For Your Tomorrow (4 page)

I pulled out Campbell’s texts and flipped through their pages, replete with Jeff’s annotations and yellow highlighting of passages:

Was this another map, I wondered, another place to find him? During my flight from Kelowna to Halifax, suspended thirty-seven thousand feet in space, I had contemplated the arc of Jeff’s life, its similarity to the archetypal stages of the hero’s journey. A glimmer of light appeared, an inkling of a pattern in the events leading up to, and culminating on, July 4—events that otherwise seemed cruelly random and senseless:
Why Jeff? He had so much to live for
.

Now as I lie beneath his floral comforter, a salty breeze blows through the window looking east onto the ocean and the blinking lighthouse on Devil’s Island. Waves hush on the shore—the sounds and scents of Nova Scotia, my heart’s home. Every summer I leave behind the tropical dry heat of the Okanagan to dwell in the misty east coast and the warmth of my family. My sister Marion is as close to me as anyone can be. One year older, she was always there to play with, and watch over me, during our early childhood in Malagash. She’s part of my earliest memory—when we were three and four years old.

Marion tells me where to get the matches: “They’re in that wooden box on the coffee table. Make sure Mom’s doing something in the kitchen
.
Just take a few.” When I get to the woodshed, she has newspaper crumpled on the floor. With the door closed, it’s dark—a bit scary. But when she scratches the match on the rock and puts it on the paper, everything is illuminated—Marion’s face aglow, her eyes fixed on tongues of fire that soon ignite the dry wood chips littering the floor. Flames leap to the wood stacked high around the walls. “Oh, oh,” she says, grabs my hand, and yanks me out the door. We run a few feet, then stop and turn around, transfixed by the smoking crackling blaze
.

Leo sisters, we celebrated our birthdays together over campfires on the Northumberland shore; cut sticks from the alders, whittled sharp ends, roasted wieners and toasted marshmallows to charcoaled perfection. We dragged our cardboard-box doll carriages down the dirt road to our granny’s house, and climbed the swaying silver maples, daring each other to go higher and higher. Marion always prevailed. She could skip with two feet when I could skip with only one, and turn cartwheels across the lawn, her coltish legs and black braids flying above her head.

Until our late teenage years, we shared a small bedroom under the sloping eaves of our storey-and-a-half house in Oromocto and slept together in a saggy double bed. We wore each other’s clothes to school. A few days before I was to graduate from high school, we buried our father. Abruptly thrust from the kingdom of childhood, we spent the following summer months visiting our grief-paralyzed mother in the psychiatric ward of the Saint John Hospital.

Two years later, we each got married—within two months of each other. In the early seventies, when I was
an undergraduate at the University of New Brunswick, Marion, Russ and three-year-old Jeff lived one floor below me in the Park Hill apartments overlooking the Saint John River. Some days, I’d hear a faint knocking, and unlock the door to see my freckle-faced nephew smiling up at me. He would toddle down the red-carpeted corridor to the stairwell, mount the cement stairs to the second floor, pull open the heavy fire-door and find my apartment—by himself. A few minutes later, I’d be opening the cookie tin when the phone would ring.
Is he there yet?
Marion would ask, and laugh with relief.

We both got degrees in English and in education, and became teachers—Marion in elementary schools in Winnipeg, Ottawa and Halifax, and I at a college in Kelowna. Like mirror images, we each had two children, and journeyed together along the rough road of motherhood. We shared its joys and challenges in letters, phone calls and summer visits, watching our babes morph into school-age kids … adolescents … adults. At the turn of the millennium, we buried our mother, and supported each other through the anguish that came with being orphans in our fifties. Last November, I joined in her exultation when her grandson—Jeff’s son—was born, the primogeniture of our family’s next generation. And in the past five months, I’ve commiserated in her all-consuming worry while Jeff was in Afghanistan.

Now, I must descend with her into the hell of our most fearful nightmare—one of our children dying before we do.
I wake to the smell of coffee, and a sound like the soft cooing of doves—the murmuring of a contented baby. I go downstairs to the kitchen. Marion stands in the sunlit window holding her grandson. For the first time, I see my sister as a grandmother, proudly embracing her treasure; and see her for the first time as a mother-in-mourning, grief already etching its fine lines in her face, darkly circling her eyes. And I behold for the very first time the bluest eyes, the rosiest chubby cheeks, the heart-shaped face and dimpled chin of Jeff’s baby son, made in the image of his father.

I smile, for the blessing of this beautiful child; at the same time I cry, for his father’s eternal absence and my sister’s loss. I put my arms around them. “I am so broken …,” Marion whispers. We look into each other’s eyes. I can feel it in her body, so fragile it could crumble in my arms. I hear it in her voice, cracked and dry. I see it in her brown eyes, brimming with tears. “How is this possible?” She shakes her head. “Before he left, I asked Jeff if he knew what it would do to us if anything happened to him.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said nothing would happen to him—that he’d be okay.”

