The Wake of Forgiveness (11 page)

Karel stood, unflinching, as his father pulled down on the horse's thickly leathered scrotum and spat tobacco juice into the dry hay that had been forked over the dirt floor.

"But we could get more for a stud, ain't it?"

Vaclav worked his tobacco slowly with his back teeth and considered his son without looking at him. "Who's this
we
you're so fond of talking about, boy? This here's my horse, and now that I've bred him I'll be damned if anyone else will. I've gotten one hell of a colt out of him, and I'll breed Whiskey next, and when I'm finished with him, I'll cut his nuts off, too, if it's to my liking. Now hold his head. I want him to see this. And enough of your got-damned questions."

Karel was amazed as ever by the deftness of his father's hands with tools. The man could shoe a horse in twenty minutes, could mend a breached fence in ten. Now it was a matter of a hot, sharp knife and less than a second. The horse screamed and reared against the ropes, stamping the hard earth and clouding the air with blond dust, and then Vaclav stood with the testicles in his hand while the horse streamed blood into the hay. "It's some folks will eat horse balls," he said, "but we ain't them folks," and he threw the whole bloody mess on the ground beneath Whiskey's head. "Get you a good look at that, by God, and don't think your time ain't coming."

Then he turned so that his eyes met Karel's, and they exchanged a strange and conspiratorial smile. "Of course, I reckon we could've had some fun with your brothers. Could've fed them a nice fried-nut supper and not told them what they were chewing till they cleaned their plates."

Karel laughed there in the hot barn with his father, and then it was time to get back to work. "Come here, boy. It's time you learn how to stitch up a gelding."

Even now, somehow, despite the shifting muscles of the horse beneath him and the creaking of the saddle and the brisk air rich with the winter smells of pine and parched sod, Karel is still in that hot stable with his father. It's not unlike the drunkenness to which he's begun, in recent months, to accustom himself. There's a comfort in the distance it affords him from the unrelenting dullness of the present day beneath the weight of hay bale or feed sack or harness or loneliness, and he can feel now, as he does some nights with a belly warmed with mash, the past start to shoulder its way into the present such that he knows, unsettling as it is in its possibilities, that there are moments and days that he'll never outrun, that he'll never bury with hoof-thrown divots of sod nor the forgetting afforded by days and months and years piled up atop the ones that came before them. Now Karel works the leather of the reins in his habitual, delicate way. He'd taken pains today, with boar-bristle brush and knife-tip alike, to get his fingernails clean, and while he'd scrubbed and scraped he'd been thinking of how much approval he'd find in his mother's eyes when he presented his hands for her careful inspection, dreaming her alive and smiling and stricken with a desire to clasp his long, slender fingers in her own.

He shakes his head now, scolds himself for thinking more fondly of a past that never happened than of a future he might occasion with hard work and horsemanship and concentration. There are times, goddamn them, that won't turn loose of you any more than they'll permit you to take hold of them.

Besides which, there's this girl sitting horseback beside him. Her father is standing next to her, leaning forward, his hair slicked back and gleaming such that it might just as well be appointed with butter as with hair tonic. He's whispering to his daughter, giving her instructions in Spanish, likely telling her to stay low in the saddle around the trees, to follow close on Karel's flank until after the turn. To make her move on the final straight half mile back to the fires.

And then he pats her thigh and whistles to his men, who tuck their rifle stocks under their arms and begin walking with the single lantern past the long lines of townsmen and into the shadows toward the stand of moss-strung trees in the invisible distance. The air is sharp with the woodsmoke from the finish-line fires, alive with the nighttime work of animals and the whispers of men, and then Vaclav Skala protests, his knife still in hand, gesturing to Lad Dvorak and Villaseñ.

"Where in steaming hell is them sawed-off Mexicans going?"

