Remember Ben Clayton (3 page)

Gil shoved back hard at one of the assailants. It was one of the kids who had attacked the man on the streetcar. The kid didn’t come back at him right away. He just stood there and stared at him for a second instead with his fists up like a prizefighter. He looked like he was just now realizing how he’d been tricked.

Instead of rushing him, the kid roared theatrically at Gil. It was a display of youthful, feral mockery at an opponent he considered old and irrelevant. In the darkness, the kid’s screaming face was so drained of blood by hate that it was the color of a boiled shirt. A coil of black hair spilled onto his forehead from under the brim of his hat. His cheeks were drawn and thin, his mouth gaping open, his eyes as blank as the eyes of a cave fish.

The ropes around the statue drew taut as the automobiles were thrown into gear. Gil took a penknife from his pocket, unfolded it, and was starting to saw at one of the ropes when the kid who had been screaming at him lunged and grabbed his hand and with the help of several of his friends pried open Gil’s fingers and liberated the knife. The kid held the knife up in the air as if it were a trophy and then threw it down onto the statue’s granite base and stomped on it. He was looking down when Gil grabbed his two-by-two and hit him hard on the top of the head. The kid looked up, said “Ow!” in a chuckling tone, as if the blow had been a pathetic gesture, and then Gil hit him again, straight down on the collarbone and driving a splinter into his neck.

Gil took a step back, still holding his makeshift club, readying himself to swing at the inevitable next assailant. But they were all on him at once, grabbing the lumber out of his hand, knocking his feet out from under him. He landed hard on his elbow. He felt one solid punch below his ear but the rest of the blows were ill-aimed or ill-timed or perhaps halfhearted. By the time he scrambled to his feet they had turned their attention to the Pawnee Scout, which was now inching out of its base, the four deep threaded pins that had held it there exposed and bending, until it sprang free and went tumbling across the grass and into the street.

“Somebody go into that hardware store and get some sledgehammers!” he heard someone say.

The mob was in motion again, answering the call for sledgehammers or racing down the street after Gil’s statue. They were going to pound it into bits and there was nothing he could do. It was just a pile of metal that had been defaced and seized by a mob, of no more concern to them than the windows they were smashing or the building they had set aflame, just a piece of junk that its creator had tried haplessly to defend.

He turned away from the street and looked down at the empty granite base as if he were staring at his own unmarked tomb. And then, as an afterthought, somebody running past cracked him on the head with some kind of club. As he fell, the ground sprang up at him and struck him with the force of a slamming door. It knocked the air out of his lungs and put his conscious mind in suspension. He stared in confusion at the burning courthouse, trying to remember where he was and what had gone wrong.

THREE

H
is concussed brain was healthy again, though it continued to emit unexpected pulses of anxiety and melancholy. The hinge of his jaw was still damaged somehow. It hurt just to open his mouth to brush his teeth, and each yawn he could not suppress was a painful event. But all the bruises and cuts were healed, and the bursa that had formed on his elbow had been successfully drained and no longer troubled him.

But the loss of the Pawnee Scout was a deep and lasting wound. It had been his finest work, equal to anything J. Q. A. Ward or even Saint-Gaudens had done, and if there were any real justice in the corrupted tribunals of art this personal judgment would have been recognized by the world. The statue’s molds were still in storage in the foundry but he could not trick himself into thinking the city of Omaha or the Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben would have the funds to have it recast and reassembled, not when the city was just emerging from martial law and the courthouse and half the storefronts would need to be rebuilt. And the chances that he could come up with that kind of money himself, at a time when major commissions were scarce and his own reputation uncertain, were faint.

The statue was gone forever and there was nothing to do but face the fact and move on. That was what he was doing today, training his hopes forward as he sat in a parlor car of the Texas and Pacific Railway. The landscape, in its drab infinity, was not helping his mood. It mocked the basic human longing for scenery. Blank cultivated fields alternated with stretches of waste ground that were distinguished only by choking tangles of mesquite and stands of cactus, with now and then a dead coyote strung by its heels along the fence line.

Gil took a handwritten letter out of his pocket and read through it again as he sipped the afternoon cup of coffee the porter had just brought. Then he swiveled in his club chair of green velvet to face his daughter.

“He says nothing in here about a horse.”

Maureen looked up from her
Saturday Evening Post
and held out her hand for the letter.

“He stresses the point—” she started to reply, then paused as the sound of the steam whistle through the open window threatened to drown out her voice. “He stresses the point that the boy was an excellent horseman.”

“Well, if he wants an equestrian statue he may very well not know he’s going to pay double.”

“He must have money, Daddy. Otherwise he’d have put us in a day coach and we’d be breathing in soot all the way to Abilene.”

“There’s nothing easy about a horse. Saint-Gaudens himself had to farm the horse for his Sherman out to A. P. Proctor.”

“If a horse is required, you’ll do it better than anybody.”

