The Monument Read Online Free PDF Page A

intention of moving. It was coming to me now, what he was, the thought, and I was wondering what it would do to Bolton.
    He looked kind of like a garden gnome, one of the statues that Clyde Frenser had in his yard and garden. Round and short with red faces, all smiling, all happy, but with some little thing in their eyes, some wicked little thing that made them look like they were always on the edge of doing something wrong. His eyes had the same look, the tip up at the corners, and he had a small beard and was bald on top and looked all mussed and devilish. Even his clothes lookedlike they came off a garden gnome. He had a bright red shirt over a pale green pair of stretch slacks that looked like they’d been on him for about a year. There were stains down the front of his shirt that I didn’t care to look at or think about much. He opened the box to show a bunch of pieces of colored chalk.
    He flipped the top of the tablet back to get to a clean piece of paper and grabbed a chunk of dark-colored chalk from the box and drew.
    “Don’t move—not a muscle.”
    He sketched fast, his head bent over the tablet, his hand flying in great motions, round and round, and when I leaned forward to see he yelled at me.
    “Don’t
move
!”
    Python rumbled at the way his voice jumped but he didn’t even notice that, didn’t notice death. He just kept sketching.
    “The light—see the light?” His voice was a whisper while he worked, a hushed sound, almost like praying, and in a few minutes he was done.
    “There—I’ve caught it. Just notes, see, justnotes, but I can paint it later if I can find somewhere in this place with light, with a room to work in. That’s it, don’t you see? Just a dry room and light. God, light is everything.”
    And here a strange thing happened. While he was talking, his voice soft about light and how he needed a dry room, while he was going on Python walked over to him and put his jaw against the man’s leg, just pushed his muzzle over, and the gnome reached down and petted him. Without losing a finger. Python had never let another soul touch him and here he walks right up to this complete stranger who could have been a pervert and lets him touch him on the head.
    “You’re the artist,” I said. “The one they sent for to do the monument.”
    “Mick,” he said. “Mick … well, any last name you want. Just Mick. It doesn’t matter. Names don’t matter, do they? Only the light matters, the light and the way colors move in the light. That’s all. And shapes. Line—it’s all in the line.”
    And all this time he’s petting Python, rubbinghis head, “But aren’t you the one for the monument?”
    “Well, that goes, doesn’t it? What in blue-bonnet hell would I be doing in this place if I weren’t sent for? I know nothing of farming or wheat or flatness. Only line, and color and form and shading. See—look now, turn and
look
, girl, at the light coming across the face of that building. Look at how it catches the bricks so you can see the soul of the men who laid them, see the guts of the men who made the building.
See?
There it is.”
    And he turned to a new page in the tablet and started to draw again. This time he wasn’t doing me so I could move, and I stood in back of him and watched him draw. It didn’t make any sense—the lines seemed to fly all over the place, all in browns and reds and yellows, sometimes one over the other and all mixed. I didn’t see how it could make anything but junk, just junk, and suddenly it did.
    Suddenly it was all there. All the dust and light from the sun and the bricks in the old Emerson building that used to be a hardware storebut now was empty—all of it was there. And the light.
    “I can see it!” I said. “I can really see it—how did you do that?”
    “It’s not me, is it—it’s the light. It’s the way the thing is, the way of it, and I just make it be the way it is. Like over there, over by that old fence, see how it comes out