Stolen Life (9 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
Yvonne:
Mom liked the White House partly because the Catholic church was so close. Dad would not let her go to mass—he said religion was a just a way to suck money out of you—but there she could sometimes sneak away to talk to the priest.
The first Christmas I remember, the tree in the White House was set up in the beautiful room with the chandelier, next to my parents’ bedroom. It had a fireplace of wood, but the fire was actually fake, with only a bulb inside it to turn on. I asked Mom why there was no fire and she said she didn’t want to torch Santa when he came down the chimney.
I tried to figure out how Santa would get down the tiny chimney. Mom said, “He puts his finger to his nose and he becomes so small and skinny, he can come right through.” I strained my little mind trying to see him. She also put up a manger set, which I stared at a lot, the sheep and the big star. My favourite was the Baby Jesus. Sometimes I would sneak him away when I had to go to bed, but most of the time I’d put him back again because the others would miss him. Like his mom and dad, looking there and suddenly nothing in their manger! I wrapped six pennies for Mom and Dad, but the night before I took the pennies to bed with me one more time. The next morning we kids all got up and I ran down to place my gift under the tree. I think our parents had had a drunk the night before and they had locked their door, so we started opening our stuff. We had all received toy instruments like drums or pipes, and we started to dance and sing, yelling around, beating or blowing our instruments, we didn’t know how to play them, until we formed a parade and danced through the big house, up one stairs and down the other, snaking through rooms and under tables, one behind the other. We heard Dad yell far away, but we just giggled and kept on, working ourselves into a frenzy until he was right over us. A lot of yelling, a few side kicks to the ass or a hit and a shove on the back of the head, and we had to clean up the mess; Christmas was over before it got started.
But my penny present was still under the tree, so I took it and gave it to Mom and Dad while they lay in bed. Then Mom got up, went to the kitchen, and started to cook, like always.
One Christmas, Leon got a chemistry set, so he mixed things together at random and made Kathy and me drink it, no matter how terrible it tasted. He said it was like the mad doctor in the movies, and we were his helpers, we had to. He always had some story to fool us into doing what he wanted. The set was soon taken away from him. Another time he got a bow-and-arrow outfit, but Earl broke it when he caught him shooting at us as we tried to run away.
The two boys were the oldest in the family, and for a short while Mom let them babysit; she said no one but our family would babysit us, such wild kids with no manners. When Karen was a bit older she had to do it, and then Karen also got the authority to discipline us. Karen and Minnie would gang up on Kathy and me, and make us keep the house clean and neat. Leon was big by then, and I think that, to protect herself from Leon, Karen forfeited us two smallest girls to him for whatever dangerous games he wanted to play; she only reported him to Mom when he hurt her. Leon would protect us, both from Karen’s demands and from Mom and Dad, if we did what he wanted.
It seems to me now Earl hardly ever spoke to me or Kathy. But he helped us, he stopped Leon from rolling us two down the big stairs in a blanket just to see how we’d bump and scream. Another time Earl yelled at us for dropping our pants and racing down the hall to the toilet to see who could pee first. He was coming out as we crashed to get in, and he warned us to always go inside first, then lock the door, before we pulled our pants down.
Did Earl really care much for me? It was Leon who always seems to have been around. He never left me alone. I remember an argument broke out between him and Dad and Earl. I don’t know about Earl, but Leon and Dad were fighting horribly. Dad beat Leon. He yelled things like: “I worked since I was fifteen, I joined the Marines at seventeen and defended my country to the death, I sent money home to support my mom, and you useless piece of shit just helling around, always in trouble!”
Dad never gave up on “manliness” as he saw it. He was always the man, the Marine, as tough and mean a son of a bitch as they
come. Maybe that particular fight wasn’t actually so bad, as some were in our family, but to a little girl it was dreadful: Leon screaming and crying with Mom trying to protect him as usual and Dad yelling, “The best part of you ran down my leg!” and Leon shrieking scared and trying to get away, into our room, with Dad right after him; he flipped over the bed Leon crawled under, then he punched him with his big fist and dropped him on the floor. Leon tried to defend himself, kicking and screaming, “I hate you! Some day I’ll kill you, cocksucker!”
Finally Dad stopped and tried to hug Leon, but Leon dodged between his legs and ran out. We girls were up against the wall, scared stupid, Mom screaming at us to get away. Dad came and said he loved us, don’t worry, Leon has to stand and take what he’s got coming like a man. Let him run, he’ll come back and I’ll straighten him out. He left us, and later came back up to use the bathroom, and then into Karen and Minnie’s room, where we were all lying together, to say goodnight. Evenings like that we two smallest girls slept with Karen and Minnie, their beds pulled together. The other girls acted as if they were sound asleep, but I didn’t know any better, I was so scared I moved, and he tucked the blanket up tighter, saying very quietly, “Goodnight, goodnight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
I loved my father, and pitied him, and I feared him as well. I learned to watch him like I learned to watch everyone. There was no trusting him or what he might suddenly do, no warning when he’d yank off his belt. Just wham! When he came home drunk, he did it to any one of us. Now he fell asleep on the bed beside us and after a while I heard Leon come back, so I got up carefully and went to tell him, “Dad’s in our room.”
