The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  That’s what the new warfare boils down to. Technology. Brains. We’ve grown soft in the West, we read manuals on how to raise our children, we offer basket-weaving courses at universities and spend untold hours in front of the boob tube. Meanwhile, in the U.S.S.R., a generation of engineers is coming of age. Khrushchev is right. They are perfectly capable of burying us.

  He pulls a paper-clipped wedge from a mimeographed stack and inserts it into a large binder; articles and essays he has culled from various American management publications—might as well keep busy.

  A heading catches his eye, Scientific and Professional Employees. He reads: Scientific and professional employees have less orientation toward their employer and more toward their work and their profession—that makes sense. Pure science is a higher calling. They are more matter-of-fact and less talkative, participative and social. That certainly doesn’t describe Henry Froelich—he is shy, but once you’ve coaxed him out of his shell…. Will Oskar Fried be the same? That is, if he makes it out of the Soviet bloc? The true scientist intends to work at his specialty regardless, and the fact that a specific employer has hired him is somewhat incidental. Jack pauses. That’s why scientists such as Wernher von Braun remain above the fray—although Henry would counter that such a thing is impossible. But rockets are rockets. And now they are ICBMs that we pray we will never use, and Saturn engines that will power us to the moon. And von Braun has switched employers, he works for us now—the Americans, that is. Aware of his ability and contribution, the scientific employee has high status drives, leading to some discontent and frustration. Jack lifts his gaze to the window and begins to construct a mental composite—a profile—of Oskar Fried.

  Perhaps he is defecting not just for ideological reasons but because he’s had it with the bloated Soviet system, which tends to reward corrupt apparatchiks, fugitive Cambridge spies and the odd cosmonaut—not to mention the periodic purges, which are not necessarily a thing of the past. Could it be that Fried is tired of a drab life labouring in obscurity and fear? That he craves the kind of prestige and rewards the West has to offer? The good life? Who could blame him? He is coming alone. Perhaps he is unmarried, or a widower. Perhaps he has nothing to live for back in the U.S.S.R.

  Jack’s gaze has come to rest on the photo of Mimi and the kids. If a man came into his home and threatened his family, Jack would kill him. Simple. He turns a paper clip between thumb and forefinger. But there is nothing simple about this situation. The men on the other side of the world don’t need to leave their homes in order to destroy his. Mountains used to afford nations a defence. Bodies of water, deserts and, until recently, sheer distance. That was why thousands of Allied aircrew were able to train in safety, at this very station among others, before heading overseas to defeat Fascism. But nowadays there is no such thing as “out of range.” Global village. And all it takes is one idiot….

  Meanwhile, Canada’s defences have not been activated. Jack’s hands are tied. He can’t so much as order a blanket broken out of mothballs, should it become necessary to provide relief for the civilian population. His own government has decided that Jack’s children don’t need to be defended. He hasn’t felt this angry, this useless, in years. Not since 1943, in Centralia.

  The phone rings. He grabs it. “McCarthy here.” Her voice at the other end is relaxed. An ordinary day.

  “Fire away,” he says, his disappointment only fleeting. The heat in his face, the pulse at his neck recede as though the sound of his wife’s voice were a cool cloth to his head. “Milk? … yup … butter….” He drops the paper clip and reaches for a pencil.

  Madeleine walks out the side door of the school. She has her art with her, a construction-paper bear. His head is square—she was unable to draw and cut out a circle, no matter how she tried.

  The afternoon is grey and gauzy, no sun except for a dirty yellow stain against one end of the sky—the only indication that there is still such a thing as east or west, or that it makes any difference.

  It burns probably because of the chalk on his finger, but that is just a sting and it will stop soon, for even though it’s her first experience of being stabbed, she sees no reason why it should sting forever, nothing does.

  The other girls disperse, unwrapping their candy. Madeleine doesn’t take the candy any more. The others put out their hands and for once in her life Marjorie Nolan has the power to say, “You can have this one.”

