From This Moment On (19 page)

Sometimes my little escapes from my cold storage bunk were with a high school friend of mine named Brian, who I met playing in the school orchestra’s horn section. He was first trumpet player, and I was second trumpet. Brian was a good year older than me and had his driver’s license. More important, he had a car to drive: a little stick shift with narrow wheels and no front- or four-wheel drive. It skidded all over the icy winter roads as we drove around together for hours in the back bush, having fun listening to music on the radio and pushing his car places it really wasn’t built to go.

I never got caught coming and going from the window of my grandparents’ basement, as my parents rarely checked on us once we were in bed, lucky for me. I’m sure my father would not have taken
well with me secretly driving off in a car with some guy in the middle of the night. However, Brian was very nice and decent, and we never had a physical relationship, so there was no reason for my parents to worry about my possibly getting pregnant in his backseat. But certainly it
was
dangerous to be out spinning wheels in winter conditions without anyone knowing where we were.

The whole time we lived with my grandparents, I couldn’t help but feel as though we were imposing on them. Not because of anything they said or implied. In fact, the two of them couldn’t have been more welcoming, and I think they enjoyed having their son closer again after his being gone from Timmins for the previous eight years. There’d been a void of regular communication between them after we’d moved away to Sudbury, then Hanmer, before coming back to Timmins once I was sixteen. With all that time apart, I almost felt as though I needed to get to know my father’s family all over again.

I rediscovered that I liked the Twains. They loved cards, joked and laughed a lot, and my grandfather was particularly funny, even though he was quiet and didn’t speak much. But when he did, it was often to say something that made us laugh. My grandfather Twain had an obvious stutter—the result of a mishap in which he’d fallen and wound up with a stick jammed down his throat, leaving him with this broken, stalled speech. Sometimes he really struggled to get the words out, and between his stutter and several missing teeth, it could take a bit of a trained ear to follow what he was saying. Plus, he also had quite a strong Ojibway Indian accent. I was very fond of my grandfather Twain, whom everyone referred to as Jerry Senior. He was attentive toward me as the little singer in the family and cried every time I sang his favorite song, “Never Ending Song of Love for You.”

Grandpa Twain had worked odd jobs in the bush his whole life, the bush being pretty much all he knew, as he grew up on the reservation of Bear Island, also in Northern Ontario. He spent his life trapping, hunting, fishing, bushwhacking, and claim staking for prospectors. He was fast and efficient in the bush, and I learned a lot just
watching him walk through the dense Ontario forest while trying to keep up with him. His fingers were strong and well worked, with layers of calluses and scars healed over several times. He had the hands of a true bushman, and it seemed he always smelled of evergreen trees and fire smoke. He had the hands of a man who’d worked for many years with snare wire, animal traps, rawhide, open fires, fishhooks, jagged knives, chainsaws, and machetes, and had been thawed out of many bouts of frostbite from the bitter Northern cold.

My grandfather preferred to eat with his hands, right off the bone of the game, and often talked while he chewed. He’d sometimes spit out bits of food through gaps between his front teeth while trying to get his words out, and this would make me quietly smile to myself. Grandpa Twain also had a distinct, sharp angle to the bridge of his nose due to a severe break incurred during his youth that was left to mend crookedly. It only added to his charm somehow, and he was nevertheless still very handsome.

He’d lived so much, but I always felt older than him in some ways, even as a smaller child. Not that I felt more mature, but I just understood that I was more comfortable with “town life” than he was. He barely had a primary school education, having been pulled out of school to work in the bush. Grandpa Twain had an endearing naïveté about him that charmed me and made me respect the life he’d lived—a way of life that I understood was now gone from the Native youth of my generation. A life of simplicity, wilderness survival, getting around by dog team or snowshoe in winter, and by canoe and foot in summer. It all gave him a sort of innocence that I could see even from my childhood perspective. He felt more comfortable out in nature and with his Native community, as did I, and I understood him in this way. I still long at times for the solitude of the bush, the smell of my grandfather’s wilderness scent, and the simple pleasure a little song from a tiny girl brought to him.

