The Wake of Forgiveness

by Bruce Machart

  By the time he got his pant leg rolled down and descended the ladder, he’d made up his mind. He would check the livestock and the windmill. He’d make sure the cattletank was full, check to see there was hay and salt put out in the near pasture. He’d fetch his rifle from the house and head up to Moulton to have a talk with Hacek, and then, if he had to, he’d cross the county line into Gonzales and see if he could find these boys before someone else found them first and put holes in them that couldn’t be mended with tweezers and iodine and bandages torn from a dirty shirt.

  He went out the side door and headed between the barn and stable toward the pastures out back of the grove. To the southwest, in the flat field between the stable and the creekside hedgerow, Karel saw that one of the remaining heifers could no longer rightly be called such. And thankfully so. She stood with her head craned back to her unsteady offspring, licking the mottles of her calf’s rust-colored hide with her wide pink tongue while the little one turned its head in sidelong suckling. Nearby, the ass rolled its head and gamboled in clumsy circles around the cow and calf, keeping watch like a daft nursemaid, its ears standing forward and its dusty hide quivering. Rolling his sleeves one by one, Karel walked to the fenceline, took note of the windmill overhead, spinning lazily, as if in halfhearted submission to a stuttering breeze it deemed less than worthy of its full attention. Just the other side of the fence, the cattletank was full, the water clean and clear and shimmering beneath the bright skies, his discontented and unshaven face floating on the surface. Everything he saw seemed roughly in order, and still Karel felt the sour torsion of his guts, for it was what he didn’t see that gave him pause. He lowered his hat and tilted its brim forward above his eyes as he scanned the outlying pasture, focusing on the hedgerows and mesquite outcroppings in search of movement. And then came a prickling twinge in his consciousness, the work of the inexplicable, all-but-insensate perception that had, on occasion, alerted him to the concerted focus of someone’s eyes on his turned back from across a stretch of landscape or a loud and crowded barroom. He turned slowly, expecting someone to be standing behind him. Instead he saw, out east of the stable and barn, four turkey vultures perched on the topmost fence braces of the cattlepen, their faces red and squeezed deep with creases and hideous in their attention to the monstrous, two-headed mass that lay expired beneath them on its side in the sun-bleached hay.

  Holy hell, Karel thought. If it ain’t one thing, it’s two. And then he went toward the mess of mother and child, toward the conjoined remains of cow and calf. Behind the stable, he pried the upturned horseshoe from the rusty nails driven into the framework of the rear door. He planted both feet and took aim at the vultures on the fence. He recalled the day his father had finished the siding of the stable, the way the man had swiped spent tobacco from his mouth and frowned at the suggestion of the boys that they hang the horseshoe there the way they’d seen on other stables, end-points up so the good luck couldn’t spill out. He had scoffed at the boys’ superstitions, but in the end he had relented. Now Karel, who had, until now, expurgated even this reminder of his father’s occasional kindnesses, leaned back and threw the thing hard, watching as it turned end over end and bounced with a reverberating clang, just off its mark, against a fencepost near the hunchbacked birds. They lifted, all four of them, heavy and clumsy and in unison toward the sky, and by the time Karel made it to the pen and swung himself over the fence, the loathsome things were circling overhead with their white-fringed wings casting swirling shadows onto the ground as if their famished, anticipatory flight were some winding mechanism vital to the very turning of the earth.

  Inside the pen, Karel removed his hat before he got wind of the animals’ decay and placed it over his nose and mouth, breathing in the soured salt of his own musky sweat. The calf was facing south, its visible eye open and filmed with the wilted, chalky remnant of its mother’s sac, its body lodged inside her up to the shoulders, its neck collared by the cracked and blistered leather that had once been the swollen and bloody flesh designed to yield what it had failed to yield, to rid itself of this young, animal burden. The heifer was on her side, one eye frozen wide and buzzing with gnats and flies. Karel pulled his hat from his face, gave the air a whiff, and, finding it yet spared a stench, settled the hat back atop his head. He spat at the ground and lit a cigarette, and then he walked around the perimeter of the pen while he smoked, his path moving counter to the revolutions of the vultures overhead, his eyes flitting now and again in perverse curiosity to the heifer he’d kicked out of anger and the unsettling, unnatural thing it had become in his absence.

