The Wake of Forgiveness

by Bruce Machart

  IN TOWN, in the candlelit narthex of St. Jude’s, Father Carew genuflects and crosses himself and then stands fraught with his own weaknesses. He’s spent the whole of the day making preparations for a Nuptial Mass that may never happen, and since the first purple hint of dusk, he’s fought the temptation to saddle his bay mare and ride her out past the feedstore and Wasek’s barbershop, past the Township Inn and the cluster of houses that stand emptied this evening of their masters. He’d prefer to ride out past Patrick Dalton’s diminished acreage in the countryside just north of town, to the Skala place between the forks of Mustang Creek, where tonight, despite the priest’s prayers, sin is set either to prevent or occasion a sacrament. To be seen there, of course, would be tacitly to condone that which calls for condemnation, but his curiosity pulls at him like a kind of depraved gravity. He’s a man, after all, just as surely as he’s a man of God. And there are the boyhood memories, too—his father come home to stand slapping his hands together at the hearth, swaying to the tuneless music of his payday pints, his long evenings spent drinking at the pub, his pockets either loud with coins or empty even of a shilling from his time spent wagering on shuffleboard. Carew’s mother would have stood wringing her hands either way. It was better, to her mind, to live on potatoes and turned lard than to buy meat for the pot by sending other men home penniless. Better to live off the alms than to occasion that humility for others.

  Carew remembers it all with a shudder. It had all been so many years ago, and now, though his joints creak with arthritis and his skin has grown onionskin thin and crinkled with age, he still longs to be among the men of his parish. It seems to him so often that he’s spent the whole of his protracted life trying to care for his mother, long dead, by tending to the women of his parish, by administering blessings and comfort and penances alike to the farmwives whose lives have played out so poorly at the mercy of their hard-willed husbands. And so he prays, and he’s thankful for the memory that answers his prayer. He’d almost forgotten. The Knedlik woman has delivered twins, and they’ve yet to be baptized. He fills a phial with holy water from the font and strings a leather lace through its cork, hangs it from around his neck. Then he snuffs the candles and makes his way out to the stables.

  The weather has come to call, and the stable’s roof timbers groan as if bearing some immense and unforgiving load beneath the descending cold. His horse, Sarah, an old girl now like her namesake, relents to the tack and blows her hot, rheumy mist as the priest works the halter over her head, and then they’re out in the night, ambling down the quiet streets, past the inn and feedstore, past Wasek’s place and around the corner where the heavy doors of the bank stand closed behind a gatework of wrought-iron bars. On the edge of town, he rides quietly past the lamp-lit houses, imagining the children sinking into featherbeds and the dreams that await them there, and soon enough he leaves the last house behind and reaches the outlying pastures. A half mile up the road, he rides around the loamy slough tucked in and fringed by water oak and yaupon, and he stops briefly near a young sweet gum just this side of the southernmost fork of the creek. Fifteen minutes in the saddle, and already Carew finds himself shifting the sharp points of his hips in the leather and wishing for the simple, meaningful discomforts of his younger years. Even the years of purposeful self-deprivation at seminary had been better. He’d been able, at least, to keep some weight on his frame and move his bowels daily, to spend time amidst other men without the nagging worry of his influence on the trajectories of their souls.

  He gives the old girl a heel, and the horse’s hooves clop across the solid and seasoned timbers of the narrow bridge. Carew is grateful for the horse and her infallible memory, for her steady gait on the hard-packed road. Even in the failing moonlight, she knows her way, and the priest laughs and feels the bite of the cold in the worn crowns of his teeth and hunches his shoulders beneath the coarse wool of his overcoat. There’s something beautiful in it, he thinks. An animal grown old and indifferent to the darkness. How many men might be able to say the same? Too few or too many?