  Madeleine did not know you could be stabbed so hard and not die or go to the hospital, she did not know anything could get up there—that must be where the pee comes out, and she can already tell that pee will make it sting more, although maybe it will also disinfect since that is what stinging often does.

  Right now she is more worried that her head may not return to normal size. The moment she left the school, it began to swell and expand until it became huge, like the grey cloud that has become the sky this afternoon. If she closes her eyes she can feel herself growing impossibly tall and weightless, her head ballooning up up and away, her feet far below and tiny on the ground in their scuffed Mary Janes.

  Walk fast and make a breeze to cool the sting, there is moistness in the air, that will help, it will also dry the underpants, which are damp and wadded like a bandage.

  She doesn’t continue through the baseball field toward home. Instead she crosses the parking lot and turns up Algonquin Drive, the PMQs on her left, the farmer’s field on her right.

  The good thing about stabbing is that she is now certain she’s no longer afraid of needles. Once you have been stabbed, a needle is nothing. And that’s what you get for secretly hoping he would touch your underpants.

  She veers onto the road and walks down the middle. She’ll hear if a car comes along. She could walk into that low field between the furrows, follow the sugar-beet road. The farmer might come out with his shotgun. She could pretend to be a scarecrow or simply walk into the bullets, she would like to feel them bouncing off her. That farmer doesn’t own the world, no one does, blow it up, earthling.

  She could keep walking in a straight line until she finally gets home for supper, years from now. Why does anyone stay anywhere? Why don’t people just roll like marbles over the tilting earth? How does anyone know there is such a thing as themself? She starts to zigzag down the road, weaving between the broken yellow lines. Perhaps this is why mothers say not to stray on your way home. Because they know you might keep going. She turns onto the Huron County road.

  The white buildings of the base spread out to her right, opposite are the PMQs, their colours muted, no expressions on their faces, and up ahead the Spitfire, indifferent. Madeleine sees everything all at once without looking at anything. All appears grim and indistinct, stripped of one layer of light, stripped of distance and difference beneath the uniform grey that has lowered the sky—the ceiling, as pilots call it. High above that blur, the day is eternally blue and sunny—this grey, these clouds change the whole world for us down here and yet they are no more than a curtain or a piece of stage scenery. Her father is over there somewhere to her right, and to her left is her mother. They are specks, words.

  Mr. March’s expression does not change, his glasses glint as usual. You would never know by looking at his face that he has his hand up a little girl’s dress. Madeleine doesn’t think of it as “my dress.” It’s as though she’s seeing the plaid pleats from the level of her hem—there are her bare legs, and a man’s grey sleeve up between them as if she were a puppet. It stings. She melts away from the pain like a Popsicle from a Popsicle stick. Do not speak, your voice is far away in another country. Do not move, your arms and legs are not attached to the pain, there is nothing for them to do but wait.

  Her feet will not stop walking—past the turnoff to the PMQs now—like Karen in The Red Shoes, she will have to find a kindly woodcutter to chop them off. She begins to run heavily, pounding her heels because this is the way to feel that your feet will not be chopped off. The air is like layers of damp tissue paper cl
inging one after another to her face. As she runs, she opens and closes her fists, twisting her wrists, because this is the way to feel that your hands will not be chopped off, or just come off by themselves and float away like pieces of Pinocchio. Stand still, little girl.

  The ragged caw of a crow, a sound like something scrawled in black ink on the air. She looks up on the run. One is returning to its home atop the pine pole where the air-raid siren protrudes from beneath the mass of twigs and hay, the rusting mouth open as though in mid-cry, or like a fountain run dry. She runs past the Spitfire on its pedestal, aimed upward, its gun barrels filled in and painted over. It won the Battle of Britain. How come someone didn’t kill Hitler? Why didn’t someone just walk up to him with a gun? Anne Frank would have lived. If only she could go back in time and kill Hitler. If only a car would come along right now with a strange man in a peaked cap who says, “Get in the car, little girl,” she would kill him, smash the door on his head. Here comes a car, let it be a kidnapper, I will bash his head in with a rock.

