The Wake of Forgiveness

by Bruce Machart

  An hour later, after stripping down to his drawers and scouring himself with a brush dipped in a pail of soapy cold well water, Karel changes his clothes and swabs iodine onto the cut at the hinge of his lips. He sets his boots beside the stove to dry, then he soaks a rag in water, puts it atop the half-melted block in the icebox. He fries four eggs and eats them with a cold biscuit and a cup of coffee. When he finishes, he washes the plate and cup and places them on the drain board beside the sink, peels the rag from the block of ice, and sits at the kitchen table with the ice-crusted thing held against his swollen eye. By the time he gets his boots back on and fetches a hat and heads out through the kitchen door onto the back porch, the morning has darkened further and still the rain is coming down steady and gray onto the distant silhouette of his father, who has gotten the two horses braced to the plow and is trudging through the slop behind them to work useless muddy furrows into the land out west. Karel glances out toward the cattle huddling together beneath the weather in the near pasture, to the sheets of water falling over the sides of the full cattletank, to the windmill shimmying in the desultory wind, its tail whipping from side to side as the gusts shift, the blades churning out pointless revolutions. In the distance, his father slips and catches himself against the handles of the plow, working out toward the farm-to-market road where, just two days before, Karel and his brothers had been working when the carriage had appeared and Villaseñor set the brake and climbed down; when he had paraded his handsome daughters before the Skala boys while they stood sweating and wind chapped, their boots caked with the soil of their father’s acreage; when Graciela had parted her lips, astonished at something unknown to Karel in the distance, and he’d seen the pink, wet tip of her tongue. And now, out along the fenceline, with the sun above incapable of mustering even enough light to throw a respectable shadow, Karel’s father snaps his whip at a pair of gelded horses he will work until nightfall. Karel reckons there’s no sense in helping a man plow a field that will have to be plowed again when the soil dries anyhow, ducks through the grove and walks out beyond the eastern side of the barn and into the field to the south, his boots already wet again and sucking in the mud when he lifts his feet. He’s seen enough of this, more than enough of his father and the animals he works toward his own ends, more than enough rainfall and wind. Still, though Graciela has wrung him dry of pride, he can’t say that he’s seen enough of her. He can’t say for sure that he ever will.

  BY THE TIME he cracks the side door leading into the narthex of St. Jude’s, Karel is wet through once more to his drawers, chilled even deeper than that, and he welcomes the relative warmth of the church and the biting cedar scent of incense hung thick in the air. The narthex is obscured by a long screen that separates this, the narrow realm of catechumens and penitents, from the nave, and Karel eases the door closed behind him and stands listening to the cracked, mismatched voices of the country parishioners who sit singing hymns in anticipation of the nuptials of the town’s newest brides. At his feet, dripping rainwater pools, slicking the stone floors, and he removes his hat and runs a hand gingerly over his face to clear his good eye. Before him rise two pillars, flanking the entrance to the nave, and as Karel moves quietly behind the screen to lean against the nearest of them, he struggles to make sense of his own presence here. He’s been inside this church so many times, on Sundays and holy days, for the yearly anniversary Mass of his mother’s death and for his own boyhood sacraments, but it has felt, on these occasions, like nothing more than an echoing and all-too-orderly indoor auction house, filled only with the improbable hopes of those who sit and kneel within, fashioning of their own desperation a god whose intercessions they rely upon for help amidst all the hardships for which they somehow hold him faultless. Karel’s earliest recollection is that of his father’s words, the furious, adamant claim that there is always blame, always one upon whom it falls. When the skin is split, there is ever a whip or a stone or a fist or a knife just as there is always someone behind the lashing or throwing or punching or slashing. Karel’s eye throbs and his mouth stings, and when he presses a palm against the smooth, cool stone of the pillar and peers around at the congregation, he finds the chancel glimmering with candles, the altar wreathed in greenery but otherwise empty. Smoke curls in blue ringlets from the censor dangling by its chain against the back wall where, for as long as Karel can remember, overarched by red brick trellised in white mortar, the bloodied Christ has hung suffering.

