The Wake of Forgiveness

by Bruce Machart

  When the horse stands ready for riding, Karel surprises himself as much with the sound of his voice as with the dream he’s suddenly willing to share. “Good horses like these, we could be across the county line by sunrise.”

  She smiles without showing her teeth, finds his eyes with her own. Stroking the long neck of the horse, she wets her upper lip with her tongue. “Which one?” she asks. “Which county?”

  “Whichever one you fancy.”

  “Karel,” she says, and the serious, almost instructive turn of her voice muddies his fantasy the way his hand reached into shallow creekwater has so often obscured his own reflection. “I fancy this one. And so does my father. And your father.”

  “I’m not so attached just now to what Pop wants.”

  “And still you’ll fight your brothers with him?”

  Karel feels the cool trail of fluid seeping from his eye down his cheek, and when he wipes it with his sleeve, it sets to stinging again. Only minutes before, she would have done this for him, but she’s not touching him now, not reaching for his neck or brushing his face with her lips. Instead, her hands are on the horse, and Whiskey is saddled and ready to ride, switching his tail idly, his great, oily eyes glinting in the low light. “Believe that if it suits you, but to me it felt like fighting for you just as much as fighting with him.”

  Now she pulls her hands from the horse and reaches forward, buttons Karel’s coat for him, every gesture a nudge that seems bent on getting him out of the stable and into the night without her. “You can’t fight them for me,” she says. “You’d have to fight my father, and you wouldn’t win. No one ever has.”

  “Excepting your mother,” Karel says. “If she could get free of him, you could, too.”

  “He didn’t go looking for her. Not the last time. Her going was his doing.”

  Then, with rain coming down on the shingles above, she tells him about a storm that had moved through the mountains of her father’s ranch in Guanajuato when she was twelve, of high winds that had taken down trees, one of which had fallen onto the fencing of her father’s corral of unbroken horses. “They ran off into the storm, and by morning they weren’t visible even from the southern ridgeline. My sisters liked the comfort of the parlor, liked sitting with my mother and drinking tea and practicing their needlework, but I always preferred to be outside, to be on horseback, to be with my father, and so he came into the house where I was taking my breakfast and asked if I wanted to go with him. Told me to bring a bedroll of blankets and a change of clothes, told my mother we’d be no longer than a day and a half, and by noon we were riding in the mountains with four of his men and four pack horses loaded with provisions and rope. Over the first rise of mountains, my father stopped and chewed on his cigar and dismounted, toed a pile of manure and smiled. He winked at me and pointed out toward the next rise of ridges three hours’ ride away. ‘Can you smell it?’ he asked me. ‘The river? The green meadow up the far side of the canyon?’ I told him I couldn’t. It was twenty-five kilometers off at least. He laughed, the same laugh he always had when we were children, and he would try to balance all three of us on his lap at night before Mother sent us off to bed. ‘I can’t either,’ he said. ‘But the horses can. They’ll have found it, to be certain.’

  “Later that day, when we came over that rise, there they were, grazing in the thick grass along the river that cut through the canyon. Father smiled, sent his men down to round them up, and then he built a fire and I cooked us lunch there in the mountains. We watched while, until nightfall, the men did their work. The next morning, we rode back to the ranch with all but one of the lost horses tied and trailing behind us.”

  Karel smiles. “Well, then there was one what got away.”

  She shakes her head. “No. The one had been snakebit. Father shot it.”

  “It don’t make much sense,” Karel says. “Riding all day after some horses and not going after your own wife when she runs off.”

