The Wake of Forgiveness (32 page)

"It's one horse made it out," Karel said. "That's for certain. And a dead man riding it. Father Carew said one of the kids was hurt. House looks like it didn't even get singed."

Groaning as he rose from his labor, Henry squared his hat on his head and then put a hand on his hip and leaned backward, stretching his spine. When he'd come straight again, he shot Karel a curious look and spat between his teeth. "Word has it Thom dropped her trying to hurry down the stairs when he saw the stable was lit. Was afraid they'd take on too much smoke on the sleeping porch, I guess. Anyhow, she ain't woke up yet, last I heard."

"Mercy. So he's inside, then?"

"Came out soon as we ran dry of water. Just stood there and watched it burn for a while with the rest of us, then walked round back to the corral. Eddie and Stan gone with him."

"That a fact? Misery loves company, I reckon."

Henry worked his tongue up behind his lip so that it looked to Karel like the man's mustache had come alive and was readying itself to inch across his face. "I don't," Henry said, returning to his work. "I don't reckon misery loves any damn thing at all."

When Karel had circled around the barn, weaving through the automobiles parked in the drive, he noted his trailer sitting unhitched and grayed by fallen ash. Just months ago, he'd been so proud of the thing, of the smooth welds and the sturdiness of the chassis, of the fine black paint of the frame and the wheel wells, of the fine, straight craftsmanship of the bed's lumber. Now it was nothing more to him than an unsettling series of questions on wheels: How had the damn thing gotten here? Whose truck had towed it onto Thom's property? He couldn't imagine that even Raymond Knedlik would have come rolling onto this spread encumbered by a trailer, and so he must have lost it somewhere along the way. He must have surrendered the thing, knowing it wasn't his to begin with, and a boy like Raymond wouldn't have shrugged that off and let it lay. He'd been outsmarted or outgunned, either one, and he'd come looking to retake what he'd lost. For Karel, the questions promised little other than indigestion and the certain prospect that, buried in the unbroken soil of the truth, some stray seed was likely yielding the determined green sprout of his own culpability.

He cleared his throat and spat, reached for his cigarettes, but then, when the wind stirred the fire and its heat washed over him, stinging his eyes, he thought better of it. There was enough burning here, enough flame and smoke, and he turned his attention to what remained of the stable. The roof had caved, buckling the loft beneath it so that the center joists had sheared, splintered in the middle, and now speared jagged and charred into the inflamed confusion of burning stall timbers at the heart of the fire. In the heap of glowing embers lay black ribbons of metal, warped door runners and tack and hardware, all of them twisted amidst the burning lumber like steely tangles of innards within the scorched remains of some mammoth beast that had fallen prey to its own infernal fate. The remaining fuel spat and sizzled, the smoke climbing and billowing, each outward rush blooming so that, from its center, another could rise. Karel leaned against the cant of his neck, trying to puzzle some whole out of all the smoking pieces, but the wreckage lacked any discernible order. The loft staircase had fallen and lay like a colossal and outstretched and steaming accordion, the former rise and run of the steps now inverted and meaningless and forever unburdened by the prospect of footfalls. Twin leg bones slanted up black from the embers like wet, axed forks of a diseased tree rooted and floundering in a steaming and tannic swampland. The stubborn, improbable loft chute still angled upward as if buttressed by some concession of gravity. Karel squinted against the smoke and squared his shoulders over his feet, the senseless remnants of the stable akin somehow to the way it seemed, when he stood in his own cropfields at dusk, that a horizon he knew to be true tilted nonetheless beneath the weight of the sun.

And then the faintest little breeze spiraled the smoke into a hazy tunnel through which he could see, out back of the stable, sitting hatless on the topmost fence brace of a corral meant to contain horses that were nothing more now than roasted bone and greasy ash, his brother. Stan and Eddie were with him, sure enough, standing with hands gripping the fence like it needed holding up, their attention turned to their brother, and when Thom caught sight of Karel, he slid off the fence and took a step forward as if he meant, with his brows furrowed and his hair swept behind his ears, to walk through the fire.

