The Wake of Forgiveness

by Bruce Machart

  “It calls for witnesses on the course,” Dvorak says. “You signed it.”

  Vaclav waves it away and swipes spent tobacco from his mouth. “Does it now? It say they have to be Mexicans with loaded guns, too, or is that part just something you gone and dreamed up in that corn-popper mind of yours?”

  Whiskey sidesteps and Karel wedges the toes of his boots into the stirrups and reins him back in line. When he glances to his left, the girl has tucked her crop handle into her boot and is running her gloved fingers through her horse’s black mane, looking at Karel with eyes half-open, as if she’s only now awoken to find herself sitting in a gleaming saddle with a boy’s eyes on her. She wets her lips and smiles, widens her black eyes at him, and then she pulls her crop from her boot and levels it across her horse’s shoulders.

  Villaseñor steps in front of Lad with his hands open and his palms out in an unthreatening and diminutive way that reminds Karel of the other day, of the first time he’d seen the man and his daughters. It’s off-putting, this gesture, and Karel reckons there’s not another man in the county who would configure himself so in the presence of other men. There’s something almost womanly about it, too forgiving and soft, too vulnerable, and still Karel finds himself beset by a soft pull in his chest, a sympathy that threatens to well into something not unlike kinship.

  His father is having none of it, and he turns now to his older boys. “Stan,” he says. “Get on up there by them trees. And take one of your brothers with you.”

  Stan straightens himself up into the best shape of a man he can make, a man with oilcloth trousers and hair wet combed and parted neatly on one side despite the turbulent weather, a young man with a neck bent to match his brothers’ and the will to walk farther away from his father than he’s been instructed to walk. He nods at Thomàs and, as the two move past Karel, Stan runs his wind-chapped hand along Whiskey’s side and, ever the eldest brother, slaps Karel’s boot from the stirrup.

  The onlookers fall back to drinking and placing whispered wagers as the two boys trail Villaseñor’s men off into the darkness, and Karel works the toe of his boot back into the stirrup and readies himself to ride.

  And then his father is beside him, and Karel catches a sour whiff of the man’s chewing tobacco. Vaclav grabs him by the coat pocket and pulls him down so he can whisper in the boy’s ear. “I expect you think you can cozy up to little Mexican heifers out back of the grove nights and keep it a secret, is that it?”

  Karel looks his father in the eye like he’s been taught, but he’s so stung by surprise that he can hardly breathe or swallow, much less speak.

  “As per usual, I expect you’re wrong. But I’ll make you a deal. Win this race and you can run off with her and sire a whole houseful of little half-breeds if she’ll have you. You ain’t good for nothing but riding any-damn-way, but I’ll tell you this, boy—you lose and you’ll never ride that horse for pleasure again.”

  FROM WHERE FATHER Carew sits, the whole affair might just as well be conducted in silence up until the moment when, with the papers made legal and the witnesses dispatched into the shadows and the riders prompted, Lad Dvorak steps beyond the horses and off to the side a few paces and raises his little pistol overhead. Carew sees the testament of smoke from the barrel before he hears the sharp crack of its report move over him as if ushered by the breeze, and he considers, as the horses plunge forward and the riders go to work with their whips, that this may well be the fashion in which the souls of men rise from their bodies—discreetly, soundlessly, yet all at once, as if cast forward into their everlasting fates without any outward indication to the temporal world.

  Carew fingers the phial of holy water through the rough wool of his buttoned coat as the sound falls over him in such a way that he finds his senses, long stunted, have been triggered as violently and unexpectedly as by the onset of seizure or epiphany. The night now overtakes him—the wild, leering cheers of the townsmen; the chill of the breeze so damp and strong with the odor of smoke and manure that he imagines it adhering itself to his exposed skin; the gritty, broomstraw taste of the hay between his lips—all so wonderfully alive with the compulsory if tainted enticements of a fallen world.

  The moon, just as surely, is overtaken again by the clouds. The horses are throwing turf, bearing their riders out of the firelight and toward whatever awaits them in a darkness so dense that, if Father Carew weren’t compelled by it all so viscerally, he might liken it to the irremediable and uncomprehending darkness of which St. John wrote, to the wholly unintelligible nature of light to a world gone black.

