The Monument (2 page)

Mick said I was pretty—like a deer—because I’ve got big brown eyes and freckles across my nose and brown hair with just a little red in it, but I don’t think so. You don’t see really pretty women with one leg stiff. Even though he swore it didn’t make any difference it did because it was in my head that way—that I couldn’t be pretty with a bad leg.

But Sister Gene Autry fussed with me, her hands moving around my hair like small flying birds. She did the best she could, and we went out into the conference room, and there sat Emma and Fred Hemesvedt.

And of course I thought of the Flintstones right away, even though they didn’t look at all like the Flintstones.

Fred was tall and thin except he had sort of a gut, and Emma was short and round, and they smiled a lot, at me and at each other and at Sister Gene Autry and Emma said:

“We decided we want to adopt you.”

“You do?”

Sister Gene Autry pinched my arm so hard I almost squealed but I shut my mouth and stayed silent.

“Yes. We want you to join our family and come to live with us.”

And that was how I came to live in Bolton, Kansas.

WHEN I FIRST came to Bolton I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be there no matter how nice Emma and Fred turned out to be.

It was a small town—I found later it had just two thousand people—and it seemed to be there just because it was too far from the last town to the next town.

There wasn’t a reason to put a town where
Bolton was—not one. The country around Bolton is totally flat, flatter than even the rest of Kansas, and Mick says Kansas is the flattest place on earth.

So they put this little town here and there are farms all around it, and when we drove toward it in the car—Fred leaning back in the seat and telling me how much fun it would be—I almost asked them to go back.

I’d seen mountains on television and hills on television and saw some hills in Kansas City, and this wasn’t right. There was nothing to stop your seeing. You just saw out and out until you couldn’t see any farther.

But I remembered the last thing Sister Gene Autry said to me:

“Keep your mouth shut.”

And so I did that and so I moved to Bolton with Emma and Fred and settled down to family life, except there wasn’t any.

Somehow in all the interviews and examinations and tests and talking the state authorities and the sisters had not learned all the things there were to know about Emma and Fred.

That they drank.

Oh, they’re nice enough and they have never, never done anything bad to me. Not even a loud word. They always let me do what I want, and even when I do something wrong they aren’t bad about it. Fred just looks at me, smiles, and says:

“Let’s do better next time.” And Emma nods and pats me on the hand and says, “She will, she will, won’t you, Rachael?”

But most of the time, all of the time, they drink. Fred owns the local grain elevator where the farmers come to sell their grain, and he keeps a bottle in his office, and Emma sits at home with a big gallon jug of red wine and watches the soaps, and they drink.

They don’t fight. Fred always goes to work, except on the weekends when he watches sports on television, and Emma always takes care of the house. I think they love me and are very good to me and are completely drunk by nine o’clock every morning so that the world is just one long alcohol haze for them, but it isn’t so bad.

Not as bad as the orphanage. Even with them
drinking and Emma and her soaps it isn’t so bad.

Inside of a month I knew I had figured how to work around the drinking and spent most of my time alone, eating meals with them now and then and going on drives sometimes on Sunday morning before Fred got too drunk to drive, but other than that I just did things on my own.

Oh, there was school. There still is school. But school in Bolton was like school at the orphanage, except that the teachers don’t hit you like the sisters do. I don’t make friends really easy so at first I just kind of stayed by myself.

Then I met Traci and she became my best friend until Python, and we did lots of things together except that Traci liked to ride her bike, and I couldn’t ride a bike very well because my left leg didn’t bend.

But then Traci moved. Her father worked with the highway department and got transferred and she moved. I didn’t get a new friend but it was still all right.

I met Python.

P
YTHON

IT WAS FUNNY how it happened. Even though it doesn’t really have to do with Mick and the monument, it’s part of how I came to live in Bolton the way I did so it’s important.

Mick says Bolton is a microcosm of the world, and I looked it up and it means a smaller version of the rest of the world, and I guess he’s right.

If you look at the center of Bolton there is the
city part, with Nicherson’s grocery store where the sidewalks are cracked and all the ants come out of the cracks, and Hillary’s hardware store and the dime store and two gas stations and three bars and two churches—just like a small big city.

