Stolen Life (60 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
Leon’s legal-aid lawyer, D.J. O’Hanlon, shrewdly pointed out
in camera
to the judge: “Effectively I do not want Cecilia Knight’s credibility reduced in any fashion. I think she was a benefit to our cause. She was […] a credible witness.”
But not for Yvonne, as it turned out.
Karen had been brought in from Winnipeg to testify, but on the morning of the first day of trial she was again badly drunk. So the Crown Prosecutor had her put in the cells again, overnight this time, and she testified on 22 June.
She was curt to the point of being monosyllabic: as for what she remembered of 1973, there were two “incidents” of Darlene going into Leon’s room, and neither time did Darlene want to go there. Karen admitted that before the second “incident” she told Leon where Darlene was hiding in the attic—under cross-examination she could not explain why she had told him—and also that at the time she had told her mother that she “suspected something was going on with Leon and Darlene, but [Mom] did not really believe me that it was anything.”
The Crown Prosecutor asked Karen nothing regarding Yvonne, but Leon’s defence lawyer did. Karen testified that at the family reunion during which Leon allegedly took Yvonne away and forced sex upon her: “I myself stayed away from Vonnie [in the hall] because Vonnie just seemed to want to attack everybody.” Did she recall whether Leon remained in the hall the entire time? “Oh, I don’t—it’s really hard to say. Leon and I we pretty much, we did a lot visiting between ourselves […] I did not want to fight, he did not want to fight.”
Yvonne does not comment to me on Karen’s evasions regarding herself and Leon; but she does tell me she believes Karen knew everything that happened to Darlene in 1973 because the two girls were very close friends then. Leon was the reality they all—Karen, Darlene, Minnie, Kathy, Vonnie, Perry—lived with in that house on the reserve, where everyone could hear whatever happened: the question was never one of being able to escape him. If he was around, it was simply a matter of what he would do, and to whom. Karen must have helped Darlene logicalize it in the only way the helpless girls could: don’t fight or he’ll beat you up and take you anyway; and convince herself: better a cousin than a sister. When Leon first comes into their bedroom, Karen pretends to sleep while nudging Darlene to go; when Darlene hides the second time, Karen tells him where she is because he threatens to beat her up. At some point Karen must protect herself; she locks herself in as best she can; Leon is huge and unstoppable—except by their mother, who is mostly away—eighteen and out of jail for the moment; he’ll have anyone he wants when he’s home, and Darlene is the newest.
Karen might have testified to all this and, Yvonne thinks, on her behalf too, but the family has closed down on Karen since her charges put Leon into prison. Karen will later tell Yvonne that she is afraid that, when he gets out, he will come after her and her children. In his own defence in June 1995, Leon admitted he had had sex with Darlene when she was barely a teenager, but said that she had co-operated completely. He went into considerable detail: she was a virgin and he had condoms, but the first condom he used broke. “I went into the kitchen and got some lard to use so the condom wouldn’t break ’cause I didn’t know how to use the condom because I didn’t leave—the thing hanging off at the end. We had sex like that off and on different evenings […] I was there only a couple of weeks.”
As for Yvonne and the family reunion? “It started out it was the men who were fighting and I would go there and make sure nobody got beat up really bad. If they started getting carried away, then I would break up the argument. I spent my time talking to Karen and going on refereeing fights.”
As far as Leon was concerned, nothing whatever happened between himself and Yvonne at the family reunion. He had no comment on the words Yvonne testified he had spoken to her: “If I don’t beat you up, you’ll sleep with me?” And after, as she lay curled up, crying: “I always knew you liked it rough.” Nor had he done anything on the trip she and Minnie made to Red Pheasant, as listed in the indictment. A few beer cans were thrown, but otherwise nothing happened. To specific questions from both Defence and Crown, he answered categorically that neither in 1988–89, nor at any time in his youth, had he ever had, or had he ever tried to have, sexual relations with his sister Yvonne.
And as for Yvonne laying charges, Leon told the Crown Prosecutor James Taylor: “My opinion is that she’s in prison and she’s doing a long time in prison and using this to gain some kind of release.”
Taylor: And to do this she’s willing to go to the extent of making up a lie about you?
Johnson: Yes.
Minnie appeared as a defence witness for Leon. She testified that, while changing little Edward’s diapers, she had seen Darlene go into Leon’s room several times; she had no idea what Darlene was doing in there. She herself and Leon “never got along, I always got him in trouble and I always pick on him. He was always my dad’s pet.” At first she admitted they often had physical fights, but she quickly changed her mind and said, “No—they were really kind of like playing around.” He never beat her up, no, nor terrorized her; they never engaged in physical fights. She concluded, “It was just more like—teasing one another.”
