Dear Life: Stories (15 page)

The woman at the organ was the pianist who had played in the abortive little concert at the house. The cellist was sitting in one of the choir seats close by. Probably he would be playing later.

After we had been settled listening for a bit there was a discreet commotion at the back of the church. I did not turn to look because I had just noticed the dark polished wooden box sitting crossways just below the altar. The coffin. Some
people called it the casket. It was closed. Unless they opened it up at some point, I did not have to worry about the Last Look. Even so, I pictured Mona inside it. Her big bony nose sticking up, her flesh fallen away, her eyes stuck shut. I made myself fix that image uppermost in my mind, until I felt strong enough for it not to make me sick.

Aunt Dawn, like me, did not turn to see what was happening behind us.

The source of the mild disturbance was coming up the aisle and it revealed itself to be Uncle Jasper. He did not stop at the pew where Aunt Dawn and I had kept a seat for him. He went right by, at a respectful yet businesslike pace, and he had somebody with him.

The maid, Bernice. She was dressed up. A navy blue suit and a matching hat with a little nest of flowers in it. She wasn’t looking at us or at anybody. Her face was flushed and her lips tight.

Neither was Aunt Dawn looking at anybody. She had busied herself, at this moment, with leafing through the hymnbook that she had taken out of the pocket of the seat in front of her.

Uncle Jasper didn’t stop at the coffin; he was leading Bernice to the organ. There was a strange surprised sort of thump in the music. Then a drone, a loss, a silence, except for people in the pews shuffling and straining to see what was going on.

Now the pianist who had presided at the organ and the cellist were gone. There must have been a side door up there for them to escape through. Uncle Jasper had seated Bernice in the woman’s place.

As Bernice began to play, my uncle moved forward and
made a gesture to the congregation. Rise and sing, this gesture said, and a few people did. Then more. Then all.

They rustled around in their hymnbooks, but most of them were able to start singing even before they could find the words: “The Old Rugged Cross.”

Uncle Jasper’s job is done. He can come back and occupy the place we have kept for him.

Except for one problem. A thing he has not reckoned on.

This is an Anglican church. In the United Church that Uncle Jasper is used to, the members of the choir enter through a door behind the pulpit, and settle themselves before the minister appears, so that they can look out at the congregation in a comfortable here-we-are-all-together sort of way. Then comes the minister, a signal that things can get started. But in the Anglican church the choir members come up the aisle from the back of the church, singing and making a serious but anonymous show of themselves. They lift their eyes from their books only to gaze ahead at the altar and they appear slightly transformed, removed from their everyday identities and not quite aware of their relatives or neighbors or anybody else in the congregation.

They are coming up the aisle now, singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” just like everybody else—Uncle Jasper must have talked to them before things started. Possibly he made it out to be a favorite of the deceased.

The problem is one of space and bodies. With the choir in the aisle, there is no way for Uncle Jasper to get back to our pew. He is stranded.

There is one thing to be done and done quickly, so he does it. The choir has not yet reached the very front pew, so he squeezes in there. The people standing with him are
surprised but they make room for him. That is, they make what room they can. By chance, they are heavy people and he is a broad, though lean, man.

That is what my uncle sings, as heartily as he can in the space he’s been given. He cannot turn to face the altar but has to face outward into the profiles of the moving choir. He can’t help looking a little trapped there. Everything has gone okay but, just the same, not quite as he imagined it. Even after the singing is over, he stays in that spot, sitting squeezed in as tightly as he can be with those people. Perhaps he thinks it would be anticlimactic now to get up and walk back down the aisle to join us.

Aunt Dawn has not participated in the singing, because she never found the right place in the hymnbook. It seems that she could not just trail along, the way I did.

Or perhaps she caught the shadow of disappointment on Uncle Jasper’s face before he was even aware of it himself.

Or perhaps she realized that, for the first time, she didn’t care. For the life of her, couldn’t care.

“Let us pray,” says the minister.

S
OME
people get everything wrong. How can I explain? I mean, there are those who can have everything against them—three strikes, twenty strikes, for that matter—and they turn out fine. Make mistakes early on—dirty their pants in grade two, for instance—and then live out their lives in a town like ours where nothing is forgotten (any town, that is, any town is a place like that) and they manage, they prove themselves hearty and jovial, claiming and meaning that they would not for the world want to live in any place but this.

With other people, it’s different. They don’t move away but you wish they had. For their own sake, you could say. Whatever hole they started digging for themselves when they were young—not by any means as obvious as the dirty
pants either—they keep right on at it, digging away, even exaggerating if there is a chance that it might not be noticed.

Things have changed, of course. There are counsellors at the ready. Kindness and understanding. Life is harder for some, we’re told. Not their fault, even if the blows are purely imaginary. Felt just as keenly by the recipient, or the non-recipient, as the case may be.

But good use can be made of everything, if you are willing.

Oneida didn’t go to school with the rest of us, anyway. I mean that nothing could have happened there, to set her up for life. She went to a girls’ school, a private school, that I can’t remember the name of, if I ever knew it. Even in the summers she was not around much. I believe the family had a place on Lake Simcoe. They had lots of money—so much, in fact, that they weren’t in a category with anybody else in town, even the well-to-do ones.

Oneida was an unusual name—it still is—and it did not catch on here. Indian, I found out later. Likely her mother’s choice. The mother died when she, Oneida, was in her teens. Her father, I believe, called her Ida.

I had all the papers once, heaps of papers for the town history I was working on. But gaps even there. There was no satisfactory explanation of how the money disappeared. However, there was no need. Word of mouth would do the trick thoroughly enough back then. What isn’t taken account of is how all the mouths get lost, given time.

