The Wake of Forgiveness

by Bruce Machart

  The widow took the baby from Sophie’s arms, and his mother threw her hands out instinctively after him as he was lifted from her, this the startled reflex of a mother who’s not yet grown accustomed to her child being without rather than within, of all those who have had to surrender from their bodies what they’ve suffered to bear and nourish, of those who must relinquish from the safe and hot and contracting centers of themselves those whom they long to hold so fearfully in their uncertain arms.

  Karel took his hat from his head and tossed it onto the chair where he’d spent the night sleeping upright, then he held his hands out to old woman Vrana, who raised her wiry brows at him and set the child hesitantly in his father’s arms. The child squirmed, throwing his arms around in the gesture of falling, kicking his little legs beneath the swaddling blanket, and Karel felt the warmth seep back into him, back into the muscle and marrow of him. “Forgot all manner of things,” he said, and when he looked up from the child, Sophie was smiling at him as Mrs. Vrana went to work changing the rags between her legs. “But then I remembered,” Karel said, and he pulled the child in close to his chest, marveling at how the whole of the boy was lighter in his arms than a suckling pig, at how the boy’s head was already beginning to take its rounded shape, how the eyes were pale blue and unfocused and still intent on seeing what they couldn’t just yet render clearly. Karel didn’t marvel at the fact that he was doing for his boy, in this, the first full day of his life, what his father had never once done for him. It would occur to him only later, when the boy was older and asked questions about his grandfather, and when Karel realized how few of the answers he could resurrect from the graveyard of memories put so long before to rest.

  The widow was still at work between Sophie’s legs, and Karel kept his eyes averted while his wife winced.

  “Well, Papa,” Sophie said. “We going to just call him ‘boy,’ or is it you’ve some other name in mind?”

  Karel smiled, bounced gently on the balls of his feet as he watched the child in his arms. He shook his head and looked up at his wife. “I was only thinking girl names. Thought we’d have us a little Klara this time, after Mama.”

  Sophie’s eyes softened and she looked at her hands, clasped as if in prayer atop the sheets. Then, as if she’d cheered herself abruptly with the memory of some childhood mischief, she threw her head back on the pillows and laughed until her body stiffened and she grimaced, sucking in air. When she’d collected herself, she widened her eyes at him and then she raised her brows lightheartedly. “I’m glad you came back, Karel. And so are the girls. It pleases everyone that you did. But if you name that boy Klara,” she said, “his first word is liable to be an angry one.”

  COME THE FOLLOWING morning, on the outlying road just south of Shiner where the farm-to-market snaked away on its unpaved and meandering way toward Dalton, Karel pulled the truck into the drive of the new filling station that had been built by Old Man Kaspar for his nephew after the boy had proven himself unsuited to running figures or machines or much of anything else at the family’s wire works. The cool air had persisted all of the previous day, and Mrs. Vrana, though she mostly avoided his eyes, had taken pains to ensure that Karel made himself properly clean for handling the infant. Within an hour of his arrival, she’d drawn him a hot bath out on the screened porch behind the kitchen and set to washing his shirt and underclothes, all of which had worked to refresh his body and obscure in his mind his latest indiscretions. After a half day of thought, he’d named his boy Frank, because it was a simple, solid name, and because it rang sound and plain and honest in his ears all at the same time without sounding weak. He liked the way the Ks stacked up between the two names, like two hard ridges in an otherwise smooth downhill ride, and as he pulled beside the petrol pump, he found himself silently mouthing the name: Frank Skala . . . Frank Skala.

  Now Karel set the brake, retrieved his hat from the passenger seat, and stepped down from the truck. The clouds had cleared to the east to render the overhanging heavens a burnished blue, and Henry Kaspar stood waiting for him in a stiff straw hat trimmed in Yoakum leather and new overalls, the fabric of which was unblemished by grease stains or scuff marks or any other testaments to actual labor. As he had ever since he’d come of age enough to grow it, Henry wore an ambitiously waxed mustache that seemed to curl around the sides of his mouth like some invertebrate creature that had slithered through cold, congealed oil only to find itself mired on a simple man’s face. At this, Karel didn’t bother hiding his amusement. A man takes to wearing something that big hanging from his lip, he thought, he surely hangs short inside his britches.

