And then Raymond shoved past, knocking into Joe’s shoulder to get around the blazing chute, running toward the sliding door while Joe went to his knees and looked up, mesmerized by this loud flare of light, the bite of burning fuel and smoke stinging in his throat, the terrified sounds of animals rising until they became for him a disorienting extension of the roar of the fire and the loud rush of blood in his ears. Flames rose from the bales beneath the loft stairs and slanted up the chute, whipping toward the door when Raymond leaned into it hard and slid it open until the rollers banged against the outermost framework of the runners. Overhead, the flames fed a thick clot of smoke that hovered over the chute’s opening, and Joe squinted against the blast of heat on his face and shielded his eyes against the thickening swirl of glowing ash. He heard his brother screaming at him from the open door, saw his face flickering and yellow and cast against the moonlight looming soft and unwavering behind him. And then there was a danger looming closer than the fire, certain but inanimate and all but silent, a thought given voice as if from the growing smoke itself, a quiet, urgent voice the sound of which reverberated only beneath the skin, in the sinew of muscles and the soft meat of marrow, in the blood that surged with adrenaline, and when he broke for the door, his brother turned from it, bolting out into the night.
Overhead, fire glowed blue through the joints of the loft decking, and then the fuel that had run through the seams caught in a raining curtain of flame before the door. Joe stopped, pulled his coat up over his head, and even with his ears covered, the stable was just deafening with the screaming panic of animals and the hot rush of spreading fire and the unmistakable approach of hoof strikes. When they were upon him, he turned, ducking and throwing his arms out, to find the filly towering above him, rearing and kicking, trapped between this raining blaze of fire and the door slammed shut behind her at the far end of the stable.
When Joe turned once more toward the door, the horse reared again and fell, its shod hoof hitting just above Joe’s calf in the hollow of his knee. His leg buckled and snapped, the sound louder than the popping of dry oak in a woodstove, and he was shot through with a searing pain as he flew forward, the impact kicking the breath from his lungs when his chest hit the dirt, his head snapping forward to slam against the hard-packed earth, and then there were moments of darkness and quiet, of the haunting sound of his mother’s voice, of her whispering in the night for water, of a body whole and calm and cool and unaware of fire or animals or the bone splintered and jutting wet through the wrecked skin of his shin.
When he came to, he worked his tongue over a scab of dirt stuck to the spit at the corner of his lips. The filly was still wild, pacing and wheezing beside him, unwilling to break through the smoke and fire that now obscured the front stable door, her hooves shaking the hard earth beneath him when they struck. Joe rolled over and the bolt of pain leapt up his leg hot and tremulous and sick until it twisted through his stomach and up his throat, and it all came so quickly there was no turning his head, no stopping it, and Joe’s eyes flooded as he wretched into his own lap, the sour spew of beans clogging his throat in abrasive waves until, when he’d finished, he was fully conscious, the heat and smoke and glowing embers falling over him as he ground his teeth and grunted and cried out and kept an eye on the frantic pacing of the horse while he scooted himself back with the palms of his hands and his good leg, working his way to the rear of the stable until he could feel his spine braced against the solid wood of the rear door.
He bent his good knee, wiped the tears from his eyes and a thick smear of blood from his nose and the muddy bile from the corner of his mouth and, with one sharp arch of his back, pushed the door open and felt, all at once, the hard bite of pain that jolted through him in the squeezing of his guts and the shivering skin and the breath expelled with a cry that could only be squelched by biting down hard on his lower lip. The horse came out wildly behind him, and he flinched as she galloped harmlessly over his outstretched legs and circled herself out against the far perimeter of the paddock’s fenceline. He found that he was holding his breath, and when he exhaled, he reached back again and clenched handfuls of the loose, sandy soil, feeling the grainy cool of it between his fingers, a sensation so commonplace and familiar that there came into him a startling cold relief. He was out of the stable. It was December. His father was dead. His brother out here somewhere in the night, looking for him or assuming him killed or racing toward the road and the truck. As Joe worked backward, dragging himself over the uneven earth that lay churned up into mounds and pocked with divots, he heard the sound of voices come alive in the night—his name called out like a desperate question in the parched, hoarse voice of his brother; the screaming of trapped animals; the barked, uncompromising orders of a man brought out of his dreams to find the night afire, his family sleeping beside him wrapped in sheets that would burn atop mattresses that would burn in a house made of timber that would burn, all in a world overseen by a god who had long since forsaken water.
