The Way the Crow Flies Page 5

  It’s unlike the ones she knew in Germany—freshly painted loudspeakers mounted on concrete posts. No birds allowed.

  “It’s left over from the war,” says Dad.

  “Did you ever hear it?”

  “Nope.”

  She knows what an air-raid siren sounds like. There were drills on the base at 4 Wing. It’s a terrifying sound that makes you have to go to the bathroom. “Does it still work?” she asks.

  “Who knows?” says Dad, “but it sure would give the crows a fright if it did.”

  The Rambler crosses the Huron County road. No traffic on either side as far as the eye can see. MON. Madeleine turns and looks back up at the raggedy nest. Glimpse of a black wing, then a crow rises and flies away.

  The Rambler enters the PMQs and Canada Avenue becomes Algonquin Drive. It leads through a little Levittown, planned suburb of semi-detached houses and bungalows in every colour of the rainbow. None of this was here in ’43.

  Each house is surrounded by a big lawn, a view of the cornfields never far away. Lawns can make slaves of their owners, but all anyone does in Centralia is water and cut, and the grass flourishes thick and green. Same with the maples that cast their twirling keys to earth, the blossom-raining elms, the shaggy bushes that erupt in snowstorms of confetti each spring, Just married! There are no fences. Crescents and bends form tulip-shapes, the whole place is hugging itself. Madeleine looks out the window at this bright new world.

  Bikes and trikes and red wagons, sprinklers going, the distant roar of a lawnmower, the smell of freshly cut grass. Kids glance up, mildly curious, strange adults wave casually at the car, Jack and Mimi wave back.

  “Who’s that?” Madeleine asks.

  “We don’t know yet,” says Dad.

  “But we will soon,” says Maman.

  Or maybe they won’t. The people who waved may be moving out just as the McCarthys move in. Or you may run into a family from two or three postings ago, and it’s a great reunion but either way it’s just as well to start off as old friends. That’s how it is in the forces. You bond, you move on, there is no contradiction.

  They drive past a park with swings, a slide, merry-go-round and teeter-totters. Paved footpaths run between the houses and open onto empty fields full of possibilities invisible to the adult eye. Among Centralia’s PMQs there are sixty-four such empty acres—big grassy circles rimmed by the backs of houses. Someone’s mother can always see you. No one worries about children in Centralia.

  “Dad, why is it called Centralia?” asks Madeleine.

  “Because it’s at the centre of the world.” Jack winks at his son in the rearview mirror.

  “Every place is the centre of the world,” says Mike, “’cause the world is round.” And Centralia feels round, the looping streets, the neatly mown fields that fill the centres of these loops. Madeleine pictures a target. And in the crosshairs, Centralia. Bombs away. Rubble. Women in kerchiefs picking up the coloured pieces of the PMQs. Lego.

  “Madeleine, stop daydreaming and look at your new neighbourhood,” says her mother. “Where do you think your best friend lives?”

  Gee, doc, maybe in that garbage can with Popeye the Sailor Man. “I don’t know, Maman.” I like to go swimmin with bare naked wimmin, I’m Popeye the Sailor Man! Rude lyrics she learned from Mike. She pictures her Popeye ukulele. It’s on the same moving van with her hair and the rest of their stuff—including, unfortunately, her accordion.

  “Madeleine.”

  “Oui, maman?”

  “I said, pick one and then later you’ll see if you were right.”

  Madeleine rests her chin on the window frame and tries to guess where her best friend lives. The one she has not yet met. Does she live in the pink house, the green one …? Suddenly she remembers that she already has a best friend, Laurie Ferry. But she can no longer quite picture her face.

  “There’s your new school, kids.” Jack stops the car. Modern single-storey white stucco with big windows and a taller section at one end, the gym. J. A. D. McCurdy School, kindergarten through grade eight. Deserted, deep in its summer sleep. The flagpole stands empty. The swings hang motionless, the slide and teeter-totters static.

  “Hop out and take a look,” says Dad. Mike opens his door and Madeleine slides out after him.

  Their parents watch from the car as they cross the playground without stopping to swing or slide, past the bike racks and up the broad front steps. In just over a week they will line up here with other kids, some of whom they will know by then. Friends.

