The Wake of Forgiveness (16 page)

O
N THE EDGE
of town, three poor horses stand tied out front of the icehouse, shuddering in their sleep. The building is the size of a modest barn, cobbled together of rough-hewn, unpainted pine. From the rooftop stovepipe coughs gray smoke, and the fogged windows glow with lamplight. Karel and the girl ride the horses by at a walk, keeping to the other side of the road beyond the meager reach of the light. Fifty yards into town, just beyond the druggist and the tack-and-saddle shop, they stop and secrete themselves beneath the eaves of the feedstore that stands next door to the Township Inn. The girl's horse takes the opportunity to lift its tail, shining and black as blued gunmetal, and leave a steaming heap on the hard-packed road such that the night smells, to Karel, of home, of the outdoor comfort of woodsmoke and horse dung.

With a hand held back to keep Karel still and quiet, Graciela peers around the corner and down the alley toward the inn's stables. Toward Dalton's town center, something moves slowly across the road, and Karel squints his working eye until he can make out the shape of the old priest, who glances back over his shoulder as he walks his horse around the corner of the church toward the parish stable.

Turning back, a hand on the cantle of her saddle, the girl says, "Father and my sisters are indoors, but the inn's stable boy is still tending to the carriage horses. It won't be long."

While they wait, Karel runs his tongue along the jagged wound at the corner of his mouth, feels the cool seep of fluid down his cheek from his engorged eye. He watches the girl leaning forward over her horse's neck, her hair falling crimped in wet ripples down her back. Even on a stationary horse, her weight is centered over her bent knees, her spine held straight. There's a seasoned confidence to her, he thinks, and she carries it in her body, in her upright and unflagging posture, a solidness in her legs and shoulders that is almost masculine. But then there is the breathtaking taper of her back, its sudden slope into a waist so slight that Karel feels certain it's smaller around than a man's hatband. There's the wide, smooth flare of her hips. If she were reclined such that you could run a finger along the side of her body from ribs to thighs, it might put you in mind of a single, perfect valley found in a landscape of irregular, rolling foothills, of a horizon you'd gladly ride all day to reach. Sure enough, she's her father's child. She has his olive skin, his dark hair and eyes, his easy assuredness, but one look at her would make any man wonder how lovely was her mother. As Vaclav Skala would say, she may have her father's features, but she sure ain't got his fixtures.

They wait there a solid fifteen minutes, and when the girl swings down from her saddle, she holds a finger over her lips and tilts her head toward the small stable set back from the road behind the inn. They walk the animals down the alleyway, the hollow sound of the horseshoes on wet stone bouncing between the brick walls of the inn and the solid planking of the feedstore. Slowly, Karel slides the stable door open and inhales the smell of animals and dry hay. The girl hands him her reins and slides beneath his arm as she slips inside to light the lantern.

When they get the horses inside and dried and curried, she scoops oats into the feed buckets and they hasp the horses into the two empty stalls. Only then does Karel get a good look at the other twin black animals, warm now and switching their tails in the opposite stalls. If anything, they are more impressive than the one the girl has just stabled, taller and hard-ridged with muscle, painted with the same distinctive and shockingly white blazes, and Karel wonders how any man could bear to harness such a horse to a carriage. He turns to the girl, who sits beneath the lantern on a farrier's stool, blond hay bales stacked two high behind her. She's removed her riding jacket, hanging it from a crossbeam to dry among odds and ends of tack. Her white blouse is buttoned to the throat, pleated and blooming across the rise of her breasts, and thin enough that Karel can see, beneath it, the lacy filigree of her camisole. Her hair falls over her shoulders, and it calls to Karel's mind shallow black water running over a gentle outcropping of stone. She's smiling up at him, her skin dark and damp still with rainwater and gleaming in the dancing yellow lanternlight. There's a pinch at the scabby hinge of Karel's lips, and he realizes his mouth is open. "Graciela, huh?" he says, and she laughs a little and nods. "You ever ride those monsters yonder?"

She shakes her head.

"Your father, then?"

"Not anyone. They're carriage horses."

"The hell they are," he says. "Just look at them."

