Karel looked into the hard sunlight until his eyes watered, and then he shut them tight and thought of his own brother. He was but a handful of miles away, and his stable had caught fire in the night. If Carew had the story straight, if one of the children was bad off, Thom might be grieving the loss of more than the lumber and tack of his horsebarn. Karel kept his eyes closed and thought hard on it, but he didn’t feel a thing. They weren’t twins. Hell, they weren’t hardly anymore even brothers. Only one of them had ever known his mother; only one had suckled a stranger.
Karel turned and opened his eyes, looking the dead boy over and shaking his head. He leaned over the body, reached down and shut the boy’s eyes one at a time with his thumb, the slick, clammy skin of the eyelids no more human to the touch than would be two wilted, frostbitten leaves. He wouldn’t drag him to the truck. The boy may have been a thief. He may have been worse. Surely, now, he wasn’t any damned thing at all, but it hadn’t been even three full days since they’d sat together in Praha, listening to the same waltzes and polkas, licking beer froth from their upper lips and tapping their feet in time to the music. If Karel had found the boys yesterday, he might have broken their legs himself, but by his reckoning you couldn’t give the dead any more of what they deserved than they’d already gotten.
He planted his feet and kept his back straight as he squatted beside the body, sliding his arms beneath the thighs and shoulders, and when he came upright beneath the young man’s weight, the broken leg swung down with a sick grinding of bone and the boy’s boot heel spurred sharply against the side of Karel’s knee. “You little shit,” Karel said, catching his breath. “All of a sudden you got to have the last goddamn word, do you?” His eyes had come full with tears, and while he waited for his vision to clear, he bent his knees such that the boy was very nearly lying in his lap. He looked him over, noticing now what he had missed before: The blue lips were upturned faintly at the corners. Not a smile so much as the promise of one. “Go on ahead, but you start laughing and you can walk your own dead ass to the truck, you hear me?”
He frowned at his own foolishness, at the fact that he was talking to a dead man, making play threats to the only kind of person who can no longer fathom fear. And then something cracked wide inside him like some parched fissure that opened deep into the baked earth during drought season. His eyes had cleared, the pain in his knee just a twinge of memory, but now he was seeing his father, the blood dark at the corner of his mouth, his body sucking into the mud of the land he’d tried the whole of his adult life to work toward his own ends, his tobacco-stained lips whispering to his one remaining son, the one to whom the land would fall now that he had fallen, the son he couldn’t lose because he’d never quite had him to begin with.
Karel looked down at Joe’s body in his arms, bore its weight over the very same land where his father had fallen, and when he got to the truck, he lowered the dead boy carefully into the bed. He drove the body to the stable and laid it out on a narrow bed of hay bales against the nearest stall, and then he came back on foot for the horse. It would have saved time to ride the filly bareback up the drive to the homestead, but when Karel untied her and stroked her white blaze, he was still all those years back, staring down at his father, at a man who was talking nonsense, asking, unless the impossible could be done, to be left for dead, and Karel couldn’t set himself right for mounting an animal that had so recently carried a dying man toward this parcel of black soil where more than one had found his end on horseback.
ON THE NORTHERN HORIZON, beyond Shiner on the road toward Praha, white steam and black smoke rose together like the slow wind-borne ascension of a ghost and its shadow from behind the distant trees, and Karel kept an eye on it above the treeline as he drove toward his brother’s farm with all the lingering, sluggish reticence of a man beholden to a task that promised to increase neither his pride nor his property. In the truck, with lips pressed tightly enough together to flatten the butt of his cigarette, Karel let the ashes drop into his lap and kept his grip fast on the wheel while his mind took only occasional note of the road. In the last ten years, they’d come to him only rarely, these memories of his father, but once they dug into him they were as biting and stubborn as the needle-sharp tip of a mesquite thorn embedded and broken off beneath the skin.
