A uniform, a love story, and an unforgettable work of art

Bristol artist David Clarke spent a decade transforming century-old agony into a powerful testament to love

By Kristen Ray
Posted 12/8/18

It was a moment intended to be private. On a fateful day in August of 1957, a heartbroken woman in Smithfield, Maine, escaped into the three-story barn that rested on the property of the lakeside …

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A uniform, a love story, and an unforgettable work of art

Bristol artist David Clarke spent a decade transforming century-old agony into a powerful testament to love

Posted

It was a moment intended to be private. On a fateful day in August of 1957, a heartbroken woman in Smithfield, Maine, escaped into the three-story barn that rested on the property of the lakeside hotel she helped run. Fully expecting to be alone with her grief, she unlocked the barn’s only room, slipped inside, and switched on the light.

Like so many times before, it was supposed to be just her, the chair and the uniform.

The woman only ever known as “Aunt Miriam” couldn’t know that way up above, 11-year-old David Clarke was perched in the loft with two other boys, all frozen still. She would never know that they each laid witness as she fell to her knees and broke down in front of what remained of her late fiancé’s memory: a standard-issued World War I uniform, draped over a kitchen chair. How, from up above, it looked like the ghost of a man, that of an unknown soldier.

Miriam, the chair and the uniform. A woman Mr. Clarke didn’t know well, a man he never knew at all.
It was a moment that seared into his memory, eventually inspiring one of the most defining pieces of artwork he would ever create.

A love long lost
Forty years before that day in August of 1957, both Miriam and her best friend, Jessie, were made a promise. Though World War I was exploding all around them, their fiancés vowed they’d come safely back home, marry their girls and start the lives they had always planned.

As it would turn out, only Jessie’s fiancé, Rolley Bickford, would be able to keep that promise.
Miriam’s, on the other hand, was killed while fighting in France, obliterated by a .75 mm shell. There was nothing left of him for the Army to send back home; all they could do was provide an impersonal, standard-issued uniform, simply intended to be buried straight into the ground.

The war ended and life moved on. Mr. Bickford transformed the farm he inherited along Great Pond in Maine into a lakeside hotel, where his now-wife Jessie and Miriam would both serve as cooks. By the time Mr. Clarke began making the trip up from his hometown in Massachusetts to the hotel during the summer, Mr. Bickford had since passed away and it was just his wife and Miriam running the show.

While Mr. Clarke knew the two women generally enjoyed looking after him and the band of boys he considers his honorary cousins, he and the others began to pick up on Miriam’s occasionally off moods. For the longest time, they couldn’t understand why sometimes, she would slip away and lock herself in that barn, where her cries would echo past its walls.

“I have never heard anything more terrifying and more tragic than her tears,” he recalled.

It wasn’t until that day in 1957 when Mr. Clarke finally understood what she was doing, and why she was doing it. After all that time, Miriam was still in a state of mourning; that uniform she had been given all those years ago had taken on its own lifeform, developed its own persona, feeding an anguish she carried for a lifetime.

“That was more than just clothing; that was a living being. That was a ghost that was there, and you could feel it,” Mr. Clarke said. “I can still feel it.”

Her family would never understand her pain, found her to be unstable. Upon her death in 1967, her funeral was rushed, gotten over with. Her beloved uniformed was burned.
For decades, it appeared as if Miriam and her lost soldier’s love story had come to a final, tragic close.

A commitment made
At the time of Miriam’s death, Mr. Clarke was in college, studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design. He wasn’t notified of the funeral, and at the time, that haunting moment 10 years before was far removed from his daily conscious.

In 1969, while working as a dishwasher at the Black Pearl restaurant and bar in Newport, he met John Millar. Mr. Millar, he discovered, was looking for someone to make a figurehead out of fiberglass for a replica of the 18th-century ship, the HMS Rose; Mr. Clarke managed to convince the man to hire him to carve it out of wood. That winter, despite having no actual experience as a woodcarver, Mr. Clarke was flown to the Smith and Rhuland shipyard in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, to complete the job. It was there, under the careful guidance of Cecil Kraus and the other boat builders, that Mr. Clarke came to learn everything he knows today about woodcarving.

“I had the graduate school I couldn’t afford,” he said.

Upon finishing his work on the HMS Rose, Mr. Clarke returned to the United States, where he began his carved sign business in 1974 and eventually settled into life in Bristol in 1977.

The inspiration
It wasn’t until Bob Johnson, the father of those honorary cousins Mr. Clarke had spent so much time with during his adventures in Maine, died 20 years ago did those memories from his childhood come raging back. After the funeral, while everyone was sitting around having drinks, Bob Johnson, Jr. — who had been with Mr. Clarke up in the loft that day in 1957 — abruptly asked if he remembered Miriam’s chair.

Everything came to a standstill and, suddenly, it all became clear: Mr. Clarke would avenge Miriam and her lost lover. He would bring that uniform back to life, return it from the ashes. He’d rescue them.

“Something wasn’t right in the cosmic order, and I was the guy who was supposed to go in make that tiny little piece of the puzzle fit in for those two people who needed me very much to fit that one little piece in there,” he said.

In that moment, he resolved to get to work on the woodworking project he now considers the most important piece of artwork he will ever create.

The final test
It would prove to be a daunting process, riddled with challenges. Before he could even begin, Mr. Clarke spend two years searching for the right pair of identical kitchen chairs to base his piece around. After borrowing a World War I uniform from a collector in Fall River, he was finally able to get to work.

For nine years, he worked on-and-off on it, starting with the shoes and helmet, then the pants, before making his way up to the hollowed-out coat that wrapped around the chair. Each time he took a step back from the project, he could hear Miriam in his head, urging him forward.

“I felt like she was there, that she wanted me to do this,” he said.

Six years in, though, Mr. Clarke suffered a serious episode of Lyme Disease: he began having seizures and could no longer use his legs; in one month alone, he lost 50 pounds. Doctors wouldn’t believe him when Mr. Clarke tried to tell them what was wrong.

Throughout the whole ordeal, though, he was able to maintain the use of his hands, and despite the pain he was in, he worked harder than ever to complete the piece he had entitled, “Miriam’s Chair.”

“I think the Lyme Disease was the last test that I had to go through, the last barrier that was put in my way,” he said.

Eventually, Mr. Clarke received the antibiotics he needed to recover, and he was able to realize his goal of finishing the sculpture in time for this year’s Newport Art Association Show. The story for Miriam and her long-lost lover, however, wasn’t over.

When it was suggested he bring his piece down to St. Michael’s Episcopal Church on Veterans’ Day for the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, it suddenly clicked with Mr. Clarke that this was where “Miriam’s Chair” was destined to end up all along.

“He was there to receive absolution,” he said. “He was there to overcome the fire that burned him up — first the shell that destroyed him, then the fire that destroyed her creation.”

It wasn’t just for her soldier; it was for Miriam, too. It was her words Mr. Clarke is convinced came out of his mouth when he asked the Rev. Elizabeth Habecker to anoint his sculpture with holy oil. As she did so, Mr. Clarke was overcome with an overwhelming sense of peace. Somehow, he knew they had finally made their way back to one another.

Miriam, the chair and the uniform. Two lost souls, brought back together again. Their memories, finally redeemed.

“Now, they’re both at peace. That love story is fulfilled.”

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