The Wake of Forgiveness

by Bruce Machart

  A little better than two hundred yards beyond her, the priest stands on his toes atop his hay bale, and for a moment he struggles to grasp the meaning of this boisterous new encirclement of men. His coat is soaked and the wind is needling his face with raindrops, and still he remains, leaning this way and that to find a better vantage point. He can’t see a thing, and then, in the irregular yellow lanternlight and haze of woodsmoke, the ring of men swells and constricts like some jaundiced heart pulsing in a miasma. Stumbling backward, one of the onlookers opens a gap in the circle such that Father Carew catches sight of what’s at work inside, and he would swear—if he swore—that his lungs have forgotten how to take air just as surely as he’s forgotten, this last half hour, how to pray. He has seen father and son both spilling blood, the exuberance of the crowd around them—he is bearing witness now to something far more regrettable than a race for land and bridegrooms’ hands. This is the bloodlust of brothers, the vengeful rage of the father, all of it born out and somehow flawless in its wickedness, like some depraved reenactment of Genesis staged solely for the amusement of reprobates. How far? he wonders. How far may we follow one ill-chosen and descending path?

  In the meantime, Skala has gotten Eduard by the hair, and before he drives the boy’s head into a raised knee, he catches Karel’s eye. The old man wears the twin puncture wounds of Thom’s teeth deep in the sun-spotted skin above one eyebrow, and he nods at Karel with a satisfied look on his face that suggests he’s been waiting for this since the first of his sons slid wide-eyed and helpless out of their mother and into the world.

  Thom is struggling to stand, his boot soles slipping on the muddy sod, and Karel watches him with the same cool patience he feels when he’s hidden behind a tree some mornings, leveling his rifle as dew glimmers in the tall grass all around him and a buck walks proudly out into the clearing, all but begging to be shot. And then it all churns sour in Karel’s mind—the lost race and his father’s bloodied, contented face; the cold rain coming down, numbing everything but the hot swell of desire that he carries for the girl; the vision of his brothers and their goddamned cigars; the smell of smoldering fires and wet cow shit; the hot hollow in his guts he doesn’t figure he’ll ever fill up; the metallic paste of his own blood on his tongue—all of it rendered clear by the electric spill of adrenaline into his veins. He recalls the quiet thrill of a morning spent hunting on his father’s land, the trigger of memory cold against his finger, imagines squeezing it back, and while his father and Eduard exchange blows, Karel drives a boot heel beneath Thom’s ear before he can find enough purchase to stand upright. Karel feels the shock of the impact in his hipbone, an abrasive jolt that makes him imagine his bones as sandy stones crushed together underfoot. Thom drops to the ground for a third time, facedown in the muck and standing water.

  And then Karel shoulders up to his father, and they’re all at it with fists and feet. Eduard rears back, landing a shot to Karel’s temple that blazes in blinding light across his field of vision such that he mistakes it at first for a flash of lightning, and he’s throwing blind punches as he awaits a rumble of thunder that never comes. When Stan leans over and drags Thom to his feet, the two of them come wildly and unwarily forward. Dazed and unyielding as a drunk, Thom still wears a look of serene release on his wrecked and swollen face. He draws back, twisting at the waist, and when he uncoils, swinging with a scream, he doubles his father over with a blow to the kidney.

  Karel gasps as if he’s taken the punch himself, and then Eduard and Stan are on him, crumpling him beneath their weight. They yank him up by the arms, twisting his wrists behind his back until he thinks his shoulders will come clean from their sockets. He flails and kicks back at his brothers’ shins, sliding in the mud and held upright by the same muscles that restrain him as he watches his father holding his stomach, grunting under his own weight and attempting to stand. Hovering over him, Thom flexes his hands at his side, waiting for more. When Karel calls out, cursing his brothers as he stamps at their feet, his arms held fast behind his back, Thom turns and avails himself of the easy opportunity. “I’m fixing to give you your druthers, little brother,” he says, showing Karel a fist. “You rather eat tomorrow or see?”

