The Monument (5 page)

“What light?”

“There! The light coming by that old wall, see how it comes down gold and across your face? Oh, God, see it, see the light? It comes down
across you like a blessing, like a kiss from the gods. I’ve got to get it … get it. Stay there. Just there. Stay there. Don’t move.”

And all the time he was talking he had moved around to the rear of the car and was rummaging in the back of the station wagon, pulling at what looked like a bunch of junk to me, folders and boxes and paper sacks. In a few seconds he found a tablet and a small box that he brought to the hood of the car.

“Don’t move, don’t move.”

I had no intention of moving. It was coming to me now, what he was, the thought, and I was wondering what it would do to Bolton.

He looked kind of like a garden gnome, one of the statues that Clyde Frenser had in his yard and garden. Round and short with red faces, all smiling, all happy, but with some little thing in their eyes, some wicked little thing that made them look like they were always on the edge of doing something wrong. His eyes had the same look, the tip up at the corners, and he had a small beard and was bald on top and looked all mussed and devilish. Even his clothes looked
like they came off a garden gnome. He had a bright red shirt over a pale green pair of stretch slacks that looked like they’d been on him for about a year. There were stains down the front of his shirt that I didn’t care to look at or think about much. He opened the box to show a bunch of pieces of colored chalk.

He flipped the top of the tablet back to get to a clean piece of paper and grabbed a chunk of dark-colored chalk from the box and drew.

“Don’t move—not a muscle.”

He sketched fast, his head bent over the tablet, his hand flying in great motions, round and round, and when I leaned forward to see he yelled at me.

“Don’t
move
!”

Python rumbled at the way his voice jumped but he didn’t even notice that, didn’t notice death. He just kept sketching.

“The light—see the light?” His voice was a whisper while he worked, a hushed sound, almost like praying, and in a few minutes he was done.

“There—I’ve caught it. Just notes, see, just
notes, but I can paint it later if I can find somewhere in this place with light, with a room to work in. That’s it, don’t you see? Just a dry room and light. God, light is everything.”

And here a strange thing happened. While he was talking, his voice soft about light and how he needed a dry room, while he was going on Python walked over to him and put his jaw against the man’s leg, just pushed his muzzle over, and the gnome reached down and petted him. Without losing a finger. Python had never let another soul touch him and here he walks right up to this complete stranger who could have been a pervert and lets him touch him on the head.

“You’re the artist,” I said. “The one they sent for to do the monument.”

“Mick,” he said. “Mick … well, any last name you want. Just Mick. It doesn’t matter. Names don’t matter, do they? Only the light matters, the light and the way colors move in the light. That’s all. And shapes. Line—it’s all in the line.”

And all this time he’s petting Python, rubbing
his head, “But aren’t you the one for the monument?”

“Well, that goes, doesn’t it? What in blue-bonnet hell would I be doing in this place if I weren’t sent for? I know nothing of farming or wheat or flatness. Only line, and color and form and shading. See—look now, turn and
look
, girl, at the light coming across the face of that building. Look at how it catches the bricks so you can see the soul of the men who laid them, see the guts of the men who made the building.
See?
There it is.”

And he turned to a new page in the tablet and started to draw again. This time he wasn’t doing me so I could move, and I stood in back of him and watched him draw. It didn’t make any sense—the lines seemed to fly all over the place, all in browns and reds and yellows, sometimes one over the other and all mixed. I didn’t see how it could make anything but junk, just junk, and suddenly it did.

Suddenly it was all there. All the dust and light from the sun and the bricks in the old Emerson building that used to be a hardware store
but now was empty—all of it was there. And the light.

“I can see it!” I said. “I can really see it—how did you do that?”

“It’s not me, is it—it’s the light. It’s the way the thing is, the way of it, and I just make it be the way it is. Like over there, over by that old fence, see how it comes out there and the shadows fall in the dirt by the road?”

And he was off again, the pad out in front of him this time, his fingers holding different pieces of chalk as he moved. Python followed and I followed and watched him work. Once when I looked down, Python was looking at the chalk as well, watching it fly around the paper.

“How did you get here?” I asked. “I mean, if you see all these things to draw all the time, how do you get anywhere?”

He stopped and looked at me. “Ahh, yes, there it is, isn’t it? I haven’t a clue. Drunk, I suppose—drunk is the only way I can seem to get anywhere. I have a drink now and then.”

“You do.” I thought of Fred and Emma. They “had a drink now and then.” Mick must swim
in it. When he moved now I could sometimes smell him, smell his clothes, and Python didn’t seem to mind. But then Python liked to roll on dead skunks on the highway when he could find them. Mick’s clothes made me want to stop breathing.

But I followed him. Even the smell didn’t stop me.

He kept moving and I kept following him.

SOMETIMES you don’t see things and time will go by and by and then you’ll look and see it. In the orphanage we always thought Sister Gene Autry was kind of ugly because she had such a square face and big jaw. But later and still later after I was adopted by Emma and Fred and woke up every morning happy, later I would sit and think of Sister Gene Autry as being kind of
beautiful. And maybe she wasn’t, but that’s how I remember her now. I wrote a letter to her to tell her, sort of, without telling her how I thought she was beautiful now, but it embarrassed me and I never did mail it. But I wished I had. Although that’s not the same.

That’s what happened now, while I was following Mick. I’d been in Bolton for years, and what with walking now every morning while we worked through the hard part of harvest, I thought I knew everything about it, how it looked and acted, but I was wrong. I didn’t know anything. Not really.