Beneath the high moon, with the yellow bone quivering outside of the skin, the blood pulsing up around it and pooling warm in the leg of his trousers, Joe didn’t notice the gunshot wound of his shoulder in the least. He didn’t any longer curse or scream or call out for his brother. He had to keep himself conscious and moving, and he set all of his mind to the sobering intake of every sensation other than pain, to the slow progress across the paddock, to these handfuls of dirt and the whispering of his mother’s voice somewhere inside of him, to the thirst that crept from her dry lips into his own throat, to the hard whipping of the wind and the tingling chill in his scalp and cheeks and shoulders as the blood siphoned down to feed the pool in the leveled leg of his pants, to the reaching and pulling and the gritty soil packing beneath his fingernails, to the sound of the horse blowing behind him and the vision of flames bursting up from beneath the stable’s eaves such that the thick, wind-borne smoke thinned smooth and flat into an unrolled bolt of threadbare fabric, doing the work of clouds on a cloudless night, skimming over the near-round moon. It was as beautiful as it was terrible, and a mass of certainty hardened like enamel around the cage of Joe’s ribs, and he knew that Judith had changed her mind, that she’d come to her senses and denied her suitor, that she was sitting her horse on this very night, waiting out on the rolling meadows of her Blue Lake Ranch in California, anticipating his arrival, and by the time Joe made it to the far fencing of the paddock and dragged himself groaning and upright on one leg and took the horse by its mane, leaning his chest over her warm hide and squeezing his arms around her neck so he could pull himself up and swing his good leg over her back, he was laughing and crying what all at the same time.
The blood ran out of him now as if displaced by the hydraulics of his own new certainties—he would ride, and he would mend, and he would go for her—and his hands were groping now, and now his vision blurred and narrowed and tinted by the faintest film of red. And here was the filly’s neck. And here her mane. And here the splintery fencerail and the thick, draining weight of his boot coming full, and more fence timbers, and the gate, and here the warm undulations of the animal beneath him, the sweet steaming of her breath in his hair, and here the cool cast iron of the latch and the sighing whine of the gate swinging open. And then they were out in the night, only countless outstretched miles of swirling wind and the merging cadences of heartbeats and hoof strikes and the wide black pastures before them.
Testaments to Seed
MARCH 1910
THERE IS OPPORTUNITY enough—whether with hired women in the stale rooms above the Bio Saloon in Shiner or with country girls made pliant by cider in the nearby woodlands on beds of fallen foliage—for the young men of Lavaca County to occasion the satisfaction of their near-constant urges. Over the course of the last two years, it has not been uncommon for Eduard and Thom, their needs strung tighter or their wills wrought of stronger stuff than their brothers’, to return after midnight with hushed laughter and drunken bragging to the boys’
shared bedroom. When they wake Stan and Karel, as they invariably do, their talk of the flabby, overused whores with whom they’ve purchased an hour is seasoned with descriptions of living but inhuman things, of animals and ripe fruit. Teats heavy and soft as muskmelons left too long in the field. A backside wide as a sow’s. Brisket. Hams.
And so it is that when this girl, Graciela, comes to Karel in the lowered light of the stable, unbuttoning her blouse and then smoothing a saddle blanket on a bed of hay bales, he is struck, as a young man is wont to be in the first fortunate moments of his exposure to the delicately unencumbered wonder of a woman’s body, by his own ineptitude, by the inaccuracy and insufficiency of all his feeble, boyish fantasies. Here, with the ticking percussion of rain at work on the rooftop and the unmoving air of the stable cool and redolent of damp horsehair and dry hay, there is simply no way to watch this girl shedding her boots, pulling her camisole over her head, and to see her in terms of anything other than the startlingly novel and incomparable vision that she is.
