Remember Ben Clayton (12 page)

ELEVEN

D
on’t ask me,” Ernest declared as he drove past the ranch gate and out along the Albany road. “All I know is that there ain’t no law that brothers and sisters got to tolerate each other.”

“You know more than that,” Gil said.

Ernest did not answer. Maybe he was pretending not to hear. They were heading for the general store at Fort Griffin. Gil had eagerly accepted the invitation for him and Maureen to go along on the errand to buy groceries and to pick up a part that had been ordered to repair a windmill. His legs were still so stiff from yesterday’s riding that he had barely been able to pull himself out of bed, and he had not been looking forward to another day on horseback. Nor was the prospect of a day at the ranch house an enticing alternative. Clayton had not appeared for breakfast, and judging by George’s Mary’s skittish mood as she served her guests his turbulent anger still enveloped the household.

Gil had spent a mostly sleepless night in Ben’s room, kept awake by leg cramps and by a sudden worry that Lamar Clayton was unstable and unpredictable enough to simply cancel his commission. Such things had happened to Gil before, bringing months of work to nothing and subverting his financial well-being with irrecoverable expenses. A man who was capable of throwing his own sister off his property was certainly capable of having second thoughts about a contract with a comparative stranger.

“I’ve begun to be annoyed by all this mystery,” Gil said to Ernest. “I’ve been hired to make a credible likeness of Ben Clayton and my attempts to understand my subject have been met with confusion and evasion.”

“Well sir,” Ernest said, a little testiness in his voice now as well, “I understand some about Lamar Clayton. I’ve worked for him for twenty-two years. But don’t be thinking I can tell you everything you want to know about that man and his boy because I can’t.”

Gil said he supposed that was fair enough but Ernest was still chewing over his complaint as he drove. Eight or ten buzzards were hunched over something in the center of the road ahead. Ernest did not bother to slow down or swerve around them, and at the last moment the birds sluggishly took flight, revealing the bloody carapace of an armadillo.

“He ain’t never told me much,” Ernest said as Gil looked back to see the buzzards patiently descending on the carcass to resume feeding. “But there used to be people all over this country who knew him back then in one way or another, and I could sometimes get them to talk about it a little, the way you’re doing with me now. I believe he was twelve or so and Jewell a year or two older than that when they was taken. It was a Comanche raiding party, Quahadas as I understand it, over there in Wise County.

“There was an old man who died here a few years back. He’d been on the trail drives with Mr. Clayton and he got him to talk some. He said Mr. Clayton had told him it was about dinnertime when this Comanche fella just walked through the door like he owned the place and stuck Mr. Clayton’s mama with a knife before she could even complain about it. There was about a dozen of them altogether and some of them wrestled with Mr. Clayton and his sister while the rest went through the place. They killed all the stock and they’d already killed Mr. Clayton’s father and brother. I heard it that they scalped the mama while she was still alive.”

Ernest turned to look at Maureen. “You let me know if this kind of talk upsets you, Miss Gilheaney.”

“Thank you. I can bear it.”

“The militia followed those Comanches all the way to the Red, but they never could find them. They beat up on Mr. Clayton a good bit, trying to see what he was made of, I suppose, and the girl got treated pretty rough herself. I mean treated rough in other ways, if you understand my meaning. The way I heard it, Mr. Clayton had to watch that business along with everything else. After a month or so she got traded away to the Kiowas, but the chief decided to keep Mr. Clayton. He was only with the Comanches a couple years before he got ransomed back, but he took to that life the way a lot of those boys did that got taken captive. It’s funny, how after watching what happened to his mother and sister he could turn into a Comanche himself. But he did. He was pretty wild, they say, all painted up and everything. This here’s the store.”

Ernest pulled up in front of a solitary general store and post office sitting off the road at the edge of a broad floodplain. There was a bluff just above it, and Gil and Maureen could see the ruins of buildings scattered at its summit.

“That there’s old Fort Griffin,” Ernest said. “There ain’t been no soldiers there for fifty years or more.”

He swept his arm across the empty floodplain. “And you can’t hardly tell it no more, but this here was a town once. They called it the Flat, and it had all sorts of goings-on. Saloons and gunfights and whorehouses—excuse me, Miss Gilheaney.”

