Free The Monument by Gary Paulsen Page B

the room it happened. You could see it. The thing between them was right there.
    “Better than football, isn’t it?” It was a low voice in my ear and I saw Fred standing there, leaning down. He and Emma had moved into the room when I wasn’t looking. “I’m glad I didn’t miss this.”
    “All right,” Mrs. Langdon said. “Who’s first?”
    Hands shot up.
    Mrs. Langdon raised her finger and pointed at somebody in back of me. It was Harley Pederson. He pretty much lived at Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium, had a head that looked like it had been screwed down into his shoulders, and was probably one of the men who beat Mick up.
    “It should be a painting,” he said, “of a soldier charging up a hill to save a blonde woman fromavenging hordes”—he took a breath—“and it should be in glowing paint on black velvet.”
    I looked at Mick and he was smiling straight at me.
    It was going to be a long night.

Sixteen

    “HOLD IT,” Mick held up his hands. It was close to midnight and people were tired and getting cranky, but the suggestions were still coming. Except that they weren’t suggestions now so much as orders.
    “I’ve listed the ones I thought I could do,” he said. “And there are over a hundred. We couldvote on each of them, but I think we would get one vote each a hundred times.”
    He rubbed the back of his neck and sat in the judge’s chair to the rear of the bench. I read a story in the orphanage once about a leprechaun in Ireland and he looked like that—a leprechaun sitting in a judge’s chair.
    “How would it be if I made some suggestions and we voted on those—based on all your ideas, of course.”
    There was some muttering, and then somebody—I didn’t see who—said, “What kind of suggestions?”
    “I’m glad you asked.” Mick stood and walked around to the front of the desk again. “We might be missing something, and I thought I would bring it up. The point is, sometimes monuments don’t seem to be monuments but are, just the same.”
    “You’re going to have to explain that,” Harley said and I thought you’d have to explain just about anything to Harley.
    “And I shall, I shall. All right, here’s an example. Everybody here knows about the Battleof Waterloo, when Napoleon was defeated. After the battle women and children went around the battlefield with pliers pulling teeth from all the young men who had been killed—on both sides. Many people in France and England had bad teeth and needed false dentures, and they had no way to make false teeth in those days, so they used real teeth from dead people set in wood for false dentures.”
    “That’s disgusting.” This from Mrs. Carlson.
    “No more than war, my dear—not a bit more disgusting than war. But the point I’m making is that those dentures—they called them Waterloo teeth in England, and only rich people could afford them—those false teeth were a kind of monument, weren’t they? A kind of reverse, sick monument to all the young men killed in Waterloo. Every time one of those rich bas … people bit down on a piece of food they thought of the boy who had died.”
    Harley didn’t get it. “You want us all to wear dentures?”
    “No. I just want you to see that monuments can come from other places than just art. There’sanother story: During the Boer War in South Africa a platoon of forty-odd British soldiers were caught in a small valley by vicious crossfire. They were all killed and the bodies were left where they lay.
    “They had just been issued their food, and each had been given a half a dozen peaches which the men kept in their knapsacks. As the bodies decomposed they became fertilizer and the peach pits took root, and now there is an orchard there, still today, of forty peach trees. It is said that the peaches from the orchard are the sweetest peaches in the world.”
    The room was silent, absolutely quiet. Even Harley kept his mouth shut.
    Trees
, I thought, all this time he was coming to