Stolen Life (37 page)

Even at Grandpa John’s funeral in January 1989, he tried to get me—no respect for the dead, not him. He threw me into the bathtub and almost crippled me, but I managed to escape because there were too many people around. And then he got arrested and I was safe from him: he was locked away in prison.

But the problem was I could tell no one. I could not tell Dwa, not the complexity and tangle of what was happening to me. All he could see was, “Okay, I cheated—so you cheat and we’re even.” He could not understand that I forgave his minor transgressions, I just could not forgive my own.

When we were charged with murder and finally met again, flanked by cops and chained, in the lobby of the Wetaskiwin Courthouse, Dwa told me what he had told me before, “Vonnie, I thought I could just love your pain away.”

Even as our world was grinding down into disaster, he taught me how to cry. Not just alone and in pain but for a certain kind of release. That last summer became one horrible blur of drinking, fighting, and sex that filled my wasted days and nights. I’d stumble
home and Dwa wouldn’t question me. “You make me love you,” I’d yell at him, and he’d mutter, half-asleep, “Hey, isn’t that good?” and all I could answer was “No. No. I’m not supposed to love anyone but my kids.”

He was that special, he taught me it was okay to cry and he’d pull me tight and tell me, “ ‘Let it go, let it go.”

I was always worried I’d go completely insane, the big guys in white would come and tie me into their long-sleeved jacket and haul me down the highway to Ponoka. Once I started to scream; a deep gutteral scream; it tore out of me endlessly and it overwhelmed Dwa—he fell back looking so terrified I forced myself to stop. I didn’t dare let go that deeply again. I just tried to shut down: let guys use me while thinking I used them more, a kind of sexless, feelingless, drunken fuck that seemed necessary to perform even when neither of us felt anything, having someone else involved in a strange hope that always failed to manifest itself; instead, just do it and get away fast.

But then everything changed because a relative by marriage raped me. Again in my house, again with Dwa gone—in my basement where I’d gone to get away, and fell asleep. I screamed the bastard out of the house, and I felt so vile and dirty I ran a shower—but I couldn’t handle another secret. I drove to the town
RCMP
and reported I’d been raped. The police took me to the hospital, and the doctor who examined me was the same one who delivered my Suzie Q. I was so horribly ashamed, I could barely cry. I’d washed and that was bad for evidence, and I just could not tell him I’d been anally raped. I was hoping he’d find the bruise I felt inside my vagina, against my pelvis, but he only found traces of possible evidence in my underwear. Not enough, the police said, to get a conviction. The best they could do was take my statement, to place in my relative’s file.

Brutalizing me in my home wasn’t enough for this swine; a few days later he had to brag about it to Dwa in the Riggers Bar. Dwa came home furious.

“It wasn’t sex,” I cried, “it was rape! I was drunk and asleep and I woke up screaming. He had something stuck in my vagina and doing anal rape!”

Dwa yelled, “You never felt that? To wake up?”

“The pain woke me up!”

“Was his cock so small you didn’t feel that to wake up?”

“I woke up! And yeah, his cock’s small, if you want to know, it’s that small.”

“And you think I’m a wimp because I don’t beat him up?”

“You don’t have to, I can beat him up myself! But you’re never here when I need you.”

“And you think I’m a wimp.”

“Okay! If you think you’re a wimp, maybe you are. You just think about yourself, you’re mad because some asshole tells you, ‘I fucked your wife,’ and you don’t care how hurt I was, you just want to know his size. Well, fuck you! I’m never telling you anything again!”

We could not talk about the rape or any other problem I had. My nightmares became more grotesque, beyond anything either of us could deal with, especially in August when Dad sent me the newspaper about the crooked Butte cops; I remembered them all, every one. That last summer, whenever Dwa was home he’d go off and drink or toke with his buddies and just come back to the house to crash. I began to see anger building in him and I was afraid. I hid on him when he came into the house, knocking things around, but he found me. He seemed to be coming after me in a rage and I was so scared I jumped up and knocked him across the room.

“Bastard, you’d beat up your wife, but not the guy who spreads lies about her!”

He lay a minute, surprised; if I’d done that to Leon, no matter how drunk, my head would already have been smashed against the wall. But Dwa just slowly got up. “You think I’m an asshole, right?”

And he pulled his penis out of his pants. “It’s all because of this, eh? A dirty prick.”

And he began to slap his penis. “You want to hurt a man, hurt me. This is the way to hit me, see, like this, like this!”

He was punching himself out, pounding at himself, he really did want to help me so much—and he wanted to know nothing.

