The Wake of Forgiveness

by Bruce Machart

  Now, after a final prayer together, she sopped Sophie’s face with a new cool rag and pulled back the sheet. She checked between the suffering woman’s legs, and then she struggled onto the mattress and positioned herself with her hands cupped on either side of Sophie’s belly.

  “I’ve waited as long as I’m willing to wait,” she said. “Catch your breath, dear. I’m afraid this is likely to pain you something terrible.”

  AT THE PARISH hall, during the two further hours of the old widow Vrana’s ministrations, and an hour longer of Sophie’s grunting and pushing to expel this thing that had so beset her, Karel Skala would unhinge himself with drink.

  It had gone full dark by the time he’d gotten Sophie and the girls over to the Vrana house and settled the little ones into bed. He’d kissed Sophie on the forehead, and the old woman had ushered him out the door as if he were no more welcome there than would have been a common cur. On the path through the thicket, without a lantern, he’d been grateful for the emerging moon, swept clean of the day’s clouds by the push of cold weather from the west. It was too cool out for tree frogs, and Karel felt their absence. He’d grown up with the throaty urgency of their chirping, and a walk through woods with only the sounds of nested birds and insects was a fresh reminder of all the little disappointments that conspired to set a man to thinking about greater ones. He stepped quickly, wishing to rid himself of this thicket, and his boots crunched in the brittle leaves and pine needles underfoot until he emerged into the unhindered moonlight.

  He was grateful, too, for the sight of the cemetery at the end of the path, for the muted animal sounds within the parish stables, then for the gleam from the hall’s lighted windows and the muffled, brassy half step of the music that could be heard as he approached, all of which brought him closer to the promise of soft skin and hard drink.

  Just outside the hall doors, Bohumil Novotny stood laughing and passing a half-gallon jug with a pair of boys who, but for the work a blade had done to one of their cheeks, could have each passed for the other. Karel stopped behind the trunk of the giant live oak so he could study them awhile. Judging from their caked work boots and oilcloth coats, they hadn’t come for church, and Karel would have bet a dollar against a dime that they weren’t yet sixteen. Still, here they stood, running their hands through their dark, closely cropped curls and taking seasoned, deliberate pulls on the jug. They made a habit, these two, of hooking their thumbs in their trouser pockets when they laughed. Karel noticed that they held themselves in the same way, upright and rigid as if they’d been skewered with cedar posts, but when they moved they did so leisurely, with loose-jointed gestures.

  As for their company, he was about as complicated as cornbread. Between his feedstore and rail interests, Novotny had amassed as much of a fortune as one could in a town so small as Praha, and he was as well dressed as he was red-faced and overfed. Beneath his tailored and unbuttoned black suitcoat, his shirtfront had been freed from his trousers by the protrusion of his belly, and when he took note of Karel approaching from the shadows, he fell silent and scratched the underside of his down-slung stomach while the young fellows beside him toed the dirt and nodded their greetings.

  “Damnation,” Karel said. “You men so scared of touching a woman that you’d hide outside in the cold rather than take a turn around the floor?”

  Novotny raised his brows at the others and took his handkerchief from his vest pocket to clear his nose. Then he took a pull from the jug and held it up as if raising a toast to something no less impressive than the moonlit sky itself. “I’d let you a drink of this corn here, Karel, if I thought it might quiet you down. Thing is, given your communion-time proclamations, I don’t believe the last few drops I give you had that effect.”

  Inside, the band held the last long note of a schottische, and then came the vigorous applause from the dancers. “A few drops just ain’t enough to do the trick is all,” Karel said, “but I see you found a bigger portion now that the sun’s not out to lay light on it.” He nodded at the hall door. “Orchestra sounds lively tonight.”

  “Whole town’s lively on account of that near beer you brung.” Novotny winked at the boys and handed the jug to Karel. “You know these boys here, I believe, or did once. Villaseñor bought their pop’s land down your way.”

