Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Meanwhile, Canada’s defences have not been activated. Jack’s hands are tied. He can’t so much as order a blanket broken out of mothballs, should it become necessary to provide relief for the civilian population. His own government has decided that Jack’s children don’t need to be defended. He hasn’t felt this angry, this useless, in years. Not since 1943, in Centralia.

The phone rings. He grabs it. “McCarthy here.” Her voice at the other end is relaxed. An ordinary day.

“Fire away,” he says, his disappointment only fleeting. The heat in his face, the pulse at his neck recede as though the sound of his wife’s voice were a cool cloth to his head. “Milk? … yup … butter….” He drops the paper clip and reaches for a pencil.

Madeleine walks out the side door of the school. She has her art with her, a construction-paper bear. His head is square — she was unable to draw and cut out a circle, no matter how she tried.

The afternoon is grey and gauzy, no sun except for a dirty yellow stain against one end of the sky — the only indication that there is still such a thing as east or west, or that it makes any difference.

It burns probably because of the chalk on his finger, but that is just a sting and it will stop soon, for even though it’s her first experience of being stabbed, she sees no reason why it should sting forever, nothing does.

The other girls disperse, unwrapping their candy. Madeleine doesn’t take the candy any more. The others put out their hands and for once in her life Marjorie Nolan has the power to say, “You can have this one.”

Madeleine did not know you could be stabbed so hard and not die or go to the hospital, she did not know anything could get up there — that must be where the pee comes out, and she can already tell that pee will make it sting more, although maybe it will also disinfect since that is what stinging often does.

Right now she is more worried that her head may not return to normal size. The moment she left the school, it began to swell and expand until it became huge, like the grey cloud that has become the sky this afternoon. If she closes her eyes she can feel herself growing impossibly tall and weightless, her head ballooning up up and away, her feet far below and tiny on the ground in their scuffed Mary Janes.

Walk fast and make a breeze to cool the sting, there is moistness in the air, that will help, it will also dry the underpants, which are damp and wadded like a bandage.

She doesn’t continue through the baseball field toward home. Instead she crosses the parking lot and turns up Algonquin Drive, the PMQs on her left, the farmer’s field on her right.

The good thing about stabbing is that she is now certain she’s no longer afraid of needles. Once you have been stabbed, a needle is nothing. And that’s what you get for secretly hoping he would touch your underpants.

She veers onto the road and walks down the middle. She’ll hear if a car comes along. She could walk into that low field between the furrows, follow the sugar-beet road. The farmer might come out with his shotgun. She could pretend to be a scarecrow or simply walk into the bullets, she would like to feel them bouncing off her. That farmer doesn’t own the world, no one does, blow it up, earthling .

She could keep walking in a straight line until she finally gets home for supper, years from now. Why does anyone stay anywhere? Why don’t people just roll like marbles over the tilting earth? How does anyone know there is such a thing as themself? She starts to zigzag down the road, weaving between the broken yellow lines. Perhaps this is why mothers say not to stray on your way home. Because they know you might keep going. She turns onto the Huron County road.

The white buildings of the base spread out to her right, opposite are the PMQs, their colours muted, no expressions on their faces, and up ahead the Spitfire, indifferent. Madeleine sees everything all at once without looking at anything. All appears grim and indistinct, stripped of one layer of light, stripped of distance and difference beneath the uniform grey that has lowered the sky — the ceiling, as pilots call it. High above that blur, the day is eternally blue and sunny — this grey, these clouds change the whole world for us down here and yet they are no more than a curtain or a piece of stage scenery. Her father is over there somewhere to her right, and to her left is her mother. They are specks, words.

Mr. March’s expression does not change, his glasses glint as usual. You would never know by looking at his face that he has his hand up a little girl’s dress. Madeleine doesn’t think of it as “my dress.” It’s as though she’s seeing the plaid pleats from the level of her hem — there are her bare legs, and a man’s grey sleeve up between them as if she were a puppet. It stings. She melts away from the pain like a Popsicle from a Popsicle stick. Do not speak, your voice is far away in another country. Do not move, your arms and legs are not attached to the pain, there is nothing for them to do but wait.

Her feet will not stop walking — past the turnoff to the PMQs now — like Karen in The Red Shoes , she will have to find a kindly woodcutter to chop them off. She begins to run heavily, pounding her heels because this is the way to feel that your feet will not be chopped off. The air is like layers of damp tissue paper clinging one after another to her face. As she runs, she opens and closes her fists, twisting her wrists, because this is the way to feel that your hands will not be chopped off, or just come off by themselves and float away like pieces of Pinocchio. Stand still, little girl .

The ragged caw of a crow, a sound like something scrawled in black ink on the air. She looks up on the run. One is returning to its home atop the pine pole where the air-raid siren protrudes from beneath the mass of twigs and hay, the rusting mouth open as though in mid-cry, or like a fountain run dry. She runs past the Spitfire on its pedestal, aimed upward, its gun barrels filled in and painted over. It won the Battle of Britain. How come someone didn’t kill Hitler? Why didn’t someone just walk up to him with a gun? Anne Frank would have lived. If only she could go back in time and kill Hitler. If only a car would come along right now with a strange man in a peaked cap who says, “Get in the car, little girl,” she would kill him, smash the door on his head. Here comes a car, let it be a kidnapper, I will bash his head in with a rock .

But the car passes. She picks up a rock and hurls it after, then turns and runs again, past the airfield on her right, dragging the toes of her Mary Janes, wrecking them, this is the way to pound someone when there is no one to pound. Put your hands around my neck, little girl. Now squeeze. That’s it. Harder . Standing beside his desk. Feeling the muscles packaged in the fat, and that strange floating thing in the front of his soupy neck like turkey bones. His eyes bug out, why doesn’t he clean his glasses? Perhaps because he is using his hanky on his thing. It sticks up under the white fabric like the chalice in church. Madeleine didn’t ask to think that, it just came into her head, and God controls everything, “So don’t blame me!” she yells, jutting her chin forward, marching now. But there is no one to hear her, the base is far behind, and the roofs of the PMQs are sinking behind the gentle rise and fall of autumn fields.

Her head is back to normal size, of a piece with her body again, and the air no longer seems so flat and far away. The grass looks real now, the pebbles at the side of the road look real and so is the feel of her paper bear crumpled in her hand. The Huron County road has become a corridor of birches and maples, farms opening on either side like the pages of a book. The light has changed, no longer flint but liquid. Cool grey has gathered, multiplying shades of hay, bales of shredded wheat dotting the fields, old gold of dry stalks, the abrupt river-green of a pumpkin field — miraculous splashes of orange, gifts the size of beachballs under each broad leaf. The fading grass of the roadside leans thick and chewy, dirty hair brushed against fenceposts. A turnip lies where it bounced from the back of a truck, milky purple like the inside of a seashell. She thinks, if I never went home again, I wouldn’t starve.