Remember Ben Clayton by Stephen Harrigan

was high-crowned, the sweatband half-unstitched, the brim rolled up just a bit on the sides where the boy had absently shaped it through years of use. The underside of the hat brim presented another sculptural issue, since to a viewer looking up from below it ran the risk of being a boring flat surface.
    “Mr. Clayton,” Gil asked, “may I borrow this?”
    “The hat?”
    “The hat, shirt, trousers, boots … everything. Unless you object.”
    “We’ll take excellent care of them,” Maureen said. “And return them, of course.”
    “All right,” the old man said after a moment or two. “Hell, pack them up and take them along with you.”
    THE EVENING MEAL turned out to be a livelier proposition than their solemn luncheon. Lamar Clayton still presided mostly in silence, but this time they were joined by Ernest and another hand, a cheerful, always smoking man who seemed to have survived thirty or so years with the daunting name of Anaxagorus Jackson. “Don’t worry,” Ernest said, as he made the introductions, “we can’t pronounce it neither, so we just call him Nax.”
    Nax smiled and buttered his baked potato with a cigarette still dangling from his mouth. He sat next to Ernest, and the longitudinal axis of his head—enhanced by a steeply receding hairline—made a somehow harmonious contrast to the foreman’s squashed-together features. Gil guessed that this was the way it usually was, Clayton and the hands eating together and talking about screwworm treatments and fence repairs and the working agenda for the next day. The private lunch with him and Maureen had been an exception.
    After George’s Mary served coffee, the hands sat around chewing on their toothpicks for another twenty minutes or so and then retired to the bunkhouse. It was barely dark. Gil was restless, as he always was at the end of the day when he was away from his studio. At home, it was his habit to work until eleven or so at night, when he could at last exhaust his churning physical and mental energy and go to bed.
    “So why do you need his clothes?” Clayton suddenly asked, just when Gil thought the old man was about to fall asleep in his chair.
    “For my model. I’ll have to find a young man of your son’s general size.”
    “Somebody else is going to wear Ben’s clothes?”
    “It would make the piece that much more authentic.”
    Clayton took another sip of coffee, mutely agreeing, though clearly still troubled by the idea of another boy in his son’s clothes.
    “I’ll have a sketch for you in the morning,” Gil said. “Then, if you approve the initial concept, I’ll make a maquette.”
    “A maquette. That like a model of it or something?”
    “Exactly. A three-dimensional clay miniature. Assuming you approve that, I would then go to work on a scale model and then on the final sculpture itself.”
    “What’s your best price for all of this?” Clayton said. He glanced at Maureen as he asked the question, giving her a faint smile, as if in apology that they had embarked upon some tedious manly subject in which she would have to indulge them.
    Gil shot a look at Maureen as well, allied with her in a wordless deliberation about the old man’s ability to finance such a project. The twenty-thousand-dollar figure he had roughly calculated on top of the mesa would have been more than a fair price for the client he had imagined when he first received Lamar Clayton’s letter—a remote, lordly cattle baron who simply sought out the best of everything without regard to cost. But the evidence of this gloomy ranch house, and the gloomy mood in it, threw him into a hurried revision.
    “The cost will be sixteen thousand dollars,” he said. “That is a complete price that includes the statue, pedestal, any necessary engraving, and the erection of the work under my supervision.”
    Clayton looked away for a moment at the blank wall—thinking it over, or pretending to.
    “All right,” he finally said, without much joy but