“I know it,” he said.
“I’m a fifty-eight-year-old woman with half my teeth gone.”
“They’d still be gone whether Ben was alive or dead. Wouldn’t make no difference.”
“I know, but I cared about that boy and he cared about me and now I got nothing.”
“Ain’t you a little late bringing all this up?”
“Didn’t know I’m supposed to feel things like I’m on a train schedule.”
She reached down and picked up the bloody cotton she had thrown on the ground and put it into her pocket instead. She turned to him and asked him if he thought about his folks much.
“Not much, I guess. I’m old and that was a hell of a long time ago.”
“I think about mine.”
She didn’t seem to have any more to say about the matter, so he just sat there with her without either of them saying anything. It wasn’t a bad place to sit on a mild February day, and he was tired from changing the tire anyway. He figured he would just give her whatever time she needed to get out of this mood she was in.
She didn’t pity herself for the most part, but every once in a while the idea that she’d missed out on something got ahold of her and wouldn’t let go for a few days. The first time he ever saw her she’d been beat all to hell and looked a lot worse than she did now. It had taken days for the swelling to go down enough to where you could see the natural shape of her head and the look of her face. He had come across her one morning when he was walking through the Flat looking for someplace to eat breakfast. She was sitting out in the dirt in front of Conrad’s store groaning and staring off into space and holding her split lip together. None of her bones were broken, but they had worked her over pretty good in all sorts of ways. Lamar talked to the sheriff in the Flat and the duty officer at Fort Griffin and even a man on the vigilance committee but he couldn’t get anybody interested. The teamsters that had done it had left in the night and had a good start, and anyway they were carrying freight for the biggest merchants in town. Even the other whores didn’t care about her. She was new in town to begin with and she wasn’t friendly. She’d been rude and pouty with the customers and it was no wonder somebody finally treated her like that.
Lamar was in his late thirties then, getting a good start for himself finally after too many years of wandering and drinking and not doing much worth a damn. Quanah Parker, the Quahada chief whose own mother had been a white captive, was the big man on the Comanche and Kiowa reservation in those days, and Lamar had talked him into leasing him some land for six cents an acre, a better price than even Burk Burnett had got. He made enough money on that Comanche land grazing longhorns that he was able to buy a few thousand acres in Shackelford County and gave up the lease years before the government would have taken it away anyway for nothing. There was a homesteader’s abandoned blockhouse on the land and he built his house around that piece by piece, and brought in Durhams and Herefords and worked on getting them right. He kept a few longhorns for nostalgic reasons but otherwise the hell with them. You could lose money thinking the years hadn’t passed and the country was still wild.
When he came across George’s Mary, he was living in his house on the ranch but he was as likely as not to be out in the line camps with the hands. He asked her if she could cook and keep house and she said she could do both. He decided that even if she was lying she would do a better job than he did, and it made sense to him to have somebody in the house when he wasn’t around. So after she’d healed up a little he took her back. He wasn’t sure why he trusted her, he just did. She was young and in those days was not bad-looking, but he never had anything to do with her that way, and it didn’t matter to him if people thought he did. She turned out to be a better cook than he thought, though she was starchy and opinionated and acted like she was the one who’d done him a favor by coming to live with him and not the other way around. She was a little resentful at first when Sarey came into the picture, but she softened up soon enough, and when Ben was born he brought the feelings out of her that she’d been hiding away all those years. It was hard to look at her now, because the grief at losing Ben had never really left her face. She was old in a way that wasn’t just old, but broken and angry and even kind of righteous, as if she meant for you to look at her and see that there was no such thing as being happy after all and you were a fool to have ever believed otherwise.
Lamar thought he probably gave the same impression to people. He and George’s Mary were more alike than they were different. There weren’t too many people who could say they’d lost their family to Indians, even back in those days. And they’d both been coaxed back into the world before having it close down on them again.
“I guess I’m about through sitting on this rock,” she said at last in her tight-jawed mumble.
