Remember Ben Clayton

by Stephen Harrigan

  He started to make his way down, carefully watching his step on the loose rock, feeling it trickle under the soles of his boots. Sure enough, he fell; not as hard as he could have, but his feet skidded out from under him and he landed on his backside and hit his funny bone on a rock. He sat there for a minute cursing his foolishness and hoping his elbow wasn’t broken. He could move it all right, so he guessed it wasn’t. That would be a hell of a note, he thought, to fall down up here and not be able to get back down, to have to wait for Ernest or Nax to find him. What if he’d passed out? Maybe they wouldn’t find him till the next morning. All because he wanted to see a damn buzzard’s nest.

  He stood up, his funny bone still humming with pain like a tuning fork. It didn’t stop hurting until he was all the way back to the bottom again, and all the good that did was shift his attention to the sore spot on his upper thigh where he had fallen and to his worn-out knees, which hadn’t needed a steep uphill climb in the first place. But he’d been right in thinking he just needed a little time to get back onto his horse. His elbow hurt and his knee hurt and his leg hurt but he got himself into the saddle with no trouble this time, and he went on and found the two cows where they were shaded up under some trees and spent the rest of the day moving them along to decent grass, wishing they had the sense to be grateful to him for his trouble.

  IT WAS FIVE O’CLOCK by the time he was home and when he rode up from the creek bottom he saw that Ernest and Nax were both on horseback and they were dragging a horse carcass out of the pen by its hind legs.

  “We’re surely sorry,” Ernest said. “It just happened about a half hour ago.”

  Lamar walked along beside the hands as they dragged Poco to a clearing about fifty yards beyond the house. The horse’s tongue was hanging out past its mouth, and as it dragged along it made its own separate trail in the dirt.

  “I think it was the sleeping sickness,” Nax said. “He was looking a little confused this morning.”

  “No,” Lamar told him, “it ain’t likely to be sleeping sickness with no mosquitoes around yet to speak of. Maybe some damn beetle or other got baled up in his hay.”

  “Or locoweed,” Ernest guessed.

  “Don’t matter now,” Lamar said.

  Without speaking about it anymore, the three of them began collecting tree limbs and dry brush to cover the horse carcass where it lay in the clearing. Peggy joined them but didn’t nose around in the piles of brush like she would have before—that snakebite had taught her her lesson. Lamar kept piling up the fuel past the point where it was necessary. He didn’t really want to see Poco when they lit the fire. It was nearly dark when they finished. Ernest left and came back with a can of kerosene and sprinkled it over the brush and tossed a match onto it, and the fire erupted into the sky and then began to settle and crackle as it took hold. Ernest and Nax went back into the house for their supper but Lamar said to go ahead without him and he’d be there after a while.

  He hadn’t planned to watch his son’s horse while it burned but he found he was drawn to the sight for some reason. There was the smell of roasting meat and burning hair. As the night around him deepened, the heat from the fire grew stronger, almost singeing his eyebrows. As it cooked out, the fat from the horse made a puddle in the dirt.

  Poco hadn’t been Ben’s first horse but he was the one that had mattered. Ben had been fourteen that Christmas, Lamar recollected. It was the year after Sarey died and he thought buying Ben a horse would distract him and keep him from being listless about losing his mother. It worked about as well as anything could. Ben broke Poco himself. He was a gentle horse to begin with and didn’t need much work before he could be ridden, but the fact that Ben had been the one to do it had gotten the animal’s attention. Lamar knew he probably didn’t have any business speculating about the things a horse might or might not feel about people, but there was some kind of closeness the horse had with Ben that he never had with Lamar or any of the hands after Ben was no longer around.

  He sat there for nearly an hour and then he left the fire to smolder and walked stiffly back to the house, feeling his sore thigh and knee with every step. As she walked along beside him, Peggy still favored her snakebit leg. Like him, she had to probe a bit before she committed to setting it down.

  When he got back inside, George’s Mary set his supper down on the table without a word, chili and warmed-over corn bread and pinto beans.

  “You get thrown off your horse?” she asked.

  “I don’t usually and I didn’t today,” he said.

  “You’re walking like you did.”

  “I slipped on some rocks.”

  “What do you mean, slipped on some rocks?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  He didn’t tell her about walking up to the top of the hill to see the buzzard’s nest. She would have found some reason to disapprove of it. While he ate, she sat in a chair in the parlor and didn’t even pretend to occupy herself with anything other than being upset about Poco. When he was through eating she picked up his dishes and gestured to a big parcel sitting on the divan with the rest of the mail.

  “It’s from that Mr. Gilheaney,” she said. “A letter too.”

  She stood over him, waiting to see what was in the letter, but he wouldn’t open it till she went back into the kitchen.

  Dear Mr. Clayton,

  I should like you to know that I have been to France and seen your son’s grave, as well as the battlefield on which he fell. Maureen was with me and took the photographs that I enclose with this letter. As you can see he rests in the company of many thousands of other American soldiers, in the great cemetery in Romagne. It is my hope that these Kodaks will bring you more comfort than pain, but if I’m wrong please forgive my presumption in sending them.

