The Monument Read online

  “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 elevator to help Fred—even though he said I didn’t have to, I felt kind of guilty about it—I went home and ate. I took a bath in a hurry and went to my room and snuggled into the covers with a glass of Pepsi and four chocolate chip cookies that Emma had made and opened the book.

  It was hard to read and the first part was all reading. I thought it would be wrong to skip it, but the letters were very small and there were lots of dates and French names so that I had trouble keeping focused on them, and I decided to move to the back of the book for a while where there were colored plates of his paintings.

  “Oh.”

  I actually made a sound. I couldn’t help it. The pictures were so good, so pretty.

  There was a painting of racehorses and the colors seemed to jump off the page; you could see the muscles moving under their skin, hear the pounding, smell the sweat.

  Another of a woman standing by a door, just that, but the colors and the light made it seem as if she had just walked in and was going to say something to me.

  But even with that, even with the beauty, I was still trying to work, trying to see the colors and the way Degas had drawn things until I turned the page and just stopped, stopped dead.

  It was a painting of a group of young women practicing ballet, called The Dance Master. The wall in the room was green and there was a big mirror on one side for the dancers to see themselves. In the background there is a raised platform or bleachers for people to sit and watch and dancers are everywhere, practicing, stretching, fixing their costumes. On one side there is an older man leaning on a cane—an instructor—and he is watching them, studying them, and still I would have been all right except for one girl.

  She was standing to the side of the dancers but almost in the middle of the painting and she is watching them, worried about something, with her hand to her mouth, and I looked at her and started to cry.

  She looked like me, or sort of like me, but that wasn’t it—at first I didn’t know why I was crying. Then I thought of what they were, all of them, dancers, and that all of what they were was gone.

  The painting was done in the late eighteen-hundreds. They were all gone. All dead. I wanted to know the girl, wanted to watch them practice. I wanted to see the dresses move and hear the music, wanted to know which ones the dance master picked for performance and if the girl who looked a little like me was one of them. I wanted to talk to them and ask them how it was to wear the costumes and dance and dance and dance without one stiff leg. I wanted to know their dreams and hopes and all of them, all the girls in the drawing and the dance master and the people sitting in the bleachers and the light and maybe even the building were dead and gone. I would never know their names or their favorite colors or what kind of music they liked or what they thought of school or what they had for supper. Gone, gone, gone.

  So I cried, thinking of it, and must have made a sound because the door opened and Emma came in and sat on the bed.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “The picture,” I said. “They’re all gone and I want them to not be gone.” And I explained what I meant while Emma sat there and nodded and pushed the hair back from my face and smiled and wiped my cheeks where the tears went down.

  “Just gone,” I said, finishing. “They’re all gone.”

  Emma shook her head. “But they aren’t, don’t you see? There’s still the painting, isn’t there? You have that. You will always have the picture, won’t you? So they can never be gone.”

  And of course she was right.

  The painting.

  There was still and would always be the painting. Emma turned out the light and I lay back on the pillow with the book on the stand next to the bed and went to sleep thinking I would find Mick in the morning and tell him what I had learned from the book on Degas.

  The painting. There would always be the painting.

  Fourteen

  PYTHON WAS WAITING for me when I came out in the morning, but not sitting the way he usually did. He was standing by the door, waiting, and as soon as we reached the sidewalk he started leading me.

  “What are you doing?” He was taking me toward the center of town and I wanted to go to Carlson’s bed and breakfast, the opposite direction, so I let him go.

  He stopped.

  “You’re going the wrong way.”

  He waited, watching me, his tail flopping.

  “We’re going this way.”

  But he didn’t turn. He had never done this before, fought me this way, so I decided there must be a reason. I went to him and grabbed the fur on his shoulder and followed the way he wanted to go.

  Toward downtown, but off to the side, into an alley and then another alley, and we came to the back of Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium.

  He was there looking sort of the same as the first morning when I saw him.

  His behind was sticking up in the air, his front end was jammed down in some boxes and garbage so that I couldn’t see his face, and there was no movement.

  Mick.

  He looked like he’d been thrown in the trash and for a minute I thought he was dead. I let go of Python and walked up to where he was crumpled.

  “Mick?”

  There was a sound—like air coming out of a tire—and I saw the rear end move.

  “Are you all right it?”

  “No.” The voice was muffled, coming from inside the garbage. “Do I look all right?” He rolled sideways—fell over—and brushed napkins and coffee grounds and beer cans and worse out of his face. “Tell me, do you have a gun?”

