Remember Ben Clayton (35 page)

“I’m sorry,” Maureen said. “I thought if you knew you had a friend in the States, if you had someone to count on, that it might make it easier for you to come home. But it’s a fault of mine—assuming too much.”

“You can sit back down if you want to.”

“Thank you, but it’s better if I go. I’m sure my father and I will have a chance to say good-bye to you in the morning.”

She left and closed the door behind her. But she had gone only a few paces when she heard it open again, and stopped to see him walking toward her, buttoning his coat. The dog that had been barking quieted when Arthur joined her. They walked up the street toward the
mairie
.

Arthur said nothing, and neither did she. With a tilt of her head she indicated her intention to veer away from the
mairie
and to continue walking past the remains of the village church, which stood roofless on a little hill, its doors and stained-glass windows raggedly blown away. In less than five minutes of walking they were at the northern limits of Somme-Py, looking out at the terrain they had covered in their trek to Saint-Étienne.

Maureen took a seat in front of a remnant of wall, all that was left of a house that had once stood here. Beyond a strip of forest that Arthur had told them was called Vipers Wood the open land verged away into the darkness, rising upward to its crest at Blanc Mont, visible tonight only as a suggestion of gathering mass against the stars.

Arthur slouched down against the wall until he was sitting on the ground next to her. They had been committed to their awkward silence for so long now that when he spoke his voice surprised her.

“I wish we hadn’t run into that Indian fella. Maybe if he hadn’t told Ben what his father did, Ben would still be here.”

“He’d be home in Texas,” Maureen said.

“Maybe we all would.”

Arthur picked up a piece of a brick from the pile at the base of the house and chucked it out into the darkness, where it landed softly in a tangle of winter branches in the ravine below them.

“I don’t expect to ever be happy or anything like that,” he said. “But I’m getting along pretty well here and I’m learning a trade of sorts, helping to put this place back together. I know you meant it out of kindness that I ought to come back with you, but I took it wrong.”

She said nothing, but smiled over at him in gratitude. She stood and brushed the masonry dust off her skirt, ready to walk back, when he looked up at her in the darkness.

“Anyway, seems to me you’re the one who’s lonely.”

“That may be,” she said. “Shall we go back now?”

But he didn’t move, just sat there and kept looking at her, his eyes hidden in shadow and his shattered face unreadable.

“I don’t know anything,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I just don’t know how you’re supposed to—”

He shook his head when he couldn’t find words to finish his thought. She crouched down beside him, saw the confusion and frustration in his eyes.

“I’m going to guess what you mean,” she whispered. “Is that all right?”

He nodded. It did not seem, in the moment, such a daring thing, touching her hand to his face, kissing him, though she would look back on this action throughout all the rest of her life with a sense of amazement. His urgent response saved her from humiliation. He did not have much of a mouth left and so the kissing itself was rather tentative, neither of them knowing exactly how to manage it. But Maureen felt on sure ground anyway, confident of his desire, grateful for the conviction that lay behind his shyness.

After a few minutes he pulled her to her feet and walked with her back past the dark church and to the center of the village. They did not speak out loud or even whisper, and when they passed the
mairie provisionaire
where her father was sleeping she did not pause, but stayed by his side and walked with him to his hut.

She knew very little about lovemaking and suspected the same was probably true of Arthur. Perhaps he had been with women while he was in the army. Her own experience had never taken her further than that dreadful evening in Austin, when she had almost given herself up to Vance beneath the empty eye sockets of his longhorn skull. Arthur bent down and built up the fire in his little stove. He turned down the blankets on his cot, each action confirming that something further would happen, that she wasn’t misreading what they meant to do. They both stalled for a moment at the staggering impropriety of taking off their clothes, until Arthur rather boldly took things in hand and began to unfasten the buttons at her throat. When they were undressed she wanted to stand there for a moment, even though they were shivering, because feeling exposed like this, revealed inside and out, was the most startling sensation she had ever known.

The cot was impossibly narrow, the coarse wool blankets intolerable against their bare skin. But the discomfort she felt, and the pleasure she felt, were fused together somehow. Shaking from cold, itching from wool, quivering from astonishment.

“You don’t have to look at me,” he told her.

“I want to.”

