Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

It’s broad daylight. Madeleine turns on her computer and lights the candle. When she turns her computer off again, she blows the candle out. And so it goes as, over the course of a month, Stark Raving Madeleine begins to take shape.

Madeleine is not unhappy. She has put something aside, she may never take it up again. Is that what it means finally to grow up? To know there are things we have wrestled with and failed to defeat? To make peace with them by allowing them to rest — like a creature in a coma? Is that maturity? Or is it just life? It could hurt many people if she tells what she knows. It could hurt her mother terribly. Whom could it help? Ricky is free and has been for years. No one ever really believed he did it anyway. Why dredge up the past?

One morning in early August, Madeleine rides her bike to the pharmacy and heads for the post office at the back with a special delivery letter for Olivia. O is coming home in two and a half weeks. She reaches into the pocket of her army surplus shorts for money and finds a crumpled “First Notice” from Canada Post. Dated ten days ago. How come she never got a “Final Notice”? She hands it to the elderly Korean lady behind the counter. “Do you still have this?”

The lady pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose, smiles and nods. She disappears into the back room and after a few moments returns with a package the size and shape of a cereal box. She hands it to Madeleine. “Muffins from Mummy.”

Madeleine smiles. “Yeah, would you like one? Let’s see if they’re still good,” and opens it on the spot, fighting her way through enough masking tape to hold together the first atomic bomb. She was right, a cereal box. All-Bran. The joys of aging. She opens the lid, reaches in and pulls out her father’s air force hat.

“Ohhh,” says the lady.

Faded blue, almost grey. Worn red velvet crown of the cap badge. Tarnished gold braid and vigilant albatross, wings outstretched in flight.

“Very lovely,” says the lady behind the counter.

“Thank you.”

Madeleine rides back home, goes inside and lights what remains of the red candle. She waits until it has burned all the way down. Then she goes back out to her car.

She tosses the hat into the back seat of the bug, gets in and drives.

Two drifters, off to see the world

there’s such a lot of world to see

We’re after the same rainbow’s end

waitin’ ’round the bend

my Huckleberry friend

Moon River, and me

She drives on because the road pulls her. That’s one of the secrets of North America: the roads have a pull of their own, reactive to rubber, to the undersides of car chassis. She feels the tug of the wheel, she doesn’t have to steer, the tires follow the bend of the highway, the car knows her destination and so does the road. Let’s just drive. We’ll find out where we’re going when we get there.

Welcome to Kitchener , formerly Berlin. All these places named after the real places elsewhere — give them time and they become real in their own right. London Keep Left. Stratford Next Exit . She exits. Welcome to New Hamburg, to Dublin, to Paris… . Outside the car windows, the corn catches the sun; leafy stalks gleam in three greens, arching oaks and maples line the curving highway, the land rolls and burgeons in a way that makes you believe, yes, the earth is a woman, and her favourite food is corn.

From four directions come the X-Men, steel soldiers marching in columns, the distance between them tightening as they close in on their home base just south of here. Cables strung like steel streamers from their outflung arms, thrumming with the drone that sets their martial pace. They are on their way to their underground fortress at Niagara Falls, where house-high turbines fuel the economic heart of the world’s biggest democracies and closest relatives, power pronging north and south across the world’s longest undefended border. “What nature has joined together, let no man put asunder.”

Welcome to Lucan… . Don’t look for that monument now, it’s gone, too many tourists left with fragments of the stone. Just sit back and enjoy the beautiful scenery. Think nice thoughts. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and Be Saved … Kodak … The Wages of Sin Is Death… .

Deciduous trees like stately homes, painted maples streaked up the side with moss, mile-long driveways, weathered gingerbread framing farmhouse windows. The congenial whiff of cowpies, the rude aroma of pigs and the fierce smell of chickens. Smelled but rarely seen or heard nowadays. Red barns, neat and scrubbed, encroached upon by mysterious long low barracks. That’s where the animals have gone, eating and shitting in the windowless dark. Many, but not all. You can still see pale pigs at their troughs, cows in the fields, they blink and flick at flies and live their slow lives. McDonald’s Next Interchange… .

Up ahead, a faded pink ice cream cone tilts toward the roadside, the white shed with its countertop peeling and disused. The cone is still in its party hat, Where did everyone go?

The afternoon intensifies. August is the true light of summer. Trust Texaco . Dusty gas pumps flash by, glimpse of a screen door emblazoned with a bottle of 7Up, beaded with moisture, poised for pouring. She drives. The sun has sat back to relax on the other side of noon, mellow and magnanimous, with no sense yet that the day is in decline. The best of both worlds.

Smell the sweetness of the grass, look how the hay is almost mauve in the fields; feel how she swells beneath your wheels, the earth in these parts, gentle as the roll of the sea on a blue day. Clouds sweep so gracefully; the high billow of trees that have lived here so long; the narrative pull of the woods; all the crackling lives lived high and low, paths that promise so many stories, and the road itself, always curving just out of sight, the allure of a storyteller and the assurance, “Follow me into the story, it’s all right. If it were not, would I be here to tell the tale?”

We’re almost there.

Madeleine stands under the beating sun and looks out. The concrete is cracked in places. Uneven with many winters, its grey expanse etched with crooked lines of scraggly green growth. The reclamation of this airfield is underway by the quilted countryside that provided so much safe space for emergency landings. The triangular arms of the runways fan out before her, trembling with heat.

Behind her the hangars loom silent, still white but no longer shipshape, bordered by grime and weeds that have choked out the hedges. People don’t know, unless they trouble to find out, what this place was. Ghost of the Second World War. Relic of the Cold War. Even Kodak pictures fade eventually, and that is what has happened here.

She drove slowly through the PMQs and the base before winding up at the airfield. The pool, empty. The arena, movie theatre, barracks, office buildings — cement steps sprouting grass, black metal railings listing, seeping rust, coming loose like teeth. The sign for the sergeants’ mess still hangs next to the dusty green door, the air force crest sun-bleached almost to vanishing — why has no one taken it down? There is no longer any such thing as the Royal Canadian Air Force. And just as the services have been unified, so the two Germanys will be, one day soon. The country Madeleine was born in will no longer exist.

RCAF Centralia is Huron Industrial Park now. A government property, leased cheap to any industry willing to relocate and bring jobs to the area. Windows are manufactured here these days, but Madeleine has seen no one and heard not a sound.

The churches are gone. Bulldozed. The officers’ mess likewise. In its place a starkly new brown brick building with a sloping roof and smoked windows, Darth Vaderesque. “International School,” says the federal government sign planted in the one patch of tended grass. Nothing to do with manufacturing windows. Suitably vague, suitably far away from anyone who might wonder what lies behind the tinted glass, the numbing government designation.