Remember Ben Clayton (4 page)

“Ernest treat you folks all right?” Clayton said, with a sly glance at his hired man, who was already hauling their luggage into the house.

“We were in excellent hands,” Gil replied. “And we’ve arrived at a beautiful place.”

“Oh, I don’t know about beautiful,” Clayton said, “but I ain’t got tired of it yet. We get a nice breeze from across the creek there this time of year, and the north wind don’t bother us too much in the winter, since we’re down here in a kind of draw.”

He paused, as if he were planning to reflect some more on the favorable location of the ranch house, but it was just a stalled silence.

“Anyway,” he said, rallying to the conversation again, “come on in. George’s Mary ought to about have our supper on.”

If there was a reason she was called George’s Mary—something beyond the obvious assumption that it was to distinguish her from someone else’s Mary—nobody explained it as they sat down to eat in the narrow parlor. George’s Mary, Gil supposed, was close to his own age, a stout woman in stout shoes and a faded print dress, who set various platters down upon the table with no comment and then disappeared into the kitchen to put a pie into the oven. Was she Clayton’s wife? Unlikely. He didn’t know much about the mores of ranch life in Texas but he assumed the woman of the house would at least preside over her own dinner table.

Ernest, the one loquacious member of the household, had disappeared to the bunkhouse, so it was just the two of them sitting there, spooning fried beef and potatoes onto their plates and trying to carry on a conversation with no great assistance from their host. It seemed to be Lamar Clayton’s attitude that dinner was for eating, and Maureen’s dutiful openers—what lovely china, what wonderfully airy biscuits—were met with that same polite half smile and maybe a word or two of explication. The china, he allowed, had been one of his wife’s great treasures.

The “had been” confirmed it: dead wife, dead son, lonely inward old man.

“Get out of here, Peggy,” Clayton said without conviction to the dog, who stationed herself by his chair and spent almost the entire meal reared up on her hind legs with unnerving persistence, looking less like a dachshund than a vigilant prairie dog. Despite Clayton’s surly commands for her to leave, he kept tossing small pieces of meat onto the floor at her feet, which of course only reinforced her commonsense determination to stay where she was.

Gil had no problem with silence when decorum or gravitas called for it, so he followed Clayton’s lead and mostly forgot about conversation as he finished his meal. Maureen did so as well, though clearly she was unimpressed with all this manly forswearing of talk, this solemn chewing. It was not until George’s Mary cleared the plates and served them buttermilk pie and coffee that Clayton looked up from his plate and seemed to understand that it was time for something to be said.

“She makes a pretty good pie, I always thought.”

“Excellent,” Gil said, smiling in George’s Mary’s direction as she hurried off once more into the kitchen.

“Everything was excellent,” Maureen jumped in. “It was a gorgeous meal.”

Clayton nodded his head and ran his hand across his full head of wavy white hair. There was another beat of silence during which he seemed to be deliberating about what to say next. Gil could hear the ticking of the mantel clock, the creak of the windmill across the yard.

“Well, now, about this statue,” Clayton finally said. “I guess you’re interested or you wouldn’t be here.”

“I’m interested,” Gil answered. “But of course I’d like to know a bit more about what you have in mind.”

Clayton folded up his napkin; he picked up a crumb of piecrust from the table and put it back on his plate.

“Ben—that’s my son—was killed over in France. Some little town somewhere called Saint-Étienne. I looked it up on a map of France over at the library in Albany, but there’s more than one Saint-Étienne in that country and I couldn’t find the one I was looking for. It ain’t but a hundred miles or so from Paris, over on the western front. Anyway, they buried him in this Saint-Étienne, pretty much where it happened as I understand, and then he and a bunch of the other boys got moved to a big American cemetery they started up over there. They asked me did I want to bring him home—they said they’d do that for me—but I didn’t take to the thought for some reason. Didn’t like the idea of bothering him again, I guess. Didn’t want to think of that. Maybe that’s a little strange.”

“Of course it’s not,” Maureen said to him.

“Anyway, I just thought if I had a statue of Ben, if I had a likeness of him, not just a picture, something I could …”

He gripped the edge of the table with his hands and sat there tensely for a moment, forcing back his emotions.

