For Your Tomorrow (5 page)

She cradles the miracle of his nine-pound body next to her, strokes the velvety pink fingers curled against his cheek. She is struck by the weight of this tiny being, the weight of responsibility she now carries—his life has come from her; his survival depends on her.
So this is what it means to be a mother
. Since that early spring annunciation—the crocuses just sprouting in the gardens—when she walked into the doctor’s office a twenty-year-old maid, and walked out in a haze of uncertainty—a mother to be—she has wondered how she would feel, if
she
would be any different.

Marion cuddles her infant son closer. She gazes into his bleary blue eyes, at the cleft in his chin, and calls him by his name—Jefferson Clifford.

W
HAT ARE THE ODDS
that the bagpipes that heralded Jeff’s birth would be from the same regiment—the Second Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment—that he would support to his death thirty-six years later? The piper calling from the cenotaph, as Jeff initiated his passage into the world, was like the herald in so many myths. A figure or divine sign summons heroes to their destiny: a burning bush startled young Moses so God could invoke him to lead the Israelites from Egypt; a blaze of light and unseen voices told fourteen-year-old Joan of Arc that she was to be the saviour of France. Just as the bagpipes harbingered Jeff’s birth and his destiny on 11-11-70, they would also accompany the ceremonies that honoured his death and his return to the earth on 17-07-07. “The herald’s summons may be to live,” Joseph Campbell writes, “or at a later moment of the biography, to die.” Every year on Jeff’s birthday, Remembrance Day, the pipes resound at cenotaphs around the world and at his gravesite overlooking the sea.

Their wild notes also evoke the days of clan warfare in the Scottish Highlands where our family has deep ancestral roots. The chieftain’s hereditary piper rallied the troops with his
piob mhor
—the great Highland bagpipe. He sounded the clan song, led the men onto the battlefield and played for as long as he could stand. The pipes’ penetrating wail carried for miles, rising above the roar of the battle. During the Highland uprisings of the 1700s, the kilted northern “savages” with their Gaelic war songs so cowed the English
troops that the British government classified the bagpipes as an instrument of war. A set of pipes attached to a sheep’s stomach became such a powerful symbol of Scottish cultural integrity and resistance that for over forty years playing the bagpipes or wearing “the plaid” was a punishable crime. The 1747 Act of Proscription decreed six months’ imprisonment for the first offence; for the second, exile—
to any of His Majesty’s plantations beyond the Seas
.

Highlanders integrated into the British Empire’s Scottish regiments—the Scots Guards and the Black Watch—and brought their pipes with them. Jeff’s more recent forefathers also rallied to the bagpipes during the First and Second World Wars as pipers continued the tradition of leading troops into combat. Jeff’s maternal and paternal grandfathers, his great-grandfathers and great-uncles all marched to the pipes and drums of “The Highland Laddie,” the regimental march-past of the Cape Breton Highlanders:

Jeff himself hearkened to their call during pre-deployment training exercises at CFB Wainwright, Alberta. “Scotland the Brave” roused the troops on the Canadian prairie for the coming mission in a land as remote, desolate and feudal as the Scottish Highlands three centuries ago. And since the bagpipes also have a lengthy history of escorting fallen
warriors to their graves, Jeff heard their laments in the Afghan desert; a lone piper knelling “Amazing Grace” as his comrades’ flag-draped caskets traversed the Kandahar Airfield. The opening line—
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
—now seems bitterly ironic, a refrain synonymous with loss and suffering.

I
HAD ALWAYS SENSED
that the day of my nephew’s birth—Remembrance Day—was a sign: this first child of our family’s next generation proclaimed “in remembrance” of our father. Jefferson Clifford carried on my father’s spirit as well as his name. His birth meant rebirth and continuance: phoenix-like, new life emerged out of the ashes. That Jeff would develop into a man so much like my father—in his reticent personality and gentle demeanour—was yet to be seen. In a 1996 letter, Jeff’s grandmother wrote to him, “You are my little Clifford—your Grandfather Murray is so much closer to all of us because we have you. You brought so many happy times to me back then when I needed so much. You are so much like your Grandfather Clifford in your ways and looks, and I’m so proud you’re like him.”

Now, in light of Jeff’s calling and the cause for which he died, his birth date resonates with numinous undertones. Born on the day that honours the wartime sacrifices of soldiers and civilians, he is one of those soldiers now remembered on this day for his sacrificial death. Moreover,
November 11 is St. Martin’s Day, the feast day of the patron saint of soldiers. A fourth-century martyr, Martin was born in what is now Hungary. He was named after Mars, the Roman god of war, but was reluctant to become a soldier like his father. At the age of ten, Martin secretly attended the local Christian church, a new sect that his parents distrusted. He longed to become a Christian monk, but was forced to join the army when he was fifteen. It was while he was a soldier, however, that Martin experienced the vision that would become his defining legend.

