The Wake of Forgiveness

by Bruce Machart

  “Good morning, ladies,” he called out. “If I’d meant for folks to come up and help themselves to my wares while I’m away, I’d of left a trough full of beer out here in the yard with a canning jar set next to it for customers to drop their nickels in.”

  Joe ran his thumb over the safety of his gun, making sure it wasn’t engaged, keeping his eyes on Thom all the while. Raymond combed a hand through his wet hair and hooked the thumb of the other into the front pocket of his trousers and laughed. “Might should have done that,” he said, turning the side of his face to the sun. “Would’ve saved us the trouble of breaking your window. Broken glass is dangerous, you know. Got me a scar what proves it.” Toeing the damp earth sprung through with weeds, Raymond noted the reassuring cool of his pistol against his spine. “It’s going to be a rough ride on the back of that trailer. But we’ll gladly give you a lift if you’re needing one.”

  Thom nodded as if in appreciation of the boy’s wit, and Joe looked the man over slowly. As it had been the day before, his face was cleanly shaven, his back straight and his shoulders squared over his hips, his neck cocked sickly to one side in a way that Joe found to be even more disconcerting than it had been when he’d first met Karel. With the latter, there was a telling, uncompromising plainness to both his appearance and his movements, as if he’d been cast unembellished at birth and couldn’t be bothered with betterment. Karel’s eyes had gazed, even in the dark of night, with a spare intensity that revealed little if anything of his intentions, and he looked deliberately unkempt, his toughness and humor evident in the way he carried himself and wore his clothes, something askew from hatband to boot heels, and in this way, for him, his warped neck seemed all of a piece. But here was a man with a starched collar and an unwrinkled vest, a polished man with polished boots, a man who wore the makings of a grin on a face that looked like it had been hot toweled and lathered and rid of its whiskers no more than an hour before. Just looking at him, Joe swore he could smell soap. Here was a man who fashioned himself so as to obscure his unsightly twin imperfections, the two top teeth folded back like someone had taken a hammer to them, and then there was that neck, bowed over like a fern blade weighted with dew.

  Raymond noticed this, too, had noticed it the day before, when the thought that there was more than one man in the world wearing this affliction opened a damper in his chest and put a red glow to the coals of his kindled anger. Now he freed his thumb from his pocket and traced the jagged scar tissue that fell away into the corner of his mouth as if he’d been made to eat the tail end of the wound he’d sustained. As if the wound itself, then, had for a while sustained him. And then he took note of his brother, the round stains of dried blood showing dull and dark as well-handled pennies through the cotton fabric of his shirt.

  “Tell you what, girls,” Thom said. “You go ahead and drive off and I’ll sit right here, and we’ll see if this trailer comes with you or not. I been having a long talk with it out here while you were lost inside my establishment, trying to find your way out, and it told me it didn’t like the recent company it’s been keeping. It’s a Christian trailer, it turns out, and can’t cotton to all the sinning it’s been drawn into of late. I reckon it might like to stay right here among more honorable, God-fearing folk.”

  “That so?” said Raymond, his hand still at the corner of his mouth.

  “I believe it is. Also, I unhitched it from your truck and let the air out of the tires on the other side. So there’s that to consider.”

  Raymond scanned the trailer, saw that it was so, that it leaned gently back and away from where he stood, that the hitch bolt had been removed and lay, missing its nut, on the shaded bare earth beneath the truck. He swallowed his bitterness along with the souring taste of beer that remained on his tongue. “We been considering a few things ourselves. Spent the better part of the night considering how birdshot finds its way out of your gun when someone turns their back on you.”

  “And so you came right on back for more, did you? It’s even mice that learn, when they lose a tail, not to go sniffing too close to easy cheese. I’m a better shot than to have missed what I aimed at. If I’d of wanted your little sister there dead, he’d of been heaped over with dirt before sundown. A man’s got to make his expectations clear. I can’t have every sharecropper in town thinking he can come into my place and spit on the floor like what you done. There’s spittoons enough in there for whatever tastes too bad to swallow.”

