Ann-Marie MacDonald: Way the Crow Flies

Melted skin .

Maman lights a cigarette. They drive in silence. Refreshing Cameo Menthol.

After a while, Madeleine glances at Mike. He has fallen asleep. Maybe when he wakes up he’ll play I Spy with her. If she doesn’t act like a baby. Or a girl. They used to play together a lot, and shared baths when they were little. She recalls vivid fragments — boats bobbing, bubbles escaping from sinking ducks, “Mayday, come in, Coast Guard.” She remembers sucking delicious soapy water from the face cloth until he grabbed it from her: “No, Madeleine, c’est sale!”

A bit of drool at the corner of his mouth makes him look younger, less remote. Madeleine’s throat feels sore — she is tempted to poke him, make him mad at her, then she might stop feeling sad for no reason.

Welcome to Lucan… .

They are standing in an old country churchyard. Not old for Europe, old for Canada. Long grass obscures the gravestones, many of which have keeled over. One monument stands out. Four-sided and taller than the rest, still upright but chipped in places. Five names are chiselled on its sides, each name ending in “Donnelly.” They were born on different dates, but they all died on the same day: FEB. 4, 1880. And after each name, etched in stone, is the word “Murdered.”

The Donnellys were Irish. Jack tells the story of how they and their neighbours brought their feud with them from the old country to the new. “You have to ask yourself why,” he says, “with all this space in Canada, they chose to live right next door all over again.” There isn’t much to the story. Most of it is written right there in the stone. Murdered Murdered Murdered Murdered Murdered .

Mimi calls from the car, “Madeleine, come, we’re going, reviens au car.” But Madeleine lingers. “How did they murder them?” she asks her father.

“They came in the night and broke in.”

“How?”

“With axes,” says Mike.

“Come on, kids, let’s go,” says Jack, heading for the car.

“Did they get the people who did it?” she asks, transfixed before the stone.

No, they never did.

“Are they still out there?”

No, I told you, it all happened a long time ago.

“I don’t know why you stopped here, Jack,” says Mimi, leading her daughter away by the hand. “She’s going to have des cauchemars.”

“No I won’t,” says Madeleine, stung by the implication that looking at an old gravestone might give her nightmares — she isn’t a baby. “I’m just very interested in history.”

Jack chuckles and Mimi says, “She’s a McCarthy, that one.” Madeleine wonders why anyone would want to be anything else.

Don’t look for that monument nowadays. It was removed years ago, because too many tourists left with fragments of the stone. The McCarthys don’t do that. They simply look and reflect, as is their custom. Rarely do they seek out “attractions”—mini-putt, go-carts — despite Mike’s pleas and Madeleine’s yearnings. Not only are those pursuits “tacky,” but the best things in life are free. The wonders of nature, the architecture of Europe. Your imagination is the best entertainment of all, writing is the greatest technology known to man, and your teeth are more precious than pearls so look after them. “‘Eat an apple every day, take a nap at three, take good care of yourself, you belong to me’—come on, les enfants, chantez avec maman….” And Mike does.

Way up in the sky the moon is visible, a pale wafer. We intend to get there before the decade is out, President Kennedy has pledged it. Madeleine’s father has predicted that when she and Mike are grown up, people will take a rocket to the moon as easily as flying to Europe. They were in Germany when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. Everyone was glued to the radio — the American Forces network with Walter Cronkite, “the voice of space.” The Russians are beating us in space because Communists force their children to study nothing but arithmetic. Madeleine closes her eyes and sees the imprint of the moon against her lids. At least the Russians sent a man up there that time and not a dog, the way they did with Sputnik. That dog smothered.

“What was that dog’s name?”

“What dog?” asks her father.

Think nice thoughts . “Nothing.”

When John Glenn orbited the earth last February, the principal played the radio over the PA system and the whole school listened to the countdown. They cheered, and when Lieutenant Colonel Glenn returned safely to earth, the principal announced, “This is an historic day for freedom-loving peoples everywhere.”

It is important to beat the Russians to the moon before they can send any more innocent dogs up there.

“How many more miles, Dad?” When Mike asks, it sounds like a question posed out of pure interest in maps and triangulated distances. When Madeleine asks, it sounds like whining. There is little she can do about this.

“Take a look at the map there, Mike,” says her father in his man-to-man voice. It is a different voice from the one he uses with her. The man-to-man voice makes Mike seem important, which annoys Madeleine, but there is also a note in it that makes her worry that Mike may be about to get in trouble for something even though he hasn’t done anything.

“Voici la mappe, Michel.” Her mother turns and hands it to Mike.

“Merci, maman.” He shakes out the map importantly, peers at it, then: “I estimate arrival at 1700 hours.”

“What time is that, Mike?” Madeleine asks.

“It’s Zulu time.”

“Mike, quit it.”

“Five P.M. to civilians,” he says.

“You’re a civilian too,” says Madeleine.

“Not for long.”

“Yes, you’re only eleven, you can’t join till you’re twenty-one.”

“Dad, you can join the army at eighteen, can’t you?”

“Technically, yes, Mike, but then who in his right mind would want to join the army?”

“I mean the air force.”

“Well, during the war….”

During the war . When her father starts this way, it’s clear he’s going to talk for a while, and probably tell them things he has told them before, but somehow that’s the best kind of story. Madeleine leans back and gazes out the window, the better to picture it all.

But Mike interrupts, “Yeah, but what about now?”

“Well, now I think it’s eighteen,” says Dad, “but during the war …”

Mike listens, chin perched on the backrest of the front seat. Mimi strokes his cheek, his hair. Mike allows himself to be petted and Madeleine wonders how he has managed to fool their mother into thinking he is pettable. Like a fierce dog with bone-hard muscles that can only be patted by its owner, and its owner thinks it’s fluffy.

“… you had fellas as young as sixteen training as pilots — they lied about their age, you had to be seventeen and a half….” Her father was training at seventeen but he wasn’t in the war. There was a crash. Madeleine closes her eyes and pictures his aircraft.

But Mike interrupts again. “Could I train at eighteen?”

“Tell you what, Mike, when we get to the station, I’ll ask around. I know there’s a civilian flying club and I don’t see why we shouldn’t get you up in a light aircraft before too long, eh?”

“Wow, Dad!” Mike punches his thighs. “Man oh man!”

Mimi reaches over and caresses the back of her husband’s neck and he returns a casual glance that says, “No big deal,” but really means “I love you.”

Madeleine is embarrassed. It is as though she were suddenly looking through a door that someone ought to have closed. Mike seems not to notice that sort of thing.