The Wake of Forgiveness

by Bruce Machart

  After Stan kissed his wife’s cheek and shooed the kids into the other room, he took his hat from the rack near the door and ran his hand around inside to give it shape. “I gotta git. It’s nothing says you can’t pay us a visit at our place some Sunday, you know. It’s sometimes a barrel of beer and a block of ice that find their way from the saloon into my cattletank.”

  Karel nodded. “Ain’t but one way to teach strays like that a lesson.”

  “That’s a fact,” said Stan, and with a wink he ducked through the door and closed it gently behind him.

  In the parlor, where the dark curtains had been tied back to let the light in, Karel wished, from his first sight of his wife sitting hip to hip with Elizka Novotny on the sofa, that the room had been left awash in shadows. His newborn son slept wrapped in a blanket in Elizka’s lap, her sensible blue dress creased between her knees and riding up on her calves so that Karel had to will his eyes from her white stockings. Father Carew sat opposite them in a plush chair the color of August corn tassels, a cup of coffee cradled by his liver-spotted hands in his bony lap.

  Sophie came off the couch slowly, wincing as she rose, and Karel put his cup atop the glowing woodstove and opened his arms to her. He would have liked to close his eyes, to smell the comforting confusion of soap and perspiration that, for these last five years had announced to him, every evening when he came in from the fields, that there had been, in his absence, nothing lacking of cleanliness or order or honest work, either one. But now, with his wife’s breath warm against his neck, Karel saw Elizka looking from the child in her arms to his father and back again as if there was some arithmetic, some simple ciphering, that might explain how sweetness could spring from such questionable seed.

  “Where are the girls? What was I to think if I’d driven all the way up to Praha to find you run off with all the children?”

  “They’re fine. They’re playing out front. Eddie’s girls are looking after them.” He felt Sophie smiling against his neck. “Maybe you would have thought you’d finally gotten what you deserved, Karel. But I doubt it. You’d have found me eventually, if you looked hard enough.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not much good at finding what I’m after these days.”

  “How flattering,” Elizka said, coming to her feet, the baby held out and away from her body as if she were carrying a bundle of soiled laundry. Sophie turned to take the child, then stood back begging questions of Karel with her eyes while Elizka bent to shake Carew’s hand. “Pardon me, Father, I pray the child will heal, but I’ve got to get back up to the store before Dad forgets we’re running a business instead of a charity. Tell Thom I’ll have the druggist send him a bill.”

  “Of course, my dear. My thanks to your father.”

  Karel had never accustomed himself to the way a woman’s joy and sorrow could sound so much the same when given voice. He’d grown up around boys, in the midst of men, for whom pain was weathered in silence and pleasure announced in exaggerated groans of relief. So when Graciela’s voice carried down the staircase, so high-pitched and trembling, he found himself reaching for his son, taking him from his mother’s arms in an attempt to protect him from the virulent spread of female grief that he felt certain about to overtake the house. In the kitchen, dropped utensils clanged against the stove and the floor as the women rushed into the parlor, their faces lit with expectation, their damp hands smoothing their flour-dusted aprons until Graciela appeared in the doorway at the foot of the stairs, her father behind her, her weight carried high on the balls of her feet with her heels off the floor. Her hands were at her mouth, her shoulders shaking with release, and then Sophie crossed her arms over her chest and embraced herself, whispering, “Oh, thank God.”

  “She’s awake,” Graciela said, her dark, dark eyes brightened by a glaze of tears. “Come see. She’s awake!”

  NEARING NOONTIME, once he’d pulled the truck off the farm-to-market road and onto his drive, the gravel grinding pleasantly beneath the tires, Karel steered with one hand and arched his back beneath Diane’s weight in his lap so that he could work his handkerchief out of his pocket and wipe the window glass with it. “Deenie,” he said, blowing into her ear to set her squirming, “it’s so many of you kids in here now that you’re steaming up the glass so I can’t see. You’re the oldest, so you’re going to have to either ride in the back from now on or hold your breath, one or the other.”