She touched his face, the wrong side, feeling the hard surfaces of the prosthesis where there should have been muscle and bone. He flinched a little in embarrassment, but by degrees relaxed and let her look at him and touch him. Then he shifted carefully and she shifted in response until she was settled beneath him. She made a point to keep looking at him during the most urgent pitch of lovemaking and in the languorous silence afterward. She did not want him to ever see her looking away. But when he closed his eyes and began to doze she allowed herself to do the same. She skimmed along the surface of sleep, her mind taking her back over the battlefield of Saint-Étienne, over that field of white crosses in the cemetery in Romagne, where she stared at her father’s face as he stared down in turn at Ben Clayton’s grave. He seemed to be trying to summon the dead boy from the ground, trying to see Ben’s face and form and spirit as they had been in life, so that he could use his genius to render them in bronze. Tight in Arthur’s arms, verging deeper into sleep, she had the sensation of lying beneath that white cross herself, keeping company with all those terrified and bewildered and homesick boys. It would have been a peaceful feeling without the thought of her father still staring down, calling out her name, unable to understand where she had gone and why she was hiding.

The dream was vivid enough to jerk her awake. It had only been fifteen minutes or so. She felt Arthur’s fingers lazily circling her forehead. He was awake as well. She told him she had better go back, and so they dressed and stood there in the
abris
holding each other, knowing that except for the formal good-bye they would have in the morning this was almost certainly the last time they would ever see each other. But she was content for this moment to stand alone. She felt it ought to be that way, like a great rock rising from the static lake of her life, visible from every direction.

She walked back by herself to the
mairie
. She could feel her father’s wakefulness as she crossed through the dark hall where he slept to her own alcove. He was awake but said nothing. If he had asked she would have told him the truth. There was nothing she cared to reveal and nothing she cared to hide. The neutral comportment she felt, the sense that her secrets were not gravely held but were simply her own business, was satisfyingly new to her.

Stuart was there in the morning with the car. They thanked the L’Huilliers. They thanked Arthur. He stepped forward and kissed her on both cheeks in the French manner. They promised they would continue to write each other but any other promise would have been false and cruel. Arthur waved briefly as they drove away and then, as she watched, L’Huillier gently touched his shoulder and directed his gaze to something on the wooden steeple of the temporary church that needed his attention.

Meanwhile Gil Gilheaney was staring straight ahead, silently fixed in his own thoughts as Stuart continued his historical narration of the events of the war.

THIRTY-TWO

T
he cattle had wintered well enough, but a late norther had kept the grass down and so there was a fair amount of weak stock that needed to be gathered and fed. After that there was the spring roundup to organize and get ready for. The thought of all that work made Lamar feel even older than he was. Or maybe not the work itself, but the way it came around with the seasons every year, a relentless cycle that seemed to grab his life before it could move forward and haul it back to where it had been the year before. Of course he didn’t have any notion about his life moving forward in the first place. You stayed in place and then you died, and that was about it.

He could remember times, though, when it felt like he was headed someplace. When he met Sarey; when Ben was born. And for a while there when he was with the Comanches. Life with them had been just as cyclical and pointless in its own way. The hunts and raids he had been on, the long stretches of idleness when it seemed like the world had stopped—all of that had followed the calendar just like the spring and fall roundups and worming and branding and putting out salt. But when he had been on the move with the Quahada—riding west into the mountains, or down into Mexico—it felt like you weren’t trapped in the world and its rules after all, like you were escaping time itself.

Today he was looking for a couple of cows that were heavy with calf and needed to be moved to better pasture. He was alone and happy to be that way. It had long ago gotten to the point where he knew what Ernest or Nax or George’s Mary was going to say before they said it, and that added to the sense he had that life just repeated itself over and over again until it finally wore you out and you could go on ahead and die. His own thoughts were tiresomely familiar too, but sometimes when you were alone with yourself you were just better company.

There was a cramp working in his thigh and he dismounted to stretch it out. That never used to happen, but neither did hemorrhoids or not being able to pass water or a hell’s dozen other nuisances of the sort. He took a thermos of coffee from a saddlebag and drank it down. It was midmorning and the coffee was cold. He put the thermos back and set his foot in the stirrup and damned if he could pull himself up into the saddle. It wasn’t his crampy leg, it was more like he’d just taken the muscles in his shoulders and arms by surprise. He knew it would pass and that in another minute or two he’d be able to mount his horse like nothing had ever happened, but in the meantime it made him angry and it made him scared too. One of these days he wouldn’t be able to get out of his bed or out of his chair. If he wasn’t lucky enough to have a heart attack or crack his head open getting thrown from his horse, there was no telling where he’d end up. Maybe in the Abilene hospital, eating jello and staring out the window.

