Karel considers the question for a moment before he realizes the gun’s still leveled at her. “Either that or you’re lost,” he says, and he drops the barrel and holds the rifle at his side. “The hell you think you’re up to in there?” he says, nodding at the stable.
She steps from under the horse and it nudges at her with its great head and sniffs and nibbles at her hair, and Karel goes cool with something akin to envy, a kind of longing he feels often in the presence of animals. There’s only the trace of a northern breeze, and he takes a sideways step, hoping he might get downwind enough of her to find her scent there in the air amidst the traces of woodsmoke and turned earth and cattle.
Gathering the reins in her hands, she holds them out to Karel. “I only wanted to see them,” she says. “So here. Have your fill. Fair is fair.”
There’s not yet so much as a hint of light on the horizon. Karel rests the butt of the gun on the ground and leans against the barrel while the horse jerks its head up against the reins and works its jaw from side to side against the bit. “I don’t have to handle a horse to outrun it,” Karel says, but then he notes her hand there, extended with the reins, and curses himself. If he’d reached for them, he might have touched her.
Now she raises a brow and slides the toe of her boot around in the dirt as if she’s intent on drawing something of importance, something he might understand. “No,” she says, “I don’t suppose you do. That’s an impressive pair of horses in there.”
Karel glances at the stables, then back toward the house, then down at what she’s drawn in the dirt. He’s gone his whole life asking himself unspoken questions about his mother, and now something about the cool, unlit morning and this girl in her dress and riding boots has him wondering if his mother ever sat horseback, ever rode while he was inside her for those months when, unlike every month since, he could touch her, even if he didn’t know he was doing it, when they were together in that way and both alive and maybe riding together amidst the morning light and the fields of alfalfa and the smells of coming rain and late-cut hay.
The girl walks her horse to the cattletank and waters him. She acts, for all the world, as if she’s paying a friendly, daylight visit to an old acquaintance.
“You better git,” Karel says. “Pop catches you here it’ll be hell to pay.”
The girl reaches down between her knees and gathers her dress hems together in one hand, then she slides a boot into the stirrup and swings herself into the saddle. Her skin shines even in the darkness, and her lips look swollen and tender and wet when she smiles. “And what about you?” she says. “What if it’s you who catches me?”
Karel lifts his rifle and flexes his fingers around its forearm and smoothes over with his boot the work she’s done there in the dirt. “Just see that it isn’t,” he says.
The girl taps a heel to the horse’s ribs and its oily eyes roll in its head as she swings him around, and then she tosses her hair to one side and looks back at Karel over her shoulder. “I will,” she says. “Tomorrow night. When we race.”
Karel tries to laugh, but what comes out of him is a sound more like that of the critters in the trees than that of a man who’s filled up with certainties. “Is that a fact?” he says. “Your father lets his girls do his racing for him?”
“He likes to win.”
“Well,” says Karel, “seems only fair that you tell me your name, don’t it? Before you leave me in the dust, I mean.”
She turns the horse back at him and walks it up slowly so that she’s looking directly down on him, her eyes so deep and full of their dark allure that Karel imagines she could pull him out of his boots and into the saddle with nothing more than a look. She curls a few strands of the horse’s mane around her finger and wets her lips with her tongue, and, before she gives her horse a heel and gallops him into the early morning fields, she leans down over Karel such that her hair brushes against his face and he breathes her in and she smells of lavender and of beeswax and of sweet feed, and then her voice is in his ear and she’s whispering: “Ask me Saturday, and I’ll tell you it’s Skala.”
A Breeding of Nettles
DECEMBER 1924
THE YEAR’S COTTON was long in, all three hundred and fifty bales of it dried and ginned and shipped overland to Port Lavaca back in September. The money was in the bank, the Mexican pickers paid and sent on their way. Both cuts of late hay had been baled and stacked three deep in the loft—all in time for calving season—and now Karel Skala was waiting for but two withering Hereford heifers and one wide-hipped wife to drop their young into the world.
