Ann-Marie MacDonald: Way the Crow Flies

No cars parked anywhere. The tennis court has gone the way of the airfield, its metal link fence flounced and ragged. The street names are still the same: the ten Canadian provinces, the two founding cultures and the famous men who made untold sacrifices to keep us free. The signs themselves remain, rusted now, askew, pointing at sky and ground. Canada Avenue. Alberta Street. Ontario, Saskatchewan, Québec…. The Spitfire is gone.

In the old PMQs, the houses are still painted every colour of the rainbow, but not so recently. People must be away for summer holidays, or perhaps not all the houses are occupied. A few people stared at Madeleine’s car as she tooled slowly past, but they didn’t wave. No swings or teeter-totters in the park any more, but the narrow asphalt paths still wend their way communally among the houses. The open grassy circles are here too, although they are not the vast fields of memory. And that hill she used to run down so recklessly — it’s barely an incline.

The confetti bush is gone from in front of her old white house — smaller than she remembered, likewise the purple house across from it. She rolled down St. Lawrence in first gear, past the little green bungalow on her left, to the school. Hardly more than a stone’s throw from her old house, yet it was such a big walk then. She stopped in the parking lot near the backstop. Nothing stirred, not even the rope on the flagpole.

How can this place still exist? Barely two hours from Toronto — she could have driven here any time. Centralia .

She stopped and got out of the car. Peeked in her old classroom window. New desks. Different art on the walls. A computer. Map of the world, redrawn so many times since her day. She tried the knob of the side door but it was locked. What was in there anyhow? Nothing that hasn’t been as close as her own heart for twenty-four years. She went round the front, up the steps, and cupped her hands around her eyes to peer through the glass double doors: framed fighter jets still flanked the portraits of the young Queen and Prince Philip.

This place, Huron Industrial Park, leased to temporary people: for them it’s home, perhaps, a community, people raising children, borrowing cups of sugar, keeping in touch after they move on…. But for Madeleine it’s a ghost town.

She stands on the abandoned airfield. She is not much younger than her parents were when they moved here. She shields her eyes and looks across the baking concrete to the crest of longer grass that marks the ditch where his aircraft went in. For her it was a story, Dad, tell me the story of the crash . It belonged to her, the myth of how, inevitably, her parents were brought together in order to bring forth her and her brother. And the unspoken corollary of the myth: if it hadn’t been for the crash, Dad might have been killed in the war … two out of three aircrew never came back . He was not quite eighteen. Mike was nineteen.

She squints up at the control tower, miniature to her adult eyes. She can see the roofs of the PMQs from here. Such a small world. What would she have done in her parents’ place? Would she have mustered the conviction “We are a family,” no matter where we move? “Here is who you are,” no matter whom you happen to live among, “this is your father, the best man and the nicest papa in the world”? Such a big world. “You can grow up to be anything you want to be.” Could she have marshalled the optimism, taken the pictures, unpacked the boxes, placed a little family at the centre of that big world? Made herself the anchor of it? Made it make sense?

Dad, are they going to blow up the earth?

Naw .

A journey of forty years. The Story of Mimi and Jack. So many nice remember-whens .

The sun is relentless. The old airfield waits, impassive, a war monument. And perhaps that’s why she is moved. These strips of concrete evoke so much about this century. Mass mobilization. Mass memory. Heavy loss.

She recalls seeing a phone booth at the edge of the parade square, near what used to be the PX. She wonders if it still works. She turns and leaves the airfield.

She has forgiven her parents.

A rotary phone in a glass booth. It still takes dimes. The slim phone book is dog-eared, pages torn out, but it may serve. She flips through familiar place names — Lucan, Clinton, Crediton….

She finds him in Exeter. Searches the many pockets of her shorts — crumbs, keys, frizzing tampon, a dime.

She dials, then leans with her palm against the glass while it rings.

“Hello.” A woman’s voice, tight but pleasant. Career wife.

“Hello, may I speak with Inspector Bradley please.”

“Oh my goodness—”

Madeleine assumes she has called another dead man, but the woman continues, “—well, hang on a moment and I’ll — may I ask who’s calling?”

“Madeleine McCarthy.”

“Just a moment, Madeleine,” and, calling away from the phone, “Tom,” her voice retreating, “Tom? … on the phone … spector Bradley.”

She will tell him everything. About Mr. March. About her father. And Ricky’s name will be cleared. The right thing.

“Hello”—manly and businesslike.

“Hello, Inspector Bradley?”

“No such person here, there’s just me, Tom Bradley, retired, what can I do you for?”

“This is Madeleine McCarthy speaking.” She sees the planes of his face, unsmiling line of his mouth, and feels as though she is lying again.

He pauses, then says, “I know you….” She knows he is probably not thinking of After-Three TV.

“I was a witness at Ricky Froelich’s trial.”

“Bingo.” Silence. The ball is in her court.

“I have new information,” she says.

“Well I’m retired, young lady, but I can give you a number—”

“I was a pupil of Mr. March’s, he was Claire’s — he was our grade four teacher.” She hears a sigh. “I think he was responsible.”

“What do you mean, ‘responsible’?”

“He did it. He murdered her.”

“I wish you gals would co-ordinate your efforts.”

“What do you mean?”

“You and — another girl, what was her name, Deanne, Diane something—”

“Diane Vogel.”

“Right you are, she called me last year, wanting to press charges.”

“Against Mr. March?”

“That’s right. Is that your story too?”

“It’s not a story, it happened.”

“Be that as it may—”

“He raped us. Grace and Marjorie included, that’s why they lied, he played games involving strangulation—”

“Even if—”

“He did it.”

“Yeah okay, look, number one, that was almost twenty-five years ago—”

“So?”

“Number two, he’s dead, all right? So much for that. Number three—”

“Thanks for nothing, buddy.” She will hire a lawyer. “Goodbye.”

“Wait! Wait. Number three: he had an alibi.”

And she knows it as he says it. That day in the schoolyard. The afternoon of flying up.

Bradley says, “You know, I’m sick and tired of people digging this up, I did my job—”

She can hear it, fractured melody on the air, struggling out the windows of the gym. Flat trombones, hesitant woodwinds — the school band bleating out a song, reaching them where they lounged on the grass of the outfield, she and Colleen, as Claire rode up on her pink bike. It’s a world of laughter a world of tears …

“Want to come for a picnic?” Her lunchbox in the basket between her handlebars. Two pink streamers. It’s a world of hope and a world of fears …

“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” says Bradley. “Your generation—”

There’s so much that we share that it’s time we’re aware, it’s a small world after all… . Mr. March conducting the band from the piano, pounding out fat chords at odd intervals so it sounded as though the piece were ending every few bars.