Once, so long ago now that Karel had all but surrendered it to the whitewash of forgetting, he had come first to the breakfast table while his brothers readied themselves for school. He must have been four, no more than five, and his father sat palming his cup of coffee, his face running with sweat so that, even at so young an age, Karel knew the man had been out already at his chores, doing what men do before dawn, milking the cows and moving the cattle, startling the hens from their eggs. On the table, dripping clots onto a doily knit by his mother or her mother, either one, sat a congealed pot of gray oats, an oily slick of butter glazed over the surface. Not a week before, Karel’s brothers had taught him the game of spoon, and now, to be sure that the final card didn’t catch him empty handed, he’d taken to carrying his supper spoon with him everywhere in the bib pocket of his overalls, proudly washing it after meals that called for its use. When he climbed into his chair, he pulled it from its appointed place and set it beside his bowl. His father, who normally rushed through meals and savored his work the way most men did the opposite, sat for a long while before he dished the breakfast into Karel’s bowl. Outside, so loud that Karel mistook the windows for open, the crows had begun their shrill, seasonal bickering over the loose kernels of maize left behind after the recent harvest.
“Ain’t no reason for them to be so loud, is it, Pop?”
Vaclav didn’t startle. Karel never could remember the man startled, but he turned that morning with a look of some stricken, warmed-over fondness in his bloodshot eyes, with an expression too bare and full of remembrance to have been meant for sharing. He dipped into the oats and scooped a second spoonful into his youngest’s bowl. “They don’t need a reason,” he said, scraping his chair back on the hardwoods so he could pull his pouch of tobacco from his trouser pocket. “It’s things aplenty like that, you’ll see. It’s some women who like the sound of birds raising Cain before even the sun’s had enough coffee to top the trees. It ain’t no reason for that, either, but that don’t make it a bad thing.”
Now, after the doves had vanished into the distant treeline to the east, Stan hitched his trousers up again and stepped forward. “Was good of your wife to come, Karel,” he said, “so near on the heels of her labor. She’s a fine woman. It’s nobody with any sense doesn’t like her. Good of the Novotny woman to bring her, and to bring the medicine Doc needed from the druggist in Praha.”
It was cold out, sure enough, but now Karel realized how flushed he’d become standing sandwiched, as he now felt, between his recollections of the past and the diminishing flames of the stable fire. Still, he had the feeling that he needed to pull his coat more tightly across his chest, button the topmost buttons where the air was finding its way to the hollow of his throat. Fever. That’s what it resembled, the feeling of being baked and chilled what all at the same time. A shiver ran in ripples down his sides from his shoulders, and he recalled the other night in the stable, the way Elizka’s skin was at once covered with chill bumps and hot against his own. He wanted a cigarette, but his mouth was parched, his tongue so dry, and still he knew his brother was awaiting some acknowledgment of his compliment. He wanted to ask how it was that Stan knew Sophie beyond passing, how it was that any of them might. He wanted to ask them if they’d ever, any of them, seen a calf stone dead and staring dumb eyed at the sky without having put a single hoof to the earth. He wanted to know if any of them could recall their mother ever speaking kindly of blackbirds, but he’d learned well enough that there were questions that revealed too much, that sometimes a question showed only that you knew less than you should. “I hadn’t realized she was here. I’d aimed to go fetch her before noontime. Go fetch all of them.”
“She saved you a trip, then. She’s in the house. The kids, too. It’s a good looking boy,” Stan said. “The baby, I mean.”
Searching his older brother’s eyes, Karel found only forthrightness and fatigue, a look too worn down by hard work and early rising to be anything other than earnest. “I appreciate that. We’re giving serious thought to keeping him.”
Eddie smiled, lifted his bottle in a mock cheer, but before he could put it to his lips, as if in afterthought, he turned to Thom, whose pale eyes glinted in the wet corners where the sunlight found the slightest upwelling of tears. “I think you should,” Thom said. “We might all ought to keep what’s ours.”
