The Wake of Forgiveness (25 page)

When he caught his breath, Joe dug the toe of his boot beneath the door to hold it fast, squatting down as he did to find a stone he could use as a doorstop. He worked with one hand in the sandy earth until he'd convinced himself there was nothing to be found, and, righting himself, he worked a small mound of dirt against the door with the side of his boot and stepped on it to pack it down. Then he retrieved his lantern and listened to the splashing of gas and the soft scuffing of his brother's boots on the floor of the loft overhead.

He was supposed to empty a can in the downstairs hay bales and splash fuel along the walls, but there was something about seeing this little black filly in her stall while his shoulder burned and throbbed, something tender and undeserving of harm, something in her dark, wide eyes and the twitching, tentative way she worked her ears. She was alert and wary, her flanks smooth and well groomed, her legs solid and long, and in her Joe imagined that he could see the many generations of long-considered breeding, the daily vision of her the cause of someone's prideful assurance that, with foresight and honest intentions, a man could see before him all the evidence he needed that he'd made some mark in the world that could not be erased by his own demise.

Overhead, Raymond's footsteps were faint now, approaching the far side of the loft. He'd be coming down soon, ready to put a match to the place, and Joe's feet grew cold in his boots thinking about it, a tingling running up his calves to prickle the hollows behind his knees. Raymond had been born first, by ten minutes or so, and Joe had been following his lead ever since. When their father was alive, prone to all his drinking and the quick ignition of his rage, it had paid to do so. There was something in Raymond, maybe some dilution of their father's hot blood, that readied him always for action, for whatever running or fighting might be called for. Joe had found as a boy that, given the rise of their father's voice in the hall, he would be caught frozen in thought, just lying in bed and thinking, until Raymond grabbed his shirt collar or wrist and dragged him out of his daze toward the window and the long, barefoot run across the pasture to the safety of darkness and trees. But earlier, by the fire, there had been a distant, ponderous look to Raymond's face, an uncharacteristic refusal to look Joe dead in the eye when he agreed to go west. It had been Joe's idea, after all, and he thought now that even his brother's consent was a kind of following, and he didn't know if Raymond's pride would allow him to make good on it.

Outside, the wind threw itself in loud waves beneath the eaves, and from the stalls came the occasional, nervous sound of a horse stamping and blowing. The little filly came forward, tossing her head, and Joe hung his lantern outside the stall and unbolted the door and stepped inside. He reached out for her, smoothing the hide of her neck with the flat of his hand, and whispering, "Shh, girl. It's a way out for you now." He heard a bale come whisking down the loft chute at the far end of the stable, then another, and when he went to meet his brother, he left the filly's stall unbolted.

At the foot of the steps, Joe stood cupping his elbow in his good hand when Raymond appeared, his lantern held low in front of him so that he could see the steps as he descended. When he got down, he narrowed his eyes at his brother and held a palm up at his side. "What is it?" he whispered, stepping into the alley and peering down to see that the opposite door was open wide.

Joe just nodded at his shoulder, shook his head.

"Goddamn it," Raymond said. He'd log-jammed the loft chute with bales, and after they'd hung their lanterns on nails in the nearest stall's siding, he went to work soaking the bottom half of them with fuel while Joe turned the other can of gas over atop the stack of hay beneath the loft stairs.

When they'd finished, Raymond shot his brother a grin and said, "Hope you ain't too pained to run." He fished in his pocket for matches, and Joe stood listening as the stable timbers groaned against the wind and then stopped in a wheezing sigh that sounded to him like the final, raspy exhalation of some infirm animal.

Of a sudden, then, the wind changed directions, swirling hard out of the southeast, and when the paddock door came free from its makeshift dirt stop, it slammed shut so sharply that the horses went wild, crying out in panicked shrieks and throwing themselves against their stalls, this booming midnight sound no less frightening to them than would be a clap of thunder unleashed indoors. "Shit," Raymond said, fumbling with his matches.

When he steadied his hands and threw the struck match, there came a blue flash of flame that leapt up the chute into the loft, and Joe took a step backward as the heat washed over him and he stared up into the blaze overhead, a rush of air roaring in his ears, surging upward as if beckoned by some undeniable and infernal summons above.

