“You’re worse than a flea on a dog!” MacTavish said. “It serves you right for getting mixed up with one of those guys. He’ll be gone in a few weeks, and then you’ll be moping around here with a face like a wet dishrag.”
Every evening I went over to the airfield after work to watch the pilots practise. I asked Max so many questions about lift and drag and altitude that he finally told me to knock it off. “I’m a good pilot, Rose. If you don’t believe me, I’ll get my commanding officer to write you a letter,” he joked.
I was only partly reassured. I knew Max’s quiet confidence would make him a good bomber pilot. It was the rest of the air force I wasn’t so sure about.
At last a press release arrived that practically transported me out of my chair with joy. The Canadian government had caved in, but only after the British government requested permission to send members of its own women’s air force to work on our air training bases.
Embarrassed and beleaguered, Parliament finally voted to allow women into the Canadian armed forces.
I rushed out of the office and rode my bicycle out to the Fisher place, where I found Monica in the barn shovelling pig manure, an expression of rapture on her face. When she saw me, she dropped her pitchfork and gave me a hearty embrace that almost knocked me off my feet.
Her drilling and letter-writing had borne fruit. She had already received a telegram from Ottawa asking her to train as an officer in the newly formed women’s division of the Royal Canadian Air Force.
“Are you going to enlist, Rose?”
“I’m not old enough yet, but I’ll join up on my twenty-first birthday next May if I can go overseas!”
“I wouldn’t count on it. Every girl in the militia is hankering to get over there.”
“What are the chances, do you think?”
“Not so good. We know the government only wants us to scrub floors at air bases. It could be years before we convince them to let us out of the country.”
I pedalled back to the office, my face streaming with tears. When I came through the door, MacTavish asked me why the waterworks. “I figured you’d be happy!” he shouted. “If there are going to be females on stations, God forbid, they might as well be Canadian!”
His words were infuriating. “There’s no reason to assume women can’t do the job, Mr. MacTavish! Even the supreme British air commander supports women in uniform. Listen to this press release: ‘Members of the women’s air force have raised the standard of efficiency, discipline, and morale on air bases all over England!’”
“Well, the poor devils are in a different boat, aren’t they? They have to use every warm body, like it or not!”
Time was the enemy now. Each red dawn brought Max closer to the day he would leave for England. I felt frantic inside, the way I had when Buckshot ran away with me.
There was frost at the beginning of September. “I say, is it almost time for the snow to come?” Max asked. “I can’t wait to see that. It must be fantastic, everything covered with white. Kathleen made me promise to send her a snap of myself standing in a big pile of it.”
“I wish you’d been here last winter. It was so deep you could climb right onto the roofs of the granaries.”
“I wish I’d been here every winter.” He squeezed my hand.
“Where do you think you’ll be stationed?” Lately I was torn between never mentioning it and talking about it constantly.
“I hear they’re sending a lot of us wild Colonial boys out of England. The Brits want to be at home, defending their patch of God’s green earth, and I can’t blame them. I just want to be where I can do the most good, so we can get this thing over with.”
I was brushing under the wavy ends of my thick hair, getting ready to go to the picture show with Max, when the telephone rang. Captains of the Clouds was showing at the Empress Theatre, starring Jimmy Cagney as an RCAF pilot.
“Rose, it’s for you!” Jack called from the bottom of the stairs.
“Coming!” I tied the sash of my housecoat. I ran down the stairs two at a time and lifted the heavy earpiece off the wall.
“Hello?”
“Rose, it’s Jimbo.” His voice sounded faint and distant.
“Hi! How are you?” Jimbo was a friend of Max’s on the base, one of the boys who liked to pull practical jokes.
“Is your mother there?”
“Yes, do you want to talk to her?”
“No. I’m afraid I have some bad news.” He paused. “Max isn’t coming tonight.”
“Don’t tell me his leave has been cancelled again!”
“It’s not that. Rose, there’s been an accident.”
“Oh, sure.” I laughed. “Pull the other one, Jimbo.”
“Listen, I’m not joking.” Jimbo’s voice broke. “His Harvard went down this afternoon.”
I didn’t reply. If this was a joke, it wasn’t funny.
“It was the ruddy kite, Rose. He told me it was acting up, but the mechanics couldn’t find anything wrong. It pranged ten miles out of town.”
My legs felt weak and I sat down on the bottom stair. There was a draft coming under the door. I tucked the hem of my robe around my bare feet, which were suddenly cold.
“Is he hurt?”
“He bailed out, but not soon enough. His chute didn’t have time to open. A farmer saw the whole thing. He reached Max a few minutes later. But he said Max was … was … dead as soon as he hit the ground. I’m awfully sorry, Rose.”
For a moment I felt, heard, saw nothing. Then I gave a harsh, guttural cry. I didn’t even recognize my own voice. The kitchen door flew open and Mother came running into the hall. “Rose, what’s the matter?”
The receiver fell from my hand and banged against the wall. I flung myself into Mother’s arms, crying like a child with my mouth wide and square.
For a long time, I could not forget the image of Max falling through the sky, his soft body striking the hard ground. It was shocking how grief felt, how crushing and how relentless. “I’ll grind his bones to make my bread,” said the giant in the fairy tale, and I felt as if giant hands were grinding my bones.
“He never saw the snow,” I wept