  Up on the farm-to-market road that snakes hoof pocked and wheel rutted beside the trickling of the creek’s southern fork, he feels suddenly less alone. Here is the sickly sweet smell of the other horses’ droppings growing cold on the road, the well-tended fenceline of the Skala property, the distant complaints of animals come alive in the night. Here, where the road parts ways with the water and turns north as it runs between the outstretched fencewires, he lets the reins fall slack and sits upright while Sarah walks at her own ancient pace and tilts her ears forward when an owl cries out. The wind comes steady from the west, and through the clouds the moon leaks only as much light as might a few long-wicked candles. To the west stands the original Skala plot, land sectioned off into cropfields that have already been turned over into black furrows in anticipation of the planting season; to the east, clusters of cattle stand sleeping and silent in the pastureland claimed from the Daltons over the last several years. A slow half mile up the road, Father Carew finds the distant stand of trees flashing in firelight, and he brings the horse to a stop beneath a low berth of mesquite branches that hangs over the fence to shade the road even of diffused moonlight. From here, he has only to cut through a cattlegate and keep himself unseen as he rides northwest past the Skala house to the Knedlik place a mere mile away.

  Instead, he dismounts and surveys the dark encroachment of clouds to the west. He walks the horse up the road until he sees, a quarter mile away, the impressive line of horses tied to the fenceposts, the dark carriage sitting empty in the distance, a single lantern hanging from its chain and flickering beside the covered coach. In his younger years, his vocation had been such that he would awaken some early mornings with night sweats and a swollen heart and a prayer already formed and half recited, his devotion strong enough to compose itself and pull him from sleep with its silent annunciation.

  Now, as he ties Sarah to a post and slips himself between the two highest fencewires, he feels the cool glass of the phial bounce against his slack and hairless chest, and thinks of the Knedlik twins, stained still with the sin of Adam. He walks carefully through the pasturage of cut hay and scrub grass, moving covertly between the sleeping cattle and farther into the darkness, imagining himself no more than another man gone deaf and disobedient within earshot of a divine calling. When he’s close enough to get a good view of the assembled men bantering and coughing up phlegm and lurching forward in laughter, close enough to see the two fires ablaze and, between them, Skala and Villaseñor looking down at the papers that Lad Dvorak is unfolding for their perusal, the priest lowers himself onto a half-consumed bale of hay, his hip joints creaking and popping as he settles into his place a safe distance beyond the reach of the firelight.

  The men of Lavaca County are less than timid tonight with the use of their shoulders and elbows. They’ve seen moonlight races before, but none like this, and they jockey for position as they form long lines on either side of the two fires. Dvorak produces a fountain pen from his coat pocket, and the two men steady the papers against their horses while they make their marks. The riders shift themselves in their saddles and look at each other with only quick, sidelong glances, and Father Carew plucks a straw of hay from the bale and works it around in the corner of his mouth, his vocation now but a whisper drowned out by the insistent, anticipatory whirring of blood behind the drums of his ears.

  A MILE AWAY, the Knedlik woman peers down into the pine drawer of her dresser where her two babies lie twisted together atop their makeshift bedding of raw cotton sewn simply into a folded blanket. They have slept most of the day, and now their eyes gaze unfocused and unfeeling into the oil lamplight of the room. Beneath her housecoat, her nipples burn, already cracked and raw and leaking with need. She leans to tuck the edges of the top blanket beneath the infants and winces when she comes upright again. She had torn during the birth, and still her husband had come in late from town last night and stabbed himself into her from behind. Sh
e’d been sleeping on her side, and when she awoke to the searing pain of him working inside her, she’d bitten her lip until she could hear her teeth grinding together through her own flesh. Now, the rags between her legs are cool and wet with her blood, and he’s gone again, out in the night drinking corn mash and cheering for his neighbor’s demise.