“I seen your statues in San Antone, Mr. Gilheaney, like I wrote you,” Clayton went on when he found his voice again. “The Alamo one, of course, and that one you did of that Cabeza de Vaca fella. I don’t know much about statues but I seen plenty that I didn’t think were any good. Yours have got something special to them. The people seem alive.”

“I do my best to make them seem that way. Do you have an idea of where the sculpture would be situated?”

“Oh, yes sir, I got that all picked out. There was a place that Ben liked pretty well, and I reckon that’s where it ought to be.”

“I should like to see it.”

“I’ll take you there, if you and Miss Gilheaney don’t mind bouncing in the car a little more.”

“And I wonder what you have in the way of photographs of your son.”

“I got a few,” he said, and stood up and walked in his shuffling, stove-up gait into another part of the house, the dog following behind. While he was gone, Gil glanced at his daughter, who simply shrugged, her eyebrows lifted in a wait-and-see expression. George’s Mary came in to collect their dessert plates. There was a teary sheen to her eyes but her manner was brisk and silent.

“Everything was delicious,” Maureen told her.

“Well, Mr. Clayton ain’t too hard to please,” she said, “long as I burn his steak till it’s tough as a boot.” She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “You’d think a man who lived all that time with the Indians would like his meat on the rare side.”

“He lived with the—” But before Gil could finish the question Clayton had come shuffling back, holding a high school yearbook.

He opened the yearbook to a bookmarked page and set it on the table in front of Gil. Maureen moved her chair closer to her father as the two of them studied the photo of Ben. It made no impression: neither handsome nor interestingly ugly, just another in a rank of young men looking indifferently at the camera, their hair tightly combed, synthetic half smiles on their lips, their thoughts hidden.

“There’s another one of him on the baseball team, but you can’t hardly see him in it,” Clayton said, as he turned to the next bookmarked page, where Ben stood in the rear rank of a team grouping, the cap on his head obscuring his face.

“And then we got these Kodaks here,” Clayton said. There were a half dozen of them, small and wrinkled from much handling. They were a little better. One photo showed the boy standing with an elegant-looking woman who, Gil supposed, had been his mother. Another had him posing with some of his fellow soldiers, their arms interlocked as they smiled at the camera in front of their barracks.

“That one’s at Camp Bowie,” the old man said. “Not too long before they shipped out.”

Gil and Maureen studied it a moment more and then went on to look at the others. Only one of them showed Ben by himself, and from that one they could get an idea of his bearing and proportions. Though solidly built, he had not been tall, perhaps a few inches shorter than his father and with an apparently unarresting face—the jawline neither particularly firm nor soft, the features regular but not remarkably so. But his smile, in the photo in front of the barracks, was electric in some frustrating way Gil could not pin down. There was some inner quality that seemed to override his features, that made their impact secondary. It was the same with Lamar Clayton himself. Ever since he had met the old man, Gil had been almost unconsciously puzzling over how one could reveal, in clay, that face’s hidden burden of experience and sorrow. If he had been handsome, it would have been easy, because handsome faces were built for the display of sweeping emotions. Gil’s own wife’s powerful face, which he had used so many times as a model for mournful or triumphant women, was an unfailing scaffold for whatever noble mood needed to be set upon it. By contrast, he thought, he could sculpt Maureen for the rest of his life and never truly capture her, never be able to make her bland exterior light up with the complex fire he knew burned within.

“These are all the pictures you have?” he asked Clayton when he and Maureen had shuffled through the few imperfect images several times.

“Yes sir, that’s pert’ near it.”

“I have to be honest, Mr. Clayton. It’s not a lot for me to go on. But of course I’d certainly do my best. And I feel that at this point, before we go too much further, I should be honest with you as well about the cost of such a project.”

“Well, a statue’s a permanent thing. I don’t expect they come cheap. How much?”

“I can’t give you an answer just at the moment. My daughter and I will have to talk about it. And a lot will depend on whether the statue would be just of your son, or whether you would want it to include some other element, a horse, say, or—”

“Oh, his horse would have to be part of it. Ben would be in the saddle, the way I see it in my mind.”

