Remember Ben Clayton (10 page)

Thousands of sharp-edged shell fragments poking up from the ground made it treacherous to walk. They found helmets and gas masks and spectacles and scraps of paper and postcards buried in the hard dirt, and once the bones of someone’s hand that the American cleanup squads had missed. Anything that looked like it might be some sort of personal artifact was tossed in a pile that Dervaux would go through at the end of the day to determine if it was something that should be forwarded to the American army.

It did not look like the same place to him. At the time of the attack the battlefield had been hidden in smoke and fumes and curtains of dirt raining down from the impact of the shells. Even if the landscape had not been so deeply obscured he would have seen little of it, since he had barely looked up the whole time as he clung tight to the ground or moved with cowering dread from one position to another. Even now, he found himself crouching and looking for places to hide himself, gripped by a fear of standing upright, exposed to fire.

After a few days they began work on the cemetery at the edge of the village. He remembered this place better, it was seared into his mind forever. There was a civilian cemetery and next to it one for the German army, built during the years when the Boche had occupied the village and thought they would never leave this part of France and so interred their dead in its soil. The Germans had left their own cemetery untouched except for a trench running between the rows of crosses, but the civilian cemetery next to it had been heavily fortified in preparation for the American and French assault. The Boche had dug into the graves, hauled the coffins and bodies away, and tied into the deep crypts with their trenchworks.

The villagers had taken it upon themselves to restore the civilian cemetery as best they could, but there were still gaping trenches and shell holes and a litter of broken marble from tombstones and grave monuments. While the men of the Service worked, some of the villagers stood and watched, anxious that the dead still remaining in their tombs not be disturbed further.

The temperature had dropped again, but there was so much shoveling and hauling to do that Arthur sweated through his work clothes and his hands felt numb and clammy inside his gloves. The discomfort helped to deaden his mind. He worked with mechanical intensity, trying to think only of the debris to be cleared and the meal to be eaten at the end of the day and the possibility of exhausted sleep to follow. He worked next to Jérôme and two other men, hauling
tôle
and wire to the scrap heap outside the cemetery walls. He had not told anyone that he had fought in the battle here. He had no interest in speaking about it, in English or in French, and most of the men here had stories of their own of far greater battles, from the dark times of the war before the Americans had come. There were braggarts in the Service, of course, men who could not shut up, but Arthur had noticed that most of the men preferred to talk of other things, or to talk of nothing at all, and that sort of evasive silence suited him well.

Turning over the dirt on the rim of a shell hole, he found a little appointment book for 1918, most of its pages eaten away by the elements, and with German notations written in pencil. In the hole itself there was a Waterbury pocket watch. It was a cheap watch, beyond repair, and there was no inscription on the back, but he added it and the appointment book to the growing pile of personal effects at the base of a monument in the German cemetery.

Many of the grave markers in the civilian sector of the cemetery had been blown to shards, others had been carried away by the villagers for safekeeping, but a few were still in place, their elaborate stonework scarred by shrapnel and machine-gun fire, their crosses and angels broken off. Arthur studied one of them as he worked in the late afternoon under the gray winter sky. It was the grave of a man with his own first name, Arthur Depuiset.
“Décédé le 15 mai 1899,”
it read.
“Âgé de 51 ans.”

He wondered who Arthur Depuiset had been. He wondered what it would like to be fifty-one years old. Arthur’s parents had been barely forty when they died, but they had seemed so old to him the last time he had seen them, standing there blank-faced as he boarded the troop train out of Fort Worth. His mother had not cried. She was from harder stock than his father, who had a sentimental streak and shook Arthur’s hand with a pleading look in his eyes. He could imagine those wounded eyes looking at him now, trying to understand what had happened to his son, and he felt once again the bitter relief he took in the knowledge that his parents were dead.

Arthur expected he himself might reach thirty or so. He did not really care to live much longer, and would surely be well through with life by then. In the hospital an English-speaking French doctor had come one day and asked him right away if he had had any notions about killing himself. Arthur had told the truth and said he had not, but he remained mildly receptive to the idea of an early death. He would bide his time uncomplainingly, and then a day would come when he would not have to think about anything or endure anything or fight back memories anymore.