  The singing stops, and there comes the gritty whisk ofshoe leather slid restlessly over old stone, the muted knocking of heavy missals returned to the hardwood book racks mounted on the backs of the pews. A few heads turn, and Karel sees that the Daltons are here, as are Lad Dvorak and the Waseks and the Kaspars, maybe two dozen others, all of them seated left of the aisle. On the right-hand side, there is only Edna Janek, her long hair dusted gray by time and the early loss of her husband, her gaze focused on the line of boys she’s brought into the world as they emerge now, arranged by age with Stan in front and Thom trailing, from the transept, their best trousers and suitcoats dry and clean but wrinkled, their necks cocked, their faces graced in various parts by smiles and injury. Karel leans back behind the pillar and touches his cheekbone, feels the slightest pressure of his fingers roll through the tender flesh and center itself into a sharp, concentrated point behind the hard sphere of his eye. He grits his teeth and pulls the swollen lid up and holds his breath against the pain, and when he sees the girls and their father emerge with Father Carew from the sacristy into the far side of the narthex, it’s as if he is watching them from some submerged vantage point beneath a murky surface of still creekwater.

  When he turns loose of his eyelid, his vision narrows again through one eye, and when Father Carew catches sight of him there, shivering and dripping rainwater, the expression on the priest’s face is one of confused sympathy, the look of a man who’s had his heart wrenched by the incomprehensible sight of a woman crumpled into some mournful posture, undone by tears of joy. The girls are unveiled, their long hair pulled back into braids embellished by tiny dianthus blossoms, their dark skin offset by dresses white and delicate as sunlit dogwood, their calves half-hidden by airy hems of scalloped lace. They are smiling at something their father has whispered to them, their faces blooming with some undisclosed joy and yet still demure and composed, all but absent of the sly pride they’d worn two days before when they’d climbed from the carriage on the farm-to-market road, beckoned by his will and his whistle. But as they near Karel, gathering behind the screen beyond the opposite column, his kneecaps prickle with a chill and the cords of muscle twitch in his warped neck. Father Carew leaves them, glancing at Karel through the corner of his eye while processing down the aisle toward the bridegrooms, but then Graciela turns to whisper something into her tallest sister’s ear, and Karel is pierced by the certainty of it—she’s wearing a bruise, a dark, upturned crescent fringed with blue beneath her left eye. Karel recalls the sweet pain of her mouth on his eye, and he’d swear his heart has fallen a hitch in his chest, that it’s dangling from some fraying wet thread in the cold and constricted insides of him. I ought to be able to return the favor, he thinks, whether she’d want me to or not. When he steps out into plain view, he returns his hat to his head and stands dripping rainwater until Villaseñor catches sight of him and shoulders hurriedly between his girls.

  From the nave, the music starts up again, signaling the arrival of the brides, and when the parishioners turn expectantly in their pews, what they see instead of the three virginal girls in white they expect to come in gracefully measured steps down the aisle is Karel Skala in his rain-soaked clothes, his hat on his head in the house of God, standing his ground against the approach of the girls’ well-dressed father. And then Villaseñor’s men rise from their pews at the front of the church, their hands hung awkwardly at their sides, the thick fingers working in the empty air, unaccustomed as they are to the lack of gunmetal.

  Karel glances toward thei
r approach, toward his brothers, who are standing frozen in their lock-kneed anticipation, and then he turns to Villaseñor, who is standing so near him that Karel can smell the clean, smoky warmth of his breath. “Who was it hit her?” Karel asks, nodding over the man’s shoulder toward Graciela.

  Villaseñor pushes his spectacles up high on the bridge of his nose, clearing his throat and righting his suitcoat on his shoulders by tugging at its hem while he studies this boy before him. When his men reach him, he brings them up short with a single hand held palm down at his side. Inside, the pews are alive with whispers, and Graciela has come to her father’s side, her face beautiful despite the bruise, her hair so dark against the feathery white bodice of her dress, her eyes urging him silent with their conspiratorial wideness.

  “Who struck you?” Karel asks.