  “And that’s that? You shoot a man because his brother spit on your floor, but now you’re just going to teach us this lesson here by stealing our trailer. What’s to keep your gun in your lap while we drive away?”

  “I had a peek under the hay,” Thom said. “And through the side window, too, while you were having your fun. It’s you who’s been doing the stealing, and I’d call the law if I thought he’d be amused by a mess of real beer being sold around his county. What I get for the trailer will make up for what you’ve drained onto my floor in there. We’ll call it a fair swap, and as long as me or my brothers don’t see you anywhere near our property again, then I can go back to selling beer instead of mopping it off the floor and wasting birdshot.”

  “How many brothers you got?”

  Thom squinted against the sun, and he put his hat back on his head while a gust of wind blew a few loose straws of hay from the bales around him. “It’s three of us,” he said, “that we claim.”

  “What if I told you that trailer don’t belong to us? That it’s on loan to us from the one you don’t claim?”

  Thom caught a laugh halfway up his throat and squeezed it off. He nodded once. “I’d say you’re right about it not belonging to you. It belongs to me. And I’d say a man can count his brothers however he damn well pleases, and that you might should get that truck running and git while your brother still has one left to count himself.”

  Raymond turned to Joe, pointing at himself and jerking his head toward the truck, and his brother stood with his rifle at the ready. Raymond strode over and got the engine cranked while the wind came up again in a hard gust that seemed both dishonest and pointless without any clouds in the sky to be blown about. When the engine fired, Raymond worked the choke and throttle, and exhaust came coughing up from beneath the bed and floated back over the trailer. Thom Skala rose from his seat on the trailer, lifting the stock of his gun up to his shoulder but keeping the barrel down and away from Joe.

  Raymond swung the truck wide out to the side of the old barn and circled back around, reaching over while he drove to open the passenger door for his brother before pulling alongside him. Joe slid his rifle behind the seats and climbed in, reaching for the newspaper on the dash before slamming the door shut behind him. And then the truck jerked with the release of the brake, and Raymond Knedlik pulled forward for one last word with the man who made him burn, two days straight, with the knowledge that he’d been outwitted and outtalked, both. “It’s going to be a hot one tonight, I’m guessing,” he said. “You try to keep cool, now.”

  Thom fingered the trigger of his gun, the idle caress of a man who’s managed to make his point without having to make it loudly. It felt to him better now than it had to have taken aim and executed his shot so well the day before, measuring the distance and the breadth of his shot pattern so he could pop the boy with a few beads while he walked out to his truck, so he could do just enough harm to send a clear and stinging message. And still, it hadn’t worked, or it hadn’t for long. Maybe this wouldn’t either. Who knew? He wondered what had possessed Karel that he’d hire them to do his bidding. These boys were clearly half a head shy on horse sense. After all, the wind had come up again, and out of the northwest, carrying a chill that was as trustworthy a sign as a green, hailstone sky in September. “You need to check the date on your almanac, son. It’ll be cold enough to light the woodstove tonight.”

  “We’ll see,” Raymond said, winking and clicking his tongue. “Never can tell about the weather, though, and I’m guessing it’
ll be too hot for good sleeping.”

  The other boy turned his attention away from the conversation, opened the newspaper and commenced reading. The engine stuttered and then caught with a gray cough of exhaust. While they drove away, Thom stood watching for a while until the truck was clear of his own and out of sight. He had work to do, and a lot of it, the little sons of bitches. The wind came up again and played violently in the upper branches of the old oaks across the road. They were in for some weather, sure enough.

