Remember Ben Clayton (2 page)

A few paces ahead Bernie Rutledge stopped, caught in something. He tried to lift his foot and back up, and that’s when the machine gunners opened up, the bullets splintering the chauchaut and the arms that were holding it, and at the same moment bursting through Bernie’s neck. He collapsed onto the strands of wire that had been planted low to the ground in careless coils so that brush and grass would grow up through it and conceal it. The Kuholtz boys dropped too, twitching and howling as the rounds kept hitting them.

“Get over the goddam wire!” Kitchens screamed at the top of his voice. He boldly planted his foot on Bernie Rutledge’s back so that he could vault over the wire. He went twenty paces before a bullet ripped through his face.

Ben and Arthur had no choice but to step on the Kuholtz boys to keep from getting snared in the wire themselves. Herman Kuholtz cried out, “Stop it! I ain’t dead!” On the other side of the wire they dove into a shell hole. The blade of the entrenching tool Arthur had shoved down his pants gouged into his groin. He glanced back and could see boys still dropping on the wire. And now the enemy artillery had opened up again, ripping open what had once been a cultivated field and raining down unharvested sugar beets that Arthur thought at first were grenades. The firing was most intense from the hill to their right, but he could hear the workmanlike rhythms of a machine gun somewhere to their left supporting the fire from the knobby summit.

Kitchens was dead. He was sitting upright twenty yards away. The bullet that had hit him had blown away his jaw and his tongue hung out the side of his face. He looked like a panting dog. Arthur saw the company’s twenty-two-year-old lieutenant, a brand-new sears-roebuck from Wichita Falls, being hauled back to the American lines, screaming as his shattered legs bounced over the clotty earth. There was no one to give orders. The units were already hopelessly mixed. He did not even recognize the nearest men to him, who were cowering in the same shallow depression as bullets tacked away at the ground all around them. Their faces were as white as cue balls. Fear had washed out their features and made them all look the same. As one of the shells made a low trajectory over their heads he thought he could hear the liquid sloshing of mustard gas.

“What do we do?” he shouted to Ben.

But Ben was already on his feet. He had spotted the Boche machine-gun nest to their left and was racing heedlessly toward it. It was not courage that drove Arthur to follow him. It was only the fear of being left alone.

TWO

W
hen Francis Gilheaney received a telegram from the president of the Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben reading “Statue in Danger,” he left San Antonio on the first train that would get him to Omaha. The riot erupted in full force as he was standing at the reception counter of the Henshaw Hotel. A couple of young thugs burst into the lobby waving shotguns and theatrically declaring they would kill any and all niggers they saw. Unable to think of any more stirring rhetoric, they ran back out to join the crowds that were rushing down Farnam Street toward the courthouse.

Gil left his bags with the desk clerk and went outside. He had not slept for twenty-four hours but his mind was alert with peril. Thousands of men swarmed in the street. They had ropes to hang the Negro man under guard in the courthouse jail who they said had assaulted a white woman. They carried torches and shot revolvers and rifles into the air. Gil could spot the men who were home from the war, who were unemployed and scared about it and looking for someone to blame. They were not firing their weapons profligately like the others. They had their eyes fixed straight ahead and their course was lethally firm.

All along the street the rioters were throwing bricks through windows and looting the hardware stores, pouring out with guns that had the prices still attached and filling their pockets with shells. Gil did not belong with this crowd and he knew it would not be long before someone gave him a look that told him so. He was not a delirious teenager or a young veteran with a grudge. He was a sixty-year-old man in a good suit, with a scowl of disapproval on his face that his pride would not allow him to remove.

At the end of the block the courthouse where the accused man was being held was on fire. It was eight o’clock at night. The flames in the lower windows illuminated cyclonic columns of smoke, which rose straight into the air and then flattened into tendrils that drifted toward the Missouri River. Up ahead a streetcar had come to a stop, unable to proceed because of the crowd and the confusion. Three or four men dragged a Negro man out of the back and over to the sidewalk in front of a Chinese restaurant.

The man kept his feet after they slammed him into a wall. As they approached he tried to argue them out of their position. He said the man they were after was in the courthouse, not here. He knew nothing about an attack on a white girl. He worked in a photography studio and was on his way home. They had no intention of listening. They smiled with feral satisfaction and kept closing in, taunting him and poking him with broom handles.

Gil had urgent business of his own but the sight of this man, helplessly pleading his case as he was about to be beaten to the pavement and probably hanged, caught him up.

“You men!” he barked out as he walked up to them.

They turned around. They were boys, no older than seventeen. He saw in their eyes that his age and his size and the way he was dressed caught them off guard, that he might be the sort of man they had the habit of deferring to in their unclouded moments.

