Remember Ben Clayton (15 page)

“Well, hell, Mr. Clayton,” she said now.

“Well, hell is about it.”

“You be sure to write this boy back and thank him.”

“I will, but it’s no business of yours if I do or not.”

She handed him back the letter and walked into the kitchen. He heard her opening the cupboards, getting down her mixing board and the flour and lard and starting the cooking fire. She shut the steel door of the stove with a hard shove, and when she struck a match it seemed there was fury in that too. She made enough noise for Peggy to forget about her snakebite and get curious, and he had to give the dog a harsh look to stop her from getting out of her basket and limping over to investigate.

He stood himself up—the dizziness was gone now—and bent over and picked up the dog so she wouldn’t follow him. Then he carried her into the kitchen and stood there holding her as he watched George’s Mary knead the biscuit dough as if she was trying to strangle it.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m making your damn breakfast, is what I’m doing.”

“Well, be quiet about it.”

She took the mixing board with the dough still on it and threw it hard on the floor, where it broke in two.

“I loved that boy,” she said.

“I never said you didn’t.”

There was a little hardback chair in the kitchen she used as a stool and she sat down on it and began to wail in a way she never had, not even when they first got the telegram that Ben had been killed. She cried so hard she had trouble getting her breath, and Lamar couldn’t think of anything to do except to stand there with the snakebit dog in his arms and watch her.

It went on for a minute or two and then she was over it. She picked up the dough and threw it in the trash, along with the broken mixing board.

“I had that for forty years,” she said.

“You would have had it for another forty if you hadn’t thrown it on the floor like that.”

She laughed at herself and smeared the tears from her cheeks and then got down a mixing bowl and reached into the coffee can where she kept the lard.

“Look at that dog,” she said. “She’s trembling. We ought not to have got her so excited, not with that snake poison in her.”

Lamar reached out and got a dish towel off the rack and wrapped it around the dog, careful not to touch her bandaged and swollen leg.

“I guess I’ll go sit on the porch till breakfast’s ready,” he told George’s Mary.

He walked with the dog out onto the porch and sat down on a weathered wooden chair whose legs were so uneven it was close to being a rocker. The sun was almost up. The night horse, a little roan called Chesty, was chuffing at him from the fence line. He could hear mourning doves calling and there was a hawk silhouetted at the top of a tree across the creek, preening itself for its morning hunt. Soon he could smell the biscuits cooking in the wood oven. He reflected to himself that if he had ever been at peace, this would have been his favorite time of day.

FOURTEEN

T
he grand ballroom of the Gunter Hotel was filled with men who looked, in one way or another, like Lamar Clayton. The members of the Old Time Trail Drivers Association were indeed old trail drivers. Some were small and wiry and bowlegged, some had grown mountainous in the decades since they had herded cattle along the now-extinct open range. Those that did not trust the young women at the coat check sat with their Stetsons in front of them on the banquet tables, making life difficult for the waiters trying to serve plates of well-done ribeyes and anemic salads. Many of their faces were hidden behind cascading white mustaches and chin beards. Some wore expensive clothes and looked like they were accustomed to being seen in them, some like Lamar Clayton wore shapeless suits with the lingering scent of mothballs. But they were mostly men who still bore detectable traces of vigor. No matter how broken down they looked, they still had a dogged physical bearing. Their eyes were keen with nostalgia.

“We deplore the loss of these old pioneers,” the speaker at the podium declared after reading off the names of half a dozen “Old Trailers” who had died during the previous year. “And it would be the father of all mistakes to allow their daring and valuable efforts in taming this country to be forgotten by future generations. And so I ask that we bow our heads and vow always to remember our old partners on the trail.”

Gil bowed his head, as did Maureen and Vance Martindale, who kept scribbling in a notebook as he pretended to pray, determined to get everything down. Only Lamar Clayton, who had invited them to the dinner, kept his head upright. When Gil glanced up during the moment of silence, his eyes met Clayton’s. Gil could not read the look he saw there. Maybe it was amusement, maybe it was a hardheaded disdain for being instructed on the manner of how to show his feelings.

Gil responded with an ambiguous half smile. They were at a delicate stage of the approval process for the sculpture and he didn’t want to risk a careless reading of his patron’s mood. Clayton had wired him only three weeks before that he was coming to San Antonio for the Old Time Trail Drivers annual meeting and that as long as he was in town he would be pleased to come by the studio to check on the progress of his statue. This news had sent Gil into a frenzy of effort to complete the scale model, since he wanted to take advantage of an opportunity to get Clayton’s approval of the work so far. He had still not quite finished by that afternoon, but had to leave off to give himself time to get dressed for the banquet that Clayton had insisted he and Maureen attend as his guests. When Maureen mentioned the event to Martindale, who happened to be in town for some reason or another, he immediately bought himself a ticket, eager for the chance to mingle with some of the old pioneers who were the subject of his research.

