Remember Ben Clayton (5 page)

“Mostly,” Clayton said. “He pretty much stuck to that one hat after his head stopped growing. I remember he picked it out when we were at the dry goods store in Abilene.”

Gil lifted up the hat. It was high-crowned, the sweatband half-unstitched, the brim rolled up just a bit on the sides where the boy had absently shaped it through years of use. The underside of the hat brim presented another sculptural issue, since to a viewer looking up from below it ran the risk of being a boring flat surface.

“Mr. Clayton,” Gil asked, “may I borrow this?”

“The hat?”

“The hat, shirt, trousers, boots … everything. Unless you object.”

“We’ll take excellent care of them,” Maureen said. “And return them, of course.”

“All right,” the old man said after a moment or two. “Hell, pack them up and take them along with you.”

THE EVENING MEAL
turned out to be a livelier proposition than their solemn luncheon. Lamar Clayton still presided mostly in silence, but this time they were joined by Ernest and another hand, a cheerful, always smoking man who seemed to have survived thirty or so years with the daunting name of Anaxagorus Jackson. “Don’t worry,” Ernest said, as he made the introductions, “we can’t pronounce it neither, so we just call him Nax.”

Nax smiled and buttered his baked potato with a cigarette still dangling from his mouth. He sat next to Ernest, and the longitudinal axis of his head—enhanced by a steeply receding hairline—made a somehow harmonious contrast to the foreman’s squashed-together features. Gil guessed that this was the way it usually was, Clayton and the hands eating together and talking about screwworm treatments and fence repairs and the working agenda for the next day. The private lunch with him and Maureen had been an exception.

After George’s Mary served coffee, the hands sat around chewing on their toothpicks for another twenty minutes or so and then retired to the bunkhouse. It was barely dark. Gil was restless, as he always was at the end of the day when he was away from his studio. At home, it was his habit to work until eleven or so at night, when he could at last exhaust his churning physical and mental energy and go to bed.

“So why do you need his clothes?” Clayton suddenly asked, just when Gil thought the old man was about to fall asleep in his chair.

“For my model. I’ll have to find a young man of your son’s general size.”

“Somebody else is going to wear Ben’s clothes?”

“It would make the piece that much more authentic.”

Clayton took another sip of coffee, mutely agreeing, though clearly still troubled by the idea of another boy in his son’s clothes.

“I’ll have a sketch for you in the morning,” Gil said. “Then, if you approve the initial concept, I’ll make a maquette.”

“A maquette. That like a model of it or something?”

“Exactly. A three-dimensional clay miniature. Assuming you approve that, I would then go to work on a scale model and then on the final sculpture itself.”

“What’s your best price for all of this?” Clayton said. He glanced at Maureen as he asked the question, giving her a faint smile, as if in apology that they had embarked upon some tedious manly subject in which she would have to indulge them.

Gil shot a look at Maureen as well, allied with her in a wordless deliberation about the old man’s ability to finance such a project. The twenty-thousand-dollar figure he had roughly calculated on top of the mesa would have been more than a fair price for the client he had imagined when he first received Lamar Clayton’s letter—a remote, lordly cattle baron who simply sought out the best of everything without regard to cost. But the evidence of this gloomy ranch house, and the gloomy mood in it, threw him into a hurried revision.

“The cost will be sixteen thousand dollars,” he said. “That is a complete price that includes the statue, pedestal, any necessary engraving, and the erection of the work under my supervision.”

Clayton looked away for a moment at the blank wall—thinking it over, or pretending to.

“All right,” he finally said, without much joy but without any apparent resentment. “It’s a deal. You make me up an invoice and tell me how much money you want up front. The sooner you get started on this thing the better I’d like it.”

“Good,” Gil said. “From my end, the timing is excellent.”

“You want to know the truth, I thought it’d cost me double that.”

