Remember Ben Clayton (11 page)

Clayton heard the note of alarm in his guest’s voice and turned around in time to see Gilheaney land on his back on more or less flat ground between a clump of sharp-sided rocks and the pads of a prickly pear. He clucked his horse to a stop and waited to see if the sculptor was going to need help to move.

“
That
was invigorating,” Gilheaney said. His breath was short but he was already on his feet, grinning as if he had fallen off the horse on purpose.

“You might’ve busted something,” Clayton said.

“Might have, but I don’t think so.” He grabbed Poco’s reins and launched himself back into the saddle. “Lead on, Mr. Clayton,” he said.

Clayton spurred his horse and Poco picked up speed to follow before Gil could instruct him to do so. Gil was rattled and horse-shy now, thinking of the rocks he had barely missed in his fall. He flexed the fingers of his hands in the cold. He might easily have broken both hands when he hit the ground, an accident which could have put an end to his life’s work as decisively as a broken neck or a cracked skull. But only his vanity was injured, and he knew that the best cure for that was to bluff his way exuberantly forward.

“Frost is late this year,” Clayton was saying in a conversational tone as they ascended to level ground again and Gil finally relaxed his grip on the saddle horn. “Once we get ourselves a good hard freeze it’ll take care of them screwworm flies but until then there’s always hell to pay.”

The sun was higher now, burning away the fog, but the temperature held steady—in the mid-thirties, Gil guessed. Wind swept down from the bluffs and mesas and feathered its way through the winter grass. Gil’s shoulder was sore. There would be a many-hued bruise when he took off his shirt tonight. His toes were growing numb in their city boots, and he was hungry and did not know if they would be eating.

“Pretty fair view of it from here,” Clayton said, nodding in the direction of a shallow mesa. At first Gil did not recognize it as the summit upon which the statue was to be placed, but once he did he was entranced all over again by the thought of a distant lone horseman standing there, iron-still and vigilant. To a passing rider like himself—and perhaps one day a passing motorist—it would not be clear at first that this apparition was a statue at all. Silhouetted against a far horizon, utterly unexpected, utterly unexplained, it would give the impression of a conscious watcher, someone who had merely paused in magnificent contemplation.

“I believe this will be my masterpiece, Mr. Clayton.” He had not planned to say this. He was unlike many of the other artists he had known, pompous and excitable men who had neither the interest nor the ability to keep the breadth of their ambition a strategic secret. But when he had sighted the mesa summit from this vantage—cold and hungry and sore as he already was—a gust of creative exuberance had come out of nowhere to claim him.

“Well,” Clayton replied, “I’m pleased you think so.”

Poco exhaled and wagged his head and shifted his weight, still bearing his rider along at a plodding walk. Gil gave some thought about what to say to Clayton next.

“I wonder if you would tell me something about your experiences with the Indians.”

They rode along, five paces, ten, Clayton not answering. Had he heard?

“I ask because of natural curiosity, of course,” Gil explained, “but also because it would help me understand the particular heritage to which your son was born. I’ve found that the more deeply I can understand a person, the more authentic a sculpture I can create.”

Clayton said nothing. He did not nod his head or grunt in response, did not smile or scowl or give any other sign that he had heard.

“We’re gonna take a look at these calves up in this here pasture,” Clayton said at last, blatantly evading the topic as they rode through another wire gate that Nax was holding open for them. They entered a big pasture, filled with young calves that were ignoring the grass for the most part and roaming up and down the fence line, bleating in anxiety.

“Bawling for their mamas,” Clayton explained. “Ain’t the happiest time of their lives. We castrate them and brand them and then put them over here to get weaned. Screwworms’ll get started wherever there’s an open wound, and these calves got plenty of those. Not just from the branding and castrating but from rubbing up against the wire like they do looking for their mothers.”

Clayton spurred his horse into a trot and Poco followed at the same pace. Gil grabbed the saddle horn again and pushed against the stirrups with the soles of his feet and did his best to take the irrhythmic shocks in his legs.

With a stern eye, Clayton inspected the miserable lonely calves as he rode among them. Ernest and Nax were doing the same thing far away on the other side of the pasture.

“Over yonder—there’s one down,” Clayton announced, and this time they broke into a gallop, or at least what felt to Gil like a gallop. They rode for a half mile or so and then Clayton reined in and roped the calf just as it stood up to run.

His horse planted its feet as the old man dismounted and walked along the taut rope to the downed calf. He was agile enough getting off his horse but in no hurry.

