Remember Ben Clayton (14 page)

He had a pair of old oars he had scavenged from the North River after a storm, and he gave them to her to support her upraised arms as she posed naked and striding for the better part of two hours. Her sense of privacy and reserve was as powerful as her bare flesh. As he openly studied her body, as he formed it in clay with his hands, he felt a thrilling intimacy with this unapproachable woman. She was entirely professional, holding the pose without complaint, anticipating his requests to shift position slightly as the changing light played across her bare skin.

He felt she trusted or respected him no more nor less than any other artist she had posed for. His lustful stupefaction had to have been plain to her, and perhaps that was part of the reason, in those first few sessions, that she deflected his solicitous questions—Was she cold? Was she thirsty? Did she need a break?—with a shake of her head and an unrevealing smile. It was only after three or four sessions that she finally felt comfortable enough with him to hold a conversation. He learned about how her father had died in a knife fight when she was twelve and the family was thrown onto the mercy of the Settlement Society. Her mother had gone to work in a shirtwaist factory and so had she, trimming off stray threads from the garments seven days a week, working till nine o’clock most nights, being paid for the overtime with a slice of apple pie. When her mother had fallen ill with tuberculosis she was taken to a poorhouse ward on Blackwell’s Island and Victoria never saw her again.

She did not expect much from life and it had been hard going at first to be in love with her. It had been hard going all along, as the weight of her grievances toward him began to accumulate. The grievances all sprang from the same poisonous source: his insistence that his mother never know of their marriage, or even of Victoria’s existence.

It was strange to think now that she had once loved him enough to agree to such a bargain. She had even listened with some sympathy when he had first explained the situation to her, when he told her that it would destroy his mother to learn that her only surviving son had married outside the Church and that his soul was condemned to hell. He could not think of doing that to her, not after everything she had already endured.

Gil thought he had a faint memory of his father before he went to the war, a hurried, balding man in an apron fussing with the shelves in his grocery store. Whatever patience and optimism there might have been in his nature had vanished at the Bloody Lane or in the slaughter fields below Marye’s Heights. He had survived both, and Fair Oaks besides, though shrapnel had badly scarred the nerves in both arms. He probably would have been a drunk anyway but maybe not so much of a tyrant if he had not been literally crazy with pain for the last twenty years of his life.

Gil’s mother sought refuge from his beatings in prayer, huddling with her two boys and whispering an Act of Contrition so that they would go to heaven in case he came against them with a knife. The dangerous rages did not happen that often, but often enough that clouds of terror loomed over them all even when Gil’s father stayed silent and tame. It was the threat of martyrdom, Gil supposed, that kept steadily raising his mother’s investment in the sheltering promise of the Church, that made the goal of preserving her sons’ souls for heaven even more compelling than saving their lives.

Gil’s brother, Michael, left as soon as he could, apprenticing himself to a fossil hunter in the New Jersey marl pits, then a year later dying of appendicitis on the train on his way to the bone beds of Wyoming to hunt for thunder lizards. The fossil hunters had been a rough bunch, and Gil’s mother was tortured by the thought that Michael might not have had a chance to make a good confession before he died. In her grief she prayed incessantly for his soul in Purgatory and could not utter her fears that he might have died in a state of mortal sin.

Gil’s father felt the pain of his son’s death too, though he was intolerant of the religious ravings of his wife. He himself mourned in drink, in a deepening hostility over the Germans, or the blacks, or the goddam Republicans. As his anger widened, his targets narrowed, to his shaken wife and remaining son. When Gil was thirteen he noticed the malicious look building in his father’s eye and stood up against him as he heaved drunkenly across the parlor toward his wife. His father tried to swat him out of the way and when Gil held his ground he threw him hard across the room, sending him smashing against his mother’s easel and smearing her half-finished portrait of Saint Catherine of Siena with the blood spouting from his torn forehead. Gil got back to his feet and there was an ugly, clumsy melee that ended with his father running out of the room weeping with shame.