“Well, of course that would considerably—”

“I understand your point. You’re the experts, you and Miss Gilheaney. You think about it a while and give me a price and we’ll talk about it. In the meantime didn’t I hear you say you wanted to see where the statue was gonna be?”

FOUR

C
layton drove them himself, taking them deeper into the ranch along an increasingly problematic road. The little dachshund stood imperiously in his lap and stared out at the passing sights with quivering absorption.

“A motorcar ain’t the best way to get back up in here,” he told them. “But I didn’t expect you folks was comfortable on horseback.”

“Comfortable enough,” Gil said, bluffing a little.

“Daddy is,” Maureen said, looking a little pale from the irrhythmic jostling of the car, “but I’m afraid the spectacle of me on a horse would be a comical sight to Mr. Clayton.”

“Well,” Clayton said, “I bet the sight of me trying to make a statue would beat it.”

At last he pulled to a stop and turned off the motor. They were in a broad, shady declivity above a dry streambed. Off in the distance stood a modestly imposing grouping of flat-topped hills that seemed as evanescent as a thunderhead.

Clayton drew their attention to a gradual rocky slope leading upward from the side of the road.

“This is the highest point on the ranch,” he said. “But as you can see, it ain’t that high. Won’t take us but a minute to climb it, if you’re ready.”

“Lead on,” Gil told him.

A horse trail led up the flank of the hill, and in ten minutes they were at its broad mesa summit, looking out over a landscape that should not have been spectacular but somehow was. The view was uninterrupted by any man-made feature, and the terrain almost pastoral in its overall sweep despite its jagged and thorny components. The sky was clear. It was startlingly vibrant, the vast reach of it as bright and blue as a solid shell, but with a limitless transparency, so that the longer Gil looked at it the deeper it drew him in. A buzzard teetered silently above them, the fringe-like feathers at the ends of its wings clearly individuated, standing out from the brilliant sky vault with a stereopticon sharpness. A few dozen head of white-faced cattle drifted along by the flank of another hill a half mile away, grazing on a thin carpet of wild grass. Gil heard some skyborne bird’s sharp whistle—not the buzzard but some unseen eagle or hawk. Otherwise there was nothing but tantalizing silence until Clayton decided to speak.

“This is the place,” he said. “It ain’t the easiest spot to put a statue, I know that, and I expect to pay the cost of that too. But this was Ben’s place. Sarey and me—that was his mother—we used to bring him up here for picnics when he was little. And when he was in a brooding frame of mind—after his mother died, or when he was home on leave right before they shipped him out—he’d tend to saddle his horse and ride off. He never told me where it was he was going, but I’m pretty sure this was the place. Anyway, it’s where I want to remember him being.”

“It’s a fitting spot, Mr. Clayton,” Gil said. “Very fitting.”

The little dog wandered determinedly across the summit, her tail wagging at the prospect of discovery. Every once in a while, when she was probing too deeply into a burrow or an overhung rock that might have housed a rattlesnake, Clayton gave a low whistle and she backed off and looked up at him, whimpering.

Meanwhile Gil paced off the ground and made notes of the distances in a small sketchbook.

“The sun rises here, I would think,” he said to Clayton, gesturing to the summit of the hill to their east.

“Pretty close.”

“And how cold will it get in the winter?”

“Can’t hardly predict. Down past fifteen or so if the right norther decides to come on through.”

“I don’t see a road down there.”

“Ain’t none.”

“So who’s going to see the statue?”

“I am.”

Gil thought about this, then turned back to Clayton.

“Perhaps you and Maureen could wait in the car for me.”

“Why?”

“He likes to be alone at this stage,” Maureen explained to Clayton. “To get his bearings, so to speak.”

“All right. Let him get his bearings.”

Gil watched as the old rancher led his daughter back down the hill, his hand hovering beneath her elbow with touching solicitude as the little dog ranged ahead of them.

