Free Stolen Life by Rudy Wiebe Page A

born, but with a single cleft lip and palate, not double. Oh, Vonnie.…”
    Clarence grinds the small cigar he chain-smokes into the heaping ashtray, wipes his blue eyes while staring at the TV screen talking brightly of firefighter camaraderie in the dark room.
    “Jesus, I felt sorry for that girl. She had a rough old life. The Crippled Children’s Society paid for most of the operations for years, andwhen she was in her teens an expert come and did plastic surgery with her lips sewed together—she shoved her food through a little hole—to build up her upper lip. Eat stuff and it would come out of her nose. They had to take her thyroid out, she’ll be on pills the rest of her life, but after a while the poor kid was terrified of needles. She’d be crying all the way to Helena, three hours. She’d take the operations, just, ‘I don’t want no needles!’ I’d have to talk her down, into it again. Cecilia had a hard time, but she loves all those kids. I love my kids. I think she loved Vonnie even more for the way she was born.”
    He appears to believe that beyond any possible question; all the confirmations and contradictions of memory, father and daughter. In any case, hard, rough times were about all Clarence and Cecilia and their family ever knew.

    Yvonne: Every summer in the late sixties, our whole family went logging. Mom was always telling Dad he worked us too hard, but we had to make money because the mines were so bad. Sometimes we camped near the place in the woods where we had a permit to cut poles, and I remember the white canvas so wide over me, moving, the whole tent breathing, mountain air. I was so little I stood on the seat of our small truck, holding onto the top when we bounced down the rutted track. And I’d get my fingers slammed between the seat and the cab on the bounce.
    Driving up into the woods was bumpy; coming back down, the road seemed smoothed out by the weight of the load. I’d sit in Mom’s lap, and when I was bigger and could stay awake I’d stand on the floor sometimes, or kneel on the seat. I loved to watch the rivers and trees and cliffs all around the crooked road, the world opening up deep for a minute and then shut away like an eye closing, to open again quick over a valley way down. I learned to watch for branches, one might whip my face as it passed and I’d cry. I enjoyed watching tall trees come at me and then do that funny thing of disappearing behind through the mirror ahead.
    And when Mom didn’t notice, I’d spit. This was really hard because I couldn’t pucker my lips or collect air as I would have ifthere had been a top to my mouth. Usually all I managed was to blow bubbles out of my nose. But I was stubborn even then when I really wanted something, and I practised and practised what would be so easy for any ordinary kid—to hang out of the truck window in the rushing air and try to gather a big gob of spit together into the tip of my mouth behind my lips and let it fly out just right, sail round and full and aimed so exactly to carry on the wind and bounce big off the back duals. And, finally, I did it!

    Even under a grey March sky, Butte, Montana, seems to me to be greener than a mining town like Sudbury, Ontario, at the height of summer. Perhaps that’s because by 1995 small spruce are again sprouting everywhere on the hills. Before coming to talk with Clarence in his small cottage, I had searched for some facts about this place which began as a gold camp in the 1860s, until digging miners discovered something even more valuable than placer gold along the creeks: an immense mountain of copper. One book explained:
    Tough as the town was, the Company was tougher. While some said that Butte
was
the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, everybody knew Anaconda … [to be] one of the most massive mining companies in the world: an operation grandiose enough to have a “500 year plan.”
     … The decline of the Butte labor force before 1955 was due as much to