He read the inscription on another grave—
“À la Mémoire de Marie Adeline Rossignon. Décédée l’août 1902 dans sa 71e année.”
He was thinking how Marie Adeline seemed like such a young name, wondering what it was like to be called that as an old woman of seventy-one, when he noticed two bullet holes in the lower left side of the monument.

He had a shuddering awareness that this was the place. This was where Ben had died. Maybe the bullets that had made those marks were the same bullets that had passed through Ben Clayton’s body.

It was odd that he could just go on working today, knowing where he was, but he could. He shoveled dirt into the trench, wrested iron and wood out of the grip of the soil and the permeable rock below. He just kept working like it was any place else.

He tried not to think about anything as he worked but it wasn’t really possible. He didn’t blame himself if his mind slipped back into the past as long as his body kept burying it. It must have been in the assault toward the positions on the far side of the stream that he had been wounded. He did not know exactly where he had been found and had been in too much pain and bewilderment to ask. Somewhere on this side of the stream, probably. The last thing he remembered was being in the German trench, staring in stupefaction at Ben’s already-dead body. Ben’s eyes were fixed and blank and it looked as if he were willingly dead, a quality of acceptance that had infuriated Arthur and made him feel as lonesome as a child in a dark forest. He remembered the feeling of betrayal as well, the sense that Ben had purposely left him for some plane of experience that was more interesting.

The memory came back to him now but without, he supposed, the proper weight. His wound had been so searing and complete that it had been impossible for him to see beyond it. He could only imagine the intensity of the grief he would have felt for Ben if he had not entered into such a cauterizing inferno of his own. Even the death of his family, which he knew should have left him howling with sorrow and shock, was something he seemed to have accepted with fatalistic understanding. It was not that he had ceased to feel, only that he had ceased to be impressed.

By the end of the day the sky was sealed in with lustrous gray winter clouds. Night would fall in an hour. He was all right. Being back on this battlefield, back in the cemetery at Saint-Étienne, had caused him no special suffering much beyond what he had already set himself to endure. The work, as always, had been hard and annealing, and he was twitchy from hunger and looking forward to the soup and bread waiting for them in their headquarters in Suippes.

He gathered up the few personal items he had found—the remains of a fountain pen, a torn photograph of someone’s mother, a single key—and took them over to the pile at the base of the monument in the German cemetery.

The monument was hideous—a relief sculpture of a naked man with his hands on the hilt of a massive sword. The man was squat in stature, his hair cropped short, his expression a disdainful frown. Above the man’s head were the words
“GOTT-MITT-UNS”
and below the sword point
“Gewidmet, 18. June. Div. 1915–1916.”
It struck Arthur as interesting that two years before the fight here the Germans had been so sure of their possession of this part of France they had buried their war dead in its soil and erected this scowling angel to watch over them.

“It’s ugly, is it not?” Jérôme said to him in French. He was lighting his massive pipe while sitting on the curving bench in front of the sculpture.

“I don’t like it,” Arthur agreed.

He tossed the fountain pen and the key and the photograph onto the pile of personal effects. The pile had grown during the day and there were perhaps a hundred items there now, nothing of any obvious consequence and certainly nothing of any value.

“To be a sculptor, to have that gift, and to produce something so wretched as this.”

Jérôme was shaking his head in theatrical disdain, waiting for Arthur to reply in the same spirit. But Arthur had stopped listening. He was looking at a small rectangle of metal that gleamed a little in the failing light and looked familiar. When he picked it up out of the pile he saw that it was what he had thought: a rectangle cut out of a mess-kit lid, with a crude relief carving of a horse standing on a Texas mesa.

NINE

G
il and Maureen returned to the Clayton ranch in late November, bringing with them suitcases with enough clothes for a week’s stay and a wooden packing box containing the clay maquette of the statue.