When Lamar stood up, he had to take a minute, because there were jabbing pains in his knee from kneeling in the dirt to change the tire and he was not all that sure it would even support him. But he worked it out enough to hobble back to the car.
“You’re getting too decrepit to sit a horse,” she said, goading him again after he’d been nothing but kind to her the whole day.
“To hell with you,” he said, but he was glad she was getting some of her bite back.
When they got home she went straight to her bed and he opened the mail. One of the letters was from Gil Gilheaney. There was a check inside reimbursing Lamar for the money he had paid out. The letter said “unforeseen circumstances” had made it impossible for Gilheaney to continue the project after all. He wished Lamar well and thanked him for his patience and said he would be happy to recommend another sculptor if one was desired.
Clayton picked up a chair and threw it against the wall. George’s Mary came out of her room and wondered why he didn’t have the decency to give her even a moment of peace.
“Because the sonofabitch went back on his word is why!” Clayton said, thrusting the letter at her.
“Just tell me what it says. My teeth hurt too bad to read.”
“It says he decided not to do the statue. Says it all calm and business-like, like it don’t matter a dime to him. Probably got a commission that paid him more and he just decided mine wasn’t worth the trouble. By God, I shook that man’s hand and looked him in the eye.”
“Well, that’s too bad but there ain’t nothing you can do about it. We don’t really need a statue of Ben anyway if you want my opinion on the subject.”
“Who the hell wants your opinion?”
Her jaw was throbbing too hard to take the insult personally. She just gave Lamar a dismissive wave and padded back to her room. He stood there in the parlor, too mad to sit down, not sure what to do with himself, just knowing he by god wasn’t going to stand for being treated that way by some self-important artist who couldn’t even keep his seat on a horse.
TWENTY-FOUR
Show me your goddam gas mask!” the inspection officer was yelling in Arthur’s dream. It was night and mustard gas had pooled all around them in the shell craters, and the officer was staring down with disgust as Arthur tried to claw his way out of a putrid slurry of liquefied human remains. If he did not get his mask on in the next few seconds the mustard gas would kill him, but for some reason his fear of the officer’s disapproval was greater than his fear of a hideous death.
Then the officer was gone and Arthur was on another part of the battlefield, horribly alone now in the foul blackness, listening to the Boche machine gunners laughing at him from their lines, taking their time with him. His mother and father and brother had just arrived. They were part of a group of battlefield tourists that was picking its way across the craters with their Michelin guides. His mother was calling his name. He tried to call back but before he could open his mouth a German soldier grabbed him from behind and was squeezing his face so hard with his big hands that he couldn’t breathe. The man was breaking his face apart and the broken pieces were choking him.
Waking up did not stop the pan
ic. The prosthesis had shifted in his sleep. It took him a moment to realize that it wasn’t totally blocking his breath and that if he was calm he could guide it back into place along the bone-grooves in his jaw. He decided, when he had stopped shaking, that he must have turned over on his side while he slept and knocked the prosthesis against the wooden frame of his cot.
It was cold but there was no wind blowing and he was too shaken by the dream and the treacherous prosthesis to stay in his hut. He put on his coat and gloves and walked outside. He lived alone in a little abris he had built himself out of scavenged wood and tôle. It was just down the street, or what used to be the street, from the old mairie that had been destroyed in the bombing. In its place was the mairie-baraque, the temporary city hall that was merely a grander version of Arthur’s own hut, and which he and the rest of the workers had hurried to finish for the visit of Poincaré the day before. The president had been traveling through the Devastated Zone, stopping at each destroyed town to marvel at the resiliency of the inhabitants and to promise that aid was on the way.
Much of the aid that the village had gotten so far, though, had come from America, where Lieutenant L’Huillier, who had grown up in Somme-Py, had been sent to raise funds. He had arranged some sort of fashion show in New York and enough money was starting to come in that in a few months they would be able to start building in earnest, not just baraquements but real stone buildings like they used to have before.