And then Raymond shoved past, knocking into Joe's shoulder to get around the blazing chute, running toward the sliding door while Joe went to his knees and looked up, mesmerized by this loud flare of light, the bite of burning fuel and smoke stinging in his throat, the terrified sounds of animals rising until they became for him a disorienting extension of the roar of the fire and the loud rush of blood in his ears. Flames rose from the bales beneath the loft stairs and slanted up the chute, whipping toward the door when Raymond leaned into it hard and slid it open until the rollers banged against the outermost framework of the runners. Overhead, the flames fed a thick clot of smoke that hovered over the chute's opening, and Joe squinted against the blast of heat on his face and shielded his eyes against the thickening swirl of glowing ash. He heard his brother screaming at him from the open door, saw his face flickering and yellow and cast against the moonlight looming soft and unwavering behind him. And then there was a danger looming closer than the fire, certain but inanimate and all but silent, a thought given voice as if from the growing smoke itself, a quiet, urgent voice the sound of which reverberated only beneath the skin, in the sinew of muscles and the soft meat of marrow, in the blood that surged with adrenaline, and when he broke for the door, his brother turned from it, bolting out into the night.

Overhead, fire glowed blue through the joints of the loft decking, and then the fuel that had run through the seams caught in a raining curtain of flame before the door. Joe stopped, pulled his coat up over his head, and even with his ears covered, the stable was just deafening with the screaming panic of animals and the hot rush of spreading fire and the unmistakable approach of hoof strikes. When they were upon him, he turned, ducking and throwing his arms out, to find the filly towering above him, rearing and kicking, trapped between this raining blaze of fire and the door slammed shut behind her at the far end of the stable.

When Joe turned once more toward the door, the horse reared again and fell, its shod hoof hitting just above Joe's calf in the hollow of his knee. His leg buckled and snapped, the sound louder than the popping of dry oak in a woodstove, and he was shot through with a searing pain as he flew forward, the impact kicking the breath from his lungs when his chest hit the dirt, his head snapping forward to slam against the hard-packed earth, and then there were moments of darkness and quiet, of the haunting sound of his mother's voice, of her whispering in the night for water, of a body whole and calm and cool and unaware of fire or animals or the bone splintered and jutting wet through the wrecked skin of his shin.

When he came to, he worked his tongue over a scab of dirt stuck to the spit at the corner of his lips. The filly was still wild, pacing and wheezing beside him, unwilling to break through the smoke and fire that now obscured the front stable door, her hooves shaking the hard earth beneath him when they struck. Joe rolled over and the bolt of pain leapt up his leg hot and tremulous and sick until it twisted through his stomach and up his throat, and it all came so quickly there was no turning his head, no stopping it, and Joe's eyes flooded as he wretched into his own lap, the sour spew of beans clogging his throat in abrasive waves until, when he'd finished, he was fully conscious, the heat and smoke and glowing embers falling over him as he ground his teeth and grunted and cried out and kept an eye on the frantic pacing of the horse while he scooted himself back with the palms of his hands and his good leg, working his way to the rear of the stable until he could feel his spine braced against the solid wood of the rear door.

He bent his good knee, wiped the tears from his eyes and a thick smear of blood from his nose and the muddy bile from the corner of his mouth and, with one sharp arch of his back, pushed the door open and felt, all at once, the hard bite of pain that jolted through him in the squeezing of his guts and the shivering skin and the breath expelled with a cry that could only be squelched by biting down hard on his lower lip. The horse came out wildly behind him, and he flinched as she galloped harmlessly over his outstretched legs and circled herself out against the far perimeter of the paddock's fenceline. He found that he was holding his breath, and when he exhaled, he reached back again and clenched handfuls of the loose, sandy soil, feeling the grainy cool of it between his fingers, a sensation so commonplace and familiar that there came into him a startling cold relief. He was out of the stable. It was December. His father was dead. His brother out here somewhere in the night, looking for him or assuming him killed or racing toward the road and the truck. As Joe worked backward, dragging himself over the uneven earth that lay churned up into mounds and pocked with divots, he heard the sound of voices come alive in the night—his name called out like a desperate question in the parched, hoarse voice of his brother; the screaming of trapped animals; the barked, uncompromising orders of a man brought out of his dreams to find the night afire, his family sleeping beside him wrapped in sheets that would burn atop mattresses that would burn in a house made of timber that would burn, all in a world overseen by a god who had long since forsaken water.