Mick went through town like a chalk storm, the little colored bits in one hand and the tablet in the other.

“The town, see, it’s all there, all … right … there.”

And he would stop and draw. Once he drew the corner, just the corner, of Henderson’s old white house. It was an abandoned house on the stretch of Third and Elm. I always just thought of it as an empty house, just a box that nobody used any longer. Fred had told me once that
there had been a large, happy family there but hard times had come in the thirties and they had all left, and nobody ever heard of them again, not a word.

Somehow that came into the drawing. I watched Mick work, saw the lines happen and the colors and, just from the corner of the old house, felt all the loneliness of the family being gone—all of it. It made me think of Sister Gene Autry and I swore to myself I would write her another letter and mail it this time, and Mick moved on.

On a back street he stopped by a small green house where Mr. Jennings lived. Mr. Jennings was so old that not even Fred and Emma knew how long he’d been in Bolton. Fred thought he was over a hundred and when I watched Mr. Jennings come out for mail once, to the box on the street, I agreed. It seemed to take him about a week to walk out and walk back, and he had this old, old dog named Rex who slept on the front steps. Rex would get up and walk with Mr. Jennings out to the street for the mail, step by
step, and together they made you think of old—old dusty dead and
old
.

Mick did a drawing of Rex on the porch, and Rex didn’t move even though Python was there which sometimes made Rex raise his head, and when he was done I could see Rex as a young dog.

He was still old and not moving and the house was still small and green and Mr. Jennings was still old but I could in some way see them all young and new. I could see Rex how he must have been when he was young with tall shoulders and pretty fur and bright eyes. The drawing made me want to know Mr. Jennings young, know what he was like when he was a young man. I decided just because of the drawing to ask around and find out all I could about him.

“How do you do that?” I asked, but he ignored me, kept going and drawing until I realized that I was late for work and Fred would have to handle the paperwork for the loads without me. He could do it, but it made things slower, and the farmers would have to wait in line longer. That
made them mad because they wanted to get back to their fields.

“I have to go,” I said, but he was doing a tree limb near the school, just a limb that hung out over the elementary playground fence, and he didn’t hear me, or didn’t care, and I turned to go.

Python didn’t come.

“Are you staying with him?” I asked. It was the first time he’d ever done that, stayed when I got ready to leave. He turned at last and came to me, leaned in so I could take his shoulder. We walked four blocks back to the grain elevator while Mick stayed to draw the town.

There was a long line of trucks and Fred looked all frazzled.

“I was about to send somebody to find you.”

I slid in behind the desk. “The man came—the artist.”

“Oh—he did? When?”

“Must have been last night sometime. I found him asleep in his station wagon.”

“In his car? Didn’t he know- they had a room saved for him at Carlson’s bed and breakfast?”

“I guess not.” Or maybe he did, I thought. Widow Carlson had heard about a new tiling for small towns—bed-and-breakfast inns—on some television show she’d seen and decided she should turn her house into one.

“Just to pick up a few dollars,” she said to Fred and Emma in the grocery store one day when we were shopping. “To help tide a woman over, you know, the rough spots.”

Fred told me later the Widow Carlson had about as much money as a small European country, having owned seven square miles of prime wheat land that her husband left to her. Maybe she just needed something to do.

The problem was Bolton is off the path to just about anywhere in the world, and nobody ever came except grain and cattle buyers. They spent the nights in Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium until near morning, buying and selling grain and cattle, and then driving on without actually sleeping the night anywhere. So when nobody came Widow Carlson just more or less saved the breakfast portion for the next time—which was
two hard-boiled eggs—and, like Fred once said, the eggs must have hair on them by this time.

Sticking Mick in there would just about kill him, especially if he tried to eat one of the eggs.

“Maybe we should go find him,” Fred said. “And tell him where to go.”

I shrugged. “He was over by old man Jennings’s place last I saw him.”

“What was he doing over there?”

“Drawing.”

“Drawing pictures?”

I nodded. “Looks like he’s going to draw the whole town unless he runs out of paper.”

“Just drawing pictures as he goes?”

“Yup.” The dust was coming into the office bad now from the dumping trucks, and I used my fingers to clean out the corner of my eyes. “His hands just fly.”

“Is that a fact?” Fred stopped with his handkerchief halfway to blowing his nose. “Are the drawings good?”

I thought a minute. “I don’t know. I think they are, but I don’t know anything about what makes a good drawing. I know this—they make
you think, make me see things I hadn’t seen before. He did a drawing of old man Jennings’s dog Rex, and I saw Rex like he must have been when he was young.”

Fred blew his nose, then carefully folded his handkerchief and put it away. “You know, I’d like to see that—I really would.”

“I could take you if you didn’t have all this to do. He’s just three blocks away.”

He looked at me. “What do you think?”

“Fred, there’s three trucks waiting.”

“We’ll take ’em with us.”

“We will?”

“Sure. There might not be a chance to see something like this again ever.”

He thought a minute, then took three cold Cokes out of the machine, poured half of each one out the window and filled them from the bottle in the sack and walked out the door.

One truck was dumping grain—there was a farmer named Hansen there—and two more were waiting. He handed Hansen one of the Cokes, went to the other two farmers and gave them each a Coke and talked to each of them a
little. Pretty soon I was walking down the street with Python by my side and four big men following along behind.

We had to walk past the hardware and grocery, then along the side of Bemis’s all-service station. Five people walking like that attracted attention so we picked up one here and one there until I looked back and we had nine men and three women following, none of them talking, just following in the early morning behind Python and me.