——
Two weeks after Jeff’s death, I arrive at the cottage before the rest of the family. I want to clean and air out his room, make it feel less forlorn. I shove hard on the wooden door, sticky after the winter’s moisture. A closed-up, musty odour permeates the air. And I’m enveloped in Jeff’s familiar essence—his swimming trunks and T-shirts hanging from hooks, childhood books and board games stacked on shelves. A book of Foucault’s essays, his well-worn Blue Jays baseball cap, his sunglasses lie on the dresser where he left them, waiting for him to come back, pick them up, take them down to his favourite reading spot on the sun-warmed flatbed of the rocks. I sink onto his bed, pummelled by his absence.
I flash back to my last time with Jeff, here at Fanjoy’s Point one hot July weekend the summer before he went to Afghanistan. Our family didn’t know then about his deployment, and didn’t want to discuss the possibility—or probability. We buried our heads in the desert sand. Each of us silently harboured our dread.
That July weekend of 2006, we are celebrating Marion’s birthday and showering Sylvie and Jeff with gifts for their baby due in early November, the much anticipated first child of the next generation. In the screened-in dining porch overlooking the lake, we feast on lobster—our family’s madeleine. We suck the tender tidbits from the spindly legs, crack the red tails and claws, dip the flesh into melted butter, scrape the green tomalley and coral roe from the bodies—a two-hour ritual of digging out and savouring every morsel, while sipping copious glasses of chilled muscat from the Jost Winery in Malagash. The lake and sky turn a fiery orange as Marion blows out her candles, and we gorge on rich chocolate mud cake, topped with raspberry gelato.
Then Jeff starts playing DJ. He has an uncanny ability to choose just the right songs to stir each one of his boomer-generation parents and aunts into dancing mode. He puts on the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman.” My oldest sister, Marilyn, jumps up, grabs Russ’s hand, and they dance into the middle of the floor. Jiving together for as many years as Jeff can remember, they whirl and twirl, duck under each other’s arms, in synch with every step.
Reared on a continuous soundtrack of Van (“He’s my man!”) Morrison, Jeff knows how to get his mother up. “G-L-O-R-I-A!” Marion struts onto the floor, her lips in a puckered pout, head bobbing backward and forward; one hand on her hip, the other pointing and wagging—a dead-on imitation of Mick Jagger. We bellow along, harking back to our teenage dances at the Oromocto boat club, stomping and sweating to Don Corey’s band—“gotta shout about it.… Gloria!”
Then DJ Jeff plays the “golden voice” that will pull the youngest sister up onto the floor.
Ah we’re drinking and we’re dancing
and the band is really happening
and the Johnny Walker wisdom running high …
I leap up to join the circle of dancers. As Cohen’s monotonal voice sings about women tearing their blouses off and men dancing on the polka dots, I lift my orange tank top up over my head, throw it onto the floor, stripped down to my hot pink lululemon bra. Jeff doubles over in laughter; his face and shaven head glowing in the candlelight. Sylvie on one side of him and Mica on the other, they raise their Scotch glasses to the dancers … dancing into memory—busted in the blinding lights of Closing Time, Closing Time, Closing Time.
He leaves quietly at four the next morning to fly back to CFB Shilo. It will be three months later, in mid-November—after the birth of his son—that we will have our have our suspicions confirmed. He is in training for deployment to Afghanistan in February 2007.
So it is here at the cottage on Grand Lake, a couple of weeks after his death, that I have my dream about Jeff—the first one anyone in our family has had about him since he died. We have all been waiting and watching for a sign, desperate to feel his continued existence in some form. I awake mystified by the mysterious imagery, reluctant to talk about the dream when I first get up. But as Marion and I sit with our coffee in the early morning sunshine, watching two loons dive and re-emerge in the glassy lake, I describe it to her:
Jeff is standing on a high cliff. He wears a kilt, knee socks, a billowing white shirt. He waves his arms in the graceful fluid motions of some martial art, like t’ai chi. And he is smiling.
“It was such a peaceful image,” I say. Marion looks at me, astounded, then recounts the similar Highland warrior dreams Jeff related as a teenager—the same age as his grandfathers when they enlisted in the Second World War; the age of St. Martin when he experienced the vision that changed the course of his life.