  She shakes her head, and her father silences her with a look before stepping toward Karel and issuing him, with a hand behind his shoulder, toward the door and out of the congregants’ view. “Come,” he says, the promise of satisfied curiosity in the calm, low tone of his voice.

  Karel goes with him, his blood pulsing hot in the lid of his damaged eye, and Villaseñor’s men follow, affording enough space between themselves and their master for the discreet exchange of confidences. At the door, Karel shrugs the man’s hand and plants his feet, stealing glances at the girl, who remains in the aisle between the columns with her groom’s eyes and his brother’s equally upon her.

  “Don’t think you can go so easily unnoticed, boy,” Villaseñor says. “By day or night, it makes no difference. You’ve had all of her you’re going to have.”

  Karel’s astonishment at such straight talk clots fast into something he can’t swallow in the back of his throat, and the nervous resentment of a scolded boy gives rise to an angry trembling in his hands. “But you’ll let him have her, sure enough? Marry her off to a man what hits her?”

  Villaseñor smiles at such foolishness, pulls his spectacles from his face and produces a pressed white handkerchief from his breast pocket with which to wipe them, though they appear to Karel to be free of even the trace of a smudge or a fleck of dust. “Boy, if he’d struck her he’d be nursing worse wounds than what you and your father have laid on him. He’s mostly of a mind that all your talk last night was just that, only talk. I assured him that it was.”

  “I wouldn’t pay a pail of pig shit for what he thinks. I’m asking about her face.”

  “It’s a hard way to go in life without brothers. You’ll likely change your mind, and you might see to it that it’s not too late when you do.”

  “It’s too late already. You’ve seen well enough to that. You going to tell me who hit the girl, or do I have to ask her?”

  “Your father didn’t have to take my wager, boy. It wasn’t all my doing.”

  Karel stuffs his hands into his pockets and runs his tongue over his teeth as if he might taste the bitterness of his words before he speaks them. “You call me boy again, and your men are going to need their guns.”

  Villaseñor laughs without parting his lips, a half-swallowed dismissal that balls Karel’s hands into fists in his pockets. “Well, they aren’t far from them if they do. But I’ve seen you fight, and you don’t want to tangle with either one of these two men, much less the both of them. They may have some gray in their whiskers, but there’s nothing but black in their hearts. Still, I see your point. You’re more man than boy, Mister Skala, and I expect you’ll act like one. I’ll answer your question, and then can I expect you’ll take your leave?”

  “I ain’t much for weddings or church, either one, so I reckon that would suit me fine, long as you don’t mean to tell me that she fell in the night or ran into a doorjamb. She’s been hit, plain enough.”

  “Yes. Plainly she has. Plainly. And it was the doing of the only man who has the right to do it. The only man who ever will. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a wedding to attend to. I’ve got my guests to think about.”

  It takes a slow second to sink in, and when it does, Karel’s hands come fast out of his pockets. “You’re one rotten son of a bitch,” he says. “It ain’t no wonder your wife up and left every time some other man came sniffing around.”

  Villaseñor smoothes his fingers over his sideburns and shakes his head as if considering nothing more personal than the antics of some intractable, half-broke colt. Still Karel notices on the man’s face the first suggestion of his vulnerability, an involuntary twitch in the fleshy lower lid of his eye, and while Karel focuses in, trying to discern in the arrhythmic pulsing some predictable pattern, Villaseñor unbuttons his suitcoat and, with an exhalation more akin to a resigned sigh than to the breath of exertion, he doubles the boy over with a solid, grunting blow to the stomach.

