Remember Ben Clayton

by Stephen Harrigan

  “What for? I ain’t canceling the damn commission.”

  “No, but I am. If you read the contract, you’ll find that either party has the right to terminate the agreement.”

  Gil saw a look of real hostility in Clayton’s eyes now, and he took some satisfaction in it.

  “You need to talk some sense into your father,” Clayton said to Maureen.

  “I do?”

  It warmed Gil to realize that his daughter was taking his part, if a little bitterly. After their tense conversation about Vance, their manner with each other had been brittle and formal, especially during the long train ride to Abilene. But now Clayton’s surliness had brought them back into their natural alliance.

  “Well, if that’s the way you want things to be I guess it’s all right with me,” Clayton said. “I see your bags packed there. I expect you want to get out of here on the next train.”

  “If it’s convenient,” Gil said.

  Clayton laughed and pointed toward the window, at the icy aftermath of yesterday’s storm. “That look convenient to you?”

  “We can wait till tomorrow,” Maureen said.

  “No,” Gil declared. “We’ll go now.”

  Clayton met his guest’s eyes. “Ernest is out riding fence, so I’ll have to drive you myself.”

  “You ought not to be out driving in this, Mr. Clayton,” George’s Mary said.

  “Well, that’s your opinion and you’re welcome to it.” He turned back to Gil and Maureen. “You folks are welcome to stay another day or so till this weather clears or take your chances in the car with me.”

  It was a miserable, dangerous trip to Abilene, Clayton wrestling the steering wheel of the flivver as it slipped along on the icy road. Several times Gil was on the point of telling Clayton to turn back, but he thought better of breaking the already irritated driver’s concentration. So Gil and Maureen just stared silently ahead, hoping the journey wouldn’t end in a spinout on the side of a desolate road where no help or rescue would be forthcoming.

  When they finally made it to the station, they learned the train would be an hour and a half late.

  “I’d better stay around and make sure it comes,” Clayton said. “Don’t want to leave you stranded here.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Gil said. “If we end up having to spend another night, we’ll stay at the hotel.”

  “No, there’s no point in waiting for the train here,” Clayton said after a moment. “Let’s go on across the street to the Grace and at least have a decent lunch while you wait.”

  “We’d be happy to,” Maureen said, before Gil could contradict her. They left their bags with the porter and walked quickly across the street to the warmth of the Grace Hotel, where they sat down in the dining room—full of stranded passengers like themselves—and Clayton scowled at an overworked waiter and demanded menus.

  They ate in awkward silence, Clayton and Gil ignoring each other, Clayton taking only a few bites of his club sandwich before pushing the plate away. Maureen introduced a few neutral remarks but the conversation went nowhere and neither man cared to nudge it forward.

  It was snowing outside now. As Gil watched the flakes descend upon Abilene he had to fight back a wave of unwelcome nostalgia. He did not need to be reminded just now of the wintry New York streets of his boyhood and adolescence and exuberant twenties, the sense of rejuvenation and mystery he had felt with every new snowfall. When he was young he had taken it as a certainty that artistic greatness awaited him, but now his best work was either destroyed or stillborn and he sat on the verge of his old age waiting for a train that would only carry him deeper into obscurity.

  “I want you to keep the money I paid you and finish the job,” Clayton said.

  “What for?”

  “Because I made a deal with you and you’ve held up your end of it and I want you to finish.”

  “I appreciate you wanting to honor your contract even though I’m not holding you to the obligation. But it’s better if we just—”

  “Is your father always so damn prideful?” Clayton asked Maureen. “Do you think you could talk him into giving me a chance to say I’m sorry?”

  He turned to Gil again. “I want you to finish the statue and don’t pay no attention to me.”

  “All right,” Gil said. “I’ll continue working on the piece and when I’m satisfied with it I’ll contact you for your approval.”

  “That settles the matter, then,” Clayton said.

