Remember Ben Clayton

by Stephen Harrigan

  They were weak from hunger but not sick anymore and it felt like they had woken into a different life. That was the morning that Ben told him about his father, how he’d been taken by Indians when he was a boy and how he’d missed out on a good part of his life because of it, and how he’d just turned meaner and more confused and more demanding the older he’d got. A few weeks before the order came down at Camp Bowie to strike tents, he and his father had gotten into a fight over Ben’s aunt wanting to pray over him in the Indian way. The old man could have gone up to Fort Worth and visited Ben and apologized and said good-bye but he never did. He sent the housekeeper, George’s Mary, instead. Nobody knew exactly when the Arrowheads were supposed to leave for the train station but it was common knowledge it would be soon. Ben told Arthur that if you didn’t go to see your son when he was about to ship out it was pretty clear you didn’t want to, so as far as he was concerned his dad could rot in hell. He had tears in his eyes when he said it. It was the only time Arthur had ever seen Ben cry, the only time he’d ever seemed lonely or lost.

  HE FINISHED his breakfast and walked down to the mairie. Mr. Gilheaney was standing outside drinking coffee and staring off toward the direction of Blanc Mont.

  “Good morning,” he said to Arthur. “Maureen tells me you’ve offered to show us the battlefield.”

  “Yes sir, I’ll show it to you if you want to see it.”

  Maureen came out of the mairie with her coat buttoned against her neck, pulling on her gloves, her breath steaming into the clear air and her skin flushed with cold. They all shook hands the way French people did in the morning.

  “Will we need the car?” the sculptor asked. “Our driver isn’t back yet from Verdun.”

  “We don’t need a car if you don’t mind a stout walk. It’s three or four miles from here.”

  “Nothing would suit us better than a stout walk.”

  Arthur went to find L’Huillier to explain what he was doing. He knew L’Huillier wouldn’t mind, since he had lectured Arthur in the past about his unhealthy and un-French dependency on work, his refusal to uphold civilization by joining with his comrades in their rare days of leisure.

  “Of course you must guide our friends,” L’Huillier declared, looking up from the writing desk in his makeshift office. “There can be no question of this. I would go with you myself but there are a hundred letters I must write today.”

  Arthur filled up his canteen and bought a baguette from the boulangerie truck that made the rounds of the devastated villages twice a week. He put the baguette and some cheese and wine from the Gilheaneys into a pack he’d found near the summit of Blanc Mont where some marine had dropped it in the fighting. Then the three of them set out walking down the dusty trace that had once been the rue de la Chaussée and followed it north out of town.

  He wasn’t sure why he’d offered to show the Gilheaneys the place where Ben had died and where his own face had been blown off. He had been over this ground yard by yard in the Service, so it was not like he was returning to it for the first time, not like it was still haunted for him, but that did not make it a place he cared to visit. Maybe he’d made the offer because he’d been so nervous around Maureen Gilheaney and just felt like he’d needed to say something. It had been strange to be alone in the abris with her, strange to have her looking at him and talking to him the way she did. She had not been like those two girls from Smith College, straining to pretend that nothing was wrong with him, or like Madame L’Huillier, with her motherly pity. He knew that Maureen felt sorry for him like they did, but there was more to it than that, something she seemed to need from him.

  She didn’t look like he thought she would. She had told him in her letters that she was thirty-two, and in his mind he pictured thirty-two as closer to fifty than his own age. She wasn’t beautiful or anything like that. If she had been, he would have been even more nervous around her than he was. But she had some quality that made you feel you ought to be looking at her and listening to her. And as they walked down the road toward what was left of the Bois des Vipères she and her dad were mostly silent, waiting for him to decide when to speak.

  Mr. Gilheaney was tall, with long arms and powerful hands and from beneath the brim of his hat he stared out at the cratered fields like a hawk looking for something to kill. He walked a few feet ahead, outstriding Arthur and Maureen without seeming to be in a hurry, every now and then pausing to let them catch up. Sometimes he took out a sketchbook and made some drawings or notes, holding it close to his chest like it was a secret what he was writing, but mostly he just stared at things, taking it all in, turning it all to his own use in a way Arthur could not quite factor out.

  “We filled in most of the trenches and a lot of the big shell holes last year,” Arthur told them. “There was a big German trench over here on the left side of the road. This was the front before me and Ben and the rest of the Arrowheads got here. The Germans had machine-gun nests all in these woods and when the marines came down this road to take that hill up there they got shot up pretty bad. They call the hill Blanc Mont, I guess because it snows on it sometimes in the winter. But I’ve never seen it white. It’s always just been dirt-colored.”

  The hill rose up before them like a cresting wave, a raw heave of earth, no longer full of twisted metal like when Arthur had first seen it but still riddled with unnatural dips and swells from the uncountable shells that had landed here. The Service had done its best to contour the slope back into something that resembled the work of nature, but it still looked nightmarishly wrong to Arthur. There were no grasses, no crops, just hard, black, poisoned soil.