Left to himself, Gil took out his sketchbook and studied the dimensions he had written down. He stared once again at the open landscape—open but secretive, because it was so far removed from any human habitation or byway. Placing a statue on this hilltop, a site undefined by pedestrians or vehicular patterns, by buildings, by conventional sight lines, by any expectations whatsoever, made no logical sense. And that was what began to stir his interest. It was a deluded, heartbroken dream of a commission, not so much a statue as an apparition. But here was a real chance, he thought, a chance to create a monument that was not carefully ushered into being by committees of city fathers or boards of directors or clubwomen, but by one man’s private grief. The challenge for Gil would be to create a piece that could somehow command this summit without calling attention to itself.

But did the old man really have the money? He wrote down some quick calculations in his sketchbook—the value of his time, the cost of materials, the fees to models and plasterers and foundry workers and stonecutters and the workmen who would be required to erect the statue and its base in this remote location. The amount came to almost twenty thousand dollars. He could do it for less, of course; he could factor in less profit for himself. He was not rich, but since moving to San Antonio, he was getting by. There were fewer commissions after the war and they were going to younger men now, or to the so-called modern artists, or to talentless blowhards who got by on nothing but flattery and connections—or simply to the monument dealers who had gotten into the business and were now trying to sell every town square in America a knockoff statue of a grenade-flinging doughboy.

Standing alone on top of this mesa, he felt all of that irritating competition drop away as his excitement about this project grew. The inexpressible thing that had raised the Pawnee Scout to true art could be coaxed forth from this piece as well. He knew it could. He had been in this business a long time and knew what it meant to be stirred in this way, aware that there was some effect, some emotion, as yet unseen and ungrasped, waiting to be revealed. It was his skill and his labor that would reveal it. He was the man for this peculiar monument, this lonely bronze eulogy in the middle of nowhere.

LAMAR CLAYTON
was not the sort of man who needed company, and Maureen felt awkward standing by the car with him while her father performed his solitary conjuring act at the top of the mesa. She watched Mr. Clayton roll a cigarette with a bewitching economy of movement and then absorb himself in his smoking, in his calm, unstudied silence. It was social habit, more than awkwardness, that finally compelled her to get him to speak. She asked him to tell her about his wife.

“Ain’t a whole hell of a lot to tell,” he said. “Her proper name was Sarah but she went by Sarey to pert’ near everybody. She was younger than me by twenty years, a hell of a lot more polish to her. She grew up on a ranch near Sweetwater but she’d spent a summer or two in San Francisco when she was a girl. There was some family out there, an aunt who was married to a Portuguese man. He’d been in the whaling business, as I understand it. Sarey had me about half talked into taking her out there to visit them when she came down with the cancer. She was close to forty years of age when she died.”

“I’m very sorry to hear it,” Maureen said.

“Oh hell, no point in complaining about such things. Ben was still pretty young when she got sick, just eleven or twelve or so. I reckon I did about the best I could with him. But I keep thinking about how I might have done better. Just looking at those Kodaks today, I thought about how if his mother had been alive she would have made sure there’d been a lot more pictures.”

“It’s clear he was a fine-looking young man.”

“He got the better part of his looks from his mother, that’s for sure. And his easy nature too. I guess you and your father already figured out I ain’t all that comfortable talking to people.”

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye with a sly half smile. He was, she thought, serenely bashful. And sad, of course. The death of his son had obviously crushed him, and she suspected he was too old to rise from such a blow. The statue itself was clearly enough a symptom of that, one of those desperate and defiant things that grieving people did when simply moving on was too much to bear. There was a part of her that wanted to talk him out of it, to spare him all the expense and what was certain to be a final, resounding revelation that death was more triumphant than bronze.

“So you help your dad out with his statues?” Mr. Clayton asked as he stared up at the summit, where her father, out of sight, was still deliberating.

“Yes, a piece of this size is quite an operation, as I’m sure you can imagine. I pitch in wherever I’m needed, though it’s a point of pride to him that the actual modeling is his alone.”

His matter-of-fact nod left her unsettled somehow. There was very little in his world, apparently, that needed to be commented upon. She was used to talkier men. Her father, when not absorbed in the quietude of his work, was a natural conversationalist. Vance Martindale, on the unannounced occasions when he swooped into San Antonio from Austin, would bombard her over dinner with opinions on
Sonnets from the Portuguese
or
Sartor Resartus
or the abject philistinism of the Texas State Legislature. The silence that surrounded Lamar Clayton should have seemed like a natural barrier, but in fact it drew her in, and in an odd way was more revealing than speech.