  AFTER A LONG DAY in the truck spent chasing those whom he hadn’t been able to catch, Karel made it home just before dusk. He propped his gun in the corner of the kitchen, filled the coffee pot with water and grounds and settled it on the stove to brew. In the course of the morning and afternoon, he’d driven to Moulton and Weid, out west to Gonzales, and back home to Dalton by way of Shiner. No one he’d spoken to had seen the Knedlik boys since the day before, when, according to a boy working at the feedstore in Gonzales, the quiet one had been winged with shot as he walked unarmed to his truck out back of the saloon, but it was the sight of the man to whom he hadn’t spoken—his brother Thomàs, decked out in his fine vest and shined shoes—that worked cold and sickening in his blood like a kind of distemper. He halved a sweet roll that Sophie had baked two days before from the leftover scraps of kolache dough and folded each half around a fatty hunk of the cured ham he’d brought in from the smokehouse. He ate standing up, wiped his hands on his trousers, scraped a chair back from the kitchen table and took a seat. After rolling cigarettes mindlessly until his case was full, he cinched the pouch of tobacco closed and sat smoking, listening to the growing wind wheeze through the window screens until the smell of coffee brought him again to his feet. He took a cup from the drain board, poured it half-full, then topped it off with whiskey from the jug of mash he kept in the cabinet over the sink and went to sit on the back steps facing the grove while he drank.

  It was uncommon, such a wind without even a trace of clouds to diffuse the pink glow of the sunset. Back when he was a boy, there’d been a comfort to the approach of weather come evening time, to the way you could know that something was on the way without quite knowing what. It might blow, it might rain, it might well do both. Depending on the season, there might fall a clatter of hail until it sounded from inside the barn or stable as if there were men doing roof work overhead.

  Most often, whether anything dropped from the sky or not, Karel had busied himself in those sunset hours with work about the stables. He’d fill the lanterns with oil so he could leave them lit overnight. He’d muck the stables and shoulder a new bale over in front of the stall doors and break it open there so he could fork it quickly into the stalls. There were extra oats for Whiskey, who could get skittish when the wind blew and he was cooped up inside. Ride him out in a thunderstorm, as Karel had so many times when dark skies slid in fast from the west and caught him too far from home to outride the clouds, and the horse would switch his tail and whinny happily and never break stride. He was spooked only when stabled, and Karel had grown to feel much the same way. He took pride in his home, in the new white paint on the house and the green window trim that Sophie had so wanted, in the graded road and the expanded smokehouse and the new cattlepens he’d fenced in behind the barn, but preferred to see it all from out of doors, where he could lay his eyes on the work his hands had done.

  And so it was, though it had been years since there were fine horses in his stables instead of draft animals and spools of baling wire and cans of oil and kerosene and tins of grease, that Karel preferred to be out of the house when the sunlight was failing and some change of weather looming. He liked it better when there were chores to do and the promise of darkness or rain or both became a clock against which he could measure his work, and tonight, when he finished his coffee, he rose to his feet and stretched his sore back with his hands twisted together high above his head, and then he fetched a length of rope and some chain from the stable and carried them out east of the smokehouse to light a small fire beneath the crankcase of his new Fordson tractor so he could get it started in the cool weather.

  A half hour later, when he made it around to the cattlepen, he was thankful for the long gray shadows of dusk, for he was sure, by now, that the vultures had made more than one good meal from his losses. He left the tractor idling loudly outside the pen and unlatched the gate and let the wind swing it wide. While he tied the rope like a noose around the half-born calf’s neck, he held his breath against the stench and thought of the knowing look on Villaseñor’s face, letting himself fantasize for a moment that he was hitching a rope round that son of a bitch’s throat. Karel worked bent over at the waist, winding the rope from the calf and then around the front of the heifer’s hind legs, looping it in two tight circles from behind the heifer’s udder up over her haunches and knotting it along the spine so that the calf couldn’t come free from its mother’s body when he dragged the whole mess of it across the pasture. When he rose, his hips popped such that he could hear it over the wind, and his back began to throb in deep spasms that felt like steaming water was being wrung upward from the small of his back to the stiffly warped knuckles of his neck. He would bet, goddamn it, that his brothers didn’t ache this way, never mind that they’d all once worn the same harness and pulled the same plow. If Thom’s youthful good looks were any indication, they were aging handsomely, like their wives’ father, who, if possible, was more infuriating now in his polished appearance and disposition than he had been when he’d first come calling in his carriage. His speech was, as ever, salted only by his choice of words, never with the tenor or volume of his voice, and he wore suitcoats and hats that made him stand everywhere in Lavaca County a head above even the wealthier Czechs and Germans. And now he’d rubbed off on his daughters’ husbands. Karel tied another two loops just behind the heifer’s front legs and pulled the remaining rope tight before looping a cinch knot into the end of it and doubling the chain through that.