  “Gun?” I shook my head. “No, why?”

  “I was hoping somebody could come along and shoot me and end this.”

  His face was all puffed and smashed and bloody, both eyes swollen almost shut, the lips cracked.

  “What happened?” I asked, but I knew the answer.

  “I’m not quite certain. It may have been something I said or something they said. One thing has a way of leading to another, doesn’t it? We were all beyond reason and there was a fight and I wound up here.”

  “They always fight in Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium,” I said. “You shouldn’t have gone there.”

  “Nonsense—it’s a very nice pub. Much nicer tha
n many I’ve been in. I remember one in Sydney—my God, they had ball bats in Sydney. They very nearly killed me for talking about one of their dogs—I think they were collies.” He rose to his feet, staggering and wobbling, his clothes half torn off.

  “You look awful.”

  “In the name of art,” he said. “All in the name of art.” He looked up at the sun where it was starting to show above the roof edge of Lyle’s and spit out what looked like a tooth. “What time is it?”

  “I don’t have a watch—I think just after seven thirty. Close to eight.”

  “Ahh—eleven hours until the presentation tonight. Good, right on schedule. Everything moving right along as the plan dictates.”

  “Plan? You mean all this”—I pointed to the garbage and the way he looked—“is part of a plan?”

  “Well—I meant to win the fight, or at least do better.”

  “You knew there would be a fight?”

  He smiled, and I was right, there was a gap where a tooth had been. “It was as sure as that little grave in the bushes, my dear. There had to be a fight, didn’t there? Because there was a Lyle’s and there was a me and there was that herd of animals who drink in there—of course there would be a fight.”

  “And you did it anyway?”

  He looked at me—or tried to look at me. It was really more of a squint through the puffy eyes. “All of it, all of everything here was to be in the monument—what I like or don’t like, what happens to me or doesn’t happen to me doesn’t matter. The art is all of it, isn’t it? Don’t you know that already?”

  I didn’t say anything but I knew he was right. I thought of the painting the night before, sitting there crying because the painting made me cry, and I knew he was right. I nodded.

  “Well, then—it’s all going according to plan. Now you go on with your sketchbook and pencils and work—draw. And I’ll get to business.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “The same as you, my dear. I’m going to draw. I’ll see you at the courthouse tonight.”

  THE

  MONUMENT

  Fifteen

  SEVEN O’CLOCK even in late summer in Bolton is still day, nowhere near night—it doesn’t get dark for two more hours—and most people in the summer work until it’s really dark. Except for the downtown people. They close up about five.

  Fred usually works into the night but early that day the trucks stopped coming. I was helping Fred—I’d gone around and just about drawn everything there was to draw in Bolton and needed to talk to Mick some more to know what to do next, or how to draw better. So I’d gone to help Fred because I couldn’t talk to Mick, and about five o’clock the trucks stopped. I looked out and there were no more. Fred came out of the machinery room that drove the augers to take grain into the storage bins.

  He was covered with dust—half an inch thick—and he sneezed and shook it off.

  “There are no more trucks,” I said.

  He nodded. “They’re stopping for the day.”

  “They are?” I’d never heard of them stopping early for anything. Not unless it rained. Then they had to wait for the grain to dry out. “Why?”

  “To get cleaned up for the meeting.”

  “Are they all coming?”

  He nodded again. “Everybody I talked to will be there. Come on, let’s get home and clean up and eat.”

  We walked home—four blocks—and you could feel something. Almost a hum. People waved and said hello and asked if we were going to the courthouse and Fred would say:

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  And the next person would wave and ask if we were going. Nobody knew quite what to expect, but everybody, everybody was going.

  We showered and I put on clean jeans and a T-shirt with the name of a hard-rock place on it even though Emma wanted me to wear a dress. We left about six forty-five to walk down to the courthouse. Fred had a car, an old Chrysler that he baby-talked to when he drove, but he didn’t use it unless we went for a special drive or had to go somewhere out of Bolton to go shopping.

  It took us about five minutes to walk downtown and it’s just as well we didn’t try to drive. There were cars parked and jammed the whole way and crowds of people walking, all clean and neat and dressed in their Sunday clothes.

  “I didn’t know there were this many people who cared about art in Bolton County,” I said.

  “It isn’t just art,” Emma said. “This monument thing is more than just art. Not everybody will come, but I’d bet there will be close to a thousand.”

  A thousand was a lot for the courthouse.

