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:
On the 28th of August, 1749, at mid-day, as the clock struck twelve, I came into the world at Frankfort-on-the-main. My horoscope was propitious. The sun stood in the sign of the Virgin and had culminated for the day; Jupiter and Venus looked on this with a friendly eye, and Mercury not adversely; while Saturn and Mars kept themselves indifferent; the Moon alone, just full, extended the power of her reflection all the more as she had then reached her planetary hour. She opposed herself, therefore, to my birth, which could not be accomplished until this hour was passed.
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.
Sometimes I’d sit in the rocking chair scrutinizing my father’s picture, imagining him that morning in early spring. In the dawning light, he strolls down the lane with his rucksack on his back. He turns around to take one long last look at the red farmhouse where he was born; the weathered grey barns where he milked cows since he was five years old; the greening fields he ploughed with a team of horses since he was nine. Then he heads down the dirt road that will take him to the crossroads, to his first trip on a train, his first voyage over the ocean on a ship that will carry him to the war.
In becoming soldiers, both my father and Jeff perpetuated a warrior tradition rooted in our Gaelic family tree. Our earliest known ancestor, the Flemish knight Freskin de Moravia, was the progenitor of the Murrays of Tullibardine and the Dukes of Atholl. To this day, from his thirteenth-century castle at Blair Atholl in Perthshire, the Duke of Atholl maintains the only legal private army in the United Kingdom, the Atholl Highlanders. But the opulence of Blair Castle—its grand portrait hall, drawing rooms with red damask wall coverings and massive oak bookcases, finely carved staircases and marble chimney pieces—was many worlds away from the raw northern Highlands where my crofter ancestors struggled to survive.
My father’s grandfather and namesake, Angus Murray, descended from Sutherlandshire clans who farmed the crofts in Rogart as far back as there is record. But their indigenous connection to the land was abruptly severed in the early nineteenth century. The British Duke of Sutherland evicted thousands of tenants from his million-acre estate to earn a more lucrative income from caorach mhòr, the big black-faced sheep from southern Scotland. An Diùc Dubh, the Black Duke, deracinated the crofters like bothersome weeds and razed their houses to the ground; the Sutherland skies stained blood red with blazing clachans. His one-hundred-foot sandstone statue, erected in 1834, still peers down from the summit of Ben Bhraggie. “Its back to the glens he emptied,” writes John Prebble in The Highland Clearances. “It faces the sea to which his policies committed five thousand people as emigrants or herring-fishers.”
The flood of propaganda about Canadian immigration promised my displaced forebears an escape from poverty and the opportunity to own two hundred acres of land. Desperate to restore their uprooted lives, my Murray, Sutherland, MacIntosh and MacLean ancestors bade farewell to Sutherland’s heather-covered moors and glens, its lochs and braes and bens—the landscape imprinted on their Gaelic souls for generations. Cha till mi tuille—“We shall return no more.”
In May 1803, Alexander and Margaret Murray, their daughter Christy and her husband, William MacIntosh, packed their bundles with oatcakes and water. They trudged ten miles over moors abloom with golden gorse to Golspie on the northeast coast. At the Littleferry pier—a port-of-sailing advertised by some unscrupulous emigration agent—they were herded onto the Perseverance as steerage passengers, crammed into a dank cavern below the deck. Without portholes or ventilation, the overcrowded hold soon reeked of unwashed bodies, urine and vomit. They tossed across the stormy Atlantic—survived hunger, seasickness, dysentery, smallpox, cholera—and six weeks later, sailed into Pictou Harbour, New Scotland. They gaped at the jungle of evergreens skirting the shore and at the buckskin-clad Mi’kmaq watching through the trees.
The most accessible shore lands and river valleys had already been taken up by settlers and land speculators. So they travelled inland to the Cobequid Mountains in north Colchester County, remote and rugged like their Highland hills, but dark with impenetrable forests. Christy and William’s daughter, Annie, married another Rogart emigrant, Angus Sutherland—nicknamed “Prince” as he so resembled Bonnie Prince Charlie—his red hair, high cheekbones and heart-shaped face. Early one spring morning in 1813, twenty-two-year-old Angus set out to find the tract of land described on his ticket of location from the Philadelphia Land Company: five miles east of the West Branch settlement.
With no road to follow, only a trail marked by blazes—chips cut into the trees at eye level—Angus used the position of the sun, the contours of the ridges and the location of streams to guide him through the gloomy forest, two-hundred-foot pines blocking the sunlight. Raised on the barren coast of northeast Sutherland, Angus flinched at the unnerving sounds. Trunks and branches cracked in the wind like gunshots. Unknown animals darted through the underbrush, entangled with deadfalls. He tromped and bushwhacked all day, breathing the pungent odour of spruce and fir. As daylight waned, he spied an east-west baseline of blazes cut a mile long—the boundary of his land. He searched out a source of water and found a brook bubbling at the foot of a ravine. He sank to his knees and drank from the stream, as cold and fresh as a Rogart burn, cupped the icy water ove
r his face and head. He had arrived.