Outside, the rain is still coming down sparingly, but the wind throws itself in dithering gusts against the cedar shingles and whistles loudly beneath the eaves. She stands, stray wisps of hair strung in wet threads about her cheeks, her eyes deep and studious, moving up and down the length of him, settling back on his eyes as she approaches him. "I've seen them, Karel," she says, and his name on her lips sets loose something warm and liquid beneath his skin, a rush of comfort that seeps into him and swirls around his bones. "I saw them born. All of them, and the best of the stable are boarded over at the Dalton place. But tell me, if horses are only ever used to pull a carriage, how are they anything but harness horses?"

Karel gives that some thought, and it reminds him of his least favorite arithmetic lessons at school, the long and pointless story problems Miss Kubek always asks last, knowing that even the brightest among her pupils will puzzle over them. But these are horses, he tells himself, not numbers, not something dreamed up to exist only on slate or paper. "Because you can look at them and tell," he says. "It's that damned simple. You can tell within an hour after they're foaled. The second they can stand without a wobble. There ain't but three kinds of horses, Miss. Those made for the harness, those made to run, and those made so poorly that you know how lucky you are if you own one of the first two kinds."

She's standing so near to him that he can smell her breath, not sweet like he might have expected, like her hair, but earthy and clean, slightly metallic, the scent of wet, mineral-rich soil at the edge of running water. As he breathes her in, she touches him again, this time with both hands cupped about his neck while she brushes her lips against the swollen mass of his wounded eye in a kiss so light that Karel thinks it either accidental or imagined.

It is neither, and when she leans back to show him her smile again, he feels as he had as a young boy when, on some rare occasion, a woman had shown him affection. What he wants now, as he wanted then, is to take hold of her, to hide his eyes in the curve of her neck and feel her fingers in his hair, her arms around him, and in this way lay claim to the moment so that it cannot be taken from him. What he wants is to accept and possess the tenderness all at once. Instead, he stands with his arms at his side and wills it to continue. Overhead, the rain spatters on the shingles while here, inside, the lamplight flickers against the rough woodwork of the stalls and crossbeams while the horses switch their tails and empty their buckets of feed.

"You may be right," she says, blinking slowly, one time, as if for emphasis. She pulls one of her hands away, traces a finger down the unnatural curvature of his neck with the other. "But how will you ever prove it to me?"

It is part beckoning, part challenge, and then his lips are on her, the warm, loamy taste of her surprised exhalation rushing across his tongue as he holds her by the hips against him. There's a pinched pain at the torn corner of his mouth, a little lick of fire come alive from stirred embers, and when she pushes him away, he drops his hands into his trouser pockets to obscure the extent of his excitement.

"Wait," she says, pulling her hair back over her shoulders as she crosses the stable toward the lantern hung from the raw timber framework of the nearest stall. When she retracts the lamp's wicking, a horse blows, and Karel knows without question that it's Whiskey, fed and dry now, and warm, but awake and restless nonetheless, disquieted by the sudden onset of shadows. Working his hands from his pockets, Karel watches the girl, steadying himself against the hot work of his own musculature, against the rolling spasms in his lower back and abdomen, the arousing arc of energy that surges from his tailbone up into the blades of his shoulders.

Her silhouette is cast against the pale remnant of light behind her, and when she approaches him, walking in slowly measured steps, Karel's breath catches, and then it comes all at once. Her hands, he sees, are at work on the uppermost buttons of her blouse.

N
OT YET NINE
in the morning, and Vaclav Skala had broken a hard sweat out in the western cropfield. He was thankful for it, for the cool slicks beneath his arms and down his back, for the ring of relief afforded by the wet band of his wide-brimmed hat. If you took the time to read the
Farmers' Almanac,
which Vaclav did, though he had recently begun to wonder why, you'd expect these May skies to be crowded with clouds, but when he whoaed his shabby draft horse and removed his hat, wiping the sweat from his face with his shirtsleeve, he looked overhead and studied the unbroken blue of it while he fished his new plug of tobacco from his pocket and unwrapped it and bit off a portion. Whatever fool it is writes that rag, he thought, probably ain't ever once set foot in Lavaca County. He was going to need plenty of dry heat in time, but if he spun all this cottonseed into the soil only to have the sun bake the earth hard before it could take, then he'd have to suffer the first poor yield since Klara had died. Just the thought of it went to vinegar in his blood. He'd have to wait another year until he could afford the lumber and shingles he needed to finish his stable, and then what would he do? Old Man Kaspar had a fine roan mare coming in season, and when Vaclav had unfolded last week's
Shiner Gazette,
he'd seen an advertisement for a monster of a horse named Arasmus, a giant stallion shipped over from Italy, of all goddamned places. He'd never seen a stud fee so high, nor a horse so imposing. After all these years, he was fed up full with all the red-faced bragging his neighbor Patrick Dalton did about his stable of racehorses, and Vaclav had folded the paper and tucked it under his arm before pushing back his chair. He left his coffee steaming on the table, told the older boys to mind Karel and their chores, and he'd ridden straight away to see Lad Dvorak at the bank.