He saw a buzzard sail down out of the sky to the top of a craggy hill and disappear into what looked like a little cave. That interested him for some reason. He figured that climbing up to the top of the hill to see a buzzard’s nest would be good for his leg cramp and give his body some time to think about getting back to business and lifting him into the saddle like it was supposed to. He tied his horse to a hackberry trunk and climbed the hill. There was no clear way up and it was steeper than it looked from the pasture, with lots of shady little crevices where it would be easy to surprise a rattler or a vinegaroon.

He was out of breath when he made it to the top. The little hill wasn’t nearly as prominent as the one that meant so much to Ben, and he’d never had enough cause or curiosity to climb up on it before. The cave he had seen from the bottom was really only a shadowy seam in the rock, part of a craggy crest guarded by prickly pear. The slope leading up to it was sharp enough that he needed to use his hands as well as his feet, and he didn’t like the sensation of all that loose rock under his boots. But he kept climbing anyway, and when he was almost to the opening the mother buzzard burst out of the nest and puffed up her feathers and threw up on the ground in front of him, the way buzzards do when they’re trying to defend themselves or make a point. The buzzard vomit was almost as foul-smelling as the spray from a skunk, and Lamar carefully backed away a few paces to keep the mother from getting any more agitated than she already was. Behind her, in the shadowy nest, the two chicks were spreading their wings just like their mother and stamping their feet and hissing at him.

The chicks already had the sharp heads and beaks of adult birds but their feathers were still mostly white. They hissed at him without any variation in pitch or any stopping for breath. It was like the noise that came from a hole in a steam pipe. They didn’t seem to know why they were mad or afraid, just that they ought to be.

“All right, calm down now,” he told the mother buzzard when she hopped toward him again. “I’m leaving.” At another point in his life he might have shot her, and her chicks too, just out of a general feeling that varmints were some kind of mistake that nature had made and that they deserved to be dead. But he didn’t have that feeling so much anymore. He had climbed all the way up here just because he had never seen a buzzard nest and at his age there probably wouldn’t be another opportunity to satisfy himself about what one looked like. And he wouldn’t like to shoot those chicks now, even though they were ugly and evil-looking and hissed at him like snakes. They were helpless creatures, and he thought maybe their disagreeable appearance had something to do with that helplessness. In any case, they pulled at him for some reason, and left him unsettled in a way he didn’t care for. The tenderness he felt for those birds was like an accusation. How come you couldn’t feel that for your own damn son? How come you let things get to the point where he could go off and leave without even saying good-bye?

He started to make his way down, carefully watching his step on the loose rock, feeling it trickle under the soles of his boots. Sure enough, he fell; not as hard as he could have, but his feet skidded out from under him and he landed on his backside and hit his funny bone on a rock. He sat there for a minute cursing his foolishness and hoping his elbow wasn’t broken. He could move it all right, so he guessed it wasn’t. That would be a hell of a note, he thought, to fall down up here and not be able to get back down, to have to wait for Ernest or Nax to find him. What if he’d passed out? Maybe they wouldn’t find him till the next morning. All because he wanted to see a damn buzzard’s nest.

He stood up, his funny bone still humming with pain like a tuning fork. It didn’t stop hurting until he was all the way back to the bottom again, and all the good that did was shift his attention to the sore spot on his upper thigh where he had fallen and to his worn-out knees, which hadn’t needed a steep uphill climb in the first place. But he’d been right in thinking he just needed a little time to get back onto his horse. His elbow hurt and his knee hurt and his leg hurt but he got himself into the saddle with no trouble this time, and he went on and found the two cows where they were shaded up under some trees and spent the rest of the day moving them along to decent grass, wishing they had the sense to be grateful to him for his trouble.

IT WAS FIVE O’CLOCK
by the time he was home and when he rode up from the creek bottom he saw that Ernest and Nax were both on horseback and they were dragging a horse carcass out of the pen by its hind legs.

“We’re surely sorry,” Ernest said. “It just happened about a half hour ago.”

Lamar walked along beside the hands as they dragged Poco to a clearing about fifty yards beyond the house. The horse’s tongue was hanging out past its mouth, and as it dragged along it made its own separate trail in the dirt.

“I think it was the sleeping sickness,” Nax said. “He was looking a little confused this morning.”

“No,” Lamar told him, “it ain’t likely to be sleeping sickness with no mosquitoes around yet to speak of. Maybe some damn beetle or other got baled up in his hay.”

“Or locoweed,” Ernest guessed.

“Don’t matter now,” Lamar said.

