The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  What is left of his aircraft jams to a stop up on its nose in the dirt. At some point his head has snapped forward into the instrument panel—“I got a pretty good bump on the head”—the knob of the radio dial, most likely. It has all but taken out his eye. “But somebody up there likes me, I thought….” Had he been operational at the time of the accident, he’d have kept his aircrew category—

  Madeleine says, “But your eye was bleeding.”

  “Well I didn’t know that then, I just figured I’d banged my head.”

  —twenty-twenty is nice but not essential, that’s why you fly with a crew. All you really have to be able to see is your instrument panel, and Jack can see it fine, it’s bent into itself below him. He is suspended over it by his seat belt, big drops of blood are splashing onto the shattered dial faces, the fuel gauge reads low and that’s good news, where is the blood coming from? He touches his face. There’s a storm raging behind his left eye—

  “And Uncle Simon rescued you,” says Madeleine.

  “That’s right.”

  A sound like a heavy zipper—Simon slices him out of his seat belt and hauls him out. Jack feels the earth travelling backwards beneath his butt—there are his boots bouncing along in front of him, how long have we been travelling like this?

  “Simon saw the accident and he was the first one across the field.”

  Grass rippling past, a pair of elbows hooked under his armpits.

  There’s been an accident, Jack hears his own voice.

  Yes you foolish bastard, there’s been a fucking accident.

  Hi Si. Sorry, sir.

  He hears Simon laugh at the same moment as he glances up to see his yellow airplane—in a headstand twenty-five feet away, skeleton wings drooping—burst into flames like a flower unfolding, burning pollen on the air.

  He wakes up in the infirmary. Why is the nurse smiling? Why does Simon offer him a shot of whiskey?

  “You did the right thing, mate.”

  What is there to celebrate? His war is over. It ended thirty yards south of the runway at Number 9 Service Flying Training School, Centralia Aerodrome, April 7, 1943. SNAFU. Situation Normal All Fouled Up.

  “And you got a medal,” says Madeleine.

  “That’s right, I got my gong.”

  “But you couldn’t fly any more.”

  “Nope, but it turned out for the best ’cause otherwise I never would have met Maman and you never would have been born, and what would I do without my Deutsches Mädchen?” Jack gets up from the bed and leans to tuck the blankets around her.

  “Dad, tell the story of Jack and Mimi.”

  He laughs. “We said one story.”

  “But it is one story, it’s part of the story.”

  “You’re going to be a lawyer when you grow up.” He switches off the light.

  “Dad, what was the name of that place again?”

  “What place?”

  “Where Johnny said Hitler’s secret weapon was?”

  “Johnny …? Oh, that was Peenemünde.”

  Pain Amunda. The name sounds like needles. “Did the Germans capture her?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “Did they torture her?”

  “No, no … she got away.” He slips out the door.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What would’ve happened if you died in the crash?”

  “… I didn’t die.”

  “But what if?”

  “Well. You wouldn’t have been born.”

  “Where would I be?”

  “I don’t think you’d be anywhere.”

  What is worse? Being dead? Or not being born? How come we’re afraid to die, but we’re not afraid of before we were born? “Dad—?”

  “Have a good sleep, sweetie, think nice thoughts.”

  Jack closes her door halfway, to allow light from the hall to spill into her room. He goes to his bedroom and crosses to his dresser without switching on the light. That other Anson never should have been cleared for takeoff. The Air Force Cross was in recognition of his decision, in disregard of his own safety, to peel left into a certain crash, rather than risk trying to overtake the aircraft on the ground and land in front of it—a risk that, had it resulted in a collision with the fuelled-up airplane, would have killed its pilot, its instructor, its student navigator and its wireless operator. Along with Jack. For valour, courage and devotion to duty whilst flying, though not in active operations against the enemy. Jack reaches into his drawer and finds what he’s looking for.