  When he had the whole affair rigged to the tractor, he climbed into the seat and worked the hand clutch while looking back, easing the slack out of the chain until the cow swung around smoothly in the hay with the calf’s head trailing behind. Then Karel throttled it up and steered out through the pasture, straightening his back to brace himself against the jostling ride of the steel drive wheels as he angled between the wide swaths mowed through the old hedgerows. While he drove toward the southern fork of the creek, he pictured his brother Thom as he had seen him from his idling truck earlier in the day just after the wind began to pick up, a man engaged in the deliberate, slow work of the well-to-do, his hair grown longer than it had been the last time Karel had seen him, his face with some sun in it but smooth and otherwise unweathered, his lips held together to hide the wreck of his front teeth, his curved neck carried in such a way that the man assumed a quiet and thoughtful show of satisfaction as he carried buckets full of mop water out to the wide front porch of his saloon and dumped them carefully over the porch railing so he wouldn’t splash his shoes or trousers. Sitting in his truck, Karel couldn’t help but wonder if his brother still held suspicions about what his wife had done before their wedding day, if she had gone to him seeking to clear her conscience. Karel supposed it wasn’t so, saw in his brother an innocence born either of ignorance or denial. And then it occurred to Karel that it wouldn’t do him or anyone else any harm to swing his door open and join his brother there on the porch, to lend him a hand. It had been so long since he’d had the company of another man in his work, so long that he now felt almost a longing for those hours and days spent hitched to the plow with his brothers, their boots sliding and sinking in the fine black soil, the sun blistering the backs of their necks where their straw hat brims proved too narrow. It had been enraging and unnecessarily hard work, but at least, linked together by leather, they had felt the common hard resentment, a kind of ill will whose tongue was held in check by fear, for the same man at the same time. If anything, this was what Karel miss
ed about the company of his brothers—their hardness and loathing had shored up his own, given him title to his own hatred. But there was something else: The older boys had also admired their father—his stubbornness and sharp tongue, the way he refused to beckon the help of other men—and so had Karel, and it was this admiration that he couldn’t cotton to, the reverence for a man you surely hated, the hard plaque of respect that all the bad blood couldn’t scour from your heart. This, too, he and his brothers had shared, and the bile of a common indigestion that rose from the two brands of unsuited feelings had been easier to swallow when there were others around who were burning inside with the same struggle to choke it down.

  Karel wondered now, as he neared the line of water oaks fringing the creekbed and the sky darkened to a deeply bruised blue, if it was this aspect of brotherhood that had made it near on to impossible for boys like Billy Dalton to come home from the war, if the mud they had tasted and the gases they’d dodged in those trenches had hardened them together in the same way that countless grains of sand, compacted and fired so long underground, were baked together, in time, into stone. Dalton had lasted only a year back in town before clearing out to take a factory job in Kansas City where a pair of brothers from his regiment overseas had gone to work after their homecoming. Karel had seen him at the icehouse in town some four years back, standing at the bar, drinking alone, young still but no longer a boy. His red hair looked dulled as if by a wash with diluted lye, and the scar Karel had occasioned on his face had faded so that it appeared, in the lamplight, to be little more than a birthmark. Karel had bid him good evening, and the young man had nodded at him, and they’d had a drink together without saying another word, the deep-rooted rivalry of their history buried and smothered by all that had since been shoveled by time over the top of it. Karel hadn’t seen him since. He’d left his father and mother and the town that carried his name, this for something akin to brotherhood that probably had no name at all.