  The girl cocked her head back to find her father’s eyes sad and blinking apologies at her. “I can try,” she said, taking a deep breath.

  Sophie nudged him with her elbow, cradling the infant in one arm and stroking Evie’s hair while the youngest girl slept with her feet up on the seat and her head in her mother’s lap. “Don’t listen to him, Diane.”

  “Well that’s a fine thing to teach a little girl, Mother. It’s a Commandment tells you you’re supposed to listen to me, Deenie. You just remember that. Don’t you let your mother lead you astray.”

  Karel gassed the throttle through the creekside lowlands and up the swell, where the road came round the hedgerow and mesquite trees, and against his hip he sensed his wife’s body tense in a way that told him that she’d had her fill of his teasing. “You want to talk about being led astray right here and now, Karel, or do you suppose we should wait until the kids are asleep?”

  Had it been her words that caused Karel to brake the truck hard, sliding it to a stop on the gravel and reaching out with one arm in an instinctive attempt to keep his family where they belonged beside him instead of letting them fly forward to crumple onto the floorboards or crash headlong into the window glass, Sophie might have sat silently staring forward for a long moment, willing her heart to slow and then checking on her children, asking were they hurt. She would have known, by his hot-tempered reaction and by the way she could see, in the grainy flexing of the muscles roped between his shoulders and neck, that he was doing something that he only ever did when he was bewildered or when he was readying himself to tell a lie. She would have known, even if he didn’t—and he usually didn’t—that his body was asking an impossibility of itself, that it was trying to right the wrongs that had been done to it long before the bones stopped growing and the boy he’d been found himself, at last, in the warped shape of the man he’d become. She would have known that her husband, clutching the wheel so hard that the tendons on the backs of his hands fanned out like the teeth of a hay rake, was working to straighten his neck, and this alone, to her mind, would have settled the issue. Had it been true, she could have begun enduring the weeks of cold nights, sleeping on her side, sliding her hip from beneath the warm weight of his hand, showing him with her body what it meant to be without it. She could have begun punishing him and, in doing so, wrapping her mind, day by day, around the inevitability of their reconciliation.

  Instead, she found herself flooded with a cold surge of fear, with a prickling chill in the palms of her hands, her scalp, the bottoms of her feet. Karel was gripping the wheel, testing with some subconscious force the inflexibility of his neck, his sight fixed on their homestead. It had proved such a comfort, always, to Sophie—the house and barn, the smokehouse and stable, all of them rising up clean and orderly the way they did against the backdrop of the pear trees, amidst all the straight furrows of the cropfields and the golden stubble of cut, sunlit hay—but now, as Karel sat with his eyes moving over the expanse of it like he’d seen coyotes slipping between hedgerows of recent and was taking stock of his calves, Sophie knew only that he saw something she didn’t.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, pulling Deenie, who was holding her breath in earnest now, from his lap. Beside Sophie, little Evie had come out of her sleep and sat upright with startled eyes, a thread of saliva strung from the hinge of her lips to her mother’s lap.

  “Karel,” Sophie said. “What on earth is it?”

  As he eased off the brake, rolling the truck down a swath of yellowed grass toward the front of the house rather than following the drive down to the
outbuildings, he pointed in the direction of the horsebarn. “In all our years together,” he said, “how many times is it you’ve known me to let the stable door ajar while I’m away?”

  Inside the house, with the girls planted in the deep, underused cushions of the front sitting room sofa, Karel bolted the front door and made his way to the kitchen where he found his rifle leaning barrel up where it always had against the backdoor molding. He levered a cartridge into the receiver, and something about the crisp metallic acceptance of the brass quieted the blood in his ears so that he was aware of his wife behind him, her son cradled tight against her bosom, her questions coming out in unpunctuated twos and threes. “Damn it, Sophie,” he said, turning the doorknob. “You reckon it was Thom’s horses set his stable afire? There ain’t a question I won’t answer once I’ve had a look out back, and not a one I got time for until then, you understand?”

