Remember Ben Clayton (34 page)

“You don’t know anything about it,” he said to the Indian.

“I just told you I did.”

“Shut up about it.”

“Your old man was a wild sonofabitch is all. He was a goddam wild Indian, just like my grandfather. It didn’t bother either of them none to kill white people. That was just the way things were in those days.”

“I told you I didn’t want you talking about this.”

But Felix was grinning now. They hadn’t seen him like this before. He had a cruel, needling side that all the exhaustion and fear was bringing out.

“Don’t know why you’re upset,” he said. “You ought to be proud your old man took a scalp or two. You ought to be—”

By that time Ben was on him and they were rolling around in the mud, but they were both too tired and overloaded with equipment to make much of a fight of it. Neither of them had a chance to even land a punch before Kitchens broke it up and sent Felix back to Company E and told Ben he’d better shut his fucking mouth and behave himself or he’d personally kick out his teeth for him.

Ben didn’t say anything. Kitchens left, shaking his head in disgust, and Ben just kept sitting there and wouldn’t talk to Arthur anymore or even look at him.

“HE WAS
just locked inside his head,” Arthur told the Gilheaneys. “He was like that all through the night and during the attack the next day and up until he got killed.”

They had been walking for twenty minutes and now they were halfway up the northern slope of Blanc Mont on their way back home to Somme-Py.

“I reckon we can eat our lunch up at the top,” Arthur said. But Gilheaney had stopped walking. He just stood there thinking, taking in what Arthur had told him.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Ben had always known his father was with the Indians. He must have guessed he might have been involved in a raid or two. Why did it come as such a shock that he’d throw his life away?”

“Well, I believe he was still pretty mad at the old man, on account of the way he’d been treated by him. And the raid Felix told him about, there was something personal about it.”

“Something personal?”

But Maureen had already guessed what he was talking about.

“George’s Mary,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am, the housekeeper. That was her family that Mr. Clayton and those Indians killed.”

THIRTY-ONE

T
hey had come to the American cemetery in Romagne early in the day. The weather was still raw and the grounds unfinished, just a flagpole and a paved road and temporary wooden buildings where the staff and groundskeepers huddled around their stoves. And fourteen thousand white crosses massed on the hillside.

The rows of crosses were laid out with such bewitching military precision that Gil had the sensation, walking through them, of being in a trompe l’oeil painting, a landscape ruled by a trickster’s perspective. As they made their way up the slope, along the grassy aisles sectioning the burial zones, more white crosses seemed to spring up at the crest of the hill, rank after endless rank of them.

Gil checked the map the American caretaker had given him and led Maureen and Arthur to a row of graves halfway up the hill. They found the cross with Ben’s name on it and Gil and Arthur took off their hats. The three of them stared down at the marker in silence for a moment, then Maureen set down a spray of winter flowers on the grave.

“I think we should take a snapshot for Mr. Clayton,” she told Gil.

“Of course.”

While she took the photo he glanced down at the big elliptical driveway at the base of the hill, where their driver, Stuart, and the caretaker stood smoking and talking as they leaned against the front fender of the Thomas Cook touring car. Then he looked over at Arthur, who had backed away from Ben’s grave as soon as Maureen got out her Brownie, alarmed at the idea of his picture accidentally being taken. The young man stood there with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, staring down at the tombstone of his friend with no apparent emotion on his face. Of course it would have been difficult to detect emotion there in the first place, since his shattering wound had left his face as blank and inexpressive as that of the man in the moon.

Maureen walked this way and that in front of the grave, looking for the best angle for her camera. It was the right thing to do to take a picture for Lamar Clayton, though Gil could not imagine the rancher taking any comfort in receiving it. The old bastard was probably beyond comfort anyway, and that was as it should be. Clayton had not just fought with his son and turned his back on him. It was worse than that. He had killed Ben with the secret of his own long-ago crimes; he had shut the door of understanding in his boy’s face and the boy had died because of it.

After Maureen finished taking her photos, Gil got down on one knee in front of the cross and studied the words incised in the marble:
BENJAMIN CLAYTON PRVT 1 CL 142 INF. 36 DIV. TEXAS OCT. 8, 1918.

“Do you want to say something, Daddy?”

“What?”

Maureen’s voice had surprised him. He had apparently been kneeling there for some minutes.

“You looked like you meant to say something.”

He shook his head and stood up. His daughter was weeping. She was standing close to Arthur now. She reached down and touched the stone.

“Well,” she said, “maybe we understand him a little better now.”

