Free Remember Ben Clayton by Stephen Harrigan Page A

walked through the door, along with the smell of lumber from the scrap pile that had accumulated at one end of the studio, where he kept the wood that he used in filling out his armatures. The high-ceilinged barn he had converted into his studio had been made higher by a four-foot-tall panel of north-facing windows installed on solid trestles that rested on the reinforced studwork of the barn walls—and it was through these windows that the moon shone now with such radiance that he could almost go to work by its light.
    But it was daylight that mattered in a sculptor’s studio, daylight of a certain proportion and strength. The reflected light from the moon lent a distorting, golem-like glower to the pieces scattered around the studio. Gil’s full-size plaster of the Yellow Rose of Texas appeared especially ferocious, her eyes lost in shadow and her beautiful delicate brow looking, in this light, as thick as a caveman’s. The statue had been commissioned four years ago by the young men of a local civic organization dedicated to the memory of the young maiden (fictitious, Gil was almost sure) who had supposedly distracted Santa Anna while the Texan army marched up to attack his camp at San Jacinto. Unfortunately, the Knights of the Yellow Rose of Texas had never been able to find the funds to have it cast in bronze, and a grocery store had in the meantime been built on the spot where it was to have been erected.
    The Yellow Rose was only one piece in what sometimes seemed to Gil a gallery of disappointment: maquettes to enter competitions for commissions that had been awarded to others, busts of bank presidents and board chairmen and the mayors of mid-size cities that he had undertaken purely for money, allegorical tablets commissioned by gas companies and department stores to honor their achievements in the annals of customer satisfaction and free enterprise.
    It had been a long time since he stood in this studio with the sense of righteous creative purpose that he felt tonight, addressing a project that was not just remunerative but inspiring. He sorted through the scrap pile until he found a thick slab of pine that would serve as a base for the maquette, blew the dust off it, wiped it with a rag, and cleared off the worktable at one end of the studio. From a deep drawer filled with tangled pieces of thick wire he retrieved a twelve-inch human armature he had built for a previous model, and with a pair of pliers he set to work bending it into the internal skeletal shape of a boy Ben’s size. When it was more or less as he wanted it, he set it aside and started to work with more of the thick-gauge wire, fashioning another armature for the horse. At the end of an hour’s work he had the two armatures screwed down to the base and standing side by side, the schematic arm of the man resting upon the spine of the horse. That’s enough, he thought, though his imagination was racing, charged by the sight of these loops of pliable wire shining in the moonlight, the always exciting first step toward three-dimensional reality. That’s enough, he told himself: leave something for tomorrow.

SIX
    M onths earlier, in secret, Maureen had entered the competition for a city sculpture commission. The piece was to be placed on the Commerce Street bridge and called Spirit of the Waters in homage to the San Antonio River, which passed below. It had seemed natural not to tell her father, though it had been difficult to locate a space in which to model the piece and sometimes awkward to invent excuses to leave the house for the extended periods of work required.
    In the end, she had been able to commandeer the studio of a friend who taught art at the Ursuline Academy. The studio was vacant only on Saturdays, but so far it had suited her schedule, and the bulk of the work was now finished and would be ready for the judging competition next week. Her father would not begin the Clayton piece in earnest for another few weeks or so and her