Remember Ben Clayton

by Stephen Harrigan

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Clayton said. Gil could tell that the old rancher didn’t know what to think of Martindale. Gil felt a little bit the same way. Martindale knew how to listen, his interest in the subject of trail drives and pioneer ranching was impressively deep and unabashed, and he was not a fake. One look at his blunt, beat-up hands told you that he was as much a product of the South Texas brushlands as he was of the university. Gil understood why Maureen liked him. But still, there was something put on about him, the cowboy boots he wore with his rumpled suit, the battered hat he wore pushed back on the top of his head. He wanted you to notice him, he wanted you to appreciate the character he had invented for himself.

  “If it’s agreeable to you, Mr. Clayton,” Gil said, “we’ll meet at my studio for lunch and you could have a look at the scale model then.”

  “That’s agreeable.”

  Gil turned to Vance Martindale. “Will you join us for lunch as well?”

  “With the greatest pleasure. But only if I’m not in the way.”

  IT WAS LATE. Her father drove home alone in his own car, after Vance had asked if he could have the honor of dropping her off. They were now heading aimlessly through the almost empty downtown streets.

  “I have the feeling your father invited me only because I happened to be standing there,” Vance said to Maureen. One of the senior professors in Austin had lent him his car while he was at a conference in New York, and Vance had gleefully taken the liberty of driving it all the way down to San Antonio.

  “He invited you because he likes you.”

  “I’d like to think so. But he’s a little suspicious of me, don’t you think?”

  “Why would I think that?”

  “I don’t know, a rough character like myself, lurking around his daughter.”

  “You’re hardly a rough character.”

  “As if you would know. You didn’t see me get into a saloon brawl the other day over Spenser’s use of the Petrarchan sonnet. Seriously, what does he think of me?”

  “He hasn’t said much about you.”

  “Do you realize how crushing that sounds to an egoist?”

  “Yes, and it serves you right. Where are you taking me?”

  “I thought we could have an ice cream sundae.”

  “There’s no place that would serve us an ice cream sundae at eleven o’clock at night.”

  “Must you wave the banner of reality in my face like that?”

  He had had maybe a little too much to drink. Maybe she had too, with that second glass of wine. The Old Time Trail Drivers—with the exception of the grimly abstemious Lamar Clayton—had unsurprisingly proved to be a group of serious drinkers, and with prohibition looming on the horizon after the beginning of the year there had been an end-of-the-world spirit of indulgence at the event. Even her father, so crushingly moderate in his habits, had been a little mellow by the time it was over.

  Vance drove to San Pedro Springs and they got out and walked through the deserted park, across a footbridge spanning a small, mostly dried-up lake. A boat, built in the shape of a swan, lay rotting on the bank. Its peeling white paint was visible in the moonlight.

  “It’s a great pity,” Vance declared as he stared into the water from the bridge.

  “What’s a pity?”

  “These springs were Texas’ Garden of Eden once. Utterly glorious, endless clear water rushing out of the limestone. San Antonio wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for these springs, Texas wouldn’t be here. Now they’ve been pumped nearly dry.”

  He told her about the mastodons and dire wolves that had once watered here, the Lipan Apaches and Spanish explorers who had camped here, Sam Houston speaking out at this very spot against the idea of Texas leaving the Union. She listened as they walked on, entranced by his enthusiasm, the bottomless depth of his knowledge, but most of all by the way, as he lectured, that he had made her his audience of one. He paused at an old stone blockhouse that he declared was the oldest building in Texas. He patted the stone with such worshipful attention that she thought he would kiss it.

  “So you have the history of Texas,” he said, turning to her again, “all compressed in this one spot. But history is boring, or so people seem to think. Let’s talk about you.”

  “My history would make a very slim volume.”

  “Well, you must add a chapter or two.”

  “Not so easily done, I’m afraid.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, Vance. Because things are not easily done in general.”