  He crosses the hall to his son’s room. On the wall, the Canadian Golden Hawks fly in formation, their gold and red Sabre jets in a starburst. Below the picture, the bed is neatly made, the boy is no slouch. He shakes his head at the new poster, however; where did he get that thing? The United States Marine Corps Wants You. Jack has a back-to-school gift for his son: a brand-new “RCAF 4 Fighter Wing” baseball cap from the boy’s old team in Germany. He tosses it onto the bed and it bounces. Regulation corners. He smiles and heads downstairs.

  His wife and son are sitting at the kitchen table playing gin rummy. Mimi gets up and puts the kettle on. “Jack, would you like a cup of tea?”

  He finds his copy of Time among Mimi’s women’s magazines with their hairdos and recipes, and relaxes on the couch. In East Berlin a boy is shot attempting to escape over the “Wall of Shame” and takes an hour to die while people on the west side scream across at the guards to do something. He flips through—the sound of his wife and son chatting in the kitchen is all the more soothing because Jack doesn’t understand French—President Kennedy in swim trunks, surrounded by women in bikinis. Infighting at NASA. Jackie Kennedy on waterskis. From the kitchen comes the whistle of the teakettle. Rockets and bikinis, what’s the world coming to? Wernher von Braun demonstrates the Saturn booster engine for the President. U.S. military advisers are helping the South Vietnamese in “the most successful operation yet carried out against the Communist Viet Cong.” Rocket-size crates on the Havana docks….

  Mimi places a cup and saucer on the side table next to him. He registers its arrival as though from a great distance—from the blackness of outer space, so that his failure to say thanks is not rudeness, merely a consequence of a law of physics. Time’s view is that Castro could have been easily “erased” if only Kennedy had properly backed the Bay of Pigs invasion last April, which it now terms “a synonym for fiasco.” Jack reaches for his cup. The pundits at Time think Kennedy is being soft on Communism, but what do they suggest? An unprovoked invasion? We might as well become Soviet citizens if we’re going to adopt their tactics. He turns the page. “OPINION Toward the Year 2000. The U.S. will defend Canada whether Canada likes it or not….”

  “Jack?”

  “What’s that?” He looks up from his magazine as though surfacing from sleep.

  Mimi is standing over him with the tea pot. She says, “I said, do you want some hot?” “Oh. Oh, yeah. Merci.”

  In Madeleine’s room the ceramic face of a little Bavarian boy, surprised by a bumblebee on his nose, shields the night light. Tomorrow is the first day of school, the dawn of a bright new era. She closes her eyes. Colours flit rapidly behind her lids. She floats up, the bed listing like a sailboat. Was there really such a person as Peter Pan? If you believe hard enough, will you hear him crowing? Are there still talking ravens? When I grow up I will have a dog. I will have a red sportscar. The bed slips gently down the stream … when I grow up….

  THE CROWS WAITED until things had cooled down there. When the blue dress with the girl inside it had become just that, they dropped down—one, two, a third—to stand at a polite distance. And began to work the charms. Tug. Tugging at the bracelet. And one charm was free. The successful crow rose into the air with a flashing silver prize in its beak. Her name. Then the others flew away, and she was left alone.

  BACK TO SCHOOL

  Write “all right.” Both “all right” and “all wrong” are written as two separa
te words. Write “all right” and “all wrong” again.

  Macmillan Spelling Series, 1962

  MADELEINE DOES NOT NEED to be walked to school by her father, but it was their first-day-back tradition when she was little. St. Lawrence Avenue is full of kids in new clothes—cotton dresses and ankle socks for the girls, plaid shirts and high-top sneakers for the boys—all freshly ironed, barbered, braided and brushed. Some are being walked to school by their parents, but those kids are younger than Madeleine. She had intended to go with Auriel and Lisa, but at the last minute couldn’t bear the thought of Dad watching his old buddy walk away without him.

  Jack whistles through his teeth and glances about at the sunny pageant. Madeleine takes his hand to make up for the fact that she would rather not be seen walking hand-in-hand with him to grade four. He winks down at her. “Don’t be nervous, old buddy.” There is no harm in letting him think that’s why she has taken his hand. She smiles for him.

