to leave town. Barber was the son of a well-to-do Butte family; his body was found and ruled dead by reason of hypothermia; on 5 January 1978, charges were laid against Frank Shurtliffe and Yvonne.
And for once in her life Yvonne was fortunate: the presiding magistrate was District Judge Arnold Olsen, one of the few humane and incorruptibly honest officials Butte ever had. The initial charge laid against Frank was manslaughter, while Yvonne was charged with “driving a car without the owner’s consent.” At her trial in late February 1978, on her lawyer’s advice, she pleaded guilty.
Yvonne writes in her journal on Independence Day, 4 July 1993: “Leon always called me zombie. Even at five foot ten and sixteen I carried myself this way, silent, head bent down, not wanting to be forced to talk because I spoke with such difficulty despite all the operations.
The roof of my mouth had been closed since Grade Four, but even that didn’t help enough. A bartender later told me, ‘You never smile, but you have a beautiful smile. Why don’t you smile?’ And I told him, ‘What for? I’ve got no reason to smile.’
“But I do have,” she continues in her journal. “The smile I have now was made possible by one good judge. Judge Olsen, you were one of the good things that happened in my life. You changed me, though you could not change the world in which I lived, and I thank you for trying anyhow. You have a special place in the good memories of my life.”
Olsen ordered Yvonne to stand and speak to the charge. She stood, but spoke so quietly he could not hear what she was saying. So he asked Clarence to bring her closer to the bench; she came, but she could project so poorly when frightened that the judge still did not understand. He asked what was wrong, and Clarence explained the double cleft palate at birth, the many operations Yvonne had already undergone, and the problems that obviously remained.
Arnold Olsen, who was the Butte district judge for the last fifteen years of his life, invariably wore a white-striped blue bowtie with his black robe. He was born in Butte, served two terms as state attorney general before being elected four times to the House of Representatives in Washington. Like Clarence, he was of Norwegian ancestry and had served four years in the war of the Pacific. “He knew our family, all we’d gone through,” Yvonne explains to me. “Leon had been in his court so often, he gave him break after break but it never helped much. He knew about our struggles concerning Earl’s death. And here I stood in front of him: barely sixteen, a man had died. I couldn’t run, facing him I couldn’t speak, my breath was so uncontrolled and choked, if I’d made a sound it would have come out a scream. I could only do what I did so often: cry.
“He looked at me thoughtfully, then he leaned forward and told me a story. He said a teenage boy was always in trouble, always showing up in his court for sentence until finally he found out that the boy had impaired hearing. So he sentenced him to an operation, that he have his hearing repaired. It had been done, and that boy never showed up in court again.
“Judge Olsen told me, ‘Yvonne, part of your sentence is that you, at State expense, receive the needed plastic surgery to your cleft palate,
and dentistry for your teeth. I hereby order you to stay in Butte, to serve fifteen months’ probation, and your probation officer will escort you to all your medical appointments. If you don’t go, you’ll answer to me. Do you understand?’
“I understood all right. He told me, ‘I hope never to see you in this courtroom again.’
“And thank the Creator he never did,” Yvonne says. And the excitement of what happened to her then, what shaped her truly lovely smile now, her fluent, often overwhelming flow of speech, springs from her like electricity.
“The most skilled dentist in Butte started work immediately on dentures to fill the teeth spaces in my mouth, and the State brought in a plastic-surgery specialist to Silver Bow Hospital on Continental Drive. He examined me and said he wanted to try something radical. I don’t know where he came from, but he was the smartest, gentlest doctor I’ve ever met; all the nurses were in love with him he was so good. When I was on the operating table I suddenly came to. I was screaming for them not to give me a needle, it would kill me! They were holding me down and as they put another tube into my iv, I was gone. He told me after the operation they were having trouble with my heart, and if they had gone on as they were I might have died, but he’d caught it in time, I was on a heart monitor, just take it easy, everything’s okay. And it was.
“I had a full bottom lip like my dad; the doctor cut a triangular wedge out of that lip and inverted it, sewed it into the cleft he opened again in my upper lip. To supply my new upper lip with enough blood so it could heal together properly and not reject the insertion, he sewed the big vein from the bottom lip into the upper he had made and then sewed both lips together so I could not stretch them and break the temporary vein connection apart. Once it was healed and blood circulation established in the upper lip, he told me, he would separate my lips.
“I was mute again, I could only moan sounds in my throat. But now there was hope.”
For weeks, first in the hospital and then at home, Yvonne could take in food only through a straw which fit into the small hole left for that purpose on the right side of her sewn-shut mouth. We sat together
in
P4W
and laughed about her stories of the great smell of food drifting along the corridors, of being given another patient’s meal by accident and sliding threads of chicken through that tiny hole until an entire breast had vanished; and the consternation of the nurses and doctor, whose major concern seemed to be not her hunger but how to avoid infection. But Yvonne was a quick, healthy healer. She even smoked, which was absolutely forbidden, but she managed it with tiny pencil cigarettes she rolled from butts she collected in the hospital. The fire escape was good for that—no smell on the ward—but once the emergency exit locked behind her and she had to climb round to the senior citizens’ ward and walk as if in erect, stately unawareness between the long rows of beds, clutching her hospital gown tightly behind her to cover her bottom. When she went home she cooked herself noodles, inserted and swallowed them one by one.
“One month, two, maybe three months, more operations under circles of blazing lights,” Yvonne tells me. “Inner-jaw carving, whole rows of teeth anchored to the ones I already had. I used to snip and pull at my stitches as they healed out. When I went in, they froze me and took out the rest, cut the blood connection from the bottom to the top lip. I had always wondered what I would look like if I had been born like my sisters, who were all so pretty, my brothers so handsome—where was the beauty of my inheritance for me? And the radical surgery worked, the doctor knew how to do it all, exactly: the vein established itself and despite the obsessive things I did I got no deforming infections, and now some people tell me I’m pretty. Judge Olsen ordered the dentists and that incredible doctor at State expense to work on me all that time; no one but a multimillionaire or a rock star could have afforded it. The surgeon was so proud of me and his architecture, six hundred and seventy-six stitches!
“At last, I could speak.”