Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

He puts the newspaper down and calls the movers. He will pay out of his own pocket to have his household put in storage at a warehouse in Toronto. Either his contact in Ottawa will come through with the posting — any posting — or Jack will retire from the air force. Regardless, at the end of this week, he will fly to New Brunswick and get his wife and children back.

He doesn’t tell himself that he won’t let Ricky Froelich hang. Anything he says now will be like shouting into a storm at sea. And if someone actually did hear him, where would that leave his family? Without a provider? Like the Froelichs?

He goes down to his basement and rummages until he finds the cardboard moving boxes neatly collapsed and stacked by Mimi last August. He begins unfolding and reassembling them.

When stories are not told, we risk losing our way. Lies trip us up, lacunae gape like blanks in a footbridge. Time shatters and, though we strain to follow the pieces like pebbles through the forest, we are led farther and farther astray. Stories are replaced by evidence. Moments disconnected from eras. Exhibits plucked from experience. We forget the consolation of the common thread — the way events are stained with the dye of stories older than the facts themselves. We lose our memory. This can make a person ill. This can make a world ill.

In 1969 a rocket piloted by men reached the moon. Men walked there. They were changed by the sight of the milky blue jewel of Earth across that vast darkness. But we were not changed. If anything, the story of flight and the dream of space were treated to a cold shower of the “it really happened” variety. We had moon rocks for a while, parades, and a sense of Western military superiority extrapolated from the physical feat of reaching an impressive target. Then we forgot about it. On to the next.

We continued, however, to have faith in Armageddon — a myth that will never disappoint, because either it will never happen or, if it does, we will not be around to puzzle over the pieces of the shattered story. Space race was outstripped by arms race. Our weapons became even more terrifying because they could now be delivered anywhere, any time. And there were so many more of them. The Bomb was like democracy — only a few countries could be trusted with it. This fact justified our preference for tyrants, and the contained wars that kept the dispossessed busy buying weapons and killing one another, far from our doorsteps. It made us rich.

In the meantime, we lost interest in the moon. We have some difficulty now in looking up to her for inspiration, or for confirmation at the moment of a kiss, because, after all, we’ve been there. We’ve had her. She put out. We think we know all about her, we think we know how NASA did it. How Apollo, the sun god, got to her. But the fuel, the thrust, the heat shield, they are not the whole story, they are just the evidence, part of which is missing. Not hidden — the facts lie scattered and dismembered. In plain sight. Perhaps, if we collected all the pieces where they lie snagged like bits of Lego, tiny army men in the grass, and laid them all out, they would turn back into a story and we could discern its meaning. We could begin, once more, to care that three brave men went to the moon in 1969.

“To tell” means to count. Like a bank teller. Even an accountant deals in narrative, and the storyteller too is a kind of accountant. Each provides an audit of events and their cost, and it’s for the listener to decide — was it worth it?

The price of the rockets is the account of how they were born, not simply of how they flew to the moon. The latter account — on its own — is a story with its feet cut off. Lame, like the child who was spared the mountain fate when the Pied Piper led the children away. Until we listen to the story, we have not paid the Piper. And he will continue to take our children.

The evidence shows that the rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral, but the story tells us that it was fired where it was forged, deep within the earth — illuminating a giant grotto, its ceiling lost in shadow, its floor littered with bones and rust, embedded with the vertebrae of train tracks. And that when it rose, clean and white, to breach the mouth of the mountain cave, it trailed flames and blood and soil as it flew all the way to the moon.

The cave is yawning open still. Emitting a draft, exerting a pull.

We were supposed to think it all began with NASA. But it began with the Nazis. We knew this, half remembered it, but a great deal was at stake and we put it from our minds. Events without memory. Bones without flesh. Half a story — like a face gazing into an empty mirror, like a man without a shadow.

What do shadows do? They catch up.

WHERE IS JACK? He’s reading his newspaper. Please do not disturb him.

He left something back there in 1963. Stepped out of it like stepping from a stream, and the current that had borne him along went on without him, water disappearing round a bend.

When you are in it, the current feels inevitable. When you step out of it and have to walk, nothing is inevitable. You notice time, bowed closer and closer to the earth by the weight of what you carry on your shoulders. The newspaper is a soothing companion, filled as it is with pieces of time presented to the reader pebble by pebble, but never as a bird’s-eye view. Turn the page and the pebbles collapse into dust, to be replaced tomorrow: Scientists Track Chernobyl Cloud. Afghan Freedom Fighters Repel Soviet Invaders. Prehistoric Fish Discovered . Crinkle of the turning page. A woman’s voice reaches him, as though through parting mists. “I said, Jack, do you want some hot?”

“What’s that—? Oh, merci.” Crinkle .

To see Jack reading the paper, edges gripped, is to see Jack for the past twenty-some-odd years. Not that he hasn’t been busy. He got his posting and moved his household from Centralia in August ’63. He taught leadership and management to the officer cadets at the Royal Military College in historic Kingston, with its antique forts and cannons still aimed at the Americans across Lake Ontario. He retired from the air force when they moved to Ottawa in the early seventies, and opened his own management consulting firm. “I’m a glorified accountant,” he liked to joke. He did well. They put in a pool. And until the heart trouble, he had every intention of pulling up stakes and moving with his wife to Bahrain or Saudi Arabia or some other friendly foreign part. Run an oil refinery. A hospital. Managerial skills are endlessly transferrable nowadays.

There is no longer an RCAF anyhow, the yahoos on Parliament Hill have seen to that. Jack hates the vulgar synthetic green uniform that all personnel now have to wear, obliterating the distinctions among land, sea and air. In summer, a cheap white version shows off the contours of jockey shorts, foolish in the extreme — as if the military hasn’t come into sufficient disrepute, tarred with the brush of American folly in Vietnam.

But he has no patience with young people who take their freedom for granted, whining about “American imperialism.” Where do they think their “free this” and “free that” come from? We like to blame the Americans, but we like to spend the dividends too. Who do we think invented Agent Orange? The baby boomers have yet to produce a single real leader — where is their Churchill, their Roosevelt, their Mackenzie King? He enjoys it when his daughter argues with him—“Oh yeah? What about your Stalin, your Hitler, your Mao?” She is the best of a poor lot — a generation of draft dodgers and potheads. Crinkle .