  But the car passes. She picks up a rock and hurls it after, then turns and runs again, past the airfield on her right, dragging the toes of her Mary Janes, wrecking them, this is the way to pound someone when there is no one to pound. Put your hands around my neck, little girl. Now squeeze. That’s it. Harder. Standing beside his desk. Feeling the muscles packaged in the fat, and that strange floating thing in the front of his soupy neck like turkey bones. His eyes bug out, why doesn’t he clean his glasses? Perhaps because he is using his hanky on his thing. It sticks up under the white fabric like the chalice in church. Madeleine didn’t ask to think that, it just came into her head, and God controls everything, “So don’t blame me!” she yells, jutting her chin forward, marching now. But there is no one to hear her, the base is far behind, and the roofs of the PMQs are sinking behind the gentle rise and fall of autumn fields.

  Her head is back to normal size, of a piece with her body again, and the air no longer seems so flat and far away. The grass looks real now, the pebbles at the side of the road look real and so is the feel of her paper bear crumpled in her hand. The Huron County road has become a corridor of birches and maples, farms opening on either side like the pages of a book. The light has changed, no longer flint but liquid. Cool grey has gathered, multiplying shades of hay, bales of shredded wheat dotting the fields, old gold of dry stalks, the abrupt river-green of a pumpkin field—miraculous splashes of orange, gifts the size of beachballs under each broad leaf. The fading grass of the roadside leans thick and chewy, dirty hair brushed against fenceposts. A turnip lies where it bounced from the back of a truck, milky purple like the inside of a seashell. She thinks, if I never went home again, I wouldn’t starve.

  She smells rain and slows her pace. The velvet scent of hay, a cud-mown field to one side; a big brown head heaves round and looks at her across the fence, its moist mother-eye. Somewhere a red-winged blackbird, its dark sweet song close up in the misted air, like a bird in a movie. Telephone wires criss-cross overhead, trapeze artists swinging voices from pole to pole, balancing nests and conversations. She stops and faces the field to her right. Beyond the ditch running with weeds is the corn. Papery yellow, standing at attention like veterans, decorated and depleted, still marching in columns, ribbons furling from empty stalks.

  The first big drops fall. Massive and far apart they come, exploding dust at her feet. She tilts her head back, catching drops that taste both soft and metallic, they tap her face like fingertips, impossible to tell where the next drop will fall, as rapid as thoughts. She looks ahead again, feels her bangs flattening against her forehead, water streaming down her nose to her lips. If she never went home again, she wouldn’t go thirsty.

  Up ahead, a willow tree sweeps the ground where the Huron County road intersects with a nameless dirt road. The tree stands at a slight sway, as though in sidelong greeting, underwater green and fading with the season, trembly with the rain that, at Madeleine’s approach, sounds lighter against its many small leaves, the song of a long-haired soprano. She sees it shimmer in the rain, a tree made entirely of wands. Perhaps this is where she will spend the night, a broad and level limb for her bed. She parts the green curtain and beads of water melt along her arm and down the back of her neck as she enters the cool dry arch, and at once the sound changes. It’s like being in a tent in the rain. She smells, before she sees, that she is not alone. Wet animal. Familiar.

  Rex is lying at the base of the tree, his fur steaming, droplets of light around his neck, the tips of his ears. An old clothespin bag sits on the ground next to him. “Hi Rex.” He must be lost. His tail pats the ground at her approach, but she stops because she has seen something out the corner of her eye. Holey white running shoes, light brown legs. Colleen, sitting on a branch. She has a long stick stripped of leaves, it bends from her hand supple as a whip.

  She slides off and drops to the ground. Madeleine takes a step back. Colleen reaches down to the clothespin bag and, without taking her eyes off Madeleine, brings out a canvas pencil case, unzips it, dips in and comes out with a tuft of tobacco and a rectangle of white paper. Madeleine watches her roll, lick and seal the paper, then put it between her lips. Colleen takes a book of matches and lights up. Success without College promises the cover. She inhales, squinting through the smoke, and leans against the tree, cigarette between thumb and forefinger. Her dirty white T-shirt glows clean in the green shadows. The leather string around her neck disappears beneath her shirt to form a tiny bump in the centre of her chest.

