Remember Ben Clayton (33 page)

The machine gun opened up just after the prisoners had been led away, and there was rifle fire from the village as well. The Americans in the cemetery had dived into the trenches and huddled there, the Maxim rounds striking the chalk at the top of the trench wall behind them. A few men from Ben and Arthur’s company were with them by now, but there were no officers close by and nobody seemed to be taking charge. Arthur was thirstier than he’d ever been in his life. Somebody had brought up a crate of canned tomatoes and the men were passing them up and down the line. They punched holes in the cans with their bayonets. Arthur cut his bottom lip on the ragged opening but that didn’t matter to him. He drank till the juice was gone, then gouged the hole wider with the point of his bayonet and dragged out the moist, pulpy tomatoes. All the time they heard the Maxim firing from the top of the steeple and felt it kicking up white dust behind them.

He saw the look in Ben’s eyes and said, “Don’t!” But Ben wouldn’t look at him or even act like he’d heard. He was in the same state of mind he’d been in all along, shutting Arthur out, fighting some kind of war in his head along with the one that was here in front of them. Ben unfastened the bayonet from his rifle, wiped the blood off on his mud-caked pants, then methodically put it back on. He checked his pockets for grenades. He was still wearing the webbing that held the Browning pouches, so he took that off. All the while Arthur kept saying don’t and Ben still wouldn’t look at him. Arthur called him a son-of a bitch and Ben said he didn’t intend to wait around here forever for somebody to do something.

“You need to settle down,” Arthur told him. “You’re all mixed up. You may think this has all got something to do with your dad but it doesn’t.”

But it didn’t do any good to try to talk to him about it. Ben just looked at Arthur like he was an annoyance. They weren’t friends anymore. It was like they’d never trained together at Camp Bowie, or drunk together at Boot’s Place in Fort Worth or had dollar steaks at the Westbrook Hotel. It was like they’d never sat next to each other riding a train all across the country, or stood on the Brooklyn Bridge looking down at the harbor with the wind hitting them in the face, or watched the sun come up from the deck of the troopship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, or kept each other’s spirits up during the march from Nuisement.

“Y’all cover me,” he said to Arthur and the rest of the men nearby. One of the men yelled at Ben that they ought to wait for a 37 mm team to take that gun out, but Ben said he was going to do it himself and he was tired of talking about it. They saw he was serious so they opened fire in the general direction of the steeple and Ben launched himself out of the trench.

When he fell right back in, Arthur thought he had just changed his mind. But if he wasn’t already dead he was close enough where you couldn’t tell the difference. Arthur put his arms around him and tried to pull him up. Half of Ben’s back seemed like it was missing, torn out by the Maxim rounds when they went through his body. Blood poured onto Arthur’s legs and onto the white chalky soil. Ben’s eyes were so fixed and blank it looked like he was willingly dead, like he had decided to shut Arthur out for good and that his death was nobody’s business but his own. Arthur didn’t remember saying anything, or screaming, or cursing. He had just sat there holding his dead friend, and then he started to shiver like a scared and lonesome child.

“YES SIR
, it was over pretty quick.” That was all he had said to Mr. Gilheaney. He didn’t particularly care to say any of the rest of it. Even if he’d wanted to, he didn’t know how. Mr. Gilheaney just nodded and kept looking around at the tombstones. Maureen leaned against the cemetery wall, staring at him. He turned away from her. He didn’t want her looking at his face. When she reached out and touched him he shied away from her, but by then it was too late. He wasn’t crying; it was worse than that. He was on his knees, barking in pain, his chest heaving, the prosthesis shifting around dangerously in his contorted face. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the villagers walking toward them thinking he needed help, but he waved his arm at them to please go away. He tried to say
“C’est rien”
but the words wouldn’t come out and he had to rely on Mr. Gilheaney to go over and tell them he was all right. Maureen sat down next to him and put her arm around him and made shushing sounds like his mother used to, and it didn’t seem to him he had any choice but to let her.