  He leaned against the ancient stone and looked at her, studied her. He was not in a hurry and his glance did not waver. She was stirred by his scrutiny. She had never been looked at in quite this way, slowly assessed and appreciated with such frank interest. It thrilled her, the way she seemed to be holding this man’s attention. She wondered if this was how her mother had felt when she modeled for her husband.

  “What do you want for your life, Maureen?”

  “Don’t ask me such a big question. I suppose I want a little independence, to start with.”

  “And after that?”

  “After that I’ll take what comes.”

  He nodded and seemed to ponder this, then he looked her in the eye again and said, “May I?”

  “May you what?”

  And so he finally kissed her. Whatever shyness or delicacy had restrained him from declaring himself before now had finally evaporated, helped along no doubt by liquor and by the stimulative effects of being in proximity to so much Texas history. He held her rather chastely as they kissed, his hands on her shoulders as if they were dancing. Nevertheless she could feel the bulk of his body against her, and take in the smell of his cologne and his pipe tobacco, and the nervous sweat that dampened the underarms of his suit. He recovered himself perhaps a moment or two sooner than she would have preferred and backed away from her, grinning widely, staring at her.

  “Well,” he said, “we better get you home before your famous father suspects foul play.”

  AS SOON AS Gil got home that night, he went straight to work. To anyone else’s eye the quarter-scale model would have appeared complete, every detail conscientiously rendered without appearing too precise in a worked-over way. But Gil was unsatisfied with an unspecified something around the boy’s mouth—were the lips too full?—and the attitude of the horse’s left hind leg was subtly wrong. He could correct this latter flaw, he realized, by veering a bit from the imaginary line he had conceived from the rear tendon to the ischium. He had relied too much on textbook proportions there, and as a result the leg looked amateurishly rigid. He worried a bit about the jugular grooves in the horse’s neck as well. They looked too deep all of a sudden, but he deferred a decision about whether that was a problem until he could see the model again in daylight.

  He attacked the human figure’s face first, very slightly planing away some of the material from the upper lip and strengthening the tension at the corners of the mouth, pausing now and then to study the imperfect Kodaks of Ben Clayton through a magnifying glass. He used tools he had bought in Rome almost forty years before, their heartwood handles still strong after all the decades of use, and soothingly familiar. But as he gripped them now the pain in his thumbs flared up again, and he had to set the tools down, cursing under his breath. In angry defiance he took them up once more and worked in spite of the pain, shearing away a bit of clay from the hock of one of the horse’s rear legs, building up the thigh to help create a more authentic illusion of muscle flexion. But he could not work for more than a few moments without pausing and cursing. The inflammation in his hands made holding the tools feel like gripping a live electrical wire.

  It was after midnight. He walked around the model as the pain ebbed away, studying it from every vantage point. He would not be able to gauge the effect completely until he had natural light in the morning, but he thought he had done his job well. Ben Clayton stood next to his horse, gazing off into what to a viewer would be a
n imaginary distance, but which to Gil’s mind was almost as real as it had been to Ben, since he had studied the landscape from the heightened vantage point of the statue and ridden a horse—Ben’s horse—across miles of open pasture. The human figure and the horse were thrillingly real to him. He had done as well once or twice before, with the Pawnee Scout perhaps, or the model for the never-cast General Gómez, but he had never done better.

  In the kitchen, he chipped some ice out of the icebox, wrapped it in a dish towel, and pressed the heels of his hands against it. Restless, he walked back out to the studio. He lifted the moistened cloth off one of Maureen’s almost-finished reliefs. He turned on a desk lamp and held it close as he studied her work. It was excellent, and yet slightly lifeless. It depicted a bird in the foreground, a yellow-crowned night heron sailing on outspread wings, about to land on the branch of a cypress tree. In the distance a modern-day voyager with a pair of binoculars around his neck stealthily paddled a canoe. What worried Gil was the over-researched precision of the heron. Maureen had done her homework, he knew. She had taken the train up to Austin and spent time in the specimen collection at the university, sketching the bird in its inert form, and she had studied it in life as well, along the banks of the river.