Without speaking about it anymore, the three of them began collecting tree limbs and dry brush to cover the horse carcass where it lay in the clearing. Peggy joined them but didn’t nose around in the piles of brush like she would have before—that snakebite had taught her her lesson. Lamar kept piling up the fuel past the point where it was necessary. He didn’t really want to see Poco when they lit the fire. It was nearly dark when they finished. Ernest left and came back with a can of kerosene and sprinkled it over the brush and tossed a match onto it, and the fire erupted into the sky and then began to settle and crackle as it took hold. Ernest and Nax went back into the house for their supper but Lamar said to go ahead without him and he’d be there after a while.

He hadn’t planned to watch his son’s horse while it burned but he found he was drawn to the sight for some reason. There was the smell of roasting meat and burning hair. As the night around him deepened, the heat from the fire grew stronger, almost singeing his eyebrows. As it cooked out, the fat from the horse made a puddle in the dirt.

Poco hadn’t been Ben’s first horse but he was the one that had mattered. Ben had been fourteen that Christmas, Lamar recollected. It was the year after Sarey died and he thought buying Ben a horse would distract him and keep him from being listless about losing his mother. It worked about as well as anything could. Ben broke Poco himself. He was a gentle horse to begin with and didn’t need much work before he could be ridden, but the fact that Ben had been the one to do it had gotten the animal’s attention. Lamar knew he probably didn’t have any business speculating about the things a horse might or might not feel about people, but there was some kind of closeness the horse had with Ben that he never had with Lamar or any of the hands after Ben was no longer around.

He sat there for nearly an hour and then he left the fire to smolder and walked stiffly back to the house, feeling his sore thigh and knee with every step. As she walked along beside him, Peggy still favored her snakebit leg. Like him, she had to probe a bit before she committed to setting it down.

When he got back inside, George’s Mary set his supper down on the table without a word, chili and warmed-over corn bread and pinto beans.

“You get thrown off your horse?” she asked.

“I don’t usually and I didn’t today,” he said.

“You’re walking like you did.”

“I slipped on some rocks.”

“What do you mean, slipped on some rocks?”

“That’s what I mean.”

He didn’t tell her about walking up to the top of the hill to see the buzzard’s nest. She would have found some reason to disapprove of it. While he ate, she sat in a chair in the parlor and didn’t even pretend to occupy herself with anything other than being upset about Poco. When he was through eating she picked up his dishes and gestured to a big parcel sitting on the divan with the rest of the mail.

“It’s from that Mr. Gilheaney,” she said. “A letter too.”

She stood over him, waiting to see what was in the letter, but he wouldn’t open it till she went back into the kitchen.

Dear Mr. Clayton,

I should like you to know that I have been to France and seen your son’s grave, as well as the battlefield on which he fell. Maureen was with me and took the photographs that I enclose with this letter. As you can see he rests in the company of many thousands of other American soldiers, in the great cemetery in Romagne. It is my hope that these Kodaks will bring you more comfort than pain, but if I’m wrong please forgive my presumption in sending them.

Maureen and I were in France on other matters when I decided to search out Arthur Fry, the young man who wrote you some months ago and who, as you know, was with Ben when he died. I suppose what motivated me was a feeling of unfinished business. The despair I felt over the destruction of the statue—a despair that you yourself of course witnessed—rendered my interest in the project dormant for a time but did not kill it. In fact, “interest” is far too weak a word for the passionate sense of direction that seemed to animate me while I conceived and modeled the sculpture. I told you, while we were riding across your ranch, that this statue would be my masterpiece. I was a little embarrassed at the time by that outburst, particularly since I know perfectly well that an artist’s reputation is the result of opinions not his own. But I sensed a defining purpose for me in this work, and though I lost the statue itself in a studio accident I did not want to lose that purpose.

Therefore I decided to take the work up again. Whether I take up the commission again is another matter, one entirely for you to decide. Upon my return from France I barricaded myself for six weeks in the studio, working at a pace and with an intensity I had not known for many years. Another full-size clay version of the statue is, as you can see, now completed. Next week the plasterers will come to take a mold, which will be shipped off to the foundry in New York for casting in bronze. I will be nervous as a cat while the plasterers do their work, hovering over them to make sure no harm comes to the clay. When the mold is taken Maureen and I will follow it to New York, where I will haunt the foundry to make sure everything is completed to my satisfaction.

You may make your own judgment about the success of my work from the photographs. I am satisfied. I have done my best and believe I have succeeded. If you do not recognize your son in the clay, then I have of course failed to satisfy you and in a more technical sense I suppose I have not met the basic requirements of my profession. But I believe this is Ben. I believe this is Ben as you described him to me, and as I encountered and understood him on my own.

If you want the statue you may rewrite the contract and amend the original terms as you desire. I do not care. I will sign what you send me. For reasons of my own I had to finish this piece and I have. Let me know what you want to do.