The Monument (10 page)

Mrs. Carlson was the same. Off in a corner she was looking at the drawing of her holding a dollar. I thought it looked just as natural as life but she was so mad she was shaking. While I was looking at her she worked through the
crowd to the wall and tore the drawing down and crumpled it and threw it on the floor.

It was as if everybody had been waiting just for that. People seemed to lean, then sway back, and then others came to the wall and did the same—tore the drawings down and crumpled them and stamped them on the floor. In moments most of the drawings were gone.

Mine was still there, and the old car and the Jennings dog and the little grave in the bushes and some of the elevator drawings showing the sparrows, but almost none with any people in them.

Things, I thought—they’ll allow things, but they won’t allow people.

Through all this Mick hadn’t moved, stood leaning against the bench, and I hurt for him, thinking what they were doing to his art, but he was still smiling that small smile, and I realized that he knew it was going to happen all the time.

He had planned on it happening.

When they were done ripping and stamping, there was a moment when it was quiet—Mrs. Langdon staring at Mick, her chest heaving and
her jaws so tight her back teeth must have turned to powder—and just then, just at that second, Mick stood away from the bench and said in a loud voice:

“Art.”

Everybody froze, stared at him.

“Katherine Anne Porter once said art is what you find when the ruins are cleared away. I did this so that you could see, could feel, could know what this is all about—this monument. This art.”

“Crap.” Somebody said. “It’s all crap.”

Mick nodded. “That too, but that’s part of it, isn’t it? Art is everything. And this monument has to be that, has to be art, it has to hurt and make you weep and lift you into love at the same time.”

“Tell everybody,” Mrs. Langdon said, her voice sounding like breaking glass, “that you never saw me nude.”

Mick stared at her, then sighed. “That doesn’t matter, does it? That’s how you would look if I
had
seen you without clothing, isn’t it—looking over your shoulder near a window with the light
on your hair and your shoulder turned just so to catch the light and the skin like cream, pure cream, and that sad look in your eyes because love, love is gone.”

A strange thing happened then. Mick was talking but I was watching Mrs. Langdon and it all went out of her, all the mad went out of her. She seemed to wilt and sag back into the people standing around her, and the look changed, the way she was looking at Mick. It wasn’t hate any longer, and not even sadness—it was more that she was drawn to him, maybe loved him. Right there in front of everybody she leaned down and picked up the drawing where she’d thrown it and smoothed it and tried to make it flat, all the while looking right at Mick, right into his eyes. I wished I had brought my tablet and pencils because I would have liked to draw that—draw the way she looked and the way Mick’s picture was, crumpled, and how nobody else in the room seemed to be there for her, just Mick up next to the judge’s bench. I wondered how come if it was
Mrs
. Langdon there was never talk of a
husband, now or gone. But Mick wasn’t looking at her.

“Art,” Mick said, louder, “is all there is and this monument must be part of all of you to be true.” He shrugged. “So, what is it, then? What do you want for your monument?”

The room exploded.

Some were still mad, although what Mrs. Langdon had done changed things and some of them had even picked up their drawings.

The noise was from ideas, but there were so many trying to talk at once it was just that, noise, and I couldn’t tell what anybody was saying.

Mick held up his hand. “Just a minute.” He went to the side of the room where there was a portable blackboard used to draw things for court. He carried the board to the front and took a piece of chalk from the rail.

“Now,” he said, “one at a time.”

“Let’s do it with hands,” Mrs. Langdon said, moving to the front of the room. “I’ll call on you, each of you, and you can tell Mr. Strum what you want.”

“Mick,” Mick said. “Just Mick.”

“Sorry,” Mrs. Langdon said, looking at him, and I could swear she was blushing.

“And I’ll call you Tru,” he said. “That’s how you signed your letter. It’s a good name for someone with shoulders like cream.”

Right there in front of the room it happened. You could see it. The thing between them was right there.

“Better than football, isn’t it?” It was a low voice in my ear and I saw Fred standing there, leaning down. He and Emma had moved into the room when I wasn’t looking. “I’m glad I didn’t miss this.”

“All right,” Mrs. Langdon said. “Who’s first?”

Hands shot up.

Mrs. Langdon raised her finger and pointed at somebody in back of me. It was Harley Pederson. He pretty much lived at Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium, had a head that looked like it had been screwed down into his shoulders, and was probably one of the men who beat Mick up.

“It should be a painting,” he said, “of a soldier charging up a hill to save a blonde woman from
avenging hordes”—he took a breath—“and it should be in glowing paint on black velvet.”

I looked at Mick and he was smiling straight at me.

It was going to be a long night.

“HOLD IT,” Mick held up his hands. It was close to midnight and people were tired and getting cranky, but the suggestions were still coming. Except that they weren’t suggestions now so much as orders.

“I’ve listed the ones I thought I could do,” he said. “And there are over a hundred. We could
vote on each of them, but I think we would get one vote each a hundred times.”

He rubbed the back of his neck and sat in the judge’s chair to the rear of the bench. I read a story in the orphanage once about a leprechaun in Ireland and he looked like that—a leprechaun sitting in a judge’s chair.