Maureen was touched by the way Ernest’s face suddenly flared into a bright blush.

“It’s all right, Ernest. I’ve heard the word before.”

“Anyway,” he said, looking off toward the vanished town to avoid meeting her eyes and blushing again, “when Mr. Clayton was a young man coming up the Western Trail he stopped here a time or two. They bedded the cows yonder and I expect they got themselves into some trouble in the town the way those young cowboys did. All them buffalo hunters used to come here too to sell their hides. They say there was always a terrible stink from them hides. But it’s all gone now. The grass done grown over it all except for this little store.”

Gil and Maureen went into the store with Ernest but there was such a tedious search for the misplaced windmill part that they ended up taking a walk across the site of the vanished town. They made their way through brittle wild grass toward a squat stone building with bars on it that they guessed must have been the jail. The remnants of a main street led past occasional piles of rotting lumber that were all that was left of the saloons and sporting houses that Lamar Clayton as a young drover might have frequented. The street ended in a screen of brush and hardwoods but Gil, in an exploring mood, found an open path that took them to the banks of a shallow river.

“I believe this is the Clear Fork of the Brazos,” he said to Maureen.

“Yes,” she replied, “and I believe that’s a kingfisher.”

She had been studying bird life for her San Antonio River sculpture, and the industrious blue bird fluttering down the center of the stream was a bright note of familiarity in a world that was still hauntingly strange to her.

Gil smiled at her as he might have if she were still a little girl satisfactorily reciting some school lesson for him and Victoria. And then he looked down at the steep-banked Clear Fork, so vital to this parched country but no more substantial than a creek.

“I wonder what sort of a father he was to that boy,” he said.

“I don’t think he’s eager for us to find out. Besides, I suppose in the final analysis such things are unknowable.”

“Are they? Do you mean, for instance, that it’s unknowable what kind of father I am to you?”

“Maybe a little,” she said, with a teasing smile. “We keep a few secrets from each other, I should think.”

“Such as what?”

“I don’t know. That drawer in your desk, for instance.”

“What drawer?”

“The one that’s locked. Where you seem to put things that you want out of my sight.”

“That’s absurd. I have no such intention.”

“What’s in it, then?”

“Why, I don’t even know precisely, to tell you the truth. Bills and correspondence and that sort of thing. And if we’re talking about secrets, what about the one you keep from me?”

“What do you mean?”

“This Vance fellow.”

“He’s hardly a secret. You’ve met him. He’s written about your work. Admiringly, by the way.”

“I’ve shaken his hand a time or two. I read his article. But I can’t say I know him, and you hardly bring him up.”

“That’s because there’s nothing to talk about. I don’t see him that often myself, you know. Only when he comes to San Antonio.”

Gil kicked a loose stone off the bank with the toe of his shoe and watched it clatter down into the shallow water below.

“You would have talked to your mother about him,” he said.

“Maybe, but maybe not. Anyway, so what? She was my mother and you’re my father. There’s a difference. It would feel awkward confiding in you about personal matters like that.”

“Tell me what sort of things you and your mother talked about.”

She laughed, then saw from the steady look on his face that he was rather serious.

“I talked about silly things with her, if you must know, Daddy. Or at least things that you would consider silly but women consider vital. Such as, well, my figure.”

“Your figure? There’s not a thing wrong with your appearance.”

She laughed again, cruelly this time, cutting him off for his dishonesty. But the mood had been set, and here they were suddenly, flailing about in deeper conversational waters than either father or daughter had ever had occasion to enter.

“She was so beautiful,” Maureen said. “I must have been
something
of a disappointment to her, don’t you think?”

“Stop it,” Gil said. “You were all the world to her.”

Confused tears were brimming in her eyes. She took a step away from her father before he could reach out to comfort her.

“There’s nothing wrong, Daddy,” she reassured him. “Absolutely nothing. Maybe I’m having an emotional reaction to last night. Seeing that poor old woman turned away from her own brother’s house. Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know, Maureen.”

“It’s unimaginable, isn’t it? What happened to her. What happened to them both.”

