The Monument

by Gary Paulsen

  He had been driving all the while, and we went past the north edge of town on County Road 1. When we were about a mile out of town Mick turned the wagon into a driveway and backed out so he was facing Bolton and cut the engine.

  It looked peaceful in the morning light. The elevators stood like statues, tall and white, on the right edge of town. The water tower stood on the left side and the trees hid most of the rest of it. You could see white here and there where a house showed through and one line of red where Carlson’s brick house stood.

  “You can’t see people,” I said. It was nice with the station wagon engine stopped—I felt like my ears were bleeding. “Not a soul.”

  “For a start—to know the place. Without people. It’s about people who are gone, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The monument—the whole idea of it. It’s about dead people, not living ones, isn’t it? So we have to see how it looks without people.”

  He sat for a time, just looking at the town, and I tried to do it the same way, and even Python seemed to be trying. His big muzzle aimed out over the hood and he watched the town but he soon became bored, and so did I.

  “What are we looking for?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s what I’ve been seeing.”

  “Keep looking. This is your first lesson.”

  He reached around in back of the seat and found the tablet and pencils he’d thrown in earlier. He handed them to me.

  “What’s this?”

  “Draw.”

  “But I don’t know anything about drawing.”

  “Draw.”

  “What should I draw?”

  “Draw.”

  “You brought this for me, didn’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “But that was before I told you I wanted to be an artist.”

  Another nod.

  “How did you know?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Open the pencils. Draw.”

  I looked down at the pencil box. It felt very old. Made of polished wood, so worn the grain seemed to be raised. It had a sliding top and I slid it back to see eight or ten wooden pencils, all different sizes and lengths. “How old is it—the box?”

  “When I was a boy I had it and it was old then—it doesn’t matter.” He pointed to the pencils. “Some are soft and some are hard. Some can be used for shading. Draw.”

  “The town?”

  “What you see. Draw.”

  So I drew the elevators. They were the biggest thing to see, and they stood up with all sorts of straight lines that were easy to make except that when I was done, it just looked like a bunch of straight lines.

  “See now, see how she does the lines,” he said, looking up at the sky. “She does the lines so well.”

  “But it doesn’t look right. It doesn’t look like the elevators.”

  “See?” He took the drawing and used a wide pencil to shade one of the elevator sides to make it look deep and it just about jumped off the paper.

  “There.”

  “I see.”

  “Draw.”

  I did some shading and it worked. The elevator grew out from the page, looked closer to what it was—round and full of grain.

  When I was done he took the tablet, looked at it for a moment, flipped the page over to show a fresh sheet and said: “Draw.”

  I drew four more drawings. The water tower, an overall view trying to show the trees which just looked like a bunch of blops until he showed me how to use shading and small lines to make the leaves so they looked like trees, then one of the edge of the Carlson house, and one of the highway going into town.

  He nodded his head when I finished each one. “You must do this and do this—for years. Draw and draw until you think your hands will fall off. Just to know the line—the way the line works.”

  “What about color—all the rest of it?”

  “It’s because you’re young, isn’t it—the impatiences? The small impatiences.” He nodded. “That’s fine—just fine. It’s all right to be impatient as long as you keep working. But remember that—to keep working. Work is all there is, all of everything. That’s enough from here.”

  I put the pencils back into the box and he put the pad and pencils in the back of the wagon again. The engine roared again.

  “Where are we going now?” I yelled.

  “Graveyard.”

  “Oh good,” I said, but he didn’t hear me.

  He seemed to know things—knew just how to drive to the graveyard, which was on the south edge of town, opposite from the way we had been.

  I don’t know about other small towns but Bolton takes care of its graveyard. I had never been there except to walk past, but the grass is always mowed and it’s always clean and neat. Many of the graves have plastic flowers by them.

  Mick stopped the wagon by the entrance to the graveyard. “Get your pad and pencils.”

  He walked down the small road that led into the graves and I followed, Python at my side.

  About in the middle of the graveyard Mick stopped, looking around. “The old section—where’s the old section?”

  I didn’t know, but after a moment of standing rubbing his nose, he nodded and walked down a side path to some older-looking headstones.

  “Here. The old ones are the best.”

  “Best at what?”

  “Best to tell us what the town is really like—how the soul is. There, look at the stones, how they’re different from the others.”

  And they were. The newer stones were just square blocks with the names carved out, sometimes stacked on another square block. Here, in the old part, there were sculpted figures and flowers and on one little stone a lamb, lying on its side.

  “See?”

  I couldn’t get my eyes off the small stone.

  CLAIR MILLER

  BORN MAY 5, 1887

  TAKEN OCT. 9, 1890

  SHE BIDES IN HEAVEN,

  AT PLAY WITH ANGELS DEAR

  “She was just a baby,” I said. “Three years old.”

  Mick nodded. “Draw.”

  “Here?”

  “What you see—draw.”

