by Shania Twain
A few hours later, my mother was shaking me awake. “Your father’s on the phone,” she said urgently. “He needs to talk to you.”
“I’m too tired,” I mumbled.
“He says it’s very important.”
I came downstairs and picked up the receiver.
“Eilleen, are you all right?” he asked breathlessly.
Hesitantly, I answered, “Yes, I’m fine. Why?” I was anxious at his adamant concern for me, especially after what I’d experienced the night before.
He persisted. “Are you sure? Tell me you’re okay.” I reassured him that, yes, I was okay. Why was he asking me this? Was this part of the dream? I was utterly confused.
“Well, it’s just that I had a bad dream about you last night, and I wanted to make sure you were okay,” my father explained. Then he went on to describe his dream. “You were at the foot of my bed, waving your hands and shouting, ‘No, no, stop, no!’” He’d woken up startled. The dream was so realistic, he told me over the phone, that he was worried about me and wanted to make sure I was okay. I believed that his concern was genuine. I also believed that he must have really been with me during those hours, in some way, and felt the power of whatever it was that happened. Our dreams were so parallel. He added that his mother woke him up around three o’clock because she’d heard him stirring and moaning in his sleep, obviously entrapped in a nightmare.
I couldn’t believe my ears. Even the times matched. I was freaked out—who wouldn’t be?—but I didn’t say a word to him about my dream. “No, everything is fine,” I said, and left it at that.
The summer I turned sixteen, in 1981, my mother went back to my father. She had become less dependent on me emotionally over the course of that period in Toronto, which had allowed me more time with Daniel. My communication with my mother diminished, and I wasn’t included in her decision to move back to my father. She did openly allude to the fact that the boys needed their dad, though, and I could sense that she was growing weary of trying to support us on her own through working and collecting welfare. So it wasn’t surprising to me that she would eventually decide to move back up North to a more familiar environment where there was some family, even if not to live with my dad. The fast pace of city life in Toronto wore on my mother, too. She was intimidated by the city dwellers’/peoples’ less friendly attitudes.
I let it be known that, plain and simple, I wasn’t going! I would not leave Daniel, and that was it! I was so set in my decision that my mother had no choice but to leave me behind, taking Carrie, Mark, and Darryl with her. Naturally, I couldn’t stay in the town house anymore, now that my mother had given it up to move back. I packed up a trunk of belongings, pages of my song lyrics, stuffed animals, pictures, a diary, and a host of other personal trinkets to send on with the family. The only thing I kept with me was a small suitcase of clothing and a few functional items for my daily needs. I decided I could squat in the old house some nights to stay close to Daniel and ride the bus through the night as another solution for lodging. Did you see the movie The Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith, which was based on the true story of a man who was homeless for a time but went on to become a wealthy stockbroker? When I watched the scene where he and his young son ride the bus all night because they have nowhere else to go, it brought me right back to Toronto, 1981.
Squatting in our old town house wasn’t very practical, as the electricity, phone, and water had all been turned off. Ironically, I guess you could say that in some respects I’d had ample training in roughing it under similar circumstances. My parents continued to try to talk me into coming home, as they knew I was bunking in the vacant house. Eventually they tracked down a distant relative of my dad’s, an aunt who lived about forty-five minutes away, but I was reluctant to stay there, as I felt it was too far from Daniel.
I remember being alone in the empty town house one night when lightning lit up the sky, and with no curtains, it brightened the room in flickers. I was frightened, as the setting felt a bit like a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. I was uneasy being alone there in the dark, but it was never as scary as the dream—was it just a dream?—I’d had when we were living there as a family. I had no bed, but the carpet was cushiony enough for me to sleep on. I was okay and would manage, I told myself. Daniel had asked his parents if there was any way either they or a neighbor friend could take me in, but no one wanted any part of housing this little small-town hobo. It made me feel like a tramp, embarrassed that no one wanted to get involved, but I also understood that it was an awkward imposition to expect anyone to engage in the drama of a teenage girl who wasn’t with her own family because she refused to leave her boyfriend.
By the end of the summer, right around my sixteenth birthday, I realized I couldn’t make it on my own anymore. Even though my father did eventually convince me to go to his aunt’s, I was able to stay only a short time in her already cramped apartment, and there was no long-term solution that would enable me to remain in Toronto. I wouldn’t be able to support myself working part-time at, say, McDonald’s, and manage to get through tenth grade at the same time. I was gutted, but it was either drop out of high school in order to be with Daniel or go back to Timmins to live with my parents and continue high school there. Dropping out was never an option. As much as I loved Daniel, I knew that I had to finish school.
