The Wake of Forgiveness (35 page)

"You don't want to be disappointed in brothers, don't tell them what to do. Where's that shiny new truck of yours? Out rolling around on its own looking for my trailer?"

"It's cash in my pocket is what it is. All I could do. Sold it at sunup to some thick-rimmed son of a bitch at the bank. Wouldn't give me but seven cents on the dollar." He tugged at his pocket, snagging a bit of the dead boy's hair when he did and flinching because of it. "Which, some of it's yours. For the bill up at the filling station. And to put this boy here in the ground proper for me. I can't dally, or I'd dig the hole myself."

"You might as well give it all to me. Otherwise it's just a couple of midget Mexicans with rifles going to take it out of your pockets when they're done with you."

Raymond considered this, his eyes registering no more surprise than they might if he heard church bells ringing of a Sunday morning. "They might. But I'll lay two to one they're heading fast to Fort Worth, thinking I'm on the nine o'clock I was on before hopping off when it weren't no one looking. It was half a dozen folks saw me buy the ticket, and just as many what watched me get on the train."

Not fifteen feet from where Karel stood, the ladder rose up from the hay-strewn dirt to meet the loft where the boy sat, and Karel lowered his gun and held it across his body, his finger still on the trigger, his eyes shifting to the close-cropped curls in Raymond's lap. "The hell'd you haul him all the way up there for? He looked comfortable enough where I left him."

Raymond put a finger in his nose and worked it around as if he might find the answer in there and bring it to light. Then he wiped his finger in the hay beside him and said, "He liked it up high. Used to find him reading way up top of the oak tree out back of the house. All that climbing and sitting way up with the bird nests, and he breaks his leg with both feet square on solid ground."

"He deserved it same as you, Raymond. It's a bunch of dead horses up at my brother's place. That and a little girl who took a hard spill and only just woke up, and you come back here thinking to borrow a horse?"

"I ain't got nothing to do with any little girl."

"That you know of."

The boy cocked his head, sucking at his teeth audibly when he did. "You don't want to loan me a horse, just say so."

"I don't."

"Fair enough. See how easy that was?"

"You can't burn a man's horsebarn down and expect his brother to help you make away."

"You ain't got any brothers, Skala, unless you're talking about me and Joe here. Them others won't claim you. You and me, we drank our milk from the same good woman's teats, and whether you'd like to forget it or not, she never did. The old man never let her, called her a whore for the one she bore when she was yet a girl, said it was God's punishment what took it from her. Said she ought to get used to being treated like what she was, no matter how many rosary beads she prayed."

Karel raised his rifle again, watched the boy tighten his grip on his pistol, thought how good it would feel to shoot the little shit, like scratching finally some old itch that had worked itself down beneath the skin so you couldn't get to it without drawing blood. The Knedlik boy wasn't telling him something he didn't know, but it stung nonetheless to have it come back to the surface the same way it hurt to work an old splinter back out through the hole it made going in. "Not remembering ain't the same as forgetting," Karel said. "Besides which, I been drinking cow's milk my whole life and I ain't once called a bull calf brother. Called a lot of them veal, though."

Now Raymond's face revealed a restless resignation, an impatience in which Karel could detect not even a seed of fear. The boy dropped his eyes into his lap and ran a thumb over the cold blue face of his brother, mussed his hair, slid his own weight from beneath that of his kin, and eased the boy's head back down onto a pillow of hay. Then he rose frowning, tucked his gun against his spine in the waistband of his trousers, and stood wiry and hay dusted and taken with thought at the top of the ladder. "Your wife," he said. "She give you a boy?"

Behind Karel, the little filly whinnied and tossed her head, and it occurred to him that he hadn't yet had occasion to tell most folks about his boy, to walk into the icehouse and buy a round of beers and beam with the pride of a man who'd done what his father had done before him. But then he thought of his own father, of all that a son's birth could cost a man besides a few dollars spent celebrating with neighbors. "Why?" Karel asked. "You take a job with the census?"

"No, but that wouldn't be a terrible way to earn a dollar. Go around keeping count of people, asking men how many little ones they've managed to make." He glanced one last time at his brother in the hay, and then he turned his back to Karel and put a boot on the topmost rung of the ladder so that he was talking all the way down to the ground. "Who knows. You do that job long enough, it might all tally up even. Joe up there does the last of his breathing, but then come to find out it's some other boy born right about the same time. A man could find some sense in that."

Karel took a step forward, keeping his gun down across his waist but balanced in both hands and at the ready. "You can make sense of damn near anything, you look at it cross-eyed long enough."

"I'm just saying," Raymond said, reaching the ground. He turned toward Karel, pulling a roll of paper money from his pocket. "It's better when things even up than when they don't. Here. It's thirty dollars more than we spent up at the filling station, plus another fifty to take care ofJoe up there."

"I ain't taking your money. You ain't got enough. There's a stable full of horses up the road you can't afford to square, and you want to stand here talking about making things even."

"Way I see it, that ain't your debt to collect, Skala. Thom can settle that on his own. You want to tell him I'm still in town, then go on ahead. I been in your house. It's not a telephone in there. That's all the head start I need."

"You ain't made it out of this stable yet, Raymond."

The boy smiled, balanced the roll of money on the third rung of the loft ladder, and nodded at Karel's gun. "Not yet," he said, "but to stop me you're going to have to shoot me in the back knowing my momma fed you at the breast."