The wind whipped and then again settled, obscuring the view through the stable, the smoke filling the empty space as readily as water found the void of displaced water, as naturally as regret and fear seeped into the fissures of a man's cracked heart. Karel went again for his cigarettes, and this time he didn't stop himself. If the pumper team couldn't put this fire out, if a cistern and a cattletank full of cold water couldn't douse the flames, then there wasn't any harm, by damn, in lighting a little fire that a man could consume and, in doing so, control. He sparked a match, lit his smoke, tucked his cigarette case back into his coat pocket. Then he made his way around the stable, giving the fire a wide berth, wondering as he went how it had looked before the sun had come up, the orange embers drawn up into the sky, the smoke blooming white against the cold night sky. Karel had seen some impressive fires in his years—grass fires sparked by negligence or heat lightning come the parched months of summer, an explosive dust fire once at the cotton gin in Shiner when he was yet a boy—but this would have been different, the panic-stricken voices of animals and men alike rising above the familiar sound of the fire, that loud rush that could all but convince a man that something unstoppable had been set into motion, roaring its way nearer, bearing down on him. Karel wondered how many fires his boy would see in his life, how many he might watch idly before one burned closer to home. Fire was one of so many things that could render a man helpless, and now, as Karel reached the corral fence and circled around to the gate, his brothers' eyes unblinking and tepid and fixed on him, he reckoned that family was another. A man couldn't any more choose which one he was born into than he could will it to stay together when so many things abraded and raveled the fibers that were meant to keep it bound. Try to hold it all together with force, with a harness and a hard hand the way their father had, and it grew so thick with the cordage of resentment that you couldn't even get your hands around it.

Now, as Karel reached the unbolted gate and swung it open, he watched his brothers, the three of them huddled silently, their boots sunk so deeply into the loose soil of the corral that they appeared to be held upright by their trouser hems alone. Behind them, the fire licked and sizzled, the dark rush of smoke issuing from the ruins of timber and tack to sully the quiet blue skies. When Karel stepped into the corral, leaving the gate wide, he studied the lit tip of his cigarette as if he could find there, in the pale glow of the thing, the words to explain his ready proximity to these men after all these years of measured distance. Eddie took a step his way and put a chapped hand on his shoulder, and Karel looked up to find some of the blue gone out of his brother's eyes, which were faded as if from sunlight or submersion and flecked with gray. Unlike Thom, Eddie and Stan kept their hair cropped short, and when Eddie pulled his hat off in the exaggerated pretense of a greeting, Karel noted the weathered crown of the man's scalp showing pink through his thinning hair. Eddie returned the hat, winking at Stan when he did, and then he took his hand from Karel's shoulder, pulling a pint bottle of clear shine from his coat pocket and bubbling it with a grimace before handing it over. "Tastes a trace like kerosene what someone's made water in, but it makes for a warm enough breakfast."

Karel exhaled smoke through his nose and let his cigarette fall to the hoof-pocked earth below. Before him, the flaming loft chute collapsed at last, roaring blue as it fell and giving rise to a loud rush of sparks that launched skyward in the updraft as if of their own hot volition. He accepted the bottle and took a polite, tentative taste of the concoction, just enough to set him to thinking that, given enough fuel, even a man's insides might take to smoldering. When it came right down to it, there wasn't all that much in life that wasn't flammable.

"Don't know that it's deserving of thanks," he said, handing the bottle over, "but it's worse poison in the world, I suspect."

"Oh, it's plenty worse out there," Eddie said. "World is full up to the brim with worse and running down the sides with worser. Get Thom here to say a word one, and I'll give you another sip."

Karel tried to clear his throat again but came up empty. He turned to Thom, who had leaned back against the corral fence like he'd just finished a hard day of working horses and set his mind now to the idleness of a man who'd earned a few minutes of stillness and quiet spent reclined into the solid, reassuring support that only a good tree or fence could offer. Stan stood unkempt beside him, arching his brows and hitching up his trousers with the frustrated effort of one who believed that even the very pull of the earth was out to reveal him in some shameful way. Thom gave Stan a sidelong glance and frowned, and after he ran a hand over his face and sighed, he pushed himself from the fence and stood upright. "You think you were invisible, little brother? Sitting yesterday in your truck up the road from my saloon?"

"Here," Eddie said, pushing the bottle into Karel's chest. "Deal's a deal."

Karel took another, deeper slug of the foul stuff, keeping his eyes on Thom as he did. "Wasn't trying to hide, if that's what you mean. You looked busy. Didn't see any reason to get between you and your work."

"You ain't seen reason to do much of anything within spitting distance of us since Pop died. Now you come around two days running. Something got you feeling lonely all of a sudden?"

