“Something happened to him, you said, something that made him not seem to care whether he lived or died. I want to know what that something was. I need to know that because I want this statue to have the truth in it.”
“I don’t believe you, Mr. Gilheaney, not really. That sounds good what you just said, it sounds like the way an artist ought to talk, but you’d probably be pretty poor at your job if you couldn’t put the truth in that statue yourself without needing me to tell you what it was.”
“All right. Fair enough.”
He moved closer to Arthur and put his hand on his shoulder. He looked him steadily in the eye, something that Arthur wasn’t used to. Most people, even those who knew him well, like L’Huillier or his wife, tended to meet his eyes for only a moment and then look away like there was something off to the side that had just happened to catch their interest.
“I didn’t mean to be condescending. Leave the statue out of it. Leave art out of it. Maybe I just want to know. For myself, for myself and my daughter.”
Arthur glanced over at Maureen. She stood there with her gloved hand at her throat, fingering the top button of her jacket. She didn’t say anything, but the expression on her face said it was up to him whether he wanted to talk about it or not.
“I don’t think Ben’s dad ought to know about it,” he told them.
“You can trust us not to tell him,” Gilheaney said firmly.
“All right,” Arthur told them. “There was this Indian.”
THE INDIAN’S NAME was Felix Whiteblanket. Arthur and Ben had met him coming over on the Lenape, after they’d gotten past the worst of their seasickness and the men in the different companies had started to mix a little bit, playing cards down in the hold and bragging back and forth to each other about where they were from and what sort of work they had done before they ended up in the army.
Company E was made up of men from the Indian Territories up in Oklahoma. Most of them were Choctaws and Cherokees, some of them were rich from oil leases on their allotments and had big cars and big houses back at home. There was an Osage boy on the ship that everybody talked about who had supposedly gotten a check before he left Camp Bowie for sixty-six thousand dollars.
There were only two or three Comanches in Company E and Felix Whiteblanket was one of them. He said nobody had bothered to look for oil on his land and he didn’t care if they ever did. He didn’t care about being rich and he pretended he didn’t care about much of anything else. He was silent and a little disdainful of all the rowdy behavior on the ship, and he acted like there wasn’t anything in the world that could surprise him.
But he had been friendly to Ben and took a liking to him. Maybe it was because Ben was silent in his own way and didn’t make a show of anything. The three of them sat on the deck playing dominoes and talking horses and cattle and watching a group of officers try to shoot flying fish with their Springfields, leading them the way hunters lead ducks. The way the flying fish skimmed above the surface of the ocean, staying aloft far longer than you would have ever thought, reminded Arthur of his own dreams of flying, in which he would suddenly rediscover a magical hovering ability that he had forgotten he possessed.
After Ben had gotten comfortable around Felix Whiteblanket, he told him about how his father had been captured by Comanches when he was a boy. Arthur recalled Felix nodding his head and playing his next domino, like he would lose face somehow if he showed too much interest in anything. He said he was going to write to his own folks to see if they’d ever heard of Lamar Clayton. He asked Ben if his dad had a Comanche name. Ben said he didn’t know because his dad never talked about any of that.
They didn’t see Felix again for months after that, not until that long nighttime march from Somme-Py when they were crossing over Blanc Mont to get into position for the attack on Saint-Étienne. They had been walking for many hours through the mud and even though they only had light combat packs on their backs they still staggered under the load. Arthur felt his oozing blister with every step. His canteen was empty and all he could think about was when the water wagons would be brought up from the wells. When Sergeant Kitchens told them to fall out and take a break, it wasn’t because somebody had taken pity on them, it was because they were lost. They collapsed onto the muddy ground, taking care not to get entangled in barbed wire or to slice open their legs on a shell fragment. They sat there listening to the German long-range guns bombarding Somme-Py and the roads leading out from it. Every time an 88 exploded in the distance the earth shook underneath them, and sometimes they heard the dud shells ploughing into the mud with no explosion but with a terrorizing impact all their own.
Felix had been sent as a runner to tell the captain to have the company stay put and wait until the guides had had a chance to talk and figure out where they were. After he was through making his report he managed to find Ben and Arthur and sat down in the mud with them. Felix had a few sips of water left in his canteen and he drank it down without offering them any. It made Arthur angry but he knew that he wouldn’t have shared any of his water either if that was all he had. The three of them were almost too tired to open their mouths and with all those German 88’s screaming across the sky it felt unlucky to be talking anyway. Nevertheless Felix told Ben he was hoping he’d run into him again because he’d just gotten a letter from his grandfather up on the Kiowa-Comanche reservation. Felix had written him and told him about meeting Ben and how Ben had said his father was with the Quahadas back in the olden days. The grandfather wrote back and said it was a pretty small world, because when he was a young man he’d known Lamar Clayton pretty well.
“Grandfather said you couldn’t hardly tell your dad wasn’t born a Comanche,” Felix said to Ben. They were all shivering now. They’d been sweating under their packs while they were marching but now that they’d stopped they felt the cold again, one more misery piled up on top of all the others.
