The Monument Read Online Free PDF Page B

eyes. The drawing made me want to know Mr. Jennings young, know what he was like when he was a young man. I decided just because of the drawing to ask around and find out all I could about him.
    “How do you do that?” I asked, but he ignored me, kept going and drawing until I realized that I was late for work and Fred would have to handle the paperwork for the loads without me. He could do it, but it made things slower, and the farmers would have to wait in line longer. Thatmade them mad because they wanted to get back to their fields.
    “I have to go,” I said, but he was doing a tree limb near the school, just a limb that hung out over the elementary playground fence, and he didn’t hear me, or didn’t care, and I turned to go.
    Python didn’t come.
    “Are you staying with him?” I asked. It was the first time he’d ever done that, stayed when I got ready to leave. He turned at last and came to me, leaned in so I could take his shoulder. We walked four blocks back to the grain elevator while Mick stayed to draw the town.
    There was a long line of trucks and Fred looked all frazzled.
    “I was about to send somebody to find you.”
    I slid in behind the desk. “The man came—the artist.”
    “Oh—he did? When?”
    “Must have been last night sometime. I found him asleep in his station wagon.”
    “In his car? Didn’t he know- they had a room saved for him at Carlson’s bed and breakfast?”
    “I guess not.” Or maybe he did, I thought. Widow Carlson had heard about a new tiling for small towns—bed-and-breakfast inns—on some television show she’d seen and decided she should turn her house into one.
    “Just to pick up a few dollars,” she said to Fred and Emma in the grocery store one day when we were shopping. “To help tide a woman over, you know, the rough spots.”
    Fred told me later the Widow Carlson had about as much money as a small European country, having owned seven square miles of prime wheat land that her husband left to her. Maybe she just needed something to do.
    The problem was Bolton is off the path to just about anywhere in the world, and nobody ever came except grain and cattle buyers. They spent the nights in Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium until near morning, buying and selling grain and cattle, and then driving on without actually sleeping the night anywhere. So when nobody came Widow Carlson just more or less saved the breakfast portion for the next time—which wastwo hard-boiled eggs—and, like Fred once said, the eggs must have hair on them by this time.
    Sticking Mick in there would just about kill him, especially if he tried to eat one of the eggs.
    “Maybe we should go find him,” Fred said. “And tell him where to go.”
    I shrugged. “He was over by old man Jennings’s place last I saw him.”
    “What was he doing over there?”
    “Drawing.”
    “Drawing pictures?”
    I nodded. “Looks like he’s going to draw the whole town unless he runs out of paper.”
    “Just drawing pictures as he goes?”
    “Yup.” The dust was coming into the office bad now from the dumping trucks, and I used my fingers to clean out the corner of my eyes. “His hands just fly.”
    “Is that a fact?” Fred stopped with his handkerchief halfway to blowing his nose. “Are the drawings good?”
    I thought a minute. “I don’t know. I think they are, but I don’t know anything about what makes a good drawing. I know this—they makeyou think, make me see things I hadn’t seen before. He did a drawing of old man Jennings’s dog Rex, and I saw Rex like he must have been when he was young.”
    Fred blew his nose, then carefully folded his handkerchief and put it away. “You know, I’d like to see that—I really would.”
    “I could take you if you didn’t have all this to do. He’s just three blocks away.”
    He looked at me. “What do you think?”
    “Fred, there’s three trucks waiting.”
    “We’ll take ’em with us.”
    “We will?”
    “Sure. There might not be a