  Maureen and I were in France on other matters when I decided to search out Arthur Fry, the young man who wrote you some months ago and who, as you know, was with Ben when he died. I suppose what motivated me was a feeling of unfinished business. The despair I felt over the destruction of the statue—a despair that you yourself of course witnessed—rendered my interest in the project dormant for a time but did not kill it. In fact, “interest” is far too weak a word for the passionate sense of direction that seemed to animate me while I conceived and modeled the sculpture. I told you, while we were riding across your ranch, that this statue would be my masterpiece. I was a little embarrassed at the time by that outburst, particularly since I know perfectly well that an artist’s reputation is the result of opinions not his own. But I sensed a defining purpose for me in this work, and though I lost the statue itself in a studio accident I did not want to lose that purpose.

  Therefore I decided to take the work up again. Whether I take up the commission again is another matter, one entirely for you to decide. Upon my return from France I barricaded myself for six weeks in the studio, working at a pace and with an intensity I had not known for many years. Another full-size clay version of the statue is, as you can see, now completed. Next week the plasterers will come to take a mold, which will be shipped off to the foundry in New York for casting in bronze. I will be nervous as a cat while the plasterers do their work, hovering over them to make sure no harm comes to the clay. When the mold is taken Maureen and I will follow it to New York, where I will haunt the foundry to make sure everything is completed to my satisfaction.

  You may make your own judgment about the success of my work from the photographs. I am satisfied. I have done my best and believe I have succeeded. If you do not recognize your son in the clay, then I have of course failed to satisfy you and in a more technical sense I suppose I have not met the basic requirements of my profession. But I believe this is Ben. I believe this is Ben as you described him to me, and as I encountered and understood him on my own.

  If you want the statue you may rewrite the contract and amend the original terms as you desire. I do not care. I will sign what you send me. For reasons of my own I had to finish this piece and I h
ave. Let me know what you want to do.

  Sincerely,

  Francis Gilheaney

  P.S. By separate mail I am sending Ben’s clothes, which you were kind enough to lend me. His saddle and hat have been shipped as well and should arrive next week. All have been insured.

  Lamar stared at the photographs of his son’s grave, at the close-up of his name carved in the marble cross, at the shot that showed his cross among all the others. It looked like there were as many crosses as there were blades of grass on the llano. He looked at the pictures of the shot-up little town—Saint-Étienne—that Ben and his regiment had attacked. He saw the cemetery where his son had died. While he was looking at the pictures George’s Mary came out of the kitchen and stood behind him. He passed each one off to her without comment and all she said was “Oh my.”

  The last photos were of the statue. It was different than the model he had seen in Gilheaney’s studio that first time, the one that had startled him so much he had forgotten who he was and where he was. It wasn’t like Gilheaney was trying to steal Ben away anymore. Ben was there, in the statue, all by himself. It wasn’t like he was put there by the artist, like he was shaped by Gilheaney’s hands; it was like he and Poco had just showed up on their own.

  It was there in the face, whatever it was: the quality that made Lamar believe that the sculptor had succeeded. He saw the innocence and trust that had been in Ben’s eyes when he was a boy, when he had been so proud to ride and work alongside his father. He saw some kind of wanting in that face too, not a lack of anything but an expectation, the bright sort of yearning that Sarey used to have when she talked about what it would be like to see Europe or some other such place.

  But there was anger too, and you couldn’t miss it. Lamar didn’t know how Gilheaney had got it into Ben’s expression but it was there. It was the fury that had been in Ben’s face the last time Lamar had seen him, a fury Lamar had never been able to erase from his memory and that Gilheaney had somehow seen and understood and sealed into the sculpture.

  The funny thing was that from one moment to the next you did not know what you were looking at: the innocence of a child, the buoyant expectation of a young man, or the anger of a betrayed son. They were all bound up together, like they might be in a living face, impossible to pin down or pry apart.

  He handed these last pictures to George’s Mary. He watched her as she looked at them. She worked her mouth like a jackrabbit, unconsciously sucking and probing the empty places in her mouth where those teeth had been pulled.

  “Well, what do you think?” he finally asked her.

  “What do I think about what?”

  “This damn statue. What do I do about it?”

  “I never saw what you needed a statue of your son for in the first place. But that’s your business. You spend your money how you want.”

  “It look like him to you?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, throwing the photos into his lap. “It looks too damn much like him. It looks too much like our Ben.”

  She went into her room and he could hear her sobbing. He thought about knocking on her door after she quieted down a little and trying to find something of comfort to say to her, maybe telling her to sleep in in the morning and not worry about getting breakfast. But he knew from long experience there was no way to be kind to her without stirring her up more. She’d wait on him hand and foot just to spite him, no matter how broken-up she was feeling.

