The Comanches were in possession of the cabin and the outbuildings and were not in the mood just then to surrender them, so for a time there was firing back and forth from both sides. Lamar had tied the reins of the horses to pecan trunks and he checked them to make sure they wouldn’t run off but they weren’t as scared as he was and they stayed in place. Through the trees he saw one of the brothers that lived on the farm rise up from where he had been hiding in the grass and run in panic toward the river. He stumbled when one of the Indians shot him but he kept on coming, right toward Lamar. Lamar could hear him breathing and could see his face. It was pale and stretched tight with fear.
Lamar notched an arrow and pulled it tight and pointed it at the man as he came crashing down the bank and flailed wildly at the tangles of branches and grapevine. He was not a man. He was hardly older than Lamar himself. The shot had caught him below the elbow and his arm was flopping like he had no control over it as he ran. He didn’t even see Lamar at first, but when he stumbled into the water he saw the horses and then he looked back like he’d missed something. He held up his good arm and said “Please” and it was the first English word Lamar had heard in a long time. It was familiar but he didn’t know the meaning of it anymore, or wouldn’t let himself.
The boy turned his back and kept on stumbling through the water toward the sandbar in the middle of the river. Lamar could hear the Comanches calling to each other behind him and he knew they had had enough of the fight and were running back to him to get their horses. The white boy kept looking back at him as he ran and waving at him not to shoot him but he did anyway. The arrow slipped into the boy without a sound and it seemed like he was determined to ignore it at first. He made his way to the sandbar and then sat down and looked back at Lamar. He was just breathing and looking at him, like he was trying to figure out who Lamar was. But Lamar turned his back on him and untied the horses just as the rest of the Comanches came running down the riverbank with the rifle balls of the attackers hitting the branches and leaves all around them.
Two of the Indians counted coup on the stunned boy sitting on the sandbar as they rode past him. Another reined up beside him, jumped down from his horse and stuck his knife into his windpipe and then cut away his scalp in practically the same motion.
They met up at the rendezvous point with the men who had attacked the homestead from the other direction, and who had carried away the body of Tosaguera, the only Comanche casualty in the fight. They had killed a number of Tahbybo but because they had been surprised by the men coming over the ridge they had not been able to carry off any stock or any goods, so the raid was counted as more or less a failure. The men who had driven them off would organize their neighbors for a reprisal, and the Rangers would be after them as well, so they decided it was best to do no more raiding along the Salt Fork that summer.
They rode for five or six days before it was deemed safe enough to have a fire, and it was only then that they began to talk about the fight with any spirit. The various members of the party claimed their kills and their coups in that boastful way that was still foreign to him. Nobody had seen Lamar shoot the fleeing boy, at least that he knew. If he stood up to speak about it there would be nobody to back him up and he would lose the respect he was just starting to gain. He was given credit by Kanaumahka for steadily maintaining his station during the fight and that was enough. It was better not to remind himself of the boy’s pale distorted face as he raced past him toward the river, and the disappointed look he had taken on as he sat down on the sandbar after Lamar shot him with the arrow.
It was only decades later, long after he had brought George’s Mary from Fort Griffin to his ranch house, that she got it into her mind to tell him and Sarey anything about that day. As he recalled it, it was after she had worn herself out cooking one Fourth of July and the three of them were sitting out on the porch after Ben had gone to bed. She said she had had three brothers. The two older ones were Octavius and Marius. Her father had been an admirer of ancient history but after the first two boys were born her mother had said enough was enough with the Roman names and called the next one Andy. Andy had almost gotten away that day, she told them. He had made it halfway across the river.
Lamar sat there frozen in his chair as she told them how they’d killed her brothers and father and uncle and how they were about to kill her when some men who had been building a bandstand a mile or so away had heard the gunfire and come to the rescue.
She said she went to live with a neighbor family after her folks were killed but it didn’t take. She was determined to be a wild and willful child in order to punish the world and everybody in it for what had happened to her. She was sent to live with a schoolteacher in Decatur and after the schoolteacher had washed her hands of her she ended up in an orphanage in Fort Worth. She was told that her family’s land had been sold and the money put in trust for her, but when she tried to find out more about that they said she had been told wrong.
George’s Mary knew of course that Lamar had been taken by the Comanches and lived with them. He knew from the way people sometimes acted around him that it was common knowledge that he had done more than live with them, that he had been a wild Indian in his own right. And one of the things he remembered about that night on the porch was the way her eyes had kept darting to his face as she told the story, like she was trying to see if what she was saying showed up somehow in his reaction. As best he knew, he had not revealed anything to her. He had kept the panic inside, and had carried it there ever since.
There wasn’t any reason to bring it out. There wasn’t any reason to confess to her. It wasn’t like she would be grateful to him for telling her, or more at ease with herself. It would just stir things up more than either of them would be able to stand.
Before he went to bed he looked out the window and he could see the smoldering fire in the darkness where Poco was burning. He saw coyotes start to come in and lick at the grease and so he got his rifle and went down there and stood guard, for no practical purpose he could think of. What did it matter if the coyotes got to his son’s burned-up horse? They would sooner or later; that’s what they were put on earth to do.