  She’d been but a girl of fifteen when Klara Skala died in childbirth, but she remembers the young family well, remembers Vaclav Skala as a young man, reserved but kind, the gentle way he had with his wife. And now, long without her, the man works his boys like animals, instead of animals, and she’s beginning to understand how you can come to see in your children only what they’ve left you without. She recalls the warmth of the youngest Skala boy held against her, taking from her what the child she’d lost never would, and now her own boys, her twins, blink and throw their limbs around beneath the blanket as if impatient already, restless as their father with nights spent at home. She can’t help such thoughts. They have his cold, inexpressive eyes, and they look at her with only their own desires in mind. On more than one occasion already, she’s found need to nurse them at the same time, one to each breast, and the sharp pull of them working at her and the weighted relief of her milk coming down has been at once reassuring and appalling. It’s as if they would take all of her that there is to take, as if they’d willingly leave her drained entirely of herself and offer, in exchange, only cold looks of shriveled brows and quiet, fleeting satisfaction.

  “Hail Mary,” she prays, “full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” and her babies twist and writhe and eye her there in the oily light.

  PERCHED ON HIS hay bale and hidden in the night, Father Carew bears unwitting witness as two motherless children get up in their stirrups to do their fathers’ bidding. Old Man Skala takes hold of the reins and flashes a blade beneath the nose of his horse, his lips moving in a way that reminds the priest of his most penitent daily communicants, the way their prayers are at once fully formed on their lips and yet unuttered, swallowed with the transubstantiated food and drink. Of course, Carew can’t hear the words, can’t think what they might be, can’t imagine just how calculating and threatening a man can be when he whispers to an animal in the cool, cloud-veiled moonlight of a half-lit winter night.

  But Karel can.

  His father’s words rise to his ears as unmistakably and lucidly as do the imagined memories of his mother’s voice. His pop nicks the stallion’s nose with the knife tip, and the whinnying horse throws its great head up and around in a furious nod until Karel gathers him back in with reins and clamped knees. The moon flickers above the moving clouds, and Karel steals a glance at the girl sitting horseback beside him. Her head is canted to receive her father’s advice while she faces Karel with her dark brows raised into an unspoken inquiry. And then his father leans in, his face just inches from the knife, the blade all but resting on Whiskey’s wet snout. “Get a nose full of that,” he says. “You remember that, ain’t it?”

  Three years back, in the stable, Karel had stood beside the crosstied horse while his father gelded the colt’s sire. It was August, past noon and blazing, and hay dust hung glinting and suspended in the slant of light from the loft window. Outside, mockingbirds called out in all their ambitious imitations, and the cattle protested the heat and ambled slowly, lowing as they went, about the nearby pastures. Inside the horse barn, the two animals stood switching their tails against the nuisance of flies. Just outside the door, Vaclav Skala worked his knife blade into a smoking pail of hot hardwood coals he’d had Karel fetch from the smokehouse, and when he wrapped the handle with wet rags and pulled it from the embers, the blade was steaming and blackened with soot.

  The two horses had been tethered nose to nose, the sire cross-tied and hobbled, and Karel watched as his father held the smoking blade to Whiskey’s nose. The horse twitched and whinnied, jerked its head in abbreviated motions that seemed, even to Karel, even then, a kind of uncertain consent. “Why not keep him fit to stud?” he’d asked.

  His father turned the knife in his hand and smiled as he dropped to a knee just safely in front of the old stallion’s rear legs. “Because I’ve got Whiskey to breed now, and I can sell the old man here for a handsome price, is why.”

  Karel stood, unflinching, as his father pulled down on the horse’s thickly leathered scrotum and spat tobacco juice into the dry hay that had been forked over the dirt floor.

  “But we could get more for a stud, ain’t it?”

  Vaclav worked his tobacco slowly with his back teeth and considered his son without looking at him. “Who’s this we you’re so fond of talking about, boy? This here’s my horse, and now that I’ve bred him I’ll be damned if anyone else will. I’ve gotten one hell of a colt out of him, and I’ll breed Whiskey next, and when I’m finished with him, I’ll cut his nuts off, too, if it’s to my liking. Now hold his head. I want him to see this. And enough of your got-damned questions.”