It was two in the morning, he supposed. He stood alone in the center of Somme-Py, his hand to his jaw, making sure he had worked the prosthesis back into place. It had been the worst dream he had ever had. The most horrible part had been his placid acceptance of the decaying human sludge in which he had been trapped as if it were quicksand. His mother’s voice, helplessly calling his name, was still echoing out of the dream. He could hear it now, and he had to convince himself not to try to answer it.
They had brought him up Baptist but he had never taken to any of it that much. He didn’t know about heaven but he had a pretty good idea that if there was one his mother would be waiting for him there and not looking for him in France like she had in the dream.
The night was moonless and the stars in their brightness only made it darker and caused him to feel more alone. The two hundred or so villagers who had moved back to Somme-Py to rebuild their homes were all asleep and so were the workers like himself who were being paid by the government to help them. There were still tables set out in front of the mairie-baraque from yesterday’s rally, and their emptiness heightened his desolation. He had stayed in his hut while Poincaré spoke, even though Madame L’Huillier and her husband had tried to talk him into attending, saying that people would be grateful for the chance to honor a young American soldier who had already given so much for France. Maybe even Poincaré himself would want to shake his hand.
But Arthur hadn’t wanted to shake the president’s hand, or to meet any of the people flooding into Somme-Py from other destroyed villages, people he did not know and whose horrified and piteous glances he would have to endure. He only wanted to be around people who were used to him. The thought of traveling even to another village, let alone to Reims, or to Paris, with its throngs of gaping strangers, or especially back home to Texas, was as much the material of a nightmare as the war memories that hounded him in his sleep.
He walked behind the waist-high wall of a bombed-out house to piss. Dogs were barking, but at each other, not at him. The village dogs all knew him and he liked their company because they did not try to cheer him on or encourage him. He liked speaking to them in French.
Except for the barking dogs the silence in the village was consuming, not an absence of noise but the presence of some aggressive deadening force. In the bombardment before the attack on Saint-Étienne he had felt something like it, all that unbelievable commotion reaching at its most intense pitch a crescendo of nothingness, the ruling silence of the universe bearing down, taking control.
Standing alone tonight in the center of the village, in the cold air, he felt the horrors of the dream slowly dissipating. But the darkness all around him and the foreign cosmos overhead greatly amplified his loneliness, and finally he had to retreat back into his abris so he wouldn’t be exposed any longer to that crushing emptiness. He put a few more sticks of wood into the stove. He was still too scared and too alone to sleep, so he lit his lantern and pulled out the letter he had received that afternoon from Maureen Gilheaney. He had read it three times already but he had not yet memorized it like he had the others. It was still new enough that he felt a sense of keen anticipation as he slipped it out of its envelope.
Dear Arthur,
Please, Maureen from now on. “Miss Gilheaney” makes me feel old, and this has been the sort of week when I don’t care to feel any older than I already am. Some rather puzzling and painful things have happened—personal things which fortunately are much too complicated to explain, so you are hereby spared the spectacle of my self-pity. (Sorry—I just realized I’m sounding breezy and dismissive, and that’s not a tone I mean to strike. I don’t know what sort of tone I mean to strike, in fact. Honesty, I suppose, but not if that means detailing my trivial troubles to someone who has suffered so much real pain.)
There is one disappointing piece of news about the statue I must tell you. Almost at the moment of its completion, before it was to be cast in plaster and then sent off to the foundry to be finally cast in bronze, the piece was destroyed. The stove in the studio went out and the clay froze. There was quite a discussion in our house about whose fault this was, though neither my father nor I is in a mood to accept the blame, and it doesn’t matter anyway. The point is that the statue of Ben won’t happen now. I’m not sure my father has the will anymore to start all over again. When he was younger this would have been a terrible setback but he would have gotten over it soon enough, in fact it might even have invigorated him. But he’s not as resilient as he was. He’s sixty now. His hands are hurting him, arthritis I think—though he doesn’t talk about it and I’m sensible enough not to ask.
I know you were enthusiastic about seeing the statue of your friend and I’m sorry. Daddy told me that he wrote Mr. Clayton to tell him that the deal is off and to return his money. Fortunately there is another commission so the bills will be paid, although I don’t think my father has much interest in the subject, not the sort of interest he had in portraying Ben.