Mom was with Leon and she told us to be very still, but Dad woke up anyway, furious. Why was everyone tiptoeing around like thieves? And Mom was the worst, he said, teaching his own kids to hate him.
“And you, Mom’s suck,” he yelled at Leon, “just a thief and a lousy one at that, why don’t you get a job instead of stealing bikes!”
“Leave him alone,” Mom yelled back. “You call him a black bastard anyways.”
At least this time Mom did not have to take the blows intended for Leon. The next day everyone was sober; you could feel everything that had happened in the whole house, but it was very quiet and calm. Dead calm.
The kitchen was Mom’s room, that’s where she was boss even though she didn’t want to be cleaning and cooking all the time. She loved those narrow stairs going up at the back.
“Servants’ stairs,” Mom would say, and she was so proud. Our big, beautiful house had once had everything proper and in order; it had had servants working in it.
The kitchen itself wasn’t very large; we never ate in it, though I remember Mom and Earl sitting there together and eating. By then Earl was big enough to beat off Dad when he came at her, drunk. Earl was hardly ever home, either at school or working, and if he was he’d just eat and run. He had lots of friends and at one point he left home completely, bought himself an old Chevy van from a dealer across from the gas station where he worked. But even after he came back home again to go to school, he wouldn’t go logging in summer with us any more. He got a better job in Eddy’s Bakery, I could smell the bread he made from my school yard. He was becoming a man.
Earl loved driving the foothills; he knew every road over the mountains where we worked logging. Once he drove a blue fin-tail Caddy convertible—it must have been my auntie Rita’s new car, though I don’t know how she got it—and I rode in the Caddy with Earl on a mountain stretch of road like a roller-coaster. He would carefully speed up over each hump and we’d throw our hands up into the open sky and lift over the top as if we were flying, all us kids laughing, screaming as we soared. He got the golden eagle from that straight stretch of dirt road off the highway, where it crossed the fields and hit the treeline. Driving there was like vanishing into a new world, cool, dark, so sudden inside the forest.
It was just before the trees we saw it: something hanging, flapping on the barbed-wire fence and crying out. It was a young golden eagle learning to fly; it had broken its wing crashing into the fence. Earl bundled it carefully in his jacket, to protect it and us, and we took it home. He splinted it up and kept it in his room for a while, but then he moved it into the big linen room across the hall.
A few days later Leon locked me in the linen room and banged on the wall to excite the bird into clawing me. At first I was afraid; the eagle raised her massive wings and screeched. The sound was overwhelming in the small room. She blinked her eye at me, turning and tilting her head to follow my movements, but I did not cry out. When she spread her wings, they touched the walls of the room. I slid to the floor, with her eye following me, and I asked her pardon, I didn’t want to bug her, but it wasn’t my fault. Her long, thin tongue stretched out of her beak as she shrieked again, and blinked her fierce eye at me, sitting on the floor.
I feared her. Leon got tired of banging outside on the wall and so I began to make the same movements she did, spreading my arms. Soon I was laughing. I thought we were laughing together; we became friends and I visited her often after that. She let me touch her claws: she knew I was afraid so she remained very still. The first time I tried to touch her back, she beaked forward and shrieked. I told her I was scared, and she held her head motionless and slowly I touched it. Her eyes seemed to roll in her head when she blinked, but they were always fixed on one place. It seemed to me our actions and thoughts together were telepathic.
In the evening, when Earl came home from school, he’d take the eagle outside and let her sit on a perch he built on the north side of the White House. Then I was posted at Eagle Watch while Mom and Earl ate in the kitchen, especially to keep kids out of the yard, whom she might attack.
It seemed to me we could speak to each other, her one eye looking at me and then the other. She was quiet, watching and waiting to heal. Now, outside, she seemed to look far away, her
round head hooked down like a claw. I watched and watched, and then I had a sense and both of us seemed to know. The eagle shook her claw and the binding on her ankle fell off; she was loose on the perch and we both knew. She hopped a little and I moved against the wall to tell Earl because I was bound to him too, I had to let him know, and then she bounced across the grass four times.
Earl came running out, tried to grab her without his gloves, but she flew to the Catholic church statue across the street. She settled on the Baby Jesus held in the arms of the Virgin Mary. Earl climbed up to reach her, and the eagle flew again to perch on the stop sign where he would swing when we came home on the truck with logs. She sat there till she turned to look at me. I could feel our thoughts intertwine, and I said, “Go. Go!”
And the eagle swooped away, low, was gone in a hiss of steam from a stinking tar truck patching the street. And she reappeared again, rising upwards, rising south over the snowy mountains.
Earl was so sad. He always said—and so did everyone in the family—that I let the eagle go. But I didn’t. I was just watching when she shook her claw and the binding fell away. I never took my eyes off her on the perch. I knew at any moment she would stretch her wings wide like she touched the walls in the linen room, and fly.
And I’m glad I watched. I was the only one who saw her when she first moved, saw her tilt forward one tiny movement, hop, swoop low, and lift herself into the light high over the roofs.