The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  “What is the capital of Borneo, little girl?” Mr. March asks.

  Madeleine starts. Is he looking at her? “Pardon?”

  He rolls his eyes. “‘Beautiful dreamer,’” he sings.

  The class laughs. He is handing out the scribblers for geography. Green.

  “Hands?” says Mr. March. No one puts up a hand.

  “How about you, …” consulting his seating plan, “Lisa Ridelle? What is the capital of Borneo?”

  Lisa replies, “I don’t know,” barely audible from behind her curtain of white blonde.

  Madeleine looks around. No one knows. Not even Marjorie Nolan.

  “Well, you will by the time I’m finished with you, as will you all.”

  Directly in front of Madeleine is Grace Novotny. The part in her hair is crooked and her pigtails are fastened with plain elastics. It’s true, Grace does smell—when Madeleine leans forward she gets a whiff. Perhaps she wets the bed. It’s a sad smell. Madeleine leans back and resists the temptation to bury her nose in the crease of her new notebook. Let everything you do be perfectly neat this year, with no crossing-out or dog ears. Let everything be spelled correctly, and do not drop this scribbler in a puddle on the way home.

  “When was the War of 1812?”

  Madeleine looks up but she’s safe. His head is turning like a periscope, looking for hands. A pause, then he says in a slightly weary way, “For your information, boys and girls, that was a joke.” Polite laughter.

  He passes out a thick red textbook. It’s the grade four reader Up and Away. Madeleine opens it and is immediately engrossed in “Dale the Police Dog.” He is a German shepherd who belongs to the Mounties. He guards their stuff and stops older girls from picking on younger ones. One day a little girl goes missing. “Dale’s master let the dog sniff at the small sweater. Dale knew at once that he must go to look for someone who carried the same scent.” Dale finds her asleep out in a field. Her parents have been worried sick. Dale looks like Eggs across the street. A blue textbook lands on Madeleine’s desk with a thud and she closes the reader, aware of somehow cheating by reading ahead.

  “I should make it clear right off the bat,” says Mr. March, “that I’m not partial to shilly-shallying, dilly-dallying or chin-wagging.”

  Madeleine whispers to Auriel, “Except that his chin is wagging, or should I say ‘chins’?”

  “What did you say?”

  Madeleine looks up, crimson.

  He consults the seating plan. “Madeleine McCarthy. Well well, alliteration. Can you define alliteration for me?”

  He must be looking at me, thinks Madeleine, because he said my name. But it’s difficult to tell, because his glasses reflect the light and there is nothing in the set of his large face to indicate where he might be focusing.

  Madeleine answers, “Um—”

  “Word whiskers.” He chants it in a fed-up way.

  “It’s when—”

  “Full sentences please.”

  “A literation is when you throw garbage on the ground.”

  No one laughs, because no one, including Madeleine, knows what alliteration is. Mr. March says, “We have a wit amongst us.”

  Madeleine is mortified, but also relieved because Mr. March seems to have forgotten what he asked her in the first place. He continues handing out the blue textbooks—Living with Arithmetic, which makes it sound like a disease, which it is. Madeleine peeks inside. Sure enough, the enticing drawings, intriguing juxtapositions of rifles and cakes, cars and hats. “Into how many sets of 8 can you divide 120 children for square dancing?” What children? Where do they live? Are they orphans? “At the rifle range Bob scored 267 points. His father scored 423 points….” Who is Bob? Why is he allowed to have a gun? Insincere accounts of Mrs. Johnson baking pies, Mr. Green putting apples into boxes, hogs onto trucks, all a treacherous narrative veneer on the stark problems of how much, when, how long, and how many left over, the human characters mere evil imposters of numbers.

  “What is the square root of forty-seven?” Mr. March asks, strolling up the aisle. Madeleine is alarmed—I didn’t know we had to do square roots in grade four. He stops at the desk of a girl with long shiny black hair.

  “I don’t know,” says the girl.

  “You don’t say,” says Mr. March. His voice sounds as though he has let go of his muscles. Like something heavy sliding down a hill.

  The girl he asked is crying! Quietly at her desk.