  Instead, the priest springs to his feet with a youthfulness he hasn’t known in more than two decades, a sound rising from some rarely plumbed depth within him, something akin to the chants of a High Mass. But there comes, just overhead and not a yard off his shoulder, a silent and startling black flash of something winging by, fast and fleeting as the peripheral arrival of the conscience in sinners. A horned owl, banking now with a wing dipped vertically, arcing across the pasture and leveling off again, gliding out toward the running horses in search of field mice or nesting coveys of quail or a young opossum lagging too far behind its mother. Carew tracks it until it vanishes into the trees assembled just this side of the creek, and then he looks around at the congregation of nightfall and desiccated pasture grass and sleeping cattle. He had almost called out, had almost cheered the riders, and now, as the relief of the undiscovered culprit courses cool within him, he turns his attention back to the race, watching in silence as the horses carry their burdens into the indiscernible distance.

  KAREL HAD EXPECTED that she would hang back before the turn, that she would test his flank and work carefully alongside him in anticipation of a final sprint back to the finish. Instead, he is trailing her from the start, her long braid whipping back at him as the ride smoothes out and he finds his balance, crouching forward and low over the horse’s rhythmic exertions. Out of the firelight’s reach and swallowed by the darkness, he squints against thrown dirt and the sharp gusting of the wind, and when his eyes adjust to the scant moonlight, when the slow, familiar muscular burn flares and creeps beneath his skin like a hot wicking of oil up his calves and into his taut hamstrings, he considers his options. He could do as the Dalton boy had done those four years earlier, biding time until the last moment, waiting to see which direction the girl takes around the trees and then veering the other way. Or he could follow her and hope for an inside opening as they break into the straightaway. A hundred yards from the oaks, Karel crosses the crop in front of him, applying it to alternating sides of the animal’s hide until he gains some ground and is riding hard just off the girl’s right flank. He has learned in these years of riding that properly sizing up the opposing rider trumps any impressions he might have about the horse. But this is something else entirely. She’s fast, unyielding with her crop, but her true advantage, and one he finds himself helpless against, is that, even now, he can’t keep his eyes off her. Something about the smooth and easy flexing of her knees, her backside cocked back and shuddering with the vibrations of the ride, her riding pants tight enough to reveal the swell of her hips and the sweet crease between them, the whole thing bobbing like a firm, just-ripe peach hanging from some wind-worried branch.

  God bless, Karel thinks, and he whips the horse soundly.

  It’s been three weeks since his fifteenth birthday, and as he urges Whiskey on, hoping to gain enough ground to afford him a look at this girl’s dark eyes and swollen lips, he finds himself wishing that he had a father like this girl has, one who would risk his own wealth and pride for a chance at earning, for his children, the pleasure of a lifetime of nights spent in the company of someone they might come to love. As it was, this year Vaclav had given Karel a birthday free of chores and two extra eggs at breakfast, that and a dollar that Karel spent the better part of buying bottles of beer for himself and his brothers at the icehouse. Hell, next year might warrant two dollars, but not if he didn’t quit himself of all
these got-damned thoughts and teach this girl and her bouncing round hams a thing or two about horse racing.

  Just before the stand of oaks, where he takes note of the surprisingly loud and mechanical sound of the insects at work there in the tangled berths of the branches, Karel shifts his weight farther forward over the horse’s shoulders and blisters its hide with a flurry of right-handed encouragements. Circling the trees to the left, the girl stands a bit in the stirrups, bringing Karel fully square with her on the outside while she turns her face his way against the spiderwebs and willow-thin branches that reach out from the treeline’s perimeter. Karel eases up on the whip and, though he means to look blankly at her, finds himself smiling the way he has some nights when he failed to disguise the joy of holding a strong hand when he and his brothers played cards around the kitchen table for pennies.