  Outside, while he wove himself into the grove, tuning out the desperate, wintertime scuttling of squirrels overhead, he kept his finger on the trigger. Still, he couldn’t help noting the bellowing of his herd in the back pasture. They’d been neglected, and there was the new calf to check over. They’d need hay set out before long. So often, his days were spent cataloging the need for chores while doing others, and he busied himself with this ingrained list-making even while he kept his eyes on the front stable door swung out a good foot from flush. When he reached the edge of the drive, he tried to step lightly on the gravel, hearing still in the solid friction of the stones compressed beneath his weight the inventory of tomorrow’s predawn undertakings. Wood for the two stoves. Milk. Eggs. Cattle to move and ash to collect from the smokehouse. By the time he considered that he’d have to find time to ride the filly back over to Thom and Graciela’s, he was peering into the stable where the cold slant of hay-dusted light revealed a vacancy that made him wonder, even while he knew it senseless, if all he’d been taught those long hours in the hardwood pews of St. Jude’s had been but a portion of the truth. If there was a Holy Ghost, then oughtn’t there to be an Unholy one, one that could bring even the undeserving dead upright and walking and altogether alive enough to swing a stable door open with all the ease of an angel rolling a stone from a cave mouth?

  Karel widened the door with his boot, the gunstock cool in his hands, and from the stalls came the indifferent breathing and stamping of the animals. Farm boys in Lavaca County were taught to use a gun the same way they were taught to use a hoe or a baler, and there was nothing more shameful, more deserving of ridicule, than some townie boy stalking imaginary game in the outcroppings of oak and sweet gum just off the road to town, the fancy new .20 gauge his father had bought for him held in his hands like he meant to strangle it. For the boys raised by fathers who fired their shotguns to put dove and quail on the wintertime table, who leveled their rifles to take a deer or keep a coyote from taking a calf, guns were tools, used only when there was no better one for the job at hand. When a boy who’d grown accustomed to the sting of weeping blisters and the weight of caked mud on his boots saw the loaded gun leaning against the back door every morning when he went out to milk the cows, he didn’t give it any more thought than he gave the milk pails when he found a cottonmouth in his mother’s garden.

  Which isn’t to say that even these boys ever got over the thrill of squeezing the trigger—You don’t never pull it, boy. Pull your little pud, you want to pull something. A trigger you squeeze. Gentle, like this, when you exhale. You want the shot coming out same time as your breath does. He never did get over it, never altogether cooled to the importance of what he held in his hands, to what it could do when used well, to the little god it made of him while the rest of the looming world—his father’s enormous, hairy hands or the hay bales he couldn’t yet shoulder alone or the horizon he could never toe with his boot no matter how long he walked toward it—made him feel so very small.

  No, when a boy or the man he’d become had cause to take up his gun, he expected to feel the loud kick of it against his shoulder before he put it down. Karel was no different, and neither, he imagined, would be his boy, his Frank, so when he stepped inside the stable, his eyes adjusting to the shadows and to the fact that there was no longer a boy’s body laid out where he’d left it on the four bales of hay before the stalls, he became all at once aware of the nervous slicks of sweat under his arms and lowered his rifle with both relief and disappointment.

  Neither of which lasted.

  When he’d strode half the length of the stable’s alley, he sensed the shadows shift overhead, and by the time he planted a foot and swung his gun up toward the loft, the boy had taken to talking.

  “He ain’t walked off on you. I got him up here with me.”

  Karel squinted up at the childlike figure of Raymond Knedlik, who sat swinging his legs over the loft, his pistol dangling from a hand resting on the bottommost brace of the loft railing, his dead brother laid out beside him with his head in Raymond’s lap.

  Karel sighted down his barrel, centering the bead on the boy’s chest. “You got a fuel can up there with you, that or a book of matches, it’s fixing to be two of you that’s done the last of your walking.”

