Way the Crow Flies Read Online Free Page B

dance in England where her parents met—The Story of Mimi and Jack. Maman sings, “‘Underneath the lantern, by the barrack gate….’” And that’s it for any serious discussion of the war.
    Madeleine’s father is not an actual veteran, but he would have been had it not been for the airplane crash. Most of her friends’ dads are veterans—pilots and aircrew. Her German babysitter’s dad was a veteran too, of the Wehrmacht. He had one arm and their family went everywhere on a motorcycle with a sidecar. Some Canadian families made trips to see the concentration camps. Laurie Ferry saw piles of shoes at Auschwitz. But Madeleine’s father says, “There’s a difference between learning from history, and dwelling in the past.” Her mother says, “Think nice thoughts.”
    Madeleine found an old
Life
magazine in the dentist’s waiting room on the base. On the cover was a dark-haired girl not much older than herself. Anne Frank. She stole the magazine and pored over it guiltily for weeks, until it disappeared from her room. Maman had rolled it up, along with several other magazines, in order to line a pointed clown hat as part of Madeleine’s Halloween costume.
    “‘My Lili of the lamplight, my own Lili Marlene,’” sings Mimi, one hand lightly stroking the back of her husband’s head.
    Jack relaxes behind the wheel. She sings the second verse in German. He is tempted to slow down, make the drive last, there is something so full about these suspended times. When it’s just the two of them and their little family on the road between postings. No neighbours, no relatives, no outside world except the one whizzing past the windows.
Two drifters, off to see the world…
. Benevolent unknown world. Full tank of gas. A good time to take stock. You can see who you are. You can see what you have. You have everything.
    He says to Mimi, “Sing it again, Missus.”
    Farms, wide and prosperous, red barn roofs painted with family names, Irish, English, German, Dutch. This is the southern Ontario heartland. “The Golden Horseshoe …,” says Jack to his family. Bounded by three Great Lakes: to the south, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario; to the west, Lake Huron. And although on a map its shape resembles more the skull of a steer, Jack is correct in adding, “It’s also known as the Southern Ontario Triangle.” The two descriptions conflate for Madeleine and she pictures a glittering golden triangle on a map, their blue station wagon seen from high above, crawling across it.
    “Like the Bermuda Triangle?” she asks.
    Her parents exchange a smile. “Nope,” says her father.
    Mike turns to her and mouths the word
stunned
.
    Jack explains that in the Bermuda Triangle things are thought to disappear mysteriously, planes and boats vanishing without a trace. The Southern Ontario Triangle is just the opposite. It is packed with people—at least by comparison to the rest of Canada. There are factories and farms, the soil as rich as the cities; orchards of soft fruit down in the Niagara Peninsula and, spanning the whole, vast fields of corn, tobacco, beets, alfalfa; dairy cattle, horses, hogs and high finance. Windsor waves across the water to Detroit; General Motors, pension plans, let the good times roll off the assembly line. The U.S. is, in some places, a stone’s throw away, its branch plants springing up to cluster on the Canadian side, reinforcing bonds across the world’s longest undefended border. As President Kennedy said last year in Canada’s Parliament, “Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.” The best of both worlds.
    “How many more miles, Dad?”
    “A few. Just sit back and enjoy the scenery.”
    Cutting a swath through fields and woodlots are massive marching steel towers. Follow those mighty X-men and they will lead you to Niagara Falls—twelve million gallons per minute to fuel turbines that never stop, the engine of this province and the north-eastern United States. Pure