Early of the morning, with the sun striking a bright line on the horizon and the wind worrying the twisted branches of the mesquite trees behind the barn, Karel stood sipping coffee and watching his mixed herd of cattle graze beneath a low line of heavy clouds sliding in from the west. December, and still warm enough to break a sweat working in shirtsleeves. He had a habit, Karel did, on account of his crooked neck, of leaning to the right at the waist so as to set the world level in his sights. Upstairs, buried with his father’s old watch beneath bank papers in his bureau, there was a photograph some fourteen years old of him and his brothers on the day of their father’s funeral. They’d been standing out in the grove among the pear trees he now owned, smoking cigarettes and meaning to say something kind about their pop but saying nothing instead, looking squint-eyed into the evening sun, all four of them young and blond-haired and blue-eyed and kinked badly at the neck, compensating as best they could—he and Stan leaning to the right, Thom and Eddie to the left. Well over a decade had gone by since they’d been together that way, standing leisurely if uncomfortably in one another’s company, pretending they could ever level off a world that had put their mother in the ground and left their father standing for so many years with tobacco-stained lips, red-faced and ever ready with his whip.
But Karel didn’t have time to think of such things, of his brothers and what had become of them, of their rich and lovely Spanish wives, of all the land that had fallen into their laps. There simply weren’t hours enough for such thoughts, not even with the year’s hottest and hardest days behind him. His Sophie had it in her mind to drive to evening Mass in Praha for the Feast, for the Jolly Club dance afterward, and there’d never been, in the five years they’d been married, any talking that woman out of a chance to spend time on her knees beneath the painted ceiling of St. Mary’s, no matter how pregnant she was.
“What you aiming to do?” he’d asked her over breakfast, nodding at her belly. “Squeeze her right out in the pews?”
Sophie had whipped her apron at him and smiled. “If it’s the Lord’s intention, Karel, I expect I will. Besides, how is it you’re so sure-fire certain it’s a girl?”
“Same as always. Dreamt it was a boy.”
She shook her head and went back to shaping dough for the kolaches she meant to take to the dance. “Well, Karel,” she said, and now her smile drew itself tight at the corners of her mouth, “seems likely—doesn’t it?—that eventually you’ve got to be right in your dreams about something.”
Maybe so, Karel thought now, but not about this. Sophie was carrying all her weight up high, and he’d seen it before, twice in three years, and he knew what it meant. He took a last sidelong look at the coming clouds, spat some loose strings of tobacco from his tongue, swallowed the grainy dregs of his coffee, and then he went to work.
In the cattle pens, he ran his hands up under the knotted tails of each red heifer, checking for inflammation or bloody show, and, finding none, cursed them both for being slow. They lowed and switched their tails, their dark eyes unblinking up high on their white faces. They bent and took in more hay, and Karel was thankful at least for this. The youngest of these girls had proven herself vengeful, an unusual characteristic for a Hereford, and he still wore a bruise on the side of his belly from her antics the week before, a dark stain of blue ringed in black scabby stitching where the teeth had drawn blood.
“You
’re whores, the both of you,” Karel said, slapping hard on her flank the young little bitch who’d put the bite to him. “Slower than Christmas, too.”
He shoveled the shit from the pens and wheeled it out back to the compost heap, which stank of rotting eggshells and chicken heads. He slung feed to the pullets who’d been thus far spared Sophie’s strong hands and sharp blade. He hung pails of sweet feed in the stables for the horses, then he walked out east of the barn to the smokehouse, added some pecan chunkwood to the embers, and pulled a strip of glistening fat off one of the hams he’d strung up two mornings before. He popped the fat into his mouth and held it there in the hollow of his cheek without chewing, sucking the salt while he made his way back to the barn.
As an afterthought, he grabbed his toolbox and went out to grease the windmill bearings, which were scored badly on their races and would soon need replacing. He loosened the shaft collars and worked the bearing puller onto the housings. Once he’d pulled them free, he popped the bearings from the housings and lubed them well with a finger dipped in grease.
