Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

“Did you know her?” asked Madeleine.

“I’m afraid that’s classified, old girl.” And he laughed.

Sh-clink . Blank.

“Time for bed, kids.”

“Aw Dad,” says Mike, “can’t we just have one more tray? Can we just see the hockey slides?”

The boring hockey slides from Cold Lake, Alberta. Backyard rinks and arenas and Mike and his friends with frozen snot, poised over their hockey sticks, no girls allowed. “Not the hockey, Mike!” Madeleine is suddenly savage.

“Temper down, now,” says Dad gently.

“Yeth, the hockey,” says Mike. “He shootth, he thcores! He-he-he-HA-ha!”

Mike can’t even do Woody Woodpecker—“Shut up!” she screams.

“Allons, les enfants, c’est assez!”

“Come here, old buddy.” And she goes to him. He picks her up. She hooks her pajama legs around his waist. She is too old to be carried upstairs to bed; she is so delighted and mortified that she mashes her face against his shoulder, but not before glimpsing Mike mouth the word “baby” at her, with his eyes crossed.

“Tell me a story, Dad,” she says, using as mature a voice as possible.

“It’s late, old buddy, you have to be fresh as a daisy tomorrow to start grade four.”

Four. A benevolent number, brown and reasonable. Her school dress and ankle socks are laid out over a chair with her new shoes on the floor. It’s as though she herself had sat down in the chair and disappeared, leaving only her clothes.

“Just one story, Dad, please.” She still has her arms around his neck from when he leaned down to kiss her good night, he is her prisoner.

“Just one,” he says.

“Tell me the story of the crash.”

“Why do you want to hear that again, why don’t we read….” And he reaches for her Treasury of Fairytales .

“No Dad, the crash.” This is not a once-upon-a-time type of evening.

“All right then. But after that, schlafen.”

There are some stories you can never hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them — but you are not. That’s one reliable way of understanding time.

He sits on the edge of her bed. “It was right here in Centralia….”

The story of the crash is already changing with you; it used to begin, It was on a little training station called Centralia, way out in the back of beyond .

“I was flying lead in formation….” At the controls of his Anson trainer. Getting ready to join a bomber stream sixty miles long over the English Channel.

Madeleine rests her cheek on the pillow and gazes at his belt buckle, a fly perfectly preserved in amber. It’s good to gaze at an object and listen to a story.

“I was coming in for a landing….” In a month he’d be flying ops. At the controls of a Lancaster bomber — a real beauty of a beast. Suited up in full gear complete with Mae West — the buxom life-preserver for those fortunate enough to bail out over water.

“I was on final approach….” Four other aircraft were set to land after him. Normally he would have a small crew in training on board but that day he was alone.

“I was flying the old twin-engine Anson….” A very forgiving little aircraft, unless you’re ground-looping on the tarmac — lovely in the sky, but a handful on the ground.

“The sky was clear as a bell….” It’s overcast but the ceiling is high, visibility good. Most pilots will fly their missions in clear moonlight over the Channel, slow and heavy with six tons of bombs to put on the target five hours away. They’ll see their own shadows rippling across the grey sea below while watching for German fighters, Messerschmitts mainly, as the crust of Europe comes into view: patchwork fields and spires below like a diorama, visibility augmented by the criss-crossing cones of German searchlights, by the flames of each other’s airplanes caught in the sticky web of light, the spritz and arc of anti-aircraft fire. And far below, their bombs tilting away, tumbling like dominoes toward earth, ending in soundless puffs of smoke. Some will make it back to Yorkshire — better to be hit on the way back, with less fuel and an empty bomb bay. If they’re lucky enough to be hit but remain airworthy, they might be able to put out the flames by diving. If not, and they’re lucky enough still to be alive, they and their crew might be able to squeeze past the equipment that crowds the narrow cabin and try to get out, climbing up the aircraft as it spins earthward. They rarely think about this. No one talks about it.

“I got clearance from the tower, so I banked left and started bringing her in for a landing….” This time next month I’ll be in England.

“Down below on the tarmac I saw another Anson rolling away from the flight line, and I took it for granted he was headed for the taxiway….” The airstrips are black with recent rain but it isn’t raining now, a bit slippery, no big deal. His worst fear has been that he will be sentenced to instructor school rather than posted overseas — the trick is to be good, but not too good….

“At about a hundred and fifty feet I saw the Anson roll past the taxiway and turn onto the runway right smack dab where I was headed….” Unconcerned as a bug on a leaf, the yellow aircraft below makes a slow right turn onto the runway and begins to pick up speed. “And I said to myself, what the heck is he doing?” Something’s fouled up . “But there wasn’t much time to think….” Too late for Jack to go around again, and at one hundred feet a decision occurs in his central nervous system, causing his hand to pull up hard and lean right on the stick. “I figured I’d pour on the power, bank and get the nose up….” His aircraft responds with sixty degrees to the left but no altitude; he is too low and slow for that at fifty feet. His port wing clips the edge of the landing strip, he cartwheels into the field, yellow plywood splintering off in all directions, let her go , he thinks, less to catch fire , he thinks, because at that point he has plenty of time to think, five spinning seconds. “But she spun in and there I was, tail over teakettle in the field.”

What is left of his aircraft jams to a stop up on its nose in the dirt. At some point his head has snapped forward into the instrument panel—“I got a pretty good bump on the head”—the knob of the radio dial, most likely. It has all but taken out his eye. “But somebody up there likes me, I thought….” Had he been operational at the time of the accident, he’d have kept his aircrew category—

Madeleine says, “But your eye was bleeding.”

“Well I didn’t know that then, I just figured I’d banged my head.”

— twenty-twenty is nice but not essential, that’s why you fly with a crew. All you really have to be able to see is your instrument panel, and Jack can see it fine, it’s bent into itself below him. He is suspended over it by his seat belt, big drops of blood are splashing onto the shattered dial faces, the fuel gauge reads low and that’s good news, where is the blood coming from? He touches his face. There’s a storm raging behind his left eye—

“And Uncle Simon rescued you,” says Madeleine.

“That’s right.”

A sound like a heavy zipper — Simon slices him out of his seat belt and hauls him out. Jack feels the earth travelling backwards beneath his butt — there are his boots bouncing along in front of him, how long have we been travelling like this?

“Simon saw the accident and he was the first one across the field.”

Grass rippling past, a pair of elbows hooked under his armpits.

There’s been an accident , Jack hears his own voice.

Yes you foolish bastard, there’s been a fucking accident .