The Wake of Forgiveness

by Bruce Machart

  “You may be right,” she says, blinking slowly, one time, as if for emphasis. She pulls one of her hands away, traces a finger down the unnatural curvature of his neck with the other. “But how will you ever prove it to me?”

  It is part beckoning, part challenge, and then his lips are on her, the warm, loamy taste of her surprised exhalation rushing across his tongue as he holds her by the hips against him. There’s a pinched pain at the torn corner of his mouth, a little lick of fire come alive from stirred embers, and when she pushes him away, he drops his hands into his trouser pockets to obscure the extent of his excitement.

  “Wait,” she says, pulling her hair back over her shoulders as she crosses the stable toward the lantern hung from the raw timber framework of the nearest stall. When she retracts the lamp’s wicking, a horse blows, and Karel knows without question that it’s Whiskey, fed and dry now, and warm, but awake and restless nonetheless, disquieted by the sudden onset of shadows. Working his hands from his pockets, Karel watches the girl, steadying himself against the hot work of his own musculature, against the rolling spasms in his lower back and abdomen, the arousing arc of energy that surges from his tailbone up into the blades of his shoulders.

  Her silhouette is cast against the pale remnant of light behind her, and when she approaches him, walking in slowly measured steps, Karel’s breath catches, and then it comes all at once. Her hands, he sees, are at work on the uppermost buttons of her blouse.

  Meander Scars

  MAY 1898

  NOT YET NINE in the morning, and Vaclav Skala had broken a hard sweat out in the western cropfield. He was thankful for it, for the cool slicks beneath his arms and down his back, for the ring of relief afforded by the wet band of his wide-brimmed hat. If you took the time to read the Farmers’ Almanac, which Vaclav did, though he had recently begun to wonder why, you’d expect these May skies to be crowded with clouds, but when he whoaed his shabby draft horse and removed his hat, wiping the sweat from his face with his shirtsleeve, he looked overhead and studied the unbroken blue of it while he fished his new plug of tobacco from his pocket and unwrapped it and bit off a portion. Whatever fool it is writes that rag, he thought, probably ain’t ever once set foot in Lavaca County. He was going to need plenty of dry heat in time, but if he spun all this cottonseed into the soil only to have the sun bake the earth hard before it could take, then he’d have to suffer the first poor yield since Klara had died. Just the thought of it went to vinegar in his blood. He’d have to wait another year until he could afford the lumber and shingles he needed to finish his stable, and then what would he do? Old Man Kaspar had a fine roan mare coming in season, and when Vaclav had unfolded last week’s Shiner Gazette, he’d seen an advertisement for a monster of a horse named Arasmus, a giant stallion shipped over from Italy, of all goddamned places. He’d never seen a stud fee so high, nor a horse so imposing. After all these years, he was fed up full with all the red-faced bragging his neighbor Patrick Dalton did about his stable of racehorses, and Vaclav had folded the paper and tucked it under his arm before pushing back his chair. He left his coffee steaming on the table, told the older boys to mind Karel and their chores, and he’d ridden straight away to see Lad Dvorak at the bank.

  Two days later, for thirty dollars up front in boarding, feed, and stud fees, the whole thing was arranged. Another thirty would be due after the foal survived a fortnight, and he’d keep Kaspar’s horses in hay for a year thereafter to pay off the mare’s share. The mere thought of it set Vaclav to tingling with anticipation, and now, as the tobacco did its work on his nerves, he studied the straight furrows of his fields, marveling at the sound results of his own able work. He looked back toward the house, over his shoulder and into the glare of the sun. He’d kept the older boys home from school, and he’d have to tan them if they hadn’t fed the hogs and chickens and gathered the eggs by lunchtime. Or if they’d let the youngest boy soil his britches again instead of coaxing him into the outhouse.

