Authors: Rudy Wiebe
Stolen Life (11 page)
At 943 Wyoming, the site of the Johnsons’ thirteen-room “White House,” is a vacant lot, its debris softly mounded under the winter’s snow. “The best house we ever had,” Clarence says sadly. “Big, wonderful house, big rooms with chandeliers and fourteen-foot ceilings. The mortgage was only seventy a month, but I couldn’t keep it up when I had my back operation and the miners went on strike. Two thousand miners lost their jobs after striking nine months in ’68.
Stupid strike really; they closed the last shafts then. By then I’d lost it. It just stood empty for years, then it burned down.”
He stares along the dip of the street spotted with occasional houses and warehouse buildings between long gaps white in the grey mountain light. “Lots of places burn down here. All the time. They’re empty, they’re vandalized, they burn.”
South Jackson Street is scraped into the side of a hill, and the house at 410, the Johnsons’ next home, a kind of duplex fitted into the slope below, has been torn down. Space, dropping away. Every house Yvonne lived in in Butte is now nothing but space.
Yvonne:
I remember the evening in late October we moved out of our lovely White House it rained, thundered and stormed. From Jackson you could see the streets cut around the sloping hills long and shining wet, all strangely yellow, with metal posts gleaming as if they were fluorescent. Cars and trucks passed swishing, the water flowed up over the sidewalk after them, and I was afraid, but oddly I felt safe as well. The heavy rainstorm comforted me. Leaving the White House and everything that happened to me there was like walking away from one world, clean, into the other. Here maybe it would all be different. Here no one knew me, no one talked to me, no one seemed to see me. I was invisible. Safe.
Clarence and I order steaks and fries in the M and M Bar and Cafe at 9 North Main, last of the original old-time (1891) eating places in Butte. In this high cavernous room, the right side is a long counter with stools, where the food you order is prepared on grills four feet from your face; the opposite side is a bar of the same length, and the back half of the building, veiled in smoke, a miasma of machines and tables where you can play live keno or poker machines twenty-four hours a day (a sign warns you: REMEMBER:
all payments are in merchandise only
). Clarence and I have to wait a while for two free stools at the food
counter; there is no space whatever at the other bar, where half the crowd drinks standing up; all you need is six inches to lean an elbow and get one boot on the brass rail. And everyone knows Clarence Johnson; he seems to have worked in the mines and logged with most of the ancient, gnarled men there, and he can tell me as many strange stories about them as we have time for, eating huge steaks off thick china and drinking triple refills of coffee.
Clarence admits that, oh yeah, he and Cecilia had “some pretty good fights.” Earl got “mixed up” in one, and “they got me down,” and Cecilia called the police. He was arrested, convicted, and fined thirty-five dollars for assault.
“But I wasn’t giving no judge any money, I said I’d sit it out for two bucks a day in the county jail. Then she got a job at the Anaconda smelter and she came to jail and said she’d pay the fine, I should come home and take care of the kids. I said no, it was me got assaulted, I’d stay my time. So she brought the judge over, he told me he’d go easy on the fine. So I came out.”
When we emerge into the sift of evening spring snow under streetlights, he will not go around the corner of Broadway to the abandoned Butte city-hall building. I’ve seen its refurbished, square clock tower over the roofs from my aged room in the once-majestic Finlen Hotel, and several times I’ve walked past its granite-arched windows. A trimly preserved four-storey stone building plus tower built (the tourist brochure explains) in 1890 for $37,000. Its upper floors once housed the mayor, the city courtroom, and all other civic offices, including city police headquarters. And the basement—sloping back down the alley below street level—contained the damp stone cells of the Butte City Jail.
Clarence Johnson can only mutter curses. “They’ve made a restaurant with white tablecloths outa that jail.”
At 12:20 p.m. on Wednesday, 5 May 1971, in the windowless prison corridor below the sidewalk at the base of that city-hall tower, twenty-year-old Keith Earl Johnson was found hanging from exposed plumbing pipes, a green garden hose wrapped twice around his neck.
“The cops said it was suicide, but, Je-e-sus, I’ve never believed that. Not for one fucken minute.”
Yvonne:
We are at Red Pheasant. I am in Saskatchewan bush helping Grandma Flora’s brother gather firewood, and Karen is there too, when I glance up and look into his eyes. He is lifting his axe to chop a log on an old sawhorse, and suddenly, out of nowhere, I am knocked back on my seat, I don’t know how. I sit in the brush and early spring grass a little stunned while they both look at me, and I say out loud, “Earl.” And I start to cry.