Karel nodded, and then he turned with his brothers to watch what was left of the fire consume what was left of the fallen stable. There was some burn left in it, but it would dwindle before nightfall, and then there’d be nothing left but the hard work it would take to raise another horsebarn in its place. For now, the four brothers stood there, shoulder to shoulder, as they had on that cold day so many years ago after putting their father in the waterlogged ground, as they had when the photographer Lad Dvorak had alerted to the occasion fetched his fancy equipment from his carriage and urged them to line up, oldest to youngest, to stand closer—a little bit closer . . . that’s some fine fellows . . . and straighten up now, boys . . . What’s with the heads leaned so? . . . You missing your pillows already this morning or . . . Oh, heavens . . . of course . . . I beg your pardon—until Karel could feel the pressed sleeve of his suitcoat touching Eduard’s as they waited for the townie with his unscuffed boots to take the photograph, each of them bristling in his church clothes at the uneasy proximity to what he had surrendered out of pride and now refused, out of the same, to reclaim.
With his arms crossed over his chest, Karel watched the low flames lick up from the embers, shook his head at the waste of it all, at all that good, solid wood reduced to ash, at the blackened, twisted remains of animals shrunken sickly there in the coals. And then his brothers were turning, shifting their attention from the fire, and when he followed their gaze he found the slow approach of men in suitcoats skirting the burning stable, walking in Karel’s boot prints as if tracking him across whorish terrain. Villaseñor and his men, the latter pair with their shining rifles held loosely across their thick, squat bodies as if they’d been fastened there at birth and had been worn, over the slow course of years that had grayed their sideburns and slowed their steps, slack as the muscles of their shoulders and wan as the skin slung beneath their eyes. As for their master, he led their procession with his spectacles pushed up high on the bridge of his nose, his face shadowed by his dark hat, his suitcoat buttoned and black and unworried as surface water on a still, moonless night. With the wet plug of a cigar planted in the corner of his mouth, he came forward with the smoothly assured gait of a man who’d seen enough trouble to have convinced himself, long ago, that walking toward it was no more taxing than was walking away.
Eddie corked his bottle, hurrying it into his coat pocket while Stan busied himself tucking his shirttail into his pants, and it was then that Karel saw what he hadn’t once considered before, that while his brothers had found a way clear of their father, it had led them to this: to farms purchased for them with another man’s wealth, to wives given to them only for walking away from what remained of the family into which they’d been born, to lives and livelihoods beholden to a man no more yielding or forgiving than their father had been. It must have been, Karel realized, for them, like waking, morning after morning, from colorful dreams of manhood to find that they were still, all of them, playing with sticks down in the grassy shadows on the bank of the creek.
When Villaseñor came through the gate and the brothers turned to face him, he unbuttoned his coat while his men settled in behind him, their eyes serious and slow to blink, unlit by the lively mischief Karel had come to expect. Then Villaseñor pulled the cigar from his mouth and held it at his side, his mouth working as if accustoming itself to this flavorless new absence. “How considerate of you to come calling, Karel. There must be so much you’d like to explain to my son-in-law here. That or to Sheriff Munson, one.”
Karel stole a look at Thom, whose face registered none of the nervousness that his fingers, moving idly at his side, made plain. “There’s
a mess of things I’d like to explain that I can’t,” Karel said. “I told you yesterday, I hired those boys to deliver some barrels and watch after my livestock. Whatever the hell else got into them, or why it did, I can’t say.”
Villaseñor waved the cigar beneath his nose and nestled it back between his lips. Then he removed his hat and slicked a hand through the silver sheen of his well-oiled hair. Before he took his matches from his coat pocket, one eye narrowed in disgust and he extended his hat toward Thom. “Do you suppose you can manage to hold on to this for a time without dropping it?” he asked.
Now Karel noted Thom’s fingers curling into fists but held tight at his sides, saw, as he had the night after the race, when Thom had taken his father’s first blow rather than hold his tongue, all the hot life at work beneath his icy expression. “I suppose you might could just as easily put the damn thing back on your gray head, is what I suppose,” Thom said, his voice steady and controlled, quiet but honed as if by a whetstone.