  Karel bubbled the whiskey and took a cigarette from his case. When he lit the thing, the first pull of smoke fell slowly, as if of its own weight alone, from his nostrils, and then he gave these boys a look, one they didn’t manage to return, as they appeared intent on studying the scuffed toes of their boots. Good-looking fellows they were, broad across the shoulders and bright in the eyes the way boys tended to be when they got the first scant sniff of their own manhood. If they had a whisker between them, Karel couldn’t locate it. “Son of a bitch bought a passel of folks’ land,” he said, passing the whiskey back to Novotny and putting a hand out as the band took up a new number inside. “Only twins I recollect was the Knedlik boys, and they were still on the tit last time I saw them.”

  Now the boys turned their attention upward in unison, and the one with the scar stepped forward, smiling, and shook Karel’s hand while indicating his brother with a tilt of the head. “Joe here ain’t got off it yet,” he said, a statement that earned him a hard elbow to the shoulder and smiles all around. “Name’s Raymond.”

  Karel took note of the mark the boy wore, a thin and winding line of poorly mended flesh that ran from the swollen underside of his left eye to the corner of his mouth. “Someone mistake your face for a beefsteak, did they, Raymond?”

  The boy put his hands in his pockets and gave his brother a glance through the corner of his unblemished eye. Novotny said the Knedlik troubles had made the paper more than once, and wondered how it was that Karel always knew the market prices of hay and cotton if he never unfolded the Gazette.

  Karel shrugged and kept his eyes on the boy to let him know he was still awaiting an answer. Before they went inside, with the moon flickering between a few remaining wisps of clouds, Raymond Knedlik worked his tongue around in his mouth awhile and spat between his front teeth. He took a step sideways to square his feet with his shoulders. “It was a family matter,” he said.

  Karel nodded and turned for the door, but the boy took hold of his shoulder and stopped him short.

  “Seeing that we’re talking appearances, Mr. Skala, I’m wondering who it was what nailed your ear to your shoulder and left it there until your neck growed that way. A family matter, was it?”

  Karel held his cigarette between his teeth and shot Novotny a look that had both amusement and wonder in it. Who in hell is this little green-ass? he wanted to say. And why is it that I want to kick him in the ribs and slap him on the back all at the same time? Instead, he took a long pull from his smoke and did something he rarely did, something that had always proved as useless as sowing seed in September—he tried to straighten his neck so he could look this boy level in the eye without leaning.

  He couldn’t any better than he ever could, so he spat his unfinished cigarette from his lips and ground it asunder with his boot heel instead. “I ain’t got a family no more,” Karel said, “excepting my wife and girls.”

  “Excepting?” Raymond said. “Hell, you can feed me shit on a biscuit if you ain’t got me beat. All I got left is Joe here.”

  “That a fact? Last I heard, your pop had bought a parcel up county from Flatonia.”

  “Yessir. And me and Joe here just sold it. Which, so long as we’re on the subject of commerce, you reckon it’s some of that beer left for sale inside? We wouldn’t mind drinking one to your family, Mr. Skala. We hear it’s getting bigger presently.”

  “It damn well better be,” Karel said, opening the door. “On both counts.”

  THERE WAS BEER left aplenty, and Elizka Novotny there to pocket Karel’s coin and hand him the glass, making sure, each time, to brush his fingers with hers when she did.

  The only child of the wealthiest man in town, Eli
zka had made use of her advantages. During the war, when enrollment fell and the University at Austin had opened its doors more readily to women, Elizka had left Praha for three years of book learning. When her mother fell to a crippling stiffening in her hands and feet, she came home before graduating to assist in the woman’s care and ended up managing her father’s business interests instead. She had a knack for numbers and negotiation, and once, when Karel had asked when she planned to settle down, Elizka Novotny had pulled a wisp of curls from the corner of her wet mouth and said, “I am settled. I didn’t grow Daddy’s business just to marry some dirt farmer who expects me to hand over the reins so he can make a wreck of it.”

