Remember Ben Clayton

by Stephen Harrigan

  But he could be a hypocrite all the same. He had arranged his own life so that everyone in it—Maureen and her mother especially—almost unknowingly were put to the task of serving him and his noble work. She had given him enough already; she would not listen to him stand in haughty judgment of her conduct or of Vance’s character.

  Gil sat there bewildered by the turn the conversation had taken, by the hurt he saw in his daughter’s eyes. But Maureen wasn’t going to allow herself to remain in her father’s presence and explode in angry tears. She turned without a word and walked down the hallway and quietly closed the door to her bedroom. She sat on the edge of her bed in defiant silence and would not speak to him when he knocked on the door. She had agitated him and confused him. Good. She listened to his footsteps as they wandered aimlessly back and forth in the house, then finally retreated toward the back door that led to the studio—though it was the middle of the night.

  EIGHTEEN

  Lamar Clayton studied the sky from the summit of the flat-topped hill where the statue was to be placed. It was cold already but it was going to get much colder, judging by the sealed-up sky to the north. His fingers were growing numb in his thick work gloves and he faced the wind for only a moment or two before turning his back to it. The thought of all the hard weather he had dealt with in his life used to be a minor source of pride to him, but now that he was old he did not care one bit for being miserable when he didn’t have to be.

  He stood there watching Gil Gilheaney, who was facing directly into the north wind with his fancy jacket buttoned to the throat and his gray hair blown back. The wind seemed to be carving the sculptor’s face as Lamar watched, paring away any loose and inessential flesh until it was as sharp as a hawk’s. His teeth were chattering and he seemed to be thinking hard. They had been up here for almost half an hour now and neither of them had said much, Gilheaney just pacing around like he had done before and sketching or writing something in a hard-backed notebook with a rippled surface.

  “Your daughter might be getting pretty cold down there in the car,” Lamar said at last.

  He thought for a moment Gilheaney hadn’t heard, but then the sculptor slowly nodded his head and turned to Lamar and smiled.

  “Sorry,” he said. “We’ll go down. You must be cold too.”

  Lamar shrugged, pretending he didn’t care whether he was freezing or not. He understood that Gilheaney and his daughter liked the idea of him as a tough old bird, and every now and then to his own annoyance he caught himself playing along.

  They turned and started carefully making their way down. Lamar hoped Gilheaney had gotten what he needed today because by tonight these rocks would all be sleeted over and he reckoned there would be a hard freeze for the next day or so. The cattle would be drifting with the storm and Ernest and Nax would need to go out tomorrow to check their feed and look for any poor stock that might be in trouble. He debated whether he would need to go out himself. He didn’t want to, but the thought of sitting around the house with company to have to talk to didn’t please him much either.

  At the base of the hill, Maureen Gilheaney was shivering in the open car with a blanket up to her chin. Lamar could see Peggy’s head poking up out of the blanket. Since getting bitten by that snake, and surviving it, the dog seemed to be thinking ahead a little bit, and she had quickly realized that staying in the car tucked up against Miss Gilheaney’s body would be more comfortable than climbing up to the top of the hill in a biting winter wind.

  “I ought to have had George’s Mary send some hot coffee out with us,” Lamar said to Maureen as he turned the crank and got behind the wheel.

  “We’ve been perfectly fine down here, Mr. Clayton. It’s the two of you who are bound to be frozen.”

  “Well, I expect it won’t do us no harm to get warmed up.”

  On the drive back it was too cold to talk. Lamar glanced at Gilheaney from time to time. He was chewing on his bottom lip, thinking about the statue. Miss Gilheaney had the same sort of look. There was some kind of trouble between the sculptor and his daughter, but Lamar didn’t know what it was and anyway it was none of his business, no more than it was Gilheaney’s business about what had gone wrong between him and Ben. They had looked to be a team when they had first come out to the ranch and you could tell she admired her father, but Lamar figured you couldn’t admire someone all your life without getting annoyed by him too, especially if you were unmarried and not all that young and starting to feel this was the way your life was going to be from here on out. Annoyed or not, she still seemed to believe in him. She had told Lamar as soon as they arrived that the statue was going to be a work of genius.

