Stolen Life (33 page)

But sometimes our life together became too much. I was too intense with the next-door neighbours, too in-your-face. They’d tell me I was so protective about my kids that at times I was downright offensive.

That in turn reminded me of Mom always saying I was crazy, and I’d suddenly become very angry that anyone leaning over a fence could make me feel I was stupid. I’d face them right down: children, family, property, everything closely personal
about me became intense, from cleaning the house to standing up for what I believed in. And later, when I started drinking heavily again, then the old skid pattern returned again: if anyone bothered me and I felt I had to protect myself, I was ready to fight till one of us dropped.

Nonetheless, those first years with Dwa were the best of my adult life. An alcoholic needs someone who will organize the practical business of living and put up with him without nagging when he messes his bed. I had such low self-esteem—my own past made me feel I was a drunk myself—that I was happy to work hard like Dwa and not expect much. I tried to keep him happy and that was such a change from his former wife, who had always wanted more and more of everything—a better house, car, furniture, times out, whatever you can think of—that Dwa loved me more than ever: just keep me to himself, as long he could stay happily drunk and work driven by bennies, what more could he ask from life? Other people just caused problems; keep them away.

Things began to change for us in the spring of 1985, when I found I was pregnant. He said he felt he was trapped into marriage right after high school when his girlfriend was pregnant with Taylor. He said to me, “Get an abortion,” but I said, “No.” Okay, Dwa agreed, but he was around less, working more, and still drinking too, and I was busy getting ready for the baby. I loved being pregnant. Dwa and Chantal would kid me. “Big Fat Momma!” James was born in December 1985, weighing ten pounds eight ounces, a thirteen-inch head and his body twenty-four inches long; the placenta also weighed ten pounds—“O-o-o-h a big baby!” the Hindu doctor said when his head appeared.

By May 1986, I was pregnant again. At that time Dwa had to answer long-delayed impaired-driving charges in court, to which were added possession of pot as well. He was sentenced to Grande Cache prison for six months.

Dwa and I never did talk about sex. I just pretended whatever we did was easy and natural, I was satisfied if I made him happy. He accepted sex straight on, no frills necessary, and he truly thought he was satisfying me because I’m a good faker, he
never suspected anything short of all right and mostly wonderful was happening. And to an extent it was, because he never seemed to expect anything beyond routine—he would not let me touch my clitoris during love-making, that was all his—he did everything he thought made me happy, and once a woman starts faking it you can never stop because then you’ll destroy his manly self. So, if he was satisfied that satisfied me too, and best of all he wasn’t violent.

But I know I didn’t experience the profound depth of sex I heard about, how it can roll you over and turn you inside out—how could I? I was taught sex was dirty, and it was tied to too many drunken assaults, to my buried child torture, to the nightmares that began to erupt into my sleep: I was being raped by something half-human, half-goat, and I was terrified, I couldn’t stop it, totally helpless. That horror began to seep into my daylight awareness. I couldn’t forget this beast thing whispering. I would cry while it whispered, “Just wait, you’ll really like this” and as it started to rape me I could feel my body react—I’d wake up screaming beside Dwa. It was too, too horrible. I dreaded falling asleep after, and then would wake up to another day of restlessness that I knew I could only numb with booze, not wanting to eat, yet trying for everyone’s sake to appear fine—Vonnie is fine, Mommy is just fine. I never had an orgasm, and yet the comfort of Dwa’s arms was all I really needed or wanted.

Nevertheless, inside the comfort of our little house and bed, I found the nightmares were like a continual video being replayed over and over, the grotesque reality of my life winding on, without end.

And when I was without Dwa they were worse.

With Dwa in prison my life started to rock; the vultures of my family moved in. I could not keep them away, I could not lock the door of the house and not answer when I knew they were out there because they would peek in the windows to see me and gossip among themselves, or more likely they’d break in and
there I would be—why hadn’t I opened the door? What was the matter with me? Too high and mighty, eh, with my man in jail for impaired like everybody else? Even the aunt I liked best came around with a guy—she was “marking him in,” as they say. She passed out drunk on my bed and left me, pregnant as I was, with this strange man in the house. I finally escorted him out the door with the help of an unloaded rifle.

My cousin Shirley Anne and her two teenage daughters were the worst. I was suffering terrible loneliness. Before Dwa got sent off, we went to a reunion in his home town of Swan Hills and he cheated on me with two girls from his past. Now Shirley Anne moved in on me. Her oldest daughter was shacked up, and when the youngest said she wanted to live with me to go to school, Shirley Anne was afraid she’d be cut from welfare. I said yes to her daughter because I wanted to help her, but Shirley Anne and my aunt threatened to report me to the cops as an unfit mother who shouldn’t be getting any support, whose kids should be taken away. That was a standard tactic: control each other by reporting on each other to Social Services. Welfare revenge, I call it.

I was pregnant and desperate about Chantal and James. I couldn’t take it, so I let Shirley Anne’s daughter go. I locked up the house, put the two kids in the van, and headed south across the border to Dad in Butte.

