For Your Tomorrow (22 page)

Scott, as escort, steps in behind the red-and-blue flag of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery to accompany Jeff’s carrying party: three members of his Lucky 13 team, three Sperwan Ghar bunkmates and his two cousins. Their ears brushing the casket; their ashen faces contorted with the burden they shoulder—the body of their comrade, friend and cousin. When all the boots are still, only the flags move slightly in the skittish breeze that has picked up. Row upon row of soldiers stand, heads bowed, berets held over their
hearts. In this prolonged pause, the only sound is of muffled sobbing; Scott feels time stop. The world shuts down. Nothing else matters.

“The light that brings life to the world,” the padre says, “will never allow the powers of darkness to overcome the light of Canadians like these.” He touches on each soldier’s life, conjures up their faces, their voices, their strong active bodies—now so silent and still.
“Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,”
he intones, “I
shall fear no evil.”

The commanding officer calls for the final homage: “Task Force Afghanistan, to your fallen comrades, salute.” Thousands of hands dart to thousands of foreheads. A quick formal gesture, Scott thinks, but so leaden with finality. He joins Jeff’s carrying party as they approach the greenish-grey Hercules C-130 aircraft—“CANADA” emblazoned on its side. It rests with its cargo ramp down like some great winged beast waiting to receive the fallen warriors into its dark belly. The men carry the silver caskets into the cavity—massive Canadian flags shrouding its walls—and encircle them. They gaze at their comrades’ berets lying on top. Internally, they say their farewells.

The Hercules lifts off from the desert, its nose, windowed eyes and finned tail pointing up into the star-studded sky. The warriors ascend, beginning their return—like the mythic Hercules, himself, carried up in Zeus’s four-horsed chariot to dwell with the empyreal gods amid the shining stars.

Scott Lang glances over at the two escort officers facing him across the cramped aisle. Only nineteen and twenty-one
years old, they sit stiffly in the red webbed seats. Eyes downcast, they appear as numb as he feels. Ears plugged to mitigate the clamour of the Herc’s engines, they delve within themselves, engulfed by the duty they have only just begun: bringing their dead friend home to his family and conducting him to his final resting place.

The Hercules touches down at Camp Mirage, and a ramp ceremony again honours the six soldiers as their caskets are borne inside the airport. Scott and his fellow escort officers follow every step, ensuring the coffins are safely secured for the night. Early the next morning, they oversee the ceremonial reloading of the caskets aboard a Canadian Forces Airbus for the flight to Germany. At Ramstein Air Base, ramp rituals again pay tribute to the soldiers as their coffins are carried off the aircraft and laded again the next day. As Scott shadows every movement of Jeff’s casket in the four sombre services, he’s unfailingly brought to tears by the great respect and dignity accorded his comrades.

The metal-grey Airbus sinks through cotton puffs of clouds, beginning its descent onto Canadian soil. Captain Scott Lang shifts in his narrow seat and steels himself for the repatriation ceremony that’s about to unfold at CFB Trenton, Ontario. Wives, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters and brothers await their loved one’s return.

J
ULY
6. The early morning fog at Eastern Passage lies thick and heavy, merging land, sea and sky into one impenetrable haze. Gerry, a friend of our family since high school, arrives with Tim Hortons coffee and muffins, a big pot of chili he made last night and crusty whole wheat buns. He’s also brought the morning newspapers. Marion and Russ didn’t allow Jeff’s name to be released to the media until late yesterday, so their son’s photo and story are front and centre in the provincial and national papers. “It’s a good picture of him, Marion,” Gerry says, holding up the front page of
The Globe and Mail
.

Her smiling freckle-faced son in his helmet and tan uniform looks straight into her eyes. “Oh, my beautiful boy!” she cries and collapses onto the sofa. His boyish face, his name, his death—on the front page of the national newspaper.
How can this be possible?
She shakes her head, unable to absorb any of it. I sit down and put my arms around her. “When I heard
the door open this morning and a man’s voice, I thought it was Jeff … I thought Gerry was Jeff,” she says, shaking her head, bewildered. “I thought Jeff had come home.” All I can do is rock her back and forth in my arms—as she cries.

So much weeping. “Where can all the water come from?” Marion asks. Streams of salty tears fill the living room; seep outside onto the deck, cascade down the stairs, flow across the road and into the ocean. The high tide rises above the rocky bank, threatening to wash away the houses along Shore Road.

