“Well,” Clayton said to Gil, “is it your masterpiece, like you said it was going to be?”
“Are you asking me if you got your money’s worth?”
He’d meant it in a light-hearted way but Clayton took it as a cross remark. “No, dammit, I’m asking you if you’re proud of it.”
“I am.”
“It don’t bother you that hardly anybody’s ever gonna see it? After you and me are dead it’ll just be standing there with nobody to explain it.”
“No, Clayton, that doesn’t bother me.”
Just as he said this Gil noticed that the statue was no longer a solitary shape on the mesa. There were moving figures next to it, a man and woman. The man was walking around the statue, gesturing with some sort of burning bundle he was holding in his hand.
“That’s my sister and her Kiowa husband,” Clayton said when Gil turned to him. “They’re blessing the statue or some goddam thing.”
“I thought you told her never to come back here.”
“I was in a hard mood that day. I wrote her a letter a while back. Figured she ought to see it, that Ben would want her to. She and Eli are camped out in town somewhere. She didn’t want to stay on my property and have to talk to me and that’s just about the way I want it too.”
Gil’s horse shifted her weight from one shoulder to the other and idly nosed through the grass at her feet. He stretched his legs in the stirrups, working out the stiffness from the ride. He thought about dismounting but liked the sensation of still being in the saddle, of looking up toward his statue with the benefit of the extra elevation that Margarita provided. He could hear Eli’s voice now, declaiming some Kiowa song as he blessed the sculpture. When he was through singing, Jewell put her hand against the statue, touching the boy’s arm, bowing her head, and then she turned and disappeared with her husband down the far side of the hill.
When they were out of sight Clayton turned to Gil.
“I expect you didn’t go all the way to France without asking that boy over there how my son died.”
“Yes, of course I asked him. He took Maureen and me on a tour of the battlefield. He showed us where it happened, how it happened.”
“What did you find out? Ben wasn’t no coward, I can tell you that right now.”
“He wasn’t a coward. Far from it. He took out a machine-gun nest, pretty much by himself. There was a rather desperate assault against the German position in the cemetery and he was in the thick of that as well. Then they were under fire from a machine gun in the steeple of the church and he decided to take that gun out too. He had just climbed out of the trench when the gunner saw him. He died instantly, as I believe you’ve heard.”
“That all of it?”
“What else do you want, Clayton? Your son was killed trying to eliminate a German machine-gun position. No one ordered him to do it. He just took it upon himself.”
“So it was just foolishness that got him killed.”
“It wasn’t foolishness. By any common definition it was heroism. If you insist on faulting your son then I guess you could call it heedlessness. He was in a big fight and his blood was up.”
“I don’t care to fault him. I done plenty of that already.”
There was just the slightest temptation to tell him the whole truth. Maybe he deserved to hear it, to hear what Ben had learned from that Indian in Company E and how it had led him to throw his life away in a rash assault on that German gun. Gil had told Clayton that his son’s blood was up, but he did not tell him his blood was up because of Clayton’s closed-up heart and his grudging secrets. Lamar Clayton had been a failure of a father, a man who had allowed his own disappointments and his own seething temper to lead his son to a bewildered death. If Lamar Clayton had had an artist’s vision, if he could have detected the fate of his son as it slumbered in the stone of his own tragic life, there might have been a better ending than this forlorn monument. But even an artist’s eye, as Gil had learned, could not necessarily detect what was buried in the hearts of the people the artist was supposed to love.
The two men sat their horses and kept their secrets and continued to train their eyes on the statue. Gil had hired a photographer from the San Antonio newspaper to come out in a few weeks to take some high-quality images, since he did not know if he would ever see the piece again firsthand. This would probably be his last chance to study it, to judge what he had done.
He was pleased. It stood there on its promontory with a kind of natural dominion, as if this cowboy and his horse were living beings that had not been painfully winched up onto the top of the mesa but had just happened upon it and had paused to appreciate the view. After so many years it was still a mystery to Gil how he had done it. How he and Maureen had done it.
“Well,” Clayton said, “do you want to sit here and look at it all day or do you want to go catch your train?”
Gil knew Clayton meant the needling tone to be friendly-sounding. But neither of them was really in that kind of jousting mood. Gil said nothing. He just wearily pulled his horse’s head up from the grass and followed Lamar Clayton back the way they had come. They were not friends and they rode under separate burdens of silence and solitude. Lamar Clayton set his face straight ahead but Gil kept looking back, startled and gratified by how alive the boy looked as he stared off into the cow pastures and beyond them to the plains.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Francis Gilheaney is a fictional character, so of course all the statues credited to him in this book are fictional as well. But I would like to acknowledge that the initial idea for Remember Ben Clayton came from reading From Dawn to Sunset, the autobiography of the sculptor Pompeo Coppini, who undertook a commission similar to the one described in this novel, and whose finished work, an affecting statue of a young man named Charles Noyes, stands today in the courthouse square of Ballinger, Texas.
It is always a privilege to thank the people whose generosity with factual information or critical judgment helps to make my work possible. In the case of this novel, it is the usual long list, beginning at home in Austin with my wife Sue Ellen and extending to New York, where I have long had the honor of being represented by Esther Newberg and edited by Ann Close. I’m continually grateful to them and to all their colleagues at ICM and at Alfred A. Knopf and Random House.
Elizabeth Crook’s sustaining insight proved, as usual, to be a crucial factor in helping me navigate my way through a complex story. I am also especially grateful to the late Elmer Kelton, who supplied me with details from his own memory of ranching life in Texas during the early part of the twentieth century.
Thanks also to Lawrence Wright, William Broyles, Jr., Gregory Curtis, and James Magnuson; to sculptors Patrick Oliphant, Neil Estern, Clete Shields, Glenna Goodacre, and Jason Scull. And to Alan Huffines, Enrique Villarreal, Tony Noyes, Christina Holstein, Steven D. Dortch, Michael Hanlon, Eleanor Crook, Betsy Tyson, Barbara Tims, Ann Mount, Laura Lewis, Martin Cox, Kevin Griffin, John Emery, Rich Turnwald, Jodi Wright-Gidley, Mireille Golaszewski, Isabelle Secretan, and Gisèle Dessieux. And since a father-daughter relationship is central to this novel, I can’t end this list without a loving acknowledgment of all that I have learned from my own three daughters, Marjorie, Dorothy, and Charlotte.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Harrigan is the author of seven previous books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels Challenger Park and the New York Times best seller The Gates of the Alamo. A longtime writer for Texas Monthly and other magazines, he is also an award-winning screenwriter who has written many movies for television. He lives in Austin, where he is a faculty fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and a founding member of Capital Area Statues, Inc.
div style = " -webkit-filter: grayscale(100%); -moz-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
Remember Ben Clayton Page 40