The Monument (7 page)

“And how could it be any other way?” It was almost exactly the same thing Fred had said the night before.

“Can you … teach me?”

He shook his head. “No. Not to be an artist. You already are that—I knew you had the hot worm in you when I first saw you walking up to the station wagon.”

“I didn’t think you could see much with your—from that end.”

“Well, then, there’s seeing,” he smiled, “and
there’s
seeing
, isn’t there? The point is I knew it, and there is nothing I—nor you, for that matter—can do about it. The fact exists. You are an artist.”

“But I don’t know anything.”

“Ahh, there I can help you.” He paused and let gas, just as natural as anything, and rubbed his stomach. I don’t think he thought it was crude or even thought of it at all—maybe nothing was crude to him. “She had strange eggs for breakfast—reminds me of some I had in India once. They were pickled but these had the strangest flavor.”

I didn’t say anything. If they hadn’t killed him by now they probably wouldn’t.

“I can teach you something of technique, of line, of color—of art.” He stopped at the station wagon and opened the back, put the pad and pencils in the back in a pile of what looked exactly like junk. He closed the rear door and motioned to the door on the passenger side.

“Get in. Your lesson starts now.”

“Where are we going?”

“Tomorrow night there is to be a public meeting
to make some kind of decision about the monument. I need to know more about your town, my dear, more of what it’s like so that I can decide what kind of a monument to do.”

“But isn’t that up to them? To the people in the town?” I held the door open and Python climbed into the front seat and sat in the middle. I climbed in and sat in the middle of a junk pile of old cans, bread wrappers, and empty potato chip bags, and some stuff I didn’t want to guess about. Python seemed to love it. “Don’t the people in Bolton get to decide what kind of monument they get?”

He looked at me, watched my face. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

I nodded. “It seems like if they’re paying for it …”

“There it is—right there.” He slammed his hand against the wheel and I felt Python jump next to me. “There’s the crux of it, isn’t it? All of art comes down to that, right down to that.” He laughed but it wasn’t a funny laugh, more a sad one. “You have to kind of squirm around that
point—like a bug on a hot stove looking for a cool place. That’s art, that is. Right there.”

He was silent for a time, which was just as well. The station wagon, once it got moving, sounded like it was going to explode. Things clunked and rattled and the muffler must have been gone because it was impossible to hear anything but a loud yell.

Which Mick did now. He leaned across Python, close to my ear, and yelled:

“Art is like medicine—people take it because they have to take it, because they
think
they have to take it or because you
make
them think they have to take it. True art, that is.” He took a deep breath, yelled again, “If we left it up to them we’d be waist deep in bleeding pictures of Elvis or Christ on black velvet in no time.”

He had been driving all the while, and we went past the north edge of town on County Road 1. When we were about a mile out of town Mick turned the wagon into a driveway and backed out so he was facing Bolton and cut the engine.

It looked peaceful in the morning light. The
elevators stood like statues, tall and white, on the right edge of town. The water tower stood on the left side and the trees hid most of the rest of it. You could see white here and there where a house showed through and one line of red where Carlson’s brick house stood.

“You can’t see people,” I said. It was nice with the station wagon engine stopped—I felt like my ears were bleeding. “Not a soul.”

“For a start—to know the place. Without people. It’s about people who are gone, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“The monument—the whole idea of it. It’s about dead people, not living ones, isn’t it? So we have to see how it looks without people.”

He sat for a time, just looking at the town, and I tried to do it the same way, and even Python seemed to be trying. His big muzzle aimed out over the hood and he watched the town but he soon became bored, and so did I.

“What are we looking for?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“That’s what I’ve been seeing.”

“Keep looking. This is your first lesson.”

He reached around in back of the seat and found the tablet and pencils he’d thrown in earlier. He handed them to me.

“What’s this?”

“Draw.”

“But I don’t know anything about drawing.”

“Draw.”

“What should I draw?”

“Draw.”

“You brought this for me, didn’t you?”

He nodded.

“But that was before I told you I wanted to be an artist.”

Another nod.

“How did you know?”

“It doesn’t matter. Open the pencils. Draw.”

I looked down at the pencil box. It felt very old. Made of polished wood, so worn the grain seemed to be raised. It had a sliding top and I slid it back to see eight or ten wooden pencils, all different sizes and lengths. “How old is it—the box?”

“When I was a boy I had it and it was old then—it doesn’t matter.” He pointed to the pencils.
“Some are soft and some are hard. Some can be used for shading. Draw.”

“The town?”

“What you see. Draw.”

So I drew the elevators. They were the biggest thing to see, and they stood up with all sorts of straight lines that were easy to make except that when I was done, it just looked like a bunch of straight lines.

“See now, see how she does the lines,” he said, looking up at the sky. “She does the lines so well.”

“But it doesn’t look right. It doesn’t look like the elevators.”

“See?” He took the drawing and used a wide pencil to shade one of the elevator sides to make it look deep and it just about jumped off the paper.

“There.”

“I see.”

“Draw.”

I did some shading and it worked. The elevator grew out from the page, looked closer to what it was—round and full of grain.

When I was done he took the tablet, looked at it for a moment, flipped the page over to show a fresh sheet and said: “Draw.”

I drew four more drawings. The water tower, an overall view trying to show the trees which just looked like a bunch of blops until he showed me how to use shading and small lines to make the leaves so they looked like trees, then one of the edge of the Carlson house, and one of the highway going into town.

