on the glass. I’d fantasize about the darkness that was Heathcliff, so much like my father, a handsome man with thick dark hair, brooding eyes, and high cheekbones that hinted at remote Native ancestry. I used to imagine my dad as a movie star. With his sober good looks and unpredictable mood changes, he exuded an air of mystery like some of the men I read about in my books.
I read incessantly anything I could get my hands on. Mom told me I had inherited my love of reading from my father. Growing up as a child in a poor family, he found that dictionaries were often the only books available to him, so he read them cover to cover many times. As for me, stories that portrayed gloomy, untamed men heightened my affinity with tragedy.
When I was twelve, Mom added wild rosebushes to the front yard, then a lilac tree and wild day lilies to her flower collection. Soon the front of our house was completely fenced in by aromatic flowers. Mixed with the scents of Mom’s blueberry pies and lemon breads, the resulting blend rivalled the intoxicating fragrance from any perfume company.
I can’t recall ever being cold or hungry. But I do remember the exhaustion in my father’s eyes when he walked the more than three miles home after work before we had a car, frequently carrying a large burlap sack of potatoes or some other groceries on his back. Stepping in the door, he’d be faced with the news that there was another leak in the roof or the shed door needed a hinge. And always wood or water had to be carried.
There was no end to my mother’s slaving. She was in constant motion—cooking, scrubbing, washing clothes by hand (and later in an old wringer washing machine), hanging them on the clothesline, preparing lunches, planting flowers. Our house and our clothes always smelled of flowers, cinnamon, and cloves. I don’t know if that scent of flowers lingered on my mother’s hands or if she carried the pollen in the pores of her skin, but I can’t think of my mother without picturing perfect rows of peach-coloured gladioli and deep red dahlias surrounded by the sky-blue of morning glories.
Neither my mother nor my father had time for imperfection or frivolity, and I was given to both. So I tried to stay out of their way. I hid in the woods for hours and talked to the trees, the flowers, the brook, and later, to my little stray cocker spaniel, Pal.
I’d tell my surroundings about my dreams, about how I was going to be a famous writer and have tons of money when I grew older. About how I would wear bright satin dresses and pearls braided in my long hair as I entertained my friends in a grand house and my babies slept in their separate beds upstairs.
I would have four healthy, happy children and I would be a good mother.
Sometimes I’d cry as I held Pal and asked him to love me and never go away I talked about everything, except the visitors who came to touch me during the late hours. I was a child and had no way of properly facing those feelings or aligning them into words.
Sometimes I collected ants and spiders and made farms for them. My mother wasn’t too thrilled with this pastime, but she allowed it as long as I stayed outside or in the shed, out of her way. It wasn’t until I smuggled a garter snake into the house in a shoe box that she put an end to it all.
Cut off from my bug and snake interests, I took up reading and writing in earnest. I read comics, dictionaries, encyclopedias, True Stories, anything, as long as it offered a world to which I could escape. Jane Eyre, with another seething male protagonist, and Wuthering Heights became my literary Bibles, but I loved my Wonder Woman comic books just as much.
I never really minded being poor. Economically challenged—what an expression! It sounded like some sort of competition. Back then all we worried about was surviving. I know today what hardships my parents fought. They did the best they could. But, as a kid, I assumed I was the problem. My world was so small and introspective that I was sure I had to be the reason for their ill tempers, especially when my father raged about how unfair life was, or how he wished he’d never been born. Like most children, I took it personally.
GRANDMOTHERS
When I was quite young, my father’s mother, Grammie Mills, visited us often. My paternal grandfather had died long before I’d been born, so Grammie Mills had been widowed quite a while. Emma was her name—a sweet little woman from Birmingham, England, who stood only five feet tall. She smelled like lilacs. I don’t remember her hair being any other colour than grey It was long, but she never wore it down. She kept it pinned up in a circle around her head that made her look to me like an angel with a silver halo. I’d stare up at her from her lap while she rocked me in her rocking chair and sang hymns that I embraced for their soothing melodies: “Rock of Ages cleft for me. Let me hide myself in thee.”
I wasn’t sure what kind of rock she was singing about, but I thought I understood. I’d once found a cave carved into the rock in the woods and figured it might be a good place to hide. I would go there and sit on the moss and pretend I was safe from my enemies. I used to think Grammie would have liked it, too.
Most often the songs she sang were about the home and mother she’d left behind when she immigrated to Canada at the age of seven. I believe she made up the words to most of the songs, because they didn’t rhyme and they rambled aimlessly without reaching any destination, but I couldn’t have cared less. She was singing them for me. Not only that, she would also read me stories and recite precious poetry.
“Two little girls in blue, two little girls in blue,” she’d mumble over and over as she stroked my cheek. Gazing toward the sky outside our kitchen window, she always seemed to be off in another world.
“What are you thinking about, Grammie?” I’d often ask.
“You, little one, you,” she’d say. And she would laugh throatily and gaze into my eyes with such love that I would feel my chest swell with pride. Sometime I thought I could detect a trace of fear in those soft eyes when she looked at me, but she spoke so few words that I could never be certain.
“Be a good girl, Eva, be a good girl” was all she’d say before once again retreating into her far-off world of daydream.
When Grammie Mills moved to Saint John to live with my Aunt Edna, I felt as if I’d lost a big piece of my newly special self. After a few months, the memory of her tranquillizing songs wore too thin to buffer my loneliness. We didn’t visit Grammie Mills often because the one-hour drive was a costly venture for a family struggling to clothe and feed five people. I wrote to Grammie frequently and she would always reply. She kept all of my letters and read them repeatedly, my aunt later told me. I did the same with hers, even sniffing the letters. Her lingering scent and the delicate curl of her handwriting gave me solace.
I saw my maternal grandmother, Grammie Brewer, more regularly She’d left my grandfather, George, the father my mother had brought lunches to in jail, before I was born and remarried a man with eight children after raising eight of her own. In later years she also raised her granddaughter, Nancy.
According to her birth certificate, Grammie Brewer had been born Effi Scoupi on December 24, 1903, in Germany. My mother said she’d come into the world with a veil of flesh over her eyes that had to be removed. This caul gave her “second sight” and established her reputation as a fortuneteller who often saw forerunners of people’s imminent deaths. Her father, Franz, was also a noted fortuneteller. He hailed from Bohemia, and her mother, Franchiska, was from Austria. Other relatives lived in Romania.
