Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

“Claire, honey, are you in any trouble at school?”

Claire turns very red.

“It’s all right, lamb, you can tell Daddy and me.”

Claire looks down and adjusts her hairband with one finger. Blair and Sharon look at one another.

“Hey, pet?” asks Blair.

“Is Mr. March not happy with your work, darlin’?” asks Sharon.

But Claire will not look up and she will not say anything. She sits on her hands and big tears fall into her lap.

Madeleine waits for the Children’s Aid to arrive in a kind of ambulance and take her away “for violence,” but nothing happens. Marjorie Nolan has not told on her. And up at the front of the class, on the big felt bulletin board, she sees that she has become a hare in all subjects. She is even a hare in arithmetic. Now I’ve hoid everything, doc .

She helps her father rake the leaves, and confesses to having attacked the tree. He asks if she owned up to it at school and she answers yes. He tells her that she was taking out her anger at her teacher for scaring them with duck and cover, and possibly her anger at the entire grown-up world for having brought us so close to the brink of war: “Sometimes when we’re frightened — when we feel powerless — we do irrational things. Do you know what ‘irrational’ means?” She does not. He tells her.

It was wrong to damage the tree, it was “not constructive” and it was not rational. But it was courageous of her to tell the truth—“You did the right thing, sweetie.” He is proud of her.

She says, “I hurt the tree,” and weeps inconsolably.

She wakes herself up screaming. She was punching the tree and her hand was full of chocolate blood.

She finishes out the night in Mike’s room.

“But what if there isn’t a war on?” she asks him, savouring the canvas smell of the hard camp cot. “How can you fight in one?” They are discussing the future.

“There’s always a bit of war on somewhere,” Mike replies in the dark. “And there’s assassin jobs that are so secret, you never even hear about them.”

“And that’s when you’re a missionary?”

“Mercenary.”

It sounds like someone going around being merciful to people, but it’s just the opposite, thinks Madeleine. How can you go around killing people you’re not even mad at, who aren’t even your enemy?

“It’s nothing personal,” says Mike, “you’re a professional soldier, you work for pay. Anyhow, mercenary’s just my third choice — like if something happens to me, say I lose an eye like Daddy.”

Madeleine can just make out the framed photo of an elegant airborne CF-104 on the wall over Mike’s bed. The pilot is looking at the camera from the window of the cockpit, but his face is not visible because he is wearing an oxygen mask — corrugated snout and goggles.

“What’s your first choice?” Madeleine knows the answer but she doesn’t want him to fall asleep.

“No question about it,” he says. “Fighter pilot. That’s what I’m going to be doing six or seven years from now.”

“What’s your second choice?”

“NHL.”

“What position?”

“Forward.”

“I’m defence.”

“You’re not on the ice, you’re a girl.”

“Let’s say I’m a boy.”

“Yeah, but you aren’t.”

“Yeah, but let’s say.”

“Well….”

“Yeah, and my name is Mike, I mean Mitch, okay? And I’m really a boy.”

“You’re stunned.”

“Pretend I’m really your brother, okay?”

“Mitch?”

“Yes Mike?”

“No, I mean are you sure you want your name to be Mitch?”

“What should it be?”

“… Robert.”

“Okay.”

He doesn’t say anything for a while and Madeleine figures he has fallen asleep. Then he whispers, “Hey Rob?”

“Yeah?” Her voice feels slightly different. Not deeper, really. Lighter. Like a basketball off the driveway. Like red jeans. Madeleine waits for him to continue. After a moment he does. “What do you think of Marsha Woodley?”

Madeleine is so embarrassed she wants to squeal and pull the covers over her head, but she remembers she is Rob. “Gee, Mike. I don’t know. Why?”

“Do you think she’s…. You know. Special?”

“Yeah.” Madeleine nods in the dark. “She’s a real lady.”

“Yeah, that’s what I think.”

She hesitates, then says, “And Rick is a real gentleman.”

“Yup.”

In the silence that follows, she waits for him to continue, but hears his breathing change and knows that he really is asleep this time. She falls asleep and has no nightmares. Rob never has nightmares.

Captain and Mrs. McCarroll are relieved when Mr. Lemmon calls their daughter’s teacher into his office, and Mr. March is able to assure the worried parents, “Claire is a bright and pleasant student but she is a little given to daydreaming.”

Captain McCarroll blushes and Mrs. McCarroll smiles, saying, “She gets that from her daddy.”

Mr. Lemmon shows Mr. March the note. “Do you have any idea who might have written this?”

Mr. March takes a moment to consider, then shakes his head. “I can ask my pupils,” he volunteers.

“Oh please don’t bother.” Sharon blushes.

Captain McCarroll says, “We don’t want to embarrass her.”

Mr. Lemmon asks if Mr. March has had occasion to keep Claire after three, and he replies that he did keep her and one or two other children for a few minutes to go over some spelling exercises, “but certainly not as a punishment for bad behaviour.”

Mr. Lemmon thanks the parents for coming in, and Mr. March for clearing the matter up.

Claire is never again required to remain after three.

It is Marjorie Nolan who first feels his hands around her neck. Then Grace Novotny brings home bruises that no one asks her to explain. And that is all you need to know about Grace’s mum and dad.

THE WREATHS HAVE WILTED at the base of the cenotaph in Exeter, felt poppies have fallen from lapel pins and washed up against curbs softened by autumn leaves, damp and exhaling the last earthy smell before winter puts all scent and soil to sleep. Overhead, the remaining leaves have lost their lustre, clinging sparse and ragged to trees revealed magnificently complex against a hard orange sky at five in the afternoon. November. Two minutes of silence at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, to mark the end of the war to end all wars in 1918—and all the others since then. It seems also to have marked the setting in of the deep hibernation that muffles the land like a blanket. Shhh, winter is coming. In the air is the unmistakeable smell of snow.

Madeleine can smell it and she supposes Colleen can too. In the park it’s cold and growing dark. Cold enough for mittens, but until the first snow comes who thinks of wearing them? Colleen’s feet are still bare inside her tattered runners. Madeleine has turned nine. A wily number, able to look after itself. She had a pajama party and felt guilty for not inviting Colleen, but she couldn’t picture her with her other friends, in baby dolls and curlers, levitating and talking about boys. And Madeleine would not have known which self to be. There is also a sense that the time she and Colleen spend together is something separate. Private.

They are crouched now at the far end of the park behind Colleen’s house. It borders a number of backyards, including Philip Pinder’s, where, this evening, there is a deer hanging upside down from a tree. Cold blood drips out of its mouth into a metal pail. Its eyes are staring open and a drop of liquid hangs from its nose. It’s draining. As it turns slowly from its rope and pulley you can see where it has been slit open as though it had just unzipped its deer suit, like in a cartoon. All of its insides are piled green and brown and pink in a plastic bucket. It’s an evil thing. Not the deer. But what has been done.