“Well, he never was the sort to do things halfway,” Ben said. “He never talked about that time of his life to me much.”
“Grandfather said he killed white folks.”
“No, he wouldn’t have done that.”
“He said they was on a raid together and Lamar Clayton did his share of the work. Grandfather watched him shoot a white boy with an arrow.”
“I don’t want to hear that kind of talk about my father.”
“Said it happened over on the Salt Fork.”
When Felix mentioned the Salt Fork there was a shuddering far-off explosion. The distant shell burst lit up Ben’s face for a second like heat lightning, and Arthur could see his friend’s eyes turning cold and his mouth growing tight as he figured out the meaning of what Felix had just told him.
“You don’t know anything about it,” he said to the Indian.
“I just told you I did.”
“Shut up about it.”
“Your old man was a wild sonofabitch is all. He was a goddam wild Indian, just like my grandfather. It didn’t bother either of them none to kill white people. That was just the way things were in those days.”
“I told you I didn’t want you talking about this.”
But Felix was grinning now. They hadn’t seen him like this before. He had a cruel, needling side that all the exhaustion and fear was bringing out.
“Don’t know why you’re upset,” he said. “You ought to be proud your old man took a scalp or two. You ought to be—”
By that time Ben was on him and they were rolling around in the mud, but they were both too tired and overloaded with equipment to make much of a fight of it. Neither of them had a chance to even land a punch before Kitchens broke it up and sent Felix back to Company E and told Ben he’d better shut his fucking mouth and behave himself or he’d personally kick out his teeth for him.
Ben didn’t say anything. Kitchens left, shaking his head in disgust, and Ben just kept sitting there and wouldn’t talk to Arthur anymore or even look at him.
“HE WAS just locked inside his head,” A
rthur told the Gilheaneys. “He was like that all through the night and during the attack the next day and up until he got killed.”
They had been walking for twenty minutes and now they were halfway up the northern slope of Blanc Mont on their way back home to Somme-Py.
“I reckon we can eat our lunch up at the top,” Arthur said. But Gilheaney had stopped walking. He just stood there thinking, taking in what Arthur had told him.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Ben had always known his father was with the Indians. He must have guessed he might have been involved in a raid or two. Why did it come as such a shock that he’d throw his life away?”
“Well, I believe he was still pretty mad at the old man, on account of the way he’d been treated by him. And the raid Felix told him about, there was something personal about it.”
“Something personal?”
But Maureen had already guessed what he was talking about.
“George’s Mary,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, the housekeeper. That was her family that Mr. Clayton and those Indians killed.”
THIRTY-ONE
They had come to the American cemetery in Romagne early in the day. The weather was still raw and the grounds unfinished, just a flagpole and a paved road and temporary wooden buildings where the staff and groundskeepers huddled around their stoves. And fourteen thousand white crosses massed on the hillside.
The rows of crosses were laid out with such bewitching military precision that Gil had the sensation, walking through them, of being in a trompe l’oeil painting, a landscape ruled by a trickster’s perspective. As they made their way up the slope, along the grassy aisles sectioning the burial zones, more white crosses seemed to spring up at the crest of the hill, rank after endless rank of them.
Gil checked the map the American caretaker had given him and led Maureen and Arthur to a row of graves halfway up the hill. They found the cross with Ben’s name on it and Gil and Arthur took off their hats. The three of them stared down at the marker in silence for a moment, then Maureen set down a spray of winter flowers on the grave.
“I think we should take a snapshot for Mr. Clayton,” she told Gil.
“Of course.”
While she took the photo he glanced down at the big elliptical driveway at the base of the hill, where their driver, Stuart, and the caretaker stood smoking and talking as they leaned against the front fender of the Thomas Cook touring car. Then he looked over at Arthur, who had backed away from Ben’s grave as soon as Maureen got out her Brownie, alarmed at the idea of his picture accidentally being taken. The young man stood there with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, staring down at the tombstone of his friend with no apparent emotion on his face. Of course it would have been difficult to detect emotion there in the first place, since his shattering wound had left his face as blank and inexpressive as that of the man in the moon.
Maureen walked this way and that in front of the grave, looking for the best angle for her camera. It was the right thing to do to take a picture for Lamar Clayton, though Gil could not imagine the rancher taking any comfort in receiving it. The old bastard was probably beyond comfort anyway, and that was as it should be. Clayton had not just fought with his son and turned his back on him. It was worse than that. He had killed Ben with the secret of his own long-ago crimes; he had shut the door of understanding in his boy’s face and the boy had died because of it.
After Maureen finished taking her photos, Gil got down on one knee in front of the cross and studied the words incised in the marble: BENJAMIN CLAYTON PRVT 1 CL 142 INF. 36 DIV. TEXAS OCT. 8, 1918.
“Do you want to say something, Daddy?”
“What?”
Maureen’s voice had surprised him. He had apparently been kneeling there for some minutes.
“You looked like you meant to say something.”
He shook his head and stood up. His daughter was weeping. She was standing close to Arthur now. She reached down and touched the stone.