  Lamar didn’t think the statue had to be a work of genius, it just had to look like Ben and give value for the money he was paying. And he didn’t even know anymore why he had wanted the damn thing in the first place. The night he’d gotten the telegram about Ben’s death he’d thought George’s Mary’s silent grieving was going to drive him crazy, so past midnight he had gone out and saddled the night horse and ridden out in the moonlight with the bewildered little dachshund running behind frantically trying to catch up. He’d hobbled the horse at the foot of the hill and walked up to the top with the dog and sat there for the rest of the night saying he was sorry out loud over and over again, his voice so monotonous and rhythmic that after a while he reminded himself of the Comanches singing their songs after a hunt or sometimes their dirges after a raid that had gone bad. It had been more like muttering than singing to him; he never did get used to it. But at times in his life he had taken a nostalgic comfort in those strange cadences, and maybe that’s what he was trying to work up on the hill that night, calling out his dead boy’s name and saying he was sorry as if the words were part of a chant that might have the power to undo what had been done.

  He never told anybody about how when the sun was rising that morning and his throat was raspy and he was trying hard to stay awake; he had had a shivery feeling and the sense he ought to turn his head. And there were Ben and Poco right beside him, looking east across the pastures where hawks were hunting above the dewy grass and the streaks of sunlight on the horizon were as bright as if they were flashing off a mirror. Ben took no notice of his father. He sat there on Poco without moving and his stillness and the horse’s stillness were indistinguishable from peace. Lamar realized he was seeing things and as soon as his mind registered that fact the image of his son and his horse was gone. They hadn’t really been there—he knew that with cold reason; and that momentary note of peacefulness did not mean that Ben was content in his death, or that his father had any more account to live. But he kept turning to it nevertheless, turning to it and turning to it until he was afraid he would use it up, that if he didn’t make it real somehow it would disappear forever.

  He didn’t know what had happened to him in San Antonio. There was still nothing in his memory between the time he had walked into Gilheaney’s studio to look at the model of the statue and when he was eating barbecue with those two mechanics at the filling station. There were plenty of blank spots in his life, times when he had passed out drunk in a bar and woken up a day later on a street bench in Fort Worth or in a livery yard in San Angelo with no idea how he’d gotten there. But that had been a different kind of absence, a different kind of shame. It was one thing to drink away your awareness; it was another just to lose it.

  The small sculpture that Gilheaney showed him in his studio had been adequate. It was a close enough rendering of what Lamar thought he had seen on the mesa that morning after the telegram came, though Ben was not mounted but standing beside his horse as Gilheaney had decreed. But at the same time he knew it was more than a rendering. It wasn’t Ben, but he was unprepared for the force of the artist’s idea of Ben. What had stunned Lamar like an electric shock was the thought that Gil Gilheaney had somehow understood his son better than he had. The statue that Lamar had commissioned to remind him of Ben had so much power and presence on its own that he worried t
hat it would end up stealing the memory of Ben away.

  “MAUREEN TOOK PICTURES,” Gil said as they sat in the parlor after dinner, their chairs pulled in close to the fireplace as the wind rattled the windows and freezing rain clattered against the roof and the north side of the house. “If you like, we’ll show them to you, though it isn’t finished quite yet.”

  “All right,” Lamar said.

  Maureen went into her room to get the Kodaks, then came back and handed them to him. In one of them Gil was standing next to the full-scale figure of Ben, and Lamar could see how big it was, towering over the sculptor by a head or more. The two figures, the boy and the horse, were not yet arranged in the right way, but he could see pretty well how it would look. This time he was not stunned, as he had been in San Antonio. He knew what to expect. In an odd way the full-scale statue looked softer and more intimate than the model had, but maybe that was just because he was familiar with it by now.

