“Little early for drinking, ain’t it?” she says, nodding at his glass.
“No use putting it off,” Karel says. “It’s late enough somewhere.”
Bern has folded his paper and taken hold of his dear bar rag and come with a relieved smile over to a customer he must assume might like to converse. “We don’t stock cider, ma’am,” he says. “We don’t get many women in here. There’s some blackberry wine.”
She smiles, winking at Karel before she looks up at the new barkeep and extends her hand. “I’m Edna Janek,” she says.
“My pleasure. Bern Chytka.”
“Well, Bern, if it ain’t considered proper for women to drink beer where you come from, then you might just as well start making yourself accustomed to it now.”
Bern tucks his rag into the waist of his trousers and his ears flush red beneath his overtended hair. “Where I come from,” he says, “it’s a woman’s privilege to have whatever pleases her.”
While Bern pulls her a beer, Edna settles into her seat and works her fingers through the wet tangles of her hair. Karel reckons he’s seen her in town or up county a couple times every month of his life without ever, excepting the occasional pleasantries at Sunday Mass, speaking more than a few words to her. She smells, always, airy and clean, faintly of jasmine and talcum, like a woman half her age and still casting her charms in search of a husband, and now, when she takes a sip of her beer and perches her chin in her hand as if she’d been summoned to meet him here but hasn’t yet learned the purpose, Karel clears his throat and widens his eyes at her in a resigned invitation.
“That’s a considerable shiner you’ve got there,” she says.
“I’ve considered it some,” he says.
She smiles and her eyes soften, little wrinkles pleating the corners of her mouth. “My boys say those heifers your father sold them last spring paid for themselves already.”
“Yes, ma’am. Herefords is good enough stock. Breed them with that Angus bull of theirs and they’ll have some nice Black Baldies. Stout enough, and less of a handful than most when it comes time to put them through the chute.”
“Well, they claim they like them.”
Karel nods and takes a pull of his beer. “Don’t know why they sold off them longhorns. It was a nice herd their father had.”
Edna spins her glass on the bar, and to Karel it seems an orchestrated act, the feigned idle habit of a woman who has none. “Say it takes too long to bring them to weight. And that’s true enough, I guess, but it don’t take too much thinking to reckon it was hard for them, working their daddy’s cows.”
“It’s hard working any cows,” Karel says, and when he finishes his beer, Bern is already setting a new glass down in front of him. Karel nods his thanks, feels the woman’s black eyes on him, and the barkeep retreats to his newspaper. “Keeps raining this way, it might could float all the livestock clear out of the county.”
She tilts her head such that Karel thinks at first she’s paying mind to the rainfall on the roof, but then he realizes that she’s mirroring the angle of his own bent neck, that she’s doing what she must to level her eyes on his. And then her hand is on him, holding his forearm, a chapped, working woman’s hand with the pale-veined traces of her age strung beneath the skin like rivers on some sunbleached map. She wears, still, her wedding band, and it squeezes a half-size too tight into the flesh of her finger. “I spoke to Father after the wedding, at the reception at the Township. He wanted me to give you his apologies if I came to see you, said it would have been his druthers to have you there, to have all four of you there. And it would have been for me, too. I tended all four of your births, and he baptized the lot of you. It was something lacking without you there.”
Karel puts a thumb to the corner of his eye. Almost numb. The beer is doing its work on him, and he suspects that, after so long on this stool, the floor will tilt beneath his feet when finally he stands. He’d rather not be talking, sure enough. He’d rather sit and drink and draw mindless lines in the frost on his glass, run through his remaining money and drink until dusk and then stumble home through the rain and slop to a father who’s spent himself aimlessly in the fields and gone early to snore alone in his bed. Still, there is a comfort in Edna’s touch, and Karel guesses there hasn’t been a time since he was weaned that he’s had occasion to have a woman’s hands on him two days running. He wishes his sleeves were rolled up.
“Your father at home? He’s going to need a lot of help, Karel. Especially now.”
“He’s home. Plowing water, last I saw him.”