  Unbidden out of his aimless circling arose a thought of his mother.

  He shook his head, trying to clear the image, trying to tell himself that he couldn’t say why the thought had nested in his mind to begin with. But when he closed his eyes he saw it so clearly—his mother’s body cold and blue, her legs splayed, the blond, tangled nest of pubic hair from which emerged, as if hatched from within, his own head and neck, his own pained face slicked with the film of birth. And this was not the face of Karel as an infant, not one that wore the fatty, innocent consternation of the just born; instead, it was the face Karel had seen reflected in the cattletank, one with a day’s growth shadowing its cheeks and chin and a jaw set with seasoned resentment. Inside this dead woman, Karel knew, the rest of his body was tucked and tethered and goosefleshed on account of the cold: his forearms softened by thick blond hair; his legs taut with the ribbons of his hamstrings; his solid, round knees held up obliquely against his chest; his slender feet with their yellowed, untrimmed toenails threatening to scrape away at the insides of the body that harbored him. Unmistakable as hunger or thirst, he felt the collapsed void of his lungs, the tightening around his throat, unrelenting and inflamed in its fleshy wet cordage below his Adam’s apple, the angry, feminine constriction of a woman who might, even in death, strangle that which she was meant to expel.

  Karel threw his eyes open, inhaling hard through his nose, and turned to face the sun while he leaned breathless against the nearest fencepost. He pushed the brim of his hat back above his hairline and forced himself to look unblinkingly into the white flare of the sun, holding it burning in his vision until tears hung glistening in fat beads from his lower lashes and fell onto the sharp ridges of his cheekbones, until he saw, when he closed his eyes, only the circular, phantom dancing of red lights cast against the flat black backdrop of his temporary blindness. Overhead, the vultures tilted their broad wings against the subtle wind. They would fly countless, lazy revolutions. They would not dizzy. They would not tire. They would outlast those who relied upon the living. They would wait.

  TWENTY MILES to the northwest, the Knedlik twins reached the outskirts of Gonzales and the icehouse where things had gone so wrong the day before. Raymond drove, smoking a cigarette, and Joe rode silently as ever, reading the local newspaper and favoring the shoulder where, only a dozen hours before, lead had nested an inch beneath the pocked blue skin. It was full daylight, not the best time for what they had in mind, but it had taken the better part of the night and a good bit of whiskey and lanternlight to tweeze the shot from behind Joe’s shoulder and get the rest of the beer loaded again into the truck and stacked over with bales of hay secured with cotton duck straps and come-alongs. As it was, they’d meant to hitch the dead heifer to the tractor and drag it out beyond the pasture to the creek, to save Karel Skala the sight and stink of it, but the sun had come up too fast, and they knew better than to dawdle. They might exact most of their revenge tonight beneath the guise of moonlit skies in Lavaca County, but there was a matter here in Gonzales that couldn’t wait.

  Raymond steered the truck past the slanted shotgun houses that fronted the road and fringed the fields just east of the railroad tracks. There was smoke coming up thinly from the stovepipes and the plain cedar siding was unpainted and warped such that the joints between planks looked each to be some irregular line on a map marking the parched bed of a stream that wide
ned and narrowed along its horizontal path. Beyond the houses, a few Mexican sharecroppers were already out in the early sunlight doing God knows what this time of year, tending to their mules and tilling manure into the sad little garden plots set back of their houses. They looked beaten down and sunbaked even from a distance, and the way they hunched their shoulders against the bald sunlight on a cool morning was all the evidence Raymond Knedlik needed to shore up his lasting aversion to cropwork.

  “Poor dumb bastards,” he said, nodding out at the field. “Rather be gunshot than a Mexican or a farmer, either one. How’s the shoulder?”

  Lowering the paper, Joe turned to Raymond and offered a weak smile.