As Jeff was moving from childhood into adulthood, was he tapping into the buried self within? Freudians believe that dreams manifest our repressed desires. Jung interpreted them as symbolic representations of the dreamer’s unconscious. Dreams during puberty until age twenty are especially significant, he said, particularly ones that show no relation to the dreamer’s conscious situation. “Called ‘great dreams’ by the primitives,” Jung writes in Children’s Dreams, “they are like an oracle, ‘somnia a deo missa’—Dreams sent by God.”
Jeff’s dream connected him to his ancestral past and, at the same time, presaged his warrior destiny. It foretold ambitions that would take him another decade to consciously embrace. “The dream is an inexhaustible source of spiritual information about yourself,” writes Joseph Campbell. “The dream is the private myth.” And what of my dream? Without any prior knowledge of Jeff’s Highland warrior dreams, I envisaged him within his “private myth”—the first sign that we were given.
After my grandmother died, my mother inherited my father’s Second World War service certificate. It hung in her living room gallery of family photographs until her death. Then, at her bequest, the framed certificate and my father’s military medals went to Jeff—linked by name, character and inevitable vocation to the grandfather he’d never known. My father died unexpectedly and unaccountably. When he returned in the winter of ′68 from six months of United Nations peacekeeping duty in Cyprus, he couldn’t carry the garbage cans to the end of our driveway without straining for breath and reddening in the face. Suddenly, my father—whom I’d never seen sick a day in his life—had to travel to Halifax to undergo medical tests at the Camp Hill Hospital.
A weekend in late April, we drove from Oromocto to his childhood home in Tatamagouche Mountain. He was staying there overnight, and his twin sister would drive him to Halifax the next day. Arms folded across his chest, he leaned against the veranda of the red shingled farmhouse—the house built by his father and grandfather, where he’d been born forty-five years earlier. He waved, unsmiling, and watched our car disappear down the lane. I had no idea that this would be the last time I’d see my father standing there, or anywhere. At seventeen, I still believed he was invincible, as rock solid and enduring as his name—a Cliff.
We visited him in the hospital two weeks later; an oxygen mask covered his mouth and nose, so he couldn’t talk to us. But he spoke powerfully through his eyes, wide, fearful eyes that knew of his fate. We drove back from the hospital that day through city streets lined with leafing trees and lilac bushes flaunting their sweet fragrance. The car radio played Glen Campbell’s hit song:
I wanna live
Till I get old
I wanna watch all of this grow
I wanna live, live and let live …
And all I could see was my father’s face, his lambent hazel eyes. A few days later, a week before I was to graduate from high school, he died.
The medical diagnosis was pulmonary fibrosis, an environmentally induced form of lung cancer. The military’s investigation concluded that it was caused by my father’s work in a salt mine for a few years and exacerbated by his military service with the United Nations in hot desert climates—a year in the Sinai Desert in the early sixties, then six months in Cyprus. So this was the story we told ourselves, and others, for many years. But we now suspect a more disturbing reason for his sudden illness and death. Only a few kilometres from home, he breathed in the toxic chemicals
that slowly and silently killed him.
In 2005 Canadian media reports disclosed the extensive spraying of herbicides and defoliants, Agent Orange and the more lethal Agent Purple, to clear brush for military exercises at CFB Gagetown during the sixties—the years my father worked every summer in the training area. Dioxins from these herbicides have been linked to many fatal health conditions, including respiratory cancers. In 2007 the federal government admitted culpability. Compensation payments of $20,000 were awarded to people who had worked at CFB Gagetown during the sixties and had since suffered an illness associated with these herbicides. These people, of course, had to still be alive to apply for the compensation—unlike my father, robbed of his life, betrayed by the country he had sworn an oath to serve.
After my father’s death, my mother—a youthful thirty-eight years old—sank into a black pit of despair so deep that she couldn’t get up in the morning. My older sisters were just setting out on careers as independent working women, and I was about to begin university. Her nest was completely and abruptly empty. With no other identity but wife and mother to sustain her, she lost her will to live. She was hospitalized for months, jolted with electroshock therapy, and sent home with many bottles of different-coloured pills.