Although my grandparents had lived much of their adult lives in towns off the reservations, both of them were still very much of the Canadian Native culture. Grandma Twain, much like my grandfather,
also maintained a long list of Native and bushman skills. For example, she is the one who taught me to track and snare rabbits. She also spent much of her life working with her hands in the bush and was a resourceful, handy lady who could make meals out of nothing and mend anything. My grandmother made a few of my childhood buckskin stage outfits that were displayed in the Shania Twain Centre in Timmins for several years, and she hand beaded several other articles of clothing for me, like my favorite mukluks that I wore every day through two winters of high school till the soles wore out. They’d been hand tanned over an open fire and never lost their smoky smell, which I loved.

Later, after we’d left our grandparents’ home for our own place on Montgomery Avenue, several blocks away, a girlfriend of mine remarked on how she couldn’t stand the campfire stink to my bedroom, like, “Ugh, what’s that awful smell?” It was the smell of my mukluks filling the room that she found so revolting. I was a bit offended. Dolly Parton’s classic “Coat of Many Colors” leaps to mind: the song she wrote about her dirt-poor childhood in the Tennessee mountains and the coat that her resourceful mother lovingly sewed together from discarded rags. At school, kids who were better off made fun of the homemade garment, but, she sings, “I felt I was rich. And I told them of the love my momma sewed in every stitch.” I felt the exact same pride in my handmade moccasins, although at first my friend’s display of disgust for the way they smelled made me feel ashamed and embarrassed. But I loved my Native connection, and I continued to wear the mukluks anyway, even though they were not very waterproof in the town slush, and I had to wear plastic bread bags inside of them to stay dry during my daily walks to and from school.

Grandma Twain was an excellent game cook and often sang old, traditional English folk songs in Ojibway, which had stayed with her from her youth. My grandmother was a Luke from Mattagami reserve near Gogama, less than an hour outside of Timmins. She looked very Native but had dark brown hair rather than jet black and some freckles
on her cheeks. Unlike my grandfather, she took much more easily to town life, especially bingo night!

All of my father’s family was quite attractive, with beautiful, smooth, tan complexions, strong bone structures, and thick, wavy, jet-black hair. I imagined them in their youth as resembling Elvis Presley’s relatives. My uncle Timmy was particularly handsome, and Lorie had the most beautiful skin and hair I thought anyone could possibly possess.

Just a week after rejoining my parents and siblings, I started eleventh grade at Timmins High and Vocational School, the same school my dad had attended. Way up in Timmins, located practically four hundred miles north of Toronto, the beginning of the school year heralded not so much fall as it did winter: before you knew it, the days would grow shorter and temperatures would already plummet below zero at night.

I was back to leading a typical teenage life, more or less. I grew up following hockey and although Timmins didn’t have a pro team, I used to watch games between our local junior league teams. Junior hockey is loaded with adrenaline, and once introduced to it, I got hooked. The atmosphere could get pretty wild: beer spilling, fists flying, people’s dental work being rearranged. And that’s just the spectators in the stands, never mind the action on the ice!

I made a few friends hanging out at the rinks, including a hockey player named Luc, a short French Canadian one year older than me. After one game, he invited me to take a ride on the back of his street bike, which is basically a souped-up motorcycle.
Very
cool. I’d never been on one before, only the much more rugged dirt bikes we rode over the punishing bush trails back in Hanmer. His street bike was sleek and white, with a motor that purred, and it had been painstakingly polished to the point of blinding. Since I knew how to handle a dirt bike, Luc let me drive it. I guess he was flirting with me, but I was totally devoted to Daniel and enjoyed the ride and only the ride.

A few days later, Luc asked if I wanted to go with him to a party
at his older brother’s place. I was cool with it and said sure. It started with a late-afternoon outdoor barbecue, but soon the weather turned cold, so we all went inside. The music got loud, and the booze was flowing. It wasn’t the kind of party that normally appealed to me, but, to be honest, I’d been feeling a bit out of place since coming back to Timmins and was open to mixing with a new crowd. Despite my age, I’d been around alcohol probably more than anyone else there, but I wasn’t drinking. As the night wore on, I began to stand out as one of the few sober people still standing. Maybe the only one!