Angus and Annie hewed the primeval evergreens from their land. They built a rock foundation and erected a log house. They cleared fields for farming, fashioned stone fences and planted apple trees. They raised four sons and four daughters on the farm that became known as “the Hennie-Prince farm.” The six-mile trail that Angus hacked through the timbered mountains from the West Branch to his land grant eventually became the established route to the settlement known as Earltown. Over the years, the footpath was widened for horses, carriages and sleighs. In the twentieth century, it was gravelled, then straightened and paved. Highway 256, which we drive on today, still follows the trail cut by Angus, my great-great-great grandfather.
Inured to isolation and poverty in the land they’d left, my ancestors adapted to the hardships of pioneer life, coaxing crops to grow in the shallow soil of the Earltown hills. “Highlanders of the humblest class,” Catharine Parr Traill wrote in her pioneer memoir The Backwoods of Canada, form “the class of people to whom this land is so admirably adapted … the unlettered and industrious labourers and artisans.”
A weather-beaten region open to the sea on three sides, the Scottish Highlands were still a world apart in the eighteenth century. There were no roads. My Gaelic-speaking preliterate ancestors banded together in tribal groups—clachans or clans—in crofting townships. Their bothies—windowless, one-room huts of turf and stone—had dirt floors and smoke-holes cut into the heather-thatched roofs. They tore thin topsoil out of the stony moors and grew meagre crops of oats, barley and potatoes. But the drudgery of crofting life was relieved in the gloam’in, the half-light, when families gathered for ceilidhs around a peat fire. They sang the laments and pibrochs, listened to the seannachie—the hereditary clan bard—recount stories of our ancestors’ heroic deeds. They kept our history and culture alive for centuries through the Gaelic oral tradition.
My Sutherland ancestors were proud of their status as warriors. When Samuel Johnson toured the Highlands in 1773 he observed, “Every man is a soldier.” A clansman was trained to fight from boyhood, taught to belt out his clan motto as he rushed headlong into the fray. Murray lads, wielding basket-hilted broadswords and Lochaber axes, charged our age-old enemies—the Campbells, MacKays, Sinclairs or Drummonds—bellowing our war cry over the moors: Firth, fortune and fill the fetters!
The Murrays were renowned for their military strength, our history one of continuous clan feuds and wars against the British conquerors. In the legendary Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, the Murrays aided Robert the Bruce in becoming king of a united Scotland. On the bleak expanse of Culloden Moor in 1745, William Murray, Duke of Atholl, and his younger brother Lord George Murray supported Bonnie Prince Charlie’s attempt to regain the English throne with three thousand Murray clansmen. Commander of the Prince’s army, “Geordie” was celebrated for his inspiring leadership in the eighteenth-century Scots jig “Atholl Highlanders”:
Wha will ride wi’ gallant Murray, wha will ride for Geordie’s sel’?
He’s the flower o’ Glenisla and the darlin’ o’ Dunkeld.
See the white rose on his bonnet, see his banner o’er the Tay.
His guid sword he now has drawn it and has flung the sheath away.
Every faithful Murray follows, first of heroes, best of men.
Every true and trusty Stuart blythely leaves his native glen.
Atholl lads are lads of honour, westland rogues are rebels a.’
When we come within their border we may gar the Campbells’ claw.
As Jeff was heading off to Afghanistan, I sent him these lyrics along with a CD of the Battlefield Band’s spirited rendition of the song. I wrote in my accompanying letter, Dear Jefferson Clifford, All we Murrays ride with you every day. Firth, fortune.… I offered words as a talisman for my nephew. Since time immemorial, warriors have carried tokens or charms to safeguard them during their trials. “We’ve always turned to amulets,” Jungian psychologist James Hillman explains in A Terrible Love of War, “invoking powers beyond [our] ken, recognizing war is out of our hands, that it is a religious phenomenon, mystical, mythical.” I put my faith in the power of words, wanting Jeff to feel that the love of all his relations and the spirits of our ancestors would guide and shield him.
Sylvie called upon the religious symbolism of her Catholic upbringing. She gave Jeff a Saint Christopher medal to carry on his journey. In the third century, Christopher—a tall, robust man—voluntarily ferried people on his broad shoulders across a dangerous rushing river. One day, he was transporting a small child, who grew increasingly heavy. Christopher, battling the swift current, had never borne such a load. Gasping for air as they reached the other side, Christopher told the child that they almost didn’t make it.
