The Monument (8 page)

“Yup.” He smiled. “Ain’t that right, Emm?”

And Emma nodded and I don’t know why I was ever worried about it.

So when I showed up at the elevator with Mick, Fred raised his eyebrows. He was covered with grain dust and it made him look like a monkey.

“He wanted to come here.” I shrugged. “I don’t know why.”

“Because this,” Mick said, his arms sweeping around at the dust and the hum of machinery and the truck dumping a golden stream of wheat through the grate with Harry Clark standing by the rear end, his hand in the falling wheat and hundreds of sparrows and pigeons all over the ground getting grain. “This is the cosmic center of the universe.”

“It is?”

“Draw.”

He had made me carry the tablet and pencil box from the station wagon. I felt really silly taking it out to draw in front of Fred and Harry Clark. There were three more trucks that pulled up while we stood there, waiting to dump grain, and all the men and two boys who were helping their fathers came into the elevator. One of the boys was Jimmy Durbin, who I liked to look at, the way you do, and I felt shy about drawing in front of them.

But Mick looked at me. His eyes seemed to go into my brain, stopped me.

“Draw,” he said again, his voice low and even. “It’s what you do—draw.”

I knew he was right. I had decided to be an artist sitting alone in my bed, where it was easy to say that, but the decision held out here as well—out where it showed, where people could see me.

Even if it was embarrassing.

So I went back into the corner of the office to
my desk and put the tablet down and started to draw.

I tried to draw people, the men standing there, but I couldn’t get them to look right so I worked at the scene, the room, the door and the window looking out to where the truck was dumping grain. It was funny but I started to see things for the first time that I had been looking at forever.

The wood over the door. It wasn’t just wood, it was beautiful with dark strips of grain that seemed to jump out even through the layers of dust from the wheat, oiled dark wood. I wondered where it came from and how it got where it was, why somebody would take so much time and effort on a piece of wood over a door. I tried to draw the wood, the door, tried to get that feeling in it. It didn’t work and I looked up and Jimmy Durbin was standing there looking at the drawing.

“It’s really good,” he said.

I looked to see if he was teasing me—thought about turning Python loose on him if he was, maybe taking a leg—but he meant it.

“It’s hard for me to do.”

“That’s because you’re making it look good. Anybody can do it if it’s easy. The hard stuff takes longer.”

“I’m going to be an artist.” Oh great, I thought. Stupid. Open my mouth and be stupid.

“It shows.”

He smiled and moved back to his father but he looked at me two or three more times. I was glad I was sitting down so my leg was under the desk. I tried to push my hair back when he wasn’t looking so it would be neater and I thought, hey, you never know, you never know. I was glad I hadn’t let Python have his leg.

“You can’t just do a monument, can you?” I heard Mick say. There were four men now, and one young boy named Carl who was seven or eight and hiding in back of his father’s leg looking at Python with big eyes while he chewed his lower lip. I wished I could draw people because it would make a good drawing, the way he was standing.

“Monuments have to be a certain way for a certain place.”

“Hell.” Clyde Jamison went to the door, opened it, and spit a gob of tobacco juice that would have killed a sparrow if it had hit one. He closed the door and turned back to Mick. “Monuments is monuments. You raise something up there and a month later pigeons are crapping on it and nobody remembers anything. It’s all a waste of money.”

“Not this time,” Mick said, his voice quiet. “Not on this one.”

“What makes this one different?”

“You,” he said. Then swung his arm around to the rest of the room. “All of you. Everybody in this town. They’re all different from all other towns. When I know you, all of you, I’ll know how to make the monument, won’t I?”

A couple of them nodded. Fred did nothing, just watched, and I was glad he was my father. He just held back and studied things and always knew—always knew. How is it, I wondered for about the millionth time, that I didn’t get adopted and didn’t get adopted and then one day Fred and Emma came in and I got lucky, luckier than I could ever have hoped.

“So I’m trying to learn as much as I can before the day after tomorrow.”

“What’s day after tomorrow?”

“The meeting,” Fred said. “There’s a meeting at the courthouse to decide on the monument.”

“Ahh, yes.”

“Everybody is coming. It’s a potluck.”

“I’ll be there—but I still think it’s just someplace for pigeons to dump.”

The men moved back to their trucks and Mick motioned for me to stay and work. He went back out to his wagon and found a new tablet and his bag of chalks and started to work on his own.

He began in the office with me, his hands floating over the paper in swirls before lowering. I watched him for a bit, then watched Fred watching Mick.

Fred’s eyes glowed.

“It’s like dancing, ain’t it?” he said to me when he saw me watching him. “His hands just dance.”

Some of the men came back in and watched him as their trucks dumped, watched him draw the trucks and the grain coming down and the
office and the old wood and the peanut machine. I thought I would never be able to do it.

He must have known what I was thinking. “You just keep working,” he said. “It will come, it will come.”

“I’d rather watch you—to learn.”

“That too, but work as well. Watch and learn and work and live and be.”

He was looking out the window while he talked and his voice trailed off.

“The sparrows. Look at them.”

He went to the window and leaned the tablet against the bottom edge so that it lay flat, and I stood to his side and saw the sparrows. They were all around the elevator—hundreds and hundreds of them, sometimes so thick they are like water when you walk, parting ahead of you and then landing again in back to get at the grain that’s spilled or blown off the trucks.