Villaseñor smiled and played his tongue against the cigar such that it seemed to bob there like a reprimanding finger. He handed the hat back to one of his men and turned to Karel, then made a show of striking a match and twirling the cigar above the little flame until smoke fell from his nose. “I spoke to the padre,” he said. “Seems he found one of my daughter’s horses on your parcel of land.”
“He did. Found a dead boy on it, too, but I’m sure the horse concerns you more than that.”
“Please, Skala. You’ve been sure of so many falsehoods since we first met that I’d think by now you’d have grown weary of sharing them so readily. Quite the contrary, really. I am interested in the boy, who almost certainly had a hand in this fire, and in the injury to my granddaughter. It’s just that I’m more taken by where his brother might be. One dead is one shy of what would satisfy me. I need to know where he is. As you’re aware, I don’t make it my habit to involve the law in my business, but the fire patrol is not bound to such discretion. They have people to report to, and if the sheriff ever gets his boots on again, he’ll want some answers out of you. You’d be well served to answer to me first, and I can assure you that I’ll vouch for you when the time comes. I need to know where that other boy might be, where he might have reason to go.” Villaseñor pulled his glasses from his face and set to work cleaning them with his handkerchief. When he had them settled back in place, he cocked his head toward his men. “They get restless when too much time passes between serious errands, and I intend to give them a chore to keep them occupied.”
“If that’s the case, then they oughtn’t to be restless for a hell of a long while. Unless they’re equipped special to track ghosts. Them boys weren’t real talkative, and the one laid out in my stable ain’t likely to speak up anytime soon. If there’s one left breathing out there somewhere, he’s likely putting fast miles between himself and here. Check all the filling stations and the train depots and hunt the little son of a bitch down. That would suit me just fine. He took off owing me money, and I don’t cotton to setting fires, but you’re likely going to need more than two men to hunt him down.”
“Two has always been enough,” Villaseñor said, sending his men away with a single hand held out to his side, the fingers working as if he were brushing dust from a coat sleeve. “You don’t have to know where to look, Skala. You just have to know how.”
“Stan and I could go with them,” Eddie said. “Lend them a hand.”
“I hardly see that you have a hand free, Eduard. Seems to me that bottle you keep glued to your palm leaves you shorthanded enough as it is. You go with Stan. He’ll have to run the saloon while Thom tends to his wife and children.”
“I been in there since the doctor showed up at sunrise,” Thom said. “It ain’t nothing for me to do but sit and wait like everyone else. I’d be better off at the saloon. The work will keep my mind off it.”
“And just why in Jesus’ name would you want to keep your mind off of your family? You dropped the child, Thomàs. You dropped her. And now you want to go off and leave Graciela alone with all the worry, is that it? You don’t leave men above ground if they can harm you, especially if you’ve given them cause to do so, but you did. You shot one of them when you didn’t have cause, and then you let them go when you should have shot them both. You aren’t going anywhere except inside your house. It’s bad judgment that has brought you to this, and there’s no escaping one’s own bad judgment. Come now, inside. The rest of you, too. Tell your wives and children good-bye before you go.”
Karel stood perplexed by how quickly his brothers fell in line, at how Eddie caught his eye and gave a dirt clod an aimless kick before following his father-in-law out of the corral gate. Stan went, too, hitching his thumbs in his trouser pockets and studying the black acreage and the distant trees to the east with a kind of round-eyed fascination that plucked a string of envy in Karel’s chest. How goddamned simple the whole mess of living would be if you could see a stand of oaks a thousand times without ever quite recognizing it or relying on it. Say a single leaf had curled brown and fallen overnight, carried away by the breeze and then rolled along the ground until some animal trod it into the earth. For Stan, that might change the whole tree, the whole treeline, the whole damned county. For Karel, it would have meant only that something he owned had been lessened, even if he couldn’t say how, and he thought now, standing beside his brother while the sharp bones of Thom’s jaw worked the cud of this most recent humiliation, that the two of them were made of this same stuff, and that it had come to them through their father’s blood.