During the family reunion she stated she drank a twenty-four of beer by herself. She said the only person she saw Yvonne leave the hall with was her husband, Dwa, and then they never came back. During the trip to Red Pheasant, when they visited Leon for a day, there was never any time that Yvonne and Leon were alone together.
Kathy refused to come to North Battleford to testify about anything. That was that for family testimony.
None of them had to face Yvonne in the courtroom while they testified as they did Leon. Except for her hours on the stand, Yvonne was alone in the holding cell in the North Battleford jail for seven days.
Yvonne:
Once I was a young girl in love with a name, and with a voice I heard—twice—on the phone. Just across the river from here, in the old town of Battleford, Saskatchewan.
Now I’m in the North Battleford jail, waiting to hear what the court verdict will be on Leon for what he did to Darlene and me in Saskatchewan; to confront him with what he did to me in Alberta and Montana, I’d have to charge him in court there.
Leon has now served half his sentence for sexually assaulting Karen, but when the police brought him from Prince Albert for trial on my charges, Karen was there to greet him, with Mom and Minnie too, bringing new clothes and shoes so he’d look good in court. And then Leon didn’t like the clothes: he wanted the yellow shirt Mom had brought for Perry, who’s in jail just now too on a drunk and assault charge. When the cops hauled Perry out, he said the shirt was too fucking small to fit Leon anyway. And so it was. Despite Leon’s crying over the phone to Mom that he had wasted away to a hundred pounds in the pen, he looks trim and muscular the way prison always makes him; he gets fat and sloppy when he’s out.
I heard my brothers’ voices, somewhere down jail halls, and Mom’s and Karen’s too, but the five days I’ve been here not one of my family has visited me, not a note, not a message, though Mom hasn’t seen me for almost three years and my sisters for over five. Mom sat in court all the time I testified, but she did not look at me. Leon’s the rapist, I’m the one who got raped, but I’m also in P4W for murder twenty-five and I guess my family believes I’m gone for life anyway, so try to get Leon off—basically, what does it matter now if he did rape her?
I saw all of them in court, of course; Karen hugged me fast before the cops could get between us. And whispered some words I couldn’t understand. She got very drunk—something bad is
happening to her and it’s not just her violent husband—and the court threw her in a cell (not one near me) so she would dry out to testify, and so the evening of Wednesday, 21 June, there were four of us Johnsons—Leon, me, Perry, Karen—all in this small jail at the same time. During the court break I asked Minnie to try and persuade the cops to let her come see me. She just snorted.
“Yeah! If they don’t throw me in too!”
I could only hope the one other Johnson, Kathy, is safe and far away in Manitoba.
Minnie hasn’t come yet. But I waited, brushed my teeth, combed out my hair, washed my combination stainless-steel toilet and sink; I smudged the cell with sweetgrass. They allow me pen and paper, and cigarettes, nothing else. I’m in their small juvenile female cage, with four chocolate-coloured bunks, green cement floor, faded yellow cement walls and ceiling. And the names of my people surround me.
Their names are everywhere, scratched, cut deep into the bunks, the yellow walls. Relatives I recognize from storytelling, or a chance meeting, family friends whom I may have met once on Red Pheasant. If I worked at it, my name here would be recognized as a Johnson of the John Bear family: Squeaky’s—strange nickname for a man that big—little sister, or “that murdering Johnson girl.” I’ve never lived much on the rez, so I’m not well known there. And for years, when my family told a story about a person, I wouldn’t know them, but I always thought that some day I would get to know my relations. But sitting here I realize I never will know all my relations. This is a loss I suffer in prison, a loss which can’t be healed.
On the bunk above me is carved a “LEON J + …” but the rest is gouged out. Maybe a little girl my brother got, and then she wanted somehow to make herself vanish, so she mutilated her name.
Sad … to search prison walls for news of one’s own people; to become like an archaeologist trying to read the stones of tombs about the lives of your own ancient dead. And lying on the thin plastic mattress in my bunk in North Battleford jail, I see on the wall one name I truly knew: “JOHN SWIFTWOLF.”
It’s enough to bring a smile to this lifer’s mind and spirit. And tears. I fell in love with that name—I wasn’t even a teenager, not quite—one winter when we were frozen out at the rez and Mom brought us in to live at the apartment house in Battleford we called “Sesame Street,” a huge building where only Natives lived, crammed in every bedroom, just across the street from the bars so no one had far to walk when they were open, or far to stumble when they closed.
We stayed with relations in this building, and a cousin and I became friends. She was older than I, her body beautifully developed, and she had a crush on John Swiftwolf’s older brother. Sometimes she babysat in one of the apartments with a telephone, overlooking the river hills, and she’d invite me to come too and we’d talk about going sliding with boys we liked. We made a plan: she said she’d call John’s brother on the phone, and I’d go with her as a double date. I dreamed: my first boyfriend, my first date; sliding in the snow down the Battle River hills. John Swiftwolf.
