The Wake of Forgiveness (10 page)

"I believe I've changed my mind, brother."

"Change it all you want. You ain't changing mine."

"I may be of a mind to change it for you, then."

Karel catches himself thinking that he'd just as soon bury them both as suffer the sight of either of them with this girl, and then something heartless and scalding blazes in his chest, and he has to lean into Whiskey's solid weight to keep himself upright. He has imagined yet another unforgivable way to prevent it, one his father might expect of him if there comes the need and the opportunity for it, and he fingers his crop silently and squints against the stinging wind and a blossoming of tears that he wipes away with the oilcloth sleeve of his coat.

The girl reins the horse to a stop beside her father just outside the gate. Their faces flicker in the outermost reaches of firelight, and Karel notices her attire—a velvet riding coat and fine leather gloves,
snug trousers tucked into her boots, little shining stubs of spurs rising from her heels—and he doesn't know whether to thank God or curse Him that this girl has come ready to ride to such an extent, that she's left her dress hanging in her wardrobe at the inn back in town. Her father places one hand on her leg and the other on the black neck of his horse, and Karel forces himself to look away, to check Whiskey's cinch strap and stirrup buckles, to ready himself and his animal in such a way that he'll forget, if he can, that he's dreading, for the first time in his life, an occasion to swing himself into the saddle and ride.

I
N TOWN,
in the candlelit narthex of St. Jude's, Father Carew genuflects and crosses himself and then stands fraught with his own weaknesses. He's spent the whole of the day making preparations for a Nuptial Mass that may never happen, and since the first purple hint of dusk, he's fought the temptation to saddle his bay mare and ride her out past the feedstore and Wasek's barbershop, past the Township Inn and the cluster of houses that stand emptied this evening of their masters. He'd prefer to ride out past Patrick Dalton's diminished acreage in the countryside just north of town, to the Skala place between the forks of Mustang Creek, where tonight, despite the priest's prayers, sin is set either to prevent or occasion a sacrament. To be seen there, of course, would be tacitly to condone that which calls for condemnation, but his curiosity pulls at him like a kind of depraved gravity. He's a man, after all, just as surely as he's a man of God. And there are the boyhood memories, too—his father come home to stand slapping his hands together at the hearth, swaying to the tuneless music of his payday pints, his long evenings spent drinking at the pub, his pockets either loud with coins or empty even of a shilling from his time spent wagering on shuffleboard. Carew's mother would have stood wringing her hands either way. It was better, to her mind, to live on potatoes and turned lard than to buy meat for the pot by sending other men home penniless. Better to live off the alms than to occasion that humility for others.

Carew remembers it all with a shudder. It had all been so many years ago, and now, though his joints creak with arthritis and his skin has grown onionskin thin and crinkled with age, he still longs to be among the men of his parish. It seems to him so often that he's spent the whole of his protracted life trying to care for his mother, long dead, by tending to the women of his parish, by administering blessings and comfort and penances alike to the farmwives whose lives have played out so poorly at the mercy of their hard-willed husbands. And so he prays, and he's thankful for the memory that answers his prayer. He'd almost forgotten. The Knedlik woman has delivered twins, and they've yet to be baptized. He fills a phial with holy water from the font and strings a leather lace through its cork, hangs it from around his neck. Then he snuffs the candles and makes his way out to the stables.

The weather has come to call, and the stable's roof timbers groan as if bearing some immense and unforgiving load beneath the descending cold. His horse, Sarah, an old girl now like her namesake, relents to the tack and blows her hot, rheumy mist as the priest works the halter over her head, and then they're out in the night, ambling down the quiet streets, past the inn and feedstore, past Wasek's place and around the corner where the heavy doors of the bank stand closed behind a gatework of wrought-iron bars. On the edge of town, he rides quietly past the lamp-lit houses, imagining the children sinking into featherbeds and the dreams that await them there, and soon enough he leaves the last house behind and reaches the outlying pastures. A half mile up the road, he rides around the loamy slough tucked in and fringed by water oak and yaupon, and he stops briefly near a young sweet gum just this side of the southernmost fork of the creek. Fifteen minutes in the saddle, and already Carew finds himself shifting the sharp points of his hips in the leather and wishing for the simple, meaningful discomforts of his younger years. Even the years of purposeful self-deprivation at seminary had been better. He'd been able, at least, to keep some weight on his frame and move his bowels daily, to spend time amidst other men without the nagging worry of his influence on the trajectories of their souls.