  But it didn’t seem settled, at least not judging by the way Clayton sat there folding and refolding his napkin in deliberative silence. There was clearly something else he felt the need to say, but a lifetime of keeping his thoughts to himself had made sharing them an unaccustomed burden.

  “You saw that woman who came to my house,” he finally said.

  “Your sister.”

  “Well, she’s part of what came between my son and me. Or maybe I ought to say I caused her to come between us. I know people have told you how I got taken by the Comanches when I was a boy. I’ve had newspaper writers and such show up at the ranch and want me to tell them all about it, but I don’t care to speak about that part of my life and the reason is it’s confusing to me and there’s a lot of it I’m ashamed about.”

  “It’s not necessary for you to discuss this with us,” Maureen said gently.

  “Well, no, I think maybe it is.”

  He paused while the waiter took away their plates, including his nearly untouched club sandwich, and waited until he was out of earshot on the other side of the dining room to continue.

  “I meant to keep Jewell away from Ben because she had taken to Indian ways and I didn’t want any of that around my son. The way I looked at it, the Comanches took away my life mostly. For a good long time I didn’t know who I was or how I ought to behave around people and there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of good that came my way except for Sarey and Ben. I didn’t want that boy confused like I was, or like Jewell was. Sarey took a different view of the subject and we had an argument or two about it. She may have been right but it seemed to me that Jewell was trying to turn my boy into a damn Indian and I wasn’t going to stand for it.

  “I didn’t know until after he got killed and I went through his room that she’d been writing him pert’ near all his life. Sarey was in on it with her. Jewell didn’t understand how to write in English anymore, but there was a woman up there at the Fort Sill Indian school that wrote down for her what she wanted to say. She’d heard that Ben lost a baby tooth once and she wrote back and told him to go out and face east right before daybreak and make a wish and throw the tooth into the sun and his wish would come true. That was the kind of thing she filled his head with. When I came across those letters it irritated me a good deal and I threw them all in the fire. I didn’t care if they were his property or not. Anyway, he was dead so it didn’t matter what I did with them. I believe I’ll have an ice cream sundae.”

  He turned in his chair and summoned the waiter with an impatient wave of his hand.

  “You saw what happened that night,” he went on when the waiter went back to the kitchen with his order, “that night when the two of you were at the house and Jewell showed up. She knew damn well she wasn’t welcome there anymore and there she was anyway.”

  “Maybe she had something she needed to say to you,” Maureen said.

  “She could have said it in a letter if it was that damn important. No, she just wanted to agitate me about Ben. You saw that bracelet she threw at me. She and Eli probably wanted to do another one of their useless ceremonies with it like they did last time.”

  “What do you mean, ‘last time’?” Gil asked him.

  Clayton didn’t answer until his ice cream sundae had been delivered and he had consumed two or three spoonfuls of the confection with as much mechanical indifference as a horse eating feed.

  “She and Eli showed up at the ranch a few days before Ben went off to the war. I don’t know how she knew he was going. I gue
ss he had written to her about it. They set up their tent down by the creek and I didn’t make too much of a fuss about it at the time. I figured I owed it to Sarey to be hospitable. Ben spent a lot of time with them down there but they seemed to be behaving themselves so I just let it go on. But the night before he was supposed to leave I heard a lot of singing coming from that tent. I remember some of those Comanche songs but I didn’t understand a word of what they were singing about in Kiowa and it made me suspicious.

  “So I just walked into the tent to see what was going on. It was the three of them sitting around a fire, Jewell and Eli doing the singing and Ben just staring into the coals like he’d lost his wits. I’d heard about that peyote church that Quanah Parker got started up there in the Territories and I knew right away that was what they were up to. I walked around that fire circle to grab Ben and get him out of there. Eli stood up and started yelling at me that I was going in the wrong direction, but I didn’t care about what he had to say one way or the other. The two of us got into a scuffle and then Ben got into it too. I saw that bracelet on his wrist and I tore it off. It ended up with me dragging him out of there somehow and the two of us yelling at each other. He’d eaten enough of that damn peyote to where he didn’t make a bit of sense, but maybe I didn’t either. I didn’t care.”