  Brother and sister cup their hands around their eyes and peer through the glass of the big double doors. The first thing they see, once their eyes have adjusted to the gloom, is an arrangement of framed photos. Mike rhymes them off: “Sabre, CF-100, Lancaster….”

  Two larger photos preside over the rest. Queen Elizabeth II, “our gracious Queen,” and her husband, Prince Philip. Their portraits greet you in the foyer of every Canadian school here and abroad. The Queen and Prince Philip, your old friends. Your godparents, in a way.

  Hi, Your Majesty. Madeleine stares up at the Queen and thinks, this will be my last year in Brownies. This spring, I will fly up to Girl Guides. There is the congenial sense that the Queen has heard her and serenely agrees, “Why yes, Madeleine, it is high time you flew up to Guides.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Mike has strolled away and hoisted himself onto a window ledge to get a better look. She joins him and he hops down and gives her a boost. She gazes in. “I wonder which one is my classroom.”

  “This one is.”

  “It is not, Mike.”

  This classroom has the alphabet marching in block letters above the blackboard, and happy numbers skipping hand in hand. It is obviously the kindergarten classroom. The pile of pastel-coloured nap mats in the corner clinches it. Madeleine is going into grade four, you do not have naps on mats in grade four. Mike is going into grade seven.

  “Due to my superior intelligence,” he says suavely.

  “Due to it’s automatic when you’re turning twelve,” she says with withering sarcasm. Mike never withers.

  “You have to pass first, stunned one.”

  “Like wow, man,” she drawls, “you passed. How womantic, how positively gwoovy,” snapping her fingers and swaggering like a beatnik, “Hey Daddyo.”

  Mike laughs. “Do Elvis.”

  She swivels her hips, wrinkling her brow over the microphone, dropping her voice, dribbling it like a basketball, “‘We-hell it’s won foh the money, two foh the show….’”

  “Do Barbie!” he yells, giggling furiously—it’s so easy to make her go crazy. Madeleine goes up on tiptoes, sticks out her chest, points her hands and totters about with a plastic face and mechanically blinking eyes. “Oh Ken, can you pick up my handkerchief for me, please?” she simpers. “I cannot bend my legs, I cannot bend my arms, eek! Oh Ken, save me. My hero!” Mike takes out an imaginary machine gun and Barbie dies in a hail of bullets.

  Madeleine gets up. “Hey Mike, want me to do Sylvester? ‘Thufferin’ Thuckotash!’ Want me to do Elmer Fudd? ‘A hunting we wiw go, a hunting we wiw go—’”

  But Mike takes off around the corner of the building. She follows. They run around the whole school three times, then they run to the teeter-totters and hang over the steel bar on their stomachs.

  “Hop on,” says Mike, and they teeter-totter violently while Madeleine hangs on for dear life, not complaining about the bumps, laughing every time she wants to cry, “Ow!”

  He abandons the teeter-totter. Madeleine crashes onto her tailbone, laughs and follows, convinced her bum is flashing visible cartoon pain behind her. He has climbed halfway up the mesh of the baseball backstop by the time she reaches it. “Come on men, follow me,” he cries, making explosion sounds, pulling a pin from a grenade with his teeth, “I need ammo!” and she tosses up a bandolier of bullets, “Thanks, corporal,” he calls through the hell of battle—normall
y Madeleine is just a private, she swells with pride.

  “Sarge!” she yells, “look out!”

  Mike turns to see a Japanese soldier clambering up after him. Madeleine takes aim and snipes. “Got him!” she yells and, as the Nazi tumbles to his death, “Auf Wiedersehen!”

  “He was a Jap,” says Mike, “not a Kraut.”

  “Mike!” says Madeleine. “Don’t say Jap and Kraut, we’re not allowed.”

  Mike’s head snaps to one side. “I’m hit!” His grip loosens and he half-tumbles down the mesh, bleeding, dying.

  “Sarge! I’ll save you!” She slides down the backstop, fingers and toes skimming the metal links, and releases her hold an impressive eight feet from the ground, tuck and roll. “It doesn’t hurt,” she announces before he can ask.