He and his father had fallen, in the gray days after Karel’s brothers left, into a restless but silent pattern of parallel work. The rain came on in taunting waves, waning of a morning only to return before the bobwhite cocks began their melodic, eventide beckoning. During the day, rain or no, his father worked the horses to a useless, steaming fatigue before the plow while Karel tended to the other wintertime needs of the farm—mending fences and setting out bales of hay for the livestock; waking early to sling feed and gather eggs; milking the dairy cow and breaking, when it froze overnight, the skin of ice that formed over the surface of the cattletank. In the early afternoon, he’d come inside to find the cold remnants of his father’s lunch on the table, and while he ate with his boots on he’d make a mental list of the chores that remained for him. The laundry, which had to be hung from makeshift lines in the hayloft to dry. The seasoned firewood he had to split and stack to dry in the smokehouse for a day or two before it could be piled into the bins beside the house’s two stoves. After lunch he’d move through the day with the same halting, nearly imperceptible progress of the enfeebled sun descending through the begrudging mass of clouds toward the murk of the horizon.
When it was all done, before his father stabled the spent horses, Karel would take a dollar or two from the roll of petty cash his father kept stashed in a tobacco pouch at the bottom of the old milk can set just inside the kitchen door. With a link of smoked sausage or a hunk of bread folded around cold ham or bacon in his coat pocket, he’d make out on foot toward the icehouse in town. Since the wedding, his brothers had been kept busy scouting the surrounding county with their father-in-law for farms they could buy out and, Karel imagined, come nightfall, in the warm beds they shared with their wives at the inn, and he took a resigned, if uneasy, comfort in the knowledge that he wouldn’t find them about town after dark. At the saloon, he’d sit apart from the other locals and spend his money quietly, pint by pint, hoping that he’d get home to find the stable lantern out, his father’s boots outside the door, and his mash jug corked in the kitchen.
More and more, as the rain kept up and the days began to bleed one into another, this would prove a fruitless hope. His father, after working the animals through all the sunlit hours, had taken to drinking whiskey by twilight and riding Whiskey by night, whipping the gelding and running him hard out near the creek in the moonless rainfall, throwing muddy turf, racing the animal against some phantom rival across the flooded black stretch of pasture, around the leafless stand of moss-draped oaks, and back between the drenched clods of ash in the fire pits toward the fenceline where, absent the agitations of tethered horses, the taut barbed wire quivered in the breeze as if charged by some cold electricity generated by unspoken compunction alone.
Now, on the road between the shimmering, sun-struck fencing, Karel shivered in the cab of the truck. He kept the window cracked despite the cold, and cigarette smoke caught the draught and threaded its way out the window in a fine, unwavering line of white. He was going to see his brother, to see Graciela, to find there some charred remnant of stable and family both. There was a dead boy in his own horsebarn, and in the stall where Whiskey had once found relief from his harnesswork, sleeping and breathing heavily, sheltered from the weather, waking only to nuzzle his bucket of dry oats and blink his eyes slowly before returning to sleep—there, now, Graciela’s black filly stood, tired and curried, keeping the company of Karel’s sad, underused team of draught horses. It was all the truth of the present, but he had let his awareness of it slouch back into the recesses of his mind the way the guilt stricken, in time, fold their sins into the gray creases of their consciousness, into the musty and neglected shadows of all that is not qui
te forgotten.
As if supplanted by the present, then, comes a night disinterred from those same rarely robbed graves of memory, and in the short drive from his farm to Thom’s, Karel considered neither the bright sky nor the red-tailed hawk riding thermals before funneling down toward some promise of prey to the west nor the face of the boy he’d met only once before carrying his corpse. Instead, there is hard, dark night. There is rain, no longer a downpour, but a sheeting of mist that overlays the landscape in a black, lacy haze, that drips from the lantern he holds in his half-numb hand. There is the cattlegate, swung open and sagging earthward on its worn hinges, the sound of some dull and distant locomotion at work beneath the hissing of the weather. Karel stands with his hat pulled down low on his brow, steadying himself with a hip on the fencepost while he unbuttons his trousers and relieves himself after a dollar’s worth of drinking, his head muddled with pilsner, his mouth dry despite the rain, his injured eye yet blue beneath the bottom lid but no longer swollen or tender to the touch.