The shame was strong enough to send his father straight to confession, and with the guidance of the parish priest he was able to remake himself for a time. He was a good businessman when he was sober and for several years the grocery store thrived, but he had a glowering nature even when he wasn’t drinking, and anyway it was too late for Gil to feel any affection for him, or confidence enough in his continued sobriety to ever let down his guard. When the storm broke again, Gil was older and stronger and the shoving match went his way. After that his father was an increasingly bitter and weakened figure in the household, no longer seeking reprieve in the Church but instead shunning the sacraments and mocking his wife’s devotion. He died at forty-eight of a heart attack on the floor of the Golden Swan Saloon.

There was enough money from the sale of the grocery to keep them from immediate distress, though they were soon gone from the apartment on St. Luke’s Place and much of the money Gil earned from his talent went to the support of his mother—as it would for many decades to come. She moved to Chicago to live with her sister at about the same time that Gil began attracting notice in New York and winning his first commissions. With his mother at such a distance, the deception he had proposed to Victoria seemed sustainable. And it was vital, of course, to his mother’s well-being. He believed this at the time and he believed it still. Victoria was a non-Catholic, a term that in his mother’s world was an all-consuming negative. To marry her, to marry outside the Church, was to live in sin, and to live in sin was to die outside salvation. He did not believe this, he never had. But his mother did, with a fervor that only grew more rigid as her life’s misfortunes compounded.

To preserve the illusion that his soul was not condemned he had few options. He could end his connection with Victoria and seek out a wife who was Catholic or who at least would convert, which Victoria was too proud and offended to consider. And it was Victoria’s defiance, her provocative disdain of convention, that stirred him as much as her beauty. She was unlike other women he had known. She was subservient to nothing, unafraid of God and uninterested in commands of conduct that did not arise from her own heart. But that did not make her like the morally confused and ready young women who swarmed around the New York art scene. She was wonderfully grave. There was a sense of purpose and direction about her that heartened Gil as he embarked on his own trackless quest for artistic greatness. He could not consider giving her up.

So the only other option was to conceal all knowledge of her from his mother. It was not difficult at first. The deceit grated on Victoria and tested her patience, but she went along with it, trusting in her husband’s belief that it was an act of kindness. But when Maureen was born the whole thing began to seem more cruel than kind. It was no longer an innocent secret to deny to both grandmother and granddaughter the knowledge of one another’s existence.

But what could he do? By that time the deception had already been in place, setting down intricate roots, for years. It was the worst decision he had ever made, could have ever made—he understood that now, but there was no going back. Even at the time he had astonished himself. He had not known until then that he could ever be capable of such a blatant, breathtaking falsehood. And there was never a moment when revealing everything to his mother would not have meant expanding and deepening the original betrayal. So he continued to conceal everything meaningful in his life from her, everything but his work, sending her newspaper accounts whenever a new statue was unveiled, and letter after letter detailing how his furiously paced but deeply satisfying career left him no time for thoughts of marriage. He did not talk about his mother to his circle of friends and they assumed without asking that she was dead. The lie to Maureen had been more direct: her grandmother had died before her birth, killed by a sudden brain hemorrhage as she walked home one Sunday after Mass.

Gil remembered the disgusted, tight-lipped forbearance with which Victoria had allowed this lie to claim their lives. They had argued about it for years on end, and he could see in her filmy, red-streaked eyes that she was edging from grudging complicity to something like hatred. She could never forgive him now, but there was no tolerable way to stop the branching deceit.

When the sister she was living with in Chicago had died, Gil’s mother had decided to come home to New York. To continue the subterfuge in such close proximity would have been difficult and damaging, and part of the reason he had agreed to move to Texas was so that the elaborate deception could go on.

Victoria had not wanted to go. She wept at the thought. She would be greeted in this new life only by loneliness while he would be welcomed as the world-famous sculptor who out of all the fair places he could have settled chose San Antonio.

And this fraudulent triumph that he had insisted upon for himself had brought her, as she predicted, nothing but homesickness and isolation and, in the end, a very real death.