  Madeleine asks, “Can I see your knife?”

  Colleen reaches into the pocket of her cut-offs.

  Its handle is carved in yellowed bone. “From a bear,” Colleen says, unfolding the blade, polished and ultra-thin with use and care. She holds the knife flat across her palm. Madeleine reaches for it. “Don’t touch it,” says Colleen, not closing her palm.

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause it’s not a toy.” Colleen talks with her face slightly averted, pale eyes narrowed. Madeleine sees the fine white scar at the corner of her mouth, faint frown.

  “I’m not ascared of you,” says Madeleine.

  “I don’t give a shit.”

  “I know,” says Madeleine, shocked yet curiously at ease.

  “Know-it-all, eh?”

  “Come here and say that,” speaking before thinking.

  “I am here, stupid.” The corner of Colleen’s mouth rises, sarcastic amusement in her eyes.

  “So you is,” says Madeleine, her mouth to one side like Bugs Bunny. She reaches out and takes the knife. Colleen makes no move to stop her. “On guard!” declares Madeleine, and slashes the air like Zorro. Colleen just watches. Madeleine holds up her soggy bear with his smearing smile and impales him—“Take that!” She taps her chin with the point of the blade and invites Colleen to “come on, hit me right here.” She starts laughing helplessly, arms limp and noodly—“Goodbye cwuel wowld!”—staggering, knife flailing, cross-eyed, pretending to stab herself. Rex stands and barks.

  Colleen takes a drag, then flicks her cigarette aside and holds out her hand for the knife. Madeleine returns it, weak with laughter. Colleen folds it and shakes her head. “You’re a maniac, McCarthy.”

  Madeleine replies in a bright voice, as though reading aloud, “Oui, je suis folle, je suis une maniaque,” starting to do a mechanical twist.

  Colleen says, “C’est ça quoi ja di, ya crazy batar.” Which is how Madeleine finds out that Colleen speaks a kind of French.

  “It ain’t French, it’s Michif,” says Colleen.

  Michif. Sounds like “mischief.”

  Colleen hooks the clothespin bag over the end of her stick and walks out from under the tree, back into the rain. Rex follows.

  “Colleen, wait up.”

  Madeleine catches up and they walk in silence. She takes off her shoes and socks. The rain hits the ground in a perpetual mist, it falls so hard. It’s easy to run in a hard rain, puddles become trampolines, it’s lik
e running on a path in the woods, impossible to get tired. Mirage-barns waver across the fields, thunder shakes the trees at the foot of mile-long farm driveways. Paws and bare feet and soaked running shoes. She smells wet dog. There is no smell in the world more comforting except perhaps a campfire. Although a campfire is melancholy too, because you sit around it with your family in the big dark, knowing that your love and who you are stretch only a little way into it.

  “Where’re we going?” asks Madeleine.

  “Rock Bass.”

  It isn’t a whip, it’s a fishing rod.

  There is still a bit of summer left down there. The greens are vivid with a sheen like old leather. Blades of grass still tall but easily bent and broken now, they will not spring back if you step on them. Leaves are still fleshy at the stems, fused to their twigs but only weeks away from that moment when they may all blow off at once. When is that moment? Some years the breezes come gradually, taking a few leaves at a time, while other autumns are still and calm, trees fully clothed and many-coloured until November, when with one huff and puff the woods stand suddenly naked.

  “Are we there yet?” asks Madeleine. They have stopped at the crest of a ravine. Below is a stream which, come spring, will be more than a creek and less than a river. On the opposite bank, a maple tree grows. The rain has slowed and the drops say hush hush hush against the red and amber leaves. It’s an afternoon sound.

  It is amazing to think that, while we are at school or asleep or watching TV, the woods are here. Breathing, changing, their stately grace made up of countless frantic lives lived high and low, each rustle and cry part of that sweeping rhythm. Breathe in, it’s summer. Breathe out, it’s fall. Stand still, it’s winter. Open your eyes, springtime.