HE SPENT THAT NIGHT
in the boy’s room, one of the two rooms that formed the original stone core of the house. There was a single small window through which he could see a hazy full moon that looked like a giant dissolving aspirin tablet high in the West Texas sky. On either side of the window, at shoulder height, were two indentations that passed all the way through the thick wall, funneling down to small circles that were open to the night air. It took Gil a minute or two to puzzle out what they were: shooting holes, to fight off Comanches during the not-so-distant days of the Indian wars.

Ben Clayton’s saddle sat on a sawhorse on one end of the room. It seemed a bit old-fashioned in a way Gil did not have the expertise to judge, something to do with the straight, high-backed cantle. There was no ornamentation, no silver inlays or intricate tooling, just solid leather. The working saddle of an earnest, unaffected young man, a plainspoken American martyr. Or perhaps that was the way Gil was already seeing his subject because he preferred to think of his own style, and hence his own substance, as unadorned as well. No simpering cherubs commenting from the ether, no bombast or symbolic blather, a minimum of the decorative vines and garlands that were known in the trade as “spinach.” He would use this saddle in the statue, of course, not merely for its authenticity but for the pleasure it would give him to sculpt something so austere and worn.

When Lamar Clayton had shown him to his room after dinner, he had pointed out the saddle and the other vestiges of his son’s life that he had been too paralyzed with sadness to do anything with but leave in place. A picture of Ben’s mother and father’s wedding day rested in a silver frame on an empty spool that had served as the dead boy’s end table. In the photograph, Lamar was twenty years younger and a few pounds heavier, his hair streaked with gray but not yet white. But there was no more buoyancy in his expression than there had been at the dinner table tonight. He must have been fifty in this photograph, Gil supposed. Why had he taken so long to marry?

His new wife, dressed in a traveling suit, her hand gripping the crook of his arm, was slender and winning, beaming at the camera as if she were in possession of a wonderful secret about her dour husband. It was a better-quality likeness of Ben’s mother than the one Clayton had shown them earlier, and it made Gil rueful to think about how the only people in this little family with a glint of vivacity were now dead.

By the light of the kerosene lamp he sorted through the young man’s war memorabilia, scant enough to fit into a shirt box. Most of it seemed to be from his training at Camp Bowie: a pamphlet called “Songs for the Hike,” a blank postcard from the Westbrook Hotel in Fort Worth, displaying a photograph of a not-very-good statue called the Golden Goddess; a “Souvenir Folder of Camp Life,” whose cover depicted a group of doughboys engaged in bayonet drill and whose pages were mostly blank. Under “My Division,” Ben (Gil assumed it was Ben) had written “36th,” and under “My Regiment” he had penciled in “142nd,” but after that he must have lost interest or become annoyed at being prompted about what to enter, because the spaces for “My Company” and “My Training Log” were left blank, as were all the rest of the pages.

There were three postcards, all from Camp Bowie. “Dear all,” one read, “Well I escaped getting my wisdom teeth pulled by one of the dental students they got here. They said there’s no reason to worry about mine. Ortho Cotton got his pulled and now his jaw is swelled up pretty bad. If somebody has the time could you send me that extra quilt after all? These blankets are thin and it would save me having to go buy another one in Fort Worth. How’s Poco? Ben.”

The other postcards were equally brief and chatty. He enjoyed working in the pit on the rifle range, he was getting pretty tired of hearing the Top’s whistle all day long, he finally could manage “right shoulder arms” without knocking his hat off, everybody in his squad had gotten tested for hookworm and passed with flying colors.

And that was all, except for a telegram at the bottom of the box from the Adjutant General’s Office deeply regretting to inform Mr. Lamar Clayton that his son Private Benjamin Clayton of the 36th Division, 142nd Infantry Regiment, had been officially reported killed in action near the village of Saint-Étienne-à-Arnes. The telegram was followed by an apologetic letter from the chief of the Graves Registration Service, pledging to inform families as soon as possible “as to the present resting places of their noble dead who glorify the nation’s roll of honor.”