I had never thought of them as pretty but Mick drew them with the chalk, just spots in the whirl of dust around the elevator so that they seemed to be moving, dancing, swirls of birds that went up from the elevator floor along the towers of
concrete where the grain was stored, seemed to be alive.

“I can’t see like that,” I said. “Not to see them that way.”

“You will—it will come. You will see that way.”

It was so strange because there were other people in the room, Fred and one other man and Jimmy Durbin had just left and here we were talking like nobody else existed, and in a way they didn’t.

There was just the drawing that he was doing and I was watching, and none of the other people seemed to be there, just us. All of that day we did the same—went around town seeing things, doing drawings.

Down alleys, into the bakery—where we sat in back on the loading steps and shared a package of rolls with Python—into the courthouse, the jail (which I had never seen) where the cells were empty, drawing after drawing, all his in chalk and mine in pencil until it was evening and we were standing by the station wagon.

“Tomorrow you’re on your own,” he said. “Do the same thing.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Work. I have to prepare the presentation and that will take most of the day. And tonight there is one place I have to investigate where you can’t come.”

“Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium,” I guessed.

“Exactly. If the grain elevator is the soul of Bolton then the pub is … well, some other part of the anatomy. But it needs to be studied, doesn’t it?”

“I guess.” I didn’t actually think so. All I’d seen of the bar was when fights between big, drunk farmers after harvest was finished would boil out into the street and the sheriff would have to stop them.

“Well of course it does, of course it does. I have one other filing for you—a present—before we part.”

“What is it?”

“A book …” He was rummaging around in the back of the wagon and he brought out a large book in a plastic garbage bag. “Here.”

“What is it about?”

“It’s an art book about a painter.”

I looked in the bag. It was a large book a foot by a foot and a half with a colored jacket and it was in good shape, kept clean by the plastic bag. I pulled it out.

Just the one word, on the cover, and below the word a painting of a racehorse.

“It’s beautiful—I don’t know what to say. Thank you.”

“Study it. I have. Work, draw, and study. We’ll talk about it day after tomorrow, after the explosion.”

“What explosion?”

“The one tomorrow evening at the courthouse. You’re coming, aren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

THAT NIGHT I read the book, or started to read it.

Degas was a French painter who was part of something called the Impressionist Movement, which I had not studied, even in school, where the arts teacher only comes once a week on a circuit from other schools.

After working for a little time at the elevator to
help Fred—even though he said I didn’t have to, I felt kind of guilty about it—I went home and ate. I took a bath in a hurry and went to my room and snuggled into the covers with a glass of Pepsi and four chocolate chip cookies that Emma had made and opened the book.

It was hard to read and the first part was all reading. I thought it would be wrong to skip it, but the letters were very small and there were lots of dates and French names so that I had trouble keeping focused on them, and I decided to move to the back of the book for a while where there were colored plates of his paintings.

“Oh.”

I actually made a sound. I couldn’t help it. The pictures were so good, so pretty.

There was a painting of racehorses and the colors seemed to jump off the page; you could see the muscles moving under their skin, hear the pounding, smell the sweat.

Another of a woman standing by a door, just that, but the colors and the light made it seem as if she had just walked in and was going to say something to me.

But even with that, even with the beauty, I was still trying to work, trying to see the colors and the way Degas had drawn things until I turned the page and just stopped, stopped dead.

It was a painting of a group of young women practicing ballet, called
The Dance Master
. The wall in the room was green and there was a big mirror on one side for the dancers to see themselves. In the background there is a raised platform or bleachers for people to sit and watch and dancers are everywhere, practicing, stretching, fixing their costumes. On one side there is an older man leaning on a cane—an instructor—and he is watching them, studying them, and still I would have been all right except for one girl.

She was standing to the side of the dancers but almost in the middle of the painting and she is watching them, worried about something, with her hand to her mouth, and I looked at her and started to cry.

She looked like me, or sort of like me, but that wasn’t it—at first I didn’t know why I was crying. Then I thought of what they were, all of
them, dancers, and that all of what they were was gone.

The painting was done in the late eighteen-hundreds. They were all gone. All dead. I wanted to know the girl, wanted to watch them practice. I wanted to see the dresses move and hear the music, wanted to know which ones the dance master picked for performance and if the girl who looked a little like me was one of them. I wanted to talk to them and ask them how it was to wear the costumes and dance and dance and dance without one stiff leg. I wanted to know their dreams and hopes and all of them, all the girls in the drawing and the dance master and the people sitting in the bleachers and the light and maybe even the building were dead and gone. I would never know their names or their favorite colors or what kind of music they liked or what they thought of school or what they had for supper. Gone, gone, gone.

So I cried, thinking of it, and must have made a sound because the door opened and Emma came in and sat on the bed.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“The picture,” I said. “They’re all gone and I want them to not be gone.” And I explained what I meant while Emma sat there and nodded and pushed the hair back from my face and smiled and wiped my cheeks where the tears went down.

“Just gone,” I said, finishing. “They’re all gone.”

Emma shook her head. “But they aren’t, don’t you see? There’s still the painting, isn’t there? You have that. You will always have the picture, won’t you? So they can never be gone.”

And of course she was right.

The painting.

There was still and would always be the painting. Emma turned out the light and I lay back on the pillow with the book on the stand next to the bed and went to sleep thinking I would find Mick in the morning and tell him what I had learned from the book on Degas.