“How would it be if I made some suggestions and we voted on those—based on all your ideas, of course.”

There was some muttering, and then somebody—I didn’t see who—said, “What kind of suggestions?”

“I’m glad you asked.” Mick stood and walked around to the front of the desk again. “We might be missing something, and I thought I would bring it up. The point is, sometimes monuments don’t seem to be monuments but are, just the same.”

“You’re going to have to explain that,” Harley said and I thought you’d have to explain just about anything to Harley.

“And I shall, I shall. All right, here’s an example. Everybody here knows about the Battle
of Waterloo, when Napoleon was defeated. After the battle women and children went around the battlefield with pliers pulling teeth from all the young men who had been killed—on both sides. Many people in France and England had bad teeth and needed false dentures, and they had no way to make false teeth in those days, so they used real teeth from dead people set in wood for false dentures.”

“That’s disgusting.” This from Mrs. Carlson.

“No more than war, my dear—not a bit more disgusting than war. But the point I’m making is that those dentures—they called them Waterloo teeth in England, and only rich people could afford them—those false teeth were a kind of monument, weren’t they? A kind of reverse, sick monument to all the young men killed in Waterloo. Every time one of those rich bas … people bit down on a piece of food they thought of the boy who had died.”

Harley didn’t get it. “You want us all to wear dentures?”

“No. I just want you to see that monuments can come from other places than just art. There’s
another story: During the Boer War in South Africa a platoon of forty-odd British soldiers were caught in a small valley by vicious crossfire. They were all killed and the bodies were left where they lay.

“They had just been issued their food, and each had been given a half a dozen peaches which the men kept in their knapsacks. As the bodies decomposed they became fertilizer and the peach pits took root, and now there is an orchard there, still today, of forty peach trees. It is said that the peaches from the orchard are the sweetest peaches in the world.”

The room was silent, absolutely quiet. Even Harley kept his mouth shut.

Trees
, I thought, all this time he was coming to this—he wants to make a monument with trees.

“It should be a place to think,” Mick continued, “a place to remember the men who have died.”

He went to the blackboard and began sketching in white chalk. “Here. Eighteen men have died from this area so here and here we plant
trees, eighteen trees in two rows of nine in front of the courthouse on the lawn so that they make a shaded area and in the area we put seats, stone seats here and here and here so that people can come and sit in the quiet shade and think of what the trees represent.”

He stopped, took a breath, waited.

All this time the room had been quiet and it was Harley who broke the silence. “There’s a place there, by the courthouse, an empty place. What’s that for?”

Mick pointed to the spot with the chalk. “For the future—it may be that you will want to plant more trees there.”

Another quiet time, longer than before. I could hear the clock from all the way out in the hallway ticking.

“Could we”—a quiet, almost whispered man’s voice cut the silence—“name them? Could we have a small plaque on each tree naming the one the tree is for?”

I turned and saw that it was Mr. Takern and remembered that he had a son killed in Vietnam.

“The name would mean so much,” he said. “The names in Washington mean so much.”

Mick nodded. “We can do anything you want.”

Mrs. Takern stood suddenly from where she’d been sitting on a bench next to her husband and left the room, and I could see that she was crying, holding a hanky to her face. I wondered what her son’s name had been and how he had died.

“Anything you want,” Mick said again. “Do we need to vote?”

This time nobody made a sound and I knew that Mick had done it—had made the kind of monument he wanted to make for Bolton, the kind that Bolton truly wanted and just needed to be shown.

Trees.

AND OF COURSE nothing happened fast after the meeting. I wanted to be able to walk down the street the next day with Python and see the monument, see the trees and the names, but there were more things to do than just build the monument.

Mick had to figure a cost estimate for the trees and the stone seats and the labor, and when it
was done he had to convince the town board that it was worth what it would cost, but that didn’t take so very long. It seemed that in just a few days I saw a truckload of oak trees stopped in front of the courthouse. They were not large—each one ten or twelve feet—but they all looked healthy, and another truck had a kind of digger attached and in one day they had put all eighteen trees in the ground.

It was strange but when the men running the tree transplanter learned what the trees were for, they became quiet and worked without smiling. I wanted to help but Mick made Python and me sit next to the courthouse with our tablet and draw. I drew all the things I could see as fast as I could make my hands move with the pencil and still make it look right.

And Mrs. Langdon was there.

Except that she had changed and we didn’t call her Mrs. Langdon anymore but Tru. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt and had all soft edges where she used to be hard and had a band holding her hair back. She helped Mick and always seemed to have a smudge of dirt on her
cheek which she kept trying to wipe off with the back of her hand. I drew her, too, and once when it was a hot afternoon and she had been helping Mick clean dirt around a tree, he reached up and used his thumb to clean her cheek. She looked at him so that it seemed she had a light inside and I tried to draw that too. The light. And how it came from her eyes and Mick’s eyes, except that I didn’t do so well. But I tried, I tried to draw it all.

And there came a day when it was done.

“Done for now,” Mick said. “It won’t really be done until the trees are full grown—forty or fifty years—and then still won’t be done until there are no more names or trees to put in. But done for now.”