Lamar Clayton had directed Gil to the shirt box, saying that’s where his son’s letters were stored. But was this all? Surely the boy had written home from France. Perhaps he had even kept a diary. But Gil could find nothing else. The traces of Ben Clayton’s life in this room were sorrowfully palpable, but as a sculptor Gil needed more. He needed to know who this young man had been, and that key knowledge did not seem to be on offer, either in the artifacts surrounding him in this room or in the terse testimony of his father.

Gil wanted his subject to be visible, and it troubled him in an obscure way that an emotional portrait of Ben Clayton had not yet begun to present itself to him. Except, of course, for the profound emotion of loss, the death of promise, which would be the unstated theme of his statue.

From the moment he first stood on top of that mesa he knew that this piece was what he had been searching for. It had the potential to turn his life in Texas from one of artistic exile to one of liberation. Sixteen thousand or twenty thousand dollars didn’t matter. This was a theme that had the power to bring forth the greatness he knew was still within his grasp. He was irritated with himself that he had not traveled with a few of his sculpting tools and a block of plastilina, so that he could make a proper three-dimensional sketch. A drawing would have to do for now. He took out his pencils and a pad of paper from his valise and went to work at Ben Clayton’s boyhood desk under the imperfect light of the lamp. The statue would be, more than anything, calm. As calm in its way as the beautifully eerie memorial Saint-Gaudens had done for Henry Adams’ wife. As a younger man, Gil had once stood in front of Saint-Gaudens’ hooded female figure, nearly weeping at its plangent mystery, and at the shivering inspiration that underlay its artistry. He sensed a similar opportunity here, an opportunity for something glorious and enduring.

He sketched rapidly; it was the work of ten minutes. Lamar Clayton’s idea of the statue was of Ben on horseback, but Gil swiftly rejected the father’s vision and supplanted it with his own: a young man, dismounted in death, standing beside a beloved horse, looking out across the landscape of his childhood. When he was finished, Gil held the drawing closer to the light. It was enough. Not a pencil stroke more. And the finished statue, he knew, would be similarly spare. The challenges were all in the proportions, in the posture of man and horse, in the fidelity and detail of the face.

It was after midnight before he finally turned off the lamp and climbed into the narrow bed upon which Ben Clayton had slept for most of his short life. Moonlight flowed in through the small window and even from the two shooting holes, helping to endow the saddle on the opposite end of the room with a seductive physicality. He heard the profound, reverberant notes of an owl’s voice as the bird made its rounds on silent wingbeats from tree to tree around the house. He heard as well the snorting and stamping of horses from the nearby stable, and from the unimaginable distances of the night came the anxious, cascading calls of coyotes. These were the sounds, Gil noted, that would have ushered Ben into sleep from his earliest childhood—so different, surely, from what he had listened to in France during the last nights of his life.

FIVE

L
amar Clayton sat on the porch with the dog in his lap as he pondered the sketch. He was in no hurry to provide a reaction. Gil waited him out, pretending to study the movements of a solitary buzzard in the pale morning sky. Maureen stood against the porch rail, sipping her second cup of coffee from one of the late Mrs. Clayton’s delicate china cups.

“That ain’t what I had in mind,” Clayton finally said. “You got him standing next to Poco, not in the saddle.”

“This is a stronger conception.”

“I pictured it different.”

“I know you did.”

“Then why are you arguing with me about what I want?”

“Because I know my business and this is the better approach.”

Clayton looked over at Maureen. “What do you think?”

“He could do it the way you suggest,” she said, “and it would be very satisfactory, even exceptional. You’d receive fair value for the price you paid. But if you want it to be a work of art, you should allow my father the freedom to make it one.”

“I want a good likeness. I don’t care about it being no work of art.”

“I think you do, Mr. Clayton,” Maureen said. “You care about that or you would have hired someone else.”