She sits him on the bales and stands over him, her still-wet hair hanging in front of her shoulders, draping over the gentle hollow of her throat and falling fanned over her breasts, and stops him when he begins to remove his coat. “No,” she whispers. “I’ll do it. Just sit.”
Karel obeys, in part because he hasn’t a notion how to defy her, in part because to sit yielding to her will is, in itself, the unexpected satisfaction of a long-untended desire. And so he listens to the rain as the sight of her body gives rise to gooseflesh on the tops of his thighs. He lifts his feet, one at a time, so she can remove his boots, straightens his elbows as she pulls his coat and shirtsleeves from his arms. When she leans over him, kneeling to unbutton his trousers, a breast grazes his knee and he sucks in breath as if in anticipation of some violent submersion.
Then there comes a honing of his senses, and Karel sits naked and marveling at how all his fifteen years in the sunlit world have come to less than this, at how bearing daily witness to outstretched plains and sunset horizons blistered with clouds has taught him no more about the bright surprise of being alive than does the way this girl shifts first onto the ball of one foot, then the other, as she works the waist of her riding pants down over her hips. If he had to, he realizes, he would trade all those years piecemeal, a year of then for a minute of now: the sight of Whiskey’s glossy and frothing and wriggling emergence from his mother for the acute work of his nerves, for his ability to distinguish, in the rough fabric of the saddle blanket beneath him, the coarse, individual threads of the wool’s warp and weft; the walks among tall, white-tufted fields of August cotton for this glimpse of the thick, dark hair narrowing down to the proud pleats of glistening skin between her legs; the hours spent imagining his mother’s tenderness for the protracted seconds in which this lovely girl ceases to be anything less than a woman, in which she positions herself astride his lap, a cool hand reaching down to take hold of him, to run the engorged tip of him back and forth along her slick folds until she nests him there just outside of her body, until she moves her hands onto the flexed muscles of his shoulders, and, with a pained push of breath rendered low in the back of her throat, takes the whole of him in one slow and shuddering descent.
Karel recognizes, in this moment, that his brothers must be either liars or fools, that there is nothing of the truth in all their lewd talk of creatures and fruit, that there is nothing so common in the sweet heat of this woman atop him, the wet flexing of her muscles taking hold of him, releasing. At the very tip of him, at the deepest point within her, there is a tightening, a hot wire of pleasure that is tethered to the base of his spine, strung from there to his navel and down to his tailbone. His face flushes hot with blood, and then there’s a cool prickle on his forehead and cheeks that yields to numbness. The girl works against him, her hands clasped firmly behind his neck, her hips shifting forward and back in their own insistent rhythm, her breath pushing quick and warm in his hair, and Karel is all but helpless beneath her, his injured eye seeping fluid, his hands cupped fast to the tender, rocking tops of her hips, and all the while he watches her.
Not once does she look at him.
Instead, she keeps her eyes shut, fluttering with the intake of breath. Her hair is pasted to her shoulders and breasts, her nipples darker than Karel would have expected, widely encircled by brown bands of skin that he traces with a thumb, the ridges of her clavicle flecked with the faintest little constellation of moles.
He drops his hands from her, bracing them behind his back for leverage, but when he tries to thrust, moving forward with his hips, she drops all of her weight on him, pinning him in place while she breathes hard through her nose and continues her steady and measured undulations. Then a horse blows in the stable, and Karel closes his good eye, listening to the soft play of the weather overhead, to the horses shifting in the stalls, and all the while the wire within him is tightening as if wound by a winch. When he allows himself sight of her again, her head is thrown back past her shoulders, rolling from side to side as if in some makeshift dance for which there is no intended audience. There is the sweet leaking of her body running down onto him, the friction of her work giving rise to a rash down low in the hair beneath his navel.
