For Your Tomorrow
Page 20
The soul moves in circles, said Plotinus, hovering, returning, and renewing.
I feel a tug on my skirt. Ry peers up at me with imploring eyes. “Nage?”
“Mais oui,” I say, smiling. “On va à Malagash maintenant.”
We park in front of a sandy-brown cottage with a red A-shaped roof, tucked in the salt-water maple and spruce trees—“Alma–Cliff Cottage” on the sign above the door. It remains a work in progress on the inside—rafters, two-by-four studs, pressboard walls, electrical wiring still exposed. But it feels homey and comfortable, furnished with our grandparents’ wooden drop-leaf table, our uncle’s handmade pine chairs, Mom’s and Jeff’s linens, kitchen appliances, dishes, cutlery, cooking utensils. Colourful rugs cover the painted cement floor. A picture window looks out upon the sea.
It’s our first family gathering at the Alma—Cliff. Ry, the fifth generation on this ancestral land, scampers about, checking out this strange house with curtain walls. From the screened-in porch, he stares out at the seagulls screeching over the Strait. We eat warm biscuits topped with juicy strawberries and whipped cream. Then Ry and I don our bathing suits; his is a navy blue UV suit with yellow flames streaking up the sides.
I take his soft hand in mine, and we step down the sandstone path through Jeff’s Way, past the ferns, variegated hostas and evergreen shrubs, past the horseshoe pits, through the feathery grass. His small sandalled feet stumble on the rocky bank, so I carry him down to the shore. Long-legged sandpipers skitter and squeak, peet-weet, peet-weet, heads bobbing into the foam. His toes touch the cool water, and he flinches. But he’s soon entranced by this new world of tidal pools—scuttling crabs, iridescent mussel shells, purple starfish, slimy lime-green sea grass draping the boulders. He digs in the wet sand with a clamshell and mounds it over the barnacled rocks. I lie down beside him and paddle my feet, gently splashing water over his face. He licks his lips, tastes its saltiness and smiles uncertainly.
I sling him onto my hip, and we wade into the sea. At low tide we can walk out a long way, see through the clear brine, down to the rippled sandbar of the ocean floor. Tiny hermit crabs scurry. Burgundy blobs of jellyfish drift, trailing wispy hair-like tentacles. Yellow-brown strands of seaweed float in the sun-dappled water. We stop and turn around to look back. We are far from the shore where his grandparents stand, waving. Ry gazes at them for several seconds, then turns back and points out to the infinite blue sea and merging sky. “Go!” he says.
And so we go, headlong into the waves.
SOURCES AND PERMISSIONS
The opening quotation from the foreword to Outside the Wire: The War in Afghanistan in the Words of Its Participants, eds. Kevin Patterson and Jane Warren, Random House Canada, by Roméo Dallaire © 2007. Reprinted by permission of Westwood Creative Artists Ltd.
PROLOGUE
The epigraph is from American Pastoral, copyright © 1997 by Philip Roth. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
The quotation “We are a spark beleaguered by darkness …” is from Earle Birney’s poem “Vancouver Lights” in Fall by Fury, McClelland & Stewart, 1978.
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, translated by Katherine Woods, Harcourt Brace, 1971.
Joseph Campbell quotations are from The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1949; and The Power of Myth, Doubleday, 1988.
“Amor fati” reference is from Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, by James Hollis, Inner City Books, 2001.
CHAPTER 1: BIRTH
Katherine G. Sutherland, from her essay “Land of their Graves” in Response to Death: The Literary Work of Mourning, ed. Christian Riegel, University of Alberta Press, 2005. Reprinted with permission.
Saint Martin’s story appears in The Catholic Encyclopedia. www.newadvent.org.
The Joseph Campbell quotation is from The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1949.
The Rudolf Steiner quotation is from a lecture cited without reference by Elisabeth Vreede in Anthroposophy and Astrology: The Astronomical Letters of Elisabeth Vreede, Steiner Books, 2001.
The Goethe quotation is from Conception, Birth & Early Childhood, by Norbert Glas, Steiner Books, 1983.
The information and quotations about Mars and Scorpio come from The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, by Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, translated by John Buchanan-Brown, Penguin, 1969.
The John Prebble quotation is from The Highland Clearances, Penguin, 1963.
Angus Sutherland’s story appears in The Rise and Decline of the Community of Earltown: 1813-1970, by G.R. Sutherland, Colchester Historical Museum, 1980.
The Catharine Parr Traill quotation is from The Backwoods of Canada, McClelland & Stewart, 1966.
The Samuel Johnson quotation is in How Scots Invented the Modern World, by Arthur Herman, Crown, 2001.
James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War, Penguin, 2004.
St. Christopher’s story is from The Catholic Encyclopaedia. www.newadvent.org.
The story of Thetis and Achilles appears in Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, by Edith Hamilton, Grand Central Publishing, 1969.
Leonard Cohen’s “Closing Time,” from the CD The Future, Sony, 1992.
Jung quotation from Children’s Dreams, Princeton University Press, 2008.
Joseph Campbell quotation from The Power of Myth, Doubleday, 1988.
Rita Dove quotation from her poem “Mother Love,” in Mother Love: Poems, Norton, 1996.
CHAPTER 2: CHILD OF DESTINY
David Adams Leeming, Mythology: The Voyage of the Hero, Oxford, 1998. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Washington Square Press, 1996.
“I am a part of all that I have met” is from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed. Norton, 2001.
“[T]hrough the unknown, remembered gate” is from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., Norton, 2001.
CHAPTER 3: CROSSROADS
James Hollis, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, Inner City Books, 2001. Reprinted with permission.