He took off his reading glasses and smiled at her, somewhat skeptically, testing whether this was a sincere compliment or just her acerbic recognition that it was time to brace him up. She returned the smile in the same spirit. She was thirty-two, unmarried, unlikely to be. She was a talented sculptress in her own right, though her ambitions in that direction were so deeply withheld from her father—perhaps even from herself—that they amounted to a kind of secret. Maureen had been his studio assistant since she was a teenager and with her mother’s death last year she had taken on the role of housekeeper and bookkeeper and emotional advocate as well. When he had returned to San Antonio from Omaha, it had fallen to his daughter to talk him through his despair, to reassure him of the great opportunities still to come, of his monumental works that still stood in public places throughout the country.

“Well,” he said as he folded the letter and returned it to the pocket of his suit, “we will find what we will find, I suppose.”

She picked up her magazine again and continued to read. If only she had taken after Victoria, Gil thought guiltily to himself for the thousandth time as he covertly studied his daughter’s face. His late wife had been his model for many years. It had been her proud jaw and straight nose and unvanquished shining beauty that had animated a dozen or more of his statues, every spirit of Columbia or Democracy or Liberty, every pioneer woman or musket-loading helpmeet. But it had been mostly Gil’s features Maureen had inherited, not Victoria’s. She did not have her mother’s sweeping brow or clear green eyes, and her build—dense and strong like his own, but without his commanding height—suggested power more than fashionable grace.

In New York there had been one or two disillusioning episodes that had never, so far as he or Victoria had been able to tell, risen to the level of love affairs; and when they had first moved to San Antonio six years ago Maureen’s heart had been shattered by a young assistant city manager who had courted her indifferently and moved on. Lately there was an English professor from the University of Texas who wore a cowboy hat and a Palm Beach suit and showed up in San Antonio every now and then from Austin to take her to the pictures, but the visits were irregular and often without notice, and if there was anything serious developing Maureen had taken pains to keep it from her father.

The worry that he and Victoria had shared over Maureen’s happiness had fallen now to him alone, and it was another burden he carried with him on this train journey deep into the bewitching nothingness of West Texas.

Outside the window, though, the emerging twilight was finally teasing out the allure of the landscape. There were low ranges of hills now, slight but seductive in the failing light, and the scrappy vegetation looked almost sumptuous. He watched a jackrabbit sprinting along near the railbed, the light shining through the parchment skin of its gigantic ears.

“Should we have an early dinner?” Maureen asked after a while. Several of the families that were apparently traveling all the way to California were now heading toward the dining car.

“Don’t we arrive at eight?” he said. “Why not just wait and have a steak at the hotel? They’re bound to have a good steak in Abilene.”

There was indeed a good steak, though by the time they had collected their baggage and walked across the street to the Grace Hotel—where Mr. Clayton, the man they had come to meet, had made a reservation in their name—they barely made it to the dining room before it closed. Gil was agreeably hungry but he noticed Maureen’s appetite was indifferent, and the imagination of the kitchen did not extend past the colossal slab of beef on her plate. She applied herself mostly to the green beans, which had come out of a can but were not terribly overcooked.

“Not such a bad hotel for a cowtown,” Gil remarked as he surveyed the elegant marble floors and glanced sympathetically at the attentive white-jacketed waiter who was doing a manly job of not expressing disappointment at the arrival of new customers when the kitchen was about to close.

Maureen agreed that it was surprisingly acceptable. They had both been expecting something squalid and dusty, a town equal to the no-account spaces they had seen outside the train window. But the impression Gil had of Abilene in the brief walk from the train station was of a city of wide streets and stolid office buildings in a brave little downtown cluster.

“I should go back through my Italian sketchbooks,” he said, surrendering his plate to the waiter to make room for a slice of chocolate cake. “I once spent an afternoon in Padua in front of that Donatello equestrian—what’s it called? Something unpronounceable.”

“Gattamelata.”

“Yes, Gattamelata. I don’t see how anybody could do a better horse. Of course, it’s a massive old-world sort of beast, not some cowboy pony. Maybe I should buy a horse to use as a model.”

“First let’s see if Mr. Clayton even wants this to be an equestrian statue,” she said sensibly. “And then let’s see if he has the money to actually pay for it.”

Gil gave her a mock frown. He finished his cake, sipped his coffee, felt some of his vital spirit returning for no perceptible reason. Worrying about his daughter, grieving over his wife, still sore in tendon and soul over the loss of his statue, he could not deny the expansive mood that was stealing over him in this shutting-down hotel restaurant in Abilene, Texas. He generally still traveled with the enthusiasm of a boy leaving home for the first time, and here he was in a place he had never expected to visit, a place that held no charm for tourists but certainly plenty of other things that would be of interest to men of serious purpose. More than that, there was the prospect of real work ahead, not just paying work but the promise of the yet-unencountered subject, the yet-unformed clay.