My word, Karel thinks, and he wants now to stand with her still clinging to him, still pressed into the wet saddle of his lap, to take hold of her hips and lift and turn and lay her back onto the blanketed hay, to put his weight on her and feel the solid cinching of her smooth legs around him as he moves inside her. But when he begins to stand, she tightens her arms behind his neck and holds him in place. She centers her weight over him and shakes her head without opening her eyes, and while she increases the speed of her movement atop him, she leans into him and puts her mouth over his swollen eye, sucking at it as if it’s her aim to take the whole of it into her mouth, to claim it as her own. Karel’s muscles seize and his hands flex hard, his fingernails digging into the flesh of her hips, and a quivering wave shivers through the length of the wire strung hot within him. His eye burns, but her mouth is so soft and wet, her tongue moving in slow circles around the tender skin of his eyelid, and after a while he feels only the remnant of pain, only the heat held in the heart of the metal when a branding iron is dropped hot into well water.
And then it is upon him, the final winding of this unsustainable torsion, and just before the surge of release runs up the length of him, from its origin within her into his stomach, up the switchbacks of his ribs and into the hard buckling knuckles of his spine at the base of his neck, she drops a hand and pulls him from her body. But she doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow her tempo in his lap, and when his own spasms wane, he pulls his face from her lips and watches as she begins to shudder about the shoulders, her hand working furiously between her legs, her dark eyes sprung wide and fluttering with the perfect, startled bewilderment of something newly born.
GRACIELA LEAVES the lantern low, the stable dimly aglow. She moves quietly, attending to her clothes, her breathing slowed, her actions deliberate and composed, and Karel watches uneasily and wonders what is expected of him. He notes the splotched bloom of flushed skin above her breasts, but then she pulls the camisole over her head and slips into the sleeves of her blouse, her eyes downcast. When she reaches for her boots, Karel is almost surprised to find himself naked, still seated on the blanketed hay. Outside, the light rain announces yet its muted arrival on the rooftop, the horses still clop the hard dirt of their stalls in their animated sleep, and while, excepting the animals and the night and whatever god is attendant upon these shadows, Karel is still alone with this girl, he can’t help but think, as he rises from the hay and pulls on his trousers, that this is not the same stable, not the same town, not the same world in which he’d found himself just a dozen short minutes before.
When they are both dressed, Graciela unhasps the nearest stall door and walks Whiskey out beneath the lamp and crossties him there, running her little hands flat against his rippling shoulders, smo
othing the roan hide as the horse nudges sleepily at her with his great head and nibbles gently at her hair with his lips. Karel takes the hint and pulls the bridle from a crossbeam hung with tack, and while he coaxes the bit into Whiskey’s mouth, Graciela fetches the blanket and places it over the horse as naturally as she had placed Karel onto it. And then there is the saddle, the bellyband, the cinch straps, all of it worked silently into place and secured with a wordless cooperation that triggers in Karel’s imagination a sunlit day in which they might work together in just this way—he out in the fields, manning the planter behind two good horses, spinning the tacky wisps of cottonseed into the earth, she out beyond the stables, hanging laundry on the line, their billowing bedsheets snapping in the wind. And later, with full bellies and the sun pressing itself into the horizon out west, he’d come up behind her and cup his hands on her hips, nuzzle her hair and breathe the smell of her into his lungs. He’d untie her apron and lift it over her head, leading her to the table where he’d sit her down and put a cup of coffee steaming into her hands so that she could rest awhile, enjoying the sounds of calling quail and mourning doves while he finished the dishes. They wouldn’t have to say a word, and then, just before full dark, they could walk out into the yard behind the grove and pull the laundry from the line, and they could make the bed and snuff the candles and weave their legs together there between cool sheets that smelled of the floral spring breeze and the clean, broken earth. And then, if they needed the sound of voices more than the sweet give-and-take of bodies, they could talk.
The Wake of Forgiveness Page 20