  The bird, and every other detail on the various panels, was more than competently rendered, and the overall idea was strong and unforced. He was quite sure the ladies who had commissioned it would be pleased. But in the end there was not much power in it, nothing that would stir you or confound you or command your attention as you glanced at it while walking across the bridge where it was to be placed.

  As they had worked together in the studio, he on the Clayton model, Maureen on her relief sculptures, she had openheartedly sought his advice and criticism, and he had given it, and the work, he believed, was stronger for it. But there was no way he could advise her past the threshold between a sculpture that was competent and professional and one that somehow breathed with life. The pieces of his that were successful in this way were mysteriously so. He did not know how he did it, only that every so often he had managed to vault past the barrier of skill and technique into the realm of magic. It was painful to admit to himself—and unthinkable to suggest to his daughter—that she did not share his gift.

  He had just finished replacing the cloth when Maureen walked into the studio. It was midnight. He could see just from the way she opened and closed the door that she was in a buoyant mood.

  “Did you hurt your hand?”

  “It’s just a little stiff.”

  “Sorry to be coming home so late,” she said.

  “You’re not a little girl, Maureen. It’s no business of mine what time you come home. Did you enjoy your drive with Mr. Martindale?”

  “I wish you would call him Vance, Daddy.”

  “All right. Of course I will.”

  “Because ‘Mr. Martindale’ sounds a little frosty and disapproving, the way you say it, anyway.”

  “I don’t disapprove of him. I don’t really know him.”

  That wasn’t exactly true. Gil had met Martindale enough to gather more than a sketchy impression, and he had a sense of the man through his writing as well—not just the enthusiastic study of Gil’s own Alamo sculpture that had been published in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, but a number of other essays he had written for the publication. In print, Martindale seemed to be always spoiling for a fight, drawing scholarly lines in the sand, throwing down provocative challenges to the timid and conventional thinking with which he imagined he was surrounded. He chastised Texans for their grandiloquent insularity and pride even as he went about romanticizing and mythologizing the place himself, celebrating everything from the rapacious Spanish explorers to the lowly prairie dog.

  Gil did his best to hold his reservations aside as he looked at his daughter. She was glancing around the studio, afraid to meet his eyes, afraid to break into the delighted smile he sensed she was suppressing for his benefit. He assumed something had happened with Mr. Martindale tonight. Vance. Something had gone right. Once more he was stung by Victoria’s absence, because it was impossible for him to be the maternal confidante that the situation called for. He could only do his best.

  “Should I know him better?” Gil asked her.

  “If you’d like to. He’s very interesting, you know.”

  “There’s no need to convince me of that. It’s obvious he’s got a brilliant mind, that he’s ambitious. He could be a match for you.”

  “Daddy, it’s hopelessly premature to even suggest such a thing.” But she was beaming when she said this. “Anyway, he’s very grateful that you allowed him to come along with us tonight. He got so much out of it.”

  “I’m glad.”

  She smiled again and looked past him, at the scale model of Ben Clayton and his horse. She walked up to it as if she were noticing it for the first time, instead of having been an intimate part of its creation.

  “What do you think?” Gil asked Maureen, after a moment or two. “Will he like it?”

  “I think so. He ought to, of course. But he’s unpredictable, as we well know. Did you do something to the mouth?”

  “Tightened it a bit.”

  She uttered a little grunt of approval, then made a sweep around the model, studying it from every angle.

  “Why do you think he invited us to go to that dinner with him tonight?” she said as she made her inspection. “It wasn’t as if he didn’t have plenty of people there he knew already.”

  “He was just being polite, I suppose.”

  “I think he wanted to impress you. To let you see that there are people who know him and like him. Maybe he’s a little in awe of you.”

  “Are you serious? Clayton?”

  “Why shouldn’t he be? Everyone’s a little bit in awe of you, Daddy. Didn’t you know that?”

  She kissed his cheek and went inside to bed. He lingered for a moment more in the studio, savoring his daughter’s happiness, wishing Victoria were here to witness it.

