The Monument by Gary Paulsen Page B

spend the night in jail, Mick, but you shouldn’t have said that to the wife of the sheriff of Westfalia. You also shouldn’t have written what you said to her on a postcard. I’m sure there are laws against it. But isn’t it lucky that Tru was there to get you out and get the sculpture going?
    You wanted a report on how it went here
.
    It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. There never was what you’d call a crowd of people and almost nobody talked. People kind of came all evening and walked down through the trees and nodded and smiled and seemed to be very polite, but when they looked down and saw the names on the plaques, even though some of them had been here before, you could tell it made them want to cry
.
    Even Harley was quiet and looked choked up. I stayed off to the side all evening until close to midnight, drawing. When it was too dark to draw I tried to memorize pictures that I could draw later
.
    I think everybody liked the monument, if like is the right word, and by midnight everybody was gone except for one person
.
    Mr. Takern had brought a little canvas folding stool, and he put it next to the tree with his son’s name and sat there until after midnight. He didn’t talk or anything, just sat, and once in a while he would reach over and pet the side of the tree, the bark, and I couldn’t watch
it after a while, but maybe after a long time I will be able to draw it
.
    I guess that’s what makes an artist, isn’t it?
    Send me any new addresses you get, and I will report on any new developments with the monument
.
    Love,    
Rachael
    P.S. — I know
— draw.
I will
.

Of
The Monument
, Gary Paulsen writes:
    Ten or more years ago I read that Katherine Anne Porter once said, “Art is what we find when the ruins are cleared away.”
    Since then this book has worked at me. I wanted to show art, show how it can shake and crumble thinking; how it can bring joy and sadness at the same time; how it can own and be owned, sweep through lives and change them—how the beauty of it, the singular, sensual, ripping, breath-stopping, wondrous, frightening beauty of it can grow from even that ultimate ruin of all ruins: the filth of war.



Gary Paulsen is the distinguished author of many critically acclaimed books for young people, including three Newbery Honor books:
The Winter Room, Hatchet
, and
Dogsong
. His novel
The Haymeadow
received the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award. Among his Random House books are
The Time Hackers; Molly McGinty Has a Really Good Day; The Quilt
(a companion to
Alida’s Song
and
The Cookcamp
);
The Glass Café; How Angel Peterson Got His Name; Caught by the Sea: My life on Boats; Guts: The True Stories Behind
Hatchet
and the Brian Books; The Beet Fields; Soldier’s Heart; Brian’s Return, Brian’s Winter
, and
Brian’s Hunt
(companions to
Hatchet
);
Father Water, Mother Woods;
and five books about Francis Tucket’s adventures in the Old West. Gary Paulsen has also published fiction and nonfiction for adults, as well as picture books illustrated by his wife, the painter Ruth Wright Paulsen. Their most recent book is
Canoe Days
. The Paulsens live in New Mexico, in Alaska, and on the Pacific Ocean.