Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

This facile anti-Americanism is, at best, naive — like so many Americans themselves, wide-eyed and trembling yet again in shock at their “lost innocence.” They never had it. What they had was a sandbox and a long neck. That’s why they fail to notice when their security agencies traipse around the planet shelling out weapons like Halloween candy, overthrowing elected governments, training religious fanatics, death squads and drug dealers. Contra, my foot. Does the poor bastard on the shrinking production line in Flint, Michigan, have a clue what’s being done in his name? Or why he may be called upon to donate a son or two to the cause? The Soviet Union is crumbling from within, creating a power vacuum; the world is flooded with arms, most of them American-made; Eisenhower’s military-industrial warning is playing out; it’s more likely than ever that we’ll all go up in a mushroom cloud; meanwhile, the President is consulting astrologists and singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” with our own sorry excuse for a prime minister. Crinkle .

On the other hand, it’s important not to lose sight of the big picture: the West appears to be winning the Cold War and, whether because of or in spite of that fact, it’s still free. Still democratic. More or less. We must be doing something right.

Mimi took his old blue uniform and hung it down in the rec room closet in a garment bag. He doesn’t recall what he did with the green abomination — that was only one of the many things that went crazy in the world after Kennedy was killed by a “lone gunman” in Dallas. That must have been some bullet, able to change direction in midair. Maybe it was designed by Wernher von Braun.

Jack barely allowed himself to register relief when, in November 1963, he read in the paper that Richard Froelich’s death sentence had been commuted to life. Relief was not for him. He pressed on, piece by piece: the next house, and the next, and the next school for the kids, and automatic car windows and microwave ovens, from black-and-white to colour, from split-level to Tudor style; picture frames from wall to packing box to wall again, “a little to the left, that’s good there.” The same wall only different, the same only different, the same only different, and the next desk and the next, a backyard pool, an empty nest and then a condo with a minimum of stairs. Jack and Mimi.

Like many men of his generation, Jack doesn’t really have friends of his own. His wife organizes that side of things. It would be nice, however, of a summer evening, to light a cigar, smell the grass, watch the sun go down through the incline of the sprinkler and talk about this crazy world. About the possibility that we may someday discover another one. Solve the world’s problems over a good German beer. But when he allows himself to picture this, only two men join him on the lawn under the hot blue of evening, and they are now much younger than he is. Sealed in memory, protected from the decaying effects of oxygen. Forever young. Simon and Henry. My friends. I lost them in the war .

He reaches for his tea.

He gets The Globe and Mail , the Ottawa Citizen, The Times of London, The Washington Post and the Sunday New York Times .

In May 1966, he read that Ricky Froelich had been transferred to a medium-security prison in Kingston, set on a working farm across the highway from their suburb. A job came up in Ottawa and Jack grabbed it. He knew his wife didn’t want to risk running into Karen Froelich at the Kmart.

He sips—“Mimi!”—scalding his tongue.

His son was arrested for possession of marijuana, but the sentence was suspended and the record later expunged. He experimented with LSD, joined the air cadets, quit, was expelled from high school. He quit hockey and took up football. An overrated game. An American game.

In July 1966, Jack read in The Washington Post that a senior American army officer had been arrested for selling atomic, missile and bomber secrets to the Russians. The man — Lieutenant Colonel Whalen — had been deputy director of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, JIOA. Simon had mentioned it only once, but Jack had a military man’s head for acronyms, and he instantly recalled that the JIOA had run Project Paperclip. Lieutenant Colonel Whalen had hand-picked foreign scientists for recruitment by the U.S. God knows how many spies posing as defectors he had knowingly imported into American military R & D programs. There was a photo of him emerging from his office at the Pentagon: a craven look in his eye, the big head, skinny arms and soft gut of the career alcoholic. The highest-placed American officer ever convicted of espionage. Simon’s boss. Crinkle .

Jack becomes absorbed in an article on the next page about the new supertankers, marvels of technology. Reads all about a new artificial heart. Just think, the day is not too far off when we’ll be able to cure diseases before they even start, with just a flick of a genetic switch. History in the making.

Jack has never told his wife about what he did in Centralia. She still thinks his strange behaviour had to do with Karen Froelich. What would she think if he told her the truth now? With the passage of years there have been fewer and fewer reasons not to tell her. But he has become so accustomed to keeping the secret that he is wary now of dislodging it. Like an old piece of shrapnel adhering to tissues and vessels — removing it might cause more harm than leaving it to rust and seep. Things have a way of changing when exposed to the air — they rot.

Assassination upon assassination, demonstration upon riot, black power, flower power, power to the people. Students shot dead on campus, people’s sons and daughters face down on the grass. In ’69 we got to the moon. We beat them. Crinkle .

In late 1970 the McCarthys were informed that their son, Michael, was missing. That same year, FLQ terrorists tried to bomb, kidnap and murder their way to civil war in Québec, then fled to Cuba. Prime Minister Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, suspending Canadian civil liberties. Mrs. Trudeau sang a made-up song to Fidel Castro and began dating Mick Jagger.

In 1973 he read in The Globe that Ricky Froelich had been “quietly paroled under a new name.” It was over.

That day, he gave some thought to what he had done back in 1963. The events rose in his memory, separate and solid as cinder blocks. The facts. He saw them float and find one another, the pieces arranging themselves in his mind’s eye until he could have drawn them as a flowchart leading to a deliberate and foreseeable outcome. This he called taking responsibility. The accompanying cost-benefit analysis took shape so that, twenty-three years on, if he were to tell what had happened in spring 1963, he would report on how he had made a decision. He would not tell the foolish tale of how he allowed a decision to happen to him. How he desperately ran to catch up with, then tried to outrun, a decision. How he feared he had betrayed his duty as a Canadian officer. How he feared for his life. How a family was destroyed. He salvaged what he could and did his best to believe it: I did not come forward because I knew that the life of one boy was less important than the cause of freedom, even if I was not able to perceive, from my limited vantage point, precisely how that cause would be served. Or if it would be served. I did my job.

“Jack?”

Crinkle .

Piece-by-piece living is hard to do. It may even feel like the hardest thing. But it has this going for it: you never need to know what it is you’re carrying on your shoulders.

Jack had his second heart attack in the driveway, turning to see if he had locked the car door. He had his third in the hospital, while waiting for bypass surgery.