The fireside men fall silent of a sudden. Villaseñ's guards look at each other with feigned surprise and smile and keep walking. One of them holds his rifle out without slowing his pace and makes a show of levering a cartridge into the receiver. The air shifts, coming cold from the north, and the fires surge and smoke whips out in gray ribbons and casts the horses and their riders in a dreamlike haze. Karel curses his neck, leans in the saddle to set the world upright so that he can catch sight of Patrick Dalton, who smiles and elbows his son. The red-headed boy stands with his hands tucked into his trouser pockets and nods knowingly, his freckles so thick on his nose that he appears to be afflicted with a single birthmark that bridges his cheeks, on one of which a slight scar is still visible. And then Lad Dvorak and Villaseñ are stepping forward, the latter with a cigar half-smoked and still kindled in his mouth, the banker unfolding the papers and holding them forward for Skala's perusal.

"It calls for witnesses on the course," Dvorak says. "You signed it."

Vaclav waves it away and swipes spent tobacco from his mouth. "Does it now? It say they have to be Mexicans with loaded guns, too, or is that part just something you gone and dreamed up in that corn-popper mind of yours?"

Whiskey sidesteps and Karel wedges the toes of his boots into the stirrups and reins him back in line. When he glances to his left, the girl has tucked her crop handle into her boot and is running her gloved fingers through her horse's black mane, looking at Karel with eyes half-open, as if she's only now awoken to find herself sitting in a gleaming saddle with a boy's eyes on her. She wets her lips and smiles, widens her black eyes at him, and then she pulls her crop from her boot and levels it across her horse's shoulders.

Villaseñ steps in front of Lad with his hands open and his palms out in an unthreatening and diminutive way that reminds Karel of the other day, of the first time he'd seen the man and his daughters. It's off-putting, this gesture, and Karel reckons there's not another man in the county who would configure himself so in the presence of other men. There's something almost womanly about it, too forgiving and soft, too vulnerable, and still Karel finds himself beset by a soft pull in his chest, a sympathy that threatens to well into something not unlike kinship.

His father is having none of it, and he turns now to his older boys. "Stan," he says. "Get on up there by them trees. And take one of your brothers with you."

Stan straightens himself up into the best shape of a man he can make, a man with oilcloth trousers and hair wet combed and parted neatly on one side despite the turbulent weather, a young man with a neck bent to match his brothers' and the will to walk farther away from his father than he's been instructed to walk. He nods at Thomas and, as the two move past Karel, Stan runs his wind-chapped hand along Whiskey's side and, ever the eldest brother, slaps Karel's boot from the stirrup.

The onlookers fall back to drinking and placing whispered wagers as the two boys trail Villaseñ's men off into the darkness, and Karel works the toe of his boot back into the stirrup and readies himself to ride.

And then his father is beside him, and Karel catches a sour whiff of the man's chewing tobacco. Vaclav grabs him by the coat pocket and pulls him down so he can whisper in the boy's ear. "I expect you think you can cozy up to little Mexican heifers out back of the grove nights and keep it a secret, is that it?"

Karel looks his father in the eye like he's been taught, but he's so stung by surprise that he can hardly breathe or swallow, much less speak.

"As per usual, I expect you're wrong. But I'll make you a deal. Win this race and you can run off with her and sire a whole houseful of little half-breeds if she'll have you. You ain't good for nothing but riding any-damn-way, but I'll tell you this, boy—you lose and you'll never ride that horse for pleasure again."

F
ROM WHERE FATHER
Carew sits, the whole affair might just as well be conducted in silence up until the moment when, with the papers made legal and the witnesses dispatched into the shadows and the riders prompted, Lad Dvorak steps beyond the horses and off to the side a few paces and raises his little pistol overhead. Carew sees the testament of smoke from the barrel before he hears the sharp crack of its report move over him as if ushered by the breeze, and he considers, as the horses plunge forward and the riders go to work with their whips, that this may well be the fashion in which the souls of men rise from their bodies—discreetly, soundlessly, yet all at once, as if cast forward into their everlasting fates without any outward indication to the temporal world.

Carew fingers the phial of holy water through the rough wool of his buttoned coat as the sound falls over him in such a way that he finds his senses, long stunted, have been triggered as violently and unexpectedly as by the onset of seizure or epiphany. The night now overtakes him—the wild, leering cheers of the townsmen; the chill of the breeze so damp and strong with the odor of smoke and manure that he imagines it adhering itself to his exposed skin; the gritty, broomstraw taste of the hay between his lips—all so wonderfully alive with the compulsory if tainted enticements of a fallen world.