As soon as they had set down their luggage, Gil carried the box to a side table in the parlor and asked for a clawhammer. When George’s Mary brought it to him he went to work, prying out the reinforcing strips of wood with a deliberate lack of ceremony. Lamar Clayton was a man who would want things presented to him plain, particularly a clay sketch of his dead son.

“I’d like the curtains open, if you don’t mind,” Gil said, after he had removed the sides of the box. The maquette itself was still shrouded in hay and egg cartons and newspaper, and he was anxious that it be presented in an advantageous light. The windows in the room were small, but when George’s Mary opened the curtains the plane-flattening dimness disappeared, and Gil and Maureen peeled back the layers of newspaper with confidence.

Clayton grabbed a hardback chair from the corner of the room and sat himself down in front of the clay model. His little dog, jealous of the attention he was giving it, tried to jump up into his lap, but Clayton swiped her away. The smell of the clay filled the room.

“I still ain’t sure about him not being on the horse,” Clayton said after a moment.

“I am. The piece will be more powerful if he is standing beside it.”

Gil disregarded Clayton’s skeptical and slightly perturbed glance.

“I can tell it’s him but there ain’t much detail,” Clayton said. “Not in the face anyway.”

“The details will come later. You can be confident it will look like your son before it’s finished.”

“Something about the horse ain’t right either. Legs are too long maybe.”

Gil merely nodded. He wasn’t worried. The sculpture was strong. He knew that Clayton understood well enough that the model before him was only a starting place. He had seen this look of dour inspection in other clients who regarded immediate enthusiasm as a sign of weakness.

“Well,
I
like it, Mr. Gilheaney,” George’s Mary said. “I look at that and I see Ben for sure, and Poco too.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” Clayton growled. He turned to Maureen. “What do you think?”

“I think it will be extraordinary.”

“Don’t want to see him in the saddle?”

“No, Mr. Clayton. I don’t think so. This is better.”

“Well, I guess it’s good the two of you are thinking alike.”

And that was his last word on the subject. His lack of any further comment evidently meant that the concept was approved. All through dinner he kept glancing at the maquette, silently assessing it. Afterwards, when Gil and Maureen were sitting with him on the porch, staring out at an orange moon, he unbuttoned a shirt pocket and handed Gil a check.

“That’s your commencement money.”

“Thank you,” Gil said. “As soon as Maureen and I get back I’ll begin work on the scale model. Then we’ll begin building the armature for the full-size clay. In the meantime, while I’m here, the more I can learn about Ben and the sort of life he led, the better the quality of the work will be.”

“The sort of life he led,” Clayton repeated.

“Correct.”

“You say you can ride a horse without falling off?”

“I can, though it’s the best that can be said for my horsemanship.”

Clayton smiled, liking his guest’s candor. He glanced at Maureen, who replied with an amused shrug, then turned back to Gil.

“We’ve got some calves in a pasture over on the other side of the ranch that need to be checked for screwworms. I’ll tell Ernest to put Ben’s saddle on Poco, and you can ride over there with us on the boy’s own horse.”

“That would suit me fine.”

Clayton tossed his cigarette off the porch and stood up. “All right. We’ll leave after breakfast in the morning.”

The old man said good night and walked into the house. Maureen waited until she thought he was out of earshot before gently confronting her father.

“You know, it’s rough country out there, Daddy.”

“I suppose the horses are used to it. Don’t worry, I’ll come back in one piece. And what better opportunity could there be for soaking up authenticity?”

FRANCIS GILHEANEY
did not make a particularly authentic-looking cowboy. Just after a hideously early breakfast, Maureen followed her father and Mr. Clayton out of the house to where Nax and Ernest were waiting with the horses saddled. Her father wore his Abercrombie and Fitch hunting clothes, with a stout pair of city boots. His spruce outfit was crowned with a hard-used cowboy hat that he had borrowed from Clayton. Underneath its drooping brim, Gil was grinning with delight. He clapped his hands together and said good morning to Clayton in a hearty voice.