He nodded his head when I finished each one. “You must do this and do this—for years. Draw and draw until you think your hands will fall off. Just to know the line—the way the line works.”

“What about color—all the rest of it?”

“It’s because you’re young, isn’t it—the impatiences? The small impatiences.” He nodded. “That’s fine—just fine. It’s all right to be impatient as long as you keep working. But remember that—to keep working. Work is all there is, all of everything. That’s enough from here.”

I put the pencils back into the box and he put the pad and pencils in the back of the wagon again. The engine roared again.

“Where are we going now?” I yelled.

“Graveyard.”

“Oh good,” I said, but he didn’t hear me.

He seemed to know things—knew just how to drive to the graveyard, which was on the south edge of town, opposite from the way we had been.

I don’t know about other small towns but Bolton takes care of its graveyard. I had never been there except to walk past, but the grass is always mowed and it’s always clean and neat. Many of the graves have plastic flowers by them.

Mick stopped the wagon by the entrance to the graveyard. “Get your pad and pencils.”

He walked down the small road that led into the graves and I followed, Python at my side.

About in the middle of the graveyard Mick stopped, looking around. “The old section—where’s the old section?”

I didn’t know, but after a moment of standing rubbing his nose, he nodded and walked down a side path to some older-looking headstones.

“Here. The old ones are the best.”

“Best at what?”

“Best to tell us what the town is really like—how the soul is. There, look at the stones, how they’re different from the others.”

And they were. The newer stones were just square blocks with the names carved out, sometimes stacked on another square block. Here, in the old part, there were sculpted figures and flowers and on one little stone a lamb, lying on its side.

“See?”

I couldn’t get my eyes off the small stone.

“She was just a baby,” I said. “Three years old.”

Mick nodded. “Draw.”

“Here?”

“What you see—draw.”

So I drew the headstone and it was going fine until I started on the little curled-up lamb on top. It was so small and alone. I remembered the
orphanage and how it had been sometimes alone in the room when I didn’t think I would ever get adopted, alone like the little lamb. I wondered how Clair Miller had come to die and I started to cry.

“Ahh, yes, there it is, isn’t it?”

“It’s not what you think.”

“Well, of course it is. You’re crying, and that’s the way it should be.”

“I’m not crying. I don’t cry.” Not at the orphanage and not since the orphanage. I didn’t cry. Not ever. And here I was, crying.

“It’s all right to cry,” he said. “I cry each day—my soul weeps. It means you’re seeing something as it is, as it’s meant to be seen, doesn’t it? Oh, yes, crying is the tiling to do.” He smiled. “As long as you keep on drawing. Know the line, always that, know the line.”

And I kept drawing and only dripped a little on the paper. When I finished I looked and saw that Mick was standing in front of a plain white stone, a rectangle, small and straight with no decoration.

I went to it and read:

“Was he a soldier?”

Mick nodded. “Civil War.”

“Killed in battle?”

“Maybe. Probably not. Most of them died of disease—four to one. Four soldiers in the Civil War died of dysentery—the black squirts, they called it—for every one that died of battle wounds. So he probably died that way.” He sighed. “Heroes all, weren’t they? All of them heroes. There were four, you know.”

“Four what?”

“Four men from the Bolton area to die in the Civil War. One more in the Spanish-American War. Seven in the First World War. Three in the Second World War. One in Korea and two in Vietnam. Eighteen all told to die in war, of one thing or another—eighteen young men gone.”

“How could you know that?”

He smiled. “I could say I just know it—the way I knew the popsicle-stick cross would be
under the bush—but the truth is I looked it up. Military records. When the fair Mrs. Langdon wrote to me I contacted a clerk in the army and asked him to check the records. It’s all in St. Louis, you know—all the army records. Eighteen dead. And they want a monument.” He looked from the graveyard to the town. “I’ll wager there aren’t two people in town who know how many have been killed—or that there’s a hero here.”

“A hero?”

“Congressional Medal of Honor winner. A true hero.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Jennings. I drew his dog, didn’t I? I saw the name on his mailbox—that must have been him. He was a hero in the First World War. God, he must be close to a hundred.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I don’t think anybody does.” He shook his head. “And we won’t tell if he doesn’t want it known, will we?”

“What did he do?”

“Killed some people. Killed a lot of them while
they were trying to kill him, probably—that’s how they usually win those things. Although some have won it for saving people’s lives—medics in combat. I don’t know. Just that he Avon a medal and we’ll let it be. Now you have to help me.”

“How?”

“I need a place where the men come to sit and talk—a gathering place for them.”

“That’s easy,” I said. “The grain elevator or the bar. Which do you want?”

“Both—but in the interests of sanity and caution perhaps we might try the elevator first. Drinking establishments have a way of … affecting me.”

FRED WAS SURPRISED to see me come to the elevator. We had talked it out the morning before I met with Mick.

“Seems like it’s in the interests of your new career to spend some time studying with this artist,” he said after breakfast.

“I’m caught up on the paperwork. I lined out all the books and stuff so you can just fill it in. I
can come in the evening and finish it out for the day.”

“Let’s not worry too much about that—art seems to be a little more important.”

“It does?” All this time and he’d never said two words about art and after breakfast he drops that.