  Graciela strokes the horse and frowns, her eyes downcast and dancing with little filaments of lamplight. “She didn’t run, Karel. She never ran. She took up with another man, another rancher. The war was coming, and he promised he’d take her back to Spain so she could be with her family. Father’s men found them at an inn together. Father would have forgiven her, I know he would have, but it wasn’t the first time she’d gone. There was something in her that needed to live only for herself, to do what her body told her to do. She’d disappear for a day, for a week, and Father would sit nights in his chair, smoking his cigars, and then we’d wake one morning and there’d be three horses missing from the stables, three saddles from the tack room, and when my father’s men rode back over the ridgeline, she’d be riding behind them with the feathers of her hat waving at us in the breeze and a smile on her lips. She was no one man’s woman, but when the skirmishes started and Father began to speak of moving east, she told my sisters and me that we should go only if we wanted, that we should go only where and when we wanted, that women were only beholden to men if they chose to be. And of course I told Father. He had always stayed with us, had never gone away only to be brought home by men sent to fetch him. I never once thought of leaving him. He never leaves, and he shouldn’t be left. He never forgets, and he didn’t forget any of the men my mother had been with, either. One morning the horses were gone again, and so was Mother, and so were the saddles. And then the men came back without her, blood on their boots, the receipt from the depot in one of their pockets. They’d put her on a train to Mexico City. Father fashioned a cross from saplings, a tiny thing, just twigs tied together, really, and he planted it on the ridge before we left. He said you didn’t always need a body to have a funeral.”

  Whiskey stands fully alert now, ready to ride, sighing and tossing his head and lifting a hoof repeatedly, dropping it to the hard earthen floor as if to punctuate these hints to his rider. Karel puts a hand on the horse’s neck to settle him, and then he looks this beautiful young woman over slowly, from the gentle swells of her calves and the slight rounds of her hips up to her hair, still damp and so dark. Her eyes shine wide, unabashed. Unapologetic. She has some of her mother in her, and she’s proud of it, that much is clear. “If your father’s so good to you, he would give you what you want.”

  “I haven’t decided what I want,” she says. “Not beyond tonight, at least. Until I do, I’d do well simply to take what he offers me.” And then she does touch him, but not in the way he wants. She cups a hand firmly on his bent neck, pressing her lips together either in sympathy for his history of harness and plow or for his wounded eye and mouth or to keep some other, gentler words inside. Karel can’t tell which. When she turns loose of him, she exhales, the hint of a smile pinching together at the pink corners of her lips. “I’ve told you about my mother,” she says. “Wouldn’t you like to tell me about yours?”

  Karel turns from her, takes his wet coat from the hay bale behind him and shrugs it on. The cold weight of the thing sets him to shivering. He wraps the horse’s reins around one hand and leads the animal to the door. Graciela doesn’t follow. He opens the door and the hard, clean sound of rainfall makes it so that he has to raise his voice to be certain she hears him. “You already know all about her. She was just like you. I was inside her, and then she was gone.”

  ON THE FARM-TO-MARKET road, just across the old plank bridge spanning the southern fork of the creek, Karel nudges the horse into a trot while the rain streams down through his hair and cools the torn corner of his mouth and the swollen wound of his eye. Even in the darkness, it seems to him a strange limitation of sensation to have no peripheral vision on his right side, to see through a single eye into a world that had been reduced to near opacity by the cloud cover and the feebleness of the moon and by the girl’s quick dismissal of all his fantastic hopes. The horse whinnies when Karel gives it another heel, moving between the outstretched barbed wire on either side, past the southernmost reaches of his father’s land and the occasional squat clusters of scrub
and mesquite this side of the fencelines. As the horse’s hooves splash down, cantering in the puddled road, it comes clear to him of a sudden that the scant light of the night is narrowing into his good eye with the same concentrated reduction as the hot liquid of his resentment funneling down through his ribcage and into the hardening core of his heart. What kind of woman, he wonders, would give herself to a man only to send him away so that she can get her sleep and marry his brother the next day? What kind of woman brings a boy into the world only to leave him there without the warmth of her bosom or the swirling softness of her skirts or the caressing comforts of her hands and lips and gentle words given voice to rid a boy of the fears that find him wide-eyed and alone in the night?