  So I drew the headstone and it was going fine until I started on the little curled-up lamb on top. It was so small and alone. I remembered the orphanage and how it had been sometimes alone in the room when I didn’t think I would ever get adopted, alone like the little lamb. I wondered how Clair Miller had come to die and I started to cry.

  “Ahh, yes, there it is, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “Well, of course it is. You’re crying, and that’s the way it should be.”

  “I’m not crying. I don’t cry.” Not at the orphanage and not since the orphanage. I didn’t cry. Not ever. And here I was, crying.

  “It’s all right to cry,” he said. “I cry each day—my soul weeps. It means you’re seeing something as it is, as it’s meant to be seen, doesn’t it? Oh, yes, crying is the tiling to do.” He smiled. “As long as you keep on drawing. Know the line, always that, know the line.”

  And I kept drawing and only dripped a little on the paper. When I finished I looked and saw that Mick was standing in front of a plain white stone, a rectangle, small and straight with no decoration.

  I went to it and read:

  CLELL MILLER

  BORN SEPT. 8, 1843

  DIED NOV. 27, 1862

  INFANTRY

  “Was he a soldier?”

  Mick nodded. “Civil War.”

  “Killed in battle?”

  “Maybe. Probably not. Most of them died of disease—four to one. Four soldiers in the Civil War died of dysentery—the black squirts, they called it—for every one that died of battle wounds. So he probably died that way.” He sighed. “Heroes all, weren’t they? All of them heroes. There were four, you know.”

  “Four what?”

  “Four men from the Bolton area to die in the Civil War. One more in the Spanis
h-American War. Seven in the First World War. Three in the Second World War. One in Korea and two in Vietnam. Eighteen all told to die in war, of one thing or another—eighteen young men gone.”

  “How could you know that?”

  He smiled. “I could say I just know it—the way I knew the popsicle-stick cross would be under the bush—but the truth is I looked it up. Military records. When the fair Mrs. Langdon wrote to me I contacted a clerk in the army and asked him to check the records. It’s all in St. Louis, you know—all the army records. Eighteen dead. And they want a monument.” He looked from the graveyard to the town. “I’ll wager there aren’t two people in town who know how many have been killed—or that there’s a hero here.”

  “A hero?”

  “Congressional Medal of Honor winner. A true hero.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Jennings. I drew his dog, didn’t I? I saw the name on his mailbox—that must have been him. He was a hero in the First World War. God, he must be close to a hundred.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “I don’t think anybody does.” He shook his head. “And we won’t tell if he doesn’t want it known, will we?”

  “What did he do?”

  “Killed some people. Killed a lot of them while they were trying to kill him, probably—that’s how they usually win those things. Although some have won it for saving people’s lives—medics in combat. I don’t know. Just that he Avon a medal and we’ll let it be. Now you have to help me.”

  “How?”

  “I need a place where the men come to sit and talk—a gathering place for them.”

  “That’s easy,” I said. “The grain elevator or the bar. Which do you want?”

  “Both—but in the interests of sanity and caution perhaps we might try the elevator first. Drinking establishments have a way of … affecting me.”

  Twelve

  FRED WAS SURPRISED to see me come to the elevator. We had talked it out the morning before I met with Mick.

  “Seems like it’s in the interests of your new career to spend some time studying with this artist,” he said after breakfast.

  “I’m caught up on the paperwork. I lined out all the books and stuff so you can just fill it in. I can come in the evening and finish it out for the day.”

  “Let’s not worry too much about that—art seems to be a little more important.”

  “It does?” All this time and he’d never said two words about art and after breakfast he drops that.

  “Yup.” He smiled. “Ain’t that right, Emm?”

  And Emma nodded and I don’t know why I was ever worried about it.

  So when I showed up at the elevator with Mick, Fred raised his eyebrows. He was covered with grain dust and it made him look like a monkey.

  “He wanted to come here.” I shrugged. “I don’t know why.”

  “Because this,” Mick said, his arms sweeping around at the dust and the hum of machinery and the truck dumping a golden stream of wheat through the grate with Harry Clark standing by the rear end, his hand in the falling wheat and hundreds of sparrows and pigeons all over the ground getting grain. “This is the cosmic center of the universe.”

  “It is?”

  “Draw.”

  He had made me carry the tablet and pencil box from the station wagon. I felt really silly taking it out to draw in front of Fred and Harry Clark. There were three more trucks that pulled up while we stood there, waiting to dump grain, and all the men and two boys who were helping their fathers came into the elevator. One of the boys was Jimmy Durbin, who I liked to look at, the way you do, and I felt shy about drawing in front of them.

  But Mick looked at me. His eyes seemed to go into my brain, stopped me.

  “Draw,” he said again, his voice low and even. “It’s what you do—draw.”

  I knew he was right. I had decided to be an artist sitting alone in my bed, where it was easy to say that, but the decision held out here as well—out where it showed, where people could see me.

  Even if it was embarrassing.

  So I went back into the corner of the office to my desk and put the tablet down and started to draw.