“Well,” she said, “maybe we understand him a little better now.”
THEY HAD a late petit déjeuner at a café in Romagne and drove back to Somme-Py. Stuart narrated the events of the last year of the war as they passed through the Argonne Forest and out again into the open Champagne countryside, through a succession of bombed-out villages.
“This is the old Roman road we’re on now,” Stuart told them. “Julius Caesar himself came this way, if I don’t miss my guess. You’ll find no shortage of history in this part of the country. History upon history, you might say, Mr. Gilheaney.”
Gil sat in the front seat with Stuart, distractedly nodding his head. To Maureen, in back with Arthur, the driver’s history lectures were an annoyance. She didn’t feel like listening to anyone prattle on about anything.
She watched Arthur as he stared out the window at the ruined villages and houses. Somme-Py was not unique. There must have been hundreds of villages just like it throughout this part of France, villages all but erased from the earth by years of bombardment. And then there were the dead, none of them unique either, lying beneath the earth in their uncountable multitudes. There were graveyards everywhere, their crosses spreading across the landscape in crop-like rows, monuments going up at every village crossroads. She had the feeling that there was something futile, maybe selfish, in their attempts to conjure up the last days of a single soldier, in investing so much in the creation of one more statue—a statue that would serve as a monument to her father’s art as much as to its subject’s life.
She had taken it as a matter of course throughout her life that art was an essentially noble thing, that individual practitioners might be scoundrels but that art itself was exempt from charges of exploitation. But she felt like a predator today. She and her father had come here against Arthur’s wishes. He had compliantly allowed them to drag him through memories he might have preferred to forget. It was Maureen who had suggested they should visit Ben’s grave, and she could tell Arthur had not really wanted to come along. He only wanted to be left alone to do his work in Somme-Py, among familiar people, like the L’Huilliers, who asked nothing of him. But out of politeness he had joined them on the drive to Romagne and stood there uncertainly at the grave of his friend.
They would go on to Reims tomorrow and take the train for Paris. Tonight they would stay once more in Somme-Py, releasing Stuart again to find more comfortable accommodations. As soon as they arrived in town L’Huillier insisted they dine again with him and his wife, and though Maureen would have preferred to escape his hospitality there was no particular way to refuse. During the dinner Gil signed over a traveler’s check and pressed it into L’Huillier’s hands for the Somme-Py fund. It was a sizable amount, the cost of their combined Atlantic passages, and L’Huillier beamed with gratitude and promised he would have their names written on the wall of the Salle Mémoriale Franco-Américaine, which would be the great room where the citizens of Somme-Py would congregate when the permanent mairie was built.
“Do you suppose Mr. Clayton ever told his wife?” Maureen asked her father after they had said good night to the L’Huilliers and to Arthur and walked back to their rough quarters in the provisional mairie.
“Told her what?”
“About what he had done to George’s Mary’s family. About all of it.”
“I shouldn’t think so,” he said, as he distractedly arranged his blankets on the narrow cot in the big open room of the building. Maureen’s own cot was on the other side of the partition, in the small office where they had first encountered Arthur. “We know that much about him. He doesn’t share his secrets easily.”
“Let me do that, Daddy. You’re hopeless.”
She stripped off the sheets and blankets and tucked them in properly as best she could.
“It would have made a difference if she had known,” Maureen said as she set a rough pillow at the head of the cot. “She would have found a way to tell him.”
“You think so?”
> “Of course I do. Women don’t like secrets.”
“Yes, you’ve made that clear enough.”
“Maybe she would have kept him from hating his father. Maybe she would have kept him from dying because of it.”
She watched him as he took off his coat and draped it over a wooden chair. He slipped his watch out of his pocket and wound it and set it on the seat. The weather had taken a mild turn and the cold wind had ceased roaring outside. For just a moment there was no sound but the ticking of his pocket watch.
“What about the commission?” she asked him.
“There’s no commission. As you recall, I gave Clayton his money back. I doubt whether he’d want to renew a deal I’ve already walked away from.”
“But you’re going to do the statue?”
“I owe it to the boy now. Or at least that’s how it feels. It was one thing to sleep in his room at Clayton’s ranch. It was another to visit that battlefield, to stand at his grave. I thought I had some understanding of this war until I came here, saw that poor fellow’s face, saw all those white crosses. I don’t care if Clayton wants his statue or not. I’ll put it up in our front yard if I have to.”
He sat down on the cot and began to untie his muddy boots, but Maureen lingered in the room, staring at the fire in the portable stove.
“You’re not going to bed?” Gil asked.
“I want to talk about Arthur.”
“Yes, we should do something for him. I could try to give him some money. I doubt he’d take it.”
“I think he should come home with us.”
Her father stared wearily down at the laces of his boots. She hated the way he seemed to be silently dismissing her opinion, as if it was something a thoughtless child had presented to him.
“And you think he would want to?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he would.”
“He’s a grown man. He’s made up his mind to stay here, as far as I can see. At some point he might make up his mind to go back to the States, but I don’t see how it’s any of our business either way.”
Remember Ben Clayton Page 35