  Their parents are still in the car, chatting. Mike and Madeleine are sweating. He pulls out an imaginary pack of smokes, and offers her one. Lucky Strikes. They lean against the backstop and puff, gazing across the road at a farmer’s field and a stand of woods beyond. “First chance I get, I’m going to light out into those woods,” says Mike.

  “Can I come?” asks Madeleine, tentative—this could be pushing things too far.

  “Sure, why not?” he says, and lets a squirt of clear spit escape his lips.

  Times like this with Mike are precious. She does not want to move or say anything to wreck it. At times like this it is almost as if he has forgotten that she is a girl, and is treating her like a brother.

  The sun tilts across their shoulders. Their shadows have grown up on the ground before them, long and lanky against the loose weave traced by the backstop.

  “You ready to roll, kids?” Dad calls.

  They walk back toward the car, comrades, no need to speak—as they say in the Marine Corps, Deeds Not Words. Their parents are smiling, amused at something. Madeleine reflects that sometimes your mother and father look pleased with you and you can’t figure out why.

  They pile into the back seat and it’s funny how this is the first time since they arrived in Canada that Madeleine has not felt as though she were climbing into the new car in the new place. It’s just the car. It’s just Centralia, where we live, and that’s our school, J. A. D. McCurdy.

  “J. A. D. McCurdy made the first heavier-than-air powered flight in Canada, in 1909,” says Dad.

  You ’spect me to remember dat, doc?

  A breeze lifts and the pulleys clank against the empty flagpole as the Rambler backs from the parking lot. On the first day of school the flag of our country will be raised. Not our flag, precisely, but the Red Ensign: the Canadian coat of arms, and in the upper left corner, the Union Jack. Canada does not have an official flag, we are not officially a country, we are just a dominion. What is a dominion? We’re not sure. It’s the name of a grocery store chain.

  Madeleine is nervous now. Her hands are cold. The Rambler’s creeping pace is taking them back through the PMQs, and closer to their house. Which will it be? Look for one with blank windows and an empty driveway. Algonquin Drive, Columbia Drive….

  At the corner of Columbia and St. Lawrence Avenue is a two-tone tan house with an orange VW van in the driveway. A plump girl with curly hair is Hula Hooping on the front lawn. As they turn right down St. Lawrence, Madeleine wonders, will I ever Hula Hoop with that girl? Will I get to drive in her van? Or is she moving away?

  A purple house ahead on the left catches her eye because PMQ driveways are not usually full of old cars and washing-machine parts, or big German shepherd dogs that are not tied up. Who lives there? Scary people? That too would be unusual.

  “That dog is loose,” says Mike.

  Mimi looks. “Tsk-tsk.”

  Her mother’s tsk-tsk is the only time Madeleine is ever aware of her French accent. She puckers her lips and tsk-tsks in a way English people think of as sexy. Madeleine twists her mouth to one side, à la Bugs Bunny, at the mere thought of the word. It makes her think of Bugs dressed up as a girl Tasmanian Devil, with a big bosom and red lipstick.

  “What’s so funny, squirt?” says Mike.

  “Zat’s for me to know and you to find out, chérie,” replies Maurice Chevalier, thanking heaven for “leetle girls.”

  The Rambler pulls into a driveway directly across from the purple house and stops. Dad says, “Say hello to the house, kids.”

  A two-storey white aluminum-sided semi-detached house on St. Lawrence Avenue. With a red roof.

  Dad opens his door. “Let’s inspect the premises, shall we?”

  Madeleine is happy their house is white. Make of me what you will, it says, you need not behave in a yellow or green way in order to live in me. An asphalt path leads from the driveway to the front porch, which is located at the side of the house for privacy from your neighbours, who live on the other side. Jack gets out of the car, walks around and opens Mimi’s door. She gets out and takes his arm.

  Their parents always lead the way to the door of the new house. Mike follows, hands jammed in his pockets, observing the tradition but looking down. He is getting old enough to feel conspicuous—this walk up to their new house, an intimate act performed in public. Madeleine slides from the back seat and turns on the movie camera in her mind—I must remember this, the first walk up to our door.