  They pass the empty green bungalow on their left. Whoever moves in there will be late for school. Mike is walking up ahead with Roy Noonan, wearing his new 4 Fighter Wing baseball cap over his fresh crewcut. He has a Spiderman comic book in his schoolbag—Madeleine saw him put it there but she didn’t tell on him. Her dress has no pockets. It has a panel of crinkly fabric across the chest and a jazzy print of Africans playing bongos on the skirt—it’s okay considering that it’s a dress. She carries her white cardigan hooked by a finger over her shoulder—this is a less sissy way of carrying a cardigan, it’s the way you would carry a bomber jacket if you had one. All she wanted was penny loafers; instead Maman bought the new Mary Janes. There is no way to pretend they are anything else.

  She is hot on the outside and chilly on the inside. Butterflies. Her father says the best performers get them on opening night. This is opening day. Fresh scribblers. Fresh kids. Fresh teacher. Fresh self. She longs to let go of his hand and slant away like a kite. “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Um. Can you meet me after school and we can walk home together?”

  “Don’t you think you’ll want to be with your buddies by then?”

  “No.”

  “Well, we’ll see. You decide at lunchtime, okay?”

  She looks up at him, his eyes shaded by his hat brim. “Okay.”

  He is in his summer uniform. It looks just like his other one except, instead of blue, it’s khaki. He wears his hat with the brim pulled a little lower than usual on sunny days to prevent his old eye injury from flaring into a headache. Madeleine loves his uniform—both the khaki and the dress blues—but her favourite part of it is his hat. The badge over the brim is beautiful: a red velvet crown edged in gold braid and beneath it, in brass, the albatross in flight, bold beak facing to its left. Some say it’s actually an eagle, and there are still vigorous debates about this in the mess, but according to her father any right-thinking air force man knows it’s an albatross. A bird of great good fortune. Unless you happen to kill one. Besides, an eagle is an American symbol.

  Above his left breast pocket are sewn his wings. Even if an air force man is no longer a pilot, the wings remain part of his uniform. This spring, if Madeleine gets enough Brownie badges, she will fly up to Girl Guides. Then she too will have a pair of wings to pin proudly over her heart.

  “Here we are,” he says. The schoolyard. The sound of the crowd rises like a wheel of gulls over a turbulence of bobbing heads, eddies of stripes, polka dots and plaid, the occasional adult sticking up like a spar. Jack surveys the scene, his hand still around Madeleine’s. He spots Mike in the crowd and touches the brim of his hat. Mike reciprocates with the bill of his baseball cap.

  Madeleine says, “Well, I guess I better go,” because it seems that otherwise Dad will wait for the bell.

  “All right then.” He leans down. “Do your best, sweetie. Do it your way.”

  She kisses his cheek, smooth Old Spice. “’Bye Dad.”

  He gives her the thumbs-up.

  She enters the crowd, allowing it to close around her. She imagines that if she stood on tiptoe it would carry her along like driftwood. The shrieking is far away and in her ears all at once. She pauses at the swings to look back at her father. He is walking away up Algonquin Drive. She ought to have turned sooner and waved. You never know when will be the last time you see your dad. This could be it. The back of his head, his hat, smooth khaki uniform. When Dad was alive. She wants to run and take his hand again—

  “Madeleine.”

  She turns. “Oh, hi Marjorie.”

  She bends to fiddle with her shoe strap in hopes that Marjorie will go away but Marjorie stays and says, “Oo-day oo-yay ant-way oo-tay o-gay oo-tay y-may ouse-hay or-fay unch-lay?”

  “What?”

  Marjorie giggles. “It’s pig Latin, silly! Ig-pay atin-lay, illy-say!”

  “Oh.” Madeleine looks past Marjorie to see Colleen Froelich arrive in the schoolyard. Unhurried, face slightly averted. She wears a kilt and blouse that make her tan look darker, her legs harder and leaner. Like a kid someone found in a forest and put clothes onto. She has loafers. Good and scuffed. Madeleine wonders if she has brought her knife to school. Colleen’s in grade six.

  “Well oo-day oo-yay?”

  “What?”

  “Do you want to come to my house for lunch?!” Marjorie rolls her eyes with mock impatience. She is wearing a fluffy yellow dress.

