Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Froelich continues, his voice soft and dark like the black of his beard. “This rocket of yours, Jack, it can do all this perhaps. This is very noble. Very beautiful. Like a poem. But it does not come from a beautiful place, it comes from….” He appears to have lost his train of thought. He glances about, takes a breath, raises his eyebrows briefly and recovers it. “You think it will take us up to heaven, ja? But it does not come from there.” He taps his pipe. “Also it is very expensive. Unfortunately only war is rich enough to pay for such a beautiful poem.”

Froelich pours himself more wine.

“Has it ever occurred to you, Jack, this? That Apollo is named for the sun? And yet the project is aimed at his sister, Artemis, the moon?”

Froelich looks at him, waiting for an answer.

“You got me there, Henry.”

“Once upon a time there was a mountain cave. And inside the cave was a treasure.” There is a glint in Froelich’s eye. Jack waits. Is it possible his neighbour is a little drunk? “You see Jack, it is a fact that only the bowels of the earth can provide us with the means to propel ourselves toward the sun. Someone has to forge the arrows of Apollo. Even as someone had to build the pyramids. Slaves, yes? Which one of God’s angels is rich enough, do you think, to pay for our dream to fly so high we may glimpse perhaps the face of God?”

Across the lawn, Vic and Mimi sing the second verse: “‘ Un Canadien errant’” … a wandering Canadian … if you see my country, my unhappy country, go and tell my friends that I remember them….

“Tell me something, Henry. What are you doing here?”

“Oh well, after the war I met my wife in Germany, she volunteered at the U.N. camp where I—”

“No, I mean how come you’re not teaching at a university somewhere?”

Jack fears he has been rude to his guest — he has known the man less than twenty-four hours and now he’s grilling him. But Jack is used to getting to know people quickly. Because you do only get one life, and if someone can give you a tour of a road not taken, why would you not seize the chance? “I’m sorry, Henry, it’s none of my business.”

“No, it is a very good question, and I have a very good answer.” Froelich smiles and the hard glint leaves his eye. He reminds Jack of pictures he has seen in National Geographic of emaciated holy men. Serene, starved. He answers: “I have everything I want right here.”

Jack follows Froelich’s gaze over to Karen, picking up the babies in the grass. To his daughter in her wheelchair.

“Cheers,” says Jack.

“Prost .”

They drink.

The singsong has changed tempo again. Betty is warbling in a Cockney accent to her husband’s accordion accompaniment, “‘Will you love me when I’m mutton as you do now I am lamb?!’” Laughter, applause. And a lull — the children are gone. A few minutes ago, as though at some signal inaudible to the adult ear, they ran off, pelting down the street in the direction of the school. The lawn is suddenly peaceful and the women draw a collective sigh of relief. “Silence is golden,” says Elaine. Betty’s younger two are in the McCarthys’ house, asleep on the couch.

Karen Froelich, having taken her babies home, has returned for Elizabeth. “Thanks, Mimi, it was a really nice get-together.”

“Oh Karen, you’re not leaving already.”

“Yeah, come on over any time.” She turns, saying to her husband, “Have fun, Hank.”

Jack watches Froelich kiss his wife and say something in her ear as he lightly holds her hand. Again there is a certain quality in her expression, not precisely sad but as though she were smiling at something in the distance, or perhaps the past. She touches her husband’s chest briefly. Jack watches her walk away, pushing the wheelchair over the grass. She is pretty when she smiles.

“Jack.”

“What’s that, Hank?”

“You make a nice party. Thank you.”

Vic gets out from under the accordion, stretches his legs and reaches into his burlap sack.

“I’ll put the kettle on,” says Betty.

Elaine hands her cocktail glass to her husband. “Just a teeny one.”

Vimy and Hal Woodley say their good nights — they’re expecting a long-distance call from their daughter at university, and in any case it wouldn’t do for them to be the last to leave. With their departure a further slight relaxation sets in.

Vic upends his burlap bag onto the grass with a clatter. Jack asks Henry if Vic Boucher always travels with his own game of horseshoes, and Froelich replies, “I don’t know. This is my first time to have a social occasion with him. And Dr. Ridelle too — Steve.”

Froelich has lived in the PMQs longer than any of them, yet he has socialized so little. Perhaps this is the first time anyone has asked him about his real subject of “how things go.” Jack senses that Froelich is a conversational treasure trove. You can almost feel the congenial heat of a fireplace when the man warms to his subject. And the sparks of impatience when he’s going full tilt. Typical German, thinks Jack. Now that he knows how much Henry likes to talk, he will pick another argument at the first opportunity. He watches Vic drive the metal post into the lawn with his foot and reflects that it just goes to show you’ll never find out anything if you don’t ask — Vic comes up to them, gold and silver horseshoes in hand, “Gentlemen, faites vos jeux” —you could be living next door to an Einstein or a Picasso and never know it. It’s important to know your neighbours. In the air force especially, because, in the absence of family and old friends, neighbours are what you have.

Froelich takes a horseshoe and raises it to eye level, taking aim. A burst of laughter from the women reaches them, the steel horseshoe glints in Henry’s hand, sterling in the late summer sun like the wing of an aircraft, and Jack is suffused with happiness. Pure and untethered by any good reason, happiness born of this warm evening, the proximity of friends — brand-new yet so deeply familiar — the smell of grass and tobacco, the dying coals of the barbecue, the deep blue dome above, sunlight on silver in his neighbour’s hand. He blinks into the big sun over the horizon because tears have come to his eyes and, to his mind, the words of a poem he learned years ago.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds — done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there

I’ve chased the shouting wind along and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,

Where never lark, or even eagle, flew;

And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand and touched the face of God .

The young air force pilot who wrote the poem also had an accident while training, and never got to go operational. He was killed. Jack watches the horseshoe leave his neighbour’s hand.

QUICK, EVERYONE RUN to the schoolyard, there’s a guy down there with a motor scooter and he’s giving people rides!

This was the information picked up by kid radar that drew Madeleine and the others from the barbecue and the singsong, and sent them tearing down the street like wildlife from a burning forest. Before they could see it they heard the engine, revving like a souped-up lawn-mower. They cut through between the houses at the bottom of the street and into the freshly mown field toward the school, where a crowd had gathered. There must have been at least fifty kids of all ages, on bikes, trikes, wagons and on foot — and beyond them, zipping past, his head and shoulders visible above the throng, a dark-haired boy. A teenager.