The Monument by Gary Paulsen

this—he wants to make a monument with trees.
    “It should be a place to think,” Mick continued, “a place to remember the men who have died.”
    He went to the blackboard and began sketching in white chalk. “Here. Eighteen men have died from this area so here and here we planttrees, eighteen trees in two rows of nine in front of the courthouse on the lawn so that they make a shaded area and in the area we put seats, stone seats here and here and here so that people can come and sit in the quiet shade and think of what the trees represent.”
    He stopped, took a breath, waited.
    All this time the room had been quiet and it was Harley who broke the silence. “There’s a place there, by the courthouse, an empty place. What’s that for?”
    Mick pointed to the spot with the chalk. “For the future—it may be that you will want to plant more trees there.”
    Another quiet time, longer than before. I could hear the clock from all the way out in the hallway ticking.
    “Could we”—a quiet, almost whispered man’s voice cut the silence—“name them? Could we have a small plaque on each tree naming the one the tree is for?”
    I turned and saw that it was Mr. Takern and remembered that he had a son killed in Vietnam.
    “The name would mean so much,” he said. “The names in Washington mean so much.”
    Mick nodded. “We can do anything you want.”
    Mrs. Takern stood suddenly from where she’d been sitting on a bench next to her husband and left the room, and I could see that she was crying, holding a hanky to her face. I wondered what her son’s name had been and how he had died.
    “Anything you want,” Mick said again. “Do we need to vote?”
    This time nobody made a sound and I knew that Mick had done it—had made the kind of monument he wanted to make for Bolton, the kind that Bolton truly wanted and just needed to be shown.
    Trees.

Seventeen

    AND OF COURSE nothing happened fast after the meeting. I wanted to be able to walk down the street the next day with Python and see the monument, see the trees and the names, but there were more things to do than just build the monument.
    Mick had to figure a cost estimate for the trees and the stone seats and the labor, and when itwas done he had to convince the town board that it was worth what it would cost, but that didn’t take so very long. It seemed that in just a few days I saw a truckload of oak trees stopped in front of the courthouse. They were not large—each one ten or twelve feet—but they all looked healthy, and another truck had a kind of digger attached and in one day they had put all eighteen trees in the ground.
    It was strange but when the men running the tree transplanter learned what the trees were for, they became quiet and worked without smiling. I wanted to help but Mick made Python and me sit next to the courthouse with our tablet and draw. I drew all the things I could see as fast as I could make my hands move with the pencil and still make it look right.
    And Mrs. Langdon was there.
    Except that she had changed and we didn’t call her Mrs. Langdon anymore but Tru. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt and had all soft edges where she used to be hard and had a band holding her hair back. She helped Mick and always seemed to have a smudge of dirt on hercheek which she kept trying to wipe off with the back of her hand. I drew her, too, and once when it was a hot afternoon and she had been helping Mick clean dirt around a tree, he reached up and used his thumb to clean her cheek. She looked at him so that it seemed she had a light inside and I tried to draw that too. The light. And how it came from her eyes and Mick’s eyes, except that I didn’t do so well. But I tried, I tried to draw it all.
    And there came a day when it was done.
    “Done for now,” Mick said. “It won’t really be done until the trees are full grown—forty or fifty years—and then still won’t be done until there are no more names or trees to put in. But done