  He told the Gilheaneys that when he had first seen Blanc Mont, on the night of October 7, it had been so clawed apart by shells you couldn’t even recognize it as a hill, you couldn’t get your bearings about whether the land was rising or falling because the ground right at your feet seemed to pitch every which way itself.

  They had been at their advanced training camp in Nuisement when the orders had come to roll packs and head for the front. They had stood in line at the scales next to the threshing barn where they had camped, a Percheron horse plodding endlessly nearby on a treadmill. They watched in wonder as the great beast exhausted its pointless life. The scales told Arthur his pack weighed forty kilograms, and it wasn’t until they were halfway to Bar-sur-Aube that Ben told him that forty kilograms was the same as ninety pounds. Arthur told him he wished he hadn’t said that, because just knowing he was carrying that much weight on his back made the pack feel heavier. They were both stupefied with fatigue and by the time they reached the train that was to carry them to Chalons their arms quivered as they handed up their packs to the other men in the forty-and-eight railcar.

  At Chalons they were told to leave their pup tents and dress shoes and extra blankets behind and they marched on from there with their packs fifty pounds lighter. Up above them the big German Gotha bombers were flying west—to Paris, Ben guessed. They ate cold meals of canned salmon and canned hash. They heard the shells of the long-range guns roaring and whining above them, and though none of the shells hit nearby they could still feel the earth shake when they landed. No one told them where they were going.

  They had marched to a village named Somme-Suippe and then after a rest they moved north. Beyond Somme-Suippe they came to the heart of the war, the fields in every direction no longer fields, no longer anything, just a heaving infinity of shell craters under the gray winter sky. It was like the ocean he and Ben had seen from the deck of the Lenape, except that on the ocean they could watch the waves moving as the wind pushed them, they could smell and sense the throbbing life below the surface. This ocean did not move, it was as still as death. The ground had been so wildly uneven that every step they moved forward took four or five more steps of clambering up and down. In some stretches work crews had come ahead of them to build a kind of road across the shell holes, but otherwise they just had to climb in and out of the craters, their light combat packs growing hea
vier and heavier, the mud caking their boots and weighing them down even more.

  Most of the dead had been removed by French burial crews, but once the Arrowheads came across a burial crew that had themselves been killed by a shell before they could make it back. The soupy corpse they had been carrying lay on its back with its eyes gone and its slack skin pulling away from the skull. But the stretcher bearers were newly dead and looked surprised to be so. The three of them were grouped around a splintered tree where they had stopped to take a break when the shrapnel struck them. One of the dead men was sitting up. He held his canteen in one hand and the opposite arm was outstretched and resting on his bent knee, as if he were still talking to the other men and trying to make a point about something.

  Arthur didn’t tell Maureen about any of this as he walked along beside her up the slope that led to the long ridgeline summit of Blanc Mont. Her father was ahead of them again, already up to the top, standing with his hands on his hips as he stared off to the west. Maureen stumbled a little on the uneven ground as they climbed. Arthur thought about holding his hand out to her, but she wasn’t helpless or frail and he couldn’t really see himself doing something like that.

  “Is that the Reims cathedral?” Mr. Gilheaney called out to Arthur as he and Maureen joined him at the top.

  “Yes sir, that’s Reims,” Arthur told him.

  “I had no idea we’d be able to see so far.”

  “The country here is pretty open. Even more open once so many trees got blown up in the war.”

  He joined them in staring across the rolling landscape of the Champagne to the distant cathedral spires on the horizon.

  “It’s so lovely,” Maureen said, and then looked at Arthur like she felt bad about saying it. “But I suppose there’s nothing lovely about a battlefield.”

  “I remember looking out at Reims from up here,” Arthur said. “But I knew we were about to get in the fight and I was pretty scared by then, I guess, not really noticing much. By the time we got to the top of this ridge the marines had already taken it, and while we were going up we kept passing them going down. You could see it in their eyes that they’d had a tough time. There were a lot of trenches up in here. They’re mostly filled in now, but those Germans were dug in tight and those marines had a time getting them out.”

  “And that little village there,” Mr. Gilheaney said, pointing off to the north a mile or two. “That’s Saint-Étienne?”

  “Yes sir, it is. That’s where Ben and me were headed. We hadn’t been told that yet, but we could guess it. The Germans were making a stand there and it was pretty clear somebody had to kick them out.”

  “And what was your mood at that prospect?”

  “We were just tired mostly. I guess a part of me wanted to get in there and do what they’d sent us over here to do. But I was scared too.”

  “And Ben?”

  “Maybe he was scared too but he didn’t show it any. He was pretty calm in his mind. That’s why I wanted to be around him. He made me feel like I could get through whatever was coming.”