  “It would be ideal if you could come to San Antonio in the next few weeks after I’ve put on the final touches to take a careful look at it. If it meets with your approval, I’ll call the plasterers to make a mold that we can then ship to the foundry for final casting.”

  “I approve of it now,” Lamar said.

  “Now? Without seeing it?”

  “I’m seeing it in these pictures. I approve of it. You can call the plasterers and I’ll write you the next check.”

  He thought this would please Gilheaney, but he could see it didn’t. A log in the fireplace popped and the sculptor stood up and walked over and scooted the embers back into the coals with the toe of his shoe.

  “I’m having a hard time understanding your reaction to this piece,” he said to Lamar.

  “That’s fair enough. It ain’t been that easy for me to figure out neither.”

  “You’re spending a lot of money, Mr. Clayton. It’s important for me to know that you’re getting what you wanted.”

  “It ought to be plain enough. I said I’d write you the goddam check.”

  Maureen started at Lamar’s belligerent tone and Gilheaney turned his head from the fire to look at him. The look had a challenge in it, and a condescending scrutiny that Lamar had seen too many times in his life already: from the Indian agent at Fort Chadbourne after the Comanches turned him in for the ransom; from various policemen and deputies into whose custody he had drunkenly been taken; from a few of the guests at his wedding who clearly thought him too old and damaged to be a husband to Sarey; from his own son, the last time he’d seen him.

  “Did I offend you?” Gilheaney asked, in a surprised and reasonable tone that infuriated Lamar more. The sculptor was a big man with long arms and powerful hands, but Lamar wondered if he’d ever been in a real fight and whether he would know what to do if he suddenly found himself in one right here and now. It was a crazy thought, but Lamar found himself thinking it. It came out of nowhere, erupting from the anger of a past he thought he had left behind.

  “I ain’t offended,” he answered. “But around here people just do their work and collect their pay without expecting to be congratulated for it all the time.”

  When he heard that, Gilheaney stood up straight at the fireplace. Lamar didn’t care to get in a staring contest with him, so he just looked into the fire and concentrated on the sounds of the norther that was screeching past the house. He didn’t look up till after Gilheaney had turned and walked into his room. Ben’s room.

  Maureen Gilheaney was still sitting there on the other side of the hooked rug, holding a book in her lap, looking at Lamar like he’d just slapped her in the face. Whatever anger she’d been nursing at her father had just been transferred to her host.

  “Do you really think he could possibly depend on your good opinion of him for his self-respect?”

  “I didn’t mean to upset either of you. That’s just what came out.”

  She stood up and grabbed the Kodaks out of his hands and waved them in his face.

  “Look at these. Really look at them. Then tell me if you think he’s doing this commission just for your money. But I can emphatically tell you one thing right now: he’s certainly not doing it because he needs your praise.”

  “I said I didn’t mean to upset either of you.”

  “If that’s supposed to be an apology, you should offer it to him, not me.”

  “I never said it was an apology.”

  She was halfway to the door leading out of the parlor when she remembered the photos in her hand and turned and walked back to him and set them down on the arm of his chair.

  “Look at them,” she repeated.

  She went to her room and he put the pictures on the coffee table in front of him. He was damned if he was going to study them just because he’d been ordered to. Peggy jumped down out of the chair where she’d been curled up with Maureen and walked over to him and reared up on her hind legs in that prairie dog pose of hers till he relented and picked her up and settled her next to him.

  •

  HE WAS HARDHEADED and he knew it. There had been no reason to get into a pointless argument with Gilheaney and no excuse for being cross with Maureen, who had been kind to him and was right to stand up for her father. He ought to call them both out here and apologize, but he wasn’t going to do it.