“I’ll take care of him,” he said. “You men go on. They need everybody at the courthouse.”

They stood there dumbly.

“Go on!” he yelled. “He’s getting away!”

They looked to the courthouse. They had not seen the fire yet, and fortunately for the credibility of his scenario it added a new dimension of urgency. One of the boys gave Gil a confused nod and led the rest of them off to join the crowd that was now running at full speed toward the courthouse. The Negro man, assuming that Gil was the ringleader he pretended to be, left his hat on the ground and ran off in the opposite direction, disappearing down a side street a half block away.

Gil walked back into the middle of the street to lose himself in the surging crowd in case the boys he had ordered away came to their senses and returned to deal with him. Above the heads of the mob he could see the flames growing in the courthouse but he could not yet see the statue that stood on the lawn in front of it. Before he got much farther the procession came to a chaotic halt as some sort of scuffle broke out twenty or thirty yards ahead. Men behind him began shoving forward, eager to be in on the commotion. Gil planted his feet to avoid being trampled to the ground and lashed out with his elbows and then with his fists to try to clear a breathing space for himself.

The violent congestion finally broke up and they were moving again. Gil felt his heart pumping with fear and exertion and he tried to calm it with deep breaths. He had no debilitating maladies to speak of, but he was at an age when this kind of excitement should not be courted. It had been reckless of him to intervene in the beating of the Negro on the streetcar, but he had come to Omaha on a mission of salvation and it would have been a poor thing to ignore a flesh-and-blood man in danger in favor of a bronze one.

The telegram had said the statue had been “defaced.” Gil had worried over the precise meaning of that word on the long train journey from Texas. Now, as the mob finally reached the courthouse lawn, his speculations came to a despairing end. The statue’s patina, which he had worked weeks at the foundry to perfect, was ruined, buried under a slapdash veneer of black paint. The statue was called the Pawnee Scout but you would not have known it to look at it now. Shining out against the black paint were garish circles of white around the eyes and mouth, a crude attempt to turn the crouching Indian into a popeyed figure from a minstrel show. And around his neck someone had tied a hangman’s noose.

Four or five men stood casually around the statue as Gil approached it. Another perched on the scout’s shoulders, yelling encouragement to a group of vigilantes who were slicing the firemen’s hoses with axes. Gil felt an almost suicidal boldness as he made his way toward the man sitting on the statue, this underweight tough with his hat pushed back on his head, cawing out to his fellow rioters. He was going to grab him and unseat him and throw him down hard onto the statue’s granite base. He didn’t think about what would happen after that or care much about it. Rage and revulsion had blinded him.

But when he was ten feet away somebody yelled out that they were hanging the mayor and the kid hopped down on his own. He and his friends took off sprinting across the lawn toward Harney Street to join another faction of the mob that was dragging someone Gil could not see toward a rope pitched over a signal tower. He climbed up onto the base of his statue to try to get a better idea of what was going on. In the light of the burning courthouse he could make out a great deal of fighting and scuffling and then he saw the body of a white man, the man they said was the mayor, twitching madly as he was hoisted on a rope. In the next moment a car slammed into the traffic tower and the man came falling down again with it. Another furious battle erupted as the men who were trying to save the victim from hanging struggled to get his body out of the mob’s possession.

The mob was like a school of fish, instantaneously shifting in response to some unseen stimulus. Now they were surging back in front of the courthouse, shooting their rifles in the air, screaming up at the police officers and deputies in the burning building to release the Negro prisoner or burn up themselves.

Gil stayed with the statue. He removed the noose from around the Pawnee Scout’s neck and threw it on the grass. He inspected the figure’s desecrated face, wondering if he could get the paint off with some kind of solvent without ruining the patina. It was unlikely. In the morning, when he could see better, he could make a more informed assessment, but at the moment he was pretty sure the whole thing would have to be sandblasted, maybe sent back to the foundry, and the patina reapplied.

No matter. For now the statue was safe, it was whole. As the crowd shifted this way and that, following its urgent, unhinged directives, Gil kept his station, standing next to the Pawnee Scout with his arms folded and his eye out for anyone who might care to do it harm. The grass of the courthouse lawn was torn up and littered with broken glass, and as the great building steadily burned, flaming papers drifted out the windows and a foul-smelling ashy film descended upon everyone who had gathered to demand the death of the supposed assailant who was locked inside. Gil looked around and found a discarded two-by-two that was no longer than a yardstick. It would make an unwieldy weapon, but he would use it as such if required. For the moment, events had subsided into a gruesome calm. After the near-hanging of the mayor, the crowd shifted its attention back to the courthouse, watching the flames and listening with nervous absorption to the screams and cries for reason coming from inside.

