Way the Crow Flies Read Online Free PDF

It’s rude to worry about the earth blowing up when your dad is right there in the front seat driving. After you’ve had ice cream and everything.
    “Would your skin melt?” She didn’t mean to ask, it just slipped out. Picture your skin sliding off after it has melted.
Nyah, pass me a wet-nap, doc
.
    “What makes you think that would happen?” He sounds incredulous, the way he does when she is afraid and he’s comforting her—as if hers were the most groundless fear in the world. It is comforting. Except when it comes to melted skin.
    “I saw a picture,” she says.
    “Where?”
    “In a magazine. Their skin was melted.”
    “She’s talking about the Japs,” explains Mike.
    His father corrects him. “Don’t say Japs, Mike, say Japanese.”
    “Would it melt?” asks Madeleine.
    “Can we talk about something nice,
au nom du Seigneur?”
says Mimi, coming to the end of her tether. “Think nice thoughts, Madeleine, think about what you’re going to wear the first day of your new school.”
    Melted skin
.
    Maman lights a cigarette. They drive in silence. Refreshing Cameo Menthol.
    After a while, Madeleine glances at Mike. He has fallen asleep. Maybe when he wakes up he’ll play I Spy with her. If she doesn’t act like a baby. Or a girl. They used to play together a lot, and shared baths when they were little. She recalls vivid fragments—boats bobbing, bubbles escaping from sinking ducks, “Mayday, come in, Coast Guard.” She remembers sucking delicious soapy water from the face cloth until he grabbed it from her: “No, Madeleine,
c’est sale!”
    A bit of drool at the corner of his mouth makes him look younger, less remote. Madeleine’s throat feels sore—she is tempted to poke him, make him mad at her, then she might stop feeling sad for no reason.
    Welcome to Lucan…
.
    They are standing in an old country churchyard. Not old for Europe, old for Canada. Long grass obscures the gravestones, many of which have keeled over. One monument stands out. Four-sided and taller than the rest, still upright but chipped in places. Five names are chiselled on its sides, each name ending in “Donnelly.” They were born on different dates, but they all died on the same day: FEB. 4, 1880. And after each name, etched in stone, is the word “Murdered.”
    The Donnellys were Irish. Jack tells the story of how they and their neighbours brought their feud with them from the old country to the new. “You have to ask yourself why,” he says, “with all this space in Canada, they chose to live right next door all over again.” There isn’t much to the story. Most of it is written right there in the stone.
Murdered Murdered Murdered Murdered Murdered
.
    Mimi calls from the car, “Madeleine, come, we’re going,
reviens au car.”
But Madeleine lingers. “How did they murder them?” she asks her father.
    “They came in the night and broke in.”
    “How?”
    “With axes,” says Mike.
    “Come on, kids, let’s go,” says Jack, heading for the car.
    “Did they get the people who did it?” she asks, transfixed before the stone.
    No, they never did.
    “Are they still out there?”
    No, I told you, it all happened a long time ago.
    “I don’t know why you stopped here, Jack,” says Mimi, leading her daughter away by the hand. “She’s going to have
des cauchemars.”
    “No I won’t,” says Madeleine, stung by the implication that looking at an old gravestone might give her nightmares—she isn’t a baby. “I’m just very interested in history.”
    Jack chuckles and Mimi says, “She’s a McCarthy, that one.” Madeleine wonders why anyone would want to be anything else.
    Don’t look for that monument nowadays. It was removed years ago, because too many tourists left with fragments of the stone. The McCarthys don’t do that. They simply look and reflect, as is their custom. Rarely do they seek out “attractions”—mini-putt, go-carts—despite Mike’s pleas and Madeleine’s yearnings. Not only