  Loud enough that it reaches him through the rain, the call of a horned owl, low and triadic and hollow sounding in its own solemnity, filters into his thoughts and makes room therein for the sorrow that has so often afflicted him. It is nameless and old, something that has preceded him, that came before his father and mother both, something tireless and bodiless and indifferent to the interminable aching it occasions, and when it sinks into him, Karel feels the stinging salt of his own tears burning within the engorged lids of his throbbing eye, and he lets himself go limp in the knees and jostle there in the saddle while the horse moves on heavily into the night and farther from the rushing creekwater behind them. The owl doesn’t call again, though Karel listens in anticipation, waiting for something familiar to make itself known in the darkness. Which it does, but only in the way that wholesome and straightforward prayers are so often met with perverted answers. Out before him on the road, maybe seventy yards ahead, there is laughter and hooting, the clamor of the happily delirious or the drunken, and Karel recognizes the voices at once—his brothers coming to town, leaving the deep furrows and sharp words and burst blisters and leather harnesswork of their father’s farm behind them in the wide wake of their elation.

  Karel leans over Whiskey’s neck, whispering behind the animal’s ears, which have come forward at the unfamiliar sounds of men’s voices pitched high with joy. “Whoa now,” Karel whispers, bringing the horse up short, sitting still in the wet saddle so it doesn’t creak, cupping a hand over his good eye and scanning the road ahead to find the pinprick of yellow light swinging toward him, the lantern’s flame casting a cold, misty halo in the rain. He angles the reins and presses a knee into the horse’s side, coaxing the animal off the road and against the easternmost fence. He slips his boots from the stirrups and lets his legs dangle there against the reassuring warmth of the animal’s hide.

  When his brothers get near enough to notice him, they quit their laughing, and Stan holds the lantern up in one hand while Thom and Eduard square their shoulders above their hips and clutch the canvas handles of their duffels in front of them with both hands. Thom is smiling despite the blood-encrusted gash on his cheekbone and the gruesome teeth slanted back in his mouth. He cocks the dripping brim of his straw hat back on his head to get a better look at Karel sitting above him on the horse. “Been nursing your wounds at the icehouse, little brother?” he says.

  Stan looks down at his boots, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. In the faint light, he appears unmarked by the fight and henlike in his reluctance for any further scuffling. “It ain’t too late yet,” Eduard says. “Turn that animal round and come tilt one back with us.”

  Thom clears his sinuses and spits, unable to conceal either the pain in his mouth or the disdain for his brother’s peacemaking. He lowers his hat back over his eyes and shoots a look at Eduard, who only shrugs and looks toward Stan for support. When the eldest nods, Thom sniffs the air as if gauging it for some foul remnant of the evening’s ill will, and then he slings his duffel over his shoulder and hitches the thumb of his free hand in his pocket. “Hell then,” he says. “Why not?”

  And here is the moment Karel will recall so often without recounting it once even to the likes of his future wife, the slow seconds of his consideration and the unexpected, fleeting blossom of appreciation that unfolds soft and sweet and delicate within the parched cavity of his chest, the cool drizzling of rain on his hatless head and the expectant eyes of his two braver brothers, the twitching of horsehide beneath him and the weight of his waterlogged boots dangling down beneath the stirrups. The cold. Overhead, a thick quiltwork of clouds gathers and bunches until, pulled forth by the wind, it flattens out as if by feminine hands pressed into its airy batting to smooth it over a mattress. The horse stamps and blows, tossing his head gently against the slackened reins, and before Karel even considers the choice laid out before him, there rises within him a remembered scent of the girl’s hair, a recollection of that tightening at the base of his spine that had uncoiled at once and so wonderfully beneath the wet weight of her in his lap. And then he’s seeing his brother touching her, their fingers grazing as they pull the sheets from the laundry line, their legs threaded together in bed, the images stamped out as if by some loud machine fueled by envy alone. He sees the girl riding horseback, waving to Thom across their fields. He imagines his mother, round bellied and smiling, her arms full as she tries to balance all three of his brothers on her diminished lap.

  Then, what has only just bloomed within him curls brittle and brown at the edges, and he believes now, in the slow seconds of understanding, ephemeral as they ever are, that what lies behind a man in the expanding landscape of his past can never be left behind entirely, that even the blazing, cotton-flecked fields of the summer can’t sweat from him the hard, fallow crust of so many winters. He can almost put it into words, but it’s fleet and then it’s gone, and all that’s left is the caustic certainty that there’s no moving forward unbridled, that the weather-checked harness will never give, that the weight of all that is dragging behind will know no abatement.