Clayton seemed to take her point, though grudgingly. He looked at the sketch again, then handed it back to Gil.

“All right, you do whatever you want.”

“Good. I’ll plan on coming back in a month or so with a maquette for your approval.”

“That’s agreeable.” Still in her owner’s lap, Peggy twisted over on her back and growled softly until Clayton consented to rub her slick belly. “How much you want to get started?”

“The usual terms are a third on approval of the maquette, a third on approval of the clay, and a third on delivery.”

“The clay? What’s that?”

“That’s the full-size sculpture. I’ll make the maquette first, then a scale model, then the finished clay. That’s what the plasterer will make a mold of, and in turn the foundry will take the plaster mold and cast it in bronze.”

Sensing that this pragmatic cowman would find it of interest, Gil launched into an explanation of the plasterer’s process and the lost-wax casting technique that the foundry would employ. He also talked about the pipe fitting and carpentry that would go into the construction of the armature, the stamina involved in hauling buckets of clay or standing for hours at a time at the top of a towering ladder sculpting the features of a monumental face. Clayton leaned forward in his chair, his solemn demeanor eroding a bit as a keen interest began to show in his eyes. He seemed to be regarding the sculptor on his porch as not just an alien conjurer but a man like himself who worked with his hands.

They talked for another twenty minutes while Maureen went inside to pack their things. When it was time for them to leave, Clayton lifted the resentful dog off his lap and rose to shake hands.

“You going to be coming back along with your father, Miss Gilheaney?” Clayton asked Maureen, as Ernest was cranking the balky motor of the car in the dusty driveway.

“If he invites me, Mr. Clayton.”

“If I’m doing the paying, I guess I can do the inviting,” he said, meeting her eyes for only a moment before looking away shyly. “You come back.”

ERNEST HAD JUST DRIVEN
off the ranch property onto the main road leading to Abilene when he turned to Gil in the front seat.

“You suppose I could see that drawing you did?”

Gil took the sketch out of his pocket and handed it to him. Ernest steered with one hand as he studied it, lifting his eyes back and forth to the mostly empty road.

“Well, that’s Ben all right,” he said.

“It’s only a preliminary likeness.”

“I know, but it’s still him.”

He gave the sketch back and drove on, not speaking but clearly working something over in his mind. Gil glanced back at Maureen, who sat quietly in the backseat, staring out at the countryside with the borrowed duster buttoned to her throat. The frail magic of the landscape could not stand up to the hard glare of midmorning. It was tangled and dusty again, a spreading rangeland with no tantalizing shadows or contours, just the foundational blankness of the earth itself.

“It’s strange,” Ernest finally said to Gil, “to think about lookin’ at a statue of Ben. Like he was the president or something.”

“It won’t be so imposing as that. That’s my hope, anyway. I want it to feel natural.”

“Well, I hope it’ll cheer the old man up. He’s been pretty daunsey since Ben died. We all have, I reckon.”

“What can you tell us about Ben?” Gil asked him. Maureen, hearing this question, leaned forward in her seat to listen.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ernest said. “It’s hard to know where to start talkin’ about somebody you knowed all his life. I still think of him mostly as a little boy. I was just gettin’ used to him bein’ grown.”

He lifted his hand off the steering wheel to wave to the driver of a car heading in the opposite direction.

“Ben was an intelligent boy. Even when he was a little kid, there weren’t no way to outsmart him. He was always ahead of what you were thinkin’. He looks a bit like his daddy but I think he come by his nature, the better part of it anyway, through Mrs. Clayton. She was a kind lady. She had a quiet way that drew people in. Kept her thoughts to herself mostly but saw everything that went on around her. Ben had that quality too. When he was pretty young, twelve or so, he’d be out nighthawkin’ with us on the roundups. You could surely trust that boy to watch those cows at night.”