  “Don’t pain you enough to keep you from lighting a match, does it?”

  Joe rolled his shoulder slowly around in the joint, the grin leveling on his lips to a squinting, concentrated expression that was neither smile nor frown. Then he lifted the newspaper to finish the latest serialization of “Judith of Blue Lake Ranch,” which had been running the last two weeks in the Gazette. His brother ribbed him about his reading, but Joe had always rather read than speak, and besides, this story was a lively one about a horsefarm in northern California, hundreds of head of mustangs and saddlebreds both, and Joe figured he’d prefer to see in his mind the rolling hills of a ranch way out west than this same scrubgrass landscape he’d been living amidst all fourteen damned years of his life. Judith, too, he wouldn’t mind seeing, and he wondered if there were women yet walking in the world with keen horse sense and big, pillowy bosoms both. In last week’s installment, Judith had up and fired her ranch foreman, Bayne, who’d been robbing her blind, selling saddle-broke horses to Judith’s well-to-do neighbor on the sly, and now Joe wanted to see how she’d fare without his help.

  Joe liked the idea, as unlikely as it seemed, that a woman could make it on her own out in the scalded, dusty world of men who took their spurs off only to sleep or shit, and he thought how his mother would have turned out if she hadn’t married Pa. He suspected she could have done better, and it didn’t seem much of a sacrifice to him that he and Raymond wouldn’t have been born if she had. She was a bright woman with a strong back and a comely enough figure. If she was hindered, it was only by her unwillingness to part from the literal word of the Good Book and from the conjugal expectations of her father. If she’d found enough room for doubt, enough hard will with which to entomb her selflessness in a cave sealed by a rock too heavy to be rolled away by the meddling or the miraculous, either one, she might have made off on her own, caught a train and gone west. She might have cooked her chicken and dumplings and pot roast and biscuits and tomato gravy at some outfit like the Blue Lake Ranch. She could have saved her pay and opened her own restaurant or saloon, taken men upstairs with her on her own terms at the end of the night. She could have gotten something out of the world instead of bringing a couple of boys into it too late to get them grown in time to save her.

  “Put the goddamn paper down and keep a lookout,” Raymond said, the scar on his face bending blanched across his cheek and down into the cracked hinge of his lips. “Remember, no shooting unless it can’t be helped. And don’t forget the rope.”

  Raymond turned the truck down a dirt road before town and followed it out beneath an overhang of mature oaks lining each side of the road until they reached the Drycreek Saloon where they’d met up with Karel’s brother Thom the day before. So far as Joe could tell, there wasn’t a creek anywhere nearby, but if there had been, he reckoned it had damn well gone dry.

  It had been Raymond’s idea to try to unload the remaining stockpile of Karel’s beer here in Gonzales. He told Joe they might prove their salt this way, stake a claim to the part of the profits they’d been promised, make themselves indispensable with their initiative. They’d turn two weeks’ take in a matter of days. The morning before, they’d done Karel’s bidding first, delivering four kegs to Hacek’s place in Moulton, moving four others to the icehouses and saloons up and down the rail lines in Weid and Sweet Home, but come lunchtime they still had thirteen barrels in the trailer, and even Raymond knew a trip to Hallettsville was out of the question. Sheriff Munson had taken a fall from the saddle the previous week, the slow encroachments of age and gout making him about as steady on horseback as a bullfrog on a barbed fencewire. He’d be staying put there in the county seat, and Raymond had it in his mind to do their business well beyond the law’s reach.

  After their conversation in Praha, where with breath that stank of sour pilsner and corn mash Karel had whispered his intentions, the twins knew what was expected of them. Karel had told Raymond that he had all the beer business in Yoakum and Shiner wrapped up tight with Kosmos’s consent, that he’d made all those local deliveries the week before, that he’d get to them again just before the holidays when they were likely to need their stores replenished. For now, Karel needed only to keep the beer cool for a week or two and find buyers in the small towns. He’d double his profits if he could sell it all, he said, and he winked and lit a cigarette, offering one each to the boys as he steamed smoke from his nose into the cool night air. And if he did, he’d be more than happy to cut the boys in for a share.