She brushes a damp strand of hair from the corner of her mouth. “I wish you’d have seen him when your mother was still alive. Wish you’d seen them together. He wore a smile you couldn’t scour from his face with hog bristles. At the parish dances, he wouldn’t give her a rest, had her on her feet for every polka and waltz. Even in church, in the pews, he’d have his arm around her shoulders. She was a handsome woman, your mother. All that pretty blond hair. You’ve seen pictures.”
“No, ma’am,” Karel says, pushing back his stool. “Not in a long time, I haven’t.”
A Reaping of Smoke and Water
DECEMBER 1924
THE WIND HAD broken before daylight with an abrupt and violent certainty. Karel had fallen asleep to the labored groans of the weather raking over the rooftop and rattling through the bare branches of the pear trees out back in the grove, and then, an hour before dawn, he’d come upright in bed when, all at once, the world was beset by silence and stood hushed and bright, coddled by moonlight. He rose, his back and neck stiff from all the jostling of the previous day spent in the truck, and he pulled back the quilt and went gingerly over the cold hardwoods, his feet bare and his long drawers sagging at the seat, to peer out the back window toward the stable. He knew before parting the curtains that there would be no vehicle other than his own parked out there in the drive, no trailer, no twins come to make amends for their time away from the farm and the animals they’d promised to tend. He’d been had, of that he was certain, and without the plaintive wind and the high-pitched voices of children, the house had fallen too quiet even for the comfort of a man who breathed always a little easier when left to his lonesome. He’d wasted a day, and there was no telling how much business he’d lost around the county, and now his pursuit of the Knedliks would have to wait. He’d get dressed and make a pot of coffee. Fry some eggs and potatoes. He’d fill his cigarette case and tend to the livestock and wrap a nice, fatty hunk of ham in paper for the widow Vrana, and then he’d go collect his family and bring them home.
If those boys hadn’t shown up by then, he’d hunt them down and make them wish to hell they had.
After breakfast, when the topmost arc of the sun neared the treeline on the easternmost fringe of the Skala property, foretelling its return with a faint flourish swept up in pink streaks from the horizon, Karel straightened his back from his work slinging feed to the chickens and turned toward the sound of an approaching motor. By the time Karel dumped the last of the feed and made it back around the barn with the empty pail swinging in his hands, Father Carew was unfolding his tenuous, ancient body from behind the wheel of his Ford. At better than eighty, the priest had a full head of hair, his brows lush, overgrown tangles that, had he found an outdoor occasion to stretch himself onto his back during the previous day’s gusts, would have made for his eyes more than adequate windbreaks. In all other ways, he was an old man, one who hunched and shuffled beneath the mass of his own prolonged history, and for the last year or so it had surprised Karel each time he saw him about in town and, upon doing so, realized that the man was, yes, still very much above ground. Karel tossed the empty pail clanging into the barn and tipped his hat. Carew came slack and sliding his feet up the gravel drive, buttoning his coat with palsied hands and meeting Karel’s eyes with a mournful tightening of the lips that had in it, to Karel’s thinking, both sadness and suspicion.
“Morning, Father. You’re about early
.”
Carew took a handkerchief from his trousers and hacked wetly into it. “Not early enough, it would seem,” he said, studying the product of his cough in the handkerchief before folding it back into his pocket and making the sign of the cross. “There’s a dead boy on your property, over where the road crosses the creek.”
Karel massaged the curvature of his neck with a thumb and narrowed his eyes. “God bless. Who is it?”
“I don’t recognize him. You ought to get yourself a telephone, Karel.”
“A telephone? They making them now so you can call a dead man and ask his name?”
“He’s just a boy, Skala. There’s a black filly with him. Looks like one of your brother’s animals. If you had a phone, Thom might have called you same as he did me. His stable burned last night. His girl is hurt, bad I think. I was on my way out there when I drove up on the horse wandering just this side of your fenceline near the road. The boy’s facedown in your creek.”