I reluctantly got on the Greyhound bus for the fifteen-hour journey back to my hometown. I knew my family would be happy to see me, and I was looking forward to reuniting with them as well, but leaving Daniel felt like a death—I was being ripped away from my best friend and first love!
8
A Teenager in Timmins
It tore me in two to have to leave Daniel behind, as well as my independence, but just in time for my sixteenth birthday, I was home with my family.
Except that we weren’t home, exactly. After my mom, my siblings, and I had fled our house on Proulx Court for the battered-women’s shelter in Toronto, my father let the house go. From what I remember, he simply stopped paying the mortgage, so it was repossessed by the bank. He then went back to live with his parents in Timmins. I recall my parents later talking about how forfeiting on the mortgage had damaged their credit and made it very difficult for them to obtain loans for their future tree-planting business and a mortgage for another home once we rejoined my father in Timmins. They decided that while they were getting back on their feet financially, we would all move into my grandparents’ house on Maple Street—one of the many streets in Timmins named after the local trees: Balsam, Birch, Cedar, Spruce.
Our family of six crammed into my grandparents’ tiny six-hundred-square-foot home, making for a grand total of eleven people living under the same roof. There was my grandfather Gerry; my grandmother Selina; my dad’s younger siblings, Uncle Timmy and Auntie Karen; and my cousin Lorie, who was my age. Now add in the six of us: two young boys, two teenage girls, and my parents. Needless to say, things were pretty tight, especially with just two bedrooms and one bathroom.
Once again, a basement served as my bedroom, except that this time our entire family lived there. The floor was all dirt, except for one small area covered with wooden floorboards that was just large enough for my parents’ bed. Mark and Darryl shared the small space with them, sleeping all in one open room. As for Carrie and me, our bunk beds were squeezed into what used to be a cold storage room—built for preserving root vegetables during the winter—only the door was missing. Did you ever read the Gothic horror novel Flowers in the Attic, in which four children are coerced into hiding for years in the attic of their grandparents’ mansion? Well, a book based on the Twain kids during this time would have been titled Roots in the Cellar, only, thankfully, our grandmother wasn’t trying to kill us.
The basement had no bathroom; however, since the washer and dryer were down there, we had access to a couple of large, square laundry sinks, and I used one as my bathtub. I was a pretty tiny teenager, so I was able to crouch down with my knees pulled
up tightly to my chest to have a soak. I was more than used to bathing like this from the years of rustic bush camping, having to sponge bathe by dappling open-fire-heated lake water from a metal bucket with a rag or coffee cup—so more like a bushman’s shower than a bath, really.
Still, being a teenager, seeking acceptance, I was too embarrassed to bring a friend over or admit to anyone that I was living like a bushman with my family, right there in town. Anyone visiting me in our basement dwelling would have been more likely to leave with their shoes sandier from our dirt floor than when they came in from outside. I would have felt uncomfortable having to ask a friend to keep her shoes on rather than take them off when she entered. It was dark and dingy down in the basement, with meager peeks of natural, outside light and only a few naked lightbulbs that dangled from exposed electrical cords off the unfinished two-by-four timber framework of the floor above. I could jump up slightly and easily touch the rough-cut timber over my head, as the ceiling was low. I was probably only a couple of inches over five feet at that age, to give you an idea of the lack of headroom down there. The basement was not finished as a living space, only as a storage, laundry, and utility area.
The cold storage room where my sister Carrie and I slept had a tiny ground-level window, no more than two feet wide by one foot high, with the bottom frame at the same level as my mattress on the top bunk. My sister was on the bottom bunk bed, and I’m not sure which of us was colder once winter came. Carrie’s bed was closest to the only bit of “finished” flooring in this basement, as it was the cold storage corner, so it had a concrete slab. Concrete with no heat is cold, and having this under her back couldn’t have been very healthy. My upper bunk, however, was like being pushed up against an ice block. I remember scraping frost off the inside of the window at night while trying to fall asleep. I’d draw shapes and doodles with the edge of my fingernail till the tip of my finger would sting from the cold, then I’d change fingers and carry on until I was ready to close my eyes.
This lone window came in handy as more than my bedtime doodling pad, though. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I’d throw on my clothes and slip outside just to escape reality for a while. Sneaking out was easy; the tricky part was easing myself back inside without getting snow all over my mattress.
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.