  Wiry and pale and almost comically bowlegged, Henry had knees that aimed out toward the peripheries of his sightlines even when he stood still, which he did whenever he had excuse to do so. After a nod, he set himself to pumping fuel into Karel’s truck, working his tongue up under his top lip as if curious to see if the roots of his mustache had sprouted through the other side so that he might actually taste how much of a man he was. The biting, clean smell of petrol swirled in the air. He gave Karel a suspicious look, and then he smiled. “Heard you added another little one to the stable, Skala, and I congratulate you on that, I surely do. But just so you know, it’s a limit on the free tickets to the picture show.”

  Karel stretched his legs and worked his boot around in the gravel, pretending to mull that over awhile. “Henry,” he said, “it must get terrible lonesome out here on the outskirts of town with only a few folks passing through for a tankful each day. Am I right?”

  The man wrinkled his brow, checked the pump gauge, then cocked his head. “We do a steady enough business, Skala, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I ain’t doubting that. What I mean is . . . Henry, do you ever find that you’re talking to yourself?”

  “Pardon?”

  Karel laughed, and a gust of wind flipped his collar upright about the whiskers on his throat and sweetened the petrol-laden air with the scent of pecan and mesquite smoke from the smokehouses of farms out west of town. Henry Kaspar topped off the tank and levered the pump off and hung the nozzle back in its place.

  “I would have thought by now,” Karel said, “that if you spoke to yourself every now and again, you might have come to realize that you make about as much sense to a sensible man as a sermon does to soapstone. A man drives in for gasoline, and here you start up talking about the picture show? You understand my confusion.”

  Henry lowered his eyes and ran a thumb along the stiff brim of his hat. “I’d think you could find a way to make your point without being so sharp. It must be me who’s confused. Given all the gas you bought of late, I just reckoned you were trying to milk us on the promotion. It was in the Gazette. For the grand opening? We’re giving away a ticket to the picture show with every dollar in purchases.”

  “All the gas I bought of late? Hell, Henry, you ain’t yet been open for business two weeks, and this is the first time I’ve stopped in.”

  Henry’s shoulders buckled forward a bit with the muscular diminution of a man who’s discovered he’s been had, of a man who’s folded the best hand to a sly bluff or bought some new mail-order tonic that tastes only and unmistakably of watered whiskey and doesn’t help to move his bowels or ease his wife’s monthly pains, either one. “Check the oil and water?” he asked, smoothing his mustache with his thumb and finger.

  “They’re fine,” Karel said. “Checked the both of them before I headed out this morning.”

  “It’s those hired hands of yours is what I mean, Skala. Couple twins a few years younger than me? Said they used to live around these parts back before Villaseñor bought up all that land. They’ve filled their truck two times and some fuel cans besides. Said they were tending your business and to put the gas on credit for you. They had your new trailer hitched to their truck, full load of hay strapped down tight with come-alongs, so I took them at their word.”

  “Hay?”

  “Yessir. I reckoned you’d sold some ba
les and they meant to deliver them for you.”

  “And you didn’t think to send someone to the house, asking was it okay?”

  “Knew you wasn’t home, Mr. Skala. Heard you’d asked the whole parish up in Praha to dance with their daughters while your wife was in her pains. Only thing I questioned was how these boys had a full load both coming and going.”

  Karel took his hat from his head, worked his hand around inside to reshape it. “That a fact?”

  “It is. Like they’d gone out to sell bales that didn’t pass muster and had to turn right around and bring it all back. The quiet one of the two looked to have found some trouble along the way, too. Back of his shirt was dried black with blood yesterday evening, and then they show up again bright and early today, and he looks none the worse for the wear. Just sits in the truck smoking without a grimace and reading the paper while his brother gets out to check the trailer hitch, and I pump some air into the tires and fill some fuel cans he had in the back of the truck. And then they head out on their way.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Karel said. “Which way?”

  And now even a man shortchanged in common sense like Henry Kaspar could tell he’d made some bad assumptions. “Looked to turn west just shy of town. Out Gonzales way, could be.”