  Now he snapped the reins and clicked his tongue at the ragged old horse, one that deserved nothing more than hard work and a bucket of dry oats and another day above ground, and he engaged the planter. If a man put his mind to it, he could single-handedly seed half an acre in an hour. By noon, when Skala will find his boys by the creek and slap the oldest one hard across the cheek, he will have exceeded that pace by nearly a quarter acre, and then he will come furiously back into the fields without eating, and he will work the horse into a half-lame lather, and he’ll let himself cry for one last time in his life.

  Fifteen years before Vaclav Skala bought his land, a storm had uprooted a hollowed-out red oak and blown it across the northern fork of Mustang Creek so that its crown splashed down in the slough on the opposite bank. It was the worst weather the residents of Lavaca County would see until the winter flood of 1910, four straight days of wind-driven rain that left the furrows brimming with water and the farmers sitting in their kitchens, watching from the windows, weathering, at once, the storm and the apron-wringing worries of their wives. As the fruitless windfall of twigs and foliage swept downstream, lodging against the downed oak, the water dammed up behind it and rolled, roiling and thick with sediment, into the slough, carving from the soft loam a deep new trench that would circumvent the fallen tree, that would last beyond the storm and the return of the sun, that would bend northward and loop back around to rejoin the stream, leaving the old creekbed dry and richly fertile and, by the time the Skala boys found it, lushly overgrown with a bed of little bluestem that made for comfortable sitting with fishing poles and lunch buckets and the collective desire to pretend, beneath the ribbons of light that slanted through the treetops, that they were not bereft of the feminine tenderness that, to young boys, is nothing shy of sustenance.

  And so just before noon, with their morning chores complete, they played, today like so many days, beside the trickling of creekwater. Their feet were tanned and bare, their faces soiled with the congress of dust and sweat. Stan stood on the bank, throwing twigs and clods of dirt into the moving water while Eddie and Thom took up makeshift arms, dueling with the swords of fallen branches. The youngest, Karel, sat where the creek had once been, pulling shoots of grass from the soil and, with full fists raised above his head, letting the blades flutter down on himself, laughing with delight, shaking his head and sputtering loudly when the falling grass stuck to his wet lips. He stood, fetched a stick, and, when shooed away from his brothers’ play, slapped it against the trunks of trees and then squatted on the bank of the creek to swirl it in the water, as entranced by the cloudy rise of silt it occasioned as he would be one day by the reaction a swung crop could affect in a horse. And then it struck him, the sudden constriction down low in his bowels, the gurgling urgency against which he tightened his muscles, locking his knees together and shuffling his feet with his back straightened, a cold panic shivering through him as he imagined the close, foul shadows of the outhouse.

  Stan bent to find another clump of dirt to hurl into the water, and he took note of Karel there, doing his rigid little dance. “Don’t you mess your pants again, Karel,” he said.

  Karel looked up at his oldest brother, his arms swung back and his hands cupped over the seat of his dungarees. “I won’t.”

  Stan sighed and shook his head. “You will, too, if you don’t go now,” he said. “Come on. I’ll go with you.”

  Off to the east of the house, just beyond the smokehouse and the new, half-framed stable their father was building, Stan stood with Karel, the door to the outhouse swung open on its rusty hinges, the smell of it rank and intensified by the heat and washing out over them. Little Karel stood there balking with his face bunched up like he’d licked a lemon, shaking his head. “Just get in there and do your business,” Stan said. “Pop will be coming in for lunch soon, and we’ll run out of time to play.”

  Still the boy wouldn’t go. “I want Mama,” he said.

  “You get in there and go,” Stan said, “and I’ll go fetch her. O
kay?”

  “You promise?”

  “I swear. You can leave the door open if you want. Just go, and don’t forget to wipe good this time.”

