Stolen Life by Rudy Wiebe Read Free Book Online

sat there obviously drunk, and it made her look worse, so sad. Perhaps Mom was looking at her mother with pity, as she must look at me, but why put it on like that? I went to Grandma and asked, ‘Do you want this on?’ but she didn’t answer. So I rubbed it off, every bit.”
    “But sometimes,” I say, “you wear it yourself?”
    Yvonne’s lips twitch in an ironic grin, and with a slight shift her face behind her long hair is more hidden.
    “I know all about disguise,” she says. “It’s a wonder what I can do to myself with some Cover Girl, lip liner, and lipstick. But if you get close, you can see I’m wearing too much make-up. And it all bothers me still—when I saw Grandma like that, with lipstick and … there are lots of reasons I don’t want people close to me. My lip is only one.”

    Yvonne: My sister Kathy, exactly a year older than me, understood me better than anyone, and she would sometimes talk for me. When Mom was fed up, she’d tell Kathy to play with me, get me out of the way. Or Dad would come in from work orsomething and she’d yell at me, “There, go to him!” I guess Mom wanted Dad to feel what she had to put up with all the time; he never did anything, she said, he was never around, he was always out, drinking with his miner buddies, and even when he was home he did damn well nothing to help.
    Mom felt she had too many kids, us four girls in a row every October from 1958 to 1961. She says now she was pregnant all the twenty years she was with Dad. I don’t know how that’s possible—there were four years between Earl and Leon, almost five years between me and Perry, who was last. She says she lost kids, but Dad says never; every one she had was born. Though the kind of man Dad is, how would he know? Mom never drank after she was pregnant with Earl until after Perry was born, and her life with Dad was tough. More than once she vowed to leave him, and once it was so bad between them, I remember when we lived in the big White House on Wyoming Street, she started a fire in the woodstove and burnt everything in the house she could; for hours, until after midnight.
    She smashed and slashed the furniture. I was sitting quite happily on the floor in the kitchen and handing her breakable stuff from the cupboards—you don’t need to say a word to do that—as she smashed it in the sink and shoved what would burn into the stove. Dad had come home drunk, mocking her with “Leave, go ahead, I’m handsome, I can find a nice blonde girl to take your place,” and she worked herself into a certain state, she wouldn’t leave one stick of furniture for any blonde bitch! She barely paused while she threw stuff into the stove, flames leaping out at her. She could justify anything she did because there was always something Dad had pulled off first.
    She met Dad at sixteen: by seventeen she was pregnant and she married Dad, and Earl was born when she was eighteen. She was herself a child, a beautiful one too. Perhaps she married because she was trying to escape being Indian, or because of the pregnancy. Dad was pulled to pieces at seventeen and put together as a U.S. Marine to kill Japanese soldiers, and Mom was reassembled into something else in a Roman Catholic Indian residential school—when two people like that get together,what could they actually know about becoming and
being
a family? My dad did not recognize that he was the standard male chauvinist; for him, men do one thing and women another. His main way of doing things, as he always said, was work hard, pay the bills, put food on the table and clothing on our backs and a roof over our heads, but his place was not with the kids—that was woman’s work. The trouble was, there was often too little money because Dad drank so much, and so he and Mom always fought over who should have what responsibility for us. There were times when Mom felt we were burdens on her; often we’d hear her cry in her room at night.
    “The reason I was so