The Wake of Forgiveness (17 page)

Stan bent to find another clump of dirt to hurl into the water, and he took note of Karel there, doing his rigid little dance. "Don't you mess your pants again, Karel," he said.

Karel looked up at his oldest brother, his arms swung back and his hands cupped over the seat of his dungarees. "I won't."

Stan sighed and shook his head. "You will, too, if you don't go now," he said. "Come on. I'll go with you."

Off to the east of the house, just beyond the smokehouse and the new, half-framed stable their father was building, Stan stood with Karel, the door to the outhouse swung open on its rusty hinges, the smell of it rank and intensified by the heat and washing out over them. Little Karel stood there balking with his face bunched up like he'd licked a lemon, shaking his head. "Just get in there and do your business," Stan said. "Pop will be coming in for lunch soon, and we'll run out of time to play."

Still the boy wouldn't go. "I want Mama," he said.

"You get in there and go," Stan said, "and I'll go fetch her. Okay?"

"You promise?"

"I swear. You can leave the door open if you want. Just go, and don't forget to wipe good this time."

Inside, Karel sat holding his nose and trying to convince himself to unclench his muscles, his little, dusty feet dangling in the angle of light that widened and narrowed as the breeze swung the creaking door back and forth. His brother Thom had told him that there were snakes down in the hole, slithering around in all that filth, biding time and waiting to bite a boy's backside. Karel didn't believe it. He'd asked his father, who'd wanted to know why a snake would choose to spend its time wallowing in shit if it could just as easily do its swimming down in the creek. This made sense to Karel. His father usually did, but he still couldn't shake the vision of water moccasins coiling in wait down there, their forked tongues flicking fast in and out of their mouths. Besides which, he himself had seen the thick, leathery tails of rats sliding beneath the rough planks of lumber where the walls of the outhouse met the ground. Rats were hardly better than snakes, and just sitting perched over the hole stiffened Karel's muscles with panic. It was worse than mere darkness, worse than his fear of falling from the top fence timbers of the cattle pens where his father sometimes perched him in the sunlight to keep him out of trouble while the young bulls were castrated or dehorned. Now Karel felt the onset of movement within him, and, as much as he wanted to finish and escape the sour, confined heat, the boy found it difficult to reckon how he could let so much of himself fall from his body and still emerge squinting, just minutes later, into bright sunlight to find that there was nothing of him missing, that he was still the same boy he'd been when he'd gone in. Now he closed his eyes tight, let his muscles go, and listened for the sick splash down below. Then he tore two pages from last year's almanac and wiped himself clean.

When he emerged into the fresh air, into a light so intense he had to clamp his eyes shut and stand blind for a few seconds against the white glare of it, he found his brother standing there, the old handmade picture frame in his hands. Stan stood looking out to the west, keeping watch for his father, and then he wiped the glass with his shirtfront and gave the photograph a look before handing it over to Karel.

"Be mindful with it," he said. "We'll have to get it back into Pop's room after lunch so he don't find it missing."

Back by the creek, the other boys pulled biscuits and bacon from their pails and sat with their feet in the cool push of water while they ate. Karel crouched in the shade beneath a pine tree, gazing at the mother he'd known only this way, as the two-dimensional woman standing in white, her fair hair smooth and long, falling back behind her shoulders, her wedding dress white and high necked, fringed with lace and beaded smartly about the bodice. Her shoulders square and strong, her legs long, her hips full and round and tapered up into her narrow waist. But it was her face that Karel sought, and though he had no words for it, he could imagine those bright eyes on him, softened by kindness. He could picture her hair falling over him as she knelt facing him, his face pressed into her while he said his prayers before bed, her lips brushing his forehead after she'd tucked him in. Looking at the photograph, it was all too easy to forget that she was one of two people in the image, that his father, too, stood in the frame, his dark suit crumpled and his starched collar buttoned to his Adam's apple. His face young and clean shaven, the sly hint of a smile on his lips. They stood together, her arm in his, and there was a stand of trees behind them, hazy and out of focus, that Karel didn't recognize. What Karel saw was only the woman, only his mother, and though he'd done so before, only to lapse into sadness and tears, he couldn't help himself: He tried to touch her. He put his fingers to her face, her ankles, her fancy dress, and what he felt was only the frame's glass, only the flat cool of her absence.