  They kept walking along the road, down the slope on the far side of Blanc Mont and on toward the plain that led to Saint-Étienne. Mr. Gilheaney strode out ahead again.

  “Your dad doesn’t look like he ever gets tired,” Arthur told Maureen.

  “No, I’m afraid he’s inexhaustible.”

  She smiled at him and he nodded his head but didn’t smile back. He knew that trying to grin with that prosthesis in his mouth would give him the look of a snarling dog and maybe worse.

  “How do you feel coming back here?” she asked him.

  “I don’t feel that much. It’s a whole lot different now than it was then. This stretch here, we came through at night. It was dark and we couldn’t see anything. We had these guides who were supposed to know the way but they kept getting lost, so every so often they’d call out ‘About-face’ and sure enough we had to walk back the way we come. It was poor planning if you ask me but I guess that sort of thing just happens in a war and there’s no point to complain about it.”

  It was true it had been dark that night and he wouldn’t have recognized the ground from walking across it now. But he could still remember exactly how it had felt to be walking toward Saint-Étienne, the whole company anxious and silent and exhausted, the captain and the top kick cursing out the useless guides in a whisper. He remembered the taste of the canned salmon he had eaten for dinner still in his mouth, not enough water to wash it away. He remembered the big blister growing on the ball of his foot, and that worried him more than anything, the idea that he would be crippled by it and left behind. There were German patrols out and he knew that at any minute the company could walk in front of a machine-gun nest or that one of the long-range shells vaulting overhead could come down right on top of them. He had walked behind Ben, keeping his eye on the back of his friend’s neck, trying to copy the steadiness of his step, the calmness he had told Mr. Gilheaney about. Every once in a while Ben would look back and smile at him, like the two of them were in on a joke together. Arthur was all right as long as he was in step behind Ben, as long as the two of them were pretending this was all just a big adventure and not a nightmare that was drawing them closer and closer into itself.

  Arthur was all right until they ran into that damn Indian from Company E. After that, everything changed and Arthur felt alone in the night.

  THIRTY

  About right here was the jump-off line,” Arthur told them. They had walked north for a half hour from the top of Blanc Mont. Now they stood facing the village of Saint-Étienne-á-Arnes, several hundred yards away across an open field. The ground was mostly level, the big craters filled in by Arthur and his colleagues. But the field remained untilled and unplanted, still scarred and bare.

  Gil brought out his sketchbook as Maureen took aim at the desolation in front of them with her Kodak. He sketched quickly, the big wooded hill to the right, the long, barren approach to the village, the scattered stone buildings visible beneath bare winter trees whose spreading branches had been sheared off in a lopsided manner by the shelling of a year and a half ago. He wasn’t sure why he was sketching all this, what purpose it could possibly serve in the execution of the Clayton statue if he decided to resume work on it. It was only curiosity leading him on at this point. From the beginning he had been vexed by some missing understanding in his portrait of Ben Clayton, and he was intrigued by the idea that this hidden something could be grasped and given life in his statue.

  “Better watch your step,” Arthur said as Gil put back his sketchbook and the three of them began to walk toward the village. “We got most of the shells out but some of them were buried deep and might have worked their way up to the top. And there could be some wire and rebar and such too.”

  As they strolled along at a casual pace, Arthur fell silent. This was the killing zone, Gil realized, and he could detect this same solemn awareness in his daughter’s face. She stopped taking snapshots and hung the camera by its strap over her shoulder, just walking forward with a respectful stride. Gil had the odd feeling he had just become a kind of proxy for Lamar Clayton, walking across a stretch of ground on the other side of the ocean that the old rancher would never see, could never bear to see.

  Gil and Maureen waited for Arthur to speak. As they waited they drew closer to the village. They could make out towering gravestones behind the gray rock of the distant cemetery wall, the shattered steeple of the village church off to the left.

  “I expect you want to know what it was like that morning,” Arthur said, coming to a stop about halfway to the village.

  “We do,” Maureen answered. “We’d be grateful if you told us.”

  “Well, it wasn’t too bad at first. They had what you call a rolling barrage in front of us, and we were supposed to be walking behind that. But we got kind of a late start and nobody seemed to know what was going on and by the time we jumped off that barrage didn’t do us much good. Right about here was where all
hell broke loose. There were machine gunners up on that hill and behind that cemetery wall, and in that steeple in the church. Pretty much everywhere, it seemed like. They didn’t open up till we got here. That’s where the wire was, where a lot of boys got hit. Ben and I got through somehow and we made it to about right over there. Twenty yards, I’d guess.”

  Arthur walked to the spot with deliberate strides, as if he was confirming his estimate of the distance.

  “There was a machine-gun nest over there,” he said, pointing off to the left. “They had us pinned down here pretty bad. But we were in a shell hole and as long as we kept our heads down they couldn’t get us, so I was happy right where I was. Ben wasn’t, though. He didn’t even say a word to me about it, he just took off to go after that machine gun.”