Once this area had been a sanctuary to the natural. Speckled birch trees and massive maples swayed in the sweet breeze that splashed up from the stream. Bushy hills and grass-covered valleys rose and fell, creasing and curving the forest into a wrinkled beauty. It lived, wildly untamed, save a few cabins barely noticed through the various shades of green. Now, the forest was gone. The cabins were shacks – worthless plots passed down through inheritance – standing feebly on barren land, waiting to be bulldozed in the name of progress that had enveloped adjacent areas.
Tom Moon struggled to the foot of the lumpy hill, leaning hard on a wooden cane. He sighed, glancing around at the depressing panorama that was his family’s plot of land – it was a place that meant nothing to him in his middle age, but in his youth, it was his playground. Now, as an old man, he could only sigh. Aimlessly, he thrust his cane into the ground and it clanked against something hard. Using it as a brush, he cleared away the debris on top of a small, rectangular stone. A penknife-etching read: He Loved Her.
“Who was he?” came the curious chirp of his granddaughter Delilah’s voice.
“He was your grandfather,” he whispered, hanging on each word.
“Who was she?”
Gently, Tom’s eyes closed and his mind wandered to younger days, to sprawling lakes and endless hallways of birch and maple – a time before suits and shaving cream and conference calls, before being called Mr. and Dad and Old Man. He thought of the wilderness and he thought of her. He drifted back years and brought Delilah along with him, painting with words a time when the landscape they now glimpsed was pure, untouched, and alive.
“She,” he said with a slight grin. “She…she was his muse.”
* * *
Someone had moved the painting. When she came in from the porch it was right in front of her, a large framed canvas leaning against the sofa. It had hung above the cabin’s stone fireplace for years. Other paintings, stretched canvases without frames, never made it to a wall. They went into wooden crates and waited for big-shouldered men to carry them away for Michael, who owned a gallery in the city. She was fond of Michael. He had visited the cabin many times and always spoke gently. And, he had paid her the highest compliment: “You should paint her, Moon.”
Michael and Mr. Moon had often stood in front of the fireplace, studying the painting above it. “I could sell it for you this afternoon.” But the painting stayed on the wall. It had been hard for her to see it up there. Now she felt as if she could step right through the gilded frame into the scene.
Birch leaves tumbled along the road in a bright ribbon of yellows swirling through the painting. Their bare white-papered trees that stood slim and straight as choirboys clustered along the roadside. Above them, brilliant red swatches still clung to the spreading maples. Higher still, the farthest branches of the oaks and elms mingled in a brown and orange fretwork that spilled drops of sun and shadow down onto the cobblestones half buried in the road.
The scene was so alive to her, perhaps, because she had been with Mr. Moon when he painted it. For many afternoons they had walked out together from the cabin to that dip in the woods where the stone fence, the cobbled road and the stream fell in alongside each other for a companionable stretch before they veered apart with the rise of the ground. She watched Mr. Moon set up his easel, planting it in the soft earth up to its spindly ankles. Then, he unscrewed tiny caps from fat metal tubes and squeezed pure color onto his palette. He would say the names of the colors as he chose them: “Naples yellow, gamboge, French ultramarine, sap green, Prussian blue, rose d’orée, burnt sienna, Chinese white.” He would smile at her. “My little incantation. I hope it works.” Then, with a thin wedge of a knife, he stroked and swirled the colors, mixing them thoroughly in some spots and barely introducing them in others. He spent almost as much time preparing the palette as he did painting.
“I don’t want to think too much when I paint. If I have exactly the right colors mixed here and I know exactly where they are on the palette, I can just paint. From the eye to the hand, with very little brain in between. Do you understand?” He talked to her while he painted. She listened and she heard the bark of geese high in the sky, the rustle of squirrel and sparrow in the leaves, the splash of trout striking at the evening hatch. His voice was full of love when he talked about painting and she loved to listen to it. She didn’t really understand what he meant. But then, she was no painter.
Now, as she looked intently at the canvas, she remembered, too, the smells of those long afternoons. She could almost see them hanging in the air around her – the molder of damp earth and moss pierced by the sharp scent of pine needles crushed under the feet of Mr. Moon and his easel. The clean cold smell rising off the stream pushed against the drifts of woodsmoke in the trees. From the cabin, wafted a faint, delicious aroma of roasting meat; from the deepest woods, floated an acrid note of skunk.