Ernest shifted his eyes to Gil. “If what you were askin’ was how he ought to look in the statue, I guess that’s what I’d say: quiet.”

Gil nodded, glad to have the vague impressions of Ben Clayton he had been forming confirmed to at least some degree, and glad to know that the attitude of calm he had proposed for the statue was on the mark.

“What is this we heard,” Maureen asked, pitching her voice above the motor noise, “about Mr. Clayton living with the Indians?”

They could both see that the question surprised Ernest. He didn’t answer for a moment, taking advantage of a low-water crossing to pretend his full attention was needed in working the reverse pedal to slow the car. When he finally spoke again, his loquaciousness had deserted him.

“Mr. Clayton don’t like to talk about that much,” he said.

“SOMETHING’S NOT RIGHT,”
Gil said to his daughter in the dining car that afternoon. They had changed trains in Fort Worth and were now on the long home stretch to San Antonio.

Maureen sprinkled a meager teaspoonful of sugar into her coffee.

“What’s not right?”

“You’d think the boy would have written home. There were no letters, only a few postcards.”

“Maybe Mr. Clayton burned them. Out of grief. People do that.”

“Yes, I’m sure they do, but I don’t think that’s the case here. There’s just a natural scarcity of information. I don’t like the sense of there being something missing. I’m not a detective.”

“You don’t have to be, Daddy. You have enough to go on.”

“Maybe,” he said.

Gil folded his napkin and set it beside his empty plate, contemplating the pleasing sway of the dishes and utensils on the table as the train rattled south out of Fort Worth.

“I think I need to go back,” Gil mused. “Not just to show him the maquette, but to stay around a while. I need a better sense of the place. I need a better sense of my subject.”

“How long a time were you thinking?”

“I don’t know. A week or so. If Clayton can stand the sight of me that long.”

“It will add to the expense.”

Gil waved the observation away, though she had a fair point. The way to get rich and stay rich was to knock out one big statue after another, as fast as possible. He had already caught the mood of this piece, he had already formulated the concept. But he could sense a hidden richness in this statue, an opportunity for greatness.

“A week is nothing,” he told her. “If it will improve the quality of the work—and it will—then we’ll afford it.”

She smiled. “You liked it out there, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did. Your father’s a cowboy at heart.”

IT WAS
well past dark when the taxi pulled up to their house off Roosevelt Avenue. Above the rooftops of this low-lying neighborhood southeast of downtown San Antonio, the full moon hung starkly in the sky, illuminating the crumbling bell tower of Mission San José. What a strange world I’ve come to live in, Gil confided to himself as he paid the driver. It was a thought that visited him often enough. How could it not? For all of his life he thought he would come to ground among the teeming opportunities of New York, or perhaps find a picturesque exile in Europe, surrounded by intoxicating ruins and statues of antiquity for inspiration. The thought of living on the edge of an old Spanish mission field in Texas, among breweries and lumberyards, would never have found an excuse to enter his mind.

And yet here he was: home. Or what was supposed to be home. His wife had been dead for a year, but at moments like this he felt the confirmation of her absence with crushing force. He knew that Maureen felt it too. As they entered the house, she hurriedly switched on the light in the parlor, as if the darkness and emptiness of the house made up some sort of an active threat.

Mrs. Gossling, the housekeeper, had left a pot roast for them that afternoon. After unpacking, Maureen heated it up and then the two of them sat at the kitchen table, eating their late dinner while they skimmed through the newspapers that had accumulated in their absence. Neither felt the need to talk much after the long train journey together, but Gil could not stop thinking about the conversation that would have taken place at this homecoming if Victoria were still alive.

The news of a major commission had always made her beam with relief, since it was she who had borne the burden of managing their accounts, scanning the mail for promised payments or an unexpected check from the sale of a gallery piece. Gil had always had a high tolerance for financial anxiety; it was a necessary trait for a man in his line of work. But the suspense had worn on Victoria, and he missed the opportunity to reward her with the news of a project that would ensure their continued solvency for a year or more. And he missed just talking to her, telling her about the old man who had seemed as poor as he was sad but who had not even blinked at the price Gil had proposed, and about the lonely primacy of the site that made him confident that this statue would be a work of heartbreaking impact.

