Remember Ben Clayton by Stephen Harrigan

After the Maine and the Gómez, word got around about him, but it did not travel as far south as San Antonio, where he had been greeted on his arrival with a banquet in his honor and a band playing an original composition titled “The Gilheaney March.”
    “What rancher?” Walter Sutherland was asking now, as he peered down with dismay into his empty glass.
    “His name is Lamar Clayton.”
    “The hell you say.”
    “You know him?”
    “Goddam, Gil, of course I know him. Everybody in Texas knows him. Back when I used to dabble in the cattle business I’d see him every year at the stock show in Fort Worth. Hardly said a word to anybody, but after what he went through I guess you can’t blame him.”
    “You mean losing his wife?”
    “Losing his wife? Hell, people lose wives every day, and they’ll still talk your ear off. You don’t know about Lamar?”
    Gil shook his head.
    “I don’t either,” Urrutia said.
    “Goddam Indians stole him when he was a boy. Him and his sister. Killed their daddy out in the fields, scalped their poor mother right in front of their eyes. Then rode off with the kids. He was raised Comanche, ol’ Lamar was.”
    So that was what George’s Mary’s mysterious reference to “living with the Indians” had been about. Gil had imagined some quaint interlude, the sort of thing he himself had dreamed of doing as a young man, voluntarily removing himself from the stifling city to seek adventure and wisdom among the uncorrupted natives. This was quite a different thing, and in some way that Gil could not consciously calculate, it explained an air of stillness and sadness in the old rancher that seemed to reach further back in time than the recent death of his son.
    “How splendid,” Urrutia declared. “Like something you’d see in the pictures.”
    “They got him home somehow when he was sixteen or seventeen,” Sutherland went on, “but he wasn’t much good for a long time after that, drinking and so forth.”
    “He seems sober now.”
    “Hell, he’s been sober thirty years or more now, I’d guess. Ain’t no fun to be around but he’s a good businessman for sure. Because he’d been a wild Indian when he was a boy he got some nice grazing leases pretty cheap from the Comanches, from Quanah Parker himself is what I hear. That’s how he made his money. He don’t like to part with it neither. I hear he lives in a sod house, almost.”
    “Not that bad,” Gil said. “But it’s not the house of a rich man.”
    “So ol’ Lamar’s son got killed in the war? I’m damned sorry to hear it.”
    “Make sure you do a good job on the statue,” Urrutia said, “or this Indian man might—what’s the word for when you rip away the hair?”
    “Scalp,” Sutherland said.
    “Exactly! Or he might scalp you.”
    WHEN GIL LEFT the Menger he walked across the plaza to the post office. He kept a box here for his business correspondence, and the mail today was mostly bills: from Star Clay Products for the ton of clay that had been delivered to his studio last month, from his foundry in New York for the balance due on the casting of a half-dozen portrait busts. There were several letters from friends in New York, though the tide of incoming personal mail had long since slackened. He did not get back home as often as he should, and it was natural for people to fall out of touch with a distant friend whose life in faraway Texas they could not imagine.
    He closed the box and his eye fell on the one next to it, his box as well, that he had not opened for several weeks. He had rented it in secret, when they first arrived in San Antonio, for the sole purpose of receiving mail from his mother. She had died five years ago but he had not given the post office box up, partly because it was also the address through which he still received correspondence relating to her affairs—small checks, mostly, from the firm that had published her paintings of martyred saints as holy cards or as illustrations