  Now Karel gave her a wink, handed beers to the Knedlik boys, and turned toward the music. On a stage of pine planks laid over railroad ties, the five-piece band had come out of their suitcoats, and there was sweat showing beneath the arms of the bandleader’s shirtsleeves and wicking into his vest as he kept time to the music with his foot. He handled his accordion with an oddly orchestrated violence, and when he stomped his boot heel sharply through a three count, the horns and drums met him on the third beat, striking up another polka.

  Bohumil Novotny buttoned his suitcoat and made his rounds, shaking hands with his fellow townsmen before begging their pardon to carry a plate of food home to his ailing wife. When Father Petardus rose from a table in the back and raised his empty glass, wishing the parishioners a pleasant night, the band kicked into a droll march as the pastor walked for the doors to make his exit. The onlookers hooted and slapped at their thighs, the older among them throwing themselves forward until the laughing turned to wheezing and hacking.

  Karel, for all his talk, spent most of the night on the perimeter of the dance hall, moving with the Knedlik boys in tow between the long tables, introducing them to the folks he knew while young suitors reached for the hands of their sweethearts and husbands danced with their wives, stirring the baby powder that had been sprinkled on the hardwood flooring to make shoe leather cooperate with the slide steps of the occasional waltz.

  The hall had gone ripe with the smells of spilled beer and sweat and the lingering, fatty spices of the sausage and onions that had been served before the band had tuned up. Throughout the hall, between songs, rose frequent outbursts of laughter and the ivory clicking of dominoes being shaken between hands, but it was the music Karel wanted, and the band kept it coming while he drank and smoked and took a seat across from the Knedlik brothers near the door.

  The boys took long drinks from their pilsners, but only Raymond studied Karel from over the rim of his glass. Joe kept his eyes on the table, his mouth pinched up between drinks like he’d been trying the whole of his short life to wash one bitter taste from his mouth with another.

  Karel tapped his toe in time with the music and sat back in his chair with a groan. He hadn’t found time to eat, what with all the commotion, and now his stomach was a sour swirl of beer and corn whiskey. “So, you boys in need of work?” he said.

  Raymond smiled and licked a trace of beer suds from his upper lip. “It could be. You in need of help?”

  There was a commotion on the dance floor, and Karel looked out to find a young girl sprawled out on her back beneath her red-faced dance partner, who was struggling to bring himself back upright after their tumble. Hell, boy, someone called out. It’s a dance, not a circus!

  Karel turned back to the twins, who were chuckling into the foam of their beers. “I might could use a hand or two,” he said. “Your folks is gone then? I didn’t hear.”

  “Ashes to ashes,” Raymond said, and then his smile turned in on itself at the corners of his mouth. “Mother was a good woman. Deserved better than what God gave her. Died of the typhus last winter. The old man, he burnt up in his bed when the house caught fire. Just after the last cut of hay.”

  “God bless,” Karel said, feeling, at the word of the mother’s death, some old, buried connection to her clawing at him like a blind, burrowing animal awakened to find its den collapsed around it. His words, he suspected, had betrayed nothing, and when Joe looked up at him, his bright eyes glassy and red with whiskey and fatigue, did Karel think how halfhearted it must have sounded, the invocation of God coming, as it had, from a man who’d not two hours ago interrupted a sacrament. “What I mean to say is, that’s a sorry lot, boys. It was good fortune you managed to make it out.”

  Now Raymond traced his scar with his thumbnail. He finished his beer and kept his lips closed while he held his stomach and muffled a belch. “We wasn’t ever in anything what needed getting out of, Mr. Skala. We don’t believe in fortune. Nor accidents neither.”

  Karel frowned and lit a cigarette. He started to say that a man ought to watch how much he said, and when, but he thought the better of it, saying instead, “How about work? You believe in that?”

  “We ain’t interested in farming, if that’s what you mean. Joe here’s good with animals. Sits a horse good as any. I can butcher damn near anything born with blood in it. But we don’t tend to crops. We got enough money to get by a good while. Got a new truck. Got no use anymore for planting fields and mending fences. If we had, we’d have kept the land up county.”