Yesterday a delivery truck pulled up to the house and unloaded four big wooden crates from the Coppini Foundry in New York. I think I told you about my “Spirit of the Waters” sculpture. Well, here it was, or at least the four panels—the granite base is still to be contracted for and manufactured. I know I should have been thrilled when I looked at the finished bronze but I just felt terribly flat instead. Maybe it’s just because of the last few weeks, but I wonder if it’s something more, the idea that nobody cares about this kind of thing as much as we pretend they do. I’ve done a nice decorative piece but that’s all it is, just decoration. Just something to relieve the plainness that would be there without it. But maybe we’re all mistaken in thinking that plainness—or even emptiness—is something that needs to be relieved. I suppose you could even say that about the statue of Ben. It could be that Ben’s absence is memorial enough and that the best thing you could have said about my father’s statue, even if it was a great work of art, was that it was beside the point.
Well, it’s very late—I can’t sleep tonight—and I see that Miss Gilheaney is making no sense. Is it very cold there? Do you need anything that we could send you, like a warm coat or gloves? Now I’m sounding like your mother instead of your friend, but I’d like to send you something. Something that could be useful to you in your new life in France or remind you—in a good way—of your life back here in the States, in Texas. I know you said you aren’t ever coming home but you’re very young and sometimes young people think that when they decide something they’re bound to it for the rest of their lives. I guess th
at’s an example of the cheap unasked-for advice you get from someone who managed to set a trap for herself but hasn’t quite managed to find the way out.
I shouldn’t even mail this but I probably will.
Maureen
When he’d first read the letter, he hadn’t known what she was so upset about and he still didn’t. Something seemed to have gone wrong between her and her father. He was pretty sure there was more to it than just what had happened to the statue. She had never sent him a photo so he couldn’t picture her one way or the other. But he had a sense of her through her letters, somebody who was unhappy and lonesome, who was too proud to come out and say it but needed somebody to know it just the same. It was odd that he was the person she had chosen to tell, somebody she had never seen and would probably never meet, somebody she would look away from in horror if she ever saw his face.
It was funny to think she was the only person in the whole United States he wrote letters to and got letters from. Somebody he didn’t even know. He felt that if she were here he could talk to her in a way he couldn’t talk to those girls from Smith College. Maybe it was because she was old, in her thirties; maybe it was the way something was gnawing at her, something that she wouldn’t say or maybe couldn’t even name. Nothing seemed to have been gnawing at those college girls. It was like they had been born into the world already knowing what it was all about and how to make their way through it.
He didn’t want to try to go back to sleep after that dream. He took out one of the school tablets that had come in the boxes of supplies from the States and sharpened a pencil with his pocketknife over the stove, watching the tiny shavings flare up as they hit the fire. He sat at the edge of his cot with his jacket still on and a piece of scrap lumber for a writing desk and wrote Maureen Gilheaney back.
He said he was sorry to hear about what had happened to the statue and sorry to hear she was out of sorts. He said he had been having a bad night himself, starting with the dream about his folks. Now he was sitting here afraid to go to sleep again and feeling pretty lonesome. He told her it was like he could see all at once the emptiness of the Champagne fields and the rest of France beyond it, and past that the whole dark ocean. All of it seemed to exist just to separate him from the home he had once had and the person he had once been. He understood what she said about setting traps for yourself but he still didn’t think there was any point in ever going back to Texas. He’d had some childhood friends in Ranger, and he’d had some other friends he’d made in the army, but it couldn’t be the same with them now and he knew it. All of them looking at him, or trying not to, and remembering how he had been. She was his only friend now. He didn’t mean that like it sounded, like he was feeling sorry for himself, it was just true. And he’d never even talked to her or seen a picture of her. He asked her would she please just keep writing even if she felt bad like she had when she wrote that last letter. It made him feel like somebody was really talking to him, not just trying to be kind.
Remember Ben Clayton Page 28