Stolen Life by Rudy Wiebe Read Free Book Online Page A

tough on you kids,” she says now, “was because there were so many of you to handle and care for. You had to toe the line, especially you four girls. I had to make sure you all behaved yourselves.”
    Strangely enough, Dad tells me now that Mom never beat us; that she was always after him to do it. Has he just forgotten, or did neither of them know what the other did with the kids, nor care?
    “I kept you girls in line all right,” Mom told me. “None of you got pregnant before you were twenty or married.”
    Mom got along great when Dad wasn’t around and she had food for her kids, but when he came home at best he became like another kid, only bigger and with bigger demands. So things became more stressed. Often Dad would go out at night and get drunk, and then, in later years, after all the kids were born, in self-defence, first chance she got, Mom would take off and go do the same. I think at times both saw family as one of them being stuck with the kids while the other played and had fun. Drink became their only time out, and they could not drink together, no matter how they had decided not to fight, because after a few drinks all agreements went up in smoke. Dad might beat her up with his fists, but Mom’s pain was deep and alive, she knew how to hit with words. Dad could never keep up with verbal comebacks. She would twist and snake all over until he felt he could do nothing but bulldoze into her, and she’d fight back as best she could. Dad could fight and forget by blocking it out withbooze, but Mom would not let things lie, and both were so shoved into drunken violence all their lives that gradually, after years of living together, each new fight became little more than an extension of the last. And I saw us kids as burdens, both of them trying to get away from us, neither wanting us. So we all chose sides, sometimes siding with one and then the other; and, as the littlest, I had to be the most careful.
    When I was very little it was still illegal for Indians to drink in Montana bars, and Mom says Dad used that as an excuse for not taking her out. So she was stuck alone in the house unless Dad brought the drinking party home. When birth control became better known, and drinking legal, Mom finally had some control over two parts of her life that were all-important to her. Her kids stopped with Perry at thirty-three, and she began to drink. As she said, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
    Until Perry came along in 1966, I was the youngest, and unable to talk. In a way my eyes became my voice. I cried to make someone understand with my tears. But I could not. I would try to look in such a way that someone must pay attention—not just little Kathy, who had no more power to do things than I—but my looking sad rarely helped. Memories ring in my ears, names like “retarded,” “dumb shit,” “knothead,” “zombie.” I learned young that no one likes a sniveller, a whining kid. I hear now—Mom said it in a public courtroom—that I was spoiled at birth, given the “special treatment” of being fed with an eyedropper, my parents taking shifts to make sure I didn’t choke in my sleep—I had to sleep sitting up—and maybe that was true a bit before I could walk, but mostly I remember having to do what Dad calls “sucking the hind teat.” I learned very young to accept what I got; to hang my head, keep quiet, and hide behind my hair. I learned very fast about eye and body language, others’ as well as my own. Look, don’t talk; move, don’t speak.

    “We’ve got a strong Native Sisterhood organized here,” Yvonne tells me. “Sometimes a quarter of the women in here are Native,” she addswith her edge of grim irony, “so we always have lots of members. They allow us to sing on the drum, and Elders to come. We’ve even been able to built a sweat lodge in a corner of the grounds. I’m chairperson of the ’Hood right now.”
    “Do you like to do that?”
    “It’s got its moments. I