In her room, with her daughters curled up beside her in the quilt and giggling softly, Sophie Skala holds her hungry, sleeping boy to her breast. She shakes her head at the thought of her husband, at the memory, only two hours old, of his awkward, half-dressed frame leaning over the bassinet so carefully, so quietly, to touch his son while she pretended to sleep.
Outside, beneath a sky flung wide over Lavaca County and hung sparsely with sun-blanched clouds that promise, instead of rain, only shade, the youngest of the Skala brothers smokes the last of his cigarette while the black horse turns her head toward the gentle sound of creekwater behind her. In time, Karel will ride her three-quarters of an hour to the north, stopping to open and close his neighbors’ gates along the way, and when they arrive, they’ll find Graciela emerging from the chicken coop with an apron full of eggs, her husband on the back porch cleaning his gun, awaiting news, raising his head at the arrival of his brother. But for now Karel stands of a bright winter morning in an unbroken field not far from his house, seeing his boy’s face, so much like his father’s, as he grinds his spent cigarette into the earth. He gathers the horse’s lead and puts a foot in the stirrup, wondering just how in the hell a man is supposed to go about asking the dead to forgive him for ever finding comfort at another woman’s breast. Or for going on living at all when she could not. Or for doing his father’s delirious bidding and leaving him to die in the mud alone. Or for leaving their children so long at odds with one another in the world.
And then he wonders if he’s just done it, if it could be that simple.
The horse sidesteps, and, when Karel corrects her, she offers a coy little halfhearted buck. Her body shudders beneath his weight, sensing, before he gives her a heel, that they are about to run.
A New, Warm Offering
FEBRUARY 1895
COME EVENING, she appeared with Edna Janek on the back porch, and Vaclav Skala opened the door to find a girl who looked, despite her slumped shoulders and tired eyes, like she mightn’t be old enough to do what she’d come to do. Edna made the introductions, and Skala took the girl’s hand, which was rough-skinned and cold and so fragile in his own that he felt, just holding it, as if he might do it some harm. He glanced at her compact frame, looking her over, wary as a bidder at auction. The girl’s slight bosom only just swelled the front of her dress, which was black and home stitched, the uneven hem a testament to the haste of its seamstress, and, estranged by grief from reason and amenities, he nodded to the hallway, toward the sound of the crying baby in the back bedroom, thinking the girl had sewn the dress out of respect for the dead.
She had, but not for his dead, and while he returned to his cup of coffee at the kitchen table, this girl who would one day bear twins listened to the hollow sound of her own footsteps echoing beneath the floorboards, hearing again the empty, earthen sound of her son’s little box coming to rest on the hard bottom of its grave.
Edna led her past the front bedroom, where long, shapeless shadows fell over a bed frame orphaned of its mattress, and in the back room they found the boys in the bedclothes they’d stayed in all day, the younger two on their bellies in their shared bed, watching while Stan stood leaning over the bassinet, his hands gripping the rail while he whispered some consolation to the crying infant. When the women entered the room, the boys looked up with the startled, expectant faces of those awakened from troubling dreams to the blinking, muddled hope that the known world would now be returned to them.
Stan loosed his hold on the bassinet and took a step backward. “I was just counting to him. I can count to fifty.”
“You’re a bright boy,” Edna said. “This is Miss Hildi. She’s going to feed the baby.”
Stan turned toward the window where the day’s last light fell against the panes. “My mama’s in heaven now,” he said.
“Yes,” the girl said. “I know. My little boy is there, too.”
Stan considered this, his hands gathering and releasing the soft cotton of his nightclothes. “Then maybe . . .” he said, turning to watch as Edna helped his brothers off the bed. When the woman led the boys from the room to give the wet nurse her privacy, Stan looked back as if awaiting the spoken answer to his unspoken question.
“Yes,” the girl said, her voice soft, her smile a weary one. “Maybe so.”
Alone with the child, Hildi gathered him in her arms and sat in the lone chair in the corner with her dress unbuttoned to the waist. The infant was hungry but unaccustomed to this new, warm offering, and the girl winced when he found the nipple only to turn it loose, wailing, his legs working beneath his swaddling, his little muscles seizing with the frustration of his effort. She whispered to him, adjusting his scant weight on her lap and cradling his head more firmly in her hand, brushing the nipple against his lips until he opened his mouth and she felt the sharp stab of him taking hold.
It would take time, but this would become, at last, on some evening later in the week, an undertaking softened by ease and familiarity, by skin, by the soft, wet sounds of satisfaction. For now, the girl leaned back into the chair as he floundered, as he started and stopped, took and surrendered and screamed, until at last he found a way to work from her what was meant for another.
When his rhythmic suckling began to yield in earnest, a cold eddy swelled beneath her collarbone, building in pressure until she found that she was holding her breath. Outside, the dark came on, and she closed her eyes as the child’s hand came up, his tiny fingers curling and relaxing against the side of her breast. And then her milk let down, the cool weight of it falling within her and warmed all at once as if by the friction of its own motion or by the newfound proximity to the heat of her heart. It felt so loud that she imagined she heard it, imagined the hot surge of it falling through the flume of her body, and for a time, before she opened her eyes and moved the child to the other breast, she pretended that the comfort she felt was her own.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted, first and always, to the teachers: Lee K. Abbott, Stephanie Grant, Jim Robison, and Melanie Rae Thon.
For their steadfast friendship and encouragement, I thank Steve Almond, Michael Bell, Johnny Goudie, Michael Lohre, Andy Mullinax, Bryan Narendorf, Daniel Rich, Chuck Rudolphy, Craig Schilling, Ron Wight, and Marvin Williams.
I’m beholden to Brenda Lincke-Fisseler and the other fine folks at the Friench Simpson Memorial Library in Hallettsville, whose holdings and help were essential to my understanding of Lavaca County history and culture.
My greatest debt is owed to my readers—Matthew Batt, Marya Labarthe, and Steve Sansom—whose insights were so often keener than my own.
I have the deepest fondness and appreciation for my intrepid agent, Irene Skolnick, and for Adrienne Brodeur, my insightful and impassioned editor.
I thank my parents and siblings, who have dealt with so much, and sometimes so little, so that I could do what I do. To Marya, for graces innumerable and nameless. And to my darling boy, Dalton Zane, after whom I’ve named the geography into which I’ve let wander these ghosts of my imagination.
About the Author
BRUCE MACHART’s fiction has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Glimmer Train, Story, One Story, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in Best Stories of the American West. A graduate of the MFA program at Ohio State University, he currently lives and teaches in Houston.
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