Free Remember Ben Clayton by Stephen Harrigan

Rusty was not much of a horseman, something that Gil would have to take into account, since the human figure would need to imply an easy conformance with the horse next to him.
    They talked for a few moments more, about whether he should lease or buy a horse to serve as the model for Poco, and where it could be stabled, and then they each silently went back to the newspapers again until Maureen announced she could no longer stay awake. She kissed him good night and retreated to her room, leaving him alone in the kitchen in a dim pool of electric light.
    He turned off the light and walked to his own room, the sound of his footfalls combining with the ticking of the mantel clock to create a lonely recessional tattoo. The haunted stillness of his own house made it that much harder to purge the gloom of Lamar Clayton’s lonely ranch house from his mind.
    He brushed his teeth and changed into his pajamas and went to bed. The trip to West Texas, as trips tended to do, had broken the continuity of his acceptance of Victoria’s death, and he felt her once again beside him, sleeping on her back, her profile looming as sharp as a mountain range. Thirty-three years of marriage had never eroded the fascination he found in staring at that unforgettable face, which still embodied for him everything that was beautiful and heroic and mournful in the female soul. Before she had gotten sick she had begun to put on weight, the broad planes of her face sagging a bit with the added flesh, but even at fifty-four she could have still served as a model for a ship’s figurehead.
    Her heroic features had implied so strongly an internal fearlessness that it had taken Gil many years to fully perceive how uncertain she could be, how deeply her morale could be shaken when tensions were in the air or prospects were on the wane. The move from New York to San Antonio had been a new start for Gil, but for Victoria it had amounted to a plummet out of a familiar world, a descent caused by her husband’s tyrannical artistic pride. She had gamely tried to start anew here, to follow him into the social embrace that greeted an eminent sculptor from New York, but the attentions of all these kind strangers had done nothing to buoy her up. They had sent her, instead, on a slow slide into solitude. Along with Maureen, she had done her share of volunteer work during the war, rolling bandages and putting together relief packages, but she had made no real friends in the process, and after the armistice she was more alone than ever, spending her days in more or less solitary management of the household while Gil and Maureen worked together in the studio. When she was stricken by the Spanish flu—a disease that had mostly attacked vigorous young people—Gil had not been able to banish the thought that the vaporous gloom of her new life in San Antonio had added to her vulnerability.
    There was no point in trying to sleep now, not when he was turning over once again in the middle of the night his responsibility for Victoria’s lingering unhappiness and shockingly swift death. He got up and put on his working clothes. He made his way through the moonlit hallway to the kitchen to drink a tumbler of limeade from the icebox. (Embracing the Mexican preference for limes over lemons had been one of the easiest adjustments to life in San Antonio.) His throat was dry and he drank the cool limeade in several long swallows while standing at the window looking out at the October night. He washed the glass out in the sink and quietly slipped through the kitchen door. His studio was only fifty or sixty feet away but in the unseasonable nighttime humidity beads of sweat were already forming at his hairline by the time he reached it. Gil did not much mind the humidity, though it had tormented Victoria. It kept the clay moist, for one thing. And it added to an overall vivifying sense of living in a strange and secret place.
    The odor of that moisture-saturated clay welcomed him as he