  “I expect you would have,” Karel said. “Anything else you won’t do, assuming there’s good money to be made in it, of course?”

  “Just that. Crop farming. I reckon that’s the whole list right there.”

  Karel polished off his beer and grabbed the boys’ empty glasses from off the table. And then, before heading toward Elizka at the bar, he clinked the glasses together and squatted down such that his haunches rested on his heels. Now that Sophie was laboring, they’d have cause to stay put in Praha for another day or two at the least, and he’d need someone to look after his heifers and smokehouse, and there were at least four kegs of beer that needed delivering to Hacek’s Ice and Coal in Moulton, but first he wanted to see how much doing it might take to spook these boys.

  The orchestra held one last, long note of a polka, and when the dancers had spun to a stop and turned toward the stage to applaud, Karel put his cigarette to his lips and held it there burning orange at the ember while he leaned in close to Raymond Knedlik. “Set a house afire, would you, Raymond?”

  The boy glanced at his brother and then looked hard and without blinking through the rising smoke into Karel’s eyes. His bad eye twitched, its bottom lid pulsing with the measured beating of his heart. Then he pushed his chair back and stood up, his brother following suit. They hooked their thumbs into their pockets and laughed while Karel came to his feet with the beer glasses still in his hands and his cigarette hanging from his mouth.

  “If what folks says is true,” the boy said, “it’s more than me and Joe here that’s helped his old man into the hole he deserves.”

  It had been a long time since anyone, friend or otherwise, had dared to mention Karel’s father within earshot of him, and Karel noticed that his fingers were gripped around the beer glasses so forcefully that his veins bulged beneath the tanned skin on the backs of his hands. What I ought to do, he thought, is take you little shit-asses outside and stomp some sense into you, but the brothers held their ground, moving together in such a way that their shoulders nearly touched, and Karel found himself thinking of the days he’d been harnessed with his brothers to the plow. It had been hard work, but they’d suffered it together, shoulder to shoulder, and now there was something cool bubbling up inside him, working its way through him fresh and clean the way the waters of the cold springs out west bubbled up through stone to feed the winding rivers in the hills.

  Karel let his cigarette drop from his lips and ground it into the floor with his boot before moving close enough to the boys to smell their sour breath. Onstage, the bandleader pulled a red kerchief from the back pocket of his trousers, mopping his forehead and the bridge of his nose before he announced an intermission. Karel found himself whispering: “If what folks says is true, then we’d all three of us be waiting for a turn in that n
ew electric chair they got in Huntsville, sure enough. So either it ain’t true or we ain’t been so goddamned mindless enough yet to go flapping our gums about it at a church dance of a Sunday night. Besides which, there’s a difference between killing a man and letting one die, so why don’t you just take your seats there and let me buy you another beer and listen to what I’m wanting to ask you.”

  HALF AN HOUR later, after the Knedlik boys had agreed to look after the Skala place for a day or two, and to stay on after that if they could agree on the terms, Karel saw them out to their truck and shook their hands, their breath steaming in the growing cold as they said their good-byes.

  And then he took to drinking in earnest.

  The beer did its work in much the same way he knew river water did, running through him and carrying away, grain by grain, the sediment of ill will that had embedded itself within him over the past year of hard work and worry. What was left now, he thought, as the night deepened and the hall thinned out, leaving only the most vigilant of dancers and drinkers, was nothing less than the very bedrock of him, deep and compacted such that neither plow nor music nor drink could unearth it.

  Karel’s earliest taste of the bottle had come eighteen years back on the night of his first race against the Dalton boy. That night, beaming with victory and the whiskey his brothers had smuggled into their room from their father’s stash, he had stirred in his bed, flushed so fully of his usual thoughts that it seemed to him there was nothing left of him but skeleton and skin and the tingling thereabouts that came from having done something his pop might praise him for and from having drunk something that might send the old man reaching for his strap.