He spent the rest of the daylight hours driving on backroads through the flat, snow-streaked Illinois countryside, trying to let the black and gray landscape soothe the unrest, the loneliness which, if uncontrolled, could grow and wrench through his insides like a twisting rasp. Damn Mark’s phone call...
He had been lonely and poor and hard-worked as a farm boy in this same country before he’d faked his age to join the Army at seventeen. The Army, its disciplines and rewards, had become his mentor and ultimately his life. As a teenager, he had been a quiet but brilliant student. In the Army he studied and broadened his horizons, taking advantage of every specialization program offered, from language school at Monterey through the Army College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and administration studies at Indianapolis. There had been deep satisfaction, a strong sense of accomplishment and pride as he worked his way through Army ranks from stripes to stars.
But the only pure joy he had ever experienced, Tarbert Weir believed, a happiness soaring out of the realm of ordinary human experience, had been in the years he was married to Maggie. His bitterness, his hardness after her death came from a conviction that he had been robbed by life, that he had not had her long enough.
As a soldier he had been exemplary, as an individual he had been a detached and introspective loner until Maggie came into his life. He had always felt that her love, her loyalty and the pleasure she gave him was curing him of some deficiency. It was her presence that made him feel complete, a full man, and her mortal absence left a void he refused to allow any other human being to fill.
After his wife’s death, a friend had suggested that then-Colonel Weir resign from the Army, find a career as a civilian, care for his young son. Weir had never even considered the suggestion. The Army and Maggie had been the centers of his life. With his wife gone he had accepted the military as a demanding mistress and chose to stay in service.
He could still keep a place in his heart for his young son, Colonel Weir had thought at the time, but there was no point in pretending they were still a family, that they had a home. He had tried for some closeness, summer vacations, weekends together whenever he was within flight distance, but Mark had spent most of his growing years first at boarding school in Germany, then at a military academy in Virginia, finally as a student at several Eastern colleges.
Tarbert Weir believed he was doing what was best for them both. And it was easier for him to love his son at a distance, when he could not see the distinctive bright eyes, the inherited mannerisms, the quick, eager smiles that reminded him so disturbingly of the boy’s mother.
Beyond explaining what the doctors at the Garmisch-Parten hospital had said and tried to do, Tarbert Weir had never been able to make himself talk much to his son about his mother’s death. It was John Grimes who was closest to the boy in the weeks afterward, held him when he cried, brought him warm milk in the night, but the older Weir had often wondered if he had been less selfish, if he had not insisted that Grimes should take the boy back to Frankfurt that winter Sunday, then Maggie Weir might be alive and standing with him on the veranda today.
“... what you’re telling me is that my problem isn’t your problem, there is nothing you can do.” It was the last few words that bothered Scotty Weir, His estrangement from his son had distressed him more than he cared to admit. And the phone call had taken him by surprise. He had been thinking more about Mark himself than the words the lieutenant was saying. Momentarily the general’s emotions had tricked him, he had spoken as if by rote, almost without thinking. But had not his son, out of the residue of bitterness over Vietnam, from his own strange interpretation of obligation and duty, made up his mind for him, articulated what the general had not truly decided to say?
The sights and sounds of the night, the whiskey, began to soothe him; the look of the lake in the semidarkness, water glinting like tarnished silver beyond the stubbled fields and the rustlings of nature, the frost creak of branches, the scuttle of rodents in underbrush. Headlights from a distant truck flared on the horizon and a jet was circling over Springfield to the south, the only movements disturbing the deep silence around the old farmhouse.
This was the home General Tarbert Weir and his wife had imagined and planned and drawn sketches of in half a dozen countries and many army posts, bundled up at a kitchen table during a Nebraska snowstorm or slapping at mosquitos on screened porches in Georgia and Tennessee and Texas. It was Maggie who suggested they try to purchase something in the area of his boyhood, so they could be together and happy in a place he had once been lonely.
Maggie had found this old house and bought the two hundred acres of farmland in Logan County, Illinois, while Scotty Weir was at a command post in South Korea. Mark had gone to first grade at a country school here while the house was tom apart and rebuilt over two years. But they had all lived together here for only one serene August before Scotty Weir, wearing the silver oak leaves of a light colonel, was transferred again to Germany and took his family with him.
One thing they had never included in their plans and sketches for this farm was the old, walled cemetery a short distance behind the house, with its moldered tombstones dating back to before the Civil War. During that hot August when they had lived here as a family, Scotty Weir had helped local masons mend the crumbling walls and right the slanting headstones, and had stripped to the waist and scythed back rye grass and clumps of wild and fragrant honeysuckle.
Colonel Weir was putting his land in order and wanted to show respect and honor for those neglected bits of human history who now rested within his boundaries. They were all strangers to him until he retired from the Army and returned to Illinois to make the farm his home. He knew he wanted Maggie with him then. He had her coffin removed from its burial site in Germany and sent to that little graveyard. Only Grimes stood with him as the men from a Springfield funeral home put Maggie Weir to rest for a second and final time. It had snowed later that day, too.
It had been because of a heavy, almost historic snowfall that German winter almost two decades earlier that the Weirs had decided to take a three-day winter vacation in the German Alps. Maggie had always wanted to show young Mark as much of Europe and its life as possible. The base school allowed students travel days in return for an essay about their experience.
On Saturday they had done some cross-country skiing, moving first over high Alpine meadows, then gliding in white silence through forests of fir, the feathered branches bent with snow. Near the end of the day, they’d skied holding hands. When they stopped to watch the sunset as it touched the highest peaks and ridged the snowdrifts with pink and coral, Colonel Weir was filled with an almost tangible sense of serenity.
Then something happened that touched first his thoughts, then his loins with a sexual stirring so deep that the quality of the arousal, and his determination to fulfill it, had never left his memory.
Just before dusk, not far from the lodge, Maggie had broken from them, pulled off her skis and shouted to young Mark, “Look, look! Mommy’s making angels!”
Then, neat and slim in a red ski suit, she had flung herself backwards onto a pristine snowbank, laughing and flailing her arms and legs in arcs on the snow, and when she rose the print of her body looked like a winged and flying angel.
Spurred by her son’s delight, Maggie tossed herself into fresh snow again and again, making a frenzy of angel imprints that lined the banks almost back to the hotel.
For Colonel Weir, the sudden, strange beauty of his wife’s body against the snow, her vitality, the grace and abandonment of her movements had acted as a new and powerful sexual spur.