One frosty November day, eighteen-year-old Martin was on garrison duty in Amiens, France. Dressed in his officer’s armour and a white lamb’s-wool cloak, he was riding through the crowded city gates when he noticed a beggar in rags, trembling from the cold. Martin reined in his horse and removed his cloak. He slashed it in two with his sword and handed half of it to the beggar. Heading back to barracks that afternoon, Martin came upon another beggar shivering by the roadside. Again, he stopped, took off the remaining half of his cloak, and offered it to the man. As Martin resumed his journey, facing a long ride in freezing temperatures, the sun burst through the grey snow clouds and the frost began to melt.

That night, Martin dreamed he saw Jesus wearing half of his lamb’s-wool cloak. “Here is Martin, the Roman soldier who has clad me,” Jesus said to the angels encircling him. This dream set the course for Martin’s life of piety. He was soon baptized. Eventually he became Bishop of the Abbey of Tours in France. Martin performed many miracles
throughout his long life, but it was his humility and benevolence that made him legendary. He was buried, at his request, in the cemetery of the poor on November 11. The phenomenon of a sunny break on a gloomy November 11 is still called Verao do Sao Martino, Portuguese for “St. Martin’s Summer.”

That the patron saint of soldiers is a man celebrated for his compassion and humbleness belies the soldier stereotypes in popular culture—the macho GI Joe, Rambo or Arnold Schwarzenegger characters who glorify violence and killing as a legitimate means to an end. Real-life soldiers are often propelled by the altruism embodied in their patron saint, motivated by love more than hate—love of country, of humankind, of freedom. St. Martin personifies the humanitarian ethics that guide many soldiers—the ideals that would one day inspire the baby born on his Feast Day in 1970.

T
HE CONSTELLATION OF
S
CORPIO
glows on the ceiling of Jeff’s bedroom. As I lay in his bed the night after his death gazing up at those stars, I wondered why he needed to put them up there. Why did he place that star above his mother’s head in the kitchen?
In one of those stars I shall be living
. Many philosophers have speculated about the connection of heavenly bodies to an individual’s destiny. “Every human being has his star,” wrote the Austrian anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, “which determines what he works on
between death and a new birth, and he comes from the particular direction of a particular star.”

Goethe went so far as to say that he waited in the womb for the auspicious hour of the constellation under which he wanted to enter the world:

Jeff’s birth under a constellation ruled by Mars, the eponymous planet of the Roman god of war, seems like one more synchronous piece of the puzzle of his destiny. The red and fiery planet of Mars signifies aspiration, striving, giving everything to realize one’s longings and desires, no matter what the risk—all traits that would define Jeff’s character. The moon enters Scorpio midway through autumn when the wind strips yellowing leaves from the trees, and nature appears to die as it prepares for renewal. “Scorpio is the love song on the battlefield and the war cry on the fields of love,” write Chevalier and Gheerbrant, “the
Scorpio-type a bird which can only confidently stretch its wings in the midst of gales, its temperament being storm and its environment tragedy.”

I wonder too if Jeff’s inevitable impulse to become a soldier could have been encoded in his genes, stirring in his solid infant body from the moment of his birth. Does our ancestry live in us and shape us in ways beyond our conscious awareness? Generations of marching men form his ancestral past. His father, Major Russell Francis, served in all three branches of the military—army, navy and air force—for thirty years. Jeff’s paternal grandfather enlisted at eighteen to fight with Cape Breton’s North Shore Infantry Regiment in World War II, then soldiered for another twenty-five years. But Jeff’s most compelling ancestral role model was the grandfather he never knew.

A nineteen-year-old farm lad from Tatamagouche Mountain in Nova Scotia, Angus Clifford Murray enlisted in 1942 with the Cape Breton Highlanders. His wood-framed World War II Service Certificate always hung above the brown tweed rocking chair in my grandmother’s dining room: faded pictures of the king and queen at the top, crests of the nine provinces around the border; above the Nova Scotia crest, a black-and-white photo of my handsome young father, sculpted cheekbones and dimpled chin. His carefree smile and the roguish tilt of his beret seemed to belie the seriousness of his profession.

The dining room’s hardwood floor was scattered with colourful rugs my grandmother had hooked over the years
from remnants of old clothes. Some had khaki wool backgrounds from my great-uncles’ World War I uniforms. As a child, I noticed how my grandmother’s eyes would linger on my father’s war certificate, and thought she must have been proud of her son’s service overseas. But perhaps that reflective gaze was one of relief, of gratitude, that he’d come home—all his limbs intact, unlike so many thousands of young men. Weaving details I’d collected from family stories, I created a picture of the day my father departed for the war. He rose at four in the morning to hitchhike to Truro where he would catch the train that would take him to Halifax. No one but his twin sister, Pearl, got up to say goodbye.