The Monument Read Online Free PDF

there and the shadows fall in the dirt by the road?”
    And he was off again, the pad out in front of him this time, his fingers holding different pieces of chalk as he moved. Python followed and I followed and watched him work. Once when I looked down, Python was looking at the chalk as well, watching it fly around the paper.
    “How did you get here?” I asked. “I mean, if you see all these things to draw all the time, how do you get anywhere?”
    He stopped and looked at me. “Ahh, yes, there it is, isn’t it? I haven’t a clue. Drunk, I suppose—drunk is the only way I can seem to get anywhere. I have a drink now and then.”
    “You do.” I thought of Fred and Emma. They “had a drink now and then.” Mick must swimin it. When he moved now I could sometimes smell him, smell his clothes, and Python didn’t seem to mind. But then Python liked to roll on dead skunks on the highway when he could find them. Mick’s clothes made me want to stop breathing.
    But I followed him. Even the smell didn’t stop me.
    He kept moving and I kept following him.

Nine

    SOMETIMES you don’t see things and time will go by and by and then you’ll look and see it. In the orphanage we always thought Sister Gene Autry was kind of ugly because she had such a square face and big jaw. But later and still later after I was adopted by Emma and Fred and woke up every morning happy, later I would sit and think of Sister Gene Autry as being kind ofbeautiful. And maybe she wasn’t, but that’s how I remember her now. I wrote a letter to her to tell her, sort of, without telling her how I thought she was beautiful now, but it embarrassed me and I never did mail it. But I wished I had. Although that’s not the same.
    That’s what happened now, while I was following Mick. I’d been in Bolton for years, and what with walking now every morning while we worked through the hard part of harvest, I thought I knew everything about it, how it looked and acted, but I was wrong. I didn’t know anything. Not really.
    Mick went through town like a chalk storm, the little colored bits in one hand and the tablet in the other.
    “The town, see, it’s all there, all … right … there.”
    And he would stop and draw. Once he drew the corner, just the corner, of Henderson’s old white house. It was an abandoned house on the stretch of Third and Elm. I always just thought of it as an empty house, just a box that nobody used any longer. Fred had told me once thatthere had been a large, happy family there but hard times had come in the thirties and they had all left, and nobody ever heard of them again, not a word.
    Somehow that came into the drawing. I watched Mick work, saw the lines happen and the colors and, just from the corner of the old house, felt all the loneliness of the family being gone—all of it. It made me think of Sister Gene Autry and I swore to myself I would write her another letter and mail it this time, and Mick moved on.
    On a back street he stopped by a small green house where Mr. Jennings lived. Mr. Jennings was so old that not even Fred and Emma knew how long he’d been in Bolton. Fred thought he was over a hundred and when I watched Mr. Jennings come out for mail once, to the box on the street, I agreed. It seemed to take him about a week to walk out and walk back, and he had this old, old dog named Rex who slept on the front steps. Rex would get up and walk with Mr. Jennings out to the street for the mail, step bystep, and together they made you think of old—old dusty dead and
old
.
    Mick did a drawing of Rex on the porch, and Rex didn’t move even though Python was there which sometimes made Rex raise his head, and when he was done I could see Rex as a young dog.
    He was still old and not moving and the house was still small and green and Mr. Jennings was still old but I could in some way see them all young and new. I could see Rex how he must have been when he was young with tall shoulders and pretty fur and bright