THEY HAD
a late
petit déjeuner
at a café in Romagne and drove back to Somme-Py. Stuart narrated the events of the last year of the war as they passed through the Argonne Forest and out again into the open Champagne countryside, through a succession of bombed-out villages.

“This is the old Roman road we’re on now,” Stuart told them. “Julius Caesar himself came this way, if I don’t miss my guess. You’ll find no shortage of history in this part of the country. History upon history, you might say, Mr. Gilheaney.”

Gil sat in the front seat with Stuart, distractedly nodding his head. To Maureen, in back with Arthur, the driver’s history lectures were an annoyance. She didn’t feel like listening to anyone prattle on about anything.

She watched Arthur as he stared out the window at the ruined villages and houses. Somme-Py was not unique. There must have been hundreds of villages just like it throughout this part of France, villages all but erased from the earth by years of bombardment. And then there were the dead, none of them unique either, lying beneath the earth in their uncountable multitudes. There were graveyards everywhere, their crosses spreading across the landscape in crop-like rows, monuments going up at every village crossroads. She had the feeling that there was something futile, maybe selfish, in their attempts to conjure up the last days of a single soldier, in investing so much in the creation of one more statue—a statue that would serve as a monument to her father’s art as much as to its subject’s life.

She had taken it as a matter of course throughout her life that art was an essentially noble thing, that individual practitioners might be scoundrels but that art itself was exempt from charges of exploitation. But she felt like a predator today. She and her father had come here against Arthur’s wishes. He had compliantly allowed them to drag him through memories he might have preferred to forget. It was Maureen who had suggested they should visit Ben’s grave, and she could tell Arthur had not really wanted to come along. He only wanted to be left alone to do his work in Somme-Py, among familiar people, like the L’Huilliers, who asked nothing of him. But out of politeness he had joined them on the drive to Romagne and stood there uncertainly at the grave of his friend.

They would go on to Reims tomorrow and take the train for Paris. Tonight they would stay once more in Somme-Py, releasing Stuart again to find more comfortable accommodations. As soon as they arrived in town L’Huillier insisted they dine again with him and his wife, and though Maureen would have preferred to escape his hospitality there was no particular way to refuse. During the dinner Gil signed over a traveler’s check and pressed it into L’Huillier’s hands for the Somme-Py fund. It was a sizable amount, the cost of their combined Atlantic passages, and L’Huillier beamed with gratitude and promised he would have their names written on the wall of the Salle Mémoriale Franco-Américaine, which would be the great room where the citizens of Somme-Py would congregate when the permanent
mairie
was built.

“Do you suppose Mr. Clayton ever told his wife?” Maureen asked her father after they had said good night to the L’Huilliers and to Arthur and walked back to their rough quarters in the provisional
mairie
.

“Told her what?”

“About what he had done to George’s Mary’s family. About all of it.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” he said, as he distractedly arranged his blankets on the narrow cot in the big open room of the building. Maureen’s own cot was on the other side of the partition, in the small office where they had first encountered Arthur. “We know that much about him. He doesn’t share his secrets easily.”

“Let me do that, Daddy. You’re hopeless.”

She stripped off the sheets and blankets and tucked them in properly as best she could.

“It would have made a difference if she had known,” Maureen said as she set a rough pillow at the head of the cot. “She would have found a way to tell him.”

“You think so?”

“Of course I do. Women don’t like secrets.”

“Yes, you’ve made that clear enough.”

“Maybe she would have kept him from hating his father. Maybe she would have kept him from dying because of it.”

She watched him as he took off his coat and draped it over a wooden chair. He slipped his watch out of his pocket and wound it and set it on the seat. The weather had taken a mild turn and the cold wind had ceased roaring outside. For just a moment there was no sound but the ticking of his pocket watch.

“What about the commission?” she asked him.

“There’s no commission. As you recall, I gave Clayton his money back. I doubt whether he’d want to renew a deal I’ve already walked away from.”

“But you’re going to do the statue?”

“I owe it to the boy now. Or at least that’s how it feels. It was one thing to sleep in his room at Clayton’s ranch. It was another to visit that battlefield, to stand at his grave. I thought I had some understanding of this war until I came here, saw that poor fellow’s face, saw all those white crosses. I don’t care if Clayton wants his statue or not. I’ll put it up in our front yard if I have to.”

He sat down on the cot and began to untie his muddy boots, but Maureen lingered in the room, staring at the fire in the portable stove.

“You’re not going to bed?” Gil asked.

“I want to talk about Arthur.”

“Yes, we should do something for him. I could try to give him some money. I doubt he’d take it.”