  Inside, Karel sat holding his nose and trying to convince himself to unclench his muscles, his little, dusty feet dangling in the angle of light that widened and narrowed as the breeze swung the creaking door back and forth. His brother Thom had told him that there were snakes down in the hole, slithering around in all that filth, biding time and waiting to bite a boy’s backside. Karel didn’t believe it. He’d asked his father, who’d wanted to know why a snake would choose to spend its time wallowing in shit if it could just as easily do its swimming down in the creek. This made sense to Karel. His father usually did, but he still couldn’t shake the vision of water moccasins coiling in wait down there, their forked tongues flicking fast in and out of their mouths. Besides which, he himself had seen the thick, leathery tails of rats sliding beneath the rough planks of lumber where the walls of the outhouse met the ground. Rats were hardly better than snakes, and just sitting perched over the hole stiffened Karel’s muscles with panic. It was worse than mere darkness, worse than his fear of falling from the top fence timbers of the cattle pens where his father sometimes perched him in the sunlight to keep him out of trouble while the young bulls were castrated or dehorned. Now Karel felt the onset of movement within him, and, as much as he wanted to finish and escape the sour, confined heat, the boy found it difficult to reckon how he could let so much of himself fall from his body and still emerge squinting, just minutes later, into bright sunlight to find that there was nothing of him missing, that he was still the same boy he’d been when he’d gone in. Now he closed his eyes tight, let his muscles go, and listened for the sick splash down below. Then he tore two pages from last year’s almanac and wiped himself clean.

  When he emerged into the fresh air, into a light so intense he had to clamp his eyes shut and stand blind for a few seconds against the white glare of it, he found his brother standing there, the old handmade picture frame in his hands. Stan stood looking out to the west, keeping watch for his father, and then he wiped the glass with his shirtfront and gave the photograph a look before handing it over to Karel.

  “Be mindful with it,” he said. “We’ll have to get it back into Pop’s room after lunch so he don’t find it missing.”

  Back by the creek, the other boys pulled biscuits and bacon from their pails and sat with their feet in the cool push of water while they ate. Karel crouched in the shade beneath a pine tree, gazing at the mother he’d known only this way, as the two-dimensional woman standing in white, her fair hair smooth and long, falling back behind her shoulders, her wedding dress white and high necked, fringed with lace and beaded smartly about the bodice. Her shoulders square and strong, her legs long, her hips full and round and tapered up into her narrow waist. But it was her face that Karel sought, and though he had no words for it, he could imagine those bright eyes on him, softened by kindness. He could picture her hair falling over him as she knelt facing him, his face pressed into her while he said his prayers before bed, her lips brushing his forehead after she’d tucked him in. Looking at the photograph, it was all too easy to forget that she was one of two people in the image, that his father, too, stood in the frame, his dark suit crumpled and his starched collar buttoned to his Adam’s apple. His face young and clean shaven, the sly hint of a smile on his lips. They stood together, her arm in his, and there was a stand of trees behind them, hazy and out of focus, that Karel didn’t recognize. What Karel saw was only the woman, only his mother, and though he’d done so before, only to lapse into sadness and tears, he couldn’t help himself: He tried to touch her. He put his fingers to her face, her ankles, her fancy dress, and what he felt was only the frame’s glass, only the flat cool of her absence.

  Then came the onset of an emptiness that, at three years old, he could already feel but not explain, and when he stood with the frame held loosely in his unsteady little hands, he walked without taking his eyes from the ground to where his brothers sat eating lunch at the edge of the water.

  When their father found them, the damage had already been done. The boys had tried to remove the picture from the frame, but the water had crept between the photograph and the glass, adhering the two, and when they went to pull one from the other, the clarity of the image was lost to a broad gray smear that obscured both bridegroom and bride, rendering them both as sullied and indistinct as the trees behind them.

  Now Vaclav stood over them with his hat in his hands, his face sun flushed and running with sweat. The three older boys were huddled around the ruined photograph, whispering accusations, and Karel was collapsed at the bank of the creek, his head buried in his out-flung arms, quivering with his crying, his tanned little hands clinging to the grass that grew in proud clumps right up to the water’s edge.

  “This don’t look like chores or lunch, either one,” Vaclav said. “Don’t recall giving you boys permission to do anything else.”