  The girl crouches and rides and averts her eyes, and halfway around the turn her forehead crinkles into delicate little ridges. Karel follows the direction of her glance to find, off to the right and some thirty yards out from the horses’ determined path, the flickering glow of lanternlight and his two brothers standing side by side with one of the Mexicans, lit cigars smoking and orange tipped in the upturned corners of their mouths. To Karel’s mind, though he might have expected it, though he wants as surely as do his brothers his own land and an easy life spent freed from the hard grasp of their father’s hand, there’s still no way to make this right, his brothers standing there in the flickering diffusion of light, smoking cigars as if they’ve been smoking them all their lives, filling their mouths with a foreign, sweet smoke that Karel knows they’ve never before had the pleasure of tasting, cigars that have all but surely come from the Mexican who stands smirking here in the shadows, his boots dusted with the topsoil of his father’s land and his heart darkened with the desire to take it from him.

  Casually, as if occasioned by afterthought, the man raises his rifle, swinging it level toward the oncoming horses for a moment just long enough to give Karel pause and cause sour questions to rise like bile in the back of his throat. Where in the devil, he wonders, is the other one?

  Instead of steadying his aim, the man moves the gun in a continuous, sweeping motion, as if practicing for a shot at a low-quartering quail, and there’s a pinched grin on his lips when he drops the barrel and holds the gun again crossways and harmless against his waist. He nods, and Karel strains against the stiffness in his neck, shifts his eyes to catch sight of this girl as her lovely face is graced by the hint of a smile, by a slight and silent and nodded reply. And then Karel is leading, if only by half a head, his crop gone cold in his sweat-slicked hand. He thinks of his father, the stink of tobacco on his breath and the bloodshot eyes, his promise and his threat, and Karel wonders if he could bring himself to strike this girl. He has her within reach, his whip in hand, and the idea works itself free in his mind the way a deep cedar splinter from a hard week of fence-work will sometimes slide, as if tweezed by a ghost, from beneath the calloused skin of his hands: If he can just get her off that horse so he’s sure to win, then he might do as his father has said he might and keep her for himself. Beside him, running hard and just trailing, her horse is lathered at the mouth and steaming from the nostrils, and the girl’s faint smile hangs on her lips like a forgotten flirtation. Karel squeezes his crop, imagines the astonishment registering on her face, those lovely, swollen lips fallen open into a pink wet ring of wounded disbelief. And then later, after he’d won—and won her in doing so—he’d sugarcoat it so she couldn’t help but understand, and she’d forgive him, and she’d close her pretty lips and put them to good use against his.

  He adjusts his weight backward over his stirrups, his stomach alive with the work of rendering conviction from uncertainty, and just as he’s convinced himself to swing at her comes the moment Karel will study in his memory for better than a decade, searching in hindsight for the details that might help him discern the difference between an occurrence occasioned by accident and one born of calculation. When a blast of damp air incites the trees to a violent bewilderment of leaning and lurching, the girl’s boots come out of the stirrups, and she’s pitched off balance and lashed forward and up and free of the saddle such that she’s clinging to the neck of her animal, her crop still clenched with the tangled hair of the horse’s mane in her gloved little hand, both legs flying wildly and slapping against the outside flank of the horse. Karel locks his knees and stands in the stirrups, feeling the hot wash of fear in his chest, his guts strung slick and tight as greased cordage beneath his first rung of ribs. Whiskey reacts with a tossing head and the jerking steps of a horse pulled up short and against its will into a trot, and Karel digs a heel into the animal’s side to swing him well out and away from the girl so that she can come off the horse, as he is sure she will, without being trampled by another.

  It’s curious, though, or it will seem so later when he plays it all out in his mind, that her horse never breaks its stride, and with Karel lagging behind, allowing her a wide berth, the reins cool and damp in the palms of his hands, she hugs the horse’s neck and relaxes her legs so that they hang insensibly toward the ground. And then, as she passes Karel’s onlooking brothers and the Mexican they seem all too eager to stand beside, the girl arches her back, limber as a bottomland cattail, and kicks her feet back. For Karel, long accustomed to the gangly and lumbering company of men, her graceful and long-practiced ascent to the saddle seems occasioned all at once by a singularly feminine and fluid motion, but when he remembers it later, when he tries to duplicate it on his own horse out in the coverts of a new-moon pasture, he’ll think on it hard enough to see then what he’s seeing now without knowing he’s seeing it—the tandem backward swing of her legs, the perfect curved line of her spine as her knees float back over the horse’s thundering haunches, the slightest cant of her hips and the scissoring of her legs that returns her smoothly to the shining leather of her saddle; her feet coming forward, the toes sliding into the stirrups just as she leans forward into her crouch and, with her backside hovering above the saddle and her knees bent and absorbing the plunging force of the ride, her head turning back so that, just as she brings the whip down hard on horsehide, she’s smiling back at Karel from three full lengths ahead.