After the dead had been remembered, another old drover who looked near-dead himself was called to the podium to discuss, in halting speech and numbing detail, the vanished cattle trails of Texas. He went on for forty-five minutes, ponderously recounting the various river crossings on the way to the Red.

“Now after crossing the Llano,” the speaker mumbled about a half hour into the talk, fortifying himself with a long drink of water, “it went up Saline Creek, up there to the head of McDougal Creek over in Menard County, and down to Pegleg Crossing on the San Saba.”

He looked out at the white-haired audience until he found Lamar Clayton. “That about right, Lamar?”

“Near as I can recall,” Clayton growled back.

“Well, I reckon as near as you can recall is about as accurate as we’re going to get.”

A ripple of knowing laughter passed through the audience. Clayton brushed off the recognition but called back at the speaker.

“About how soon you gonna finish, Bud? You ain’t even got to the Brazos yet. We could have driven a herd of cows all the way up the damn trail by now.”

The room erupted in laughter and applause. The cattlemen and their stout wives turned in their seats to grin at Lamar Clayton, who looked across the table and winked at Gil and Maureen.

“You think you can give this damn speech any faster, Lamar,” the ancient speaker said, “then by god you get on up here and do ’er.”

Martindale beamed in delight, still scribbling. If there was a heaven for the academic study of old-time Texas, he was in it. Meanwhile Clayton jokingly halfway rose out of his chair as the audience kept laughing, but he settled back down again and after a few more good-natured interruptions the speaker was droning on once more, cataloging endless feeder trails and minor watercourses, until he came to Doan’s Crossing on the Prairie Dog Town Fork and began a sentence with the words that the audience had been longing to hear: “In conclusion …”

When the dinner was over, Gil and Maureen and Martindale waited in the lobby while Clayton shook hands with some of his old trail-driving friends and their wives. There was an air of convivial vitality about him that neither Gil nor Maureen had seen before, and a strange kind of urbanity too. He seemed oddly more at home in this hotel ballroom in San Antonio than he did in his own house. And Gil noticed the way he talked to the wives of those tremulous old cowboys, the way he held their attention with a steady, undistracted look. It was the sort of look that men naturally interpreted as challenging but that women saw as flattering. Seeing Clayton in this company helped Gil to understand how this temperamental and solitary rancher had ended up marrying a beautiful and sophisticated woman twenty years younger; and at the same time how he might have ended up driving away his only son.

“Sorry that dinner took so long,” Clayton said when he returned to them. “That fella always was a little long-winded. I recall that three or four months on the trail with him was about plenty.”

“It was a privilege to hear it, Mr. Clayton,” Vance Martindale said. “A privilege just to be at a gathering like this.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Clayton said. Gil could tell that the old rancher didn’t know what to think of Martindale. Gil felt a little bit the same way. Martindale knew how to listen, his interest in the subject of trail drives and pioneer ranching was impressively deep and unabashed, and he was not a fake. One look at his blunt, beat-up hands told you that he was as much a product of the South Texas brushlands as he was of the university. Gil understood why Maureen liked him. But still, there was something put on about him, the cowboy boots he wore with his rumpled suit, the battered hat he wore pushed back on the top of his head. He wanted you to notice him, he wanted you to appreciate the character he had invented for himself.

“If it’s agreeable to you, Mr. Clayton,” Gil said, “we’ll meet at my studio for lunch and you could have a look at the scale model then.”

“That’s agreeable.”

Gil turned to Vance Martindale. “Will you join us for lunch as well?”

“With the greatest pleasure. But only if I’m not in the way.”

IT WAS LATE
. Her father drove home alone in his own car, after Vance had asked if he could have the honor of dropping her off. They were now heading aimlessly through the almost empty downtown streets.

“I have the feeling your father invited me only because I happened to be standing there,” Vance said to Maureen. One of the senior professors in Austin had lent him his car while he was at a conference in New York, and Vance had gleefully taken the liberty of driving it all the way down to San Antonio.

“He invited you because he likes you.”

“I’d like to think so. But he’s a little suspicious of me, don’t you think?”

“Why would I think that?”

“I don’t know, a rough character like myself, lurking around his daughter.”

“You’re hardly a rough character.”

“As if you would know. You didn’t see me get into a saloon brawl the other day over Spenser’s use of the Petrarchan sonnet. Seriously, what does he think of me?”

“He hasn’t said much about you.”

“Do you realize how crushing that sounds to an egoist?”

“Yes, and it serves you right. Where are you taking me?”

“I thought we could have an ice cream sundae.”

“There’s no place that would serve us an ice cream sundae at eleven o’clock at night.”

“Must you wave the banner of reality in my face like that?”