“Jesus,” Karel said, “but he reminds me of Pop.”
Thom put a hand on the gate, swung it back and forth on its hinges like he was testing it for need of oil. “How’s that?” he asked, his eyes fixed only on this invented work.
“Ain’t nothing that ain’t someone’s fault.”
Thom swallowed, let his recognition of the words show only in a short exhalation that bore the muffled, wordless sound of his voice. At their backs, the fire had quieted to a hissing bed of embers and heavy, reluctant smoke, out of which rose only the ruined black remnants of the stable’s framework.
From out near the drive, Villaseñor called back to them. “Now, Thomàs.”
Thom flinched at the man’s voice, and now he shook his head until he broke into a smile so that Karel could see his father’s work in his brother’s mouth. Opening his mouth wide, Thom ran his tongue over his damaged teeth. “I don’t need no more reminder than looking in the mirror,” he said. “Tough old son of a bitch, wasn’t he? Tell you what, Karel. You’d have burned Pop’s stable down, he wouldn’t have sent someone else to find you. He’d have come to stomp the shit out of you himself.”
“I got it coming, I expect.”
Narrowing his eyes at Karel, Thom let a laugh and a sigh out in tandem through his nose. “Not from me you don’t. I ain’t talking about you, little brother.”
“Well, all right, then, but I ain’t talking about the fire. It’s other things that ain’t been squared between us.”
“You needing to say penance, Father Carew’s right up there in the house. But don’t say it for me. A whole lot of years have gone by, Karel. Graciela and me been happy together. If something ain’t square, I reckon all you have to do is square it with yourself. If it’ll help, though, I’ll let you do me a favor. You get wind where that other little bastard twin is, don’t tell Guillermo. You come to me with it. It’s my little girl up there hurting, not his.”
“That’d suit me fine.”
“All right, then. I need to go see how my little one’s doing. You ain’t supposed to have favorites. That’s what Graciela’s forever telling me. Maybe if I had a boy, things would be different, but Tina puts a burr in my heart that won’t turn loose. I was only trying to get her clear of the smoke. Anyway, there’s about a hundred women up there at the house. Let’s see if one of them will pour you a cup of coffee.”
FOR THE WOMEN of Lavaca County,
the harshest of whispered judgments was reserved for the wife or daughter, not common in these parts, who might be found sitting idly with her apron off in a kitchen, her own or otherwise, and when Karel left his boots in line with a half-dozen other pairs in the mudroom and followed Thom inside, the rich smells of baking kolaches and creamed ham made his insides brew as audibly as the strong coffee on the stove top. Women were everywhere, their hair pulled back into hasty braids and pasted in little wisps to their flushed cheeks, their satisfaction in their work masked only by the seriousness of the occasion that had brought them to service in their neighbor’s house. Thom made his way quickly through all the consolations toward the back of the house, where the stairs creaked beneath his steps as he climbed toward news of his little girl.
Karel heard his wife’s voice in the parlor, but before he could go to it, a steaming cup of coffee was being put softly into his cold hands. He nodded his thanks and smiled at the tallest of Villaseñor’s girls, who’d grown full in the hips over the years and wore her hair in a single rope that dangled past the small of her back. She turned, shaking her head when Stan came waddling in from the parlor, his lock-kneed steps encumbered by two young boys, one straddled around each leg like they were in training for the pumper team that had just rumbled off the property for its firehouse in Shiner. Cinched around his waist were the dark arms of a girl, his eldest—Could she be ten already? Eleven?—who clung to her father with such a fierce affection that Karel knew at once all he needed to know about his brother’s inability to keep his trousers from riding down on him.
“You remember Violeta, surely,” Stan said.
Karel took her hand, which was softly padded and dusted with flour. “Morning,” he said, nodding.
“And these monkeys here is our meal ticket,” said Stan, shaking his legs, one at a time, until the boys turned him loose and fell in a tangled, laughing mass to the floor. “Gonna raise them to do tricks and sell them to the next road show what comes through town.”
The Wake of Forgiveness Page 26