Free Stolen Life by Rudy Wiebe

courtroom, 20 June 1995

    I FIRST STARTED WORKING in Butte when I left the Marines, in 1946,” Clarence Johnson tells me. “There was always a job in Butte then, if you were a miner. I worked underground up to a mile down—shaftwork, staking, shovelling, anything miners do. My back didn’t bother me in those days.”
    He laughs, a tall, still slim, old and mellowed man remembering how strong he was then, twenty-two years old and a four-year Marine veteran, survivor of some of the most hideous fighting in the Pacific war against the Japanese. He sits facing the TV set in a chair worn down around his body, the blinds of the entire small house drawn all day, the gatherings, the accidental arrivals, the hoardings of a lifetime piled everywhere on floor and furniture, toppling out of boxes, suspended on walls. He tells me he intended to vacuum his house after we agreed on the phone that I would drive down from Edmonton to talk to him about Yvonne, but he didn’t quite get around to it. In fact, he guffaws enormously at his own joke, he hasn’t got around to it for three years now! From what I can see, and feel under my feet, it may be a good deal longer than that.
    Clarence’s long bushy white hair is brushed back over his head; his glasses rest on his large ears. The TV set mutters on while he remembers and remembers.
    “I was working on the Cabinet Gorge Dam that summer, 1961, but I got laid off, living in Kalispell by October, and we thought”—he laughs a huge double laugh—“we’ll have the baby at home, it costs so much, but at the last minute we thought, Whoa, this won’t work, and we chickened out and jumped in the pick-up for the hospital. Kathy was barely a year, she was sitting on the floorboards and Cecilia’s water broke while I was driving like crazy and poured over Kathy’s head. Shewas howling, half drowned! At the hospital they come running out with the wheelchair for Cecilia, and I took Kathy into the bathroom to clean up the mess. Yvonne was born easily after all that, but it turned out real lucky we brought her there.
    “The doctor came out. I was holding Kathy, all cleaned up, and he said the baby’s fine, healthy but there’s a problem, it’s pretty bad. He wouldn’t say what, so finally I yelled at him, ‘I don’t give a damn if she has two heads, I want to see her! She’s my child and I want her!’ So he took me in and the nurse showed her to me, and then to Cecilia too. God, it was pretty bad; double cleft lip and palate, the doctor called it. There was just blood in the middle of her face; he had had to clean it out before he could make her breathe.”
    He finds a box, knowing exactly where in the room’s chaos, and shuffles in it until he tilts towards me, one by one, the clinic pictures of Yvonne’s tiny face. A month after birth, eyes squeezed shut above the unrecognizable centre of a tiny countenance, labelled on the back, “Uncorrected.” Then, six months later, “Beginning Correction,” after the first surgery. The long, excruciating “correction” of a “mistake”—made by whom?—the unaware irony of medical terms. Then Clarence offers a pale picture taken July 1964, two and a half years later, of the same deep cleft, though nostrils and lips are beginning to find shape.
    “I want you to see what she’s gone through,” Clarence tells me. I get up, raise the blinds behind the couch so the sunlight streams in, sit down, and take off my glasses. And look more closely. Doctors trying to make a baby’s face. It would seem a lifetime of “mistake correcting” will be needed, provided the lifetime is long enough.
    “When we took her back to the doctor the first time for a check-up and Cecilia opened the blanket, the nurse just jerked back. But the doctor was very good about it; he talked to us all the time, he said for sure it could be fixed. All our other kids were fine, but it was heredity. Cecilia’s mother had it, and now Vonnie’s oldest too, when she was