CHAPTER 4: THE VOID
Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings, translated by Thomas Cleary, Shambhala, 2000.
Chögyam Trungpa, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Shambhala, 2007.
James Hollis, from Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, Inner City Books, 2001.
Salary figures for Canadian Forces members and civilian workers are from a Statistics Canada report by Jungee Park, “A Profile of the Canadian Forces” in Perspectives (July 2008).
The phrase “changed, changed utterly” is from W.B. Yeats’s poem “Easter 1916,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., Norton, 2001.
Van Morrison’s “The Philosopher’s Stone” is from the CD The Philosopher’s Stone, Polydor, 1998.
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, Doubleday, 1988.
“It is easier not to take the journey … but then life can dry up” is from The Power of Myth.
“ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, Back Bay Books, 1976.
“[T]o strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” is from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., Norton, 2001.
Nichola Goddard’s letter is in Outside the Wire: The War in Afghanistan in the Words of Its Participants, ed. Kevin Patterson and Jane Warren, Random House, 2007.
CHAPTER 5: GOODBYE
Excerpt from Heroes: The Champions of Our Literary Imaginations, copyright 2007, by Bruce Meyer, published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Timothy Findley, The Wars, Penguin, 1977.
CHAPTER 6: AFGHANISTAN
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, Doubleda
y, 1988. Reprinted with permission.
“Fear no more the heat ’o the sun …” is a quotation from Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage, Penguin, 1969.
The Aztecs’ “the house of the sun” is from The Codex Mendoza, Vol. 1, by Frances F. Berden and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, University of California Press, 1991.
CHAPTER 7: ASCENSION
“The Flight of Quetzalcoatl” is from Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, and Oceania, 2nd ed., Jerome Rothenberg, University of California Press, 1985. Reprinted with permission.
CHAPTER 8: TEARS
Archibald Macleish, “Ars Poetica,” Archibald MacLeish: Collected Poems 1917-82, Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Copyright © 1985 by The Estate of Archibald MacLeish. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
The quotation “Home they brought her warrior dead …” is from Tennyson’s poem “The Princess,” in Tennyson: Poems, Knopf, 2004.
The story of Isis comes from James Frazer’s The New Golden Bough, S.G. Phillips, 1959.
Niobe’s story appears in Bulfinch’s Mythology: The Age of Fable, by Robert Graves, Doubleday, 1968.
CHAPTER 9: FIFTY BRIDGES
Chase Twichell, “Saint Animal,” The Snow Watcher Poems, Ontario Review Press, 1998. Reprinted with permission.
“The dove is never free” is from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” on the CD The Future, Sony, 1992.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Dover, 2002.
“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies …” is from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies,” The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, eds. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Norton, 1985.
Reverend Jane’s verse is from Peace in Every Step, by Thich Nhat Hanh, Bantam, 1992.
CHAPTER 10: DESCENT
Rita Dove’s poem “Demeter Mourning” is in Mother Love: Poems, Norton, 1996. Copyright 1995 by Rita Dove. Used by permission of W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.
Inanna’s story is from Sumerian Mythology by S.N. Kramer, Harper Torchbooks, 1961; and Myths of the Female Divine Goddess, by David Leeming and Jake Page, Oxford, 1994.
The stories of Isis and Demeter come from The New Golden Bough by James Frazer, S.G. Phillips, 1959.
The Theodore Roosevelt quotation is in Nichola Goddard’s letter in Outside the Wire: The War in Afghanistan in the Words of Its Participants, eds. Kevin Patterson and Jane Warren, Random House Canada, 2007.
EPILOGUE
T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets, Faber and Faber, 1942.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, translated by J.B. Baillie, Dover Publications, 2003.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am deeply indebted to many people for their contribution, advice and support during the writing of this book: my friend Mary Ellen Holland, who encouraged me to write it and bolstered me every step of the journey; Jeff’s comrades—Scott Lang, Clay Cochrane, Sean Connors, Jason Francis, Craig Etherlston, Stephen Ker, Chris Henderson, Tim Haveman—who told their stories about Jeff as a soldier, his final mission and the aftermath of his death; Joselyn Morley, Pauline Rankin and Alan Hunt, who relayed their memories of Jeff during his decade at Carleton University.
Lee Windsor, David Charters and Brent Wilson’s book, Kandahar Tour: The Turning Point in Canada’s Afghan Mission, was an indispensable source of information on Task Force 1-07’s training and its operations in Kandahar province.
I am grateful to Karen Connelly, my mentor at the Humber School of Creative Writing, for her invaluable guidance; to my editor, Craig Pyette, for his unfailingly sound, insightful editorial suggestions; to Doris Cowan for her astute copy editing; and to Denise Bukowski, my literary agent par excellence.
I wish to thank Okanagan College for granting me financial assistance and release time to work on this project, as well as my English Department colleagues for their steadfast encouragement, especially Frances Greenslade, John Lent, Alix Hawley and Craig McLuckie.
Finally, this book could not have been written without the involvement and loving support of my family: my son, Damian, who drove me around the Scottish Highlands; Marion, Russ, Mica, Sylvie and Marilyn—who delved into their deep wells of memory and allowed me to be the seannachie.
MELANIE MURRAY grew up in the military town of Oromocto, New Brunswick, during the 1960s while her father was a soldier at CFB Gagetown. She has been living in Kelowna, British Columbia, since 1987, teaching English at Okanagan College and raising her two sons, Damian and Gabriel. Captain Jeff Francis is her nephew. For Your Tomorrow is her first book. www.melaniemurray.ca.