  “There’s no need for tears, little girl.”

  The bell rings. Recess.

  “Side door, boys and girls,” he says over the racket. The side door leads directly outside to the playground and they pour out into the sunshine, one jubilant scream of kids. The long wild fifteen minutes of freedom. The boys rush past the girls, taking over the baseball diamond, finding smooth spots on the asphalt for marbles, or simply chasing and pounding one another. Lisa, Madeleine and Auriel link arms and stride in step like robots across the playground, chanting, “We don’t stop for anyone!” They walk right into the teeter-totter bar and collapse over it. They pretend they’re swimming. They pretend they’re flying.

  The bell goes all too soon, and the grade fours file back in through the side door to find that the girl who cried is already there, cleaning the blackboard with a shammy. It’s a treat to do that, Mr. March must have been trying to be nice, he’s not an ogre. Her name is Diane Vogel. She’s very pretty. Mr. March lets her write the title for the next lesson in chalk: Botany. Diane Vogel has beautiful printing.

  Sitting back down in her row, Madeleine experiences that first reassuring proprietorial sense: my desk. My inkwell, which no one ever uses any more. Her father has told her it used to be filled with ink in the olden days, during the Depression. Boys would dunk girls’ braids into it. She looks at Grace’s higgledy-pigtails and wonders if any boy would be tempted to tease her like that. According to Maman, when boys do that it means they like you. You got a funny way of showin’ it, doc.

  Mr. March hands out crayons and construction paper and no one gets in trouble for the rest of the morning. They copy pictures of leaves and wildflowers such as Queen Anne’s lace, “which grows in abundance in these parts,” says Mr. March.

  “Udderwise known as stinkweed,” whispers Madeleine to Auriel, but it’s okay, he doesn’t look up from his desk. He’s busy. While everyone draws quietly, he writes with a squeaky Magic Marker on sheets of yellow bristol board.

  “How was your first morning of school, sweetie?” asks Jack, over tuna salad sandwiches, Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup and, for dessert, pète-de-nonne—Acadian cookies. The name means nuns’ farts; it’s only rude if you say it in English.

  “It was great.”

  “Good stuff.”

  No need for her father to walk her back to school, the mortality of the morning has fled. She runs to the end of the driveway in time to meet up with Auriel and Lisa. She turns and waves to him on the porch, then runs with her friends the whole way back to school, their cardigan sleeves tied around their necks for Bat capes.

  Just before recess that afternoon, Mr. March says, “I need a volunteer.” Hands shoot up. Mostly girls. Madeleine has not put up her hand and she feels a bit rude, so she half puts it up in order to be polite. Marjorie Nolan is jabbing the air with her hand, saying, “Oh!” with every jab. Mr. March consults his seating plan. “Marjorie Nolan. You will stay in at recess and do a job of work for me.”

  Marjorie looks about proudly as though she expects to see jealous faces. Madeleine is relieved not to have been picked to miss recess, and she is doubly relieved that Marjorie was, because she won’t have to worry about hurting Marjorie’s feelings by avoiding her. The bell goes.

  “One at a time, boys and girls, in an orderly fashion.”

  After recess they return to see Marjorie installed at Mr. March’s desk. She has a pair of scissors and is cutting out the last of numerous oval shapes from the sheets of yellow bristol board. Mr. March begins pinning them in a verti
cal row down the left-hand side of the felt bulletin board: each oval bears a name in black Magic Marker, one for every person in the class. There are multiple Cathys, Debbies, Dianes, Carols, Michaels, Johns, Bobbys, Davids and Stephens, so those names are followed by an initial. Across the top of the bulletin board, he pins more ovals: one for every subject. Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography, History, Art.

  Mr. March says, “Pay attention, class.” He turns to the felt board and sticks something onto it. When he steps aside you can see what it is. Three felt cut-outs: a hare, a dolphin and a tortoise. “It’s up to you,” he says.

  Will you be a speeding hare? An adequate dolphin? Or a stupid tortoise? The tortoise is the only one smiling, which strikes Madeleine as odd unless you think of it as “Ignorance is bliss.”