  They are coming to the end of their homeless sojourn. In these last few moments they are still vulnerable, soft-shelled. Roofless for another few seconds, open to the rain, to kindness, to cruelty. Jack climbs three concrete steps to the small porch, opens the screen door and reaches into his pocket for the key. Mike runs back to the car for something as Jack slides the key into the lock.

  Then Jack does what he always does, over Mimi’s squeals and protests. He scoops her up in his arms and carries her across the threshold. Madeleine covers her face and peeks through her fingers, mortified and delighted. Mike returns and tosses her mangy Bugs Bunny to her. “Come on, kiddo,” he says. She hugs Bugs and follows her brother into the house.

  To the left of the vestibule, stairs descend to the basement. Directly in front it’s up three steps and a quick right to the kitchen—functional Formica, frost-free Frigidaire and Westinghouse oven, with just room to spare for a small table and four chairs. A window over the sink looks onto the front lawn. In Mimi’s mind it is already curtained. To the left is the living room with fireplace and, immediately off it, the dining room. It never seems possible that the china cabinet and buffet will fit once the dining suite is in, but somehow they always do. A bay window in the living room overlooks the backyard and one of Centralia’s big empty green fields ringed by the backs of houses.

  Mimi squints, mentally arranging the furniture—couch under the window, framed oil painting of the Alps over the mantelpiece, reproduction of Dürer’s Praying Hands on the kitchen wall. She leads the way up fourteen steps that turn on a modest landing, to three bedrooms and the bathroom. She makes the sign of the cross when she enters the master bedroom. Once the moving van has arrived, she will call up the Catholic padre and have him bless the house. Mimi is not as devout as her mother, but the master bedroom is where children are conceived.

  Madeleine and Mike know better than to squabble over the choice of bedrooms. Maman is the commanding officer at home and she will assign quarters.

  They troop back downstairs, footsteps clattering, voices hollow. Mimi turns to Jack, arms folded.

  He says, “What do you think, Missus?”

  She tilts her head. “Ça va faire.”

  He smiles. Passed inspection.

  The four of them stand in their new living room. The empty smell. Fresh paint and cleanser. The white echo of the place.

  Tonight they will sleep in a motel. Tomorrow the moving van will come and, though they will eat in a restaurant again, they will sleep in their own house. On the third night, Mimi will make a fabulous supper in their own kitchen, and from then on the house will breathe with the smells of home. An invisible welcome will billow like sheets in a breeze when they walk in the door. Hello.
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  That night in the motel, tucked into a rollaway cot, Madeleine asks her mother to tell The Story of Mimi and Jack.

  “Oui, conte-nous ça, maman,” says Mike, snug in the extra bed.

  And Mimi tells the story. “‘Once upon a time there was a little Acadian nurse called Mimi, and a handsome young air force officer named Jack….’”

  If you move around all your life, you can’t find where you come from on a map. All those places where you lived are just that: places. You don’t come from any of them; you come from a series of events. And those are mapped in memory. Contingent, precarious events, without the counterpane of place to muffle the knowledge of how unlikely we are. Almost not born at every turn. Without a place, events slow-tumbling through time become your roots. Stories shading into one another. You come from a plane crash. From a war that brought your parents together.

  Tell the story, gather the events, repeat them. Pattern is a matter of upkeep. Otherwise the weave relaxes back to threads picked up by birds to make their nests. Repeat, or the story will fall and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men…. Repeat, and cradle the pieces carefully, or events will scatter like marbles on a wooden floor.

  HERE’S TO BEING ABOVE IT ALL

  This organization operates in a complex system of values and relationships which may be conceptualized as a social system. The number of possible combinations of variables therein defies imagination. Possible combinations appear to be as limitless as the physical universe with its billions of galaxies.

  “Organization Theory; An Overview and an Appraisal,” Journal of the Academy of Management, April 1961

  JACK IS ALONE in his new office. He has just looked in on the commanding officer of the station and introduced himself, informally. He has not yet officially reported in or taken command of the Central Officers’ School. That will come in a few days, once he has settled in with his family. Centralia is still on summer hours so things are pretty quiet, many personnel on leave. He has a little time before meeting some fellow officers for a casual lunch so he has strolled over to take a look at his new digs.