LAMAR CLAYTON stood leaning against the corral fence as the sculptor busied himself with studying the little chestnut pony. Gilheaney had taken a tape measure from his jacket pocket and had his daughter help him as he measured off the animal’s height and girth and the length of its head. Then Miss Gilheaney walked around in a circle taking pictures with a Brownie. Poco didn’t like the snap of the shutter and he was suspicious of these strangers and didn’t trust their intentions. He calmed down some when Lamar walked over to him and put his hand on his neck and told him to hush.
Lamar wasn’t sure the horse had the wrong idea about Gilheaney. There was something about the sculptor’s methodical inspection of Poco that Lamar found irritating, or maybe threatening. Like he wasn’t just measuring the horse but taking him over in his mind. Gilheaney was a big enough man he could have been a statue of himself, over six feet tall and framey and turned out in an expensive-looking suit. He was big-headed, with steely hair that he parted in the middle and kept short on the sides, the kind of man who always looked like he’d just walked out of a barbershop. But to judge from his hands, his blunt, powerful fingers, you would have thought he’d grown up doing ranch work. He had a look in his eye that saw into you, or past you, or to somewhere you weren’t expecting him to be looking.
“He’s mostly a night horse,” Clayton said. He felt the need to reclaim the horse somehow from the sculptor’s scrutiny. “He’s clean-footed and Ben used to say he could see in the dark like a bat. Ben loved this ol’ horse.”
“He’s a fine animal, that’s plain to see,” Gil replied absently, stepping back to study the horse as Maureen clicked away with the Brownie. As the creature’s proportions became clearer to him, he was preoccupied with an emerging artistic challenge. The impression he had from the photos of Ben Clayton was of a muscular young man, with a solid torso and wide shoulders. Since this figure would be sitting atop a diminutive working pony, he did not want the boy to appear to be riding a donkey. On the other hand, he was excited by Poco’s musculature and comportment, his pared-down authority. It was more important for the statue to appear real than heroic, but achieving that authentic end would require levels of artifice Gil had yet to gauge.
He turned to Clayton. “What about Ben’s clothes?”
“His clothes?”
“Do you still have them?”
“Some of them. What do you want his clothes for?”
“I’ll need to get as accurate an idea of his size as I can. They would be very useful, if you don’t object.”
“Hell, I ain’t got no reason to object,” Clayton said.
But the old man looked particularly sorrowful, Maureen observed an hour later, as George’s Mary brought out the boy’s laundered and folded clothes and set them on the dining room table. She put down a pair of boots as well, and a battered sweat-stained hat.
“What did he wear mostly around the ranch?” Gil asked.
Clayton picked up one of the khaki-colored work shirts, frayed at the cuffs and with one of the pocket flaps half torn off.
“I’d say this one here if I had to guess,” he said.
“You don’t have to guess,” George’s Mary said. “That was his favorite shirt. I ought to know. I washed it about a thousand times.”
“And this hat? This is what he wore on the ranch?”
“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 th
e 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
Lamar 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 m
y 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.
Remember Ben Clayton Page 5