Stolen Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

will be to tell her story. After forty years of work at writing, I think I know a bit about making stories, but I don’t grasp the impossibilities of this one; not yet.
    “Maybe not
only
my story—but it is
mine
. Others maybe won’t agree, but I want to tell my life the way I see it.” Yvonne continues more quietly, “Brother against sister, sister against sister, we fight, we shift from one clique to another of gossip and unspoken accusations. Once my sister Minnie said to me, ‘So you got fucked, huh! So forget it, you’ll get fucked again.’ But I can’t live like that.
    “We won’t talk. And now that we four sisters all have kids, we just know we have to watch closer over them, protect them from what happened to us. And if anything should happen, well, we’ll run away and just act as if nothing happened—it’s all right, nothing happened! We all know it’s not right, it’s no family secret any more, and yet the denial goes on and on. I try to tell my sisters I’ve made a way for them to follow, I can take it, I’ve laid myself down like a bridge, all they have to do is walk over me. But their healing can’t be done by me; for them, it’s still just deny and run, that’s all.”
    Yvonne pauses. For some time I have been staring at, but not really seeing, her beaded moccasins. They look so soft and delicately beautiful, to walk in them must feel like silk feathers.
    “That’s a mystery to most of the world—why silence? why denial? But it’s no mystery to the abused.
    “Predators and victims. That’s why my family drinks to excess. Drugs and booze suck up hopes, every little dream you have, as easy as opening your mouth and just lift your hand and pour it down. Abuse happens, and down it goes into you, down to hide in the mucky silence of drugs and booze. Living like we do, it’ll happen again, and again, and we take it. It just goes with the territory.”
    She will tell me later, when I ask, that she sewed the moccasins herself, low, Cree-style. And I will see the superb, delicate drawing andsewing she does, the laced-together knee-high Apache boots she makes but does not wear with jeans. They, too, are as lovely as anything I’ve ever seen flickering on dancing feet in a powwow.
    But now she tells me, grimly, “I never had any great plans about what I wanted to be when I grew up. My life got to be so minimal, my only plan … I guess, stay alive. Though sometimes I can’t think of why I even wanted that. The cop who interviewed me yesterday said, ‘I can’t recall anything that young.’ I knew he was feeling me out, and I told him I can recall things before three, or even two. If I have a visual memory, I don’t doubt myself. I don’t doubt the houses I lived in, in Butte, Montana.”

    Yvonne: I’m a baby, less than two, and I’ve been laid down for a nap. I’m looking through the bars of my crib, through the small square panes of the window, and there’s a bell-shaped window in the house next door. Years later my sister Kathy and I play hookey from school and we’re in an empty lot on busy Montana Street, just weeds wide open to the sky, and I feel it: I’ve been here; our first brick house stood here once. A sagging garage at the back is all that’s left on the lot, and there’s the name
L-E-O-N
painted on the door. My brother’s name, with the E backwards, the way he often wrote it.
    I looked up then and yes, there was the bell-shaped window that got hid in my memories. And on the corner the gas station, still there, where the orange balls jumped around on the side of the pump when Dad gassed up. Leon once started a fire there, and another time the gas station had a fire on its own without Leon’s help.
    That’s the first house I remember, red brick on Montana, Butte’s main street, coming wide and straight down the mountain through town, with shaft mines and frames sticking up all over between the houses and buildings. Parades come marching, down past the front of