  FIFTEEN

  He arrived exactly on time in a chauffeur-driven car he had hired through the hotel.

  “I thought we’d have lunch first and give you a chance to inspect the model at your leisure afterwards,” Gil suggested when he met Clayton at the door.

  “Well, leisure don’t have much to do with it but that sounds all right to me.”

  He shook hands with Vance, who was dressed in the new suit Maureen had helped him pick out, his thick, wayward hair respectfully plastered down. A notebook and pencil peeked touchingly from his jacket pocket, and helped to frame in Maureen’s mind what she liked about him. He had a passion for recording and cataloging these old-time tales that was as strong as her father’s passion for modeling in clay.

  Mrs. Gossling did not work on Saturdays, so Maureen had gotten up early to prepare the meal herself, drawing from a dozen or so recipes that her mother had, at Maureen’s urging several years ago, finally written down on file cards. She decided on pot roast with potatoes and onions and carrots and a devil’s food cake for dessert. From the time spent on his ranch and the fare served at his table, Maureen had guessed Clayton would not be a hard man to feed. Plain food would do just fine.

  He was far more talkative than he had been when presiding at his own table. As they ate, Vance peppered him with questions about his experiences on the cattle drives and he rambled on pleasantly, impressed and, despite himself, maybe even a little flattered by the younger man’s precise interest.

  “I didn’t care for that country up around the Stinkingwater,” Clayton said, in answer to one of Vance’s questions about the land north of Dodge City to Ogallala. “The creek had a safe bottom but that’s about all I can say for it. Nothing but bad grass and sandhills and ever now and then a little bitty pond about the size of a teacup. I remember when we finally got through that country we come to a ranch where a little girl was waiting for us. She’d been milking the cows all morning and had that milk cooling there in
the spring waiting to sell it to us. You never did see a happier bunch of cowboys than when we got to drinking that milk.”

  Vance was writing as fast as he could, shoving a bite into his mouth when there was a pause, occasionally looking up and grinning at Maureen like he could not believe his good fortune.

  “You must have been a young man on that drive,” Maureen said to Clayton as Vance scribbled to catch up.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am, just a kid, though I don’t recall thinking of myself that way. They say people grew up faster in those days but I don’t know if that’s true or just something you hear. There’s a lot of boys buried over there with Ben in France that grew up pretty fast if you ask me.”

  In the subdued silence that followed this comment, he ate the last bite of his cake and then looked at Maureen and said it was as fine a cake as he’d ever eaten. He toyed with the silverware a moment and then set his napkin on top of his plate.

  “Well, I expect I better take a look at what you done,” he said to Gil.

  VANCE INSISTED on staying behind in the dining room, sensitive enough to appreciate the fact that the rancher’s encounter with a sculpture of his dead son ought to be a private moment, off-limits to his curiosity and note-taking.

  Maureen smiled at him in gratitude as she followed her father and Mr. Clayton into the studio. When they entered, the midday winter light was strong. The model stood in the center of the room, hidden by a simple cotton drape.

  “As I believe I explained to you,” Gil said, standing in front of the draped model, “this is a scale model, a third the size of the final sculpture. Assuming you approve it, I’ll then begin to build the armature and model the statue in full size. It will look very much like this, so if you have any hesitations or concerns it’s important that you make me aware of them now.”

  Clayton nodded. Gil pulled back the cloth to reveal the model. Clayton took a step toward it and then stood there sweeping his eyes across it.

  He did this for a long time, a very long time. Gil had been in this anxious position many, many times in his career, waiting silently for approval. People were different. Some were over-effusive, some were embarrassed or strategically disinclined to register a reaction, some—a very few—were disappointed. Usually the person assessing the work was a member of a board or committee, sometimes they had known the individual whose likeness they were studying, but most often not. Once or twice he had silently withdrawn as an old lady had wept at the image she had commissioned of her long-dead father. But he did not know what to expect from a grieving, complicated man studying the face and form of his son.