"Carew came by this morning. Said one of your horses was on my land, and a body in my creek. I had to make the trip north to Praha no matter what else. I figured I'd leastwise come by to tell you I had some of your property. That it ain't going anywhere and that the boy who took it from you ain't either."

"Which one was it?"

"What's that?"

"The boy. Which one?"

"The mute one, without the knifework done to his face. If it's one of them that deserves a lungful of water, it's the other one that got it."

"Ain't that the usual way? It's rarely the ones deserving that does the getting."

"I reckon that's right. It hardly ever adds up the way it should." Karel had meant to ask after the child, but there came of a sudden from behind the barn the consumptive coughing of the pumper truck, the burst of the engine's ignition and the increasingly urgent rumbling as the throttle was levered up, all of which gave rise to a loud flushing of doves from the grove. The brothers stood watching, turning their warped necks in concert and squinting as the proudbreasted birds came into view above the barn before angling—their wings tipped sharply down and flashing and stroking beneath a blue sky hazed with smoke, their bodies too heavy to be kept aloft absent this constant effort—in a sharp vector around the rising heat of the fire.

Once, so long ago now that Karel had all but surrendered it to the whitewash of forgetting, he had come first to the breakfast table while his brothers readied themselves for school. He must have been four, no more than five, and his father sat palming his cup of coffee, his face running with sweat so that, even at so young an age, Karel knew the man had been out already at his chores, doing what men do before dawn, milking the cows and moving the cattle, startling the hens from their eggs. On the table, dripping clots onto a doily knit by his mother or her mother, either one, sat a congealed pot of gray oats, an oily slick of butter glazed over the surface. Not a week before, Karel's brothers had taught him the game of spoon, and now, to be sure that the final card didn't catch him empty handed, he'd taken to carrying his supper spoon with him everywhere in the bib pocket of his overalls, proudly washing it after meals that called for its use. When he climbed into his chair, he pulled it from its appointed place and set it beside his bowl. His father, who normally rushed through meals and savored his work the way most men did the opposite, sat for a long while before he dished the breakfast into Karel's bowl. Outside, so loud that Karel mistook the windows for open, the crows had begun their shrill, seasonal bickering over the loose kernels of maize left behind after the recent harvest.

"Ain't no reason for them to be so loud, is it, Pop?"

Vaclav didn't startle. Karel never could remember the man startled, but he turned that morning with a look of some stricken, warmed-over fondness in his bloodshot eyes, with an expression too bare and full of remembrance to have been meant for sharing. He dipped into the oats and scooped a second spoonful into his youngest's bowl. "They don't need a reason," he said, scraping his chair back on the hardwoods so he could pull his pouch of tobacco from his trouser pocket. "It's things aplenty like that, you'll see. It's some women who like the sound of birds raising Cain before even the sun's had enough coffee to top the trees. It ain't no reason for that, either, but that don't make it a bad thing."

Now, after the doves had vanished into the distant treeline to the east, Stan hitched his trousers up again and stepped forward. "Was good of your wife to come, Karel," he said, "so near on the heels of her labor. She's a fine woman. It's nobody with any sense doesn't like her. Good of the Novotny woman to bring her, and to bring the medicine Doc needed from the druggist in Praha."

It was cold out, sure enough, but now Karel realized how flushed he'd become standing sandwiched, as he now felt, between his recollections of the past and the diminishing flames of the stable fire. Still, he had the feeling that he needed to pull his coat more tightly across his chest, button the topmost buttons where the air was finding its way to the hollow of his throat. Fever. That's what it resembled, the feeling of being baked and chilled what all at the same time. A shiver ran in ripples down his sides from his shoulders, and he recalled the other night in the stable, the way Elizka's skin was at once covered with chill bumps and hot against his own. He wanted a cigarette, but his mouth was parched, his tongue so dry, and still he knew his brother was awaiting some acknowledgment of his compliment. He wanted to ask how it was that Stan knew Sophie beyond passing, how it was that any of them might. He wanted to ask them if they'd ever, any of them, seen a calf stone dead and staring dumb eyed at the sky without having put a single hoof to the earth. He wanted to know if any of them could recall their mother ever speaking kindly of blackbirds, but he'd learned well enough that there were questions that revealed too much, that sometimes a question showed only that you knew less than you should. "I hadn't realized she was here. I'd aimed to go fetch her before noontime. Go fetch all of them."