  Karel was amazed as ever by the deftness of his father’s hands with tools. The man could shoe a horse in twenty minutes, could mend a breached fence in ten. Now it was a matter of a hot, sharp knife and less than a second. The horse screamed and reared against the ropes, stamping the hard earth and clouding the air with blond dust, and then Vaclav stood with the testicles in his hand while the horse streamed blood into the hay. “It’s some folks will eat horse balls,” he said, “but we ain’t them folks,” and he threw the whole bloody mess on the ground beneath Whiskey’s head. “Get you a good look at that, by God, and don’t think your time ain’t coming.”

  Then he turned so that his eyes met Karel’s, and they exchanged a strange and conspiratorial smile. “Of course, I reckon we could’ve had some fun with your brothers. Could’ve fed them a nice fried-nut supper and not told them what they were chewing till they cleaned their plates.”

  Karel laughed there in the hot barn with his father, and then it was time to get back to work. “Come here, boy. It’s time you learn how to stitch up a gelding.”

  Even now, somehow, despite the shifting muscles of the horse beneath him and the creaking of the saddle and the brisk air rich with the winter smells of pine and parched sod, Karel is still in that hot stable with his father. It’s not unlike the drunkenness to which he’s begun, in recent months, to accustom himself. There’s a comfort in the distance it affords him from the unrelenting dullness of the present day beneath the weight of hay bale or feed sack or harness or loneliness, and he can feel now, as he does some nights with a belly warmed with mash, the past start to shoulder its way into the present such that he knows, unsettling as it is in its possibilities, that there are moments and days that he’ll never outrun, that he’ll never bury with hoof-thrown divots of sod nor the forgetting afforded by days and months and years piled up atop the ones that came before them. Now Karel works the leather of the reins in his habitual, delicate way. He’d taken pains today, with boar-bristle brush and knife-tip alike, to get his fingernails clean, and while he’d scrubbed and scraped he’d been thinking of how much approval he’d find in his mother’s eyes when he presented his hands for her careful inspection, dreaming her alive and smiling and stricken with a desire to clasp his long, slender fingers in her own.

  He shakes his head now, scolds himself for thinking more fondly of a past that never happened than of a future he might occasion with hard work and horsemanship and concentration. There are times, goddamn them, that won’t turn loose of you any more than they’ll permit you to take hold of them.

  Besides which, there’s this girl sitting horseback beside him. Her father is standing next to her, leaning forward, his hair slicked back and gleaming such that it might just as well be appointed with butter as with hair tonic. He’s whispering to his daughter, giving her instructions in Spanish, likely telling her to stay low in the saddle around the trees, to follow close on Karel’s flank until after the turn. To make her move on the final straight half mile back to the fires.

  And then he pats her th
igh and whistles to his men, who tuck their rifle stocks under their arms and begin walking with the single lantern past the long lines of townsmen and into the shadows toward the stand of moss-strung trees in the invisible distance. The air is sharp with the woodsmoke from the finish-line fires, alive with the nighttime work of animals and the whispers of men, and then Vaclav Skala protests, his knife still in hand, gesturing to Lad Dvorak and Villaseñor.

  “Where in steaming hell is them sawed-off Mexicans going?”

  The fireside men fall silent of a sudden. Villaseñor’s guards look at each other with feigned surprise and smile and keep walking. One of them holds his rifle out without slowing his pace and makes a show of levering a cartridge into the receiver. The air shifts, coming cold from the north, and the fires surge and smoke whips out in gray ribbons and casts the horses and their riders in a dreamlike haze. Karel curses his neck, leans in the saddle to set the world upright so that he can catch sight of Patrick Dalton, who smiles and elbows his son. The red-headed boy stands with his hands tucked into his trouser pockets and nods knowingly, his freckles so thick on his nose that he appears to be afflicted with a single birthmark that bridges his cheeks, on one of which a slight scar is still visible. And then Lad Dvorak and Villaseñor are stepping forward, the latter with a cigar half-smoked and still kindled in his mouth, the banker unfolding the papers and holding them forward for Skala’s perusal.