Stolen Life by Rudy Wiebe Read Free Book Online Page B

support the sisters, especially the ones on B Range, who have tighter security. The prison here tried to keep them out of the Sisterhood because they were very solid together.”
    “They try to stop them from joining, even if they are Native?”
    “Staff said the B girls helped too many kill themselves. I worked long and hard as the chair. At one point, if I ducked out, the ’Hood would have folded. Everyone was hurting and the institution likes it that way.”
    “But you kept it together?”
    “I stayed out of cliques, to be neutral, so I had no friends, but I didn’t have enemies either. And we had Elders come in, and that helped. The Elders always talk of patience. I know that’s important, but I may begin to hate that word. ‘Have patience’—where’re you supposed to have it from? Patience mostly too is silent, and now I look for some understanding as I talk and explain what I remember.
    “And I am sort of backwards, I guess—in my thirties and trying to grow into the world at last. How do you give birth to yourself at thirty-one? Too much life has already happened to me, and yet I still have to grow up into it. I’m okay with strangers passing through, but with someone day by day by day, I’m often too much.”

    Yvonne: To this day I can’t breathe and talk at the same time. It took years of practice so I could control my breath right to speak easily. And I still can’t speak when wind is blowing hard, or raise my voice. I’ve perfected it now, but if I forget and hyperventilate, I lose my breath as if I’d run a hundred miles and I have to stop talking to retrack my breathing. Then my heart races. I’m so insecure with myself that often when I speak in public I have to fight panic. And then I can’t say a word without tears.
    Learning to talk took years, the operations continuing even while I went to school. But long before I started school, thingswere already happening to me, I was suffering in some horrible way. I didn’t know what it was. I was often in brutal pain, and I remember once I went to Dad to try and tell him about it. He was sitting in the living room and I tugged at his sleeve and tried to explain how I had been hurt. He listened and I tried harder. He told me to speak up and I did; I could see his frustration and I tried to yell louder because I knew he was getting mad. Then I started to cry, which of course plugged me up. Dad called to Mom but she wouldn’t come, so he got up and grabbed me to take me to her in the kitchen. I didn’t want to go, I got more upset, I lost all my breath control; soon it came in hiccups, jerking, sucking deep into my throat. I swallowed and choked on gobs of stuff. I was about to puke with Dad dragging me into the kitchen. But Mom had dinner to get ready: Dad was there, let him deal with it.
    Kathy and I understood each other, and at least we could cry together. At the Pink House, Leon, who was nine years old to my three, dug a hole in the yard and placed Kathy and me in it, then he got the hose and started filling it with water. We howled and our Big Brother came to the rescue. As usual, Earl beat Leon until he was shrieking—we always called him “Squeaky” because as a baby he never cried, he squeaked. Our family was all cut from the same cloth: survival of the strongest. And me the littlest of the litter.
    Then we had to move out of the Pink House, and Leon—Squeaky—was mad. All around us near Madison were deserted houses filled with the broken junk of people who had had to move on, windowless houses disabled by vandals or kids playing at wreckers. Leon was always hunting, and often he brought things home to be used, but Dad would call him down for being a vulture off other people’s fall. How did he know they wouldn’t come back to get their stuff? When we were packing up in the Pink House, Leon went into one room with a sledgehammer and smashed holes in the walls big enough to crawl through.
    I drove around with Mom to look for a place