He gives the old girl a heel, and the horse's hooves clop across the solid and seasoned timbers of the narrow bridge. Carew is grateful for the horse and her infallible memory, for her steady gait on the hard-packed road. Even in the failing moonlight, she knows her way, and the priest laughs and feels the bite of the cold in the worn crowns of his teeth and hunches his shoulders beneath the coarse wool of his overcoat. There's something beautiful in it, he thinks. An animal grown old and indifferent to the darkness. How many men might be able to say the same? Too few or too many?

Up on the farm-to-market road that snakes hoof pocked and wheel rutted beside the trickling of the creek's southern fork, he feels suddenly less alone. Here is the sickly sweet smell of the other horses' droppings growing cold on the road, the well-tended fenceline of the Skala property, the distant complaints of animals come alive in the night. Here, where the road parts ways with the water and turns north as it runs between the outstretched fencewires, he lets the reins fall slack and sits upright while Sarah walks at her own ancient pace and tilts her ears forward when an owl cries out. The wind comes steady from the west, and through the clouds the moon leaks only as much light as might a few long-wicked candles. To the west stands the original Skala plot, land sectioned off into cropfields that have already been turned over into black furrows in anticipation of the planting season; to the east, clusters of cattle stand sleeping and silent in the pastureland claimed from the Daltons over the last several years. A slow half mile up the road, Father Carew finds the distant stand of trees flashing in firelight, and he brings the horse to a stop beneath a low berth of mesquite branches that hangs over the fence to shade the road even of diffused moonlight. From here, he has only to cut through a cattlegate and keep himself unseen as he rides northwest past the Skala house to the Knedlik place a mere mile away.

Instead, he dismounts and surveys the dark encroachment of clouds to the west. He walks the horse up the road until he sees, a quarter mile away, the impressive line of horses tied to the fenceposts, the dark carriage sitting empty in the distance, a single lantern hanging from its chain and flickering beside the covered coach. In his younger years, his vocation had been such that he would awaken some early mornings with night sweats and a swollen heart and a prayer already formed and half recited, his devotion strong enough to compose itself and pull him from sleep with its silent annunciation.

Now, as he ties Sarah to a post and slips himself between the two highest fencewires, he feels the cool glass of the phial bounce against his slack and hairless chest, and thinks of the Knedlik twins, stained still with the sin of Adam. He walks carefully through the pasturage of cut hay and scrub grass, moving covertly between the sleeping cattle and farther into the darkness, imagining himself no more than another man gone deaf and disobedient within earshot of a divine calling. When he's close enough to get a good view of the assembled men bantering and coughing up phlegm and lurching forward in laughter, close enough to see the two fires ablaze and, between them, Skala and Villaseñ looking down at the papers that Lad Dvorak is unfolding for their perusal, the priest lowers himself onto a half-consumed bale of hay, his hip joints creaking and popping as he settles into his place a safe distance beyond the reach of the firelight.

The men of Lavaca County are less than timid tonight with the use of their shoulders and elbows. They've seen moonlight races before, but none like this, and they jockey for position as they form long lines on either side of the two fires. Dvorak produces a fountain pen from his coat pocket, and the two men steady the papers against their horses while they make their marks. The riders shift themselves in their saddles and look at each other with only quick, sidelong glances, and Father Carew plucks a straw of hay from the bale and works it around in the corner of his mouth, his vocation now but a whisper drowned out by the insistent, anticipatory whirring of blood behind the drums of his ears.