He was the sort of man who could wear anything and make it his, Maureen reflected, the sort of man who strode onto an unfamiliar scene with confidence and purpose. As a young girl, watching her father at work in his studio as he heaved on pulleys, built massive armatures, carried around bronze busts as heavy as cannonballs in a single hand, she had naturally formed the conviction that to be a monumental sculptor you had to be a monumental man. He had been that, and was still.

The seventy-year-old Lamar Clayton mounted his horse with no more effort than it required him to take a seat at the head of his dining table. Maureen knew her father to be a fit man, but he was fit in the wrong way for ranch work, and for a moment—as he tried to lift one long leg high enough to set his foot into the stirrup—she worried that he would need assistance from Ernest and hence die of embarrassment. But he managed finally to heave himself into the saddle and when he did so he looked down at Maureen with an expression that suggested she keep her doubts about his riding ability to herself.

They set off at a walk along the road leading from the house and over the shallow creek. Maureen watched them long enough to satisfy herself that her father was not going to immediately fall off his horse, then she went inside to help George’s Mary with the breakfast dishes.

“Oh no, don’t you dare even think about that,” George’s Mary said, pretending to slap her arm away when she brought in a few dishes from the table. “You and your daddy are guests here, and that’s all there is to it.”

Maureen stayed in the kitchen, thinking that the least she should do was keep George’s Mary company as she went about her housework. The housekeeper scrubbed the dishes and placed them in the drying rack with a precision and efficiency that Maureen found compelling, a lifetime’s expertise behind the work. George’s Mary’s face was big and blunt but Maureen supposed that in her youth her features had been agreeably strong; maybe there had even been a period of beauty. She was rather fat now but there was tensile strength in her forearms, which bulged with muscle as she wielded the scrub brush.

“I hope my father survives this outing,” Maureen said.

“Oh, I expect he’ll be wore out when he comes back, but Mr. Clayton’ll look out for him. I ain’t never cared much for horses, myself. They had their way they’d keep biting you till hell ain’t bigger than a minute.”

“You must have done your share of horseback riding, growing up in this country.”

“I did, but I also made sure to find a way around it whenever I could.”

“And tell me about—”

George’s Mary laughed. “You’re polite, so it took you about a minute longer to get around to asking about my name than most folks.”

“I’m sorry. I hope it isn’t forward of me.”

“To ask somebody about their name? Don’t see what’s forward about that. I got it because my daddy and my uncle Dan both had little girls named Mary. They were partners on some land over on the Salt Fork, and we were all piled on top of each other in a sod house there for a while with everybody calling out Mary and nobody knowing which one they meant. So it came to be Dan’s Mary and George’s Mary.”

“Does your family still call you that?”

“No, they was all killed by Indians a good long time ago.”

Since George’s Mary said this with no particular inflection while she went on scrubbing the dishes, Maureen did not think it her role to gasp with horror, as she most certainly would have done among her own set. Of course, no one among her own set would have the occasion to let slip in a matter-of-fact way that her whole family had been wiped out by Indians.

“So it’s just the two of you—you and your dad?” George’s Mary asked.

“Yes. My mother died last year of the flu.”

“Well, I’m sure sorry to hear that.”

“Thank you. Are you sure I can’t help you with the dishes?”

“You just go on about your business,” George’s Mary answered, “and maybe I’ll let you help me get supper on a little later.”

The problem was that Maureen had no business to go about. She walked into the parlor and looked wistfully out the window, irritated at how casually her father had left her behind, and how neither he nor Lamar Clayton had even thought to ask if she might want to accompany them on their screwworm expedition to the far reaches of the ranch. She had had no desire to do so and, unlike her father, nothing to prove, but the assumption that none of this was any of her real concern left her deeply annoyed. Here on this ranch the witless primacy of men was in its fullest expression.