  Shouldering past Henry, Karel climbed into the cab of his truck, his face flushed in wide red streams that ran hard down the ridge of his jawline to a confluence of flushed rage about the stubbled skin above his Adam’s apple. “Rotten little shitasses,” he whispered, and he levered the truck’s throttle.

  Henry took a startled step backward when the gears engaged and the truck shuddered on its chassis. “You want this on credit then, too?” he asked, his eyes looking off to the side of the truck as if something out on the horizon had been called to his attention by the insistent pointing of his outturned knee.

  “That’ll be fine,” Karel said. “But keep two accounts. I aim to have them boys pay theirs separate.”

  IN THE DAYS before Vaclav Skala’s death, the drive from the farm-to-market road to the house had been a deeply rutted cause for concern. It ran, as it did now, between the forks of the creek, climbed a slight swell, dividing cotton fields from pastures, and put a good quarter mile between all that belonged to the Skalas and all that did not, between the outlying county road upon which Villaseñor’s carriage had all those years ago appeared and the shelter of the house and the pear grove in which Karel had hunkered in his boyhood, watching as Graciela slipped from the stables and swung in the darkness onto her horse until she’d been stopped by surprise and gun barrels both; between where she’d been that night, with her hair falling over him smelling of honeycomb and oats, and where she was now, tending Thom and her children in a solid house afforded by the man who’d been just capable and sharp-witted enough to win the allegiance of another man’s sons.

  Nowadays, this was a fine road that ran narrow and sure and absolute in its demarcations, but before Karel’s improvements it had been bare, hard-packed earth that often went to slurry, deeply pocked and corduroyed with fruitless furrows during the wet spring months such that it proved a torment to wheel spokes and boys’ backsides alike. And so it was now that the level, graded earth overlaid with sand and gravel dredged from the Navidad River proved a daily source of pride for Karel. Of a normal day, his satisfaction bloomed within him as surely as the twin forks of Mustang Creek swelled during a deluge, providing a steady reminder of how natural and simple it was to render oneself, with only labor and diligence, straight backed and confident in a world overrun with men beaten down by their own ineptitude and softness—men like Henry Kaspar, the thought of whom leached from Karel the pleasure of riding this road, his road, and hearing the solid crunch of gravel grinding beneath the truck’s tires.

  Atop the swell, once he came round the outcropping of scrub and mesquite that made for a thorny hedgerow between meadows, the whole of the homestead came into view beneath the hard blue sky and a sun so white that it reminded Karel that the blazing thing was a star, just one of some all-but-infinite number. He eased on the brakes, pulled his pouch of tobacco from the breast pocket of his coat, and tugged the pouch’s cinch-string tight with his teeth while his hands worked, as if through some half-surfaced memory made animate, to roll a cigarette while he looked at the bright star throwing pure light from the heavens onto his house and stable and smokehouse and barn. He startled with the realization: It was almost Christmas. It was almost Christmas, and he had the kids to think about, his new boy among them, and he’d need to get something nice for Sophie this year, maybe that new Delco-Light laundry machine he’d seen last month at Pavelka’s Hardware in Yoakum. He sparked a match and lit his cigarette, exhaling slowly through his nose and squinting against the familiar sting of smoke as he released the brake and drove toward his barn, beside which was a lone rectangular patch of bare earth ringed by a weedy fringe that announced the absence of Karel’s new trailer. Henry Kaspar might have been a fool, but he wasn’t a liar.

  Karel parked the truck out front of the swinging barn doors and again set the brake. Then he sat pulling on his cigarette, watching the smoke as it whirled in thick blue ribbons from his lips and nostrils through the open window and out into the expanse of light and wafting air, as if drawn by some whispered and enthralling promise of its own dissolution.

  There was something to be taken from this, Karel thought. Something more than the work of the wind and the fleeting, ghostlike floating of smoke. Something more than the way a dime’s share of tobacco that you’d had to spend two bits for turned, in two days’ time, to something no more noteworthy than air. No, there was something else to it, Karel thought. There were things other than smoke, he reckoned, that ushered toward their own ends as if they willed it. People, too, some of them, and there was no telling but that these Knedlik boys might be just that sort. If they proved to be filching from him, Karel reckoned he’d have to give them what they must somehow have craved and render them as impermanent in the world as if he had taken them briefly into his lungs only to exhale them through his nose and mouth and watch as they whirled away and flew apart in the breeze until they were of no more consequence than a dry throat and the remaining trace of a pleasantly bitter taste on his tongue.

