Monthly Story (September '23): A Maxfield Parrish Sky

Fiction

Colonel McLean and his wife Margaret never had children of their own. Shifting from one posting to the next, and then the next, plus enduring long overseas assignments and separations, never gave them the right moment to unpack and make the start that Margaret McLean especially dreamed of. She’d always wanted a girl. “There are more than enough of you men around,” she liked to say in her flat, detached manner. Then, by the time of his retirement, after the horrors of Korea, they both realized it was too late.

They settled comfortably on sixty acres of Pennsylvania farm and woodland. The grounds and the surrounding two-lane roads offered the colonel a refuge to drive or walk alone with his camera. On his long solitary drives through the countryside, he discovered all the tiny chapels and Quaker meetinghouses and their graveyards, and he wandered the rows of headstones reading inscriptions and snapping photos. Often, especially in early spring, when animals had become more active again, he came by their dead bodies on the road and cursed the drivers who couldn’t be bothered to swerve or brake. These he photographed, too, and then used a stick kept in his trunk to remove the bodies from the road. Out of sight in the weeds, he reasoned, spared them at least some indignity. And, often, wandering his woods, he sensed that familiar stench, and bushwhacked off the trails to find a recent death among his animal neighbors. He developed the photographs in his third floor study’s darkroom, but only showed the quaint churches and meetinghouses to Margaret. The others he poured through alone at his desk, memorizing every one, wondering at their indifferent finality.

Except that she had no children to enjoy it with, and a husband she watched with a silent, worried eye, the setting pleased Margaret. It had fields, the creek running through the woods, an apple orchard, deer munching yard grass in the dawns and dusks, and, best, the venerable old fieldstone farm house itself. She’d gratefully forgotten the names of most of the hastily thrown together officer’s quarters she’d made-do in as she dreamed of such a place. With the indignant realization that this, at long last, was actually her first “home” as a married woman, she set about furnishing the rambling old house. She collected apples in their orchard and conjured pies, turnovers, fritters, and dumplings. She discovered patches of asparagus and rhubarb and, though they had grown well all on their own, she weeded and watered them anyway. When a neighbor told her about a nearby strawberry farm, she branched her baking out to include strawberry-rhubarb pies and added the homemade ice cream she remembered from her childhood. She marveled that finally they had left no trunk unpacked and found a place for everything they owned in this new place. When the colonel, turning to her in bed, apologetically alluded to her long suppressed desire for a family, she took his hand with a brave smile and repeated what had been their motto all along: “We soldier on and do our part.”

He squeezed her hand and turned over, then lay awake for hours, alert to the night sounds. It all should have been enough.

Mornings and evenings, he pulled on his heavy shoes to set out on his twice-a-day “constitutional,” dressed out of the L.L. Bean catalogue. Sweaters, scarves, tweed jackets, khaki trousers of durable fabric. Though he had taken off his uniform for the last time, anything he wore said “Soldier.” He followed the stream into the woods. In a hundred yards, out of the trees, he turned up a steep hill through a meadow and into neat rows of hemlock. Here, he stopped to listen to the birds out of sight in the top branches, trying to recognize their calls from the recordings he listened to in his attic study. He knew if he kept at it day after day he would become proficient, and the colonel liked nothing better than to discipline himself into proficiency. The practice had made his career as a staff officer. He would do the same with wildflowers in spring and summer. Daily practice and study would prepare him to walk a companion through these woods some day, pointing out the tiny blue asters and the calls of the warblers. Whatever they confronted, he would be able to identify and rattle off some fact of their life cycle or place in folklore. His constitutional led him out of the hemlock plantation to a fallow pasture sloping up to the edge of their property. At its crest two giant oaks stood forty yards apart framing the sky to the west. His Two Old Men, he called them. Here, he took his sunsets, heading home in the dark.

Every autumn Colonel and Mrs. McLean drove down to the Army-Navy football classic in Philadelphia. These trips challenged his self-discipline, as inevitably he could not un-notice the dead deer or cat or raccoon one sees on the road. More than once, he pulled onto the shoulder and got out. He took the long stick from the trunk and moved the bodies while passing cars slowed to watch what he was doing. He tried not to take a picture, but if he didn’t, the images came to him at odd moments, exaggerated in their detail. Margaret hesitantly patted his knee as he climbed back into the car. They spoke of it exactly once. Briefly. He never explained.