  Sometimes he wondered if her resentment of him had to do with more than just her nature and his and them being in the house together for so long. Sometimes he wondered if she knew. She had never told him much about what had happened on her farm when she was a little girl. He’d had to put it together himself, and after he had he’d kept quiet about it. He had made it a rule never to say much about his life with the Comanches to anybody—especially not to the newspaper writers or the college professors who used to come around every few years wanting him to drop everything he was doing and tell them his story, thinking he would be pleased by their attention. Sarey he had told the bare outlines, Ben even less. Enough time had passed that people thought there was romance in it, but he looked back on that part of his life with mostly shame—shame at what he had let happen to his sister and what he had let happen to him. His character, even as a boy, ought to have been stronger. He ought not to have surrendered his soul and turned into a Comanche because Kanaumahka and a few of the others had decided to be kind to him and accepting of him.

  The invitation to go on his first raid had been a surprise. Kanaumahka and some of the other warriors had gotten all painted up and ridden their horses through the camp, gathering up recruits. They’d gone around three or four times when Kanaumahka finally reined up in front of Lamar and gave him a look that said: Ain’t you coming? It had never occurred to him before that moment that he was a member of the band and that he could decide what he wanted to do along with the rest of them. So he got his horse and followed the caravan around the camp and took part in the dancing that night and Kanaumahka gave him a shield and put it next to his on the rack outside his lodge, where it gathered up power from the sun all the next day.

  They rode east for the better part of a week, Kanaumahka building little maps in the dirt at the start of each day’s travel, explaining to them all the landmarks they would pass in case any of them got separated from the main bunch. It was all very organized and strategic. Not a bunch of wild Indians whooping and carrying on, but a disciplined and well-informed body of mostly young men moving deliberately across the prairie. At the Salt Fork, the scouts came back with the opinion that a farm up ahead looked like a likely prospect, just a man and his wife, three or four teenage sons, a young girl, six or eight horses in the pen at night and a pasture with thirty head of cattle. Kanaumahka went on himself to see the place and came back and sketched out his plan. They would kill the dogs with arrows first and then whoever was visible in the pasture or in the horse pens and then move on up to the house before a clear warning could be given.

  The party attacked on two fronts and Lamar was given the task of holding the horses of the warriors who crept up to the farm from the riverbank. It was late summer and that part of the Brazos was almost dry, the water only ankle-deep between sunbaked sandbars. In the case of a forced retreat, the assault party would have little trouble making its escape across the river to the rendezvous point. He held the reins of the horses while they stood cooling their forelegs in the shallow water. The trees were thick along the riverbank and they obscured his view as the Indians made their way along the grassy slope up toward the horse pens. He could hear the mother in the house calling out to somebody, but in a normal voice. She had not yet noticed anything wrong. He was confused, because the stealth and deliberation of this attack seemed at odds with his own memory of the Indians suddenly bursting into the house while his mother was setting the table. There had seemed no planning at all to the act that had changed his life, just a hair-raising impulsiveness.

  He had painted his face black and yellow, and in the midday heat it was a suffocating paste. He could feel sweat running down the mask of his face and tickling the crown of his head, where he had outlined the parting of his now-longish hair with a red streak. He was young and inexperienced and not qualified to wear a feather, but the hair he had gathered into clumsy braids and tied with strips of blue homespun was decorated with beads of glass and flashy triangles of tin. He wore a bandanna around his neck whose ends were gathered into a hollowed-out knob of buffalo bone. He had asked a kindly old woman in the band to pierce the tops of his ears in imitation of the older warriors, and each ear now held multiple ornaments of brass and silver wire whose sagging weight he could feel. All of this he had fussed over. He could feel the power of these signs and markings. He understood them and gloried in them. Although his mouth was dry from fear he somehow did not feel confusion about the raid in which he was about to play his small part. He felt contempt for the Tahbybo, the white p
eople who kept swarming over the horizon to live their demeaning settled lives, rooted to one spot, slaves to their crops and even to their stupid cattle. He no longer clung to his memories of being one of them, he no longer thought of his white family as anything more than unthinking people trying to control a land whose enormity and dominion and ancient memory they could not understand. Their ignorance had swept them away, all but him. In his mind the predation in which he was now taking part was mixed up with a sense of biblical righteousness, a cleansing of all who were presumptuous and ignorant and not fit to abide on the majestic earth.

  He heard the abbreviated yelp of one dog and the agonized howling of another and swept the tree branches aside to see his fellow Comanches converging toward the cabin from two directions. The family that was taken by surprise was angry and incautious. An older brother came to the door and shot down an eighteen-year-old warrior named Tosaguera, who lay twisting in the grass with his legs drawn up for the rest of the fight and was dead before anybody could come to his aid. Kanaumahka burst through the door before the shooter could close it and another five or six followed him in. There was screaming in the cabin and not much gunfire. Lamar guessed that the fighting was too close and fast for anybody to reload. In a minute he saw one of the older warriors dragging the mother out by the hair with the little girl clinging to her skirts and trying to pull her away from the Indians. They bashed the mother’s head in but before they could do anything else there was rifle fire from a ridge on the other side of the cabin and four or five white men came running into the fight with their teeth bared and not caring whether they got killed or not. Nobody had seen the men on the scout and it was much argued about later where they had come from and how they had been able to take the Comanches by surprise.