  The boys rose, their eyes on the ground. Not one of them had been brave enough to stand with the evidence of their failure in his hands, and now their father stood chewing his tobacco and wiping perspiration from his forehead, shaking his head and gazing down at the boys’ feet where the photograph and its dismantled frame lay in the grass.

  “One of you little shitasses better start talking,” he said.

  Eddie and Thom moved together behind their older brother, and Stan avoided his father’s eyes and glanced down at the picture frame, twisting his hands in the hem of his shirt, bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet. “Karel wanted to see it,” he said.

  “Well so did I, goddammit. Wanted to see it about a hundred times this morning, but I didn’t leave my work to go get it, did I?”

  “No, sir.”

  The man took a step forward and lifted the wet print from the ground, his eyes squinted and impassive and shot with blood the way they were sometimes when he came home from the icehouse of a Saturday evening and sat at the kitchen table drinking from a canning jar while the older boys played sheep and wolf or spoon before bed. “You going to stand there jittering like you’re set to piss your britches, or do you reckon you can tell me why the thing’s wet as a dish rag?”

  Twisting his shirt tighter in his fists, Stan stopped his bouncing and willed himself to meet his father’s gaze. “It went in the creek. Karel tripped over Thom’s lunch bucket.”

  “And so it’s his fault, is it?”

  “No, sir. It ain’t nobody’s fault. Not really.”

  “The hell it ain’t. There’s nothing ever happens that ain’t somebody’s fault. Even if it’s God what made a mess of things, it’s always someone to blame. And this time it ain’t a three-year-old nor God nor a goddamn lunch bucket, boy. It’s whoever took the thing out of my room without any business doing so. Now, who would that be?”

  The boy turned his shirt hem loose all at once, and his mouth pinched at the corners as he took a step forward and a tear ran fast down his cheek and fell to the earth. The slightest of breezes played in the pine boughs overhead, and the boy’s bottom lip quivered. “Don’t strap me, Pop,” he said. “Can’t we fix it?”

  His father put his hat back on his head and looked down at the wrecked image of his wedding day, and when he dropped the thing to the ground, watching as it floated and swayed on its way to the earth like a broad, fallen leaf, he ground his tobacco with his back teeth and then spat. And then he struck the boy square across the wet cheek with the flat of his hand.

  Stan’s hat flew from his head, and the boy crumpled beneath the blow, dropping to his knees and cupping his face in his hands. He was only down for a few seconds before willing himself to stand, biting his lip to keep from sobbing and looking his father in the eye the way he’d been taught.

  “You’re too old to strap,” Vaclav said. “It ain’t going to be that easy for you anymore.”

  Karel had righted himself on the bank of the creek. Leaf-th
rown shadows played across his face, which was caked with dirt and tears and seized with a seriousness that, even for his father, seemed shamefully sad for such a young boy. Vaclav thought for a moment that he might go pull the boy from the creekside and take him into the cowbarn, let him sit there in the cool shade while they took their lunch, but his stomach was soured with anger and he thought about what he’d just told the oldest boy, about how there wasn’t anything without blame or anyone blameless, either. He thought of Klara, of how light her body had been and how, even so, carrying her out of the house had been a burden he’d never be able fully to straighten his back beneath. And then his mouth was flooded with saliva, and for a moment he thought he might be sick. His eyes began to water, and when he realized he was about to cry in front of his boys, he pushed the tobacco from between his teeth with his tongue, holding it in the hollow of his mouth while he bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to stop the tears. Then he sucked snot hard through his nose and spit a wad of tobacco-stained phlegm into the now-grassy silt where, twenty-some years before, creekwater had gurgled and surged downstream.

  Before turning from the boys and walking back to the cropfields out west, where he would spend the rest of the day away from them, working without relief from sun or hunger or heartbreak, either one, he gave the older three each a sharp look in turn and said, “It ain’t no fixing this, boys. She’s ruined permanent. Now get back to your chores.”

  Vaclav took a deep breath through his cleared nose and called out to his youngest. “Karel,” he said, “get on your feet, boy. Eat your lunch. And don’t you dare shit your britches today, you hear me?”