Behind Karel, the little filly whinnied and tossed her head, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t yet had occasion to tell most folks about his boy, to walk into the icehouse and buy a round of beers and beam with the pride of a man who’d done what his father had done before him. But then he thought of his own father, of all that a son’s birth could cost a man besides a few dollars spent celebrating with neighbors. “Why?” Karel asked. “You take a job with the census?”
“No, but that wouldn’t be a terrible way to earn a dollar. Go around keeping count of people, asking men how many little ones they’ve managed to make.” He glanced one last time at his brother in the hay, and then he turned his back to Karel and put a boot on the topmost rung of the ladder so that he was talking all the way down to the ground. “Who knows. You do that job long enough, it might all tally up even. Joe up there does the last of his breathing, but then come to find out it’s some other boy born right about the same time. A man could find some sense in that.”
Karel took a step forward, keeping his gun down across his waist but balanced in both hands and at the ready. “You can make sense of damn near anything, you look at it cross-eyed long enough.”
“I’m just saying,” Raymond said, reaching the ground. He turned toward Karel, pulling a roll of paper money from his pocket. “It’s better when things even up than when they don’t. Here. It’s thirty dollars more than we spent up at the filling station, plus another fifty to take care of Joe up there.”
“I ain’t taking your money. You ain’t got enough. There’s a stable full of horses up the road you can’t afford to square, and you want to stand here talking about making things even.”
“Way I see it, that ain’t your debt to collect, Skala. Thom can settle that on his own. You want to tell him I’m still in town, then go on ahead. I been in your house. It’s not a telephone in there. That’s all the head start I need.”
“You ain’t made it out of this stable yet, Raymond.”
The boy smiled, balanced the roll of money on the third rung of the loft ladder, and nodded at Karel’s gun. “Not yet,” he said, “but to stop me you’re going to have to shoot me in the back knowing my momma fed you at the breast.”
When the boy turned and took his first careless, loose-jointed steps toward the open door, Karel found his gunstock cold against his cheek, risen without summons like the weeks of nighttime fantasies that would afflict him thereafter, visions in which he’d imagine himself squeezing the trigger and knowing, with the blast from the barrel and the jolt in his shoulder, that he’d set something right other than his pride. Instead, he steadied the gun’s sights on Raymond’s back until the boy reached the door, and then he called out, “Your mother got paid, did she not?”
The boy swung the door outward and the stable was flooded of a sudden with harsh noonday light. “Not near enough,” he said. “Ain’t a woman ever been paid enough for all that gets taken from her.”
IT WOULD PROVE a wearisome night, all that sleepless darkness coming, as it did, on the heels of a long day that had found Karel Skala answering the questions he’d promised he would after fretting over matters left so long untended on the farm. In the end, the chores and the outdoors, all these years his sanctuary, had failed him, and he’d come inside before suppertime, his socks left on the back porch, salted with the sweat of his nervous work and stuffed inside his boots. For now, the baby was asleep, the two girls playing in the other room, their usual squealing tempered by the charged quiet of the home, by the way in which a house where a newborn sleeps becomes, through some mystery of its own and through the ready, unquestioning complicity of those inside, a series of rooms constructed as baffles against sound so that there, where the infant dreams in the warm heart of them, the silence can incubate the silent.
Karel hung his hat on the rack and lifted the chair rather than scraping it back, suppressing even the groan that usually announced the end of his labor and the beginning of his evening meal. Sophie turned, her apron tied loosely at her padded waist, and poured a cup of coffee, placed it on the table with an ashtray and a halfhearted smile. Karel laced his fingers around the cup and sat for a long minute in appreciation of its warmth against his calloused hands, of the strong smell of it hanging rich in the air, of the sureness of its arrival before him, all of which made him think that, if God had been a woman, she would have sent Adam from the garden all the same, but not without a cup of coffee.