With this on her mind she became aware, standing idly in the parlor, of another female presence. The late Mrs. Clayton’s clothes were doubtless all packed away or given away, and her personal effects were not on display. But there was the elegant china in its glass-fronted cabinet, and several nicely framed prints on the walls. They were nothing special—just a wintry sketch of a sleigh ride and a watercolor of distant strollers on a windswept beach—but they had obviously been chosen with a woman’s eye for balance and color, as a vital assault upon the dim functionality of the house where she had come to live. And next to a battered rolltop desk was a single anomalous specimen of furniture, a corner piece of polished cherry decorated with ormolu script. On its surface someone had thoughtlessly set down a rusted crescent wrench and an old coffee can full of nails and screws. Maureen hesitated for a moment, satisfied herself that George’s Mary was still busy in the kitchen, and walked over and bent down to open the small curved door at the front of the chest. Inside, on a shelf, were stacked subscription copies of
Harper’s Bazaar
, the
Atlantic Monthly
, and several other magazines she would not have expected to find in this barren stretch of Texas. There were respectable novels as well, and catalogs from fashionable department stores, and news stories about museum exhibits and New York theater productions that had been clipped out of the Dallas newspapers.

She had understood from talking to Mr. Clayton that day on the mesa that his wife had been more worldly than he was, but Maureen glimpsed in this hidden reliquary a heartbreaking yearning for a sophisticated life, for news from the distant capitals of culture. She tried to imagine this woman lying in bed next to Lamar Clayton. She tried to imagine her chatting with George’s Mary, setting down her copy of
Harper’s Bazaar
to listen to the story of the massacre of her housekeeper’s family.

Maureen wondered what aspirations Mrs. Clayton would have had for her son—had she survived his childhood, had he survived the war. Perhaps she had loved this wild country as much or more than any man; it was certainly not impossible. But it was more than a guess on Maureen’s part that it could not have been enough for her, and that she would not have accepted that it would be enough for Ben. If she had lived, perhaps he would have too, propelled by her unfulfilled dreams to attend some eastern school or laze about in some foreign capital where neither duty nor the draft would have found him.

But there was barely a hint of the woman who might have presided over this alternative future, just a stack of magazines and books and a few pictures on the wall. And, perhaps most tellingly, no statue to her memory.

“YOU DON’T NEED
to worry about them reins so much,” Clayton told Gil as they rode across a vast open pasture, golden with winter grass. “Poco’s got a pretty good notion about where we’re headed and how fast we need to get there.”

Gil loosened his grip and let the reins slacken a little, grateful for the chance to concentrate just on keeping his seat in the saddle. He decided not to feel perturbed by Clayton’s implicit comment on his riding skills.

“I didn’t mean to interfere with my horse’s pursuit of his professional duties,” he said.

Clayton chuffed out a laugh. Ernest and Nax were a half mile ahead of them, dismounting to open a wire gate that led away from the easy prairie flats onto broken ground. The weather had closed in a little, a moist fog hovering above the grass and in tangles of wiry mesquite. Gil buttoned his jacket up and wished he’d brought gloves or that somebody had thought to bring them for him. They had gone maybe three or four miles and the novelty of riding a horse across the Texas prairie had long since fled. They were moving at a fast walk, and he was having trouble finding a rhythm in the erratic tremors the pace created in animal and rider. Stretching out his legs to absorb the shock had already given him intimations of cramps along the insides of his thighs.

Gil had never had instruction in riding and, unlike his companions today, he had not been born to the saddle. But he had learned to sit on a horse, more or less, during one particularly heady period in New York, when he was a young sculptor on the rise and was frequently invited to Mrs. Gilder’s salon. Mingling with various Sedgwicks and Frelinghuysens and Morgans, he had been invited often enough for country weekends involving tame equestrian rambles.

He was a long way from those well-kept trails today, he thought, suppressing a wave of concern as they passed through the wire gate and Clayton—without a word of warning—led them into a plunge down a steep creek bank. It may not actually have been steep, but to Gil it seemed like a cataclysmic drop. He surrendered the pretense of controlling his horse and just grabbed the saddle horn with both hands and prayed that Poco would get them out of this. The horse picked his way carefully downward, along a rude path bordered with jagged rocks, but when he got to the bottom of the slope he hopped forward into the shallow water and then lurched out again on the other side. The horse clambered up the opposite side of the slope with what seemed to Gil—just before he was pitched off—like malicious exuberance.