Stolen Life Read Online Free PDF

sweetgrass and three small red cloth pouches of the other sacred medicines—tobacco, cedar, sage—tied together with leather thongs. We sip coffee; at first we chat about easy things to find our balance, about the usual Canadian distances, weather, the long flight from Edmonton and the seemingly even longer highway trip from Toronto.
    Then she places three thick notebooks on the low table—her journals—and explains how hard it is for her to write her thoughts; it would be so much easier, she thinks, to talk into a tape recorder. And I am rippling the pages of one hardcover book and then another, my eye running over words, dates, down pages of marvellous words fixed there for as long as paper and ink will endure, and I tell her again, please, as I have so often on the phone, tapes are so hard to order, so hopeless to organize or grasp because to find anything you have to listen to everything all over again, in sequence: if she wants to tell her story, her words must be on paper.
    She of course knows this. She says she’s kept a journal since early May 1991, two weeks after they brought her to Kingston. And she likes writing in these hard black books, paper feels good, filling every lineeven if her spelling isn’t so hot, and we chuckle, feeling better with each other; though we remain very careful. We don’t know this yet, but in the next six years of working together we will never once have an argument.
    And I listen to her low, quiet voice become steadily more flat, her warm, expressive face retreating into an apparent calm, almost expressionless. It must be a projection from within, perhaps a shield to protect herself from all I still have no comprehension of, as gradually, steadily she begins to speak with that amazing candour she will always give me about herself and her family, a taut personal quality which I do not yet know will continue without hesitation for hours.
    “Everyone in my family is suffering, but we’re never responsible, no, never us—somebody else did something horrible, okay, but never us. If anything ever gets said, about what went on between us, it’s a slip of the lip when we’re drinking, and sure, that can turn into a drunken argument or a fight, no-holds-barred, and maybe even Mom will get pulled into it, if things are yelled and repeated. But we’re all partly drunk when it happens, and then we part ways for a while, and a long time later we’ll slowly drift together again, but if we do, it means we never speak about what happened, never. Pretend we don’t know, never admit anything, never look into anyone’s eyes more than a second—nothing happened. We just can’t pull it together to try to talk, about anything. My family has stayed together as much as it has by denial, shame, fear … all the other good stuff like that.”
    She laughs without smiling, humourlessly. “Don’t talk, just play the duck.”
    “Duck?”
    “Sure, a duck swims on the water, it dives under, water rolls off its feathers. It’s never actually wet—so just float, dive and hide, come up, and let the shit roll off with all the rest of the crap that’s being thrown at you.
    “But me, I’m tired of playing. The truth and reality of my life is in the existence I live now, in this prison with this sentence. I won’t be ashamed of what was done to me in my life any more. I accept my faults, I’ve learned to wear my own shame, but I refuse to wear anyone else’s—and I give back to my abusers the shame that is theirs and theirs alone. What I have done, what was done to me, that will never silence me again.”
    “Yes,” I say, “yes—but it’ll be hard. There are so many people in your life, no story is ever only yours alone.”
    She looks at me quick and straight. We are sitting on the Core Can Industries furniture, assembled by the several thousand men who are inmates in all the other federal stone prisons scattered around Kingston. Neither of us yet has a true conception of how difficult it