Way the Crow Flies (7 page)

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
.

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.

J
ACK 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.

He’s in civvies. Mimi has already taken his uniform to the cleaners so it will be crisp for the handing-over ceremony toward the end of the week. This morning he wears tan trousers with a cream-coloured sports jacket she picked out for him in Paris. He pretends not to notice that it’s raw silk, and he would never spend his money on himself this way, but he does submit from time to time to her sartorial interventions. She’s the boss, after all.

He does what he always does when he moves into a new office: places a framed photo of his wife and children on the big government-issue oak desk. This office is much the same as the one he occupied at RCAF 4 Fighter Wing back in Baden-Baden, Germany. And the one before that in Alberta, and before that at the Pentagon, where he was an exchange officer in the Accounts Branch; a succession of smaller and smaller desks in shared offices all the way back to the supply section at the RAF station in Yorkshire during the war. This desk, these green metal filing cabinets, the shelves with
The Queen’s Regulations and Orders
in three thick blue binders; the
photo of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, the photo of the Governor General, a Department of National Defence map and four white walls—he could be anywhere. It even smells the same: floor wax and pencil shavings, the tang of shoe polish and wool uniforms. The view is similar too. Out his window, green hedges, white buildings, blue sky—no jet stream though. Just a single yellow Chipmunk banking into view.

The handing-over ceremony will occur in this office. It will be attended by the commanding officer—the CO—and the staff of the Central Officers’ School. Jack and the officer he is replacing will shake hands, then co-sign a document in formal recognition of the change in command. Standard operating procedure—SOP—in the military: there must be no break in the continuity of command and control. Afterwards, a meet ’n’ greet will be followed by lunch at the mess, during which a detailed schedule of one-on-one briefings between Jack and his senior staff will be drawn up. He will tour the facilities and meet the instructional and support staff, so that, by the end of the day, all concerned will have been made aware that Jack has taken up his position as officer in command of the Central Officers’ School—OC of the COS. Another SOP: a leader must be seen and identified by his men, whether he is commanding a wing of jet fighters or a building full of desks.

Jack notices some paper stuck behind the radiator below the window ledge. He bends to retrieve it.
I’ll be darned
. A copy of the
Schwarzwald Flieger—Black Forest Flyer
. The monthly magazine of RCAF 4 Wing, Germany. It’s a small world. The issue is from February 1958, and on the cover, the newly elected Prince and Princess of the Fasching Karneval stand triumphant before the
Narrenzunft
—the Fools’ Council. Fasching is the German lead-up to Lent—bigger and wilder than Mardi Gras. The photo was taken at the Kurhaus in Baden-Baden. He and Mimi were at a similar do one year later, two among dozens of personnel and wives who had turned out to mingle and celebrate with hundreds of Germans. He flips through. In among the birth announcements, squadron scuttlebutt, Little League news and ads, the schedule of events is printed—party after party,
Children’s Fancy Dress Ball, Rose Monday Ball
… Canadians welcome.
Willkommen
. So many nice times. So
many nice remember-whens. He tosses the magazine onto his desk. No doubt it belongs to the outgoing officer. He’ll want to hang onto it for sentimental value.

When you get your transfer message telling you where you will be posted in a few short months, two factors determine whether your reaction is elation or disappointment or something in between. The first thing you look at is: who’s in charge? Group Captain Harold Woodley is Centralia’s current CO, a man whose reputation as a wartime pilot enhances his relaxed style of command, which is vintage air force and synonymous with firmness of intent. Jack was pleased. Veterans—especially pilots—tend to know that, although they are answerable to a big organization, that organization is made up of human beings, not just systems. The second factor is geographic, and this better be good or you’ll have an unhappy wife on your hands—although Mimi could make a radar station on Baffin Island into a social mecca. The air force has an efficient informal communications network, otherwise known as the grapevine, and Jack knew Centralia’s reputation as a great place for kids, with plenty to keep the wives busy. The city of London is just down the road, the small town of Exeter is even closer, not to mention countless villages, flea markets, auctions and the great inland freshwater sea of Lake Huron for swimming, camping and picnicking. He knew that the officers’ mess is well run and that the station as a whole has healthy links to the civilian community—curling leagues, charity events, all manner of sports and recreation. So, although nothing can compare to 4 Wing, Jack’s reaction to his transfer message last spring—once he got over the irony—was pretty much on the elation side. But no matter where they sent him, he would have the sense of a fresh start; the optimism that imbues every change, coupled with his belief that no situation is beyond improving—after all, in the military, change is the only constant. He pulls out one of the heavy blue binders—
Administration
—and flips through.