He’s come home to find the stable lantern lit, the back door of the house cracked open, his father’s jug uncorked beside an all-but-empty jelly jar on the stable workbench. And now his father, he knows, is out here somewhere on the horse he promised would never again race. Refastening his trousers, Karel looks up to find horse and rider emerging from a night unadorned by moonlight, the animal steaming toward him, churning water up in a wild confusion of spray to meet in midair the persistent rainfall. His father is red-faced and beaming and unsteady in the saddle, his hat brim wilted and streaming, one cheek bulging so with tobacco that he appears to have come directly from some visit to the town dentist gone wrong. When he brings the horse up short before the fence and speaks, Karel can’t tell if it’s his own drunkenness or his father’s that thickens the words with such a gauzy slur.
The horse blows, a gluey froth slung from its mouth, before sidestepping, lurching beneath the weight of days and nights both at this crazed man’s mercy. Vaclav reins the animal around and sits there in the yellow haze of rain and the halo of the lantern’s flame, his labored breath smoking as he digs into his coat pocket for his watch, which he tents with a cupped hand before springing it open. “Holy hell,” he shouts, turning the illegible face toward Karel. “I should’ve run the thing myself, boy. Even at my age, and in the goddamn slop, too, I can outrun your scrawny ass.”
There comes, despite the cold, a hot, crawling wash of blood along the skin of Karel’s throat, and he tilts his head the easy way, with the curvature of his neck, and opens his parched mouth to the falling rain. He swallows, his fingers clenching and relaxing around the lantern handle, prickling with cold as the feeling returns to them. “It must be some awful cocksure whiskey you’re drinking. You couldn’t outrace even Stan, and his nuts turn to mush just thinking about running a horse full out.”
His father comes off the horse so fast that Karel startles, throwing his free hand up to protect his healing eye while the lantern swings from its handle, casting the staggering man’s face and the standing water at his feet in oscillations of jaundiced light and shadow. Vaclav spits tobacco juice and swipes the rain from his face, on which furrowed disgust has displaced the wide flush of pride. “Hell, boy, of course I can’t. And neither can you. Ain’t no outracing a goddamn ghost. But you look flesh and blood enough.” Balling the reins in his fist, he thumps his knuckles into Karel’s chest and reaches for the lantern. “Go on ahead then and make me a liar. Show me how fast you are. You sure as shit didn’t show nobody nothing the other night.”
Now, in his truck and less than a half mile from his brother’s spread, Karel remembered little about his own ride that night other than that he’d been prideful enough to take his father’s bait. There had come an eagerness, too, to feel the animal once more beneath him, to ride him again while his father was drunk enough to have either forgotten or neglected his promise. And while Karel eased up on the truck’s throttle, stretching the short drive even farther, he saw himself handing the lantern to his father, surrendering the only light to be found on the quarter section of flooded meadow. In the memory, the rain is constant, coming down in a mist so fine that the individual drops prove indistinguishable one from the others. Karel climbs, as he has so many off-kilter nights, into the saddle while his father’s eyes flash in the oily flickering like twin filaments sunk deep in the sockets of some otherwise insensible skull. Vaclav checks his watch, gives his son the signal, and Karel nudges the horse, feeling the trace of extra give in the overworked gelding’s joints but coaxing him forward nonetheless, crouching forward and low over the shoulders of an animal that makes clear, with a violent, steaming snort and the rearward slant of its ears, that it has lost all of the will but none of the instinct to run.
After he circles the trees in a night so absent of animal sounds amidst the sheeting rainfall, he slaps the horse with his wet hat on the homebound stretch, then he stands lock-kneed in the stirrups and watches his illuminated father as the horse circles, favoring now its left front leg, in a half-hobbled, elliptical pattern like some scorched and humbled planet coming timidly round its sun.
When they stop, Karel puts his drenched hat back on his head and strokes the long roan slope of Whiskey’s neck while Vaclav lurches forward, the lantern swinging erratically and the watch held out. “The hell’d you even mount the horse for if you didn’t aim to run it? You ain’t even broke four minutes, and I done that twice tonight already. Done it twice each night this week.”