  “Hafta go home,” mumbles Madeleine, scanning the playground, desperate now for a sight of Auriel and Lisa.

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know”—there they are, over by the teeter-totters—“I have to go.” She retreats, adding as politely as possible, “’Bye.” But before she can reach her friends, the bell goes.

  She joins the stampede toward the steps. A row of teachers is suddenly there, a blur of instructions through a megaphone, something about grade ones on the right—the right of what? Who’s on first? Kindergartners have already been shepherded through a separate door so they won’t get trampled. “Quiet, boys and girls!”—school is officially starting. Madeleine lines up with the grade fives by mistake, vaguely aware that something is amiss, everyone at least an inch taller than she—“Psst!” She turns to see Auriel gesturing frantically for her to “get over here, you ding-dong!” She steps out of the grade five line and Auriel grabs her by the cardigan, yanking her to the safety of grade four.

  “Gosh almighty, McCarthy!” whispers Auriel.

  Lisa Ridelle is doubled over, laughing her silent ghosty laugh. The three of them giggle into their hands, a whistle sounds, squads of pupils begin filing up the front steps and in through the big double doors. Madeleine follows the caravan into the future. Who will my teacher be? Will she be pretty? Will she be nice? Will I understand fractions? Que será, será….

  “Good morning boys and girls, my name is Mr. March.”

  He is fat in a grey suit, but maybe that means he’s nice. Fat people often are.

  “Good morning Mr. March”—eternal grade-school singsong.

  He has brown brogues. They are dusty. Perhaps he is too fat to bend over and polish them. That was cruel, sorry dear God.

  The first thing Mr. March does is move the boys to the front. “I know what boys are,” he says, revising his seating plan. He doesn’t see the need to move the girls, or perhaps he doesn’t know what they are. Madeleine is grateful because her desk is perfect: right across from Auriel, and one in front of Lisa.

  A scraping of chairs; everyone rises to sing “God Save the Queen” and “The Maple Leaf Forever,” and recite the Lord’s Prayer. Then the rattle of chairs and outbreak of chit-chat as everyone sits down again. “Let’s keep it down to a dull roar, shall we?” says Mr. March.

  There is a bit of dandruff on the arm of his glasses, Madeleine sees it when he walks down the rows handing out the new scribblers for spelling. Pink. “Gordon Lawson,” says Mr. March, consulting his seating plan. “Spell ‘licorice.’”

  “L I … C O….
” Gordon has wavy ginger hair freshly slicked, and the perfect number of freckles. “R … I … S—no, C, E.”

  “Very good, sir,” says Mr. March. “The rest of you, look to Mr. Lawson. Emulate him.”

  Madeleine wishes Mr. March would ask her to spell something. A pink scribbler lands on her desk. Hilroy is emblazoned across the cover in bold cheerful script.

  The first time you open a fresh scribbler. The clean smell. The paper sheen. Large scribblers, no longer little baby scribblers with wide lines. This is grade four. Copy the beautiful cursive letters that adorn the wall above the blackboard, each one repeated in upper and lower case like mother and child, doe and fawn. Study the map of the world that is pulled down over the blackboard. Canada and the British Commonwealth are pink. Ponder the cut-outs that decorate the walls between the big windows all along one side—hams and bottles of milk, fruit and poultry and other wholesome foods; bushels and pecks, gallons and yards; isosceles triangles cavort alongside wild animals and children from other lands in Eskimo parkas and Mexican sombreros. Up at the front, near the big oak desk, a felt-lined bulletin board on an easel. The only blank surface.

  Madeleine arranges her new package of Laurentian pencil crayons next to her ruler and her new plaid pencil case. The air is bright with promise, the school pervaded by the aroma of fresh pencil shavings, orange peels and floor polish. No one has yet thrown up in the hallway, occasioning the spread of coloured sawdust; rain and snow have not yet soaked and musted the coats on the hooks at the back of the room—those hooks are empty, it being still too warm for coats. It is difficult to believe, when you look out the row of big windows onto the playground and the bright PMQs beyond, that winter will really come. The seasons will change through that window, thinks Madeleine, I will turn nine through that window….