Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Out on the lake a loon flies low across the water, feet skimming to a landing. It releases its effortless liquid cry and is answered within moments from farther down the shore.

“Here!” says Vivien, and thrusts a guitar almost the size of herself into Rick’s arms. He takes the pick from behind the strings of an upper fret, places it between his teeth and begins to tune the instrument. He strums—“Not so good at picking any more, eh? But I can still chord some.”

“How’s your mum?” ventures Madeleine.

“She’s great,” he replies, “still crazy after all these years.”

“She runs a nuthouse,” says Colleen.

“A halfway house,” says Rick. “For bag ladies. In Toronto.”

“That’s great.”

“Yeah. Look her up if you ever lose your marbles.”

Vivien says, “Gran is a Quaker.”

“How about your baby brothers?”

“Roger and Carl.” Rick shakes his head and smiles. Colleen is chuckling.

“Carl’s a biker—” Rick starts laughing. Colleen pokes the coals, laughing now too. “And Roger’s a cop.” He begins to strum a series of chords.

Madeleine asks quietly, “What about Elizabeth?”

Neither of them answers, and Madeleine is somewhat relieved that they seem not to have heard her. But after a moment he says to his guitar, “She died, pal.”

He starts playing a tune. The little girl takes two spoons from the table and starts rattling time with them, a serious expression on her face.

Rick says, “Lizzie got flu.”

“She was too sad to get better,” explains Vivien. “She’s with her dog Rex now.”

Madeleine gets up and goes to Colleen. “I’m going to leave now. I’ll put it all in a letter for you. I’m going to get in touch with the McCarrolls too.”

Colleen finally looks at her. Madeleine is startled, the way she was when she was a child. Wolf eyes.

Colleen reaches into her pocket for her knife. Yellowed bone handle, thumb-faded. Blade curved with age. She slits open the foil and steam escapes. Two big trout.

“Ricky and Viv caught them,” she says. She reseals the foil and lifts the package onto a platter. “You’re funny, I guess you know that, eh?”

“I know it’s weird, me just showing up like this out of the blue—”

“No, I mean … you’re good at what you do.” And now Colleen is smiling. She sets the platter on the table. “Want to see the dogs?”

“Okay.”

Rick and Vivien sing softly, “‘So hoist up the John B . sail. See how the mainsail sets. Call for the captain ashore, let me go home…’”

The two women walk up to the kennels. Soft muzzles at the fence, a Bremen choir of barking. Colleen unlocks the gate and holds out her hand to Madeleine, palm up. There is the scar. Madeleine takes the hand and squeezes it, then lets go and follows her friend along the dog runs, hands out for licks and pats, wet teeth grazing her flesh.

Colleen says, “Tell me now.”

Madeleine does. It doesn’t take long.

The fish is still warm when they return to the table and join the others.

AN AIR-RAID SIREN is a beam of sound more terrifying than any other. During the Second World War it was terrifying but now it is more terrifying, because it was a normal sunny day until the siren went off. Birds were flying, the fields were buzzing and kids were riding bikes. The siren screams over wading pools and backyard barbecues, it says, I was here all along, you knew this could happen. It pauses for breath, resumes its pitiful rise, mourning its own obscenity, mounting to obliteration. It is everywhere — it makes all places into the same place, turns everyone into the same person. It says, Run to where there is no shelter. When the planes come, run, but only because you are alive and an animal.

And then it stops. The summer sky is empty. Turn on the radio, the television. Come up from the basement, get up from the ground. It was a birds’ nest. In the siren atop the wooden telephone pole that stands near the gates to the old air force station at Centralia. Crows. Who knew the old siren was operational after all these years?

Municipal workers from the nearby town of Exeter climb the pole to clear away the nest and remove the siren altogether. Bits of tinfoil, bottle caps, a key glint amid the straw — the shiny things that crows collect. And a tiny silver charm. A name.

Claire .

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders; in the event of an inadvertent omission or error, please notify the publisher.

Lyrics from “This Land Is Your Land,” words and music by Woody Guthrie. TRO © Copyright 1956 (Renewed) 1958 (Renewed), 1970 and 1972. Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, NY. Used by permission.

Lyrics from “Whatever Will Be Will Be” by Raymond B. Evans and Jay Livingston. Used by permission.

Lyrics from “Swinging on a Star” by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen. Used by permission.

Lyrics from “Moon River” by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer. Used by permission.

Lyrics from “Button Up Your Overcoat.” From Follow Thru . Words and music by B. G. DeSylva, Lew Brown and Ray Henderson. Copyright © 1928 by Chappell & Co., Stephen Ballentine Music Publishing Co. and Henderson Music Co. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

The epigraph to “Welcome to Centralia” is from Camelot . Words by Alan Jay Lerner. Music by Frederick Loewe. Copyright © 1960 by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. Copyright renewed. Chappell & Co. owner of publication and allied rights throughout the world. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

Jack’s thought, “God watches over your first solo, after that you’re on your own,” comes from Royal Canadian Air Force lore recounted in Ted Barris, Behind the Glory . Toronto: Macmillan Canada, 1992.

The epigraph to “Here’s to Being Above It All” comes from “Organization Theory: An Overview and an Appraisal,” Journal of the Academy of Management , Vol. 4, No. 4 (April 1961). Briarcliff Manor, NY: Academy of Management.

The epigraph to “The Mayflower” comes from “How America Feels” (Gallup survey), Look , January 5, 1960.

Lyrics from “Unforgettable” by Irving Gordon. Used by permission.

The epigraph to “How Sweet It Is” comes from Heloise, Heloise’s Kitchen Hints . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1963.

The poem that begins “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth” is “High Flight” written in 1941 by John Gillespie Magee Jr., an American who served with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War.

The Dion song quoted is “The Wanderer,” composed by Ernest Peter Maresca.

The Time magazine quotes that Jack reads are from August 31, 1962, Canada edition, Vol. LXXX, No. 9.

Excerpts from Madeleine’s Girl Next Door reader come from W. W. Bauer, Gladys G. Jenkins, Elizabeth Montgomery and Dorothy W. Baruch (eds.), The Girl Next Door . Toronto: Gage, 1952.

Wernher von Braun’s mother’s comment, “Why don’t you take a look at Peenemünde? Your grandfather used to go duck hunting up there,” is quoted in Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

The epigraphs to “Oktoberfest” and “Duck and Cover” come from Doris Anderson’s editorials in the July 1962 and February 1962 issues of Chatelaine , respectively.