The Wake of Forgiveness

by Bruce Machart

  Lad had his tellers sign as witnesses to the transaction and handed Mr. Villaseñor his voucher. “It’s a pleasure,” he said, “having your business. Did you need some smaller change for these?”

  “The pleasure is mine,” the man said. “And those bills are for you. And for your men.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  Villaseñor lifted the lid of the box and removed two cans of shoe-black, a brush, and a felt strop. “My wager,” he said, running his thumb through the stiff bristles of the brush. “The way I see it, I can leave my money here in your bank, or I can withdraw it tomorrow and do my business over in Shiner or Yoakum. I’m betting you’d rather I didn’t, and I’m betting, because this is true, that when I get back in an hour from having a word with Monsignor Carew about my daughters’ Nuptial Mass, you and your boys will be just about finished putting a shine to these undersized men’s boots. Five dollars apiece is more than fair—don’t you think?—all things considered.”

  Now Lad’s fingers were back in his beard and his ears were flushed with blood. “I’m certain,” he said, “that you would be happier with the twenty-cent shine they’ll get around the corner at Wasek’s barbershop, but let me be the first to congratulate you on your daughter’s wedding. Who’s the lucky man?”

  “I don’t believe I said.” Villaseñor fished a cigar from his suit coat. “Not to you, I didn’t. And I’d be happier, sir, if you didn’t presume to tell me what would make me happy. That money there, it’s yours. And so is my business, assuming these little farmwives here, who’ve put more men in the ground for me than yours have swindled for you, have, by hour’s end, boots in which I can see myself well enough to shave.”

  Then he bit the tip from his cigar, ground the tobacco with his back teeth for more than a wordless minute, and sent from his lips onto the bureau top a long string of thick black spit. He lighted his cigar and the whole room went suddenly and sweetly ripe with its smoke. “There,” he said, “another token of my generosity, Mr. Dvorak. If your spit’s too good for my men’s boots, then you can use mine.”

  FOR TWO DAYS thereafter, the talk about town was constant as the lowing of cattle in the pastures. While the townswomen sat together quilting or stood clustered in kitchens, polishing copper pots or latticing dough over pies filled with fruit canned the previous summer, their lips moved faster than their hands. Faster, their husbands said, than their minds.

  Gathered in the icehouse, the men took long pulls on their pilsners and shook their heads, feigning indifference, but at home, even after sweating behind plows or beneath the weight of hay bales, they found themselves these days with more patience for their women’s words. They’d sit at their tables long after they’d eaten, elbows on each side of their coffee cups, and they’d listen to the stories the women brought home.

  The Mexican had rented the whole second floor of the Township Inn for a month. Paid in advance, he did. Then there was Sy Janek’s wife, Edna, who claimed that, on her way home from delivering the Knedlik twins, she’d seen the girls, all three of them, riding black horses after dark, running the animals hard out behind Patrick Dalton’s granary and into the pecan grove by the north fork of Mustang Creek. In dresses they were, with a foot in each stirrup and God only knows what, if anything, between their tender parts and the saddle leather. There was Father Carew, who’d canceled both Masses for this coming Saturday and would say, when pressed, only that this Villaseñor fellow had wedding plans, and for more than one wedding, and that to secure the church he’d brought with him a Papal Indulgence, the first Carew had ever seen, and three Sundays’ worth of collections in cash. And then there was Patrick Dalton, who’d been seen taking lunch with Villaseñor and his men at the inn, and who had called Lad Dvorak to tell him that he’d run suddenly short of room at his stable, that the banker would have to come fetch the drays Dalton had boarded for him all these years in exchange for prime interest rates at the bank. These wives, the broad-hipped women who bore bad news and children both with a sad but softened look around the eyes, claimed Dalton had been seen smiling at the feedstore while he ordered two hundred pounds of molasses oats, smiling even while he shouldered them out to his wagon, two forty-pound sacks at a time.

  And this is where the men of Lavaca County stopped listening.

