For Your Tomorrow (6 page)

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 over 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”:

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 him 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.