Bolton is the county seat and so in the middle of the town there is a large grass area and an old courthouse with a flagpole and big old black cannon out front with a bunch of round balls welded in a pile. I know they’re welded because I tried to get one loose and they didn’t move. On the flagpole is the United States flag and just below it the Kansas flag, and every morning Sarah Widmerk, who is the court clerk, comes down the steps and raises the two flags and looks up at them in the morning light and then walks back up the stairs and goes to clerking.

Out around the middle part of town there are the houses where all the town people live, like Emma and Fred and me, and outside that there is another ring of houses where people who work for the other town people live, like Garret
Emerson, who works for Fred at the elevator and has about thirty-seven kids.

Out there, in that outer ring, most of the people don’t have a lot of money so they have big gardens. Some of them keep goats and chickens and that was the problem.

Something about animals gets me. I don’t know why, but maybe it’s that we couldn’t play with animals at the orphanage. So when I see an animal, a dog or cat or a horse or a goat or even a chicken, I want to touch it and play with it, and even now when I’m thirteen going on fifty-like Mick told me—I’m the same. I’ve just got to touch them.

But Emma and Fred can’t have animals because Emma gets all swollen and bleeds out her nose from the animal hair, so I would sometimes go out to the outer ring of houses and pet goats and dogs and chickens, and one day out there I saw Python.

Of course he didn’t have a name then.

He was just a big, scruffy dog with his ribs sticking out and curly tight hair all over his body, and you could tell he was starving. I hadn’t seen
him around and don’t know where he came from. The first time I saw him I was standing in front of the Seversons’ yard, and there was a loud noise from their chicken coop in back of the house. When I ran around—Mrs. Severson came out of the back door of the house with a baseball bat at the same time—I saw this dog come barreling out of the door of the coop with a chicken in his mouth. He looked at me, then up at Mrs. Severson with the bat, and took off. He cleared the fence around the coop like he had wings, and while he was flying he swallowed the chicken.

Whole.

And that was how I came to name him. The year before Emma and Fred had taken me to the county fair. There was a side show with some animals in it, and in one glass case they had a big python.

“Ten feet long, big around as a man’s leg and alive—see it on the inside!” the man yelled. Fred took me in while Emma tried to throw nickels on some glass plates, although they kept sliding off.

And it was all pretty tacky except that the snake was real, and in the case with the snake they had a chicken.

The chicken looked like it had been in there eight or nine years. It was half bald and walked around pecking at things, now and then pecking at the snake which lay back in a corner. I asked a man wearing dirty clothes and picking his nose what the chicken was for.

“Snake food,” he said. “What did you think?”

Well it didn’t look to me like the snake was ever going to move, let alone eat a chicken, and we turned to leave. Just then the snake’s head came up, it flicked its tongue twice and whap, it nailed the chicken.

There were some feathers flying around, the chicken kicked once or twice, then the snake opened its jaws and swallowed the chicken.

Whole.

And that’s how I named Python.

Except that I didn’t see him again right away. He took the fence and was gone, chicken and all, in maybe two seconds. Mrs. Severson swore a
little and went in to call the sheriff and I limped for home, and that was it.

Bolton doesn’t have a dogcatcher. We have the county sheriff who is named Kelvin, Warren Kelvin, and the next morning when I got up I knew I was going to Kelvin’s place.

It was impossible not to go. He had a pen out back, a chain-link concrete pen. That’s where they kept the stray dogs until either somebody came to pick them up or Kelvin took them out and shot them, which is usually what happened. I had spent the whole night thinking of the dog flying over the fence and how it wouldn’t be right for Kelvin to shoot him.

I got to the pen just after dawn, and sure enough, there was the dog.

He was sitting on the concrete, leaning against the fence. When I squatted next to him he growled, a low sound, but it wasn’t mean and I knew it wasn’t, and I put my hand through the fence and petted him and said:

“Hello, Python.”

IT REALLY happened that fast. When I knew his name and said it, he looked at me through the fence and stuck his muzzle down, scarred like it was a road map, and licked my fingers where they were on the wire. There wasn’t anything I could do except break him out of there.

I waited until dark and came back and unlatched
the gate and let him loose. I thought he would run but he didn’t.

He came to me and stood next to me in the darkness and leaned so his shoulder was against my leg, his fur warm and the muscle tight under the skin. I petted him and thought he would leave then but he still didn’t but stood, waiting. When I took a step, he took one, and when I stopped, he stopped.