As part of these ritual journeys, they included a short visit with Margaret’s niece Jill, her late sister’s youngest child, and Jill’s precocious eleven-year-old daughter, Audrey. In truth, he never had much to say to anyone, but he was always willing to smile and offer a courtly greeting and then pretend to listen. Sadly, and maddenly, he could not miss Jill’s disordered apartment. The pile of dirty dishes in the sink, a bowl of soggy Cheerios left on the kitchen counter, and discarded articles of clothing embarrassed him as he sat adjusting and readjusting the crease in his pants while the two women chatted. The little girl had disappeared into a bedroom to talk on the telephone while a loud radio covered her conversation. He fought the urge to get on his feet and set the place aright. And then, out of this discomfort, the colonel invited Jill and her young daughter to come visit the farm. He fully respected that one does not make casual invitations, but this, he told himself, would meet everyone’s needs. “We’ll send you the fare, and I’ll come and meet you at the station,” he told them. “It’s a short drive to the farm.”

 Margaret’s eyes glistened in wonder. He had never before made such a gesture. “Why, Jimmy McLean,” she began in the car going home. “Just imagine…”

He kept his eyes on the road and said nothing, suddenly unsure of what he had done.

So the visits began. How Jill’s life unraveled and how Margaret McLean fought for custody of Audrey would make a good story another time. But, by the next summer, now twelve years old, Audrey came to live on the farm. Margaret saw to the repainting of the walls in the largest of their spare second floor rooms and to the buying of the colorful sheets and blankets and pillows that she imagined would appeal to a twelve-year-old girl. She quickly discovered Audrey’s favorite foods and stocked the pantry with what she’d need. And Margaret allowed Audrey to arrange her books and stuffed animals and other belongings as she pleased and to tape her posters on the newly painted walls. They had bought a desk and a bookshelf especially for her.

“You make this room yours,” she told Audrey. “We’ll have a talk later about the rules.” She paused here to gauge whether Audrey stiffened at the word “rules.” She did not, only returned Margret’s neutral gaze. “There won’t be many,” said Margaret and left the room.

Colonel McLean had acquired a dog by then. He was a ten-week-old Springer Spaniel named Merlin. The colonel thought he might take up pheasant hunting. In the meantime, Merlin had to be trained not to relieve himself indoors and prevented from chewing the carpets or gnawing the legs of the dining room chairs. The colonel obedience-drilled him every day on the grass behind the house, and Merlin behaved well. With one exception. Whenever he sensed Audrey’s presence, he raced into her arms. The colonel would sigh and begin slowly gathering himself up as he stepped forward to once again remind dog and girl that training was serious business. They would have to learn. No one needs a problem dog. But how do you make a child understand that? He hadn’t the slightest idea. He could only offer a pained smile, standing off a bit, waiting, at a loss for words.

“Let her love that little dog,” Margaret told him. “They aren’t your soldiers, you know.”

He remembered the girl’s mother. The red-rimmed eyes, the hair askew, unbrushed, the ripped sweater, and the bruises on her arms and neck, not to mention the disordered apartment signifying a disordered life. Maybe Jill would rehabilitate herself and come back for her daughter and he could go on training his dog in peace.

His dog. The colonel had risen all his life at five a. m. Now, in minutes, he brushed his teeth and dressed and headed out for his morning walk, keeping Merlin leashed until they reached the pasture on the other side of the hemlock plantation. There, at the crest of the ridge by his Two Old Men, he released Merlin and began working again on stay, sit, and heel. He made a point of extending his morning walk until well after Margaret had fed Audrey breakfast and driven her into Bucks Mills for a summer arts program at the school. “It’ll give her a chance to meet some other children,” said Margaret, “so she’ll know someone when she starts school in the fall. She won’t be so lonely.” They wouldn’t be back until lunch.

After lunch, if he could manage to pry child and dog apart, he marched Merlin up the third floor stairs to his study and closed the door. This was his time to browse those lovely paintings in his priceless edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, and to play his recorded bird calls on the Hi Fi. Merlin curled up in an old Army blanket in a corner. Often, the familiar itch led the colonel to unlock the darkroom drawer where he kept his collection of graveyards and dead animals. He spread them out over his desk, lingering over some for reasons he could never manage to explain. From time to time, the sound—more a vibration really—of Audrey’s radio came through the floor. Her room was directly below the study. Margaret had encouraged her to invite friends from the summer arts program to come for lunch and then to do whatever it was that twelve-year-old girls did together. As the colonel sensed the activity below over time, he became increasingly curious about what could be going on during these visits. One day when he happened to look out the study window and saw Audrey and her friends kicking a ball around the back yard, he couldn’t resist gathering up his photographs and returning them to their locked drawer, then tiptoeing down the stairs to her room. Merlin came along. The colonel opened Audrey’s bedroom door and stepped inside. Merlin immediately followed and jumped onto the bed. He obviously knew the room well.