He sat there senselessly in the dark, holding his rifle in the crook of his arm, sensing the coyotes with their intolerable excitement pacing back and forth just out of sight.
If he had any sense he would write back to Gilheaney and tell him to go to hell. Ben was gone and now Poco was gone and a statue wasn’t going to change that. But he and Gilheaney were alike in one way, maybe. Once they got an idea in their heads, it didn’t seem to come easily to their nature to let it go.
It occurred to him he might take that sixteen thousand dollars he was paying Gil Gilheaney and give it to George’s Mary instead. But she wouldn’t take it, and if he told her the reason he offered it she would turn her face away from him and be gone the next day. She would go away fuming with resentment, just like Ben had. Just like Jewell too, once he’d run her off. Maybe that’s what he had been trying to do all along, just drive people off his property and out of his life.
THIRTY-THREE
The hackmen were all gone. The avenues of New York were jammed with the motor taxis that had replaced them, and crossing the street in the middle of the block was now as hazardous as it was illegal. Women smoked brazenly in the restaurants, the old Elevated still clattered overhead, adding to the traffic and subway noise, and the money the war had brought to the city was visible everywhere, from the streetside demonstrations of expensive cooking ware to the vibrant display windows of the department stores and groceries, to the well-dressed young people with time on their hands queuing up for chop suey or swarming giddily into the wicky-wicky clubs.
He had not been home to New York for five years, not since he had come back alone to his mother’s funeral. He realized he was looking upon all the changes with the sort of reflexive disapproval he had always despised in others. Once again he had the sense of the world surging forward, leaving him
stranded behind.
Gil had not bothered to notify any of his old friends to tell them that he would be in New York for the casting of his statue, and he had made a point of avoiding the Algonquin or any of the other hotels or watering holes where he was likely to encounter someone he knew. He was not in hiding but he was not in a mood to catch up with people; he didn’t know where to begin. He had booked Maureen and himself into a small tourist hotel a few blocks from Madison Square Park, where Saint-Gaudens’ Farragut still stood with its foursquare brilliance—no allegory, no sculptural business, just a statue of a determined man modeled with quiet fidelity.
He and Maureen had arranged to meet in the park today at eleven, but he had woken at five a.m., unable to sleep, unable to be still. He had set out walking through the dead streets, all the way down to Battery Park. After so long in Texas, he felt a nostalgic freedom in being a New York pedestrian again, ranging through a cityscape that had been built for walking.
Now it was sunrise and he was standing quayside at the Battery, looking out toward the bay. There was no wind, the water lay flat. The ferries were coming in from Brooklyn and Staten Island, and because it was still so early and the day so calm he could hear the ploshing of the vessels as they neared the quayside and even the voices of passengers bounding across the taut water. He could hear the barking of seals from the aquarium.
The rising sun struck the breastplate of Ettore Ximenes’ statue of Verrazano, whose dedication Gil had attended years earlier. Hartley’s John Ericsson statue caught the sun as well, though not as dramatically, and across the park at the entrance to the Customs House Dan French’s muscular tribute to the continents of America, Africa, Asia, and Europe sat there taking on the morning light with a magnificent indifference to the firefly span of human life. Good for Dan, Gil thought as he stood in front of the sculptures. The sculpture groupings were a little busy and the sinuosity of the minor figures was rather sinister, but they held the eye with honest force and the perspective from below was commanding.
He was pleased that he did not feel the envy and sense of injustice he had felt when he had stood here in the past, surrounded by the works of men who had made more of a mark than he had. The Clayton statue was almost done, it was at the foundry across the river in Brooklyn. It was the equal of anything here, anything in New York. He had no idea if it would ever even be displayed. If Lamar Clayton didn’t want it for his desolate hilltop it would be difficult to find another place for it. But he would try. He would never stop trying.
He flexed his hands, just to feel the pain. The arthritis, which had been tentative for so long, was now solidly established. He was not sure if he could ever really work again, not in the same way, not without assistants to take over the greater part of the modeling. It was his own fault. He had worked too heedlessly, unable to stop himself. The voyage home from France had been a kind of torture, all that static time on the ship trying to burn up his energy on the promenade deck, trying to read in the library, politely listening to the talk of strangers in the dining room. He had been desperate to work, to pack clay onto the armature again, to bring to this new version of Ben Clayton’s likeness all that he had learned about his subject from Arthur Fry.
When he was finally in his studio again he had worked almost without pause, his mind flaring with urgent inspiration even in sleep. When his hands began to hurt again, he still kept up the pace, attacking the clay in short bursts, using the heels of his hands when the pain in his fingers was too great. Maureen worked alongside him, the two of them hardly speaking, both because they had so little to say to each other now and because the primacy of the task superseded conversation. He had tried to spare his hands as much as possible for the detail work, trusting her with the gross contours of the human and horse figures. But toward the end, when his hands were so inflamed he could barely move them, he could only stand there and watch and instruct as Maureen used his own cherished tools to make the delicate additions and elisions that would spell the difference between a credible likeness and a work of art.