So when I see the name SWIFTWOLF scratched on this jail wall, it lays a sour bitterness over a sweet memory that until now has kept itself somehow hidden—and therefore whole—in my mind. I didn’t know how sweet it was until I remembered it. And in that instant, of course, it turns bitter.
John’s older brother had a car, and I’d watch at the window when he was coming to pick up my friend. But when I saw the car, I’d tell her quickly, then run and hide. I didn’t want anyone to see me. I felt ugly and thought that if he actually saw me he wouldn’t even want to talk to me on the phone.
But we did talk on the phone, twice, and I finally agreed that next day we’d meet to go sliding down the river hills. I was so happy, so scared, I was almost thirteen and I had such a crush on him, his beautiful name, meeting him!
“Sesame Street” was a huge former hotel three storeys high with all its standard-sized bedrooms rented out as “apartments” to Natives. It was crammed full of men, women, kids, and everyone seemed to be drinking, fighting, screwing around from one apartment and along the halls into another. “Parties” went on
non-stop. And the cops could show up at any time: no one called them, they showed up when they wanted action. When the patrol car rolled up, kids playing outside would disappear into the halls yelling, “Simakunis!”—“police” in Cree, like runners in the old days warning a camp—and everyone would vanish, the whole place lock itself down, nothing but dead silence. Like an old western before the shoot-out.
Because the police weren’t just dangerous for adults. We kids were taught to stay away from them too. Every kid understood that, if the
RCMP
appeared, you could knock on any door and you’d get taken in; parents didn’t worry, we all knew each other or were related, you were being taken care of in some apartment and you’d come out after the cops left.
The day of my first date I was in the hall when I saw a woman fall. She bounced down the stairs on her head and I ran to her; there were bubbles foaming from her nose and mouth. Mom came and the fallen women seemed to be breathing all right, so Mom said there was nothing to do, I should just stay and check her now and then lying on the floor. I stayed in the hall, and suddenly kids burst into the building yelling, “Simakunis!” The cops were looking for two men, escapees or parole breakers, and what better place to look than Sesame Street. I didn’t know what to do. I was just scared.
The woman lying there with foam coming out of her mouth was young and almost as beautiful as my mom, except Mom never had to wear make-up. The woman wore her hair up in the high, combed-back ratted style of the time, and after that fall she was always called “Bubbles” because the rubby she drank—they called it “taster’s choice”!—made her foam.
That day I was so frightened of the cops in Sesame Street I couldn’t do anything but try to hide, run. One of the men they were hunting was tall and skinny, and he was dodging around, with a woman leading him from one apartment to the next, slipping out one window and into the next while kids running in the hall pretended to give the cops signals, “He’s in here, in here!” The other guy was huge, arms like trees and drunk to boot, but he had a naked shank and he wanted to get away from
his friends trying to hide him, swearing he’d scalp the pigs, just give him a chance! I was at the stairwell, ready to dodge up or down, but the woman guiding the skinny guy told me to yell, “He’s going down the stairs!”, so I did that, me at one end of the hall yelling and the cops at the other. Then I dodged down around a corner and a cop came out of an apartment and turned away and the woman ducked into the apartment he’d just left; he almost saw her, but I yelled and distracted him. Ahead of me a man leaped out of one apartment and dived across the hall into another like a soldier hitting a foxhole, and I pointed the cop to the next apartment—I had no idea who lived there—and ran back up to the third floor to see if Bubbles was okay.
But the big man with the knife was at the end of that hall swearing he could take on any pig, C’mon! C’mon! and a cop at the corner pulled out his gun to get him. Then a bunch of people jumped on the man, actually covering him from the cop, took his knife away and hauled him into an apartment. The policeman was yelling “Clear out, Clear out!” when three more cops arrived and then a real fight took place, in the apartment and out into the hall. The four cops beat the man, but he gave as good as he got till they pistol-whipped him. That was too much for the Natives; they all jumped in too. I got slammed into a toilet and told to stay there, and I heard the fight going on and on, but I was safe behind the door.
I looked out the toilet window, and I laughed. The skinny guy had jumped out from a second-floor window into the snowbank. He was flapping around trying to get out of the chest-deep snow when the Swiftwolf car drove up. John’s brother coming for his date with my cousin. The skinny guy ran for the moving car, dived, rolled over the hood, and grabbed the door and jumped in. The car wheeled doughnuts around the slick snow and roared away.
About the same time the four cops were dragging the big guy out of the building, unconscious; a woman screaming and crying at their heels.
Mom had had enough of Sesame Street. When it was warmer she took us back to the Rez. And I never went snow sliding with John Swiftwolf. I never met him.
John Swiftwolf, if you ever feel unloved, know that there is someone who has kept an innocent love for you over twenty years. If you want to, maybe after the year 2014 we could still go sliding on the Battle River hills.