  There was a reckoning of trouble to be found inside the barn, and the first of it was the brim-chipped bowl of blood left coagulating on the old workbench in the barn. The sight of it sank into him like some grainy weight that made him feel in his bowels as if he’d swallowed enough sand to flatten the rope of his guts down into compressed coils beneath his stomach. It wasn’t the blood that unsettled him. He’d seen enough of that in his years, his own and others’; it was the sight of his mother’s dishware atop the hand-hewn bench his father had made. When Karel was just a boy, his father would serve grits or oats for breakfast, and, while the boys ate, he’d stand watching, a cup of coffee steaming in his sun-chapped hands, and he’d never once failed to remind them to take care with their mother’s dishes. After the only photograph of her was lost, the old man had become half-crazed with his protectiveness of the things that had been hers around the house. The dishes. The knitted blanket folded across the back of the wide oak rocker in the living room. The tiny cut-crystal bud vase on the kitchen windowsill into which Vaclav each year had placed the first bluebonnet he found sprung up in the pastures behind the stable. Now Karel seized himself against the downward pressure in his bowels and rubbed the dry skin along the curvature of his neck. He lifted the bowl carefully, hearing his father’s admonishments as he did. Inside, a half-dozen beads of lead shot glinted gunmetal gray and smooth in the black tar of blood. Beside the bowl was a torn white shirt, soaked through with blood at the back of the shoulder and yellowed with dried sweat beneath the arms, its hem torn away in a wide strip from beneath the lowermost button around to the opposite buttonhole. On the workbench sat the tweezers and iodine bottle from the upstairs shaving cabinet. Karel picked the bowl up by the brim and tilted it in his
hand, watched as the dark liquid oozed grudgingly to the lowered side while the shot stuck in the glue of dried blood at the bottom of the bowl. Not two days by themselves, Karel thought, and already someone’s managed to get shot.

  And then he looked up into the broad swath of overhead light falling on the hayloft, where the bales he kept so neatly stacked were now set haphazardly to the side in stacks of two or three, revealing the empty hollow where the kegs of Spoetzel pilsner had been. Karel returned the bowl gently to the bench and crossed the barn, climbing the ladder too quickly. When his boot sole slipped from a rung about halfway up, he caught himself with both hands, and his shin hit the rung below with the unforgiving sound of seasoned timber on bone. His mouth flooded with saliva and the pain flared into his hip bone. He cursed between his clenched teeth, got his foot up and found his purchase, then spat down into the hay forked over the floor. He went up the rest of the way in a staggered, half-lame fashion, moving one foot up and then shadowing it with the other so that, with every other step, his boots would come to rest side by side on a single rung. By the time he stood in the loft, the pain was only a stinging nuisance where the skin had been abraded along the flat ridge of his shinbone. Then he stood to prove to himself there above the earth what he had suspected with his feet on the ground: They were all gone. All twenty-one kegs, and better than a dozen bales of hay with them. Karel sat on a bale and rolled up the leg of his trousers, trying to pry loose from the haze of his memory the drunken conversation he’d had with Raymond Knedlik two nights before. He knew they’d talked about the delivery to Hacek’s icehouse in Moulton, and he knew from the past year’s business that Hacek would never be good for more than six kegs at a time. That left fifteen reasons why Karel sat rubbing spit absentmindedly into the abrasion on his shin when there was a half-full bottle of iodine downstairs beside a bowl of another man’s blood on the workbench, fifteen reasons why he pressed his thumb into the bruised blue flesh around the wound a good bit harder than he had to, hard enough to cause himself to wince and grind the worn crowns of his back teeth together while he thought about how best to find these boys. Wish the little son of a bitch would’ve been gut-shot instead of winged, he thought. They’re young and their truck is new. It’d be easier to follow a wide trail of blood or the stink of a corpse, either one.