Karen grabs her chest and screams, “Earl! Earl!” and runs screaming towards the house. We pack immediately, all us girls are there, and start for Butte. I lie on the back ledge of the car—I can get into the smallest places—all glass over me and a full moon. I can see deeper than the stars. But after nine hours the car breaks down just past Great Falls, and Mom tries to call Earl at our house on Jackson Street. There is no answer. Then the Montana patrol car spots us, stops, and the cops inside gesture for Dad to come over. He walks along the edge of the highway towards them very slowly.
The people and events surrounding the death of Yvonne’s oldest brother in the dead-end corner of Butte’s city jail are tangled even more than sudden death usually is. What exactly are the facts of what happened? Who did, who saw, what? If someone had been accused and arrested, if a trial had been possible with enough clever lawyers paid huge fees to ask questions, the data would certainly have piled up for months. But of course Clarence Johnson and Cecilia Bear Johnson had no money, and no one was ever brought to trial for anything. Though they tried.
As it was, the further I searched into Earl’s death a quarter-century later, the more convoluted the possible story became and the more I had to settle for the barest probable sequence of facts.
The day after Earl’s death the front page of Butte’s daily newspaper,
The Montana Standard—
“Good Morning, It’s Thursday, May 6, 1971”—headlined pictures and articles of three thousand demonstrators in Washington protesting the Vietnam War. But its largest, top headline read: “CITY CLOSING JAIL TODAY.” The article began:
The city jail will be closed today until further notice.
Mayor Mike Micone and the city council ordered the closure at a regular council meeting Wednesday night.
All prisoners at the jail will be transferred to the Silver Bow County jail.
The closure apparently stemmed from a suicide which occurred in the city jail Wednesday, although Micone two weeks previously made negotiation attempts … to house city prisoners at the county jail.
As it went on to detail other council matters, the newspaper article had an insert: “Related story on page 12.” The complete text on that page read:
Young man takes life in jail
Keith Earl Johnson, 20, of Butte, a bakery worker formerly employed with his parents as a timber cutter, was found dead Wednesday in the city jail.
His body was suspended by a watering hose from an overhead pipe.
Acting Police Chief Bob Russell said it was suicide. Coroner Leo Jacobsen, called to the jail, said he will decide later about calling an inquest.
In Johnson’s effects held by police for safekeeping was more than $1300, including some $80 in cash. The rest was in large federal checks and two other checks for work for the baking company here. The job checks were dated April 24 and May 1.
The police reports show Johnson came to the police station about 1 a. m. Wednesday. He was booked for intoxication and also for possible mental examination. The report said Johnson claimed he had been using the drug mescaline and had been “out of my mind for five days.”
He slept by himself in a cell, officers said, until it came time for him to appear in police court at 10 a.m. on the drunk charge. He pleaded guilty, but with all that money held downstairs, he refused to pay the fine. He told Judge John Selon he would serve out the penalty at the rate of $10 per day.
Meanwhile, the jailer assigned him and another trusty to sloshing down the main corridor of the jail and washing out the cells, one of which contained three men who came to court later in the day.
About 11 a.m., Johnson asked the jailer to send him a military recruiter because he wanted to join the service. A Marine Corps recruiting officer arrived and talked some minutes with Johnson, who was reportedly advised “you get out of this and then we can talk later about enlisting.”
Johnson’s fellow-trusty missed him for a while after the recruiter left, so he went looking. He found the body, and summoned help. Various officers raced into the jail, and Johnson was lowered to the floor. A three-man resuscitator crew from the fire department could get no response, and the coroner came.
Earl had appeared in the
Standard
before. On 24 May 1963, there was a front-page picture of him as a twelve-year-old, balancing, arms wide, on a wooden Anaconda cable drum. He is laughing open-mouthed. The caption declares:
Rolling Along
A rolling cable drum is the fun vehicle for Earl Johnson, 12, of 1328 Madison. It takes the skill of a log-roller, but many boys have mastered the new fad and found it much more exciting than skate boarding, they report.
“He was no suicide kid,” Clarence tells me as we examine the papers, the boxes, the hard black strands of his memory in his dark house. Outside I know the old city houses marooned among vacant lots are flaming snow, brilliant in sunlight.
“Earl turned twenty in January 1971. He was big, over six feet, a hundred and sixty-seventy pounds; he was always so steady. Leon’s always been crazy, I can’t understand why he behaves the way he does, though he’s a pretty good worker if you can get him to work—Leon hurts himself, he’s nuts, he never hurt nobody as much as himself. At sixteen he’d just steal a car, get in a speed chase with police, finally get forced over by his tires being shot out, and he’d smash the windshield with his fist, slash his arm all to hell, just nuts—sometimes, when
I look Leon in the eye I see nothing. All the way to the back of his head—nothing there.