Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

At the bottom of St. Lawrence she runs into a bear — just someone in an old raccoon coat, a paper bag over their head, with eyeholes. As Mr. March might say, this individual has not made much of an effort.

“What brings you out this evening?” inquires Mr. March with an English accent disguised as a clown with a moustache going golfing.

“Free stuff, what else?” Colleen Froelich. Who would have thought she would stoop to something as fun and normal as trick-or-treating?

They are at the schoolyard. Madeleine dropped a bar of soap into her golf bag before she left home, so she must have known she was going to do something bad, though she’d no plans to use it. She tips the bag over and some rockets and crappy candy kisses tumble out along with the soap. She has lost her Unicef box. She takes the soap and writes PEAHEN all over the grade four windows, staggering, scrawling and calling out like a parrot in a pirate movie, “Peahen! Peahen! Grawk! ”

Colleen says, “You’re crazy.”

Madeleine collapses on the ground beside her, giggling uncontrollably. “Why thank you, Peahen.”

“What’s ‘peahen’ supposed to mean?”

“Hmmm, qu’est-ce que c’est la ‘peahen’?”

Colleen leaves. Madeleine lies on her back in the schoolyard in the dark, the laughter tapering off to no more than a dark trickle out the side of her mouth. Then she rises, slings the golf bag over her shoulder and follows Algonquin Drive up behind the houses, taking slap-shots, whacking pebbles with the putter as she goes. She hears one hit a garbage can. She wonders what would happen if she heard the smash of glass, and keeps on whacking. She cuts through the park and takes a swing at the oak tree. Bark flies up, exposing a slash of white. She chops and chops, each metallic blow an ache that numbs her palms, travels to her shoulders and rattles her head on its post; she chops until her bangs are slick with sweat, until her arms have turned to rubber, and she figures she has just about chopped that tree right down.

Mimi is surprised to find no candy in Madeleine’s golf bag. “What did you do all evening if you weren’t trick-or-treating?”

“We gave our candy to a little kid who lost his.”

It doesn’t feel like a lie because she didn’t think about it before she said it. She hides the bent golf club behind the furnace, and goes to bed with a stomach ache.

“You have a stomach ache because you ate all your candy, don’t tell me des petites histoires about poor little boys losing theirs.”

The next morning the grade four windows are perfectly clean. Maybe she didn’t soap them. Maybe it was all a dream. But after the national anthem and the Lord’s Prayer, the principal, Mr. Lemmon, comes on the PA system and announces that there has been vandalism—“wanton vandalism”—in the park, and that school property has been violated. “The offenders are invited to come forward and confess. Otherwise, shame on you.”

Madeleine feels prickly, and clammy as though she had wet her pants, and her head feels set to burst like a smashed pumpkin.

Before supper.

“Dad, say someone commits vandalism, do they get sent to training school?”

“That depends on what they did and how old they are.”

“How old is a juvenile delinquent?”

“Under twenty-one.”

“Oh.”

“And over twelve. Why?”

“If a person was my age they wouldn’t send them to training school, would they?”

“Well, what did this eight-year-old person do?”

“I’m almost nine.”

Jack refrains from smiling. “What did this almost-nine-year-old do?”

“Nothing. But what if they broke something or something?”

“Well. I’d have to say that, unless it was something of great value, something that couldn’t be fixed”—it can be fixed. Windows get washed, tree bark grows back—“or unless it was a person who was harmed … I’d say it would be sufficient for the guilty party to apologize.”

“But no one knows they did it.”

“All the more reason they should come clean.”

“Confess?”

“Yup. Do the right thing.”

She feels as though there’s a smell coming off her, and she sniffs her fingers to make sure they are clean.

SHE KNOWS THAT the smell will go away if she confesses to Mr. March about the windows. Then she must go to the principal and tell about the tree.

Mr. March’s eyes get big and round, he looks at Madeleine as though he is seeing her for the first time — like an elephant noticing a mouse.

“I’m sorry, Mr. March.”

It’s weird because he says, “Just forget about it, Madeleine.” He doesn’t say, “Forget about it, little girl,” he uses her name, which he never does unless he is reading it off his clipboard.

It’s lunchtime. They are in the hallway outside the classroom. She has confessed to soaping “Peahen” all over the grade four windows. She has also confessed to dressing up as him as a clown going golfing. Throughout, he has not taken his eyes from hers. For once she can see them through his glasses. They are large and grey. As she confessed, she felt cool water pouring over her head, even though her voice was shaking.

Mr. March glances down the empty corridor and asks, “Have you told anyone?”

“No.”

“Well don’t.”

“I have to tell Mr. Lemmon.”

“No you don’t.”

She is surprised, then reflects that he probably wants to tell on her himself. Then he will phone her parents and tell them. “I’m going to tell my own parents,” she says.

“What for? What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

She goes to walk away down the hall because it’s lunchtime, but he says, “Wait a moment, Madeleine.”

She stops, and as she turns back to him, she gets the I’m-not-hungry-any-more feeling, because she realizes that he is going to make her do exercises even though it’s not after three. Just as she had never imagined the possibility of doing exercises in a Halloween costume, she is now ambushed by the prospect of doing them at lunchtime. You can do them in a box, you can do them with a fox… .

She follows him back into the classroom, arms limp at her sides, but he just nips over to his desk and takes something from the drawer. He writes on it, then hands it to her. “You got a hundred percent on your reading comprehension, what do you think of that?”

At recess she knocks on Mr. Lemmon’s door. She tells him about the tree. He doesn’t say anything at first, and she thinks, oh no, I’m going to get the strap.

Then he says, “Come here, Madeleine.” He is sitting behind his desk, and she thinks, I’m not going to get the strap after all, he is going to make me do exercises. She feels tired because this means she will have to start feeling sorry for Mr. Lemmon too. She approaches his desk and sighs — she ought to have known that this is what happens. She stands close enough for him to reach out and squeeze her arm muscle, and he does reach out, but he takes her hand instead. He shakes it. “I’m impressed, Madeleine, very impressed.”

That I hacked up a tree?

“Most children would not have the courage to confess as you’ve just done.”

Courage . A hail of bullets. Saving a dog from rapids. Being a juvenile delinquent. Confessing to it.

“Run along now, Madeleine.”

Mr. March doesn’t call the exercise group for a week after Halloween. And then, in the second week of November: “The following little girls will remain after the bell: Diane Vogel, Joyce Nutt, Grace Novotny …”

Madeleine waits for her name, the hot feeling in her underpants, the sick feeling in her stomach.