Gil walked into the mission church, following the ghost of his wife. The memory of the way she had stood here that night two years ago was still so strong that he had an urge to rush back to his studio and sculpt it, just as he remembered: Victoria standing alone staring up yearningly through a church’s broken vault. Her expression that night had looked untroubled and accepting, the worry and anger smoothed away in a wash of moonlight. It was the way he would like to remember her, but he sensed that capturing her like that would amount to nothing more than another betrayal.

THIRTEEN

Dear Mr. Clayton,

My name is Arthur Fry and I served with your son in the 36th or as it is known by us Arrowhead Division over here in France. Ben and I were good friends. We met at Camp Bowie our first day there while waiting in line to fill these empty bed-sacks they gave us from a big pile of oat straw. Ben made a joke that when we went to bed that night we would hit the hay for sure. I trained with your son all the way through at Camp Bowie and sailed with him to France on the Lenape. It was an unpleasant trip, a lot of us were sick most of the time, and we were worried we might get sunk by a U-Boat. But Ben had a way of putting everybody at ease and everybody liked him and wanted to be around him and I told myself when we stepped onto the pier in Brest “I believe I’ll stick with Ben.”

I don’t know if he mentioned my name in any of his letters home to you but we were good friends. I come from Ranger over in Eastland County where my late mother taught school and my late father worked for the County Clerk’s office. I liked to hear Ben talk about growing up on the ranch. I grew up in town mostly. He said you had driven cattle up to Kansas back in the old days and I was always interested to hear about that and other adventures you had in pioneer times.

I was there at St. Etienne when Ben was killed and will tell you more of that battle if it is something you would care to learn. I know you have delicate feelings toward your son and may not want to hear the details of his death but I will just say here that it might be a comfort for you to know that it was quick and I do not think he suffered very much. Write me with your questions if you care to using this address. We move around a lot but this French outfit I work for—the STE—is pretty good about getting letters to me, though I don’t get much mail and don’t care that much about it.

I got wounded pretty bad in the same fight that Ben got killed in. I don’t think I’ll be coming home to the United States anytime soon. I like it in France well enough and my wound is such that people might get upset to see me. If I were coming home I would come to see you and bring you this in person, but as it is I will put it in this letter and hope it arrives safely. It is something that Ben made out of a mess-kit lid. I guess you could say it is a kind of charm or the like. As you can see there is a picture of a horse on it. Ben told me that the horse’s name is Poco and where he is standing is a place on the ranch that Ben said he felt particular affection for.

Ben was looking at this picture he had made of his home place just before we jumped off for the attack on St. Etienne. He put it in his pocket and I guess it fell out when the stretcher bearers lifted up his body. It laid there in the dirt for a year or more until I came across it when I was doing reclamation work for the French government. This part of France is called The Devastated Zone and that is the right name for it because hardly anything is there anymore except shells and barbed wire and blown-up towns. It is a miracle I came across this little piece of tin but I did and I thought you ought to have it to remind you of your son. I hope that seeing it does not add to your grief but subtracts from it instead.

Please write to me if I can be of service to you. For now I will close with my best wishes to the father of my friend Ben Clayton.

Yours sincerely,

Arthur Fry

L
amar Clayton folded the letter back into its envelope. It was the fourth time he had read it, and for some reason this time it made him angry. He goddam well did not want to know the details of how his son had died. Maybe other people would, that was their own business. But he didn’t have to be thinking about such things at his age. He had seen enough killing of one sort or another in his life and there wasn’t a thing in the world productive about looking back on it.

It was bad enough, holding this little square of tin in his hand, having to think about Ben scratching the image of the ranch and his horse onto it, probably eaten up with homesickness in the very hours before he died. Lamar kicked out hard at the baseboard of the parlor with the toe of his boot, and then rocked irritably in his chair as hot tears came to his eyes. Goddam it to hell. Had the boy even thought of his father in those last hours? Had he thought of him with hate?