  I tried to draw people, the men standing there, but I couldn’t get them to look right so I worked at the scene, the room, the door and the window looking out to where the truck was dumping grain. It was funny but I started to see things for the first time that I had been looking at forever.

  The wood over the door. It wasn’t just wood, it was beautiful with dark strips of grain that seemed to jump out even through the layers of dust from the wheat, oiled dark wood. I wondered where it came from and how it got where it was, why somebody would take so much time and effort on a piece of wood over a door. I tried to draw the wood, the door, tried to get that feeling in it. It didn’t work and I looked up and Jimmy Durbin was standing there looking at the drawing.

  “It’s really good,” he said.

  I looked to see if he was teasing me—thought about turning Python loose on him if he was, maybe taking a leg—but he meant it.

  “It’s hard for me to do.”

  “That’s because you’re making it look good. Anybody can do it if it’s easy. The hard stuff takes longer.”

  “I’m going to be an artist.” Oh great, I thought. Stupid. Open my mouth and be stupid.

  “It shows.”

  He smiled and moved back to his father but he looked at me two or three more times. I was glad I was sitting down so my leg was under the desk. I tried to push my hair back when he wasn’t looking so it would be neater and I thought, hey, you never know, you never know. I was glad I hadn’t let Python have his leg.

  “You can’t just do a monument, can you?” I heard Mick say. There were four men now, and one young boy named Carl who was seven or eight and hiding in back of his father’s leg looking at Python with big eyes while he chewed his lower lip. I wished I could draw people because it would make a good drawing, the way he was standing.

  “Monuments have to be a certain way for a certain place.”

  “Hell.” Clyde Jamison went to the door, opened it, and spit a gob of tobacco juice that would have killed a sparrow if it had hit one. He closed the door and turned back to Mick. “Monuments is monuments. You raise something up there and a month later pigeons are crapping on it and nobody remembers anything. It’s all a waste of money.”

  “Not this time,” Mick said, his voice quiet. “Not on this one.”

  “What makes this one different?”

  “You,” he said. Then swung his arm around to the rest of the room. “All of you. Everybody in this town. They’re all different from all other towns. When I know you, all of you, I’ll know how to make the monument, won’t I?”

  A couple of them nodded. Fred did nothing, just watched, and I was glad he was my father. He just held back and studied things and always knew—always knew. How is it, I wondered for about the millionth time, that I didn’t get adopted and didn’t get adopted and then one day Fred and Emma came in and I got lucky, luckier than I could ever have hoped.

  “So I’m trying to learn as much as I can before the day after tomorrow.”

  “What’s day after tomorrow?”

  “The meeting,” Fred said. “There’s a meeting at the courthouse to decide on the monument.”

  “Ahh, yes.”

  “Everybody is coming. It’s a potluck.”

  “I’ll be there—but I still think it’s just someplace for pigeons to dump.”

  The men moved back to their trucks and Mick motioned for me to stay and work. He went back out to his wagon and found a new tablet and his bag of chalks and started to work on his own.

  He began in the office with me, his hands floating over the paper in swirls before lowering. I watched him for a bit, then watched Fred watching Mick.

  Fred’s eyes glowed.

  “It’s like dancing, ain’t it?” he said to me when he saw me watching him. “His hands just dance.”

  Some of the me
n came back in and watched him as their trucks dumped, watched him draw the trucks and the grain coming down and the office and the old wood and the peanut machine. I thought I would never be able to do it.

  He must have known what I was thinking. “You just keep working,” he said. “It will come, it will come.”

  “I’d rather watch you—to learn.”

  “That too, but work as well. Watch and learn and work and live and be.”

  He was looking out the window while he talked and his voice trailed off.

  “The sparrows. Look at them.”

  He went to the window and leaned the tablet against the bottom edge so that it lay flat, and I stood to his side and saw the sparrows. They were all around the elevator—hundreds and hundreds of them, sometimes so thick they are like water when you walk, parting ahead of you and then landing again in back to get at the grain that’s spilled or blown off the trucks.

  I had never thought of them as pretty but Mick drew them with the chalk, just spots in the whirl of dust around the elevator so that they seemed to be moving, dancing, swirls of birds that went up from the elevator floor along the towers of concrete where the grain was stored, seemed to be alive.

  “I can’t see like that,” I said. “Not to see them that way.”

  “You will—it will come. You will see that way.”

  It was so strange because there were other people in the room, Fred and one other man and Jimmy Durbin had just left and here we were talking like nobody else existed, and in a way they didn’t.

  There was just the drawing that he was doing and I was watching, and none of the other people seemed to be there, just us. All of that day we did the same—went around town seeing things, doing drawings.

  Down alleys, into the bakery—where we sat in back on the loading steps and shared a package of rolls with Python—into the courthouse, the jail (which I had never seen) where the cells were empty, drawing after drawing, all his in chalk and mine in pencil until it was evening and we were standing by the station wagon.

  “Tomorrow you’re on your own,” he said. “Do the same thing.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Work. I have to prepare the presentation and that will take most of the day. And tonight there is one place I have to investigate where you can’t come.”