This was the kind of morning work Karel liked, simple little tasks he could complete without calculating figures or opening his wallet or asking his wife for help. If the world were made of only such chores, he thought, he wouldn’t fret so about being without a son. He wouldn’t have to keep Sophie on her back every night in March so that, come next December, after the bulk of the year’s work was done, she might finally get it right and deliver a boy. If all his work were this easy, he could spend his time thinking instead about the Novotny girl, the way her skin shined dark as a polished penny, the way her arms and shoulders rippled with ribbons of muscle from years of working at her father’s feedstore, the way she hadn’t grown heavy in the hips or sharp of the tongue. The way she never said no.
The wind was picking up out of the west as if bent on keeping the sun on the morning horizon, and when Karel got the bearings remounted and the drive shaft engaged, the mill began pumping furiously.
Out in the pasture, the jackass lolled its heavy head around while lumbering along, chasing the new calves in circles. The dumbest animal on earth, Karel thought. Dumber even than a cow, but just as useful. Too dumb to fear coyotes, and stubborn enough to keep them clear of the calves. Karel swallowed the pork fat, put his fingers in his mouth, and whistled loudly. The jackass stopped in place, its ears standing forward. The air was ripe with the smells of cattle and smoke and winter pine. Stray wisps of cotton swirled in the wind, and Karel couldn’t help but see the waste in it, couldn’t help but imagine the three or four bales his hired Mexicans had left in the fields. The ass was still motionless amidst the herd, waiting, and as Karel walked back to the barn to check on the kegs of beer that had arrived overnight, his guts stung with the recognition that he couldn’t command much in the way of obedience from anything but a half-wit animal.
The week before, when the heifer had bitten him, he’d kicked her hard down in front of her udder. She’d shuddered and stepped backward, just keeping her feet, and her great white face turned away from him in a way that reminded Karel of the hiding game his youngest daughter, Evie, had taken to playing in recent months, covering her eyes with a blanket, certain that if she couldn’t see, she couldn’t be seen. Karel had looked down at the scuffed toes of his boots, inflamed with anger at himself, worrying over the money he’d lose if the heifer took to bleeding inside and couldn’t calve. Then he spat into the soiled hay and waited for the cow to turn her face to him. When she did, he kicked her again, this time harder and higher, just back of the brisket, where it would be sure to sting her like fire without costing him so much as a cool penny.
UP IN SHINER at the Spoetzl Brewery, the young brewmaster Kosmos made most of his living these days by ruining the strong pilsner he’d become known for in half a dozen counties. The Texas Senate still allowed for near beer, an all-but-tasteless concoction that could get a man drunk only if a man’s definition of drunk involved a dull pain above the ears and a near-constant need to piss. By state law, Kosmos was to brew his Bohemian recipe and then boil off the bulk of the alcohol, but he could be forgetful sometimes, especially when Karel Skala paid him to forget. To be a Czech farmer in south Texas was to be always thirsty, and it was a well-known joke among the women of Lavaca County that if their men were made to choose between their pints of pilsner and their peckers, there’d be a premium on good sharp knives and coagulant salts at the general store in Dalton.
In the loft, amidst the stagnant smell of still-damp hay, Karel pulled back the square bales near the northern ladder and stepped into a long corridor of secreted beer, a single oaken row of kegs stacked two high that ran the length of the loft. From the ground level of the barn, all anyone could see of the loft was a wall of hay bales, but for four years now Karel had kept a hollow between the back row of bales and the wall. In the winter months, the kegs would stay cool for several weeks, long enough to find buyers for them but not too long to keep them hidden before the hay needed to be put out for the cattle.
The Praha Jolly Club would be good for at least three, Karel figured, and if he had to make the long trip out there today, and sit in church besides, he was damn sure going to turn a profit doing it.