The colonel looked around the room, for what he didn’t know. Audrey had decorated the walls with posters and prints. One large black and white was of some wildman with a completely out of control black beard and an Uncle Sam top hat. Another showed a band. He knew that one. They were that new English band, the Beatles. Then “Peaceable Kingdom.” Hicks. Well, he appreciated the sentiment. The dream of a world at peace. He’d seen enough to sympathize. Believing was another matter. Picasso, too. The old man with the guitar. And, Lord help us, that damned Maxfield Parrish. He’d seen that garish monstrosity on the wall of his commanding officer’s quarters in the Thirties when he’d been ROTC adjutant and thought it acutely unbecoming of the man’s rank to display. He’d been a major at the time. His C. O. had five children, a tumultuous household, and a wife who flirted with his college boy cadets—and with him. Clair. A pretty woman. “Harmless,” Margaret had laughed. “Full of life.” But one wrong move in that direction would have ended his career, maybe even his marriage. Now here it was again, the sensuous pinks and purples and baby blues in feathery, pillowy, dreamy skyscapes. Semi-clad women and men cavorting amid classical ruins. He remembered Margaret admiring what she called its “life force.” And now on the girl’s desk, a watercolor in the same pallet. He called the dog away and closed the door.

He continued to plan his entire day around keeping the dog away from Audrey, but the moment they saw one another, all obedience training evaporated. Merlin followed her everywhere. Though she knew better than to feed him at the table, Merlin insisted on stationing himself next to her chair at meals. Never mind that the colonel forbade it.

“Why don’t you take Audrey with you on your evening walks?” suggested Margaret one dinner time. “Go a little earlier so you’re back before dark.”

It seemed a mischievous suggestion. He looked across the table at Audrey. A puzzle. He’d always thought of her as “that little girl,” almost as if she had nothing to do with him. In the short time she’d been with them, she’d turned into a lanky kid with slightly unruly blond hair, all arms and legs and curious green eyes. A hardy weed that had pushed itself up through a crack in the pavement. She wasn’t a sweet little thing, which he grudgingly appreciated. Both she and the dog, who he had ordered away repeatedly, looked back at him. They obviously thought his walks a fine idea. “Maybe you can teach me the wildflowers,” said Audrey. “And the birds. Aunt Maggie says you know all about them.”

He couldn’t think of what to say. Those were his walks.

“That’s a wonderful idea, honey,” said his wife. “You will do famously! And I’ll have some time to catch up on my reading!”

“As if you were behind,” he scoffed, then, to Audrey, “You want to learn all my secrets, is it?”

So began a new routine of late afternoon rambles with dog and child, who, ran ahead squealing and barking, poking their faces into tree hollows and rock piles. Audrey tested her balance on giant, moss-covered logs as Merlin ran alongside jumping and barking. All of this amused the colonel, but he regarded the educational content of these explorations as very low indeed. He absolutely, and rather crossly, too, put a halt to them the instant they reached the Two Old Men.

Oddly, Audrey learned about wildflowers and birds. Merlin learned to come and sit and stay and heel. How this happened escaped the colonel. He somehow missed that Audrey took out picture books of wildflowers at the library and actually used her allowance to buy a copy of Birds of Pennsylvania. Some afternoons she climbed the third floor stairs with specimens of wildflowers for him to identify from her own explorations. When he heard her on the stairs, he hurried to shut the darkroom door, but looked forward to pouring over his books with her as they identified her samples. And he didn’t miss that Audrey, aside from allowing Merlin to sit by her chair at meals, followed him in reinforcing the simple commands that he had taught. On their walks, she became that companion to whom he would rattle off details of lifecycles and folklore. 

Audrey started seventh grade in the fall and did well. She played junior high field hockey and sang in the chorus. The social workers and law enforcement authorities eventually lost track of her mother’s whereabouts. She stopped calling. They waited to hear from her, but heard nothing. Audrey soldiered on as if she’d expected this all along. Her depression and anger would surface much later. Eighth and ninth grade came and went. “Our little girl is going to be a beauty,” Margaret remarked more than once. A goose walked over his grave to hear that. He tried to disguise the chill it gave him with a shrug, and he feared now that Jill would indeed suddenly materialize to take Audrey away into her aimless, dangerous world. It irked him that this worry seemed to please Margaret.

The changes in senior high distressed him. He couldn’t understand the headband Audrey began wearing, or the buckskin jacket with the fringes. She’d started looking like an Indian in a John Wayne movie. All Audrey’s friends dressed like that. And when Audrey’s three best girl friends visited, they sat in a circle on the grass for hours with Merlin taking turns snuggling one then the other, and finally—dog and girls together—they disappeared into the woods and returned wearing garlands of flowers or leaves. The colonel helplessly watched this shift from his study window. He knew, everyone knew, about the rise in drug use among young people. Not just the protesters. And Audrey’s grades had slipped. Margaret reported that she’d cut school to ride the train into Philadelphia with a friend one afternoon. Was she looking for her mother? Why would she do such a thing?

The afternoon Margaret delivered this news, he made sure Audrey came with him on his walk. As they started into the woods, she turned to him and said, “We found a dead fawn yesterday.”

