and I felt tears spring to my eyes. I had never been threatened before and I wasn’t about to attempt fighting a girl with arms like a wrestler’s.
“There’s nothing going on between Alfred and me,” I lied. “Besides, I already have a boyfriend.”
“That better be true!” she screamed in my face. “If I find out different, I’ll wrap that long hair around your throat!” She glared at me, deciding what to do next. Then she backed away, still watching me, before heading onto the road that would take her the three miles from Haneytown to Oromocto. She sure does talk strange for a white girl, I thought.
Fearing for my life, I told Alfred I couldn’t see him anymore when he came to visit his sister a few days later. He didn’t offer any objection. No decrees of love for me, no long pleas of devotion. I had a sneaky suspicion his girlfriend must have already warned him off. After all, she was twice as tough as he was.
GRAMMIE MILLS’S DEATH
I didn’t see Grammie Mills as frequently as I would have liked in my early teen years, but I thought of her often. I wondered what she would say if I had been able to talk to her about boys. I didn’t think she would get as mad as my mother when I tried broaching the subject. Grammie Mills never got mad at me.
It was a freezing cold morning, February 13, 1967, when my father received the call informing him Grammie Mills was gone. Ordinarily I would have been at school, but on this particular morning I was home with a cold. My father was told there had been a fire caused by overheated ductwork in Aunt Edna’s Lakewood home on the outskirts of Saint John. Aunt Edna had already left for work. A neighbour had noticed smoke billowing from the house and alerted the fire department. When the firemen arrived, it was too late. They had discovered my grandmother’s body on the kitchen floor, three feet from the door. Aunt Edna’s German shepherd, which had lain faithfully next to Grammie Mills, had also perished.
The policeman notified my father that Grammie had been overcome by the smoke. She never suffered. Not a bit.
“The police want me to go to Saint John,” my father quietly told us, his hand still on the receiver. “To identify the body.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. I stood there, watching the pain etch deeper into my father’s face. It was too much for me to bear. Without a word I headed to my bedroom. I stayed there, unwilling even to say goodbye to him as he left.
The following day, when my father returned from Saint John, he didn’t talk about Grammie in front of me. He wouldn’t mention her name. I noticed that some of his dark brown hair had turned white. It had happened in less than twenty-four hours. I’d read in one of my books about a man whose black hair turned completely white after coming face-to-face with a demonic spirit. I was afraid for my father, but I didn’t want to know what had happened, what had made his hair change colour in what seemed like nothing more than an instant.
Grammie Mills’s funeral was held in Fredericton. All during the service I stared at the casket, determined to rip it open and have one last look at her to make certain she was really inside. I couldn’t believe they required such a big box for such a tiny woman. I wanted it all to be just a bad dream. I wanted to wake up and see her visiting us again for a big Sunday dinner. I wanted to hear her gruff little chuckle as she greeted me with a warm, perfume-scented hug and kiss.
Sitting with my mom and dad in the funeral chapel, I recalled how purely delighted my grandmother used to be when I brought her flowers. She didn’t like winter and so it seemed unfair to me that we would be taking her for her last car ride in the middle of a winter storm. She should be surrounded by sunshine and daffodils, I reflected.
I glanced across the handful of people, all dressed in black, who sat stoically listening to the words of some dreary hymn. My aunts (Aunt Lois looked so much like Grammie), parents, brothers, cousins, and other relatives I’d only met at funerals stared straight ahead as a minister stood to pray for my grandmother. You’re too late, I thought, concentrating on holding back my tears. Too late.
Two ministers conducted the funeral service: Dr. Harold Mitten from Brunswick Street Baptist Church, where my Aunt Lena, Dad’s other sister, and my cousin, Heather, attended faithfully; and Archdeacon A. S. Coster, the Anglican priest who had married my parents.
How can you look so calm! I longed to shout. It was impossible to measure the amount of pain my relatives might be suffering by studying their faces. My dad’s family had a long history of suffering in silence.
I stared down at my own black skirt and felt fury and resentment as the pallbearers carried the casket from the funeral home to the hearse outside. On the fifteen-mile trip to the graveyard I studied the snow as it began to blow into tiny white tornadoes along the way, and I imagined I could see Grammie Mills’s smiling face along the edge of the cloudy sky above the dancing flakes. By the time we reached the gravesite, I was certain she wasn’t even there, so I never watched as they lowered the casket into the ugly hole that had been hacked out of the frozen earth.
Many times since her death, at junctures when conditions appeared darkest, I have felt Grammie Mills’s caress on my cheek. One night, about six months after her death, I was sick with the flu. I awoke to see her standing at the side of my bed, I began to cry and she reached down and touched my cheek. Her fingers were warm. When I closed my eyes and opened them again, she had vanished, but her touch lingered. I have felt her presence five times since then, episodes that have sealed my faith in the afterlife.
OUT OF CONTROL
After Grammie Mills’s death, I felt angry most of the time. I despised who I was and hated everyone around me. Even my writing provided little distraction or release. I turned my back on trying to be the good girl simply to win the approval of others. I’d had enough of home and wanted to leave. The old-fashioned Christian laws that ruled my house allowed me absolutely no leeway. I felt as if I were being suffocated, especially now that it was summer and I was around my parents more than usual. If I was even a few minutes late coming home, I was accused of plotting an escapade with a boy. It was time to run my own life. I had it in my mind that I wasn’t going back to school. I’d had enough of school, enough of everything from my past life.
To hide my true intentions, I told my folks I was going to visit Judy, my cousin in Fredericton. My parents didn’t like the idea, but they couldn’t do anything about it. I had made up my mind. I guess they reasoned I would be away only for a short while. They had no way of knowing I had shut my mind to them and was never coming back.
I showed up on my cousin Judy’s doorstep and asked if I could stay with her for a few days while I searched for a job. She wasn’t surprised to see me. I often popped in unexpectedly. Two days later I was working at a lunch counter in the Queen Street Zellers in Fredericton.
I met a new, exciting crowd—most of them at least four or five years older than I was—and began to experiment with hashish and uppers. The first time I smoked hash I felt sleepy and hungry, nothing more sensational. I never liked it. But I did like the uppers. After living with the chaos of my mom’s and grandfather’s drinking, I’d promised myself I’d never let alcohol touch my lips.
Three weeks into my stay in Fredericton I was smoking hash with a few hippie friends in a run-down rooming house on Regent Street when one of the guys, an educational student at the University of New Brunswick, suggested we all go to a dance at the KP Hall a few blocks away. I’d never attended any functions there, but I’d heard it was a pretty rough place. Everyone seemed eager to go except me, but I would never have admitted I was afraid. The stone