He lowered the kegs one by one from the loft with a rope hoist, rolled them out to the Dodge truck he’d bought last year, for five bits on the dollar, from old Lad Dvorak’s bank in town after it foreclosed on the Slovacek place over in Weid, and by the time he got the kegs loaded up and the truck’s wheel bearings greased, the fast fat clouds were blowing past overhead without turning loose even a misty bit of their burden.
Inside, after a long hour spent tallying earnings and costs in his ledger, Karel shaved and changed into his suit, then he sat sipping coffee at the kitchen table, rolling sixteen cigarettes and lining them up in the silver case Sophie’s father had given him for a wedding gift. The house was warm and fragrant, the milky-sweet yeast dough of kolaches browning in the oven, and when his cigarette case was full, Karel spent a few minutes chasing the girls around the house, growling like a bear while they squealed and laughed and Evie hid behind her blanket. In the living room, Karel plucked his youngest off the floor and nibbled behind her ears until she giggled and buried her face in the collar of his shirt. The oldest girl, Diane, ever hungrier for attention these days, stood below, tugging on the leg of his trousers. Karel put Evie back on the floor, squinted up his eyes and made his fingers into claws before crouching down beside his oldest. “Deenie,” he said, “when I catch you I’m going to pull off your toes and eat them with mustard.”
The girl, at three, was as fast as she was loud in her escape, and Karel couldn’t help but laugh. “Let’s to it, all you good-looking women,” he said. “If we’re going, we’re going now.”
This was a trip that gave Karel fits, that slicked his guts with a hot mix of envy and resentment and lust, and he tried, mile after slow mile, to keep his eyes only on the road, on the out-flung fencelines blurred by the dirty haze of the truck’s front glass. Had it been a stranger at the wheel, someone from northern Fayette County or down near the Gulf Coast, that man would likely have taken note of the name on the passing cattlegates and assumed that he was rolling by one man’s expansive spread of property. But the men of Lavaca County knew different. The land between the south and north forks of Mustang Creek, with its wire-fenced stretches of pastureland and black-soiled cotton fields, was the original Skala parcel, some of it bought and some of it won—all of it amassed by old man Vaclav before his sudden death and then deeded to Karel. Everything north, for six miles beyond the Shiner town limits, was the property of the older three Skala boys and their families. The northernmost plot, nearly four hundred acres that lined both winding sides of the Shiner-Moulton road, was the one that most made Karel wish he could drive blind.
Even with sweet little Diane in his lap and Sophie up against him, hip to hip, holding their two babies, one on her knees and one yet curled up and floating tethered in the soft
and murky insides of her—even with all this family pressed so close to him—Karel couldn’t keep his eyes from the stand of blackjack oaks about a mile up the road, from the farm road that ended at the gate amidst those trees. Nor could he keep his imagination from winding up that road to the house that sat, just out of view, a quarter mile from the gate, nestled among a grove of peach and pecan trees, its back porch steps leading up to the door that opened into Graciela’s kitchen. Just last week, he’d seen her out front of the mercantile in Shiner, walking with her children, the little girls dressed in gingham and hair ribbons and clean white stockings, and for once he hadn’t crossed to the other side of the road to avoid trading pleasantries with her. The truth was, talk or no talk, it took less than the sight of her to take him back all those years, to the wonder of her dark hair and the taut swell of her calves below the hem of her dress, to the sweet, earthy smell of her he’d taken in some fourteen years back, and to the desire that he’d begun to imagine he’d never again satisfy or suppress, either one.
It was a long trip, just shy of thirty miles to the church in Praha, and the unkempt road made the driving slow. The truck bounced and lurched, slipping into and out of the hard ruts, throwing packed clods of dirt and rock against the undercarriage. Karel steered with one hand and put his eyes back on the northernmost horizon and pulled his cigarette case from his shirt pocket. He flipped the top open with his thumb and pulled a cigarette out with his teeth.
“Time we get home,” he said, “it’ll be twice as much driving as praying.”
The Wake of Forgiveness Page 4