The harder he tried to calm himself down the worse it got, until he was stupidly out of control, crouching tighter and tighter against the cemetery wall while the snot ran out of his nose and sounds he had never made before—like the bellowing of cattle—came out of his mouth. While all this was going on he was aware of Mr. Gilheaney withdrawing tactfully over to the German side of the cemetery and staring at the monument there, with its ugly carving of the squat, naked man with his hands on a sword hilt. He stayed there until Arthur was finally calm again, and then came back and sat down next to Arthur and Maureen against the wall.

“We’ve asked too much of you,” he said.

“No, you didn’t do anything,” Arthur told him. “I guess I just never went over it in my mind that way before.”

When he realized Maureen still had her arm around him like he was a little boy he was even more embarrassed. He shifted a little and she got the idea that he didn’t need to be comforted anymore. She stood and wiped the dry grass from her skirt and none of them said anything for a long time.

Then Maureen asked: “What about you, Arthur? When did you get hurt?”

“I don’t know exactly. It must have been right after Ben got killed. I believe there was a counterattack. We must have fallen back because the French found me out there somewhere, in those fields yonder. But I don’t remember any of it, to tell you the truth.”

“What you went through, it must have been—”

“It was pretty bad, yes ma’am, but I don’t care to talk about it if you don’t mind.”

“Of course.”

“Maybe we should head on back to Somme-Py. You folks are probably hungry for your lunch.”

Half the cemetery wall had been blown up in the fighting and nobody had repaired it yet. Arthur stood there watchfully as Maureen hitched up her skirt and stepped over the rubble and then he followed her. He had gone only a few yards when he realized Mr. Gilheaney didn’t seem all that interested in going anywhere.

“Aren’t you coming, Daddy?” Maureen asked him.

He didn’t say anything right away; he was thinking about something.

“You said he was boiling over,” he said to Arthur after a moment.

“Sir?”

“In your letter to Maureen. You said Ben was boiling over about something he’d found out. What was he so upset about?”

“I believe I said I didn’t want to talk about that.”

“Why not?”

“It seemed like a private matter of Ben’s.”

“Ben’s dead.”

“Yes sir, I know that. But it still seems private. And I don’t expect it would have much to do with making a statue of him.”

Arthur saw that the sculptor thought he had an answer to that, something along the lines of what do you know about making a statue? The man clearly had a high opinion of himself and thought he had the right to whatever information he needed. But when he spoke again his voice was softer than Arthur expected it to be. He stepped through the breach in the cemetery wall and walked over to Arthur and stood there next to him, looking out across the sugar beet fields.

“Something happened to him, you said, something that made him not seem to care whether he lived or died. I want to know what that something was. I need to know that because I want this statue to have the truth in it.”

“I don’t believe you, Mr. Gilheaney, not really. That sounds good what you just said, it sounds like the way an artist ought to talk, but you’d probably be pretty poor at your job if you couldn’t put the truth in that statue yourself without needing me to tell you what it was.”

“All right. Fair enough.”

He moved closer to Arthur and put his hand on his shoulder. He looked him steadily in the eye, something that Arthur wasn’t used to. Most people, even those who knew him well, like L’Huillier or his wife, tended to meet his eyes for only a moment and then look away like there was something off to the side that had just happened to catch their interest.

“I didn’t mean to be condescending. Leave the statue out of it. Leave art out of it. Maybe I just want to know. For myself, for myself and my daughter.”

Arthur glanced over at Maureen. She stood there with her gloved hand at her throat, fingering the top button of her jacket. She didn’t say anything, but the expression on her face said it was up to him whether he wanted to talk about it or not.

“I don’t think Ben’s dad ought to know about it,” he told them.

“You can trust us not to tell him,” Gilheaney said firmly.

“All right,” Arthur told them. “There was this Indian.”

THE INDIAN’S NAME
was Felix Whiteblanket. Arthur and Ben had met him coming over on the
Lenape
, after they’d gotten past the worst of their seasickness and the men in the different companies had started to mix a little bit, playing cards down in the hold and bragging back and forth to each other about where they were from and what sort of work they had done before they ended up in the army.