“Care for some help?” Gil called to him.

Clayton shrugged. Gil climbed down and let Poco’s reins drop, assuming the horse knew not to run away. By the time he got over to the calf, Clayton had already thrown it to the ground and was wrapping its rear legs with a pigging rope.

“Grab ahold of this here hind leg,” he said. Gil did as he was instructed, pulling one hind leg and bracing his foot against the other as Clayton held the calf down with one hand and inspected an oozy, bloody scar on its stomach.

“He was bleeding from his belly button,” he said. “That’s how the flies got in. They been eating at him three or four days now, I reckon. That’s how he come to be lying on the ground—just too weak to stand anymore. You keep holding him down and I’ll get the medicine.”

The calf bawled in distress but lay compliantly still as Gil held him. The stench of the wound came to him now, and he turned his head away.

Clayton untied a boot from the side of his saddle and brought it back and set it down by the calf. From the boot top he pulled out a bottle of chloroform and a jar filled with what looked like black tar.

“First we got to get them worms out,” Clayton said, setting to work. He used his fingers, gouging out the white pulsing worms from the open wound on the calf’s belly and flicking them away onto the grass. The calf thrashed in pain. The smell of suppurating flesh blossomed.

“Whiffy sonsofbitches, ain’t they?”

Lamar saw the sculptor gag as he nodded in agreement. He’d been pretty game up until now, but Lamar wondered how much of his enthusiasm was show and how much was real. He didn’t like the pushy way he was about Ben, prying into the boy’s life as if it was his private business as much as it was Lamar’s. He had his Kodaks, he had Ben’s clothes, he was riding his goddam horse. How much did you need to take a likeness of somebody?

He didn’t say any of that, of course. But he couldn’t help pushing back a little.

“Want to take a turn?” he asked Gilheaney.

He had to give the sculptor credit. He just took a breath and started digging around in the wound with his fingers while Lamar took over holding the calf down.

“They’re slippery little creatures,” he said, turning his head off to the side, away from the smell.

“They eat live meat,” Lamar said. “We didn’t put a stop to it, they’d pretty much eat up this poor animal from the inside.”

He watched as Gilheaney scooped out another few wiggling handfuls, then leaned over and inspected the wound himself.

“That ought to about do it,” he said. “You been a good friend to this little cow today, Mr. Gilheaney. Not that he’d ever admit it to you.”

GIL SAT BACK
, breathing clear air again, and watched as Clayton poured chloroform on the wound. After that he reached into the can and spread the tarry black medicine on the wound to keep more flies from settling in.

When he was through he nodded to Gil to let the calf go. Weak as it was, it sprang to its feet and trotted away, back toward the fence line, hopelessly bellowing for its mother.

The two men remained on the ground, watching it.

“Well, that’s ranch work. You want to know what Ben was up to most of his life, this is it.”

“I suspect he was very good at it.”

“Most of it he was. Not this part especially. He was softhearted, didn’t like to see things in pain. But hell, when it comes to ranching, some critter’s always going to be mad at you for some damn reason or other.”

“Where’d the soft heart come from? His mother?”

“Could be,” Clayton said. He pulled himself up from the ground, and Gil could see from the arthritic effort that the feat of roping the calf had cost him. Had he done it for his benefit? To show the dude in the Abercrombie hunting jacket that a seventy-year-old man was more vital than he was?

Twenty yards away, Poco was calmly grazing. The horse made no objection when Gil picked the reins up from the ground and launched himself back into the saddle. Off in the distance Ernest and Nax had another calf down.

“As far as that other thing goes,” Clayton said, as he tied the medicine boot back onto his saddle. “I don’t generally talk about that part of my life.”

“All right,” Gil said.

“I know you say you’re looking for something more than what the Kodaks show he looked like, but seems to me that’s enough to catch his likeness.”

“All right,” Gil said. “But I thought
you
wanted more than a likeness.”

Gil was tired and hungry—and irritated. His tone had been stern. Clayton caught the bite in it and responded with a tight smile.

“All I want is sixteen thousand dollars’ worth of your best work,” he said. “Ain’t neither one of us going to bring him back to life.”

TEN

T
hey were back at the house by late afternoon. Gil offered to help Ernest and Nax put away the tack and take care of the horses, but they refused, as he had secretly hoped they would, and so he was able to stagger into Ben’s room and lie down on the floor. He was so covered with dust he could not consider lying on the bed, and anyway the floor suited him, since his body was so dramatically sore and cramped.