  Felled and gasping, Karel slumps forward on his knees, his throat soured with the rise of bile, the stinging of sacramental incense ablaze in his vacant lungs. The man is standing before him leisurely, buttoning his coat, fishing the handkerchief from his pocket again and wiping his face while his men wrench Karel’s arms behind his back and bring him to his feet such that it feels like his limbs might tear loose of his shoulders at the joints. And then he’s swung toward the door, his face turned to protect his injured eye as the men use his body to push open the door, his forehead knocking against the seasoned oak with the same muted thud of the parishioners’ missals dropped into the backs of the pews. Outside there’s the cold, reviving bite of wind, the splattering of rain in the rutted and puddled road, the helpless fluttering in his chest as he’s turned loose with a heave toward the slick descent of the church steps. When he lands, his breath comes back to him all at once, and he takes hold of the railing, righting himself, surveying the torn knee of his trousers and the abraded palm of his hand. There’s a compacted, leaden weight in his gut, and he imagines that his heart, dense and still throbbing, has been jolted free of its frayed tether and has splashed sickly into his stomach so that it might be consumed by one of the very organs that it has failed with its frailty.

  From just inside the doorway, flanked by his men, Villaseñor throws Karel’s crumpled hat to the boy’s feet and then stands with his arms at his sides, palms up. Overhead, the clouds roll curdled between the horizons, and Karel can make no more sense of the man’s gesture than he could two days ago, though it seems now, as then, neither apology nor promise, neither benign nor threatening. He leans forward beneath the weather to pick up his hat, gestures with it at the man, and then sets the sopping thing on his head. “I’m betting it’s a lot more of her mother in her than you care to think,” he says. “She gets it in her mind to go, she’ll be gone for good.”

  Villaseñor whispers to his men, tilting his head and looking toward the interior of the church, into which they disperse. Turning back toward Karel, he smoothes his lapels and squares his coat again on his shoulders. On his face he wears the impatient disinterest of an undertaker at a late wake. The tick beneath his eye, too, is gone, shed with the mindless, deciduous ease of a single glinting fish scale cast toward the creekbottom by a meandering school. Before he closes the door and the bolt scrapes into its socket, he averts his eyes so that he appears to be looking over Karel’s shoulder, speaking to the storm or the Township Inn across the road or some other boy, one he expects might listen. “Boy,” he says, “I’d expect you’d have sworn off betting after last night. Besides which, I’ve heard all the stories, and you don’t know any more about my daughter’s mother than you do about your own.”

  THREE HOURS LATER, near on to two o’clock, Karel sits in his still-damp clothes near the blue crackling of the wood-burning stove at the end of the icehouse bar, tracing with his thumb a swath through the cool condensation that has fogged the side of his glass. Excepting him and the new barkeep, the place is empty. Bern Chytka has learned in short order to pull Karel a new pint before the foam of the previous draught slides to the bottom of the otherwise empty glass. And even more to Karel’s liking, he’s settled into silence and sits behin
d the bar reading the Gazette, keeping a distant vigil over his solitary customer. In the first ten minutes, he’d spoken often enough to keep Karel in his wet coat, to prove himself interested enough in his own reflection to keep the bar polished to a reflective sheen in which he could heed the wet-combed part in his dark hair. A young man who, due either to his pale, willowy physique or his townie temperament or both, Bern has chosen, even before taking a wife, a life spent tending the slurred needs of Dalton’s thirsty over the shin-deep frustrations of his family’s rice fields out east in El Campo. Karel knows this and more, cares to know none of it, but now there has grown a common comfort in the hot popping of hardwood in the stove and rustling of the newspaper and the bitter cool of pilsner fizzing in his throat. He wonders how it’s become so that, at fifteen, he can feel like he’s been in the world for an eternity, that he can watch this man behind the bar with the knowing amusement of an old man watching a boy spit between his teeth or stand with a thumb hitched into his trouser pocket, playing at an age the trials of which he can’t possibly fathom.

  He’s far from drunk, but he knows it will only be a matter of time, by damn, so when the swollen door groans open behind him, he shakes his head at the wavering nature of a fate that has rendered him half-orphaned and brotherless only to refuse him a few hours of quiet. He keeps his shoulders hunched forward and his eye on the white rise of bubbles through the amber beer, posturing himself against intrusion, but when Bern says, “Afternoon, there,” and the stool next to his scrapes back from the bar, Karel figures it’s no use to pretend he’s any longer alone. What he doesn’t expect, when he turns to bid some rain-idled farmer good afternoon, is to find sitting next to him the quiet, gray-haired woman who’d pulled him into the world.