And so the gloomy skies open and torrential rains flood the highway as we drive to the Halifax airport. I’m following behind Marion and Russ’s green Mazda van. The military is flying them, along with Mica and Aaron, up to Toronto for the repatriation ceremony at CFB Trenton. My son Gabriel and I are picking up his older brother, Damian, who’s flying in from Vancouver. The wipers swoosh frantically on high speed, but we still can’t see through the water pouring down the windshield. Like many other cars on tourist-packed
Highway 102, I pull over until visibility improves. His seat in the reclining position, thirteen-year-old Gabriel is curled towards the door, hoodie over his head, earbuds plugged in. He’s dealing with death’s blow for the first time—witnessing his distraught aunt and uncle, hearing their anguished weeping. His green and golden realm of summer holidays has vanished: he, Russ and Jeff playing navy seals with their Super Soakers in Grand Lake. Up until now, war has been a video game—
Call of Duty
.

Damian emerges into the airport reception area, and I cry with relief and gratitude—guilty gratitude. Twenty-four years old, he’s a young man like Jeff in so many ways: a first-born son who has also inherited his grandfather Clifford’s reticent personality, gentle demeanour and trademark dimpled chin. Six foot two, like Jeff, he also thrives on intellectual challenges, as he begins his master’s degree at UBC this fall. It’s been a few years since Damian has seen his cousin Jeff; their summer vacations at the cottage just didn’t coincide.

We hurtle down the highway en route to Malagash on Nova Scotia’s north coast. To have both my sons safely stowed beside me in our rental car seems as much as I could ask for. “Whenever you say goodbye to someone,” Damian says, gazing out the window, “you should remember that it could be the last time you’ll ever see them.”

The pelting rain changes to showery mists when we turn off at the Folly Lake exit and wind through the green hills of the Wentworth Valley. We stop to buy groceries, and I’m exiting the store when my eye catches the newspaper
rack, the Halifax
Chronicle Herald
on top. Jeff stares at me from the front page:

Our family decided to avoid all the media coverage; it was just too painful. But I can’t resist picking up the paper and reading about my nephew—his life, and his violent death. Some details are inaccurate—his age, where he grew up—and upsetting: “An unidentified source said Capt. Francis wasn’t supposed to be in the vehicle when it went on patrol but offered to help out when a sixth person was needed.” Can
this be true?
Shoppers bustle around me with their carts, oblivious to this rent in the universe and the dazed woman, wiping away her trickling tears.

Sunlight is shafting through the clouds when we reach the crest of MacLean’s hill. Yellow-brown hayfields roll down to an indigo sea. I feel a visceral thrumming in my heart—the landscape of home. On the North Shore Road, across from the Union Hall where my parents met, we pass the house where I lived my first four years. The faded-red house of memory transformed to white vinyl siding and black shutters. Just down the hill, beyond the brook we were forbidden to play in, my McGrath grandparents’ house still stands,
but with a disorienting facelift as well. White siding covers the pale yellow shingles and green trim of the house that exists more powerfully in my memory. At the end of the lane, a swing hangs from the same branch of the silver maple where our swing once hung. We turn at the carved wooden sign—McGrath Lane—and drive down the rutted lane, through the woods, to our place on the shore.

When my mother, her sister and two brothers inherited my grandparents’ property, they divided the waterfront into four cottage lots. They have expansive views of the Northumberland Strait, the warmest salt water north of the Carolinas. My aunt and uncles built their cottages here some twenty years ago. But my mother’s land remained overgrown with alders, scruffy spruce and saltwater maples. She was proud, though, to leave the only property she had ever owned—her most valued possession—to her four grandchildren: Jeff, Mica, Damian and Gabriel. When packing up her belongings after her death, we found a picture we’d never seen, tucked away in the back of a cupboard—a framed print of a brown A-frame chalet surrounded by trees. On the back, written in her familiar script:

This picture now hangs in the travel trailer I parked on her land a few years after her death. Its wide front window
faces eastward down the Strait so that the rising sun streams through, summoning me to the day. Every summer I return here with my sons to be nurtured by the sea and by land that remembers me. And every summer, Marion and I take a few more steps towards realizing our mother’s dream, to build a place that’s rooted in the soil from which we grew—for our children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.… The building site is prepared, waiting for the cottage that we planned to have constructed this summer. But now, all has changed … 
changed utterly
.

Throughout the humid afternoon and evening, my sons dig into the red dirt and hack through the matted tangle of tree roots to make horseshoe pits. Dripping with sweat, they haul bucket after bucket of sand up from the shore and wheelbarrow it into the one-metre-square depressions. After a cooling swim, they still have enough daylight to throw their first shoes. I sit on the bank, inhaling the salty air, hearing thuds in the sand and occasional clinks on the iron stakes. The lights of Prince Edward Island blink across the water. Three hundred metres straight out, a reef stretches under the sea—shallow enough at low tide that my father would swim out during the off-season, hauling a lobster trap.

A solitary blue heron spires on the rocky shoal. Waves foam with lacy flounces, breaking and receding, the eternal sound of breathing, the ceaseless ebb and flow. Through eyes blurry with tears, I see Jeff sauntering down the sandbar in a white tank top and knee-length shorts. He wades through the lapping waves, his muscular body silhouetted against the violet and crimson sky.