Then came the onset of an emptiness that, at three years old, he could already feel but not explain, and when he stood with the frame held loosely in his unsteady little hands, he walked without taking his eyes from the ground to where his brothers sat eating lunch at the edge of the water.

When their father found them, the damage had already been done. The boys had tried to remove the picture from the frame, but the water had crept between the photograph and the glass, adhering the two, and when they went to pull one from the other, the clarity of the image was lost to a broad gray smear that obscured both bridegroom and bride, rendering them both as sullied and indistinct as the trees behind them.

Now Vaclav stood over them with his hat in his hands, his face sun flushed and running with sweat. The three older boys were huddled around the ruined photograph, whispering accusations,
and Karel was collapsed at the bank of the creek, his head buried in his out-flung arms, quivering with his crying, his tanned little hands clinging to the grass that grew in proud clumps right up to the water's edge.

"This don't look like chores or lunch, either one," Vaclav said. "Don't recall giving you boys permission to do anything else."

The boys rose, their eyes on the ground. Not one of them had been brave enough to stand with the evidence of their failure in his hands, and now their father stood chewing his tobacco and wiping perspiration from his forehead, shaking his head and gazing down at the boys' feet where the photograph and its dismantled frame lay in the grass.

"One of you little shitasses better start talking," he said.

Eddie and Thom moved together behind their older brother, and Stan avoided his father's eyes and glanced down at the picture frame, twisting his hands in the hem of his shirt, bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet. "Karel wanted to see it," he said.

"Well so did I, goddammit. Wanted to see it about a hundred times this morning, but I didn't leave my work to go get it, did I?"

"No, sir."

The man took a step forward and lifted the wet print from the ground, his eyes squinted and impassive and shot with blood the way they were sometimes when he came home from the icehouse of a Saturday evening and sat at the kitchen table drinking from a canning jar while the older boys played sheep and wolf or spoon before bed. "You going to stand there jittering like you're set to piss your britches, or do you reckon you can tell me why the thing's wet as a dish rag?"

Twisting his shirt tighter in his fists, Stan stopped his bouncing and willed himself to meet his father's gaze. "It went in the creek. Karel tripped over Thom's lunch bucket."

"And so it's his fault, is it?"

"No, sir. It ain't nobody's fault. Not really."

"The hell it ain't. There's nothing ever happens that ain't
some
body's
fault. Even if it's God what made a mess of things, it's always someone to blame. And this time it ain't a three-year-old nor God nor a goddamn lunch bucket, boy. It's whoever took the thing out of my room without any business doing so. Now, who would that be?"

The boy turned his shirt hem loose all at once, and his mouth pinched at the corners as he took a step forward and a tear ran fast down his cheek and fell to the earth. The slightest of breezes played in the pine boughs overhead, and the boy's bottom lip quivered. "Don't strap me, Pop," he said. "Can't we fix it?"

His father put his hat back on his head and looked down at the wrecked image of his wedding day, and when he dropped the thing to the ground, watching as it floated and swayed on its way to the earth like a broad, fallen leaf, he ground his tobacco with his back teeth and then spat. And then he struck the boy square across the wet cheek with the flat of his hand.

Stan's hat flew from his head, and the boy crumpled beneath the blow, dropping to his knees and cupping his face in his hands. He was only down for a few seconds before willing himself to stand, biting his lip to keep from sobbing and looking his father in the eye the way he'd been taught.

"You're too old to strap," Vaclav said. "It ain't going to be that easy for you anymore."

Karel had righted himself on the bank of the creek. Leaf-thrown shadows played across his face, which was caked with dirt and tears and seized with a seriousness that, even for his father, seemed shamefully sad for such a young boy. Vaclav thought for a moment that he might go pull the boy from the creekside and take him into the cowbarn, let him sit there in the cool shade while they took their lunch, but his stomach was soured with anger and he thought about what he'd just told the oldest boy, about how there wasn't anything without blame or anyone blameless, either. He thought of Klara, of how light her body had been and how, even so, carrying her out of the house had been a burden he'd never be able fully to straighten his back beneath. And then his mouth was flooded with saliva, and for a moment he thought he might be sick. His eyes began to water, and when he realized he was about to cry in front of his boys, he pushed the tobacco from between his teeth with his tongue, holding it in the hollow of his mouth while he bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to stop the tears. Then he sucked snot hard through his nose and spit a wad of tobacco-stained phlegm into the now-grassy silt where, twenty-some years before, creekwater had gurgled and surged downstream.