  It had been a burden to Sarey, how inflexible he was. At Christmas parties with her family, he would not allow himself to sing at the piano with the rest of them. She said it didn’t matter if he had a terrible voice or not, but he wouldn’t let her talk him into it, even after her affectionate coaxing turned to confused pleas. He remembered the tears in her eyes when she finally learned she couldn’t talk him into it and gave up. To this day he didn’t know if he could sing or not. He had just gotten it into his head that it wasn’t something he was going to do, and he never did it.

  When Ben was born, Lamar had had that same instinct to hold himself apart, to leave unrevealed to his son the satisfaction he took in being his father. He didn’t know why he had been that way. Maybe that had been his nature from the beginning or maybe it was some caution that had come into his life during his time with the Comanches or in the hard period afterwards. Maybe it was because of his own father, who as much as Lamar could recall had been so preoccupied with work and worry he never had time for a spare word.

  Nevertheless, he remembered moments of ease with Ben. The boy was always desperate to be outside with Lamar and the hands when they were at work. Even when he was only six months old, before he could walk or speak, he tracked every move Lamar made and seemed to be studying how he did things. Lamar had to get himself used to the idea that the boy just wanted to be around him, that he regarded his father as a figure of fascination. On the back of an old bankbook in his desk drawer, Lamar had written down Ben’s first words and noted the day he first walked and when he first sat a horse, or made note of odd things he had said when he was learning how to speak. Lamar had felt a need to keep this accounting of his son’s life secret. He never mentioned it to Sarey and he doubted she had ever come across it, since she wasn’t the type to go rooting around his desk without asking. He wondered now why he had ever thought those little penciled scraps of dates and phrases needed to be hidden from anyone. The bankbook was still there in the desk drawer. He had not looked at it in years, and would never have the heart to now. After he died George’s Mary might find it and toss it away without looking at it when she cleaned out his desk, assuming it just belonged with the piles of bills and giveaway datebooks from feed stores that it was buried under.

  All his life he had treated the things that brought him pride and comfort as if they were shameful secrets—even his love for his own son. There were times when Ben was older, when they were riding fence together or camped out during the roundup, that he had felt such contentment in being with him that he thought he ought to say something out loud about it. But he never had, not that he could recall. He had expected Ben to know his own value to his father just as he had expected Gilheane
y tonight to know the quality of his own work. You shouldn’t have to tell people what ought to be plain to them already.

  He remembered sharply and with regret how Ben had looked toward him after Sarey had died. He had wanted something from his father that Lamar didn’t have the will or the imagination to give him. That night after they’d buried her he couldn’t think of anything to say to the boy, or at least anything that sounded right. And after that, the subject of Sarey hardly ever came up between them. They just kept on living their lives without her there.

  Lamar supposed he would have been a different sort of man if the Comanches hadn’t taken him, but it was a hard thing to factor because now he could barely remember the boy he had been beforehand. In an instant, that part of his life had just been sheared away.

  They just walked through the door like they had lived there all their lives and were coming home from a day’s work. Lamar’s father and his older brother, Emory, were already lying dead and scalped along with their big Newfoundland dog two miles out on the Decatur road where they had been looking for a stray calf. That was the reason there was no warning.

  Jewell was setting the table and his mother was cutting dough into strips for a cobbler crust. He remembered the fine hairs on her forearms dusted with flour and the concentration on her face as she cut the dough with a paring knife. The knife’s handle was worn and water-streaked and was as familiar to him as the smells of his mother’s cooking or the sound of her voice. There was a glass pickle tray on the table that she was proud of because it had come from New Orleans with her own mother and survived the Runaway Scrape after the Alamo fell and Sam Houston was on the run.

  That afternoon the half-wild horse that his father had bought from a Tonkawa Indian had bolted with Lamar on it and jammed Lamar’s foot against the trunk of a bois d’arc tree. That was why he was in the house and not out looking for the calf with his father and brother. The little toe on his left foot had split off from the other four like a bent twig on a sapling. It was swollen tight and his mother had heated some water on the stove and poured it in a pan for him to soak his foot in. The pain was still strong and it felt personal, as if the pain itself had done this to him and not the horse or his own neglect.