For Your Tomorrow (8 page)

M
ARION AND
R
USS
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.

O
NE MORNING IN
N
OVEMBER
, 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 bottom.
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!”

“Ma’am, is this your grandson?”

Jeff doesn’t wait for an answer. “Hi, Granny.” He breezes past her through the door. “I wanted to see you today.”

A
S A BOY
, J
EFF OFTEN
revealed the courage and determination to “slay the giant,” to challenge the authority of an adult who tried to block his intentions or, perhaps, his soul’s yearnings. Longing to connect with his unknown grandfather-namesake, he would search through the stacks of old photo albums to find pictures of Clifford, and question his grandmother about each one. He’d sit in her rocking
chair, staring up at his grandfather’s Second World War service certificate, and ask if he could hold his grandfather’s military medals with their colourful ribbons. He would rub his fingers over their shiny faces, wanting to know what each bronze disc signified.

One day, when he was in first grade, Jeff pleaded with his mother to let him take one particular picture of his grandfather to school. It was only a 2-by-2-inch, black-and-white photo, but it loomed large in the imagination of six-year-old Jeff: his uniformed grandfather sits, smiling, atop a huge Centurion tank. “Sorry, Jeff,” his mother said, “but you can’t take the picture to school. It might get lost or torn.”

A few days later, Marion was doing the laundry and about to put Jeff’s blue jeans into the washer. She felt something tucked inside the front pocket, reached in and pulled out his grandfather’s photo—crumpled and creased from its journey to school and back.

Now, it seems that Jeff’s grandfather was like a spirit guide for him—the semi-mythical ancestor who embodied Jeff’s own calling. Thirty years later, when Jeff was perched in the commanding hatch of his LAV in Afghanistan, Marion taped this wrinkled picture of his grandfather onto her fridge. Beside it, she placed a photo of Jeff in his uniform, and the lyrics of “The Atholl Highlanders”—
All we Murrays ride with you every day
.

I
T’S A
S
ATURDAY
afternoon in early November just before his eighth birthday. Jeff and his grandmother are playing a game of crazy eights at the kitchen table. He’s staying for the weekend with her and his step-grandfather, Jack, at their home in rural New Maryland. “Granny, can we go to the mall? Jeff asks. “I want to show you this really cool race car set at Zellers.” He flashes a gap-toothed grin. “My birthday is only six days away you know.”

“That would be fun,” she says, getting up to go into the living room. “Let’s see if Jack will drive us there.” Jack is lounging with his feet up in his brown velour La-Z-Boy, eyes glued to the TV—the Saturday afternoon football game.

“It’s a tie game,” he says. “I can’t miss the last quarter.”

Alma glares at him, hands on her hips. She has her licence, but hasn’t driven a car for many years. As a young woman she learned to drive on rural dirt roads, but only got behind the wheel to drive a few miles to the shore in Malagash. She looks at Jeff’s deflated face.
It’s only six miles into Fredericton
, she thinks.
And there’s not much traffic on this road
. “Well, then,” she says, “I guess I’ll just have to take the car myself. What do you think, Jeffy?”

“Yeah! You can do it, Granny,” he says, eyes sparkling. “You’re a good driver.”

“Okay,” she says, “let’s go.” They climb into Jack’s new maroon and tan Oldsmobile sedan, two pals off on an adventure. She drives slowly down the long driveway onto the main road, her moist hands gripping the steering wheel. She isn’t accustomed to the car’s more modern features—power steering, power brakes, automatic locks, push-button
windows. But the road is traffic free, and she’s going well below the speed limit. There’s just that one busy intersection with traffic lights where they have to turn left onto Prospect Street, she thinks, then the mall is right there on the corner.

Jeff is fingering all the shiny silver buttons on his door, curious to see what they’re for and how they work. “Granny, I’m hot,” he says. “Can I put my window down a bit?”

“Sure. Go ahead,” she says, her eyes fixed on the road, hands white-knuckled in the ten o’clock—two o’clock position. Jeff presses all the buttons, but nothing happens. So she reaches over with her right hand, across the wide bench seat to help him. Her left hand jerks the steering wheel towards the side of the road. The car swerves. Tires crunch onto the gravel shoulder. The Olds careens down a steep six-foot embankment, and lands nose-down in the ditch.

Twenty-two years later, we found the letter tucked away in her cedar chest. At the bottom of the blue-lined notepaper
she’d written,
Nov. 5
^th
1978
—
Oldsmobile went in a deep ditch in New Maryland
. It’s one of the stories engraved in our family’s collective memory. It encapsulates their relationship—his grandmother’s helper role and Jeff’s appreciation of her unwavering assistance. This letter was the first of many that Jeff would write to his grandmother over the years, all of which she saved in the chest that kept her cherished possessions. These letters trace Jeff’s growth throughout childhood, then his struggles with school during his stormy adolescence: