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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
M ONUMENT

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 helpingFred—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. Peoplewaved 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 everybodywill 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