Remember Ben Clayton Read Online Free PDF

his daughter, grieving over his wife, still sore in tendon and soul over the loss of his statue, he could not deny the expansive mood that was stealing over him in this shutting-down hotel restaurant in Abilene, Texas. He generally still traveled with the enthusiasm of a boy leaving home for the first time, and here he was in a place he had never expected to visit, a place that held no charm for tourists but certainly plenty of other things that would be of interest to men of serious purpose. More than that, there was the prospect of real work ahead, not just paying work but the promise of the yet-unencountered subject, the yet-unformed clay.
    AT BREAKFAST the next morning a man approached their table and said that Mr. Clayton had sent him into town to pick them up and drive them out to the “place.” He introduced himself as Ernest, which Gil thought an unlikely name for a cowboy. But he was unmistakably a cowboy. His hair had been creased all the way around the circumference of his head by the tight fit of his hat, so that bareheaded—as he was now, deferentially twirling the brim of his hat in his hands—he looked like a threaded jar without a lid.
    “Sit down and have some breakfast with us,” Gil said.
    “Well sir, thank you. I just might do that. I already had breakfast but I guess another one won’t hurt me none.”
    He ordered eggs and biscuits and something called redeye gravy. He had a wide, eager smile and a rather sloping chin and was missing a thumb on his left hand. He wore jeans and a clean work shirt with a frayed notebook and a pencil poking up out of the breast pocket. When his breakfast came he ate with sloppy enjoyment. Gil supposed he was about forty, though his face was so deeply weathered he could have been much older.
    “It ain’t but a little over twenty miles,” he was saying. “Shouldn’t take us even an hour to get there.”
    He turned to Maureen. “Might be a little dusty, ma’am, but I got a couple dusters in the back of the car so you won’t ruin those nice clothes.”
    “That’s thoughtful,” she said. “Thank you.”
    “What can you tell us about this statue that Mr. Clayton has in mind?” Gil asked.
    “Oh, I better let Mr. Clayton himself tell you about that. He got it in his head to have a statue of his boy, is all I know.”
    “And you knew the boy yourself, I suppose?”
    “Oh, yes sir,” Ernest answered, looking down into his coffee cup while his face took on a faint, fleeting somberness. “We all knew the boy.”
    •
    THEY DROVE through the downtown streets and through Abilene’s outlying neighborhoods and past a few desolate-looking diners and then onto a dirt road leading to nothing.
    Maureen rode in the backseat, sitting forward, listening as her father quizzed Ernest about rainfall and annual cotton yields and varieties of cattle. It was his interviewing voice, his open-handed man-of-the-world demeanor, so different from the private working silence into which he disappeared once a piece was truly under way. Even now she could detect the subtle onset of that feverish distraction. As Ernest talked, her father moved his fingers slightly, unconsciously kneading the air above his lap. This meant, she knew, that he was working already, with nothing to go by: no photographs, no description, no knowledge of whether there was to be a horse included or not. Out of nothing, he was creating a statue of a dead boy.
    She shifted her attention to Ernest’s own hands, splayed tight like a frog’s feet on the big steering wheel. She didn’t realize she was staring at Ernest’s missing thumb until he took his hand off the steering wheel and held it up to her face with a grin.
    “Caught it in a dally when I was workin’ a steer,” he said. “Popped right off like a bottle cap.”
    “I’m sorry,” Maureen shouted over the grinding motor. “I hope you don’t think I’m being rude.”
    “No, ma’am. I stare at it myself sometimes when I ain’t got nothin’