Karel squinted into the glare of dawn, his ribs chilled of a sudden so that it felt to him like his bones had been left to soak overnight in the cistern. He pulled his cigarettes and matches from his coat pocket, offering one to the priest, who shook him off. Striking the match, Karel looked to the north where, faint but unmistakable, dark smoke haloed with white steam hung above the horizon. He took a pull on his cigarette, saw the girl as she’d been all those years back, the dark hair pasted to her chest and the hips slid each in turn from her pants, the little moles up high above her breasts. He exhaled smoke, which rose white and pluming in the aimless winter air. “Which girl?” he asked. “Graciela? His wife?”
The priest sucked on his teeth and shook his head, his eyes creased with curiosity at the corners. “His little girl,” he said. “The third child, I believe.”
The coldness ran out of Karel, and he took another deep drag on his cigarette, his relief rising within him unburdened for a moment before buckling beneath the dense compression of guilt that found him recalling the recent occasion on which he’d seen the girls following their mother outside the mercantile in Shiner, each of the older two in her store-bought gingham and pigtails, the baby perched on the still-alluring swell of her mother’s hip. Over the years, when a chance meeting in town with one of his brothers or their wives occasioned it, Karel had taken to crossing the street, keeping his distance, avoiding even the exchange of feigned pleasantries. There had been times, sure enough, when he’d turned the corner and found himself face-to-face with one of them, but last week there had been nothing unavoidable about their meeting. He’d seen her a full block away, and something about the baby perched on Graciela’s hip and her girls all decked out in town made it seem to Karel all the more spineless to dodge something so simple as a conversation. Still, when she smiled at him without showing her teeth, a cautious sadness on her lips, something bitter rose in his throat such that, when he removed his hat, he had to swallow when he would have preferred to spit. “Quite a little stable full of fillies you and Thom got there,” he said, returning his hat to his head and reaching for his cigarettes.
Now the smile washed from her face altogether. The two older girls stood at her side, each reaching for their mother’s free hand, and Graciela worked her fingers such that one could have the pinkie, the other the thumb. Even now, Karel thought, there’s not enough of her to go around. “Is it all still about horses with you, Karel? I heard you sold all your best stock years ago.”
“Wasn’t anything but geldings left to sell,” he said. “Anyway, horse farming didn’t suit me. Ain’t nothing ever come out of a stable but disappointment.”
She nodded while he lit his cigarette, and Karel could see in the dark widening of her eyes that it was a nod of understanding, not agreement. “Well,” she said, “it’s easy to expect too much, I suppose, out of any animal.”
“Expect much of anything with some and it’s likely to be too much.”
“Too much for the animal, Karel? Or for the one with all the expectations?”
Before she’d guided her children around him and walked down the street, she’d watched him furrow his brow, and she’d laughed with such kindness that he’d wanted to laugh with her. It had been so long, so damned long ago. All of it. And still he couldn’t bring himself to cheapen it with a smile.
Even now, when Father Carew spoke of her family, he saw her. Not Thom. Not her father. Not the children. He saw her, felt her long hair falling over him. He couldn’t help himself, and then he remembered the nameless boy he’d seen out hunting, working downwind with his nameless father in that pasture up north of Shiner. He saw his own son, just hours in the world, sleeping and sucking quietly at the memory of his mother’s breast. “Jesus,” he said.
The priest frowned. “Yes. May He help us. I need to go. There could be need of a sacrament. Can you tend to the horse and the body?”
“Better than they can tend to each other, I expect. Tell Thom I’ll be there in an hour. I show up unannounced, it’s liable to surprise him more than a stable fire. I was heading up to fetch Sophie and the kids in Praha. I’ll stop in on the way.”
HE FOUND THE filly nibbling at the fringe of yellow grass along the farm-to-market road just north of the creek’s southern fork. Karel set the brake and left the truck idling in the drive while he fetched the rope and harness from the bed and cleared his throat, spitting into the earth that he owned outright. The sun was up in full now, its proud rays striking brightly against the gravel of the drive Karel had so improved since the farm fell entirely to him, and the horse looked up and whinnied when it took note of his arrival, her slender head bobbing in little, anticipatory nods. From her nostrils came punctuated bursts of steam. Karel held a cigarette between his lips, the smoke coming up thin and curling like that which routinely rose from the snuffed altar candles of St. Jude’s after Mass. Karel buttoned his coat, left the door of the truck open. He slid his boots as he made his way to open the gate, comforted, as he always was, by the feel and sound of gravel crunching underfoot. With the passing of the previous day’s wind had come a distillation of the county’s cold-weather fragrances, the sweetness of burning oak from wood-stoves given edge by the mesquite of the smokehouses, all of it overlaid by the cool black newness of the awaiting soil, the sappy hints of sweet gum and pine.