  The trouble had begun just a hundred yards down the dirt road the Knedlik boys now traveled, where Villaseñor and his sons by law had outfitted an old barn’s loft with floor-to-ceiling hay-bale insulation and enough ice to keep the bootlegged Spoetzel beer cold even in the summertime. On the bottom floor, where once there’d been tack and farm tools and feed bins, they’d opened a saloon. Villaseñor, who grew ever more wary the farther west, and nearer to his old adopted home of Mexico, he got, had put the surliest of the Skala boys in charge of the Gonzales concern, and this was how it came to pass that, on the previous day, Raymond and Joe had come calling, trying to peddle beer to Thomàs Skala, who had fifty kegs of his own on ice upstairs, a loaded twelve-gauge behind the bar, and a merciless, motherless determination to keep fast all that he’d been granted.

  To the Knedliks’ right, out east, there was nothing but the blond stubble of cut hayfields, the earth gone glossy and dark after the week’s rainfall. The saloon was housed in an old horsebarn, one that still had corral posts and a few fence braces rotting along its southern wall, the whole thing leaning on warped beams where the sandy soil had been swept from beneath the masonry piers by years of rainfall and erosion. Out back, a stable had been converted to house stockpiles of coal shipped in by rail. The saloon’s siding curled with peeling paint the color of raw cotton, and Raymond steered the truck near the rear of the building, pulling forward and backing such that the trailer would sit broadside behind the sliding doors that had once led to the corrals. When he got the rig situated to his liking, he flicked his cigarette out the open window and set the brake. Climbing down from the cab, Raymond buttoned his vest and rolled his shirtsleeves up to the middle of his forearms as he took a look around. He knew the saloon didn’t open until noon just as surely as he knew there was a tack and harness shop out front across the road. From this vantage point behind the saloon, there was nothing in sight and nobody around to take note of them. Nothing but the adjoining hayfields and the barn and granary of the neighboring farm. Raymond pulled his new Smith and Wesson .32 from the seat of the truck and tucked it into the waistband of his trousers so that he could feel the cool of its walnut grips against the knuckles of his spine. He reached around with both hands to see that his vest fell flat in back to conceal the butt. Joe pulled his lever-action Winchester from behind the seat and swung the cab door closed with his foot. Then he lifted the coil of rope from beside the full gas cans in the truck bed and put his arm through the center of it so he could balance the weight on his good shoulder and still keep both hands on the rifle.

  The air was still and cool, smelling faintly of coal dust, and the sun hastened its light unobstructed down through the cloudless sky. If it were summer, Raymond knew, he’d have already sweated through his underclothes and shirt, and he was thankful for the cool, a
s was Joe, who had, as it was, more than enough heat burning beneath the bandages wrapping his wounds. “All set then, brother?” Raymond said. “Let’s see is it anybody here what needs tying up.”

  Joe nodded, but before he took a step toward the saloon’s back door, he glanced at the newspaper folded on the dash of the truck. He hadn’t finished the serial, and Judith was all dressed up in white boots and a yellow dress, fixing to visit her nearest neighbor who’d been recently widowed. Together, they had over eight hundred acres and just as many broken horses as wild ones. Joe reckoned most readers would want Judith to fall sweetly in love and get married and live a comfortable life as the wife of the neighboring rancher. Most folks wouldn’t mind that he’d been buying stolen horses from the wily foreman she’d had to cut loose, but Joe couldn’t bring himself to cotton to the possibility of such a wrong given a spit shine and thereafter accepted as right. You could rub a dry turd with a whole can of linseed oil, after all, and all you’d end up with was a mess of shiny shit. As for Joe, he wanted Judith to do the man some fashion of harm, to break his fool heart or swindle him for part of his landholdings and even the score. To bat her eyes at him over coffee while she kept her shawl wrapped tight across her shoulders so he couldn’t see the flash of pale skin that glistened there in the hollow of her throat, anything that would cause him even a hot twinge of unsatisfied longing.