Dear Life

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 havingtheir 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. Itwas 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