Peggy woke up with a whimper in her little basket, startled awake by his kicking the wall. She looked up at him with a bewildered, entreating expression, her left front leg bandaged and swollen up double. He had tied a little tourniquet above the bandage to keep the poison from traveling up to her heart, but he didn’t know if it would have any effect. He figured it was just wait and see. Everybody had their own ideas about how to treat snakebite and Lamar’s was to swab the wound with kerosene and then to bind to it the head of the snake that bit you. That was how the Quahadas had taught him over fifty years ago and it worked well enough except when it didn’t. He didn’t see much point to start cutting on Peggy and he didn’t care to suck the blood out of a dog anyway. He’d once met a doctor in a Fort Griffin saloon who told him with drunken authority that when a rattlesnake hit you with his poison it was like ink spreading into a wet sponge. You could suck all you wanted but there was no way that poison was coming back out.

“Don’t think I have any sympathy for you,” he muttered at the dog. “It’s your own damn fault.”

Peggy was twelve years old. She ought to have known better by now than to nose around in rock crevices the way she had been doing this afternoon when they rode in from the horse trap. When she was young he’d had to whistle her away from brush piles and prairie dog holes a hundred times a day. If she hadn’t got the idea by now that there were rattlesnakes in such places, she had nobody but herself to blame. The problem was dachshunds were burrowers. They cared about crawling into narrow unreachable places more than they cared about any other thing in the world. It was a stupid sort of dog to have on a ranch, but Sarey had seen a picture of a dachshund pup in a magazine and there had been no point in trying to talk her out of it.

The dog had been imperious from the beginning and had assumed she had the right to sleep in their bed with them, wiggling down through the bedcovers to warm herself at Lamar’s feet. He’d put a stop to that, but the pup just migrated to Ben’s bed instead. He tried to stop that too, but the whole household stood up against him and after a while he didn’t have the energy to fight about it anymore.

Looking up at him from her basket now, the dog kept whining in pain and bewilderment and he told her to hush. His voice must have been sharp enough because she moved her head and looked past him at the wall and in a little while she was asleep again. Or dead. He leaned forward and put his hand on her rib cage until he felt her breathing and then he settled back in his chair and read the letter again and smoked another cigarette and sat there awake as another hour or two passed.

His mind was agitated. He did not want the dog to die, but there was a part of him that wanted everything over and done with, for every person and every creature that had a claim on him just to be gone and leave him alone. And while he was at it, he didn’t see much point in not being dead himself.

He recalled how when he was with the Comanches, when they would be coming home from a raid or a hunting party, they would follow the trail up to some bluff or high point of rock. They would find stones there placed by the party that had gone before. The stones were arranged in a manner to suggest the phase of the moon when the first party had passed by, and there were other stones telling you which direction they had gone. It had been so simple and so calming to him to see those stones like that. Here you might be out in the middle of the llano with nothing but grass and emptiness all around you, and it was like somebody was speaking to you, telling you there were others out here, letting you know how close or far they were, showing you the way home.

He felt lost now, alone in open country with no sign to guide him. Worse, far worse, he felt—he could see—that his son’s ghost was lost and wandering, somewhere in those horrible French battlefields, amid the mud and slime and stinking shell craters and twisted dead tree trunks. He sensed that Ben was expecting to discover some sign from his father, some indication of how to get back to Shackelford County. But Lamar had left nothing for him. He had not thought to. He had not wanted to.

He jerked upright and opened his eyes. He had fallen asleep, or close to it. The image of Ben staggering alone through the hellish western front had been a kind of dream, one of those furiously vivid dreams that he had sometimes before settling down into real sleep.

He sat there alone in the room, awake and alert again. The dog fussed and whimpered in her sleep. Lamar did not like being at the mercy of his waking mind at three in the morning or any other time. Lonely hours such as this had never been a problem for Sarey. She had had her books and her magazines, the letters she was always writing to her three sisters. Like Sarey, the sisters were inquisitive, industrious, and chiding. They had grown up on a ranch over on the Clear Fork with a big stone house and rich pastures that back in those days were untouched by mesquite. He had met her at a dinner at the old Stockyards Hotel during one of Fort Worth’s first fat stock shows. Sarey’s father had brought his four daughters with him, joking to everyone who would listen that he was almost as proud of them as he was of his Hereford bulls. They were an exuberant family, always singing around the organ, organizing croquet matches and boating parties on the deep pools of the Clear Fork.