But it was all mixed up in her mind with what had happened to her own family, and to the world at large. She remembered sitting in the hospital with her father during that last, desperate surgery to drain the pus off her mother’s lungs. There had been an odd comfort in knowing that she and her father could very easily die as well, carried off by a disease that seemed of a piece with the apocalyptic convulsion that had generated the war. The gauze masks people wore in the streets had struck Maureen at first as almost comically useless, the meekest possible protest against the world’s driving urge to annihilate itself. Even before the epidemic had claimed her mother, she had guarded herself with steely fatalism, an unsentimental preparation for death that was sometimes dangerously close to a longing for it.

But she had been so unprepared. During the operation, she and her father had sat in a waiting room at the end of the hospital hallway, with nothing to look at but a large crucifix on the opposite wall. Its contorted, agonal Christ seemed to confirm that they were in a nightmare world where anything could happen. The nurses were all nuns, treading about in medieval silence, only the whisper of their footsteps and the clacking of the beads of the oversize rosaries they wore about their waists making any sort of sound. The surgeon who finally came to see them was old and stout, with wispy white hair hovering as if by static electricity at the margins of his bald head. There was a smile on his face and Maureen did not recognize it at first as a nervous smile; she thought he was going to tell them that the operation had been a success. But instead he told them that he had hoped for a better outcome, and was sorry that it hadn’t worked out that way. Then he just stood there saying nothing else until her father had to ask him pointblank, “Do you mean she’s dead?”

The doctor replied that, yes, this was unfortunately the case. Then he shook her father’s hand and offered Maureen a pat on her arm as he walked away, past a nun carrying a tray of quivering orange jello into a patient’s room. Maureen did not cry but she clung to her father like a child, holding on to him as if the floor had dropped away and if she let go she would fall into the blankness below.

THEY HEARD
the car’s horn honking, and turned to see Ernest waving to them, holding the windmill part in the crook of his arm.

“If this was close to spring,” he told them when they reached the car, “you two wouldn’t have any business walking through that grass.”

“Why is that?” Gil asked.

“Oh, there’s rattlers all through here. Sometimes you’ll see them in the winter, if it’s warm enough, but I expect they was mostly denned up today.”

“Mostly?” Maureen said.

Ernest laughed as he closed the car door behind her. After he had turned the crank and vaulted over the driver’s side behind the steering wheel, he adjusted the accelerator and sat there for a moment in deliberation, then turned to look at both Gil and Maureen.

“I wish you wouldn’t tell Mr. Clayton what all I told you.”

“We won’t,” Maureen promised.

“I can tell you something else about this place, but I don’t know if I ought.”

Gil and Maureen said nothing, allowing him room to make up his mind.

“Well, you know George’s Mary,” Ernest said. “I expect you know she ain’t had it that easy in her life.”

“She told me about what happened to her parents.”

“Yes, ma’am, that was a terrible massacre. They have a plaque up about it over in Aspermont, I believe. Well, she was an orphan after that and she made her way as best she could. There used to be a saloon here called the Beehive. And that’s where George’s Mary used to work. You understand the sort of work I’m talking about?”

“I believe we do,” Gil said.

“Well, one time these teamsters got a little rampageous and beat her up pretty bad. They say Mr. Clayton come across her lying bleeding in the street the next morning and took pity on her and hired her as a cook without ever knowing if she could even make biscuits or not. So there’s that side to him, is why I’m telling you this. What you saw last night with Jewell, that don’t necessarily mean that old man ain’t got a kind heart.”

THE SOUND
of coyotes wailing in the black night worried its way into Maureen’s dream, and she woke with the sense of malevolent beings near the house. The dream, as she sat up shaking in bed and reflected on it, had been about Indians, about their silent approach and her paralyzed compliance. At first, the Indians had seemed no more threatening than costumed bit players in the pictures, but gradually the dream tightened and grew darker and they became predatory wraiths who moved as softly as a spreading gas. Her father had not been there. There was a sense that he was either lying dead outside the house or had abandoned her in terror. She had seen the years of captivity looming ahead, the pain and defilement and loneliness that would be her life from now on.