Leon was back in prison, so I was safe from him, though he threatened me from there through Mom about Dwa having tried to sleep with his woman when she visited us in Canada. I knew that was a lie. Then Mom called me from Wetaskiwin and told me the news, all in one breath:

“Your house is broken into and everything’s smashed and you got robbed, but I checked your mail and you got a cheque and I want the cash for the van you never finished paying me for, and I nailed your house door shut.”

Dad came back with me to Wetaskiwin and we fixed up the damage. He stayed for a while. We visited Dwa, and I got him home on passes, and finally they released him to me on probation.

My father and Dwa did not get started well. “It’s a hell of a thing,” Dad said to me. “A man meets his son-in-law for the first time in jail.”

Once before, when I couldn’t take Dwa’s alcoholism any more and I thought of leaving him, I phoned Dad to come help me move back to Montana. I was at my wit’s end, and Dad was always fixed in one place there at the end of his telephone in his little seventy-year-old house shoved full of stuff, with Earl’s old van still inside the rotten garage and our rusty logging truck with its cable and pulley on the tripod hoist parked behind the fence in the yard. He said he’d come to get me and my kids, but I’d owe him. At the time I thought he was talking about work, but he wasn’t.

I didn’t have to go then, but later he asked me, “What did you think I meant, work? What work do I need?”

I said I thought he meant clean up his place. It was like a porcupine’s den, a dark hole where the dirt and droppings the old guy leaves behind trail into his sleeping area.

“Work, hell. I knew what you’re doing, no matter where you live and how many common-law husbands and kids you have. I’m a man and men need it in bed, you knew that.”

I was always his daughter whom he loved, but, no matter how I lived, it seemed that to him I was also a whore. How to understand that? Though I should have known: that was the way he himself lived. Sometimes when we visited him he’d be sitting in his dark house, blinds shut and
TV
on, with one of two Butte sisters who traded off on him in his bed. If he was on a binge, he’d sit with them in his lap in his mouldering chair, smiling, sucking a thin black cigar. But at the time I called him I had forced from my memory what he did to me at sixteen, when I was hurt and made the mistake of coming to him for comfort.

My White father and grandfather abused me, but my Cree grandfather, John Bear, never touched me. He was very quiet, a
dark, lean man in denim work clothes and broad-brimmed hat, a silent sadness carved on his sharp face. As if he was never inside a building, always the open air, in the poplar bush and clearings, like Allan Sapp of Red Pheasant painted him. I saw that picture once in a magazine, a beautiful painting like a crystal; the winter air hangs in hoar frost over the trees and sky and horses and the long load of poplars he has cut to haul home to Grandma on his sled for firewood. Grandpa John sits deep in the snow beside a tiny fire, drinking tea from a small, black pail.

Grandpa John Bear was a quiet man. He spoke very little when he came to Butte, or when we visited them in Red Pheasant: he rarely spoke English at all. When I was alone with them on the reserve, he left me undisturbed with Grandma Flora; he never so much as looked directly at me that I can remember. He must have known how deeply troubled I was as a child—he understood when Leon was hurting his grandchild Darlene, Aunt Josephine’s second daughter, and took her out of our house—but he left me to Grandma’s care. I love his memory for that, and also because I know he loved Earl. Dad has a framed snapshot under glass on the wall above his
TV:
Grandpa John and Earl together, head and shoulders only, their faces leaning close together. Beautiful of them both.

When Grandpa and Grandma Bear came from Red Pheasant to Butte for Earl’s funeral—Great-Grandma Baptiste, Kokhum, was 108 years old and couldn’t come—I don’t remember Grandpa John saying a word, even in Cree. He only cried when he thought no one was watching him.

My first memory of my grandparents was visiting them in Idaho before I went to school. Grandma had dried meat hanging from the eavestroughs all around the house where they lived. We kids were not around the grown-ups, they talked in Cree, but we worked with them in the potato fields and huge hayfields. I sat on a bale and found a Wizard of Oz comic book left there by the boss’s children. We were so poor: my great-grandma was born when the Whites came west in Canada, my grandma was that first generation born on reserves, my mom was taken into residential school, and I was born into the in-between
Indian-White world where you do year-around labouring jobs and the Indians leave their reserves for the slave labour the different seasons need: hay, fencing, potatoes, vegetables in Idaho, or sugar beets in southern Alberta.

Grandma said Indians had no concept of “poor” before the Whites came; the Whites created poverty. When our grandparents stayed with us in Butte they would go to the dump and find lots of good things people throw away; once we loaded Earl’s van to the roof with useful things, all the grown-ups got the best places to sit and we kids squeezed in wherever we could and we headed north for Red Pheasant. I was stretched on top of two mattresses, sleeping, and all pit stops were regular as clockwork, boys piss on one side, girls on the other. The food was Klik or baloney sandwiches, drinks Kool-Aid or water in a plastic jug, and you never said a word of complaint. If you cried, Mom’d give you one warning, “When we get home, I’ll really give you something to cry about,” because she was very sensitive about how we behaved around her Cree parents. Indian children are supposed to be quiet, well behaved, and say nothing to their elders, but we kids often behaved White, and Grandma Flora especially didn’t like that. So Mom, to please her mother—as I now long to please mine—wanted us to be quiet and perfect.