Maureen knocked softly on the door and asked if he was all right, and he called out that of course he was, he was just changing his clothes. But it took him another ten minutes to gather the will to pull himself off the floor and remove his jacket. He went to the basin and washed his grimy face and neck as best he could and admired the bruise spreading across his upper back. Then he painfully bent down to unlace his boots. Gil was used to brutal physical labor but the chronic discomfort of riding a horse for most of the day was new to him. As he was pulling off his trousers, cramps began in both his legs at once, and he sank to the floor again until they had passed.

He was starving. Lunch had been a boiled egg and a piece of bread eaten on horseback as they left the far pasture with the weaning calves still crying piteously for their mothers. So far, a city man’s muscle and stomach pangs were the only insights he could conclude he had gathered from the day’s exertions, but he was confident that on a deeper level something important had registered in his imagination. The smells of leather and sweaty horsehair, the damp cold, the sere winter grass, the cramps in his thighs, the numbness in his fingers, his growing hunger as they ventured farther and farther into a country that was trackless and unknowable to him, the indifference of his horse to his existence as it took its deliberative steps over difficult terrain, the sight of the screwworm flies teeming in open wounds, the terror of the abandoned calves, the boundless but oppressive sky, Lamar Clayton riding beside him in silence, his expertness in every gesture and deed, his immemorial presence: these things could not be sculpted, but they could be called upon. The hands that shaped Ben Clayton’s form would have at least held the reins to his horse, would have turned themselves for a day or two to the work that the boy had known.

He walked stiff-legged into the parlor. Maureen was the only one there. She was setting the table while George’s Mary was busy in the kitchen. Gil could smell chicken frying and bread baking.

“She finally gave in and let me help her set the table,” Maureen whispered. With a glance, she assessed her father’s stove-up condition. “I hope it was worth it. You look like you’ve—”

“It was worth it,” he said. He stood with his hands on a chairback, watching as she set down the plates.

“Why don’t you sit?” she said.

“I’m all right. What was your day like?”

She glanced at the kitchen to make sure George’s Mary did not hear her.

“Long. Maybe even longer than yours.”

“I doubt that.”

She came around from the opposite end of the table and whispered in his ear.

“It turns out
her
family was killed by Indians too. We’re really in the wild west, Daddy.”

Gil was about to respond when Clayton walked into the room. He had taken off his jacket but was still wearing the clothes he had spent the day working in. There was calf’s blood on his blue jeans where he had wiped his fingers after gouging out screwworm flies, and though he had washed his hands there were still traces of the black gunky medicine on his fingers.

“Well, your father did his share of work today,” he said to Maureen. “Didn’t know any better, I’d have thought he’d been riding horses and doctoring calves all his life.”

“Mr. Clayton, you get them settled at the table before this dinner gets cold!” George’s Mary called from the kitchen.

“You’re in charge of cooking the food, not telling me when I’ve got to eat it,” Clayton yelled right back in what might have been a tone of real hostility if he hadn’t been smiling when he said it, and gesturing in a courtly way for Maureen to sit.

George’s Mary came in with platters of chicken and carrots and rolls, which she laid down heavily on the table as Clayton acknowledged their bestowal with a grunt. It was just the three of them again tonight, Ernest and Nax presumably banished to the bunkhouse for the evening meal. Maureen had the impression that when visitors were not here—and when there was no need to make a show of hierarchy—Clayton had supper every night with his ranch hands, and maybe George’s Mary even joined them too, instead of dining by herself at the little kitchen table after all the others had finished.

“It must have been lively around the table when Ben was a little boy,” Maureen decided to say. She was determined that there be some kind of conversation.

“Oh, I expect so,” Clayton said. “That was a long time ago. I remember his mother would hold him in her lap and feed him with a spoon, and he’d wave his arms and smile and so forth the way little children do.”

“When he was older,” Gil said, “did he have strong opinions? About the war, for instance?”

“Well, he wasn’t the sort to get his bristles up generally, but he was all for fighting it, I guess. I can’t say if he had any particular feeling about why it needed to be fought—any better reason than anybody else. People around here weren’t happy about that telegram the Mexicans got. We’d had our share of wars with Mexico and didn’t appreciate the Germans putting them up to another one. You care for the gizzard, Miss Gilheaney?”