She watched as Peggy sniffed around at the perimeter of a stand of cactus. The dog looked up and happened to catch Mr. Clayton’s disapproving eye and then trotted back on her stubby legs to stand next to his boots. In a moment, with a slight nod, he released her with a warning.

“She’s not what I would have pictured for a ranch dog,” Maureen said.

“Me neither. Peggy was my wife’s idea. She wanted some sort of creature around the ranch that didn’t have to earn its keep, that could just sort of be. Ben and that little dog got to be pretty close after Sarey died. Now I guess she just puts up with me.”

The dog woofed and the hair along her spine turned dark with alarm, but it was only Maureen’s father coming back down from the hill, scattering loose rocks as he walked. Moses coming down the mountain, Maureen thought. His eyes were alight with that familiar charge of creative discovery she had known from her girlhood, those magic moments when he was always at his happiest—the time when pure inspiration was flooding through his mind, before the frustration of real work set in.

“Mr. Clayton,” he called out, “I would very much like to meet your son’s horse.”

LAMAR CLAYTON
stood leaning against the corral fence as the sculptor busied himself with studying the little chestnut pony. Gilheaney had taken a tape measure from his jacket pocket and had his daughter help him as he measured off the animal’s height and girth and the length of its head. Then Miss Gilheaney walked around in a circle taking pictures with a Brownie. Poco didn’t like the snap of the shutter and he was suspicious of these strangers and didn’t trust their intentions. He calmed down some when Lamar walked over to him and put his hand on his neck and told him to hush.

Lamar wasn’t sure the horse had the wrong idea about Gilheaney. There was something about the sculptor’s methodical inspection of Poco that Lamar found irritating, or maybe threatening. Like he wasn’t just measuring the horse but taking him over in his mind. Gilheaney was a big enough man he could have been a statue of himself, over six feet tall and framey and turned out in an expensive-looking suit. He was big-headed, with steely hair that he parted in the middle and kept short on the sides, the kind of man who always looked like he’d just walked out of a barbershop. But to judge from his hands, his blunt, powerful fingers, you would have thought he’d grown up doing ranch work. He had a look in his eye that saw into you, or past you, or to somewhere you weren’t expecting him to be looking.

“He’s mostly a night horse,” Clayton said. He felt the need to reclaim the horse somehow from the sculptor’s scrutiny. “He’s clean-footed and Ben used to say he could see in the dark like a bat. Ben loved this ol’ horse.”

“He’s a fine animal, that’s plain to see,” Gil replied absently, stepping back to study the horse as Maureen clicked away with the Brownie. As the creature’s proportions became clearer to him, he was preoccupied with an emerging artistic challenge. The impression he had from the photos of Ben Clayton was of a muscular young man, with a solid torso and wide shoulders. Since this figure would be sitting atop a diminutive working pony, he did not want the boy to appear to be riding a donkey. On the other hand, he was excited by Poco’s musculature and comportment, his pared-down authority. It was more important for the statue to appear real than heroic, but achieving that authentic end would require levels of artifice Gil had yet to gauge.

He turned to Clayton. “What about Ben’s clothes?”

“His clothes?”

“Do you still have them?”

“Some of them. What do you want his clothes for?”

“I’ll need to get as accurate an idea of his size as I can. They would be very useful, if you don’t object.”

“Hell, I ain’t got no reason to object,” Clayton said.

But the old man looked particularly sorrowful, Maureen observed an hour later, as George’s Mary brought out the boy’s laundered and folded clothes and set them on the dining room table. She put down a pair of boots as well, and a battered sweat-stained hat.

“What did he wear mostly around the ranch?” Gil asked.

Clayton picked up one of the khaki-colored work shirts, frayed at the cuffs and with one of the pocket flaps half torn off.

“I’d say this one here if I had to guess,” he said.

“You don’t have to guess,” George’s Mary said. “That was his favorite shirt. I ought to know. I washed it about a thousand times.”

“And this hat? This is what he wore on the ranch?”