The moon, just as surely, is overtaken again by the clouds. The horses are throwing turf, bearing their riders out of the firelight and toward whatever awaits them in a darkness so dense that, if Father Carew weren't compelled by it all so viscerally, he might liken it to the irremediable and uncomprehending darkness of which St. John wrote, to the wholly unintelligible nature of light to a world gone black.

Instead, the priest springs to his feet with a youthfulness he hasn't known in more than two decades, a sound rising from some rarely plumbed depth within him, something akin to the chants of a High Mass. But there comes, just overhead and not a yard off his shoulder, a silent and startling black flash of something winging by, fast and fleeting as the peripheral arrival of the conscience in sinners. A horned owl, banking now with a wing dipped vertically, arcing across the pasture and leveling off again, gliding out toward the running horses in search of field mice or nesting coveys of quail or a young opossum lagging too far behind its mother. Carew tracks it until it vanishes into the trees assembled just this side of the creek, and then he looks around at the congregation of nightfall and desiccated pasture grass and sleeping cattle. He had almost called out, had almost cheered the riders, and now, as the relief of the undiscovered culprit courses cool within him, he turns his attention back to the race, watching in silence as the horses carry their burdens into the indiscernible distance.

K
AREL HAD EXPECTED
that she would hang back before the turn, that she would test his flank and work carefully alongside him in anticipation of a final sprint back to the finish. Instead, he is trailing her from the start, her long braid whipping back at him as the ride smoothes out and he finds his balance, crouching forward and low over the horse's rhythmic exertions. Out of the firelight's reach and swallowed by the darkness, he squints against thrown dirt and the sharp gusting of the wind, and when his eyes adjust to the scant moonlight, when the slow, familiar muscular burn flares and creeps beneath his skin like a hot wicking of oil up his calves and into his taut hamstrings, he considers his options. He could do as the Dalton boy had done those four years earlier, biding time until the last moment, waiting to see which direction the girl takes around the trees and then veering the other way. Or he could follow her and hope for an inside opening as they break into the straightaway. A hundred yards from the oaks, Karel crosses the crop in front of him, applying it to alternating sides of the animal's hide until he gains some ground and is riding hard just off the girl's right flank. He has learned in these years of riding that properly sizing up the opposing rider trumps any impressions he might have about the horse. But this is something else entirely. She's fast, unyielding with her crop, but her true advantage, and one he finds himself helpless against, is that, even now, he can't keep his eyes off her. Something about the smooth and easy flexing of her knees, her backside cocked back and shuddering with the vibrations of the ride, her riding pants tight enough to reveal the swell of her hips and the sweet crease between them, the whole thing bobbing like a firm, just-ripe peach hanging from some wind-worried branch.

God bless,
Karel thinks, and he whips the horse soundly.

It's been three weeks since his fifteenth birthday, and as he urges Whiskey on, hoping to gain enough ground to afford him a look at this girl's dark eyes and swollen lips, he finds himself wishing that he had a father like this girl has, one who would risk his own wealth and pride for a chance at earning, for his children, the pleasure of a lifetime of nights spent in the company of someone they might come to love. As it was, this year Vaclav had given Karel a birthday free of chores and two extra eggs at breakfast, that and a dollar that Karel spent the better part of buying bottles of beer for himself and his brothers at the icehouse. Hell, next year might warrant two dollars, but not if he didn't quit himself of all these got-damned thoughts and teach this girl and her bouncing round hams a thing or two about horse racing.

Just before the stand of oaks, where he takes note of the surprisingly loud and mechanical sound of the insects at work there in the tangled berths of the branches, Karel shifts his weight farther forward over the horse's shoulders and blisters its hide with a flurry of right-handed encouragements. Circling the trees to the left, the girl stands a bit in the stirrups, bringing Karel fully square with her on the outside while she turns her face his way against the spiderwebs and willow-thin branches that reach out from the treeline's perimeter. Karel eases up on the whip and, though he means to look blankly at her, finds himself smiling the way he has some nights when he failed to disguise the joy of holding a strong hand when he and his brothers played cards around the kitchen table for pennies.