Karel takes the watch and holds it close so he can see the second hand spinning in an orbit of its own beneath the timepiece’s primary face, and here he realizes the pointlessness of his father’s challenge. Swinging from the saddle, he says, “It’s no way for me to tell if I did or didn’t, so we might as well just say you won and stable the horse. It’s something wrong with his leg, anyway.”
Vaclav spits and frowns and pushes his hat down low, reaching for the reins. “Horseshit,” he says, handing over the lantern. “If I say you didn’t, boy, then you didn’t. And I don’t care if the animal’s ground down to stubs, I’ll be damned if I ain’t going to prove to you just how slow you are. Just wait until I’m set and tell me when.”
Once his old man heaves his weight up into the saddle, Karel nods the signal and shields his face against the splattering of mud slung back at him. The horse jolts forward and then falters, and when Vaclav prods him with two heels thrown back at once, Karel stands in the muck and feels the numbness creep back into his hands. It looks shameful, his father spurring the horse this way, with his knees slack and his backside heavy in the saddle, throwing his feet backward like some moving-picture cowboy gaining fast on some moving-picture Indian so that he can pretend to shoot him with his shiny pretend gun. Karel sloshes his boots around in the standing water, and after a few minutes he holds the lantern high with an extended arm, searching the impervious distance for the emergence of the man for whom he feels a cold flash of embarrassment. He checks the watch, shielding it from the rain, and when five minutes have passed, he snaps it shut, drops it back into his pocket and makes off across the pasture toward the circle of oaks from which pain so often comes unforeseen.
It takes him longer than he would have thought to find them. He had expected to come upon his father drunkenly sulking and dismounted, leading a half-lame horse through the standing black water, the bitterness of his disappointment narrowing his eyes, but when Karel makes it all the way out to the stand of trees without a sign of them, he thinks at first his father has outwitted him once again, that the old man has loped the animal out to the far fenceline and ridden around the perimeter of the pasture in the dark until he’s made it back to the stable, leaving Karel out here to drip and shiver in the cold and keep time for a race that was never intended to be run in full. He imagines his father grinning while he stables the horse, chuckling while he warms his hands in front of the kitchen stove and splashes mash from a new jug into the makeshift glass of his jelly jar.
&
nbsp; Karel trudges through the mud and the drowning brown grass, holding his lantern out so that he feels the weight of the thing in his shoulder as he circles the stand of oaks. Just audible beneath the rainfall, twigs snap and rattle down through the brittle tree branches, landing in the brushwood below. The red eyes and ghostly mask of a mother opossum peer from within a high red oak hollow at the fringe of the treeline. The rain comes down heavier, and his boots suck ankle deep with each step until, when the light finds the twitching muscled haunches of the crippled horse, Karel stops and feels himself sinking beneath his own weight as if the earth itself were consuming him, little by little. Whiskey lies, slick with mud, on his side, working his rear legs periodically in frantic attempts to render himself upright, and Karel can see the front legs twisted and splayed, one of them clearly broken through above the pastern, a swath of disturbed earth trenching out from beyond the reaches of the lantern such that it appears the horse has dragged himself out of the darkness toward the feeble comfort of radiating light. Karel moves with caution around the horse’s rear legs, circling the animal until he can squat, sitting on his soaked boot heels, near its head and run a hand over its neck while he peers into the dark where he knows his father must be. The horse exhales with a shudder, its breath coming in labored bursts of steam, the hollow music of the rain striking its hide like that of a wet-skinned drum played only with the fingertips of children. Karel has never thought of his love for the horse, has never thought of what he felt for the animal as love, and even now he isn’t sure that’s the word he would choose. But it is certainly something akin to affection, something as fluttering and warm as the fine quivering of the horse’s musculature now at work beneath its damp hide. The trouble with animals, with caring for beasts, is that, if you do it very long at all, you have to witness the end of something you’ve seen born. Karel curses under his breath. He thinks of the rifle leaning by the kitchen door, of the long walk through the rain and mud he’ll have to take so that, when he returns, he can do so equipped for a loud and necessary and violent kindness.
The Wake of Forgiveness Page 24