  “I ain’t thirsty,” he says, lifting his feet back into the stirrups. “I been sucking your girl’s teats till I can’t stomach another drop.”

  Stan flinches and then looks down again, resuming his studious consideration of his boots. Eduard smiles and shakes his head, his eyes glinting with disbelieving appreciation of his kid brother’s gall. Thom gives them both a look, lets his duffel splash to the ground. “I never heard such a steaming pile of horseshit,” he says.

  Karel stands in the stirrups and locks his knees so that he looms high above his brothers when he spits in the road without taking his eyes off Thom’s. “That’s the thing about shit,” he says. “It ain’t something you can hear, but once someone’s stepped in it there’s no doubting the stink. Give her a sniff, big brother, and you’ll know yours ain’t the first toes she’s squished up between.”

  When he lowers himself back into the saddle and puts a heel to the horse, he does it harder than he needs to, and when he hears behind him the sound of his brother’s voice beneath the splashing of hooves and the drizzling of rain, what he makes out is the anger and weight of it but not the words. A swirl of nausea sloshes around sour in his gut, and when he notes the ache in his jaw, he realizes he’s grinding his teeth. The horse is running hard, the cold rain needling them, the speed whipping Whiskey’s mane back into Karel’s face. Still, it’s not fast enough, and Karel kicks the horse again.

  HE SLEEPS PAST dawn and wakes to find hay pasted with dried blood to his mouth, his eye throbbing and his toes clammy and cramped from the night spent wet in his boots. Up in the loft, he sits forward atop the hay upon which he’s slept so soundly and listens to the rain and the pained animal sounds below. When he’d gotten home, dismounting at the cattlegate with his stomach turned by a hunger that he had no means to feed and a rising regret of the hasty words he now couldn’t unsay, he’d walked the horse the last quarter mile across the brittle stalks of cut hay and found the downstairs windows flickering with the irregular light of the oil lamp. He’d had enough by way of family talk for one night, so he’d come quietly around the outermost fringe of the pear grove to the stable, where he’d lit a single, short-wicked lantern so that he c
ould see his work while he removed Whiskey’s saddle and the heavy, rain-soaked blanket and then dried and curried the horse and bolted him into his stable beside that of his seedless sire. Then he’d climbed the ladder and pulled his arms from the wet sleeves of his coat and burrowed himself into the piles of hay straws on the floor.

  Now he’s come awake all at once from his short, dreamless sleep, and when he plucks the hay from the corner of his mouth, it tears the scab and he finds, even before breakfast, the jolting taste of his own blood on his tongue. His legs have gone stiff, as if his bones have been sunk into mud that’s been left to dry overnight, and he works his toes around in the swampy wool of his socks while his head clears and his father’s voice rises amid the echo of rainfall on the shingles above and Whiskey’s distressed complaints down below.

  By the time he gets to his feet and makes his way down the ladder, his father is standing with his steaming knife in one hand and the testicles of the gelded horse dripping blood from the other down into the hay. The horse is thrashing its head about, stamping with two hooves in unison against the ropes crosstied from the load-bearing beams. Just emerged from sleep, Karel has to steady his one good eye on the gore in his father’s hand before it registers—the cleft between the two testicles pinching a seam into the horsehide such that it appears as if two heavy peaches have been dropped down into a soft brown cinch-purse made of leather with the hair left on it. On the workbench, just this side of the nearest stall, there’s a cup of coffee and an uncorked jug of mash, and when Karel looks up to find his father’s eyes on him, shot through with a fine lacework of blood and slowly blinking and glazed over from a lack of sleep or from drink or both, the man just stands there, his back molars grinding tobacco and his bottom lip stained brown from the juice.

  “A man ain’t no better than his goddamn word, boy. And it don’t matter if he gives it to a man or an animal or only to himself. Now sew him closed and put some salve on it. He’s a plow horse now, and his day’s just getting started.”