“I think he should come home with us.”

Her father stared wearily down at the laces of his boots. She hated the way he seemed to be silently dismissing her opinion, as if it was something a thoughtless child had presented to him.

“And you think he would want to?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he would.”

“He’s a grown man. He’s made up his mind to stay here, as far as I can see. At some point he might make up his mind to go back to the States, but I don’t see how it’s any of our business either way.”

“He hasn’t gone home because he doesn’t have anyone there. He’d have us.”

“You want him to
live
with us?”

“You’ll need a studio assistant.”

“I will? I was under the impression I had one.”

“Not forever.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Only that I believe I’m well past the point where I should be entitled to my own life.”

“And I’m the one who’s kept you from having your own life? Is that what you think? Is that what you truly think?”

She whispered no and shook her head—she knew it couldn’t all be his fault—but he wasn’t looking at her anymore. He was staring at the bare plank wall, quietly furious, fitting something together in his mind.

“By God,” he said, “you and that Vance Martindale aren’t planning something, are you?”

“No, Daddy,” she said, though not immediately, since his accusation almost took her breath away. “I’m not quite so desperate to get away from you that I would run off with a married man.”

She bid him good night with far more civility than she felt and retired to her own makeshift bedroom in the office next door. But she was in too much of a stir to think about sleeping. She sat on the edge of her cot for ten minutes, staring at the piles of file cards at the desk where Arthur worked, breathing in the smell of new lumber and feeling the depth of the night outside, a night as lonely and boundless as those she had experienced on Lamar Clayton’s ranch. She had come all the way to France in an effort to jar herself loose from her own confining existence, but nothing had changed. She was still as much her father’s hostage as his daughter, her life ruled by his ambition, diminished rather than enlarged by his creative power.

Before her mind could quite catch up to her actions, she had pulled on her coat and walked out of the office and then out the front door of the
mairie
. She heard her father, unable to sleep himself, rise up from his cot and ask her where she was going, but he had no right to ask her and she had no intention of answering.

IT WAS ELEVEN THIRTY
, the sky mostly clear overhead, just a few torn tufts of cloud against the stars. The temperature was only in the mid-thirties but she had the sense, here in this lifeless land, of an interstellar cold bearing down upon the earth. One of the village dogs who had not yet accepted her presence trotted along behind her, calling down judgment upon this trespasser with a howl that rebounded across the landscape like the voices of the coyotes she had heard in West Texas.

She saw pale lantern light leaking through the wooden shutters of Arthur’s
abris
. She walked up to the door and knocked swiftly, before she could talk herself out of it. She was used to the way he looked by now but she was still startled a little to see him so suddenly appear at the opened door, his expressive eyes hidden in shadow so that the distorted remainder of his face seemed to confront her with its hostile blankness.

He swung the door wide to let her in. She noticed an open book lying on the single chair.

“Were you reading?”

“Yes ma’am.”

She picked the book up and glanced at the title:
Kindred of the Dust
.

“There were some books in one of those aid packages that came from the States,” he explained.

“Is it any good?”

“I guess so. I’m not that far into it yet.”

Maureen sat in the chair and held the book in her lap, saving Arthur’s place with her finger. He took a seat opposite her on his cot with its neatly tucked-in blankets. He looked away from her as he waited for her to speak.

“Thank you,” she said. “For everything that you’ve told us, and shown us. You’ve been very patient, letting us intrude on your life like this.”

“That’s all right.”

“We’re leaving here tomorrow. Our ship sails in five days. I know it would be very presumptuous of me to imagine that you might want to come home with us. But I have imagined it.”

He said nothing. She couldn’t tell if his silence was meant to shut her out or to hear her out.

“I’m not trying to make a case that you should come back,” she said. “I just want you to know that if you did, you would have friends. We could find you work.”

“I’ve got work here.”

“I know that, but you seem lonely. You seem—”

“I don’t even know you,” he said.

His tone was not just sharp, it was almost violent.

“You keep talking like it’s your business to save me from something. But it’s not.”

“I’ll go,” she said after an unnerving silence. She stood up and replaced the book on the chair, open to the page he’d been reading.

“I didn’t say you had to go.”

“Don’t worry, the initiative is mine.”

He stood up and walked across the room in two strides and put his hand over hers before she could pull the rope latch of the door.

“I didn’t mean to sound that way,” he said. “It was nice of you to think you could take me back to the States with you but I’m fine where I am. I don’t want to go home. I don’t need anybody to take me there. If I wanted to go I could get there by myself. I could find work by myself. I could get used to people looking at me.”