All I could do was hug him, stop him. We were hurting each other so badly: if he couldn’t handle a rape, how could I tell him anything about Leon or my nightmares? I remained silent, and I held that against him. He would take me in his arms when the nightmares hit and flung me around the bed; he’d wake me by holding me until my shuddering stopped and I knew where I was and could say whatever to reassure him, “I’m okay now … I’m okay.”

He couldn’t handle anything I actually was, not really. Except the bit of me that was a mother and working as hard as he, and easy, simple sex in bed and drink a bit, steady, don’t you overdo it like me, make sure there’s always enough money around to keep us going. And I tried. I had tried as hard as I could at the beginning to be the perfect mother, lover, wife, housekeeper, and business partner.

But my past was too much for us both. And I knew the nightmares were not that, nor were they dreams. They were memories; there were more of them alive in my head when I was awake.

Now when my relatives arrived, Dwa turned completely quiet. Barely a word, and soon none of them came unless he wasn’t home.

All except Shirley Anne, who wanted him for herself. He didn’t even like her. “Why don’t you kick her out?” he asked me. Some time before our arrest she tried to get him to sleep with her and he laughed her off. When I asked her about it, she denied it. But Dwa told me, she was sitting behind me, shaking her head at him with her finger on her mouth so bloody-red with the lipstick she always keeps fresh. Dwa didn’t care about her signals. He told me right in front of her.

A few minutes before I had taken a colour picture of her trying to flirt with him. There he is, his grey duck-billed cap and long, flared nose as he looks out of his van window at her open mouth talking, talking, looking like such a wonderful person with her brown-red hair neatly curled, and sweating a little. Behind Dwa on the seat, in the shadow of the van, stand our blond James and baby Suzie Q; her hands up around her mouth and
little bare belly curved over her shorts. They’re watching Shirley Anne too. They were usually frightened of her and would run to me when she tried to pick them up. But they were fine at that moment, Dwa was between her and them.

Chantal was three when James was born in December 1985, and six months later Grandma Flora Bear died. Susan was born February 1987, and Grandpa John Bear died in January 1989. The deaths of my grandparents, especially Grandma’s, were far more significant to me and my children than I then recognized. I was falling apart—for reasons deep beyond my own understanding.

F
OR
YVONNE
, a house was a place to care for, to try to make beautiful for living. When, in August 1996, I park my car and again study the house where she once lived on the southeast corner of 43rd Avenue and 53A Street, Wetaskiwin, I see the trees, shrubs, the rows of raspberries she planted; but they are all untended, wildly overgrown in ragged grass gone to seed and volunteer saplings; pickets broken, missing in the fence; grey plaster on the walls fallen out in blotches; at one corner of the house a wooden barrel cut in half is filled with black rainwater. The Realty World
FOR SALE
sign appears to have been leaning there for several seasons.

It was different in 1989. Not even the sterility of police photographs can hide the particular care with which Yvonne decorated her house. When they were taken on Saturday, 16 September, the long, narrow-leafed plants she had hung in planters in her living room were still there, and pictures were neatly arranged on the wall; when the Wayside Inn replaced its dance floor, she had salvaged enough of the best parquet squares for her and Dwa to cover the living-room and children’s bedroom floors with the very surface they had danced on the night they first met. Outside she planted shrubs along the sidewalk and expanded the vegetable garden around the garage, lined the walks with flowers.

“I felt I was rich,” she tells me; “a home, a husband, healthy children. No matter how terrible my problems seemed to me, I tried to share that.”

Her three children, aged seven, three, and two, played with everyone, and one day Dwa laughed as he counted fourteen little kids either running through the house or playing in the yard. One of the reasons
they loved to play there was Yvonne’s games: she was strict, she had them clean up the messes they left, but often she made games out of the cleaning by hiding dimes or nickels around the room they were to tidy, or in the vines or roots of vegetables they were to bring in. Any money they found working was theirs to keep. She maintained her house and yard, watched them carefully; she never left her door unlocked when she was gone, never left her children unsupervised. And it made her happy, it rested her, she tells me, to see children happily at play.

And what do you do when your wider family—all of whom certainly don’t make you happy—arrive at your door? You open it.

On Tuesday, 12 September, early afternoon, her cousin Shirley Anne phoned. Yvonne was surprised: the last she’d heard of her, she was on the wagon and living near Toronto with her baby and nice Christian husband; now she was alone in Wetaskiwin and feeling really sick. The reason was obvious in Shirley Anne’s slurred voice, and Yvonne wouldn’t invite her over, but admitted she might have some “cure” in her house. In ten minutes there was Shirley Anne on the porch, alone, peering through the screened window in the door with nothing more than a shoulder purse; looking pitiful.