And so it was she who had put the finishing touches on Ben Clayton’s face, and in doing so had brought something to it that Gil was quite sure he could not have brought on his own. He had watched her work, he had seen every adjustment she made, but he could not say at what point the piece’s defining quality—its shifting tones of heartbreak, and anger, and loneliness—had entered the portrait. All he knew was that it came from his daughter’s hand.
HE WALKED back up Broadway to Madison Square Park. Maureen was already there, standing by the Farragut holding a mixed bouquet of spring flowers.
“Shall we go?” he asked, and she nodded. She did not ask him how he had spent the morning and he did not dare ask the question of her. The experience in France had bound them together in a different kind of way. They had walked the Saint-Étienne battlefield together and shared in hearing Arthur’s secret story of Ben Clayton’s death. Upon their return home they had spent six weeks in the studio together, working so swiftly and harmoniously there had barely been any need for discussion. The flush of power and independence that Gil observed in Maureen seemed to be predicated upon a kind of fluid silence. She was polite, judicious, companionable—but no longer quite his daughter. Or maybe he was no longer quite her father. The balance between them had shifted; a little girl’s unquestioning admiration had been replaced by a woman’s calculated respect.
They got into a cab at the edge of the park and rode up Fifth Avenue, leaving the Farragut behind only to pass by another of Saint-Gaudens’ great works twenty-five blocks farther north, his gleaming Sherman riding A. P. Proctor’s horse.
“Proctor has nothing on you,” Maureen said, with a hint of the old admiration in her voice. “Your horse is every bit as good.”
“I think I’d like it even better if you said Saint-Gaudens had nothing on me,” he told her.
“Well,” she said, smiling, “why don’t we just let history decide that?”
It was as strong a compliment as she could have given, a cool acknowledgment that his Clayton statue deserved to be judged in the courts of history alongside the works of the master. He looked at her but she was turned away from him, staring at the buildings of Marble Row. The scent of the flowers she held in her lap filled the cab and in some odd way seemed to increase the distance between them. She needed that distance today, had been declaring it for some time now, most emphatically on that night in Somme-Py when she had disappeared from the mairie before midnight and did not come back until a few hours before dawn. Where she had gone, whom she had seen—common sense pointed only in one direction. He knew she would never tell him what had happened between her and Arthur Fry that night, that she had no more reason to confide in him about Arthur than he did to tell her the story of his night with Therèse at the St. Charles Hotel. He knew that his daughter’s quiet self-sufficiency was in part an indictment of himself, of his own failure as a father. His deceit had liberated her.
They crossed the East River on the new Queensboro Bridge and ten minutes later passed through the gates of Calvary Cemetery. The driver took them to the side of a sloping hill from which the buildings of New York were vibrantly visible across the river. Gil had designed his mother’s tombstone himself, a simple granite marker upon which he had hand-carved her name and dates, and above them a detail he had taken from a holy card she had painted of the Thirteenth Station of the Cross.
He said nothing and stood back while—for the second time in a little over two months—Maureen set down flowers on the grave of a person she had never met. He watched her read the wording carved into the granite, saw her lips move as she did so, as if she were muttering a prayer.
“How many people were here?” she asked. “When she was buried?”
“Twenty or so. Most of her old friends were dead. People she knew from church mostly.”
“And Mother and I were in San Antonio?”
He nodded. “She died just after the plaster molds for the Crockett ha
d been shipped. I was planning to come up here to supervise the foundry work anyway.”
“Yes, I remember you leaving. So there was no need for any great subterfuge? Not that time?”
“Not that time.”
“Was it a lonely feeling, to be here by yourself, burying your mother?”
“Yes. I missed you and your mother terribly.”
She knelt down and traced the carving of her grandmother’s name with her fingers, plucked away at the unruly grass at the marker’s base. Then she stood and looked at him, not crying but with such a burden of sorrow and disappointment on her face that it took all his nerve not to look away.
FOR ALMOST A WEEK Gil had anxiously watched the plasterers at work in his San Antonio studio, making molds of the finished clay statue. It was a delicate business and there was always the chance it could go wrong, ruining the original work while at the same time making a useless impression of it. But under Gil’s demanding supervision the plasterers had done their job well, and a negative plaster impression of the statue had been shipped to the Coppini Foundry in Brooklyn in eleven pieces that, when cast in bronze, would be welded back together.
At the foundry, the hollow plaster impressions were filled with liquid wax. When the wax cooled and the plaster shells were pried off, Gil was relieved to see the pieces of the sculpture once again in their positive form, though in wax this time, not clay. He spent most of the day at the foundry, as was his custom when an important piece was being cast. He consulted with the workers on the system of hollow sprues that needed to be added to each wax piece of the sculpture through which heated air could escape and liquid bronze could be channeled. He tracked each piece as it was dipped into a silica slurry until it was covered with yet another mold, this time a hard ceramic shell. The process of casting was the process of repeatedly obscuring the original sculptural form, then liberating it from this new chrysalis, each time in a different material: clay to wax and finally to immortal bronze.
Remember Ben Clayton Page 38