Did he really believe this? Could he have gone
unless
he believed this? Jeff was no raw young recruit, harbouring youthful delusions of invulnerability. He joined the military at thirty after a decade of university studies. He embarked on the Afghanistan mission as a mature, thoughtful man. Was his response to his mother’s question meant to quell
her fears as he headed off to a war zone on the other side of the world? Was he, like all soldiers, playing the odds in God’s lottery—that significantly more would survive than be killed, that he wouldn’t be one of the unlucky ones?

Before he left for Afghanistan, Jeff must have looked death in the face. Forty-two of his comrades had already been killed—one a friend from his regiment, Nichola Goddard, also a forward observation officer. Like every deployed soldier, Jeff had to ensure that his legal affairs were in order, had to choose a photograph to be issued to the media in the event of his death. He posed in his dark green uniform in front of the Canadian flag, knowing there would only be one reason that his family would ever see this picture—enlarged to a 24-by-36-inch framed colour portrait and delivered to his grief-stricken family. When you see these photos of our soldiers in the media, you’ll notice that none of them are smiling.

This picture isn’t the one Jeff chose to be released in the event of his death. Rather, he selected one taken in Afghanistan: He stands in front of his crew’s LAV—
Lucky 13
—dressed in his tan camouflage uniform and helmet with dust goggles attached. The desert sun lights up his face, the boyish freckles on his sunburnt nose and cheeks. His hazel eyes squint, but his gaze is direct. And he is smiling, a knowing half-smile. It’s a photo that seems to say
amor fati
, love of one’s fate—not fatalism—but love of the life one is called to live.

N
OVEMBER
11, 1970

On a grey November morning, the smell of snow in the air, a young man and woman will soon cross a threshold. They will enter a three-storey yellow brick building. A hospital, built high on a hill, overlooks a town nestled between two rivers, the meandering Oromocto—which gives the town its Aboriginal Maliseet name—and the mighty Saint John, which flows hundreds of kilometres southeast to the Bay of Fundy. The man carries a small white suitcase and a large shoulder bag, a red corduroy bag packed with flannelette diapers and blankets, tiny nighties, terry-cloth sleepers,
hand-knit woollen sweaters, bonnets and booties. With his other hand, he opens the door wide for his young wife. She catches a glimpse of her round silhouette mirrored in the glass door.
I’ll be casting a different reflection the next time I pass this way
, she thinks, feeling her belly silently quaking.

Settled into the hospital bed, her long dark hair fanned out on the white pillow, Marion hears the skirl of bagpipes drifting up the hill from the cenotaph—a pibroch so familiar she can sing along in her mind:

Between contractions, that rush in gentle waves every ten minutes, she envisions the slope above the river, the piper in a red-green tartan kilt; wreaths studded with poppies; a grey granite monument engraved with the names of fallen soldiers. A Canadian flag flaps in the wind; wires clink against the steel pole. Grey-haired war vets in navy berets and blazers, with gleaming medals, stand in solemn salute.

“The Last Post,” the bugler’s call, echoes through the hospital window:
They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old
. “The last time I went to the cenotaph,” she tells Russ, sitting in the armchair beside the bed, “was with Dad—three years ago, I think. We walked together down the hill to the ceremony. It must have been a Saturday, or he’d have been in a parade himself on the base.”

Father and teenage daughter crossed the stubbly school
field behind their house, the wind whirling yellow leaves around their legs. She wanted to ask him about his war—the Second World War, she’d read about in history class. But he never talked about it. He was a man of few words; spoke more with his wide hazel eyes and his flashing grin. Only once when she was a child, thought to be asleep upstairs, she’d overheard him tell his brother about his platoon entering a village in Holland: “Bullets started flying—zinging over my head, coming from every direction … I’ve never been so scared in my life.” Maybe he told his stories to his buddies at the Malagash Legion or at the Sergeants’ Mess happy hour, exorcised his demons over one too many pints of Moosehead.

He had survived that day in Holland, and that war. He’d survived to become her father four years later, but not long enough to become a grandfather to the child about to be born. That day they strolled together to the cenotaph was his last Remembrance Day ceremony. The following year he was in Cyprus, wearing the blue beret of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force. And the spring after that—when he was forty-five years old—“The Last Post” sounded at his funeral. Sergeant Clifford Murray’s final duty concluded.

Water gushes between her legs. Her baby awakens from its sleepy sojourn, and commences its first dangerous journey, moving down the constricted canal of birth. Through the long afternoon, the waves of contractions mount into tsunamis that pull her under into dark swirling currents; until they finally break, leave her breathless and panting in their wake. She resurfaces to the squeeze of a moist hand on hers, opens her eyes to glaring fluorescent lights and Russ’s
face, smiling uneasily. Daylight wanes and night comes on—a Herculean twelve-hour labour—until she feels the head, bears down and pushes out the crown of damp dark hair. The doctor’s gloved hands ease out the broad shoulders, first one, then the other. At 8:38 p.m., a blood- and mucus-coated body slips through the narrow opening into the world. A bleating cry, then the words her family has been hoping for nine months to hear: “It’s a boy!”