Outside, floating sluggish over the southern fields, a stray cloud carried about its fringes a touch of color so that it appeared to Karel that the thing had made off with some of the unsuspecting sunset. “I know you’ll be hard at it awhile,” he said, “and you’ll need what rest you can get. You strip the bed linens tomorrow, I’ll get them washed and hang them on the line for you. Skies look to hold.”
She was mixing batter for an easy supper of pancakes, a meal she knew certain to find no complaints from the girls, and when she let the wooden spoon drop against the side of the bowl, Karel closed his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose. And then Sophie was lowering herself gingerly into the chair beside his, and when he opened his eyes and took his cigarette from the ashtray, she was waiting with her elbows propped on the table and her chin in her hands. “I’d appreciate that, Karel,” she said. “But you’re giving me butter when what I’m wanting is the biscuit.”
And so he had told her, wanting to touch her pale arm while he did but settling for the comfort of the sturdy seat beneath him and the coffee in his hands. He told her about the boys and the beer, about the lost heifer and calf, about the body in the stable and the boy he’d found there swinging his legs from the loft with his dead brother’s head cradled in his lap. About the talk he’d had with his brothers while they watched Thom’s stable smolder. As he spoke, moving from the story of one day to the story of the next, watching his wife’s eyes for the eventual softening that told him he’d said enough, Karel reckoned that she’d stop him short in time, that she’d return to what she’d come so close to saying those hours before in the truck, that she’d want to know, though he felt sure she already did, what he’d been doing out past midnight while she’d suffered their son into the world.
Instead, she sat listening, baiting him on with neither comment nor nod, asking only the occasional question, rising periodically to refill his cup, to feed the stove, to check on the baby, returning each time to lower herself slowly into her seat and set her head in her hands and her eyes upon him, and when the girls came asking after their supper, she set the table and poured the batter onto the griddle and flipped the cakes onto the plates. Then they’d sat together, watching their children eat while the last of the light bled out of the day. When Evie had finished her supper, her pink lips glazed with syrup, the girl hopped down from her chair to help her mother clear the table and stood with her plate in her hands before carrying it to the sink. “That baby is lazy,” she said. “He needs to wake up.”
Sophie laughed, wincing and pressing a hand down low over her apron when she did, and the sound of her, so unexpected and full of her easy demeanor, brought Karel out of his chair until he was standing behind her, the soft taper of her waist in his hands.
She leaned into him and shook her head. “You’ll be hearing all you want to out of him soon enough, sweet pea. He’s a Skala, and the Lord doesn’t make any lazy ones.”
She was up three times with the child before midnight, and when Karel awoke each time from less than an hour of sleep to find the baby crying again, he propped a pillow beneath his head so that he could watch the silhouette of her against the diffused moonlight that found its way between the bedroom’s curtains, so that he could watch her bend over the bassinet to change the baby’s diaper and then sit with her back against the headboard while she nursed him.
When they’d first gone to bed, Karel had undressed and slid into the cool sheets while Sophie changed into her nightgown, and when she’d fed the baby before joining him there, he’d been heartened by th
e cool points of contact between them, by the milk-dampened cotton of her gown against the skin of his bare back. Since then, each time the child had come awake, the sounds he made like those of some nocturnal animal who’d grown terrified of the night, Karel had wanted to go to him, to see in his angry little face the confusion of all his needs and to hold him, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, couldn’t bring himself to deprive the child of the one soft and able answer for all of those needs. And so instead he’d prop his head up and watch, and at some early hour during the fourth feeding, while the boy suckled, Karel turned onto his side and put a hand on his wife, squeezing the solid round of her knee. “You want me to hold him awhile after he eats?” he whispered. “I’m not in any danger of sleeping anyway.”
Sophie worked a finger gently into the corner of the baby’s mouth to unlatch him, and then she turned him to the other breast, his tiny arms thrown up as if he’d found himself unmoored and falling from the night’s only comfort when she did. “What I want, Karel, is for you to think about him if you have to.”