  Karel hurls his body forward, trying to shrug free of his brothers’ grasp, but they torque his arms harder behind his back and it burns in his shoulders enough to bring tears to his eyes and flood his mouth with saliva. He tries to spit, but the stuff catches on his swollen lower lip and rolls down his chin like drool from a toothless dog. “You ought to see yourself, Thom. Face like yours would scare a whore off a five-dollar dick.”

  Thom spits blood and opens his mouth wide, making a prideful show of his injuries. “I got no use anymore for whores,” he says, smiling. “I’m the marrying kind.” When he swings, the night flashes hot white before Karel’s eyes. As the light wanes, it is replaced by a blackness overlaid with crimson. A tide of nausea crests in the hot swirl of his stomach and all the starch drains out of his knees. His brothers yank him back to his feet, his pulse throbbing hot in his blind eye, the welt over his cheekbone swelling until he can feel it buoying the tender skin of his lower eyelid.

  The wind shifts again and plays hell with the trees such that out by the creek comes a clattering racket of snapped branches and fallen pinecones. Over the commotion of weather, Vaclav is shouting, “Turn him loose,” and when Thom spins around with his fists up he finds his old man on his feet with his knife drawn, waving it there in front of him, the honed blade wet and shimmering in the flickering light.

  When the gun goes off, even Vaclav startles. The blast is sharp and short-lived, the sound of an errant hammer striking milled white pine.

  Karel freezes, half expecting to hear a body splash against the waterlogged earth. Startled, one of the Mexicans swings his gun up and leans his cheek into the smooth walnut of its stock, stepping back and readying himself to return fire while his partner waves the light above his head, searching the darkness to locate the shooter.

  “Put that damned knife away!” Lad Dvorak shouts, stepping forward with his pistol raised and smoking above his head.

  Karel shrugs off his brothers, and they turn him loose and step warily toward the safety of the armed guards as their father turns one way and then another, slashing the air in front of him with his blade, squinting into the shadows until he locates Dvorak. “Best mind your own business, Laddie,” he says.

  “I mean to,” Lad says. “I’m going to make it my business to ride clean into Hallettsville and collect Sheriff Munson if you don’t put that thing back in your belt where it belongs.”

  Skala grunts and shakes his head, wipes his face with the sleeve of his coat. “Put that sorry excuse for a gun away, you son of a bitch. This whole thing stinks to high hell. I ain’t putting this knife anywhere but in your gut unless someone can explain to me how a boy runs a horse for a mile and comes back bloody.”

  Without shouldering forward from his place in the ring of onlookers, Patrick Dalton lets out a disgusted laugh. “Lord-a-mighty,” he says. “Listen to yourself, Skala. Just look at my boy’s face and listen to yourself.”

  “Hell, Dalton. All these years and your cunny’s still sore? Why don’t you limp back home and have your boy rub some salve on it if it’s all that bad.”

  There comes a chuckle from the crowd, and then there’s whispering and jostling as the circle widens and breaks open to admit Guillermo Villaseñor to its center. The man walks with his hands in his coat pockets as if he’s strolling around town of a dry Saturday evening, his wavy hair as yet oiled and orderly despite the blowing rain, and when he gets within a few feet of Skala, he motions to his men with a tilt of his head and a clicking sound he makes with his tongue. They nod slowly, in unison, and only once, and then their boss brings his hands from his pockets and holds them out as if he’s come down from his surrey with no business other than that of collecting rainwater by the handful. The wet lenses of his spectacles throw slanting reflections of lanter
nlight from their surfaces, and before he speaks he makes a sound of paternal disappointment and impatience, half clearing his throat, half sighing. “I must confess,” he says, raising his voice above the din of rainfall, “that I had hoped I might afford my daughters the luxury of unblemished bridegrooms, Mr. Skala. As I had hoped you’d be a man whose word proved worthy of his wealth.” He tilts his head and arcs his thick brows in a look that indicates regret and resignation both. Returning one hand to its place in his pocket, he flips the other palm down, working his fingers in a dismissive gesture one might use to give an idle servant leave from the room. “Please, let’s be reasonable. Put the knife away.”

