The Monument by Gary Paulsen Page B

of the men came back in and watched him as their trucks dumped, watched him draw the trucks and the grain coming down and theoffice 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 ofconcrete 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.”
    “Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium,” I guessed.
    “Exactly. If the grain elevator is the soul of Bolton then the pub is … well, some other part of the anatomy. But it needs to be studied, doesn’t it?”
    “I guess.” I didn’t actually think so. All I’d seen of the bar was when fights between big, drunk farmers after harvest was finished would boil out into the street and the sheriff would have to stop them.
    “Well of course it does, of course it does. I have one other filing for you—a present—before we part.”
    “What is it?”
    “A book …” He was rummaging around in the back of the wagon and he brought out a large book in a plastic garbage bag. “Here.”
    “What is it about?”
    “It’s an art book about a painter.”
    I looked in the bag. It was a large book a foot by a foot and a half with a colored jacket and it was in good shape, kept clean by the plastic bag. I pulled it out.
DEGAS
    Just the one word, on the cover, and below the word a painting of a racehorse.
    “It’s beautiful—I don’t know what to say. Thank you.”
    “Study it. I have. Work, draw, and study. We’ll talk about it day after tomorrow, after the explosion.”
    “What explosion?”
    “The one tomorrow evening at the courthouse. You’re coming, aren’t you?”
    “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Thirteen

    THAT NIGHT I read the book, or started to read it.
    Degas was a French painter who was part of something called the Impressionist Movement, which I had not studied, even in school, where the arts teacher only comes once a week on a circuit from other schools.
    After working for a little time at the