“I have been,” Karel said. “I am.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. What I mean is, I want you to try thinking about him when thinking about me isn’t enough.”
Two hours before the reluctant winter dawn, Karel pulled his trousers on and buttoned his shirt. Child and mother both were sleeping, and before he went to make the coffee and light the stoves, Karel stood over the bassinet where, in a sliver of moonlight, the child lay with his face pinched up and a fist at his mouth as if he were conscious, even in slumber, of his mother’s distance from him. There was something familiar and unsettling in the seriousness of the boy’s expression, and Karel couldn’t help himself. He reached down and flattened a hand on the boy’s chest, felt the faint, fluttering rise and fall of his breathing, and then, before he turned to the awaiting labor of a day not yet fully made, he traced a finger over the little furrows creased into the tender skin of the boy’s fine neck.
After an hour of chores in the barn and about the house, before even the suggestion of dawn backlit the eastern treeline, Karel unlatched the stable door and found the lantern in the dark. The air was close and stagnant, the scents of urine and hay and animal exhalations soured overnight by the onset of decay up in the loft. Karel breathed deeply through his nose, growing himself used to the smell while he led the filly out of the stall and cross-tied her, stroking her long black neck and speaking softly to her about where they were going and who she’d soon see until he had gotten her saddled and coaxed the bit into her mouth.
Outside, after he walked her from the stable and down the drive and out to the cattlegate, she nibbled at the yellow tufts of hay left uncut along the fenceline while he worked the latch. Clouds had come chasing the previous day’s stray overnight, and their undersides blushed as the topmost arc of the sun came beaming like some proud suitor over the distant trees. From the water oaks and pines along the northern fork of the creek, a mockingbird called out the first of the day’s admonishments. With the gate latched behind them, Karel stood beside the horse and put a foot in the stirrup as he took hold of the pommel and swung himself astride the animal, who sidestepped, tossing her head in protest while he sat her and gave her the slack of the reins and waited her out.
And then they walked, the two of them, out toward the stand of oaks that rose up out of the grazing land and stood old and gray and strung heavy with moss over the soft sod once worn to bare earth beneath the hooves of racing horses. He nudged the filly with his heel and turned her loose with his knees, and while Karel cantered her out toward the trees and then around their wide perimeter, he watched her breath come in steamy jets from her nostrils and thought how long it had been since he’d been on horseback and what a damned fool he’d been for keeping himself from it. And still, he couldn’t discount his own hesitation any easier than he could avoid the acreage in which it had taken root, growing as it had alongside cotton and cattle and mesquite trees and farm boys reared on absence and fear. He lived on it, was riding toward it. He had seen it in the labored, moonlit frown of his sleeping son’s face, and now, when he brought the filly up short and sat her there beneath the overhang of the trees, the past comes to meet the present, the connection between the two no less certain than the tethers strung taut through time between a man’s father and son.
It comes. The hard, mineral scent rising from the soft, flooded land. The raw wind and the stinging rain. The swinging lantern throwing its transient light onto the standing water. The ankle-deep mud and the heavy steps away from a suffering horse, and then there he is on his back, Karel’s father, his shoulders driven into the mud, his eyes squinting against the rain, his mouth bubbling at the corner with a dark upwelling of blood and tobacco. Karel sees himself kneeling beside him and feels the cold, puddled water wick into the cloth of his trousers. He sets the lantern burning by his old man’s shoulder, and when he puts a hand on his father’s chest, the man groans and his eyes come wide and Karel feels the damage done there. The ribs caved inward, crushed and sunken. “Jesus, Pop. The horse come down on you?”
The lantern throws the man’s shadow long against the ripples of rainfall in the pooled water, and Vaclav’s lips move in a pale whisper, his arms twitching at his sides. “You boys promised me a bale of cotton before my birthday,” he says, “and here it is almost daylight and you’re just now out of bed.” Sliding his boot heels in the mud, he gasps and bends his knees as if readying himself to stand.