  “Mrs. March made these cutouts and I have found them to be very effective,” says Mr. March—as if he were talking about Ex-Lax, thinks Madeleine, and in order not to think of Mr. March on the toilet she pictures Mrs. March, a benevolent woman with a bun, hunched over a table with a pair of scissors, pining for children of her own. It doesn’t occur to Madeleine to wonder why she assumes the Marches have no children.

  She watches Mr. March’s broad grey back as he amasses dolphins, tortoises and hares at the bottom of the bulletin board, peeling them from his soft colourful pile, pressing them to the felt board with finger and thumb. And there they cluster, waiting to embark on their various missions to hop, swim or crawl next to every name in every subject. Madeleine is confident of at least one hare, in reading.

  “But fair warning, boys and girls,” Mr. March says in his porridge voice. “Though you may fancy yourselves hares, remember the story of the tortoise and the hare….” His glasses glint at no one in particular; he is looking at them and past them all at once, rather like those iguanas on Wild Kingdom.

  “That hare was fast, but he had no powers of concentration …”—iguanas have somewhat porridgy skin, and they stare like Mr. March—“like Madeleine McCarthy.”

  Madeleine blinks. The class giggles. Everyone else has their spelling books open at page—what? When did that happen? She glances across at Auriel, who tilts her book helpfully—page ten. Madeleine opens her speller: Unit I: blame brakes flake grave slave shame mistake bare rare glare farewell average postage cabbage….

  “… management, military, executive, finance as well as the admin course for junior officers….”

  Jack is in his office with his senior staff. The hooks on his halltree have sprouted air force hats; several more are ranked along the window ledge. One or two of his officers are likewise new to the station, so he has invited everyone for a general briefing. Vic Boucher has already gone over the series of special events—visits to and from Air Training Command Headquarters in Winnipeg, visits by school staff to the Staff School in Toronto, intramural curling and volleyball, etc. Now Squadron Leader Nolan is giving a rundown of incoming students. The man speaks into his clipboard; Jack leans forward, the better to concentrate—“Six hundred students in the COS, a hundred and forty flight cadets in the PFS, thirty-eight of them NATO”—but his gaze strays to the hats, then up to the window—“as well, we’ll look to process something like seventeen hundred candidates through the OSU.”

  Jack pulls his focus from the blue sky, back to the briefing, as Nolan winds up. “Good stuff.” He drums the eraser end of his pencil lightly on his desk and says, “Are any of you gentlemen familiar with what is known as the case-study method?”

  One or two assents from the younger officers.

  “Can someone give me the air force definition of leadership?”

  A junior instructor, himself an MBA candidate, raises a hand. “Sir, I believe the standard definition goes as follows”—he looks a little lost in his uniform, is it possible that this young man has the slightest interest in aeroplanes? “‘Leadership is the art of influencing others to achieve an aim.’”

  He has answered by the book. A real ground-pounder. Name of Vogel. Ironic.

  Jack nods. “Close enough,” he says, “but what does it really mean, eh? ‘Influence.’ How? Who sets the ‘aim’? How do you deal with resistance to change?”

  A chief instructor, Squadron Leader Lawson, pipes up, “In the military I believe the accepted method is ‘Change or else.’”

  Laughter. Jack grins. “That’s right, ‘This won’t hurt a bit, did it?’” More laughter. “In the military,” he continues, “we have a chain of command, and in the heat of battle it’s pretty cut and dried. But in peacetime—extended periods of peace like the one we’re in—the tendency can be toward bureaucratic bloat, a loss of the sense of what it’s all for. Although,” he adds, “lest we forget, even in wartime there’s always some general back in an office sticking pins in a map.” Groans of assent, despite the fact that none except Vic—and Jack, in his way—are veterans. The eldest among the others is a hair too young to have served. Jack continues.

  “I’m looking to take a bit of a more sociological approach. That’s what’s been going on for the past while at the good business schools, and it’s been the trend in the real world for a few decades now. We’re talking about something a little different from the traditional ‘sir-yes-sir’ approach. We want to dig a little deeper, get a little more complex, because the world is getting a helluva lot more complex.”

