Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

She smells rain and slows her pace. The velvet scent of hay, a cud-mown field to one side; a big brown head heaves round and looks at her across the fence, its moist mother-eye. Somewhere a red-winged blackbird, its dark sweet song close up in the misted air, like a bird in a movie. Telephone wires criss-cross overhead, trapeze artists swinging voices from pole to pole, balancing nests and conversations. She stops and faces the field to her right. Beyond the ditch running with weeds is the corn. Papery yellow, standing at attention like veterans, decorated and depleted, still marching in columns, ribbons furling from empty stalks.

The first big drops fall. Massive and far apart they come, exploding dust at her feet. She tilts her head back, catching drops that taste both soft and metallic, they tap her face like fingertips, impossible to tell where the next drop will fall, as rapid as thoughts. She looks ahead again, feels her bangs flattening against her forehead, water streaming down her nose to her lips. If she never went home again, she wouldn’t go thirsty.

Up ahead, a willow tree sweeps the ground where the Huron County road intersects with a nameless dirt road. The tree stands at a slight sway, as though in sidelong greeting, underwater green and fading with the season, trembly with the rain that, at Madeleine’s approach, sounds lighter against its many small leaves, the song of a long-haired soprano. She sees it shimmer in the rain, a tree made entirely of wands. Perhaps this is where she will spend the night, a broad and level limb for her bed. She parts the green curtain and beads of water melt along her arm and down the back of her neck as she enters the cool dry arch, and at once the sound changes. It’s like being in a tent in the rain. She smells, before she sees, that she is not alone. Wet animal. Familiar.

Rex is lying at the base of the tree, his fur steaming, droplets of light around his neck, the tips of his ears. An old clothespin bag sits on the ground next to him. “Hi Rex.” He must be lost. His tail pats the ground at her approach, but she stops because she has seen something out the corner of her eye. Holey white running shoes, light brown legs. Colleen, sitting on a branch. She has a long stick stripped of leaves, it bends from her hand supple as a whip.

She slides off and drops to the ground. Madeleine takes a step back. Colleen reaches down to the clothespin bag and, without taking her eyes off Madeleine, brings out a canvas pencil case, unzips it, dips in and comes out with a tuft of tobacco and a rectangle of white paper. Madeleine watches her roll, lick and seal the paper, then put it between her lips. Colleen takes a book of matches and lights up. Success without College promises the cover. She inhales, squinting through the smoke, and leans against the tree, cigarette between thumb and forefinger. Her dirty white T-shirt glows clean in the green shadows. The leather string around her neck disappears beneath her shirt to form a tiny bump in the centre of her chest.

Madeleine asks, “Can I see your knife?”

Colleen reaches into the pocket of her cut-offs.

Its handle is carved in yellowed bone. “From a bear,” Colleen says, unfolding the blade, polished and ultra-thin with use and care. She holds the knife flat across her palm. Madeleine reaches for it. “Don’t touch it,” says Colleen, not closing her palm.

“Why not?”

“’Cause it’s not a toy.” Colleen talks with her face slightly averted, pale eyes narrowed. Madeleine sees the fine white scar at the corner of her mouth, faint frown.

“I’m not ascared of you,” says Madeleine.

“I don’t give a shit.”

“I know,” says Madeleine, shocked yet curiously at ease.

“Know-it-all, eh?”

“Come here and say that,” speaking before thinking.

“I am here, stupid.” The corner of Colleen’s mouth rises, sarcastic amusement in her eyes.

“So you is,” says Madeleine, her mouth to one side like Bugs Bunny. She reaches out and takes the knife. Colleen makes no move to stop her. “On guard!” declares Madeleine, and slashes the air like Zorro. Colleen just watches. Madeleine holds up her soggy bear with his smearing smile and impales him—“Take that!” She taps her chin with the point of the blade and invites Colleen to “come on, hit me right here.” She starts laughing helplessly, arms limp and noodly—“Goodbye cwuel wowld!”—staggering, knife flailing, cross-eyed, pretending to stab herself. Rex stands and barks.

Colleen takes a drag, then flicks her cigarette aside and holds out her hand for the knife. Madeleine returns it, weak with laughter. Colleen folds it and shakes her head. “You’re a maniac, McCarthy.”

Madeleine replies in a bright voice, as though reading aloud, “Oui, je suis folle, je suis une maniaque,” starting to do a mechanical twist.

Colleen says, “C’est ça quoi ja di, ya crazy batar.” Which is how Madeleine finds out that Colleen speaks a kind of French.

“It ain’t French, it’s Michif,” says Colleen.

Michif . Sounds like “mischief.”

Colleen hooks the clothespin bag over the end of her stick and walks out from under the tree, back into the rain. Rex follows.

“Colleen, wait up.”

Madeleine catches up and they walk in silence. She takes off her shoes and socks. The rain hits the ground in a perpetual mist, it falls so hard. It’s easy to run in a hard rain, puddles become trampolines, it’s like running on a path in the woods, impossible to get tired. Mirage-barns waver across the fields, thunder shakes the trees at the foot of mile-long farm driveways. Paws and bare feet and soaked running shoes. She smells wet dog. There is no smell in the world more comforting except perhaps a campfire. Although a campfire is melancholy too, because you sit around it with your family in the big dark, knowing that your love and who you are stretch only a little way into it.

“Where’re we going?” asks Madeleine.

“Rock Bass.”

It isn’t a whip, it’s a fishing rod.

There is still a bit of summer left down there. The greens are vivid with a sheen like old leather. Blades of grass still tall but easily bent and broken now, they will not spring back if you step on them. Leaves are still fleshy at the stems, fused to their twigs but only weeks away from that moment when they may all blow off at once. When is that moment? Some years the breezes come gradually, taking a few leaves at a time, while other autumns are still and calm, trees fully clothed and many-coloured until November, when with one huff and puff the woods stand suddenly naked.

“Are we there yet?” asks Madeleine. They have stopped at the crest of a ravine. Below is a stream which, come spring, will be more than a creek and less than a river. On the opposite bank, a maple tree grows. The rain has slowed and the drops say hush hush hush against the red and amber leaves. It’s an afternoon sound.

It is amazing to think that, while we are at school or asleep or watching TV, the woods are here. Breathing, changing, their stately grace made up of countless frantic lives lived high and low, each rustle and cry part of that sweeping rhythm. Breathe in, it’s summer. Breathe out, it’s fall. Stand still, it’s winter. Open your eyes, springtime.

The maple tree is so quiet, yet it is passionately changing. Part of it is dying. The pretty part. Its sadness will soon be exposed, its true age and wisdom, casting up its gnarly prayers. That is the beautiful part.

“This is Rock Bass,” says Colleen, and skids straight down the ravine to the stream below. Rex follows. So does Madeleine. There are stepping stones but they wade across.

There’s a flat rock under the maple and, nearby, the remains of a campfire. Colleen takes an Eight O’clock Coffee can from her clothespin bag, removes a wax-paper lid and lifts out a fat worm. She hooks it onto the end of her line, it curls in spasm, she casts into the stream, then stands on the flat stone and waits.