  This is where they breathed in abruptly through their noses and pushed their chairs back from the table and took their coffee out into the swirling night air, which was growing cold of a sudden and sharp with pecan and mesquite and oak from the chunkwood fires smoldering in their smokehouses. They stood out on their porches or out back of their barns, and while the low moon slid behind thin bands of clouds and they pulled tobacco from the bib pockets of their overalls and rolled cigarettes with callused thumbs, they grew more certain than ever of their wives’ willful foolishness, of their forthright and feminine need to believe the world a far more mysterious and alluring place than it was. Patrick Dalton, the men knew, hadn’t smiled in coming up on four damned years, not since the night when he’d for the first time lost an acreage-staked race to Vaclav Skala.

  They’d been there, after all, and in their memories they’d borne witness to the race the same way their wives had borne their children—with the assurance that they’d each played a vital and thank-worthy role, and with the misguided confidence that, for having done so, they would remain forever attuned to both the memory of the bearing and the born alike.

  And so it was that on this March night, smoking out behind their barns, the men of Dalton, Texas, and its hinterland drew from the oft-unswept corners of their memories dozens of mismatched and contradictory notions of a night four years back, a night that, by all accounts, had seen them standing in the shuddering light of two rock-ringed finish-line fires, their undershirts starched yellow with the dried sweat of an August day’s work, their backs to the creek where they’d floated their jars of corn whiskey and beer bottles to keep them cool. They’d stood drinking and smoking, comparing crop yields and woman troubles, making half-dollar bets with their neighbors while the riders readied themselves.

  Some forty yards to the west, just beyond the swinging cattlegate, Vaclav Skala’s youngest, Karel, sat his pop’s biggest roan stallion. The boy’s neck, like his brothers’, was kinked from so much time harnessed to a plow, warped such that his head cocked sharply to the left and made him look a little off-kilter in the saddle. Still, there was an ease in the way he handled the animal, a casual confidence that kept his boots slid back in the stirrups so that it appeared he rode only on his toes, the reins held so delicately between fingers and thumbs, held the way a lady might hold her most precious heirloom linens after washing.

  He turned the horse a few times back beyond the gate and edged him up alongside the Dalton boy on the county’s newest horse, a nervous, twitching red filly his daddy had shipped in from Kentucky or Tennessee or some-damned-where. The boys kept the animals reined in just the other side of the gate while their fathers shook hands.

  These were the communal truths, the recollections the landowners and townsmen shared the way they kept in common a constant worry over rainfall and boll weevils and cotton futures. What they didn’t know, though they might have suspected as much, was that Vaclav had taken in those days to praying shamelessly of a Sunday that pestilence might visit the Dalton herd, and that Dalton had once that summer crept in the moonlight among the outermost rows of Skala’s melon crop, injecting the ripe fruit with horse laxative. These two, given a normal night, would have sooner sat bare assed on a cottonmouth nest than exchange pleasantries with each other, but here they were, something about the night and the onlookers and the improvident stakes pushing to each man’s lips at least the pretense of sporting civility—Good luck, then, neighbor— before they went to inspect their animals.

  Dalton pulled on the saddle straps and slapped his son on the leg, leaning in to offer some last bit of advice. As for Vaclav Skala, he didn’t say a word to his boy. He’d said what he needed to half an hour before wh
en he handed young Karel his crop. His mouth moved only to work the tobacco. He spat juice into the weeds and scratched at the arc of blond curls he had left behind his sun-speckled crown, pulled a nine-inch blade from the sheath on his belt and held it up to his horse’s nose, letting it glint there awhile in the flickering hint of firelight while the animal got a good, strong smell of its steel.

  The men of Lavaca County looked questions at one another and shook their heads, laughing together by the fire nearest the creek. That Vaclav’s a few deuces shy of a deck, someone said.

  But he’s shored up straight compared to Laddie, ain’t it? Where is it you’re going after this, Dvorak? Bury a bishop?