  Skala lowers the blade, but keeps it in hand at his side. His forehead is deeply bruised and swollen above the twin toothmarks, his speech dulled by a split lip, his shoulders thrown back as if he were bragging of an evening at the icehouse about cotton yields or bale weights. “It’s been some shenanigans during the race, I’m betting. And that’s got to be answered for,” he says. “It’s raining to strangle toads, sure enough, but not hard enough to break skin.” He points to Karel with his knife. “I want to know how the boy’s mouth got bloodied of a horse ride.”

  Karel hears his father speak the word, and he’s suddenly aware that he’s lost track of Whiskey. He gazes one eyed toward the creek, scans the line of trees back toward the cattlegate. When he reaches up to feel the swelling beneath his eye, there flares a searing pain beneath the skin that Karel would swear begins burning before he even touches the wound. He wonders if the worst of pain lies in the anticipation of its arrival. Wincing, he turns back toward his father, squared off and awaiting an answer from Villaseñor. The horse is nowhere to be seen.

  The man nods slowly, shifts his attention from Skala to Karel, from his future sons-in-law, who now stand battered and serious and shouldered in front of his guards, back to Skala. “Well, sir. While I can’t say that I appreciate the tenor of your curiosity, I certainly do recognize your right to its satisfaction. Thankfully, despite all your pleasantries here, your boys still appear to be conscious. Shall we ask them if the race was run fairly?”

  “I told you at least once before, stranger, that we ain’t doing anything. Besides, I already asked them twice—once with words and once with an ass whipping.”

  Out west, the moon slides into view, washing pale over the landscape for a slow moment before ducking back behind another jagged-bottomed line of clouds. The rain slackens to a drizzle, and Karel feels the hot throb of his pulse in his swollen eye. Grown suddenly impatient with all the chatter, the townsmen take to groaning and whispering, shuffling around in the mud and waiting.

  “It don’t look to me like you got that much the better of it, Skala,” Patrick Dalton says. “Besides which, if you choose to lay licks to your witnesses, then it ain’t nobody’s fault but your own if they won’t vouch for you.”

  “Dalton,” Skala says, an angry blue vein snaking up his throat from beneath his shirt collar. “I believe I already invited you to leave. Ain’t a man here who doesn’t know you sit down to piss, and not a one who’d take two steps out of his way for your fool opinion.”

  Villaseñor holds a hand up to the crowd. “This is my business, gentlemen, and as much as I might appreciate your interest, I’ll kindly ask you to hold your tongues until I can effect a solution.” He motions to Stan, and his guards push the boy gently forward into the circle. “You are the oldest, is that correct?”

  Stan’s nose is bent opposite the cant of his neck, a black plug of dried blood protruding from one nostril. What surprises Karel is that his brother wears his welts with a prideful posture. He stands straight and nods immediately, then he clears his throat and says, “I am.”

  “Very well. Then would you tell me, as your father’s witness, if there’s any reason to doubt the result of the race.”

  Stan glances at his father, who turns the knife in his hand at his side while he returns the boy’s gaze. “The girl was out front the whole way, best I could tell. She damn near lost her mount out back of the trees, but even then she was leading.”

  “What about your brother’s face?”

  “Can’t say for sure. Wind came up mighty strong before the rain blew in. Gusted through them oaks pretty good, and they were riding right up tight against the treeline. I expect he took a branch to the face, but if he did it didn’t look to hinder him much.”

  Villaseñor turns to Karel, swiping beads of water from the smooth skin of his coat sleeves. “That sound accurate enough to you?”

  Karel glances one eyed at his brothers standing three abreast, their backs straight, knees locked in anticipation. In the corner of his vision, Skala weaves on his feet like he does some nights when he stays late at the icehouse. Turning the knife at his side, the man coughs phlegm and spits, and it occurs to Karel that, in all these years, he’s never thought to imagine that this wiry and unforgiving man was once the very one his mother had loved. When he imagines her, dreaming her alive daily in his mind, manufacturing memories, forging connections with her that he’d never known, what he sees is a woman sitting horseback with a swollen belly, a woman pale and lovely and comforting her youngest son, stroking his curly hair and pressing him to the warm, faintly perfumed comfort of her bosom. Only now, with the wind’s murmuring in the pines akin to the hushed sounds of graveside consolation, does he shiver with the notion of all she’s lost, all she’ll never know of the family she’s left alive and discontented in the world from which she must always have meant to protect them.

