The Monument by Gary Paulsen Read Free Book Online Page A

got moving, sounded like it was going to explode. Things clunked and rattled and the muffler must have been gone because it was impossible to hear anything but a loud yell.
    Which Mick did now. He leaned across Python, close to my ear, and yelled:
    “Art is like medicine—people take it because they have to take it, because they
think
they have to take it or because you
make
them think they have to take it. True art, that is.” He took a deep breath, yelled again, “If we left it up to them we’d be waist deep in bleeding pictures of Elvis or Christ on black velvet in no time.”
    He had been driving all the while, and we went past the north edge of town on County Road 1. When we were about a mile out of town Mick turned the wagon into a driveway and backed out so he was facing Bolton and cut the engine.
    It looked peaceful in the morning light. Theelevators stood like statues, tall and white, on the right edge of town. The water tower stood on the left side and the trees hid most of the rest of it. You could see white here and there where a house showed through and one line of red where Carlson’s brick house stood.
    “You can’t see people,” I said. It was nice with the station wagon engine stopped—I felt like my ears were bleeding. “Not a soul.”
    “For a start—to know the place. Without people. It’s about people who are gone, isn’t it?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “The monument—the whole idea of it. It’s about dead people, not living ones, isn’t it? So we have to see how it looks without people.”
    He sat for a time, just looking at the town, and I tried to do it the same way, and even Python seemed to be trying. His big muzzle aimed out over the hood and he watched the town but he soon became bored, and so did I.
    “What are we looking for?” I asked.
    “Nothing.”
    “That’s what I’ve been seeing.”
    “Keep looking. This is your first lesson.”
    He reached around in back of the seat and found the tablet and pencils he’d thrown in earlier. He handed them to me.
    “What’s this?”
    “Draw.”
    “But I don’t know anything about drawing.”
    “Draw.”
    “What should I draw?”
    “Draw.”
    “You brought this for me, didn’t you?”
    He nodded.
    “But that was before I told you I wanted to be an artist.”
    Another nod.
    “How did you know?”
    “It doesn’t matter. Open the pencils. Draw.”
    I looked down at the pencil box. It felt very old. Made of polished wood, so worn the grain seemed to be raised. It had a sliding top and I slid it back to see eight or ten wooden pencils, all different sizes and lengths. “How old is it—the box?”
    “When I was a boy I had it and it was old then—it doesn’t matter.” He pointed to the pencils.“Some are soft and some are hard. Some can be used for shading. Draw.”
    “The town?”
    “What you see. Draw.”
    So I drew the elevators. They were the biggest thing to see, and they stood up with all sorts of straight lines that were easy to make except that when I was done, it just looked like a bunch of straight lines.
    “See now, see how she does the lines,” he said, looking up at the sky. “She does the lines so well.”
    “But it doesn’t look right. It doesn’t look like the elevators.”
    “See?” He took the drawing and used a wide pencil to shade one of the elevator sides to make it look deep and it just about jumped off the paper.
    “There.”
    “I see.”
    “Draw.”
    I did some shading and it worked. The elevator grew out from the page, looked closer to what it was—round and full of grain.
    When I was done he took the tablet, looked at it for a moment, flipped the page over to show a fresh sheet and said: “Draw.”
    I drew four more drawings. The water tower, an overall view trying to show the trees which just looked like a bunch of blops until he showed me how to use shading and small lines to make the leaves so they looked like trees, then one of the edge of the Carlson house, and one of the