When he married Sarey, Lamar had been almost fifty, a damaged, silent man she had coaxed out of solitude and drawn into her welcoming family. He had picnicked with them and gamely done his untutored best on the croquet lawn, but the sociability had always been a strain, a price he knew he had to pay for the peace he found at home on his own ranch with Sarey. Studying her in bed as she slept, staring at her in the parlor as she read or wrote letters or cradled their drowsy son in her arms, he had felt a calm he had not known since the days of his own childhood, when he would go to sleep at night listening to the hum of his mother’s spinning wheel. In those suspended moments, it was almost as if the child he had been had grown into the man he was meant to be, as if the Quahadas had never walked through the door that day, as if he and his family had been left alone to live out the future that it had once seemed God intended for them.

He had last seen Sarey’s family at Ben’s funeral service. It was at the Methodist church in Albany that Lamar had allowed Sarey to drag him to six or eight times during their marriage. There had been no casket, no graveside service, since Ben’s grave was far away in France, just a morose reception afterward at one of the church members’ houses, the house of a stranger. Lamar had talked beef prices and tick medicine with Sarey’s father as the women from the church handed them plates of lemon cake. Each of his late wife’s sisters—Ben’s bereaved aunts—had kissed him on the cheek and told him to let them know if there was anything at all in the world they could do for him. He reckoned he would run into some of them again from time to time, but there was nothing left to bind that vibrant family to him. Like his dead wife and son, they had come and gone through his life like a fast-moving norther.

It surprised him now that he hadn’t started drinking again. He just never thought to. Maybe it was Sarey, still lingering on in his mind, still holding him up to her standards. Probably it was just that drinking seemed like another damned thing to do, and he didn’t feel like doing anything except being out with the cattle.

And if he had held himself to Sarey’s standards after she died, things would have been different with Ben. The gulf between living father and dead son would not now feel so dismayingly, impossibly wide.

“You been awake all night?” George’s Mary’s voice startled him. Was he asleep again? He looked over to see her standing there in her housedress, tying on her apron.

“What time is it?”

“Four in the damn morning. I was about to start the biscuits.”

She squatted down and stroked Peggy’s head. The dog opened her eyes and craned her head upwards, staring at George’s Mary with a woeful look.

“Well, she’s alive,” George’s Mary said. “You think she’s going to have to lose that leg?”

“I doubt it. It wasn’t a big snake and this early in the winter it probably didn’t have that much poison stored up.”

He started to stand up but he did so too fast and inside his head it felt like a flock of birds had just flown up off the ground all at once. George’s Mary reached out and grabbed him and helped him back into the chair. One by one, the birds started to return.

“You better not be having a heart attack.”

“No, I was just dizzy for a minute.”

“Well, that’s what you get for sitting there in one place all night. Stay here and I’ll get you something to eat.”

She went into the kitchen and came back with a handful of crackers and a glass of milk.

“What’s that letter there in your lap?” she said as he was eating the crackers.

“It’s about Ben.”

He handed the letter to her. She was a slow reader and it took her a long time to work her way through it, but there were tears coming out of her eyes soon enough. When she was through reading the letter she held the piece of tin in her hand and stared at it. Her face had grown fleshy, and her thick gray hair was coarse and tangled and she didn’t seem to take much care of it. It was hard for Lamar to conjure up anymore what she had looked like when she was young. Pale and thin, the best he could recall. He remembered her shivering in the wagon when he brought her home from Fort Griffin, even though it had been summer. She had probably thought he was going to rape her and beat her the way those teamsters had who had left her lying in the mud in front of Conrad’s store. He’d had no thought along those lines at all—he just needed a cook—but it took her a long time to accept that fact, and when she did she went right from fearful to bossy. She’d never thanked him for his good turn and it didn’t matter to him whether she did or not.