When my mother, Marion Alma McGrath, came of age in 1940s rural Nova Scotia, men grew up to become farmers, salt miners or lobster fishermen, and women grew up to become their wives. Alma wanted to be a teacher. Until a summer Saturday evening in 1946 at the Malagash Union dance hall. Sweet-sixteen in her dirndl skirt, white bobby socks and saddle shoes, she fox-trotted with Clifford Murray. Twenty-four years old, he had just returned from the war overseas and was working at the Malagash salt mine. He had a prominent Kirk Douglas–like dimple in his chin and an irresistible grin. They courted for a year while Alma completed grade ten; then they married on a sunny afternoon in June at the United Church manse. She was just seventeen, a willowy raven-haired beauty in her brown wool-crepe suit, pink silk blouse, pink felt hat and a corsage of pink sweetheart roses.
Amid a shower of confetti at Malagash Station, they boarded the train to embark on their honeymoon. As it chugged out of the station, iron wheels click-clanging over steel rails, Alma watched the familiar landscape recede through the window, and the adolescent schoolgirl and obedient daughter slip away. She was Mrs. Clifford Murray, en route to becoming the mother of three baby girls, born within three years, her three Ms—each with “Clifford’s trademark” dimple in her chin. When the salt mine closed in the mid-fifties, my father re-enlisted in the military. He served his country—often in faraway places—while my mother remained home, serving her family.
Our kitchen always smelled of something baking: bread, biscuits, gingersnaps, pies. The living room was fragrant with lemon oil burnishing the walnut tables and hardwood floor. Our clothes, sheets and towels smelled of fresh air and sunshine. Every Monday she washed them in her wringer washer and hung them out on the line to dry. On Tuesdays she ironed—everything (sheets, towels, dishcloths, underwear)—and starched and pressed all our dresses and blouses. Even in the evenings when she relaxed to watch TV, her hands kept busy, knitting sweaters, hats and mittens for us. She kept our home as spotless and orderly as the soldiers kept their barracks, ready for inspection every six months.
Those were “the tranquilized fifties,” as Betty Friedan called them; women made careers of domestic perfection and lived lives of quiet desperation. Military wives, like my mother, endured the loneliness and alienation of living in PMQs (permanent married quarters) while their husbands were absent for extended periods on military exercises or overseas deployment. Just a few months into 1962, the year my father served in Egypt, my mother was so despondent that we went to live with relatives in Nova Scotia until he came home. When he was in Cyprus in the fall of 1967, I would come home from school at noon to find her still in bed. After that six-month tour of duty, he promised my mother he wouldn’t ever go away again. In the spring of ′68, just before his illness, they bought a small travel trailer, anticipating their dawning freedom now that their children were grown. But Clifford went away again—for good this time.
Two years later, the birth of Jefferson Clifford was a beam of light that lifted our family from the shadow of my father’s death. He was like the magical child of the myths, the boy my mother had always longed for but never had—a saviour. Every woman knows that the remedy for grief / is being needed, writes Rita Dove in “Mother Love.” My mother was certainly needed. Marion was working full time while Russ was completing his third year at university. And so began the extraordinary bonding of Jeff and his beloved Granny.
MARION AND RUSS bring their five-day-old son home from the hospital and carry him into the room that Marion has specially decorated for him. Red-and-white gingham curtains hang from the window. A red woollen rug covers the floor. A white dresser, draped with a red scarf, sits against one wall. A wooden rocker, with a red cushioned seat, waits by the window. They lay him in a white wicker bassinet with a red-and-white-chequered lining, pillow and quilt. A few months later, baby Jeff sleeps in a white crib with red flower decals. He lies on his back and kicks his legs, watching red teddy bears and white lambs circle around and around under a red-and-white umbrella-mobile.
I think about the strange synchronicity—the circle of red and white. They’re not typical colours for a baby’s room. But they would be the colours of the flag under which Jeff would one day serve—the Canadian flag that would blanket him as he lay in the white satin lining of his coffin.