Mr. Moon and his easel were another world of scent. Pipe tobacco, turpentine, sweat, linseed oil, apples and whiskey mingled in its atmosphere. Something very pungent that Mr. Moon called rabbit skin glue occasionally fouled the air. From its smell, she thought perhaps it really was made from rabbit. Sometimes a ham sandwich with mustard announced itself from his pocket. In another pocket, a ham sandwich without mustard waited for her.
Mr. Moon was gone now. Last week, more big-shouldered men had loaded him into an ambulance redolent of blood and disinfectant and death. His easel was packed away with the clothes (mothballs), the books (mildew) and the dishes (detergent). His children, Tom and Lila (shaving cream, perfume and cigarettes), did the packing. They didn’t seem to want her help, so she spent most of the day on the porch, resting and remembering.
She had known them for a long time. When they had visited Mr. Moon in the summers, she had spent a great deal of time with them, making sure the stays were fun for them even when their father was busy with a canvas. She had played games with them for hours in the sunshine and walked miles with them through the woods. She had waded in the stream with them and helped capture frogs along the banks. She had sat with them at their early dinners, while Mr. Moon was still out trying to catch the last of the good light. “The best light,” he would say.
If Lila woke in the middle of the night, sobbing softly with a bad dream, she would leave Mr. Moon’s side and slip through the child’s door and into her bed. She would curl close against Lila’s warmth and then there was no more room in the bed for another bad dream. When Tom got tangled up in a broken barbed wire fence – she could still hear him screaming, “I can’t move! I can’t move!” – she stayed with him while Lila ran for her father. She kissed him gently and let Tom lean against her, even though the rusty barbs dug into her skin, too. She and Tom both needed shots that day.
Now, Tom and Lila were tall and lean and dressed as grown-ups. They spoke to her kindly when she came in from the porch, but they were busy with lists and labels. So, she leaned in as close to the painting as she could, trying to catch a whiff of varnish and damp wool and the man she had loved.
“Sadie,” Lila called from the kitchen door. “”Come here, look what I’ve got.”
“Yes, that’s a good idea,” said Tom. “Keep her in the kitchen. That dog was about to lick the painting.”
* * *
“What are we going to do with her Tom?” Lila muttered. Tom shook his head. Though gnawing on a wishbone left over from last night’s take-out meal, Sadie’s ears heard. She understood. In this moment, something broke behind her patchwork fur and aching paws, inside her itchy skin. She knew that Mr. Moon would not come back and that she was no longer wanted. Swiveling her collared neck, she abandoned the bone and went again to face the painting. Tom and Lila watched her go, her four paws falling silently on the tattered carpet that had yet to be packed away. She leaned back onto her hind legs and settled into a sphinx-like posture. In front of her, the birch trees and cobblestone path rambled forward.Her eyes, misty and bloodshot, slid shut but the painting stayed. She saw the canopy of maples. She heard the swallows chattering in their branches. She felt the soft creek-side breeze tickle the whiskers on her muzzle and sift through her golden coat. The breeze stirred her. Led by her nose, she lifted from her crouch, body tense, head tilted forty-five degrees in the air, the black half-moon curves of her moist nostrils quivering under the cascading warmth of light flickering through the trees.
Suddenly, she galloped forward, her four legs muscular and powerful. She barked loud and long and tumbled into the dewy grass that grew wild beside the cobblestones. Her fur shimmered as she rolled on her back, legs dangling above her, like a gleefully overturned tortoise or beetle. She flipped back up and snorted, her head rocking back and furry ears flopping sideways. Splashing into the creek, she gobbled fresh water with her swaying red tongue in the shade of the birches.
Her nose twitched as the scent of tobacco momentarily danced above the surface of the water, a few feet in front of her. She leapt up the bank, ears perked. A familiar cascade of smells followed: turpentine, sweat, apples, whiskey, and oil paints. She stepped onto the cobbles and saw Mr. Moon. He was seated at his easel though not focused intently down the road, as he had been the day he’d painted this scene. He was smiling at her, waving a ham sandwich without mustard in his right hand.
She darted, paws smacking cobbles, towards him. Faintly from the kitchen her keen ears caught Tom saying, “the dog isn’t supposed to outlive the master, right?” as she lurched forward into the canvass to meet Mr. Moon’s outstretched hand.