When Maureen said no thank you, he looked mildly disappointed and said he guessed he would just have it for himself then. He put the gizzard in his mouth and silently chewed it. Perhaps he was caught up in his thoughts or perhaps he had just reverted to that state of unvexed silence that seemed to be his natural mood.

“Ben didn’t wait to get drafted,” he said after a moment. “He just went out and joined the Guard and never told any of us a word about it till a week or so before he was supposed to go. Maybe he just wanted to see a new place or two. He took after his mother that way.”

“Not after you?” Gil asked.

“No, I seen all the places I care to see. I know this part of the country pretty well and I been up the Western Trail a time or two, and I’m satisfied with that. But Sarey had her wandering side. If she’d been alive, it would have broke her heart to send her boy off to war, but she would have liked the idea that he got to see France. You folks ever been over there?”

“I haven’t,” Maureen said, “but Daddy studied in Paris, and in Rome as well.”

“Well, I guess Paris and Rome have got Shackelford County beat all to hell.”

“That’s true in some ways,” Gil said, heartened by the way Clayton seemed to be falling at last into an easy conversational frame of mind. “But certainly not in all. For instance, as I was watching you rope that calf today, I had the impression that—”

But Clayton was no longer paying attention. He was staring past Gil, looking out the front window, his eyes suddenly narrow and wrathful. His alarm was intense and public enough that there was no reason for Gil and his daughter to pretend they had not noticed it. They both turned to look out the window themselves, where a beat-up, dust-covered Model T had just rattled down the road and pulled to a stop in front of the house.

Clayton set down his napkin, got to his feet, and walked out the front door without excusing himself. Gil and Maureen watched through the window as he climbed down the porch steps and walked toward the car with a combative stride. An old Indian man with long, graying braids and a shapeless campaign hat sat behind the steering wheel, but it was the woman next to him that Clayton clearly meant to confront. She was old too, her face long and sagging and almost toothless, and like the driver she wore her hair in stringy braids. She was opening the door to step out when Clayton intercepted her and called out, loud enough to be heard inside the house, “You two can just turn that car around and go home right now!”

“Oh, Lord,” said George’s Mary, who had just come in from the kitchen holding a pitcher of iced tea.

“Who is it?” Maureen asked.

“Oh, honey, that there’s Mr. Clayton’s sister.”

She filled their tea glasses while all three of them watched the standoff outside as it grew in intensity. Clayton had lowered his voice, and they could no longer make out what he was saying, but as he argued with his elderly sister he pushed against the car door, holding her in place as she tried to get out. The Indian man who was driving got out of his side of the car and walked around to intercede, but Clayton pushed him away with his free arm and for a moment it appeared that the two old men were about to lunge at each other and fall grappling onto the dirt. But the Indian seemed to grasp the absurdity of that proposition and backed away and got behind the wheel again. As Clayton stood there scowling at the intruders with his hands in his back pockets, the car tore off down the road, spitting gravel from its rear tires.

Clayton came back inside and returned to his chair and sat down.

“Those people are not welcome in my house,” he blurted out by way of explanation.

Neither Gil nor Maureen saw any reason to respond. George’s Mary said nothing either, but her mouth was set tight and Gil could see her glowering at her employer.

“Well, what the hell did you want me to do?” Clayton said to her.

“You know I don’t give a damn what you do.”

“Well, then that about takes care of it, don’t it?”

George’s Mary turned and walked into the kitchen and pulled the swinging door forcefully behind her. It swung in and out for a minute, squeaking on its hinges.

“You folks finish your supper,” Clayton said to Gil and Maureen. “This business don’t have nothing to do with you and I’m sorry you had to—”

He was looking up at the window again. The Model T was back. Through the window Gil could see the woman getting out of the car and running up to the porch. Clayton stood up, trembling with anger, and pulled open the door just as his sister hurled something through it. The object struck his face and landed on the table by the late Mrs. Clayton’s china gravy boat.

“Don’t you ever come back to this house, you god-damned squaw!” Clayton called after his sister as she ran back to the car and drove away.

Maureen reached out to pick up the thing the woman had thrown. It was, she saw, a primitive bracelet, thick strands of sinew supporting a row of glistening animal teeth. She handed it to Mr. Clayton. He accepted it from her with a grim nod and stuffed it in his shirt pocket. This time he did not bother with the pretense of sitting down to finish his meal, he just walked out of the parlor and headed toward the corral, yelling for Ernest to saddle his god-damned horse.