II. CHILD OF DESTINY
In the myth, the child proves himself by confronting a physical force or by receiving a divine blessing. He kills the giant—the irrational authority of the adult who would suppress him.… Each of us has felt the frustration in childhood of being constantly thwarted by adults, of being treated as a child when we knew we were no longer one.
David Adams Leeming,
Mythology: The Voyage of the Hero
The child is the father of the man.
William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up”
ONE MORNING IN NOVEMBER, shortly after his fourth birthday, Jeff isn’t at daycare as he usually is during the week. He’s at home, trying to play quietly by himself while his dad studies for military exams. He watched his favourite TV shows—Sesame Street and The Friendly Giant; built tall towers with his Lego blocks, then crashed them down with the shiny silver airplane he got for his birthday. Now he’s sitting up beside his dad at the kitchen table, covered with piles of papers and books—thick books without any pictures. He pulls a brown crayon out of his new Crayola box, draws a big cake—chocolate—like the one his Granny made for his birthday. Four candles on top—red, blue, yellow, green—and an orange flame on each one. He puts red hearts around the cake, thinking I’ll give this picture to Granny, and wishing he could take it to her today. His dad doesn’t have time to play; his head is buried in all those books and papers covered in lines of tiny black letters.
“Dad, can we go visit Granny?”
“No, not today,” Russ says, glancing up from his book. “Mom took the car to work. It’s a long walk to Granny’s place, and it’s really chilly outside. We can’t walk that far in the cold.”
“I can walk there, Dad. I’ll put on my snowsuit and boots. I won’t be cold. Please.”
“Sorry, Jeff, we can’t go today.”
“But I drew a picture for Granny.”
“You can give it to her on Sunday when we go there for supper.” Russ gets up from the table. “I’m going to make lunch now; then you need to have your nap. We can play after you wake up.”
After Russ reads Jeff his favourite picture book, Little Red Riding Hood, and tucks him into bed, he stretches out on the couch to read another military manual. He wakes up an hour or so later. The house seems unusually still. He’s sure having a good nap, Russ thinks as he tiptoes upstairs and peeks into Jeff’s room. His bunk bed is empty; only a blue-and-red comforter in a rumpled heap at the bott
om. He must be in the basement, shooting balls into his hockey net. He opens the basement door; there are no comforting sounds of a stick scraping cement or a rubber ball careening off the walls, no reply to his calling—“Jeff?” He’s probably hiding, trying to fool his old man. Russ hurries from room to room, peers under the beds, in the closets, behind the chairs. At the back door, the little black boots aren’t on the boot tray; the red snowsuit is not hanging on the hook. He rushes outside; calls around the empty courtyard of their row house; races back into the house and grabs the phone.
When Marion answers, he blurts out, “Jeff’s gone.”
“What do you mean?”
“I put him down for his nap, then fell asleep on the couch. He was gone when I woke up. I’ve looked everywhere—in the house and outside.”
“I’m leaving now—I’ll be right home.”
As soon as Russ hangs up, the phone rings.
Jeff strides along the grassy edge of Waasis Road—the town’s main thoroughfare—with a Big Bird knapsack on his back. His red snowsuit gapes open, his boots flap unbuckled. His sandy brown hair blows in the biting wind. Cars and trucks swish past. A van pulls over to the side of the road just ahead of him. Two men get out.
“Where are you going, son?”
“To my granny’s house.”
“Would you like a ride?”
“Okay.”
“Where does your granny live?”
“You go down this road. I can show you.” Jeff watches out the window of the back seat as they drive past the soccer field, past the track where his mom goes running. “There it is!” he says, when he sees the red-brick apartment building on the corner of Gilmour Street, “That’s Granny’s house.”
Alma has her hands submerged in a bowl of bread dough when the doorbell rings. Wouldn’t you know it—who could that be? She scrapes the sticky dough from between her fingers as the ding-dong sounds again. She peeks through the tiny viewer in the door—two men in khaki uniforms, provosts, the military police. She fumbles with the safety latch and opens the door. Her gaze drops to a freckled face, hazel eyes looking up at her. “Jeffy!”
For Your Tomorrow Page 5