Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Madeleine arranges her new package of Laurentian pencil crayons next to her ruler and her new plaid pencil case. The air is bright with promise, the school pervaded by the aroma of fresh pencil shavings, orange peels and floor polish. No one has yet thrown up in the hallway, occasioning the spread of coloured sawdust; rain and snow have not yet soaked and musted the coats on the hooks at the back of the room — those hooks are empty, it being still too warm for coats. It is difficult to believe, when you look out the row of big windows onto the playground and the bright PMQs beyond, that winter will really come. The seasons will change through that window, thinks Madeleine, I will turn nine through that window….

“What is the capital of Borneo, little girl?” Mr. March asks.

Madeleine starts. Is he looking at her? “Pardon?”

He rolls his eyes. “‘Beautiful dreamer,’” he sings.

The class laughs. He is handing out the scribblers for geography. Green.

“Hands?” says Mr. March. No one puts up a hand.

“How about you, …” consulting his seating plan, “Lisa Ridelle? What is the capital of Borneo?”

Lisa replies, “I don’t know,” barely audible from behind her curtain of white blonde.

Madeleine looks around. No one knows. Not even Marjorie Nolan.

“Well, you will by the time I’m finished with you, as will you all.”

Directly in front of Madeleine is Grace Novotny. The part in her hair is crooked and her pigtails are fastened with plain elastics. It’s true, Grace does smell — when Madeleine leans forward she gets a whiff. Perhaps she wets the bed. It’s a sad smell. Madeleine leans back and resists the temptation to bury her nose in the crease of her new notebook. Let everything you do be perfectly neat this year, with no crossing-out or dog ears. Let everything be spelled correctly, and do not drop this scribbler in a puddle on the way home.

“When was the War of 1812?”

Madeleine looks up but she’s safe. His head is turning like a periscope, looking for hands. A pause, then he says in a slightly weary way, “For your information, boys and girls, that was a joke.” Polite laughter.

He passes out a thick red textbook. It’s the grade four reader Up and Away . Madeleine opens it and is immediately engrossed in “Dale the Police Dog.” He is a German shepherd who belongs to the Mounties. He guards their stuff and stops older girls from picking on younger ones. One day a little girl goes missing. “Dale’s master let the dog sniff at the small sweater. Dale knew at once that he must go to look for someone who carried the same scent.” Dale finds her asleep out in a field. Her parents have been worried sick. Dale looks like Eggs across the street. A blue textbook lands on Madeleine’s desk with a thud and she closes the reader, aware of somehow cheating by reading ahead.

“I should make it clear right off the bat,” says Mr. March, “that I’m not partial to shilly-shallying, dilly-dallying or chin-wagging.”

Madeleine whispers to Auriel, “Except that his chin is wagging, or should I say ‘chins’?”

“What did you say?”

Madeleine looks up, crimson.

He consults the seating plan. “Madeleine McCarthy. Well well, alliteration. Can you define alliteration for me?”

He must be looking at me, thinks Madeleine, because he said my name. But it’s difficult to tell, because his glasses reflect the light and there is nothing in the set of his large face to indicate where he might be focusing.

Madeleine answers, “Um—”

“Word whiskers.” He chants it in a fed-up way.

“It’s when—”

“Full sentences please.”

“A literation is when you throw garbage on the ground.”

No one laughs, because no one, including Madeleine, knows what alliteration is. Mr. March says, “We have a wit amongst us.”

Madeleine is mortified, but also relieved because Mr. March seems to have forgotten what he asked her in the first place. He continues handing out the blue textbooks— Living with Arithmetic , which makes it sound like a disease, which it is. Madeleine peeks inside. Sure enough, the enticing drawings, intriguing juxtapositions of rifles and cakes, cars and hats. “Into how many sets of 8 can you divide 120 children for square dancing?” What children? Where do they live? Are they orphans? “At the rifle range Bob scored 267 points. His father scored 423 points….” Who is Bob? Why is he allowed to have a gun? Insincere accounts of Mrs. Johnson baking pies, Mr. Green putting apples into boxes, hogs onto trucks, all a treacherous narrative veneer on the stark problems of how much, when, how long, and how many left over, the human characters mere evil imposters of numbers.

“What is the square root of forty-seven?” Mr. March asks, strolling up the aisle. Madeleine is alarmed — I didn’t know we had to do square roots in grade four. He stops at the desk of a girl with long shiny black hair.

“I don’t know,” says the girl.

“You don’t say,” says Mr. March. His voice sounds as though he has let go of his muscles. Like something heavy sliding down a hill.

The girl he asked is crying! Quietly at her desk.

“There’s no need for tears, little girl.”

The bell rings. Recess.

“Side door, boys and girls,” he says over the racket. The side door leads directly outside to the playground and they pour out into the sunshine, one jubilant scream of kids. The long wild fifteen minutes of freedom. The boys rush past the girls, taking over the baseball diamond, finding smooth spots on the asphalt for marbles, or simply chasing and pounding one another. Lisa, Madeleine and Auriel link arms and stride in step like robots across the playground, chanting, “We don’t stop for anyone!” They walk right into the teeter-totter bar and collapse over it. They pretend they’re swimming. They pretend they’re flying.

The bell goes all too soon, and the grade fours file back in through the side door to find that the girl who cried is already there, cleaning the blackboard with a shammy. It’s a treat to do that, Mr. March must have been trying to be nice, he’s not an ogre. Her name is Diane Vogel. She’s very pretty. Mr. March lets her write the title for the next lesson in chalk: Botany . Diane Vogel has beautiful printing.

Sitting back down in her row, Madeleine experiences that first reassuring proprietorial sense: my desk. My inkwell, which no one ever uses any more. Her father has told her it used to be filled with ink in the olden days, during the Depression. Boys would dunk girls’ braids into it. She looks at Grace’s higgledy-pigtails and wonders if any boy would be tempted to tease her like that. According to Maman, when boys do that it means they like you. You got a funny way of showin’ it, doc .

Mr. March hands out crayons and construction paper and no one gets in trouble for the rest of the morning. They copy pictures of leaves and wildflowers such as Queen Anne’s lace, “which grows in abundance in these parts,” says Mr. March.

“Udderwise known as stinkweed,” whispers Madeleine to Auriel, but it’s okay, he doesn’t look up from his desk. He’s busy. While everyone draws quietly, he writes with a squeaky Magic Marker on sheets of yellow bristol board.

“How was your first morning of school, sweetie?” asks Jack, over tuna salad sandwiches, Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup and, for dessert, pète-de-nonne —Acadian cookies. The name means nuns’ farts; it’s only rude if you say it in English.

“It was great.”

“Good stuff.”

No need for her father to walk her back to school, the mortality of the morning has fled. She runs to the end of the driveway in time to meet up with Auriel and Lisa. She turns and waves to him on the porch, then runs with her friends the whole way back to school, their cardigan sleeves tied around their necks for Bat capes.