Luc was in no shape to drive his bike, and since he was my ride home, I resigned myself to spending the night. I could have called my parents for a lift, and I know they would have picked me up without complaint, but I just … didn’t. I’d been feeling a bit disconnected from them, to be honest. For one thing, I’d never wanted to leave Toronto (and Daniel), and for another, I was doubtful that the two of them could avoid backsliding into their same old pattern of violence. Plus, I didn’t much like sleeping in a cold storage room, either, and, well, I was just plain angry at my mother and father
for my life.
Like most teenagers, I suppose.

Now: where to sleep? Everyone was passed out in chairs, on couches, on the floor; it was a messy home with dirty clothing left wherever it landed. Luc was sprawled out on a couch in the living room; I curled up on the floor. I was relieved that he didn’t pressure me to lie down with him, as it would have been awkward, considering that I was in his “territory” and didn’t know a soul there.

Luc’s brother must have given up his bed, because he and his girlfriend ended up a few feet away from me zipped up in a double sleeping bag on the floor. I could hear her panting quietly in a curious rhythm.
Oh!
I eventually realized.
They’re having sex!
How strange, I thought, that people would “do it” so openly. To me, making love was a private act, and I felt both embarrassed as well as shocked.

I especially felt bad for the girl. It never occurred to me that maybe she was drunk, horny, and quite happy to screw her boyfriend
no matter who was looking on. All I know is that at the age of sixteen and being so new to sex, I just assumed that she was being controlled and that he was an arrogant, disrespectful, selfish pig, because what girl would possibly consent to being so exposed? I certainly wouldn’t let any boy decide for me when, where, or if we’d be intimate. But maybe she was a totally willing partner. Or even the instigator! One thing was for sure, I was confused and uncomfortable.

I stopped hanging with this crowd immediately after the party, realizing that I was probably lucky to have escaped without being taken advantage of. Thank goodness that Luc had been so cool; another guy might have been much more insistent. I knew not to tempt fate, though, and decided that I’d better find some new friends.

I got a job at the local McDonald’s, which happened to sit along the same highway that my sisters and I regularly walked to the Schumacher pool ten years before. I started on “windows,” taking orders and making change at the drive-through, then soon moved up to being a crew trainer. Carrie-Ann began working there as well, and sometimes we used to have a bit of fun while manning the drive-through window late at night. There were big helium tanks in the back of the store. (I have a feeling you already know where this is headed.) My sister and I would suck in the gas, then get on the microphone. Customers would pull up and be greeted by what sounded like a pair of Munchkins from
The Wizard of Oz:
“Welcome to McDonald’s’ drive-through; can I take your order, please?” Some were amused, others confused. The two of us would also ignore the carloads of people waiting to order and chat over the speaker about boys, sing songs, crack jokes, and generally engage in more giddy nonsense. Looking back, I’m amazed that no one ever complained to the manager.

With the time apart starting to wear on us, Daniel and I agreed that we’d take turns traveling to see each other to share the financial strain of a round-trip bus ticket. Remember, there was no instant
communication such as email or Facebook, so we relied on slow mail and the rare long-distance phone call if we’d saved up enough money. The first time he came to Timmins, I was so sick with anticipation/excitement/impatience that I drove everyone around me
nuts
with stories about
my
boyfriend from Toronto
who was coming to visit. I just went on and on and on. It usually would have been weeks since I’d seen Daniel, probably even as long as three months. This felt like an eternity at sixteen.

By then my family had moved into our own small second-floor apartment in a house that had been divided into four separate apartments. It was a humble setup, but brighter and cleaner than the dirt-floor cellar accommodations we’d been living in at my grandparents’.

This apartment had just one formal bedroom, which was where all four of us kids slept. We somehow managed to fit both sets of bunk beds in there, with about a four-foot space between them. I took the top bunk and Carrie the bottom, right across from the two boys, each of whom had his own bunk against the opposite wall. I was a little uneasy over the fact that a second door in the room led to a public hallway. Not only didn’t it have a lock on it, but it was one of those flimsy hollow wooden doors. As a precaution, we kept both bunk beds jammed against it, but it wouldn’t have taken much for anyone to force his way in.