“I might use the Holloway boy again,” he said to Maureen.

She looked up from the
Evening News
, with its screaming headlines about Bolsheviks and railroad strikes.

“He might be a little too slender.”

“Maybe a little. We’ll see how the clothes fit him.”

Rusty Holloway was the young man whom Gil had used as the model for one of Crockett’s men in his Defenders of the Alamo grouping. He was the son of a well-known Texas Ranger captain, though he himself was an unadventurous postal worker who had a Class 3 deferment and had missed the war. And despite his father’s iconic occupation, Rusty was not much of a horseman, something that Gil would have to take into account, since the human figure would need to imply an easy conformance with the horse next to him.

They talked for a few moments more, about whether he should lease or buy a horse to serve as the model for Poco, and where it could be stabled, and then they each silently went back to the newspapers again until Maureen announced she could no longer stay awake. She kissed him good night and retreated to her room, leaving him alone in the kitchen in a dim pool of electric light.

He turned off the light and walked to his own room, the sound of his footfalls combining with the ticking of the mantel clock to create a lonely recessional tattoo. The haunted stillness of his own house made it that much harder to purge the gloom of Lamar Clayton’s lonely ranch house from his mind.

He brushed his teeth and changed into his pajamas and went to bed. The trip to West Texas, as trips tended to do, had broken the continuity of his acceptance of Victoria’s death, and he felt her once again beside him, sleeping on her back, her profile looming as sharp as a mountain range. Thirty-three years of marriage had never eroded the fascination he found in staring at that unforgettable face, which still embodied for him everything that was beautiful and heroic and mournful in the female soul. Before she had gotten sick she had begun to put on weight, the broad planes of her face sagging a bit with the added flesh, but even at fifty-four she could have still served as a model for a ship’s figurehead.

Her heroic features had implied so strongly an internal fearlessness that it had taken Gil many years to fully perceive how uncertain she could be, how deeply her morale could be shaken when tensions were in the air or prospects were on the wane. The move from New York to San Antonio had been a new start for Gil, but for Victoria it had amounted to a plummet out of a familiar world, a descent caused by her husband’s tyrannical artistic pride. She had gamely tried to start anew here, to follow him into the social embrace that greeted an eminent sculptor from New York, but the attentions of all these kind strangers had done nothing to buoy her up. They had sent her, instead, on a slow slide into solitude. Along with Maureen, she had done her share of volunteer work during the war, rolling bandages and putting together relief packages, but she had made no real friends in the process, and after the armistice she was more alone than ever, spending her days in more or less solitary management of the household while Gil and Maureen worked together in the studio. When she was stricken by the Spanish flu—a disease that had mostly attacked vigorous young people—Gil had not been able to banish the thought that the vaporous gloom of her new life in San Antonio had added to her vulnerability.

There was no point in trying to sleep now, not when he was turning over once again in the middle of the night his responsibility for Victoria’s lingering unhappiness and shockingly swift death. He got up and put on his working clothes. He made his way through the moonlit hallway to the kitchen to drink a tumbler of limeade from the icebox. (Embracing the Mexican preference for limes over lemons had been one of the easiest adjustments to life in San Antonio.) His throat was dry and he drank the cool limeade in several long swallows while standing at the window looking out at the October night. He washed the glass out in the sink and quietly slipped through the kitchen door. His studio was only fifty or sixty feet away but in the unseasonable nighttime humidity beads of sweat were already forming at his hairline by the time he reached it. Gil did not much mind the humidity, though it had tormented Victoria. It kept the clay moist, for one thing. And it added to an overall vivifying sense of living in a strange and secret place.