  And sure enough, Lad Dvorak had been there, all turned out in one of the suits he wore to work, his eyes wide enough with unease to give the lie to the rigid set of his jaw. He was holding a little .22 revolver stiffly at his side, and he looked, when he moved, like he considered his steps before taking them, each an act of pained determination, the walk of a man whose bowels had seized up on him, or who was heading to the confessional with something venial to cut loose from his conscience.

  Suspect of anything that couldn’t be learned from acreage or animals, the locals wondered if that’s what education did to a man. Sure, he’d drawn up the papers for Dalton, making the whole wager legal as the sale of heifers or hay, but you couldn’t trust a man who walked flat pastureland like he’d gone all day plugged up by his own turds. He might have held liens on half the acreage in Dalton and Shiner, but he sure looked a silly son of a bitch holding a gun.

  Still, it had been left to him to fire the shot that would send the horses and their riders churning dirt through a half mile of dust and darkness, up around the thick and twisted stand of water oaks just shy of the parcel’s far hedgerow, and back to the fire-lit finish line where now all the men stood waiting, pointing and laughing at Dvorak, who held his pistol so tentatively in front of him that the barrel drooped downward like the willow tip of a divining rod.

  Got-damn, Lad, that ain’t your dead daddy’s pecker you’re holding. Put a squeeze on it the way you do them purse strings of yours.

  Lad squinted into the darkness and shrugged it off. There wasn’t a man here who hadn’t yet come to him for a loan, and if his position of power wasn’t apparent in the way he held a gun, he more than made up for it with his willingness to foreclose on a loan, with the reticence of his Sunday smile, the simple withholding of which could set a man’s wife to fretting in the pews, praying her husband hadn’t missed a payment.

  To be certain, as Patrick Dalton swung the gate out and the horses threw their heads around and lifted their tails to drop great clods to the turf, Lad would have his hand in this, too. He came out from the fenceline, watching, on account of his new shoes, where he stepped, and when he positioned himself a few yards out of the way near the pine saplings clustered alongside the creek, he waited for a nod from Dalton, one from Skala, and then he raised his arm and pointed the gun at a sky strung brightly with stars.

  Since the first wagonloads of Czech settlers rolled onto the flat and fertile land of south Texas from the port of Galveston, folks had joked that if a sober man rode over these Texas plains from the coast, and if he thought, before nearing Lavaca County, that he saw in the distance even the slightest rise, even the gentlest hint of a valley, then what he was noting was nothing more or less than the very curvature of the planet. Here in Dalton, between the two forks of the creek, the land offered its first embellishment, a gentle swell that came to a two-hundred-acre plateau and then fell away to sloughs near the water’s edge. And so it was on that night, despite the indecisive summer winds, that the highland discharge of such a small caliber gun brought farmwives even a half mile away to their kitchen windows and caused their sleeping children to twitch in their beds.

  The horses reared and surged, and the smoke from Lad’s gun flew up in a windswept whirl and circled itself like a confused spirit into the creekside trees. The boys got up fast in their stirrups, and by the time they urged their animals up to speed, hoof sod flying behind them as they tore past the cheering line of men and between the two fires and into the darkness, eleven-year-old Karel was laying it on thick with his whip.

  This boy had been outriding his older brothers since he was nine, and when his old man bragged on one of his sons—which was rare and only brought on by drink and never within earshot of the boys themselves—the words he found himself slurring were always the same: That youngest of mine, men, he could whip some fast into a common ass.

  The truth, Karel knew, though he could not have yet put it into words, was that the horse wanted the whip, wanted it the same way Karel wanted his pop’s strap, the stinging and unambiguous urgency of its attention, and, for Karel, the closest he got to his father’s touch.

  Now he kept his crouch tight and marveled as always at the way the ride smoothed out the faster the horse ran. He would come, in later years, to find the same comfort in hard loving, in the convergence and confusion of violence and tenderness, but tonight he knew only the nervous thrill of it, the hot smelter of fear and joy found only in this kind of abandon, in riding for a stake in another man’s land, in riding for the father who had refused to hold him on the day of his birth, or any day thereafter, in riding into a darkness that his adjusting vision was only now beginning to brighten, and while he alternated pops of his crop on the animal’s hindquarters, he kept Billy Dalton in the corner of his eye, making sure to hold him close and on his outside flank as they approached the quarter-acre stand of oaks they were to circle before heading back to the fires and their fathers at the finish line.