Ida’s father ran the bank. Even in those days bankers came and went, I suppose to keep them from ever getting too cozy with the customers. But the Jantzens had been having
their way in town for too long for any regulations to matter, or that was how it seemed. Horace Jantzen had certainly the look of a man born to be in power. A heavy white beard, even though according to photographs, beards were out of style by the First World War, a good height and stomach and a ponderous expression.

In the hard times of the thirties people were still coming up with ideas. Jails were opened up to shelter the men who followed the railway tracks, but even some of them, you can be sure, were nursing a notion bound to make them a million dollars.

A million dollars in those days was a million dollars.

It wasn’t any railway tramp, however, who got into the bank to talk to Horace Jantzen. Who knows if it was a single person or a cohort. Maybe a stranger or some friends of friends. Well dressed and plausible looking, you may be sure. Horace set store by appearances and he wasn’t a fool, though maybe not as quick as he should have been to smell a rat.

The idea was the resurrection of the steam-driven car, such as had been around at the turn of the century. Horace Jantzen may have had one himself and had a fondness for them. This new model would be an improved version, of course, and have the advantages of being economical and not making a racket.

I’m not acquainted with the details, having been in high school at the time. But I can imagine the leak of talk and the scoffing and enthusiasm and the news getting through of some entrepreneurs from Toronto or Windsor or Kitchener getting ready to set up locally. Some hotshots, people would say. And others would ask if they had the backing.

They did indeed, because the bank had put up the loan. It
was Jantzen’s decision and there was some confusion whether he had put in his own money. He may have done so, but it came out later that he had also dipped improperly into bank funds, thinking no doubt that he could pay it back with nobody the wiser. Maybe the laws were not so tight then. There were actually men hired and the old livery stable was cleared out to be their place of operations. And here my memory grows shaky, because I graduated from high school, and I had to think about earning a living if that was possible. My impediment, even with the lip stitched up, ruled out anything that involved a lot of talking, so I settled for bookkeeping, and that meant going out of town to apprentice to an outfit in Goderich. By the time I got back home the steam-car operation was spoken of with scorn by the people who had been against it and not at all by those who had promoted it. The visitors to town who had been all for it had disappeared. The bank had lost a lot of money.

There was talk not of cheating but of mismanagement. Somebody had to be punished. Any ordinary manager would have been out on his ear, but given that it was Horace Jantzen, this was avoided. What happened to him was almost worse. He was switched to the job of bank manager in the little village of Hawksburg, about six miles up the highway. Prior to this there had been no manager there at all, because they didn’t need one. There had just been a head cashier and an underling cashier, both women.

Surely he could have refused, but pride, as it was thought, chose otherwise. Pride chose that he be driven every morning those six miles to sit behind a partial wall of cheap varnished boards, no proper office at all. There he sat and did nothing until it came time for him to be driven home.

The person who drove him was his daughter. Sometime in these years of driving she made the transition from Ida to Oneida. At last she had something to do. She didn’t keep house, though, because they couldn’t let Mrs. Birch go. That was one way of putting it. Another might be that they’d never paid Mrs. Birch enough to keep her out of the poorhouse, if letting her go had ever been considered.

If I picture Oneida and her father on these journeys to and from Hawksburg, I see him riding in the backseat, and her in front, like a chauffeur. It may have been that he was too bulky to ride up beside her. Or maybe the beard needed space. I don’t see Oneida looking downtrodden or unhappy at the arrangement, nor her father looking actually unhappy. Dignity was what he had, and plenty of it. She had something different. When she went into a store or even walked on the street, there seemed to be a little space cleared around her, made ready for whatever she might want or greetings she might spread. She seemed then a bit flustered but gracious, ready to laugh a little at herself or the situation. Of course she had her good bones and bright looks, all that fair dazzle of skin and hair. So it might seem strange that I could feel sorry for her, the way she was all on the surface of things, trusting.

Imagine me, sorry.

The war was on, and it seemed things changed overnight. Tramps no longer followed the trains. Jobs opened up, and the young men were not searching for jobs or hitching rides but appearing everywhere in their dull blue or khaki uniforms. My mother said it was lucky for me that I was how
I was, and I believed she was right but told her not to say that outside the house. I was home from Goderich, finished with my apprenticing, and I got work right away doing the books at Krebs’s department store. Of course it might have been said, and probably was, that I got the job because of my mother working there in dry goods, but there was also the coincidence of Kenny Krebs, the young manager, going off to join the Air Force and being killed on a training flight.

There was shock like that and yet a welcome energy everywhere, and people going around with money in their pockets. I felt cut off from men of my own age, but my being cut off in a way was nothing so new. And there were others in the same boat. Farmers’ sons were exempt from service to look after the crops and the animals. I knew some who took the exemption even though there was a hired man. I knew that if anybody asked me why I was not in service it would be a joke. And I was ready with the response that I had to look after the books. Krebs’s books and soon others. Had to look after the figures. It wasn’t quite accepted yet that women could do that. Even by the end of the war, when they’d been doing some of it for a while. For truly reliable service it was still believed you needed a man.

I’ve asked myself sometimes, Why should a harelip, decently if not quite cleverly tidied up, and a voice that sounded somewhat peculiar but was capable of being understood, have been considered enough to keep me home? I must have got my notice, I must have gone to the doctor to get an exemption. I simply don’t remember. Was it that I was so used to being exempted from one thing or another that I took it, like a lot of other things, completely for granted?

I may have told my mother to be quiet on certain matters, but what she said did not usually carry much weight with
me. Invariably she looked on the bright side. Other things I knew but not from her. I knew that because of me she was afraid to have any more children and had lost a man who was once interested in her when she told him that. But it didn’t occur to me to feel sorry for either of us. I didn’t miss a father dead before I could have seen him, or any girlfriend I could have had if I’d looked different, or the brief swagger of walking off to war.