After swinging open the gate, Karel surveyed the horse. She was a flawless, glossy black except for her blaze and socks, and there was no mistaking her owner. She worked her jaw cross-hinged against a mouthful of winter grass, and Karel’s eyes followed a trail of bent, blood-painted weeds down to the sick sprawl of the body in the slough on the soft bank where water trickled and gurgled timeless secrets intelligible to the creekbed stones alone. He let the cigarette drop from his mouth and steadied the animal with a hand smoothed down her neck, whispering to her as he did. “Who the hell was it brought you here, girl?”
She snorted as if in answer, and Karel coaxed her into the harness and roped her up short to the corner fencepost. It was an inconsiderate job of horse-tying, a lead too stingy to allow for easy grazing, a half-assed knot, and Karel knew that, had he found her this way, he’d have thought the job done by some prideless, townie fool, by a man who meant to return either directly or never, and who, either way, couldn’t be bothered to feel the same way Karel usually did about the importance of doing even the simple, workaday things right.
Down at the water’s edge, squirrels were at work in the high branches of the pine and water oak, and when Karel approached the body, a pair of mourning doves launched themselves loudly up and across the creek, flashing the white fringes of their wings in the sunlight as they went. One of the dead boy’s legs called to mind a thick and dangling storm-sheared bough. It was broken through such that the trousers creased unnaturally, folding over on themselves at mid-shin, the calf and muddy boot hanging at a tortured angle as if by only the fabric of the pant leg itself. The boy’s face was in the creek, the shoulders of his coat darkened with water. It made Karel’s stomach sour
just to look at it, and he squatted down, picked up a fallen twig and, perching himself on his boot heels, drew a row of imperfect little circles in the wet silt as he considered whether to drag the body or carry it. It was one of the Knedliks, sure enough. From the looks of the broken leg, it was held together by muscle and skin alone, so Karel guessed he’d best lug the boy from under the arms or lift him like some sleeping, overgrown child from bed.
Either way, he’d have to get him out of the water and turn him over. There’d either be a scar on the boy’s face or there wouldn’t be, and Karel figured he’d know soon enough how at least half of their story had ended. Karel came back to his feet with the groan of a much older man, and when he bent over the boy, flipping his coattail up to find that, thankfully, the little son of a bitch at least had the common courtesy to be wearing a belt, he took hold of the leather. The boy wasn’t much heavier than a week-old bull calf, and Karel pulled him up through the mud and into the weeds before flipping him onto his back with a grunt.
It was the quiet one, Joe, and Karel stared down at the boy, who stared blindly into the brightening sky. His lips were the chapped, peeling blue of a molting water snake, lips that Karel realized now he’d never heard utter a word, and something about this new certainty prompted Karel to turn, surveying the pastureland behind him for any sign of the boy’s brother. Recalling the way the twins had stood together in the moonlight, their loose-jointed confidence and the easy allegiance of those who’d known each other even before they’d drawn breath in the world, Karel couldn’t imagine one wandering too far from the other’s sight. It would have taken something violent and unforeseen to wreck a leg that way, something even more so to allow for the dislocation of these brothers one from the other. Out two hundred yards to the north, just this side of the nearest hedgerow, a dozen head of Karel’s herd stood grazing around two broken bales, switching their tails and paying no heed whatsoever to the mindless, maternal circling of the jackass. Far behind them, smoke churned in the sky like storm clouds. If Raymond was yet around, he was well hidden, but Karel reckoned it was unlikely. He’d heard stories about twins, about the twinge of fear or pain that might vex one if the other, no matter the distance between them, had stumbled into some trouble.
The Wake of Forgiveness Page 23