He had had maybe a little too much to drink. Maybe she had too, with that second glass of wine. The Old Time Trail Drivers—with the exception of the grimly abstemious Lamar Clayton—had unsurprisingly proved to be a group of serious drinkers, and with prohibition looming on the horizon after the beginning of the year there had been an end-of-the-world spirit of indulgence at the event. Even her father, so crushingly moderate in his habits, had been a little mellow by the time it was over.

Vance drove to San Pedro Springs and they got out and walked through the deserted park, across a footbridge spanning a small, mostly dried-up lake. A boat, built in the shape of a swan, lay rotting on the bank. Its peeling white paint was visible in the moonlight.

“It’s a great pity,” Vance declared as he stared into the water from the bridge.

“What’s a pity?”

“These springs were Texas’ Garden of Eden once. Utterly glorious, endless clear water rushing out of the limestone. San Antonio wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for these springs, Texas wouldn’t be here. Now they’ve been pumped nearly dry.”

He told her about the mastodons and dire wolves that had once watered here, the Lipan Apaches and Spanish explorers who had camped here, Sam Houston speaking out at this very spot against the idea of Texas leaving the Union. She listened as they walked on, entranced by his enthusiasm, the bottomless depth of his knowledge, but most of all by the way, as he lectured, that he had made her his audience of one. He paused at an old stone blockhouse that he declared was the oldest building in Texas. He patted the stone with such worshipful attention that she thought he would kiss it.

“So you have the history of Texas,” he said, turning to her again, “all compressed in this one spot. But history is boring, or so people seem to think. Let’s talk about you.”

“My history would make a very slim volume.”

“Well, you must add a chapter or two.”

“Not so easily done, I’m afraid.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, Vance. Because things are not easily done in general.”

He leaned against the ancient stone and looked at her, studied her. He was not in a hurry and his glance did not waver. She was stirred by his scrutiny. She had never been looked at in quite this way, slowly assessed and appreciated with such frank interest. It thrilled her, the way she seemed to be holding this man’s attention. She wondered if this was how her mother had felt when she modeled for her husband.

“What do you want for your life, Maureen?”

“Don’t ask me such a big question. I suppose I want a little independence, to start with.”

“And after that?”

“After that I’ll take what comes.”

He nodded and seemed to ponder this, then he looked her in the eye again and said, “May I?”

“May you what?”

And so he finally kissed her. Whatever shyness or delicacy had restrained him from declaring himself before now had finally evaporated, helped along no doubt by liquor and by the stimulative effects of being in proximity to so much Texas history. He held her rather chastely as they kissed, his hands on her shoulders as if they were dancing. Nevertheless she could feel the bulk of his body against her, and take in the smell of his cologne and his pipe tobacco, and the nervous sweat that dampened the underarms of his suit. He recovered himself perhaps a moment or two sooner than she would have preferred and backed away from her, grinning widely, staring at her.

“Well,” he said, “we better get you home before your famous father suspects foul play.”

AS SOON AS
Gil got home that night, he went straight to work. To anyone else’s eye the quarter-scale model would have appeared complete, every detail conscientiously rendered without appearing too precise in a worked-over way. But Gil was unsatisfied with an unspecified something around the boy’s mouth—were the lips too full?—and the attitude of the horse’s left hind leg was subtly wrong. He could correct this latter flaw, he realized, by veering a bit from the imaginary line he had conceived from the rear tendon to the ischium. He had relied too much on textbook proportions there, and as a result the leg looked amateurishly rigid. He worried a bit about the jugular grooves in the horse’s neck as well. They looked too deep all of a sudden, but he deferred a decision about whether that was a problem until he could see the model again in daylight.

He attacked the human figure’s face first, very slightly planing away some of the material from the upper lip and strengthening the tension at the corners of the mouth, pausing now and then to study the imperfect Kodaks of Ben Clayton through a magnifying glass. He used tools he had bought in Rome almost forty years before, their heartwood handles still strong after all the decades of use, and soothingly familiar. But as he gripped them now the pain in his thumbs flared up again, and he had to set the tools down, cursing under his breath. In angry defiance he took them up once more and worked in spite of the pain, shearing away a bit of clay from the hock of one of the horse’s rear legs, building up the thigh to help create a more authentic illusion of muscle flexion. But he could not work for more than a few moments without pausing and cursing. The inflammation in his hands made holding the tools feel like gripping a live electrical wire.

It was after midnight. He walked around the model as the pain ebbed away, studying it from every vantage point. He would not be able to gauge the effect completely until he had natural light in the morning, but he thought he had done his job well. Ben Clayton stood next to his horse, gazing off into what to a viewer would be an imaginary distance, but which to Gil’s mind was almost as real as it had been to Ben, since he had studied the landscape from the heightened vantage point of the statue and ridden a horse—Ben’s horse—across miles of open pasture. The human figure and the horse were thrillingly real to him. He had done as well once or twice before, with the Pawnee Scout perhaps, or the model for the never-cast General Gómez, but he had never done better.