AT BREAKFAST
the next morning a man approached their table and said that Mr. Clayton had sent him into town to pick them up and drive them out to the “place.” He introduced himself as Ernest, which Gil thought an unlikely name for a cowboy. But he was unmistakably a cowboy. His hair had been creased all the way around the circumference of his head by the tight fit of his hat, so that bareheaded—as he was now, deferentially twirling the brim of his hat in his hands—he looked like a threaded jar without a lid.

“Sit down and have some breakfast with us,” Gil said.

“Well sir, thank you. I just might do that. I already had breakfast but I guess another one won’t hurt me none.”

He ordered eggs and biscuits and something called redeye gravy. He had a wide, eager smile and a rather sloping chin and was missing a thumb on his left hand. He wore jeans and a clean work shirt with a frayed notebook and a pencil poking up out of the breast pocket. When his breakfast came he ate with sloppy enjoyment. Gil supposed he was about forty, though his face was so deeply weathered he could have been much older.

“It ain’t but a little over twenty miles,” he was saying. “Shouldn’t take us even an hour to get there.”

He turned to Maureen. “Might be a little dusty, ma’am, but I got a couple dusters in the back of the car so you won’t ruin those nice clothes.”

“That’s thoughtful,” she said. “Thank you.”

“What can you tell us about this statue that Mr. Clayton has in mind?” Gil asked.

“Oh, I better let Mr. Clayton himself tell you about that. He got it in his head to have a statue of his boy, is all I know.”

“And you knew the boy yourself, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes sir,” Ernest answered, looking down into his coffee cup while his face took on a faint, fleeting somberness. “We all knew the boy.”

•

THEY DROVE
through the downtown streets and through Abilene’s outlying neighborhoods and past a few desolate-looking diners and then onto a dirt road leading to nothing.

Maureen rode in the backseat, sitting forward, listening as her father quizzed Ernest about rainfall and annual cotton yields and varieties of cattle. It was his interviewing voice, his open-handed man-of-the-world demeanor, so different from the private working silence into which he disappeared once a piece was truly under way. Even now she could detect the subtle onset of that feverish distraction. As Ernest talked, her father moved his fingers slightly, unconsciously kneading the air above his lap. This meant, she knew, that he was working already, with nothing to go by: no photographs, no description, no knowledge of whether there was to be a horse included or not. Out of nothing, he was creating a statue of a dead boy.

She shifted her attention to Ernest’s own hands, splayed tight like a frog’s feet on the big steering wheel. She didn’t realize she was staring at Ernest’s missing thumb until he took his hand off the steering wheel and held it up to her face with a grin.

“Caught it in a dally when I was workin’ a steer,” he said. “Popped right off like a bottle cap.”

“I’m sorry,” Maureen shouted over the grinding motor. “I hope you don’t think I’m being rude.”

“No, ma’am. I stare at it myself sometimes when I ain’t got nothin’ else to look at.”

She nodded, and mouthed silently to her amused father: “What’s a dally?”

They drove on into a subtly changing landscape, the flat agricultural terrain giving way to rhythmic dips and swells that grew more pronounced in the bluish distances, though the far-off hills were not nearly as emphatic as the lovely rock balustrades that loomed above a wonderland of clear creeks west of San Antonio.

When at last Ernest shifted gears and turned off the main road, warning them to hang on as they turned onto a rutted, semi-maintained track, dispiriting doubts started to creep into Maureen’s mind, and she could see that her father shared them. She would have assumed a wealthy rancher would mark the edge of his property with an arch or decorative column of some sort, at any rate something more imposing than a beat-up mailbox. The poor road was another bad sign. They swayed back and forth in the hard seats as Ernest navigated around the ruts for another five or six miles, following the road as it led between two shallow peaks and then alongside a creek with barely more than an inch or two of water flowing above a broken limestone bed as smooth as paving blocks.

The ranch house and outbuildings finally came into sight after the road veered off onto higher ground. Gil and Maureen exchanged cautious looks. It was not much of a house, just a fortress-like main room of stacked stone to which a long peaked-roof wing appeared to have been more or less randomly appended. A man stood on the porch, watching the truck drive up. At his feet sat an unlikely ranch dog, a chubby gray-muzzled dachshund. As the car approached, the man climbed stiffly down the stairs and walked out to the edge of a parched circle of grass that marked the end of the caliche drive. He stood there bareheaded, his hands stashed in the back pockets of his trousers, his head cocked, staring at the approaching vehicle as if awaiting not a pair of invited visitors but some dreaded decree of fate.

Gil stepped out of the car and said hello and offered his hand. Lamar Clayton took it and looked back at Gil with an assessing stare and a faint smile that could have been either an expression of welcome or the manifestation of a private judgment. Gil judged he was a decade or so older than himself, a quiet old man with an air of grave self-possession, the tough skin of his face marked by a network of wrinkles and deep vertical creases.

His expression brightened as he greeted Maureen, but he did not have much to say to her besides hello. Maybe the self-possession was just shyness, Gil thought, the evasive, deflective manner of an old rancher unused to being around women. Nevertheless, there was something commanding about his stillness, his patient assumption that it should be others who speak first and say the most.