  The horse, Whiskey, the youngest and fastest of his father’s prized pair, wanted to turn it all loose, wanted to shred acres of sod with his hooves and fill the night with the hot breath of his nostrils. Karel could feel it as he squeezed his thighs to bring the horse into the left-hand turn, the rippling ribbons of muscle beneath the animal’s hide, the quivering resistance to the slightest tension on the reins. And then, just before the moss-veiled cluster of trees with their low-hanging, skeletal branches, the Dalton boy stood in the stirrups and cut back behind Karel to take the turn clockwise instead.

  Whiskey threw his head to the left and broke stride, and Karel snapped the crop across the right flank and crouched into the turn, keeping the horse tight against the treeline and, because of the cant of his neck, squinting his eyes against the branches that reached out, slapping at his shoulder and face, snagging and snatching clumps of hair along the way.

  The Dalton boy was out of sight, orbiting the same sizable stand of oaks in the opposite direction, and for Karel, now, there was only the sound of wind and hoof strikes, the hot pumping of breath from the horse, the memory of his old man’s words when he’d handed him the crop half an hour before, the stuttering seconds before two horses would meet headlong at all but full speed.

  Sooner than he expected, Karel looked up to find the Dalton horse coming on hard, Billy tucked forward and low behind the filly’s windswept mane, his look one of tight-eyed determination. It was a matter of who would hold his ground and who would veer to the outside, and it was, Karel knew, one horse or the other, rather than the rider, that would likely make the decision if left to the last second.

  It was Karel, too, who knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  When the horses were ten yards shy of colliding, Karel dug a knee into Whiskey’s left flank and the horse swung out to the right, away from the trees, and then, as the Dalton boy’s lips turned up at the corners and he leaned in harder, thinking he’d gained an irremediable advantage, Karel pulled his crop back sharply and, just as the horses passed, he did what his father had told him to do.

  What the men of Lavaca County remember correctly is that Karel Skala broke first into the firelight, and that he blew past them at full stride before standing in the stirrups, his head cocked, as always, so far off-kilter, and slowing the horse into a wide circle out beyond the cattlegate before can
tering back to where his father and brothers awaited him. Patrick Dalton went red-faced with disbelief as he stood taking it in, watching his landholdings dwindle, sucking snot up through his nose and spitting it, one last time, into the soil he’d just lost. And then waiting, waiting while Karel dismounted and handed the reins to his father, waiting while the older Skala boys gathered around their brother, slapping him hard on the shoulders and laughing. Waiting a full minute or more until the other boy, his own son, came ambling atop his filly out of the night, his right arm twisted into his lap, the shoulder hanging loose of its socket, the left side of his face puffed up and split open from cheekbone to chin.

  The men standing creekside, they either pulled forth or pocketed coins, crept back to the creek for their jugs, circled around the horses, and watched while Lad Dvorak handed over both fifty-acre deeds to Skala. The Dalton boy, he was protesting, his eyes awash in tears, his face gone to a sickly blue around the wound. “The son of a bitch,” he said. “I was winning.”

  Skala took the deeds, folded them into the back pocket of his trousers. One of the men handed him a bottle of whiskey and he bubbled it good before offering it to Dalton. “Looks like your boy caught a tree branch,” he said. “They hang low around that turn, ain’t it?”

  Dalton refused the bottle, took his son’s arm and pulled down on it and then raised it straight-elbowed until it popped back into the joint while the boy howled, crying in earnest now. “It’s more than enough of that,” Dalton told him, and he grabbed Billy by the hair and dragged him out into the saplings by the creek. There was some breathless whispering out there, more of the boy’s complaints, and then Dalton, loud enough that everyone could hear: “It’s worth fifty goddamn acres, then, is it? That’s what you’ll have me believe, boy? A stripe on the face?”