  They were packed on the steps going in so I had trouble making room for Python by the concrete lions. I kind of had to let Python look at a couple of smart-aleck boys the way he looks at chickens before they made a place for him.

  The hallways were jammed and the courtroom—the biggest room in the building—was full. Men and women were trying to get in the doorway. I heard sound, voices, some saying things—it sounded angry—some just rumbling.

  Fred and Emma were stopped but I was smaller and by moving sideways I worked past the blocked doorway into the courtroom. By standing on one of the benches at the rear I could see all around the room over the heads of the people.

  Mick stood in the front, up on the raised platform next to the judge’s bench. He was cleaner, had his hair slicked back on the sides, and looked fresh in a pair of gray pants and an almost-white shirt rolled up at the sleeves.

  He stood quietly, his elbow on the judge’s bench, leaning sideways and watching with a small smile on his face—which still looked like it was made of hamburger. His eyes were still swollen almost shut and his lips were thicker than normal.

  The crowd was jammed into every square foot of space, and near as I could see, not one of them was looking at Mick.

  All around the walls, in two rows, one above the other, were drawings. Many of them were in the colored chalk—some I had seen him do, like the one of the small grave and drawings at the elevator, but most of them I had not seen before. Some were in pencil, some in charcoal, some just a few lines to show an idea, a few lines that showed everything, and many of them in more detail.

  They were all of Bolton and for a second I just stared without seeing—there were so many. Dozens of them. And he had done them all in just two days and one night. One after the other, and they were all taped to the walls in the courthouse, and it didn’t seem possible that he could have done it. Not in such a short time. But then I remembered that I had seen him do some of them in three, four minutes, his arm swooping with the chalk.

  Then I started to look at the drawings, really look.

  They were more than just drawings—they were pictures of Bolton, pictures of the inside of Bolton, pictures of everything.

  “Look,” somebody near me said, “look at Mrs. Langdon.”

  They meant the drawing. I saw it to the left of the bench on the wall. It was a chalk drawing in a partially lighted room, almost dim, and she was standing near a window looking back over her shoulder at the person looking at the picture.

  She was nude.

  Her hair was down and she was nude and it was one of those things you had to believe because of the things around it. There was the drawing of Jennings’s dog, and there was Mrs. Langdon, and the drawing of the old car up on blocks, and there was Mrs. Langdon, and there were the sparrows at the elevator, and there was Mrs. Langdon, and even if it weren’t true, even if Mick hadn’t seen Mrs. Langdon nude, it didn’t matter.

  The drawing made it true.

  And more—more drawings of all the inside of the town. Drawings of the men in Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium that made them look coarse and ugly and thick-necked and drunk and red. Drawings of Mrs. Carlson holding a dollar in her hand and it was her, just exactly her, and she looked greedy and like she could hold on to the dollar forever and ever.

  And me.

  There was a drawing of me.

  I was walking down the street with P
ython, holding on to his shoulder and the leg was there, the leg I didn’t like to think about was there, and I could see it now, see it as others saw it, and I felt tears coming to my eyes. Not because I was sad or upset, but because I felt like I did when I saw the painting by Degas with the ballet dancers in it and I wanted to know them and they were gone.

  And there was me and I wanted to know me, to talk to me and ask me all about the leg and the dog, and I couldn’t because it was me. I think in all the time of my life, in the long nights in the orphanage when we used to sneak into the bathroom and talk at night and bring cans of fruit cocktail and pretend to have picnics in there, in all the times of dreaming for somebody to come along and adopt me, in all the time of my life, I never saw me. Just me.

  And there I was.

  I started to choke up and saw that some others were crying and some—like Mrs. Langdon—were mad. She was standing in the middle of the crowded room staring, first at the drawing of her and then at Mick, who was not looking at her, and then back at the drawing and then to Mick. If she’d had a gun, I think he would have been dead.

  Mrs. Carlson was the same. Off in a corner she was looking at the drawing of her holding a dollar. I thought it looked just as natural as life but she was so mad she was shaking. While I was looking at her she worked through the crowd to the wall and tore the drawing down and crumpled it and threw it on the floor.

  It was as if everybody had been waiting just for that. People seemed to lean, then sway back, and then others came to the wall and did the same—tore the drawings down and crumpled them and stamped them on the floor. In moments most of the drawings were gone.

  Mine was still there, and the old car and the Jennings dog and the little grave in the bushes and some of the elevator drawings showing the sparrows, but almost none with any people in them.

  Things, I thought—they’ll allow things, but they won’t allow people.