  “What was the purpose of the ceremony?” Gil asked. “To protect him in the war?”

  Clayton nodded wearily. “That’s what Jewell kept yelling at me. That was what the bracelet was for too. But I already told you I wasn’t going to stand for that nonsense. And it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. You tell me what you think: you think a buffalo tooth bracelet’s going to stop a German artillery shell?”

  He was staring at Gil with aggressive intensity, as if he really meant for the question to be answered.

  “You don’t need my opinion about any of this,” Gil said. “You already know what sort of a mistake you made.”

  “I guess I do.”

  Clayton looked down at his melting sundae in its glass tulip dish. He took another bite of ice cream and then set down the spoon and watched the snow brushing softly against the windows.

  “Anyway,” he said finally, “that was the last time I ever saw Ben.”

  EVEN AS THE TRAIN traveled south to tropical San Antonio the winter storm held steady. Gil and Maureen lingered after dinner in the dining car, passing ice-sheathed tree branches that shone in the moonlight and fields whose shallow coating of snow made them eerily luminescent. The dispute with Clayton had thrown them briefly into a lively alliance that seemed now to be fading. The revelation about his break with his son should have provided them with plenty to discuss on their trip home, but perhaps it was too raw a subject so soon after their own argument about Vance.

  “I had a letter from the Louisiana Historical Society before we left,” Gil said to Maureen, in the careful tone they seemed to be using with each other lately. “They want a La Salle for the riverfront in New Orleans.”

  “A competition?”

  “No, it’s mine if I want it. But they want to meet me and draw up the contract while I’m there. I hate to leave the Clayton before it’s off to the foundry, but they want me in New Orleans in the next few weeks.”

  “So you have a major commission in your pocket. No wonder you were so quick to give Mr. Clayton his check back.”

  “It’s not about money and you know it.”

  “Yes, I know it, Daddy.”

  “I had no intention of letting that man push me around. It seems to be his way of doing things, judging by how he drove off his own son, but it won’t work on me.”

  “I feel sorry for him,” Maureen said.

  “Of course. It’s a pitiful situation all the way round.”

  They resumed looking out the windows as the Texas night rolled by. The disquiet that had arisen between Gil and his daughter over Vance Martindale still lingered, and he had been unsettled by hearing Clayton’s story of open hostility toward his own son. Their situations were hardly comparable, of course. Clayton was a hard and naturally disapproving man, his confused grief just another means of angering people and pushing them away. But Gil could recognize traces of that overbearing man in himself. He too was a father who expected his child, even his grown child, to behave in a certain way, an expectation that, as in Clayton’s case, was no longer countered or softened by a motherly influence. But didn’t all fathers, if they were worth anything, expect something of the sort?

  It would be several hours before the train arrived in San Antonio. Maureen excused herself to go back to the parlor car to finish the Sherwood Anderson novel she was reading. Gil stayed in the dining car, thinking about his statue of Ben Clayton. The trip to Clayton’s ranch, for all its unpleasantness, had been worth it. Now with the piece nearly finished and so strongly lodged in his imagination, it was almost as if it had already been in place when he stood again on that lonely summit. He had seen at once that by placing the statue six inches farther to the west than he had originally planned he could bring the whole landscape into conformance with it. The statue would in some mysterious way define the world that surrounded it. And he had also seen that a delicate shift of Ben Clayton’s eye line would make him appear to be looking not just at some distant hill but beyond the horizon itself, giving the piece an additional measure of sadness and lofty yearning.

  He was glad he had made the trip, an extra step he would not have taken for a less crucial sculpture. And confronting Clayton had been necessary, both for his own pride and for the sake of the statue. The work was now his in a way it had not been before. He had claimed it as his own, he would fight for his vision of it. He owed Clayton nothing except the promise to toil in the service of his own imagination, to create a work that had a chance of transcending the demands of the client, perhaps even the vision of the artist.