Before turning from the boys and walking back to the cropfields out west, where he would spend the rest of the day away from them, working without relief from sun or hunger or heartbreak, either one, he gave the older three each a sharp look in turn and said, "It ain't no fixing this, boys. She's ruined permanent. Now get back to your chores."

Vaclav took a deep breath through his cleared nose and called out to his youngest. "Karel," he said, "get on your feet, boy. Eat your lunch. And don't you dare shit your britches today, you hear me?"

O
VERNIGHT, THE COLD
had deepened, the mass of dry air descending as if to make amends all at once for the previous summer's heat, and before the sun was up, when it was yet a glowing, cloud-streaked promise of pale pink beyond the trees to the east, Karel Skala stood beside his truck in the yard of St. Mary's parish, smoking a cigarette and nursing a pain behind his eyes as surely as his wife, over beyond the cemetery in the old widow Vrana's house, was now nursing his child. He'd woken with his boots still on, aching about the shoulders and slumped forward in the overstuffed chair that sat in the corner of the widow's front room. Sophie had been sleeping still, propped up with pillows, the baby silent and swaddled on her chest, and the old woman stood over them, gazing down and sucking audibly at her own teeth, tucking the blankets around mother and child with her skeletal hands.

Karel rose to his feet with a groan, and Mrs. Vrana turned toward him slowly, less startled than expectant, her wispy brows raised to beg questions of him that he felt certain he wouldn't have been able to answer even had he known their content. When Sophie stirred, he told her that he had need to go check on the cattle. He didn't mention the Knedlik boys. Didn't mention the dream he'd had in which he'd arrived back at the farm to find everything in order, even improved, the fencewires strung taut and the Monitor windmill spinning productively and the cattle healthy and fat, ready for profitable slaughter, the entire operation running so smoothly that he'd recognized himself, at once, as wholly dispensable. No, he simply kissed his wife on the forehead and fetched his crumpled hat from the floor beside the chair where he'd slept. He gave the widow two dollars so she could purchase what she might need to provide for his wife and children, telling her that he'd be gone no more than two days, that he'd pay her well for her attentions when he returned, that he'd bring half a nice ham from his smokehouse, too.

Afterward, out in the churchyard, despite the cold, Karel's shirt was soured with perspiration, with the slow leaching of the previous night's beer and corn mash from his body. Across the way, the windows of Elizka's room above the store were dark, and he imagined her in there, lying awake in her bed, cursing him even more soundly than she had the night before. His stomach swirled, and he wished like hell there were somewhere nearby to take an early breakfast. As it was, he'd have to wait until he got back to Moulton, at least. He finished his cigarette, walked back behind the parish stable to relieve himself before the long drive home. When he unbuttoned his trousers to make water, dousing the thickly barked base of an old pecan tree, the smell all but knocked him over—not the diluted ammoniac odor of urine, but a biting, rank fermentation of his and Elizka's congress, the turned scent of her embittered by the hard musk of his own sweat. He finished, buttoned up, and when he made his way back to the truck and got the engine running, he gave his fingers a smell and recoiled, shaking his head and wiping his hand on his pant leg.

Well, hell, he thought, putting the truck into gear. I reckon that's about how fast a woman will turn sour on you.

Out on the road, without Sophie so big in the belly and wincing beside him, without the little one on his lap, he made better time than he had the day before, keeping the wheels in the ruts so that he hardly had to steer. After half an hour, the ride's vibrations and the crunch of gritty, hard-packed earth beneath the tires and the chilled rush of air through the window had all worked well to clear his senses so that now, with the horizon turning loose of the sun, he could sit easily in the brightening light of dawn and smoke a cigarette to mask the acrid, pasty taste of his own mouth. Ahead, the road ran straight out of the little swells of hills, and the miles of well-kept fencelines stretched out, glinting sunlight and shimmering with dew on either side. It was good country, broken black soil, cemented with just enough sand and clay to keep it all from washing away come a hard rain, and Karel thought what a fine fortune a man could make if the seasons wouldn't put an end each year to his industry, if he could take two or three harvests of cotton the same way he could get several cuts of hay.