without any apparent resentment. “It’s a deal. You make me up an invoice and tell me how much money you want up front. The sooner you get started on this thing the better I’d like it.”
“Good,” Gil said. “From my end, the timing is excellent.”
“You want to know the truth, I thought it’d cost me double that.”
HE SPENT THAT NIGHT in the boy’s room, one of the two rooms that formed the original stone core of the house. There was a single small window through which he could see a hazy full moon that looked like a giant dissolving aspirin tablet high in the West Texas sky. On either side of the window, at shoulder height, were two indentations that passed all the way through the thick wall, funneling down to small circles that were open to the night air. It took Gil a minute or two to puzzle out what they were: shooting holes, to fight off Comanches during the not-so-distant days of the Indian wars.
Ben Clayton’s saddle sat on a sawhorse on one end of the room. It seemed a bit old-fashioned in a way Gil did not have the expertise to judge, something to do with the straight, high-backed cantle. There was no ornamentation, no silver inlays or intricate tooling, just solid leather. The working saddle of an earnest, unaffected young man, a plainspoken American martyr. Or perhaps that was the way Gil was already seeing his subject because he preferred to think of his own style, and hence his own substance, as unadorned as well. No simpering cherubs commenting from the ether, no bombast or symbolic blather, a minimum of the decorative vines and garlands that were known in the trade as “spinach.” He would use this saddle in the statue, of course, not merely for its authenticity but for the pleasure it would give him to sculpt something so austere and worn.
When Lamar Clayton had shown him to his room after dinner, he had pointed out the saddle and the other vestiges of his son’s life that he had been too paralyzed with sadness to do anything with but leave in place. A picture of Ben’s mother and father’s wedding day rested in a silver frame on an empty spool that had served as the dead boy’s end table. In the photograph, Lamar was twenty years younger and a few pounds heavier, his hair streaked with gray but not yet white. But there was no more buoyancy in his expression than there had been at the dinner table tonight. He must have been fifty in this photograph, Gil supposed. Why had he taken so long to marry?
His new wife, dressed in a traveling suit, her hand gripping the crook of his arm, was slender and winning, beaming at the camera as if she were in possession of a wonderful secret about her dour husband. It was a better-quality likeness of Ben’s mother than the one Clayton had shown them earlier, and it made Gil rueful to think about how the only people in this little family with a glint of vivacity were now dead.
By the light of the kerosene lamp he sorted through the young man’s war memorabilia, scant enough to fit into a shirt box. Most of it seemed to be from his training at Camp Bowie: a pamphlet called “Songs for the Hike,” a blank postcard from the Westbrook Hotel in Fort Worth, displaying a photograph of a not-very-good statue called the Golden Goddess; a “Souvenir Folder of Camp Life,” whose cover depicted a group of doughboys engaged in bayonet drill and whose pages were mostly blank. Under “My Division,” Ben (Gil assumed it was Ben) had written “36th,” and under “My Regiment” he had penciled in “142nd,” but after that he must have lost interest or become annoyed at being prompted about what to enter, because the spaces for “My Company” and “My Training Log” were left blank, as were all the rest of the pages.
There were three postcards, all from Camp Bowie. “Dear all,” one read, “Well I escaped getting my wisdom teeth pulled by one of the dental students they got here. They said there’s no reason to worry about mine. Ortho Cotton got
“Good,” Gil said. “From my end, the timing is excellent.”
“You want to know the truth, I thought it’d cost me double that.”
HE SPENT THAT NIGHT in the boy’s room, one of the two rooms that formed the original stone core of the house. There was a single small window through which he could see a hazy full moon that looked like a giant dissolving aspirin tablet high in the West Texas sky. On either side of the window, at shoulder height, were two indentations that passed all the way through the thick wall, funneling down to small circles that were open to the night air. It took Gil a minute or two to puzzle out what they were: shooting holes, to fight off Comanches during the not-so-distant days of the Indian wars.
Ben Clayton’s saddle sat on a sawhorse on one end of the room. It seemed a bit old-fashioned in a way Gil did not have the expertise to judge, something to do with the straight, high-backed cantle. There was no ornamentation, no silver inlays or intricate tooling, just solid leather. The working saddle of an earnest, unaffected young man, a plainspoken American martyr. Or perhaps that was the way Gil was already seeing his subject because he preferred to think of his own style, and hence his own substance, as unadorned as well. No simpering cherubs commenting from the ether, no bombast or symbolic blather, a minimum of the decorative vines and garlands that were known in the trade as “spinach.” He would use this saddle in the statue, of course, not merely for its authenticity but for the pleasure it would give him to sculpt something so austere and worn.
When Lamar Clayton had shown him to his room after dinner, he had pointed out the saddle and the other vestiges of his son’s life that he had been too paralyzed with sadness to do anything with but leave in place. A picture of Ben’s mother and father’s wedding day rested in a silver frame on an empty spool that had served as the dead boy’s end table. In the photograph, Lamar was twenty years younger and a few pounds heavier, his hair streaked with gray but not yet white. But there was no more buoyancy in his expression than there had been at the dinner table tonight. He must have been fifty in this photograph, Gil supposed. Why had he taken so long to marry?
His new wife, dressed in a traveling suit, her hand gripping the crook of his arm, was slender and winning, beaming at the camera as if she were in possession of a wonderful secret about her dour husband. It was a better-quality likeness of Ben’s mother than the one Clayton had shown them earlier, and it made Gil rueful to think about how the only people in this little family with a glint of vivacity were now dead.
By the light of the kerosene lamp he sorted through the young man’s war memorabilia, scant enough to fit into a shirt box. Most of it seemed to be from his training at Camp Bowie: a pamphlet called “Songs for the Hike,” a blank postcard from the Westbrook Hotel in Fort Worth, displaying a photograph of a not-very-good statue called the Golden Goddess; a “Souvenir Folder of Camp Life,” whose cover depicted a group of doughboys engaged in bayonet drill and whose pages were mostly blank. Under “My Division,” Ben (Gil assumed it was Ben) had written “36th,” and under “My Regiment” he had penciled in “142nd,” but after that he must have lost interest or become annoyed at being prompted about what to enter, because the spaces for “My Company” and “My Training Log” were left blank, as were all the rest of the pages.
There were three postcards, all from Camp Bowie. “Dear all,” one read, “Well I escaped getting my wisdom teeth pulled by one of the dental students they got here. They said there’s no reason to worry about mine. Ortho Cotton got
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