“They’re coming out!” somebody called after a few minutes, and there was another barbarian rush toward the front of the courthouse. But it was just a group of female prisoners who staggered out of the building, their hair and uniforms covered with ash and grime, all of them trembling and gasping for breath. The crowd let them pass. Its attention was fixed on the courthouse roof now, where a hundred or so prisoners and deputies had climbed to escape the flames. The smoke was so thick and the confusion so intense that Gil could not make out what was going on. The man the mob was after was named Brown, and they kept screaming his name until their throats were raw.

Gil was not going to let these people deface the statue again. There was nothing he could do about the rest of it and it was pointless to think otherwise. He did not know the precise nature of the crime this Brown was accused of and he doubted that any of the mad avengers besieging the courthouse had reliable information either. The rage of the mob was as distinct from justice as the force and direction of the winds blowing the black smoke out to the prairies. Some sort of horrible reckoning was brewing and it could not be stilled.

While the prisoners milled about on the roof, something else was happening on one of the floors below. Men were climbing toward a window there on firemen’s ladders. But the climbing figures were not firemen, they were white-shirted men who had left their coats and hats on the ground and were scrambling upward toward the window in a way that reminded Gil of spiders rushing to the center of a web. One of the men had a long coil of rope across his shoulders. Someone on the ground had control of a searchlight and the beam played across the face of the building as the men reached the window and climbed through it.

Gil was alone now. Everyone else on the lawn had closed in on the building again, and when a thread of gunshots erupted on the south side they pushed their way forward, trampling the slower or less curious, until most of them were out of sight. For fifteen minutes nothing happened. Then there was a tremendous exultant roar and Gil knew the Negro man had been surrendered. When an even louder roar went up he knew he had been hanged. There was cheering and wild gunfire for a long time and then an open car came around the corner with men in the passenger seats standing and shooting off their guns and the mob trailing along triumphantly in its wake. Behind the car, attached by a rope, skidded the body of the Negro they had just hanged. The man was dead but he was not dead enough. The rioters were yelling, “Burn him! Burn him! Burn him!” and it was clear to Gil that killing this man had only left them more wild, more unsated, more afraid of missing some exhilarating next development. The car moved slowly, and the body behind seemed to move at a processional pace along with it, the eyes and mouth open as if still straining to comprehend the sudden thing that had happened to it. Gil looked away; it was unseemly to lay his eyes on this dead man’s public humiliation. But everyone around him was joyous, and he knew at once that the body being towed along behind this Model T was not the resolution of the terror he had been witnessing but only the beginning of it.

He stood closer to the Pawnee Scout. The figure was larger than life-size but because of its crouching position Gil was able to set one hand protectively on its shoulder. The two-by-two, his makeshift club, was in reach. He had not seen the statue in many years, but the sight and feel of it brought him back vividly to the six months he had labored on its creation in his Washington Square South studio, six months of feverish, frustrating, transcendent absorption. The Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben, the civic group that had commissioned the Pawnee Scout, had at first insisted on a hackneyed representation of a lone Indian scanning the horizon. But Gil had argued for a stronger conception, a figure crouching above the ground, his hand lightly touching a hoof- or footprint, his face registering something subtly wrong. Gil had never told himself what was behind that expression, what unfortunate sign the Indian had just come across, but this barely detectable wash of sadness or alarm was what had made the piece work. He did not even know how he had rendered that emotion in the scout’s face. It had just come as his hands were forming the clay. Sometimes that happened; you gave a statue a reason for existing. You gave it a soul.

A half hour after the car towing the dead man had disappeared around the corner, the mob came back. They had burned the body of the Negro by then and were looking for someone else to kill or something else to destroy.

“What about this nigger here?” someone yelled, pointing at Gil’s statue. “He’s awful damn quiet.”

“He ain’t a nigger, he’s an Indian,” another man said.

“Well, he’s an honorary nigger now.”

Gil stepped forward, trying to keep his posture and tone as relaxed as possible.

“It’s all right,” he said.

“What’s all right?” a man with a repeating rifle said. He had a beefy face and was smiling and seemed inclined to be friendly.

“I mean we can all just leave this statue alone.”

“But maybe all of us don’t want to do that.”

“Well, I’m asking you to.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m the sculptor.”

“What do you mean? You built this thing?”

“That’s what I mean, and I’d appreciate it if—”

“Well, then next time you ought to build something worth a shit.”

They started laughing and came forward with ropes while several cars backed up onto the lawn. It was too late to reason with them. He held his ground and told them to stop but they didn’t listen and began to shove at him without even looking at him, as if he were an obstacle that merited no comment or concern. They tied the ends of the ropes around the Pawnee Scout’s neck and trunk. The other ends were already fastened to the axles of the cars.