Beneath the high moon, with the yellow bone quivering outside of the skin, the blood pulsing up around it and pooling warm in the leg of his trousers, Joe didn't notice the gunshot wound of his shoulder in the least. He didn't any longer curse or scream or call out for his brother. He had to keep himself conscious and moving, and he set all of his mind to the sobering intake of every sensation other than pain, to the slow progress across the paddock, to these handfuls of dirt and the whispering of his mother's voice somewhere inside of him, to the thirst that crept from her dry lips into his own throat, to the hard whipping of the wind and the tingling chill in his scalp and cheeks and shoulders as the blood siphoned down to feed the pool in the leveled leg of his pants, to the reaching and pulling and the gritty soil packing beneath his fingernails, to the sound of the horse blowing behind him and the vision of flames bursting up from beneath the stable's eaves such that the thick, wind-borne smoke thinned smooth and flat into an unrolled bolt of threadbare fabric, doing the work of clouds on a cloudless night, skimming over the near-round moon. It was as beautiful as it was terrible, and a mass of certainty hardened like enamel around the cage of Joe's ribs, and he knew that Judith had changed her mind, that she'd come to her senses and denied her suitor, that she was sitting her horse on this very night, waiting out on the rolling meadows of her Blue Lake Ranch in California, anticipating his arrival, and by the time Joe made it to the far fencing of the paddock and dragged himself groaning and upright on one leg and took the horse by its mane, leaning his chest over her warm hide and squeezing his arms around her neck so he could pull himself up and swing his good leg over her back, he was laughing and crying what all at the same time.

The blood ran out of him now as if displaced by the hydraulics of his own new certainties—he would ride, and he would mend, and he would go for her—and his hands were groping now, and now his vision blurred and narrowed and tinted by the faintest film of red. And here was the filly's neck. And here her mane. And here the splintery fencerail and the thick, draining weight of his boot coming full, and more fence timbers, and the gate, and here the warm undulations of the animal beneath him, the sweet steaming of her breath in his hair, and here the cool cast iron of the latch and the sighing whine of the gate swinging open. And then they were out in the night, only countless outstretched miles of swirling wind and the merging cadences of heartbeats and hoof strikes and the wide black pastures before them.

T
HERE IS OPPORTUNITY
enough—whether with hired women in the stale rooms above the Bio Saloon in Shiner or with country girls made pliant by cider in the nearby woodlands on beds of fallen foliage—for the young men of Lavaca County to occasion the satisfaction of their near-constant urges. Over the course of the last two years, it has not been uncommon for Eduard and Thom, their needs strung tighter or their wills wrought of stronger stuff than their brothers', to return after midnight with hushed laughter and drunken bragging to the boys' shared bedroom. When they wake Stan and Karel, as they invariably do, their talk of the flabby, overused whores with whom they've purchased an hour is seasoned with descriptions of living but inhuman things, of animals and ripe fruit. Teats heavy and soft as muskmelons left too long in the field. A backside wide as a sow's. Brisket. Hams.

And so it is that when this girl, Graciela, comes to Karel in the lowered light of the stable, unbuttoning her blouse and then smoothing a saddle blanket on a bed of hay bales, he is struck, as a young man is wont to be in the first fortunate moments of his exposure to the delicately unencumbered wonder of a woman's body, by his own ineptitude, by the inaccuracy and insufficiency of all his feeble, boyish fantasies. Here, with the ticking percussion of rain at work on the rooftop and the unmoving air of the stable cool and redolent of damp horsehair and dry hay, there is simply no way to watch this girl shedding her boots, pulling her camisole over her head, and to see her in terms of anything other than the startlingly novel and incomparable vision that she is.