  “Well, boy?” Vaclav says.

  “She was too far gone from the start,” he says. “Tree or no tree, there wasn’t any catching her.”

  AFTER THE TOWNSMEN break away from their tight-huddled circle, murmuring at the disappointment of a fight brought so abruptly to an end, recounting the most staggering blows and arguing light-heartedly about who got the best or worst of it, Karel dodges his father’s attention and goes in search of Whiskey. The horse has wandered from the dry shelter of the trees and is nibbling at the short remains of wet hay on the fringe of the southern pastureland. Beyond him, the girl has turned her horse out into the dark field and is walking the animal slowly, looking back over her shoulder as she goes.

  Trudging out to collect his father’s animal, Karel hears his father getting in the last words, warning his brothers, telling them that they have one hour to collect a change of clothes and get the hell out of his house. They can sleep at the inn, by damn, and on Villaseñor’s nickel, too. That or they can sleep out in the rain or go cuddle up in some hayloft with the mustachioed Mexicans they’ve taken a fancy to. And then the man is swinging open the cattlegate, stopping to bite a new portion of tobacco off his plug, spitting and shaking his head, a hand clamped to his side as he heads out across the dark stretch of acreage in which, at least outwardly, he’s always taken greater pride than in his boys.

  As for Karel, he comes up slowly on Whiskey, works a flattened hand down the horse’s smoothly muscled shoulder, stroking cold rainwater from the horsehair and reassuring the animal for a few moments with his voice. “There you go, boy. That’s it. It wasn’t your fault, now was it?” Taking hold of the pommel, Karel slips a boot into the stirrup and swings himself into the saddle, nudges the horse around with a heel and a clicking of the tongue.

  What Karel knows, as he rides into the darkness to the south, is that he has nothing more to say about this night, no desire to go home and meet the silence of his father or the whispering exodus of his brothers. He’ll ride the horse fully cool out here in the weather, let his stinging lip and his swollen eye and the reassurances of nightfall and drizzling rain convince him that it wasn’t only his distracted riding that cost him the race. When he makes it home and gets the tack put away and the new hay forked into the stables, maybe he’ll bed down out in the loft until morning. But for now he’ll ride south until he finds the lower fork of the creek, and then he’ll follow it around to the house. Out there somewhere in the darkne
ss, he knows, is a girl astride her black horse, the both of them streaming rainwater, and it is toward her that Karel rides out into the night, a failure on his father’s horse.

  ON THE BANKS of the creek, where the remaining men stand winding frayed wet twine around their wrists, reeling in their jugs of corn mash and laughing and passing the wet coins of their wagers between them, the horned owl perches amber-eyed and ruffling rainwater from her feathers, watching from the sheltered lower branch of a sweet gum tree. Across the creek along the far bank, near the tangle of water oak and pine roots and the deep impressions of boot soles in the wet silt, she discerns the slightest distinction in the clustered dancing of bluestem spires, knowing by some sharp and instinctive insistence in the grainy fibers of her muscles that rain and wind bend the uppermost inches of grass blades while the scuttling of prey and the dragging of a tail will set the reeds to shivering upward from the tillers.

  And then she’s aloft and diving, her wings thrown back and rippling as she descends across the water and meets the ground with outflung wings and extended legs. The men turn their heads in the darkness, sensing amidst the drizzling rain and uncertain wind her silent and feathery slice through the air and across the creek.

  Then the little opossum shrieks and writhes as the hard points of talons break the skin and dig deeply in.

  A moment more and they’re airborne again, the prey fighting its useless clash of twisting tail and snapping teeth, knowing in its thoughtless and animal intuition that to effect escape by the instinctive feigning of its own death is as unlikely as is this flight itself of a wingless creature over treetops.

  There’s the confusion of the dreamed and the dreamlike. The dying animal, only two weeks weaned and shunned from the pouch in the colder months, is shot through with a searing internal heat, the distinction blotted out between its normal downturned sleep and this new, impossible reality of hanging high above the earth without its tail coiled and clinging to tree bark.