Two days later, for thirty dollars up front in boarding, feed, and stud fees, the whole thing was arranged. Another thirty would be due after the foal survived a fortnight, and he'd keep Kaspar's horses in hay for a year thereafter to pay off the mare's share. The mere thought of it set Vaclav to tingling with anticipation, and now, as the tobacco did its work on his nerves, he studied the straight furrows of his fields, marveling at the sound results of his own able work. He looked back toward the house, over his shoulder and into the glare of the sun. He'd kept the older boys home from school, and he'd have to tan them if they hadn't fed the hogs and chickens and gathered the eggs by lunchtime. Or if they'd let the youngest boy soil his britches again instead of coaxing him into the outhouse.

Now he snapped the reins and clicked his tongue at the ragged old horse, one that deserved nothing more than hard work and a bucket of dry oats and another day above ground, and he engaged the planter. If a man put his mind to it, he could single-handedly seed half an acre in an hour. By noon, when Skala will find his boys by the creek and slap the oldest one hard across the cheek, he will have exceeded that pace by nearly a quarter acre, and then he will come furiously back into the fields without eating, and he will work the horse into a half-lame lather, and he'll let himself cry for one last time in his life.

Fifteen years before Vaclav Skala bought his land, a storm had uprooted a hollowed-out red oak and blown it across the northern fork of Mustang Creek so that its crown splashed down in the slough on the opposite bank. It was the worst weather the residents of Lavaca County would see until the winter flood of 1910, four straight days of wind-driven rain that left the furrows brimming with water and the farmers sitting in their kitchens, watching from the windows, weathering, at once, the storm and the apron-wringing worries of their wives. As the fruitless windfall of twigs and foliage swept downstream, lodging against the downed oak, the water dammed up behind it and rolled, roiling and thick with sediment, into the slough, carving from the soft loam a deep new trench that would circumvent the fallen tree, that would last beyond the storm and the return of the sun, that would bend northward and loop back around to rejoin the stream, leaving the old creekbed dry and richly fertile and, by the time the Skala boys found it, lushly overgrown with a bed of little bluestem that made for comfortable sitting with fishing poles and lunch buckets and the collective desire to pretend, beneath the ribbons of light that slanted through the treetops, that they were not bereft of the feminine tenderness that, to young boys, is nothing shy of sustenance.

And so just before noon, with their morning chores complete, they played, today like so many days, beside the trickling of creekwater. Their feet were tanned and bare, their faces soiled with the congress of dust and sweat. Stan stood on the bank, throwing twigs and clods of dirt into the moving water while Eddie and Thom took up makeshift arms, dueling with the swords of fallen branches. The youngest, Karel, sat where the creek had once been, pulling shoots of grass from the soil and, with full fists raised above his head, letting the blades flutter down on himself, laughing with delight, shaking his head and sputtering loudly when the falling grass stuck to his wet lips. He stood, fetched a stick, and, when shooed away from his brothers' play, slapped it against the trunks of trees and then squatted on the bank of the creek to swirl it in the water, as entranced by the cloudy rise of silt it occasioned as he would be one day by the reaction a swung crop could affect in a horse. And then it struck him, the sudden constriction down low in his bowels, the gurgling urgency against which he tightened his muscles, locking his knees together and shuffling his feet with his back straightened, a cold panic shivering through him as he imagined the close, foul shadows of the outhouse.