A
MILE AWAY
, the Knedlik woman peers down into the pine drawer of her dresser where her two babies lie twisted together atop their makeshift bedding of raw cotton sewn simply into a folded blanket. They have slept most of the day, and now their eyes gaze unfocused and unfeeling into the oil lamplight of the room. Beneath her housecoat, her nipples burn, already cracked and raw and leaking with need. She leans to tuck the edges of the top blanket beneath the infants and winces when she comes upright again. She had torn during the birth, and still her husband had come in late from town last night and stabbed himself into her from behind. She'd been sleeping on her side, and when she awoke to the searing pain of him working inside her, she'd bitten her lip until she could hear her teeth grinding together through her own flesh. Now, the rags between her legs are cool and wet with her blood, and he's gone again, out in the night drinking corn mash and cheering for his neighbor's demise.

She'd been but a girl of fifteen when Klara Skala died in childbirth, but she remembers the young family well, remembers Vaclav Skala as a young man, reserved but kind, the gentle way he had with his wife. And now, long without her, the man works his boys like animals,
instead
of animals, and she's beginning to understand how you can come to see in your children only what they've left you without. She recalls the warmth of the youngest Skala boy held against her, taking from her what the child she'd lost never would, and now her own boys, her twins, blink and throw their limbs around beneath the blanket as if impatient already, restless as their father with nights spent at home. She can't help such thoughts. They have his cold, inexpressive eyes, and they look at her with only their own desires in mind. On more than one occasion already, she's found need to nurse them at the same time, one to each breast, and the sharp pull of them working at her and the weighted relief of her milk coming down has been at once reassuring and appalling. It's as if they would take all of her that there is to take, as if they'd willingly leave her drained entirely of herself and offer, in exchange, only cold looks of shriveled brows and quiet, fleeting satisfaction.

"Hail Mary," she prays, "full of grace, the Lord is with thee," and her babies twist and writhe and eye her there in the oily light.

P
ERCHED ON HIS
hay bale and hidden in the night, Father Carew bears unwitting witness as two motherless children get up in their stirrups to do their fathers' bidding. Old Man Skala takes hold of the reins and flashes a blade beneath the nose of his horse, his lips moving in a way that reminds the priest of his most penitent daily communicants, the way their prayers are at once fully formed on their lips and yet unuttered, swallowed with the transubstantiated food and drink. Of course, Carew can't hear the words, can't think what they might be, can't imagine just how calculating and threatening a man can be when he whispers to an animal in the cool, cloud-veiled moonlight of a half-lit winter night.

But Karel can.

His father's words rise to his ears as unmistakably and lucidly as do the imagined memories of his mother's voice. His pop nicks the stallion's nose with the knife tip, and the whinnying horse throws its great head up and around in a furious nod until Karel gathers him back in with reins and clamped knees. The moon flickers above the moving clouds, and Karel steals a glance at the girl sitting horseback beside him. Her head is canted to receive her father's advice while she faces Karel with her dark brows raised into an unspoken inquiry. And then his father leans in, his face just inches from the knife, the blade all but resting on Whiskey's wet snout. "Get a nose full of that," he says. "You remember that, ain't it?"

Three years back, in the stable, Karel had stood beside the crosstied horse while his father gelded the colt's sire. It was August, past noon and blazing, and hay dust hung glinting and suspended in the slant of light from the loft window. Outside, mockingbirds called out in all their ambitious imitations, and the cattle protested the heat and ambled slowly, lowing as they went, about the nearby pastures. Inside the horse barn, the two animals stood switching their tails against the nuisance of flies. Just outside the door, Vaclav Skala worked his knife blade into a smoking pail of hot hardwood coals he'd had Karel fetch from the smokehouse, and when he wrapped the handle with wet rags and pulled it from the embers, the blade was steaming and blackened with soot.

The two horses had been tethered nose to nose, the sire cross-tied and hobbled, and Karel watched as his father held the smoking blade to Whiskey's nose. The horse twitched and whinnied, jerked its head in abbreviated motions that seemed, even to Karel, even then, a kind of uncertain consent. "Why not keep him fit to stud?" he'd asked.

His father turned the knife in his hand and smiled as he dropped to a knee just safely in front of the old stallion's rear legs. "Because I've got Whiskey to breed now, and I can sell the old man here for a handsome price, is why."