  The boy tilted his head back slowly so that a trace more of the scant sunlight shone in his pale eyes, which looked to have lost forever the wide aperture of youth, to have seen more than they could have at his age if he’d slept every night with the both of them frozen open. He shook his head slowly, the way Karel’s father had when his sons had disappointed him, and the boy’s scar flashed bloodless and white when it caught the light. “I ain’t come here to burn you out, Skala. I come to pay you what I owe, maybe borrow a horse for half a day. Walked in here an hour ago to see if it’s anything worth riding, and look who’s waiting for me but my clumsy little brother here. Any of yours like that? Tell them to run and they fall down crying with a leg snapped in half instead?”

  “You don’t want to be disappointed in brothers, don’t tell them what to do. Where’s that shiny new truck of yours? Out rolling around on its own looking for my trailer?”

  “It’s cash in my pocket is what it is. All I could do. Sold it at sunup to some thick-rimmed son of a bitch at the bank. Wouldn’t give me but seven cents on the dollar.” He tugged at his pocket, snagging a bit of the dead boy’s hair when he did and flinching because of it. “Which, some of it’s yours. For the bill up at the filling station. And to put this boy here in the ground proper for me. I can’t dally, or I’d dig the hole myself.”

  “You might as well give it all to me. Otherwise it’s just a couple of midget Mexicans with rifles going to take it out of your pockets when they’re done with you.”

  Raymond considered this, his eyes registering no more surprise than they might if he heard church bells ringing of a Sunday morning. “They might. But I’ll lay two to one they’re heading fast to Fort Worth, thinking I’m on the nine o’clock I was on before hopping off when it weren’t no one looking. It was half a dozen folks saw me buy the ticket, and just as many what watched me get on the train.”

  Not fifteen feet from where Karel stood, the ladder rose up from the hay-strewn dirt to meet the loft where the boy sat, and Karel lowered his gun and held it across his body, his finger still on the trigger, his eyes shifting to the close-cropped curls in Raymond’s lap. “The hell’d you haul him all the way up there for? He looked comfortable enough where I left him.”

  Raymond put a finger in his nose and worked it around as if he might find the answer in there and bring it to light. Then he wiped his finger in the hay beside him and said, “He liked it up high. Used to find him reading way up top of the oak tree out back of the house. All that climbing and sitting way up with the bird nests, and he breaks his leg with both feet square on solid ground.”

  “He deserved it same as you, Raymond. It’s a bunch of dead horses up at my brother’s place. That and a little girl who took a hard spill and only just woke up, and you come back here thinking to borrow a horse?”

&
nbsp; “I ain’t got nothing to do with any little girl.”

  “That you know of.”

  The boy cocked his head, sucking at his teeth audibly when he did. “You don’t want to loan me a horse, just say so.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Fair enough. See how easy that was?”

  “You can’t burn a man’s horsebarn down and expect his brother to help you make away.”

  “You ain’t got any brothers, Skala, unless you’re talking about me and Joe here. Them others won’t claim you. You and me, we drank our milk from the same good woman’s teats, and whether you’d like to forget it or not, she never did. The old man never let her, called her a whore for the one she bore when she was yet a girl, said it was God’s punishment what took it from her. Said she ought to get used to being treated like what she was, no matter how many rosary beads she prayed.”

  Karel raised his rifle again, watched the boy tighten his grip on his pistol, thought how good it would feel to shoot the little shit, like scratching finally some old itch that had worked itself down beneath the skin so you couldn’t get to it without drawing blood. The Knedlik boy wasn’t telling him something he didn’t know, but it stung nonetheless to have it come back to the surface the same way it hurt to work an old splinter back out through the hole it made going in. “Not remembering ain’t the same as forgetting,” Karel said. “Besides which, I been drinking cow’s milk my whole life and I ain’t once called a bull calf brother. Called a lot of them veal, though.”

  Now Raymond’s face revealed a restless resignation, an impatience in which Karel could detect not even a seed of fear. The boy dropped his eyes into his lap and ran a thumb over the cold blue face of his brother, mussed his hair, slid his own weight from beneath that of his kin, and eased the boy’s head back down onto a pillow of hay. Then he rose frowning, tucked his gun against his spine in the waistband of his trousers, and stood wiry and hay dusted and taken with thought at the top of the ladder. “Your wife,” he said. “She give you a boy?”