Dear Life

could understand how some people might think so. It wasn’t just her big bones and her big white nose, and the violin and the somewhat silly way you had to hold it—it was the music itself and her devotion to it. Devotion to anything, if you were female, could make you ridiculous.
    I don’t mean that I was won over to Uncle Jasper’s way of thinking entirely—just that it did not seem so alien to me as it once had. Creeping past my aunt and uncle’s closed bedroom door early on a Sunday morning, on my way to help myself to one of the cinnamon scones Aunt Dawn made every Saturday night, I had heard sounds such as I had never heard from my parents or from anyone else—a sort of pleasurable growling and squealing in which there was a complicity and an abandonment that disturbed and darkly undermined me.
    “I wouldn’t think many Toronto people would drive way up here,” Aunt Dawn said. “The Gibsons aren’t going to be able to make it, even. He’s got a meeting and she can’t reschedule her students.”
    The Gibsons were the people next door. Their friendship had continued but in a lower key, one that didn’t include visits to each other’s houses.
    A girl at school had said to me, “Wait till they make you do the Last Look. I had to look at my grandma and I fainted.”
    I had not heard about the Last Look, but I figured out what it must be. I decided that I would slit my eyes and just pretend.
    “As long as the church doesn’t have that musty smell,” Aunt Dawn said. “That gets into your uncle’s sinuses.”
    No musty smell. No dispiriting damp seeping out of the stone walls and floor. Someone must have got up early in the morning and come to turn the heat on.
    The pews were almost full.
    “Quite a few of your uncle’s patients have made it out here,” Aunt Dawn said softly. “That’s nice. There isn’t any other doctor in town they would do this for.”
    The organist was playing a piece I knew quite well. A girl who was a friend of mine, in Vancouver, had played it for an Easter concert. “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”
    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. Somepeople 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 andmade 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