Company E was made up of men from the Indian Territories up in Oklahoma. Most of them were Choctaws and Cherokees, some of them were rich from oil leases on their allotments and had big cars and big houses back at home. There was an Osage boy on the ship that everybody talked about who had supposedly gotten a check before he left Camp Bowie for sixty-six thousand dollars.

There were only two or three Comanches in Company E and Felix Whiteblanket was one of them. He said nobody had bothered to look for oil on his land and he didn’t care if they ever did. He didn’t care about being rich and he pretended he didn’t care about much of anything else. He was silent and a little disdainful of all the rowdy behavior on the ship, and he acted like there wasn’t anything in the world that could surprise him.

But he had been friendly to Ben and took a liking to him. Maybe it was because Ben was silent in his own way and didn’t make a show of anything. The three of them sat on the deck playing dominoes and talking horses and cattle and watching a group of officers try to shoot flying fish with their Springfields, leading them the way hunters lead ducks. The way the flying fish skimmed above the surface of the ocean, staying aloft far longer than you would have ever thought, reminded Arthur of his own dreams of flying, in which he would suddenly rediscover a magical hovering ability that he had forgotten he possessed.

After Ben had gotten comfortable around Felix Whiteblanket, he told him about how his father had been captured by Comanches when he was a boy. Arthur recalled Felix nodding his head and playing his next domino, like he would lose face somehow if he showed too much interest in anything. He said he was going to write to his own folks to see if they’d ever heard of Lamar Clayton. He asked Ben if his dad had a Comanche name. Ben said he didn’t know because his dad never talked about any of that.

They didn’t see Felix again for months after that, not until that long nighttime march from Somme-Py when they were crossing over Blanc Mont to get into position for the attack on Saint-Étienne. They had been walking for many hours through the mud and even though they only had light combat packs on their backs they still staggered under the load. Arthur felt his oozing blister with every step. His canteen was empty and all he could think about was when the water wagons would be brought up from the wells. When Sergeant Kitchens told them to fall out and take a break, it wasn’t because somebody had taken pity on them, it was because they were lost. They collapsed onto the muddy ground, taking care not to get entangled in barbed wire or to slice open their legs on a shell fragment. They sat there listening to the German long-range guns bombarding Somme-Py and the roads leading out from it. Every time an 88 exploded in the distance the earth shook underneath them, and sometimes they heard the dud shells ploughing into the mud with no explosion but with a terrorizing impact all their own.

Felix had been sent as a runner to tell the captain to have the company stay put and wait until the guides had had a chance to talk and figure out where they were. After he was through making his report he managed to find Ben and Arthur and sat down in the mud with them. Felix had a few sips of water left in his canteen and he drank it down without offering them any. It made Arthur angry but he knew that he wouldn’t have shared any of his water either if that was all he had. The three of them were almost too tired to open their mouths and with all those German 88’s screaming across the sky it felt unlucky to be talking anyway. Nevertheless Felix told Ben he was hoping he’d run into him again because he’d just gotten a letter from his grandfather up on the Kiowa-Comanche reservation. Felix had written him and told him about meeting Ben and how Ben had said his father was with the Quahadas back in the olden days. The grandfather wrote back and said it was a pretty small world, because when he was a young man he’d known Lamar Clayton pretty well.

“Grandfather said you couldn’t hardly tell your dad wasn’t born a Comanche,” Felix said to Ben. They were all shivering now. They’d been sweating under their packs while they were marching but now that they’d stopped they felt the cold again, one more misery piled up on top of all the others.

“Well, he never was the sort to do things halfway,” Ben said. “He never talked about that time of his life to me much.”

“Grandfather said he killed white folks.”

“No, he wouldn’t have done that.”

“He said they was on a raid together and Lamar Clayton did his share of the work. Grandfather watched him shoot a white boy with an arrow.”

“I don’t want to hear that kind of talk about my father.”

“Said it happened over on the Salt Fork.”

When Felix mentioned the Salt Fork there was a shuddering far-off explosion. The distant shell burst lit up Ben’s face for a second like heat lightning, and Arthur could see his friend’s eyes turning cold and his mouth growing tight as he figured out the meaning of what Felix had just told him.