  And then she’s running hard and away, hugging the perimeter of the trees as she widens her lead and whips her horse, her braided hair flung back and black and dancing playfully in the air behind her shoulders.

  Alive in Karel’s mind is only a whisper of suspicion, one muted by the astonishing beauty of what he’s seen, and he smiles at the fortune of having borne witness to something so graceful and yet so capable and strong, to a girl turned woman before his eyes, to that woman flashing her white teeth at him, smiling because, for her, as for Karel, there is nothing quite so thrilling as a race run on horseback, nothing filled more with wonder, nothing so able to convince you that you are flesh and blood and alive in the world that offers so few joys other than this running.

  Instinctively, he whips his horse and gives chase, angling the animal back into a tight, sweeping circle around the trees, but then it’s as if a leafless branch reaches out for him from the stand of twisted oaks. He catches it out of the corner of his eye the way he sometimes notes the flash of a diving hawk in a distant pasture while harnessed to his father’s plow. He leans instinctively away, but his neck is locked in its perpetual cant and the thing rakes him hard across the scalp and face. There’s a flaming pain where the hair snags and rips from its roots, and he knows, from the taste of warm iron and the hornet’s sting of it, that the tender skin at the corner of his mouth has been torn. He’s knocked off balance but manages to keep his mount, holding the reins a little too tightly for good riding and grinding the serrated enamel of his teeth until the horse takes note of the boot heel digging into its side and resumes its running. A gust blows cold, biting at Karel’s wounded lip, and he’s as certain that he can still ride as he is that even the most violent of winds don’
t stretch tree branches outward from their trunks into the paths of riders. He looks back over his shoulder to find the branch retracting into the mossy veil of the trees, and he’s still cursing when he breaks into the open pasture and spots the distant fires burning as if in self-consuming anticipation of his arrival. The missing Mexican, he knows, was up to nothing so innocent as relieving himself in the shadows, and Karel runs through a few quickly imagined scenarios of how he will take his revenge, none of which, he realizes, is going to help him gain enough ground to win this race.

  The girl is running hard out front, and he swings his crop and nudges Whiskey to the left to avoid the stinging draft of dirt and dust thrown back at him by the horse he’s trailing. Still, he can’t quite let loose the image of the girl, of her body willing itself back onto her horse. And what to make of his brothers? Of their easy way of standing, hips cocked and arms crossed, those cigars aglow like smoking punctuation marks to all the sentences they’ve thought but kept themselves from saying. He knows it shouldn’t, but still it surprises him—they want him to lose just as surely as he wants to win, but wasn’t there supposed to be something more binding in brotherhood than that? Wasn’t there something written by common blood or by God or by what Karel imagines as the fine, looping script of their mother’s unwritten will that should have kept them from standing idly by, grinning and sucking on cigars afforded them by the very men who had tried to take his head off at the roots with an uprooted timber?

  Karel is running five full lengths behind but holding when the moon slips out brightly from the clouds just long enough to oversee the goings-on below, and when it ducks back under cover there comes, from out north in the pastures beyond the creek, a sound like slow-tearing parchment that grows steadily louder in its approach. This is a rainfall that will defy the almanac and swell the creeks beyond their banks, a four-day flood that, before it relents, will level the furrows and float topsoil from the cropfields and drive the county’s cattle to huddle loudly together beneath the shelter of mature oak and pecan trees. It will prove a nuisance to nuptials and make it all but impossible to dig a respectable grave. It will reduce the finish-line fires to soft and steaming black stacks of drenched timbers, but for now, to Karel’s way of thinking, it is a welcomed relief. It’s been a long, dry winter, and soft soil makes for easier labor. The cold water wicks into his clothes and numbs his scalp and face. Besides which, Karel has spent the larger portion of his life waiting for simple changes, for the sun to come out or the rain to fall, for the school bell to ring and release him to the outdoors, for the cows to show in the swollen gashes beneath their tails the bloody discharge and the hard edges of hooves that signal the onset of calving.