So casual, he thought. She reported this death as if telling him when a bus had arrived or what she’d had for lunch. A matter of only passing importance. He was offended.

“We?” he said.

“One of my friends and me.”

“And I, you mean,” he said. He knew not to ask for a name, but then did.

“Just somebody,” she said. “But you are interested in that, aren’t you?”

He nodded. “In your friends? Yes, of course.”

“No. I meant about the deer,” she said.

He stopped walking and looked at her. She’d grown to be nearly his height, and he saw now that she was beautiful. She pulled her hair back as she looked him full in the face and let it fall over one shoulder. Honey blond. The open air and the gentle climb added color to her cheeks.

“You know. Dead animals and such,” she said. “I’ve noticed. You must study them, I guess.”

Looking at her, he had to acknowledge that she’d become a young woman, but she’d said this, had thought this, out of a child’s understanding. Was it that he studied the dead? Examined the nature of the fur or teeth, was fascinated by anatomy? He almost wanted to tell her. No, none of that. He was looking for something else, for what death had taken.

“I can show you where it is, if you like,” she offered.

He hesitated, still in his thoughts. “Just tell me,” he said, “and I’ll come back.”

One evening a boy began appearing in the circle on the grass. A young man, actually. Likely the un-named friend. Margaret looked into him. The Wolcott boy from the property the other side of the Two Old Men. Thomas Wolcott. He’d dropped out of college. “Enlisting?” asked the colonel. No. Apparently he refused to have anything to do with the military. “They say he’s an excellent student,” said Margaret, “and an Eagle Scout, to boot.” He brought a guitar to the circle, and his voice rose to the colonel’s window. A fine singing voice, but … “But what?” Margaret wondered. “She’s a good girl, James. We both know that,” she said, and then added, “She’s not like her mother, that poor thing.”

Nevertheless, he worried.

Late one afternoon, Audrey led her young man in the back door to the kitchen and made the introductions. Thomas shook the colonel’s hand with a firm grip and looked him in the eye. “And what do you plan to do now that you have left the university?” the colonel asked. He set the question down like an anvil on the kitchen table. Thomas answered that he was unsure, but that he had become active politically. The country was in turmoil. A vague answer that didn’t sit well. “We all have to do our part,” said the colonel. He didn’t say “duty,” but that’s what he wanted them to hear. Thomas agreed. He said he was wrestling with that very issue, what his part would be. This puzzled the colonel, whose own understanding of one’s duty had never been complicated.

“A nice young man,” Margaret said after they had gone. “Polite. Well brought up.” She read the book on his face. “These are difficult times for young people. So many choices to make.” She shook her head as she turned her back to rinse a glass in the sink. “Not like when we were starting out in life,” she added.

The colonel heard her but didn’t want to hear. He turned, looking for Merlin. Called. No response. Almost as reflex, he took his tweed jacket off its hook and slipped his arms into it. Wrapped a scarf around his neck and opened the door. “Where did he go?” he muttered into his scarf.

“You know very well where he went,” Margaret sang. “But you don’t seem to know who you’re really looking for.”

He ignored how pleased she seemed and started toward the woods across the creek. He didn’t notice that she had found her own coat and followed. As he came out of the trees, he stopped in the meadow to listen. The afternoon shadows had lengthened, a time of day when in the stillness you might imagine voices. He walked on. In the hemlock plantation, the birds were roosting. He once stood in such a place with a girl he wanted to impress. It was the day before he enlisted, and he was full of his “duty,” cocksure, blissfully ignorant of the tragic losses ahead. They had stood silently under a thick pine forest. A massive flock of crows roosted above them. He listened to them settling, murmuring to one another and had an inspiration to clap his hands loudly, suddenly, to make his girl jump at the sudden cacophony of wild cawing and fluttering of wings as a thousand startled crows lifted and began circling and circling above, screaming the alarm. To have been such a foolish young man, in love like that, amused and saddened him now. That girl had been Margaret.

He came out of the hemlocks knowing why he had not simply whistled up Merlin. He would have come. They had trained him well, he and Audrey.

He found himself at the edge of the hemlocks and looked up the rise at the Two Old Men framing a pillowy, feathery sunset of pinks and baby blues and purples. A Maxfield Parrish sky. Thomas Wolcott leaned against the old man on the left. The first, soft notes of his guitar filled the space between them. Audrey sat off a few yards on the ground, her knees pulled up, stroking Merlin peacefully. Thomas began to sing. That sky, that beautiful monstrosity, would last only a moment but would mean everything in their memories. The colonel had known the world that Audrey now entered. The boy’s voice came straight from that world. There was nothing the colonel wanted to do to change that. He turned and caught a glimpse of Margaret watching from under the hemlocks, and he swelled with a ferocious, almost forgotten joy as he walked toward her.