The Peculiar Monument

In this exclusive excerpt from Stephen Harrigan’s new novel, Remember Ben Clayton, an ambitious sculptor meets a lonely rancher who lost his son in World War I. But as the two fathers come to rely on each other, they realize they both have secrets they are desperate to keep.

by Stephen Harrigan

May 2011

The ranch house and outbuildings finally came into sight after the road veered off onto higher ground. Gil and Maureen exchanged cautious looks. It was not much of a house, just a fortresslike main room of stacked stone to which a long, peaked-roof wing appeared to have been more or less randomly appended. A man stood on the porch, watching the truck drive up. At his feet sat an unlikely ranch dog, a chubby, gray-muzzled dachshund. As the car approached, the man climbed stiffly down the stairs and walked out to the edge of a parched circle of grass that marked the end of the caliche drive. He stood there bareheaded, his hands stashed in the back pockets of his trousers, his head cocked, staring at the approaching vehicle as if awaiting not a pair of invited visitors but some dreaded decree of fate.

Gil stepped out of the car and said hello and offered his hand. Lamar Clayton took it and looked back at Gil with an assessing stare and a faint smile that could have been either an expression of welcome or the manifestation of a private judgment. Gil decided he was a decade or so older than himself, a quiet old man with an air of grave self-possession, the tough skin of his face marked by a network of wrinkles and deep vertical creases.

His expression brightened as he greeted Gil’s daughter, but he did not have much to say to her besides hello. Maybe the self-possession was just shyness, Gil thought, the evasive, deflective manner of an old rancher unused to being around women. Nevertheless, there was something commanding about his stillness, his patient assumption that it should be others who speak first and say the most. “Ernest treat you folks all right?” Clayton said, with a sly glance at his hired man, who was already hauling their luggage into the house.

“We were in excellent hands,” Gil replied. “And we’ve arrived at a beautiful place.”

“Oh, I don’t know about beautiful,” Clayton said, “but I ain’t got tired of it yet. We get a nice breeze from across the creek there this time of year, and the north wind don’t bother us too much in the winter, since we’re down here in a kind of draw.”

He paused, as if he were planning to reflect some more on the favorable location of the ranch house, but it was just a stalled silence.

“Anyway,” he said, rallying to the conversation again, “come on in. George’s Mary ought to about have our supper on.”

If there was a reason she was called George’s Mary—something beyond the obvious assumption that it was to distinguish her from someone else’s Mary—nobody explained it as they sat down to eat in the narrow parlor. George’s Mary, Gil supposed, was close to his own age, a stout woman in stout shoes and a faded print dress who set various platters down upon the table with no comment and then disappeared into the kitchen to put a pie in the oven. Was she Clayton’s wife? Unlikely. He didn’t know much about the mores of ranch life in Texas, but he assumed the woman of the house would at least preside over her own dinner table.

Ernest, the one loquacious member of the household, had disappeared to the bunkhouse, so it was just the two of them sitting there, spooning fried beef and potatoes onto their plates and trying to carry on a conversation with no great assistance from their host. It seemed to be Clayton’s attitude that dinner was for eating, and Maureen’s dutiful openers—what lovely china, what wonderfully airy biscuits—were met with that same polite half smile and maybe a word or two of explication. The china, he allowed, had been one of his wife’s great treasures.

The “had been” confirmed it: dead wife, dead son, lonely, inward old man.

“Get out of here, Peggy,” Clayton said without conviction to the dog, who stationed herself by his chair and spent almost the entire meal reared up on her hind legs with unnerving persistence, looking less like a dachshund than a vigilant prairie dog. Despite Clayton’s surly commands for her to leave, he kept tossing small pieces of meat onto the floor at her feet, which of course only reinforced her commonsense determination to stay where she was.

Gil had no problem with silence when decorum or gravitas called for it, so he followed Clayton’s lead and mostly forgot about conversation as he finished his meal. Maureen did so as well, though clearly she was unimpressed with all this manly forswearing of talk, this solemn chewing. It was not until George’s Mary cleared the plates and served them buttermilk pie and coffee that Clayton looked up from his plate and seemed to understand that it was time for something to be said.

“She makes a pretty good pie, I always thought.”

“Excellent,” Gil said, smiling in George’s Mary’s direction as she hurried off once more into the kitchen.

“Everything was excellent,” Maureen jumped in. “It was a gorgeous meal.”

Clayton nodded and ran his hand across his full head of wavy white hair. There was another beat of silence during which he seemed to be deliberating about what to say next. Gil could hear the ticking of the mantel clock, the creak of the windmill across the yard. “Well, now, about this statue,” Clayton finally said. “I guess you’re interested or you wouldn’t be here.”

“I’m interested,” Gil answered. “But of course I’d like to know a bit more about what you have in mind.”

Clayton folded up his napkin; he picked up a crumb of piecrust from the table and put it back on his plate.

“Ben—that’s my son—was killed over in France. Some little town somewhere called Saint-Étienne. I looked it up on a map of France over at the library in Albany, but there’s more than one Saint-Étienne in that country and I couldn’t find the one I was looking for. It ain’t but seventy or eighty miles from Paris, over on the western front. Anyway, they buried him in this Saint-Étienne, pretty much where it happened, as I understand, and then he and a bunch of the other boys got moved to a big American cemetery they started up over there. They asked me did I want to bring him home—they said they’d do that for me—but I didn’t take to the thought for some reason. Didn’t like the idea of bothering him again, I guess. Didn’t want to think of that. Maybe that’s a little strange.”

“Of course it’s not,” Maureen said to him.

“Anyway, I just thought if I had a statue of Ben, if I had a likeness of him, not just a picture, something I could . . .”

He gripped the edge of the table with his hands and sat there tensely for a moment, forcing back his emotions.

“I seen your statues in San Antone, Mr. Gilheaney, like I wrote you,” Clayton went on when he found his voice again. “The Alamo one, of course, and that one you did of that Cabeza de Vaca fella. I don’t know much about statues, but I seen plenty that I didn’t think were any good. Yours have got something special to them. The people seem alive.”

“I do my best to make them seem that way. Do you have an idea of where the sculpture would be situated?”

“Oh, yes, sir, I got that all picked out. There was a place that Ben liked pretty well, and I reckon that’s where it ought to be.”

“I should like to see it.”

“I’ll take you there, if you and Miss Gilheaney don’t mind bouncing in the car a little more.”

“And I wonder what you have in the way of photographs of your son.”

“I got a few,” he said and stood up and walked in his shuffling, stove-up gait into another part of the house, the dog following behind.

While he was gone, Gil glanced at his daughter, who simply shrugged, her eyebrows lifted in a wait-and-see expression. George’s Mary came in to collect their dessert plates. There was a teary sheen to her eyes, but her manner was brisk and silent.

“Everything was delicious,” Maureen told her.

“Well, Mr. Clayton ain’t too hard to please,” she said, “long as I burn his steak till it’s tough as a boot.” She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “You’d think a man who lived all that time with the Indians would like his meat on the rare side.”

“He lived with the—” But before Gil could finish the question Clayton had come shuffling back, holding a high school yearbook. He opened the yearbook to a bookmarked page and set it on the table in front of Gil. Maureen moved her chair closer to her father as the two of them studied the photo of Ben. It made no impression: neither handsome nor interestingly ugly, just another in a rank of young men looking indifferently at the camera, their hair tightly combed, synthetic half smiles on their lips, their thoughts hidden.

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