  “Better believe it,” says Vic.

  “Think of the military as a corporation,” says Jack. “What business are we in? We’re in the peace business. Who are our shareholders? The people of Canada. Our aim is to defend the country. In order to achieve that aim we must identify various objectives: to join with our allies in managing the threat of Soviet expansion; to monitor and respond to perilous situations within our own borders and around the world; to assess risk in the light of present-day weapons of mass destruction. What becomes key? Communication.” He pauses and looks around. The men are relaxed on several chairs scavenged from neighbouring offices. Listening intently. “You may have a crack pilot, but if his ground crew used the wrong wing nut because the engineer submitted the right form to the wrong department whose initials changed last week and the orderly’s bored with paperwork, you’ve got a potentially lethal domino effect.”

  “‘And all for the want of a horseshoe nail,’” says Flight Lieutenant Vogel.

  Jack pauses. Vogel looks down. Jack continues. “That’s right. The question is, do our officers know how to manage people and the flow of information in order to lead effectively? It’s our job to teach them.”

  He gets up and walks over to his bookshelf. “I’ve arranged for some of you fellas to sign on for the admin practices course up at Western, in London, and I’ve been pulling together stuff from some new books that are starting to float around out there.” He pulls out a hefty wedge of bound mimeographed paper and drops it onto his desk. He flips through, creating a breeze. “These things aren’t just bedtime stories, they walk you through every aspect of an actual business. General Electric, American Motors…. You can deduce the aims of an organization by analyzing its actions.” He lets the pages fan shut again. “Human behaviour.” He pats the book and gives the others a cagey look. “Think of Tom Sawyer as the original management whiz.”

  An officer near the back says, “How do you get someone else to paint the fence?”

  “And give you the apple,” adds another from the opposite end of the room. Laughter.

  Jack says, “So far, military admin practices have erred on the side of action. We’re looking to redress that. At the same time, you don’t want the pendulum swinging so far that you get loads of analysis—every what-if in the book—and wind up crippling your ability to act. Not every leader can pull off both. A fella you’d fly to hell and back with might be hopeless on the ground.” He wedges the book back onto the shelf, then turns, places both hands flat on the desk in front of him and looks them in the eye. “You’ve got to ask yourself, where do I fit into the picture? Am I looking at the whole picture, or just part
of it? Which part can I influence?”

  After a moment, one of his finance instructors says, “In other words, how big is my box?”

  “Bang on,” says Jack.

  The door opens a crack and a young Flying Officer puts his head in. “Sir, it’s a Captain Fleming on the phone for you, should I—?”

  “Tell him I’ll call back in a bit,” says Jack.

  “Yes sir,” says the FO, withdrawing.

  Vic Boucher says, “You moonlighting, sir?” The others chuckle. There are no captains in this room; there are flight lieutenants. In Canada, “captain” is an army rank.

  Jack grins. “Some flatfoot up at National Defence HQ probably thinks he can up the army quota in the Flying School.”

  “‘Army pilot?’” says one of the men. “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”

  Jack is going to enjoy this group. He glances at his agenda and asks Squadron Leader Baxter to brief them on some cadet personnel issues, then sits back. Captain Fleming. He keeps his eyes on the speaker, easily focusing on two things at once: “… with the Nigerian cadets, and while not all the Egyptians celebrate Christmas, we’ve made special provision for them to….”

  Oskar Fried must be on his way. The blue sky through Jack’s window, the row of hats, the smell of wood polish and pencil shavings peculiar to schools and government offices, all are warmed to mingling by the afternoon sun, and he basks in an unlooked-for sense of well-being. He is in no hurry to return Simon’s phone call. If “Captain Fleming” calls, it means the matter is of ordinary importance. If “Major Newbolt” calls, it means drop what you’re doing. Jack was amused when Simon picked the code names. While the Fleming reference is obvious if not ludicrous, he must remember to ask Simon where Newbolt comes from. He reaches for his pencil and resumes tapping as he listens—“… Ad Pracs, Accounting, Statistical Analysis….”