The cold works into Karel as if born up as liquid from his soaked trousers and into his skin, washing up in little waves until he’s shivering in earnest and shaking his head. “It’s wintertime, Pop. Cotton ain’t even planted yet. Hold still. I’m going to get you out of here.” But before he can stand, his father’s hand is on him, gripping the same arm that, just days before, the Janek woman had held. He can’t remember the last time his father has touched him any more clearly than he can fathom, now, how he’ll get the old man to the house. The breathing comes labored and gurgling, little spent strings of tobacco floating in the blood that films the man’s teeth and bubbles along the seam of his lips. He needs his brothers. He can’t get it done without them, and he knows the old man is going to die here on his back in the mud.
He coughs, spraying Karel’s face, moaning and cinching down harder on his son’s arm, and the boy tastes the sour metallic mist of his father’s blood on his own lips. He wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his coat, and the wind shifts such that a wet nest of moss falls from the oaks onto his head and blinds him with his own soiled hat. He jerks the thing off and blinks his eyes and pries his father’s hand from his arm. “I’m going to get you to the house,” he says. “I’m going to rig the other horse and pull you out of here.”
Vaclav glares into the lanternlight, his eyes washed yellow with rage around their hard gray centers. “The hell you are. Ain’t none of you setting foot in the house until you’ve picked me a goddamn bale of cotton. Now get your brothers and get your scrawny asses into the fields.”
In the heartwood of Karel’s history, at the onset of his remembering and way back in the days when his father was first teaching him to sit a horse, when his brothers would bet him a day of their corn shucking on a game of spoon, the end of which they’d foreseen with a careful orchestration of cards, when bobwhite cocks still came out brazen and pale-bellied from their coverts to steal some seed beneath the sunlight, and when a boy’s sleepless thoughts told him, as they ever do, to play at being a man without ever once telling him how—there had come a Sunday when Karel sat pressed between his brothers in the pews of St. Jude’s while Father Carew’s homily had found the priest leaning over the lectern, his eyes afire despite the tears welling up in them . . . So often, when we pray for the dead, we fall prey to the belief that they must so long for their earthly lives, for those they’ve left behind, for us, when what is certain is that they long, in the company of the Lord, for nothing at all. So don’t pray for them because they m
ight now be suffering. Pray for them because they have been released from the temporal world, because they have been lifted from the binds of time as we have yet to be. Pray because for them there is no past or future, and, inasmuch as this is so, our prayers can ease the pains they suffered while they walked the earth as sinners among us.
Now, astride the black filly, Karel reins her out to the creekside pines, and together they weave themselves through the trees as the sun breaks free of the horizon and squirrels come alive in the branches overhead. When they reach the bank, Karel sits watching the shadows of the trees on the water, waiting until the horse folds her ears softly to the sides of her fine head and begins working the bit gently in her mouth, and then he takes her into the water and guides her toward good footing and leans forward in the saddle as she comes up the other side onto the soft silt of the slough, where he bids her to stop so that he can look back as the evidence that they’ve come through the water widens behind them before it subsides and heals itself and slides downstream.
He’s not sure he can bring himself to do it, even now, even with Sophie’s words so clear in his memory, and so he comes down from the horse and walks her out of the slough and up into the un-plowed field where he can smoke a cigarette and run his eyes along the outstretched fencewires until their shimmering melts into the distance.
Some hundred miles to the west, there’s a boy slumped in his seat with a gun in his pants, his scarred cheek pressed against the window glass as the Sunset Limited gathers speed on the outskirts of San Antonio, its locomotive trailing smoke out over the length of the cars rolling behind it toward California. Behind him, a dead brother but not the thorn of his memory. That he’ll hold with him as surely as, back in Dalton, at St. Jude’s parish, Father Carew holds the Eucharist before the aging, penitent few who’ve come for early Mass.
The Wake of Forgiveness Page 28