  What he had learned from Clayton in the dining room of the Grace Hotel, the anger and heartbreak and never-to-be-healed rift between father and son, would now work its way into the statue. He did not know how exactly, but it would. The new information residing in his mind would be transferred to his hands as he modeled the clay, and would be present in the final image of the boy’s face.

  TWENTY

  Dear Miss Gilheaney,

  I am sorry to trouble you again by writing to you. I hope you don’t take it wrong I just have to talk to an American every now and then and though this is not talking but writing it feels kind of the same. You have been very kind to answer my letters and tell me about the statue and to give me news of the States. I don’t know what I think about prohibition, I guess it is all right. My uncle Cloyce was bad when it came to drinking and my aunt Verna had to live with it. When it got out of hand once, Cloyce got into a fistfight with his own son, my cousin Phil when Phil was about fifteen. He couldn’t live with his dad anymore after that and moved on down to the Concho country where he is presently working sheep. They could never have passed that law in France if you ask me. The French people drink a lot of wine and put a lot of store by it. I have drunk a lot of wine since I’ve been here but it seems a natural thing to do and I do not think I will end up like my Uncle Cloyce.

  People here are asking about the treaty and when the Americans are going to sign it. I don’t know much more than they do though. I don’t see any American newspapers. Everything is pretty hard to get in Somme-Py but that is okay because I don’t need much and don’t really need to know about what the Reds are up to or what President Wilson has to say about this or that matter because when I am busy with my work the world doesn’t concern me too much.

  Somme-Py you may remember from my previous letter is the name of the little town that is near St. Etienne where I was wounded and Ben was killed. I am not working with the Service des Travaux anymore. There is a man here in Somme-Py named L’Huillier and when he found out I was an American he said I had to help him rebuild the town and he hired me away just like that. L’Huiller is a lieutenant Colonel in the French Army.
He was born in Somme-Py and was a big hero in the war and they sent him to the States to raise money for reconstruction. There is a lot of work to do, since there’s almost nothing left of the town, and decent pay. L’Huiller likes Americans and even wants to rename the place Somme-Py les Marines because the marines helped liberate it. I told him that was all right with me as long as he named it Somme-Py les Marines et La Garde Nationale because the Guard was in that fight too and we don’t care to be left out! He likes having me around to practice his english I think. Also he doesn’t mind the look of my face too much. He was wounded two or three times himself and has seen a lot of boys in my condition.

  So I am not roving all over the Champagne anymore but am in one place Somme-Py and I will call it my home for now. People are moving back in and we are working hard to build a new town where the old one stood. We already built the church back. Well it is only wooden and just temporary but it is satisfying just the same to have built it and see the people go in there to worship.

  Well I will close by thanking you for your patience in reading another letter from me and hoping you will write me back again even though you don’t have to. It is good to have an American friend. I know you don’t think we are friends because we have never met but maybe you don’t have to see somebody in person to get a good idea of who they are and whether that is a person you would like or not. Therefore I like you Miss Gilheaney. I think you are a good lady. You are welcome anytime in my new “home” of Somme-Py where I will show you the “sights.”

  Sincerely,

  Arthur Fry

  It was the third letter she had received from Arthur Fry in three weeks. She read it sitting on the bed in her room with the door closed. Her father was gone to New Orleans and she had the house to herself, but the habit of reading her mail in solitude, in her own private space, had taken root when she was a girl and had grown to be an imperative for a young woman living in a house with her parents. When she was finished reading she sat at her desk and answered the letter immediately, haunted by the thought of this boy as he waited plaintively in his bombed-out village for the appearance of the postman. She did not want to keep him waiting, did not want to disappoint him. It had become her responsibility somehow to keep him from succumbing to despair in a strange land.