“You had on your shoulders the weight of the world,” the child replied. “I am the Christ. I carry the burden of the world’s sins on my shoulders.” Thus Christopher—meaning “Christ-carrier”—became the patron saint of travellers. His statues and pictures mark the entrances to churches, bridges and houses. They often bear an inscription: Whoever shall behold the image of St. Christopher shall not faint or fall on that day.
Marion heeded the same urge to shield her son with amulets. She had read about the protective energies in gemstones. Desperate to try anything, she made her first visit to a metaphysical store, Little Mysteries, in downtown Halifax. She chose gemstones with renowned strengthening properties: a pinkish-grey-streaked agate for victory in battle; a shard of clear quartz for healing; a pure black jet stone to dispel fearful thoughts; green jasper to promote health and restful sleep; a black-gold tiger’s eye to instill courage; a shimmering pink moonstone to prevent anxiety; and a black obsidian arrowhead, especially beneficial to Scorpios. She even followed the prescribed procedure to cleanse and energize the gems: exposed them to the rays of the sun and the beams of the moon above Eastern Passage, and dedicated their powers to safeguard her son who was now in a remote desert outpost. Jeff carried them with him on his final ride. The Saint Christopher medal and the gemstones, still within their shiny green drawstring pouch, were found tucked in a pocket of his uniform.
So too the Greek hero Achilles, the mightiest of warriors, could not be saved from his destiny. Even with a goddess for his mother, the sea goddess Thetis, a mother who dipped her infant son into the River Styx to make him immortal; a mother who disguised her warrior son as a girl so he would not be drafted into the Trojan War; a mother who even had a suit of divine armour forged to guard her son in battle. Still, Achilles could not escape his fate. He died young, slain by a god and by a man in the Trojan War. When Thetis dipped her baby son into the sacred river, the waters didn’t flow over the heel she held him by. Many years later, the arrow of a vengeful Paris, guided by Apollo, found the unguarded spot.
In the same way, Jeff’s talismans didn’t necessarily fail: he did not lack courage, nor did he succumb to anxiety or ill health. He didn’t engage in a battle, so victory wasn’t an issue. On July 4 he rode in the third vehicle in the convoy—the first one without ECM equipment. Death found a loophole in his protections.
Murray clan stories, blue-green Murray tartan ties, scarves, kilts and afghans; clan pins and crests, inscribed with our French heraldic motto, Tout Pret—“Quite Ready”—prevailed in Jeff’s upbringing and loomed large in his imagination. During his late teenage years, he dreamed he stood on a rocky cliff, dressed in a kilt, holding a shield in one hand and a sword in the other. This same dream recurred many times. He was so mystified and troubled by the dream that he told his mother about it. “He was really disturbed that he kept having the same dream,” Marion told me much later. “He felt it meant something, but he didn’t know what.” At this stage of his life, his adolescent rebellious phase, Jeff voiced intense opposition to the military. He had no inclination to become a soldier, or at least no conscious inclination. In the unconscious realm of dreams, however, was the guardian of his fate—his daimon, as Plato called it—reminding hi
m of his soul’s calling?
It wasn’t until a couple of weeks after Jeff’s death that I learned about these Highland warrior dreams. Our family had retreated to the cottage at Fanjoy’s Point. Shell-shocked, consumed by our loss, we were just embarking on the long road of recovery.
You turn off southern New Brunswick Highway 105 onto a narrow dirt road. You wind past fields of strawberries into a tree-canopied funnel of time, past cottages built in the forties and fifties. At the end of the lane, you reach a lighthouse beacon and a red cottage set back in the trees. The rocky point exudes the spirits of wind, water, ancient rocks, old-growth pine, and its first inhabitants; their bones lie in an overgrown Loyalist burial plot a few feet outside the back door. This cottage has been the navel of our family life since my sisters bought it twenty-five years ago. It’s a place alive with memories—birthday celebrations, horseshoe games; sun-filled days spent basking like lizards on the sandstone rocks between cooling dips in the lake; long summer evenings of wining and dining and saffron sunsets. The place we marked the changes in our growing children every summer.
As a teenager, Jeff labelled the cottage “Base Boring.” He resented having to come here every summer vacation. But in his adult years, Fanjoy’s Point became his refuge, a space to relax and unite with his extended family; it was the one place that remained constant throughout his transient military upbringing, imbued with the feeling of home. He had his own separate room in the “bunkhouse” adjoining the garage. Its east window brings in the morning sun, the sound of waves lapping low on the rocks and poplars sifting in the breeze.
For Your Tomorrow Page 4