When the boy turned and took his first careless, loose-jointed steps toward the open door, Karel found his gunstock cold against his cheek, risen without summons like the weeks of nighttime fantasies that would afflict him thereafter, visions in which he'd imagine himself squeezing the trigger and knowing, with the blast from the barrel and the jolt in his shoulder, that he'd set something right other than his pride. Instead, he steadied the gun's sights on Raymond's back until the boy reached the door, and then he called out, "Your mother got paid, did she not?"

The boy swung the door outward and the stable was flooded of a sudden with harsh noonday light. "Not near enough," he said. "Ain't a woman ever been paid enough for all that gets taken from her."

I
T WOULD PROVE
a wearisome night, all that sleepless darkness coming, as it did, on the heels of a long day that had found Karel Skala answering the questions he'd promised he would after fretting over matters left so long untended on the farm. In the end, the chores and the outdoors, all these years his sanctuary, had failed him, and he'd come inside before suppertime, his socks left on the back porch, salted with the sweat of his nervous work and stuffed inside his boots. For now, the baby was asleep, the two girls playing in the other room, their usual squealing tempered by the charged quiet of the home, by the way in which a house where a newborn sleeps becomes, through some mystery of its own and through the ready, unquestioning complicity of those inside, a series of rooms constructed as baffles against sound so that there, where the infant dreams in the warm heart of them, the silence can incubate the silent.

Karel hung his hat on the rack and lifted the chair rather than scraping it back, suppressing even the groan that usually announced the end of his labor and the beginning of his evening meal. Sophie turned, her apron tied loosely at her padded waist, and poured a cup of coffee, placed it on the table with an ashtray and a halfhearted smile. Karel laced his fingers around the cup and sat for a long minute in appreciation of its warmth against his calloused hands, of the strong smell of it hanging rich in the air, of the sureness of its arrival before him, all of which made him think that, if God had been a woman, she would have sent Adam from the garden all the same, but not without a cup of coffee.

Outside, floating sluggish over the southern fields, a stray cloud carried about its fringes a touch of color so that it appeared to Karel that the thing had made off with some of the unsuspecting sunset. "I know you'll be hard at it awhile," he said, "and you'll need what rest you can get. You strip the bed linens tomorrow, I'll get them washed and hang them on the line for you. Skies look to hold."

She was mixing batter for an easy supper of pancakes, a meal she knew certain to find no complaints from the girls, and when she let the wooden spoon drop against the side of the bowl, Karel closed his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose. And then Sophie was lowering herself gingerly into the chair beside his, and when he opened his eyes and took his cigarette from the ashtray, she was waiting with her elbows propped on the table and her chin in her hands. "I'd appreciate that, Karel," she said. "But you're giving me butter when what I'm wanting is the biscuit."

And so he had told her, wanting to touch her pale arm while he did but settling for the comfort of the sturdy seat beneath him and the coffee in his hands. He told her about the boys and the beer, about the lost heifer and calf, about the body in the stable and the boy he'd found there swinging his legs from the loft with his dead brother's head cradled in his lap. About the talk he'd had with his brothers while they watched Thom's stable smolder. As he spoke, moving from the story of one day to the story of the next, watching his wife's eyes for the eventual softening that told him he'd said enough, Karel reckoned that she'd stop him short in time, that she'd return to what she'd come so close to saying those hours before in the truck, that she'd want to know, though he felt sure she already did, what he'd been doing out past midnight while she'd suffered their son into the world.

Instead, she sat listening, baiting him on with neither comment nor nod, asking only the occasional question, rising periodically to refill his cup, to feed the stove, to check on the baby, returning each time to lower herself slowly into her seat and set her head in her hands and her eyes upon him, and when the girls came asking after their supper, she set the table and poured the batter onto the griddle and flipped the cakes onto the plates. Then they'd sat together, watching their children eat while the last of the light bled out of the day. When Evie had finished her supper, her pink lips glazed with syrup, the girl hopped down from her chair to help her mother clear the table and stood with her plate in her hands before carrying it to the sink. "That baby is lazy," she said. "He needs to wake up."

Sophie laughed, wincing and pressing a hand down low over her apron when she did, and the sound of her, so unexpected and full of her easy demeanor, brought Karel out of his chair until he was standing behind her, the soft taper of her waist in his hands.

She leaned into him and shook her head. "You'll be hearing all you want to out of him soon enough, sweet pea. He's a Skala, and the Lord doesn't make any lazy ones."

She was up three times with the child before midnight, and when Karel awoke each time from less than an hour of sleep to find the baby crying again, he propped a pillow beneath his head so that he could watch the silhouette of her against the diffused moonlight that found its way between the bedroom's curtains, so that he could watch her bend over the bassinet to change the baby's diaper and then sit with her back against the headboard while she nursed him.

When they'd first gone to bed, Karel had undressed and slid into the cool sheets while Sophie changed into her nightgown, and when she'd fed the baby before joining him there, he'd been heartened by the cool points of contact between them, by the milk-dampened cotton of her gown against the skin of his bare back. Since then, each time the child had come awake, the sounds he made like those of some nocturnal animal who'd grown terrified of the night, Karel had wanted to go to him, to see in his angry little face the confusion of all his needs and to hold him, but he couldn't bring himself to do it, couldn't bring himself to deprive the child of the one soft and able answer for all of those needs. And so instead he'd prop his head up and watch, and at some early hour during the fourth feeding, while the boy suckled, Karel turned onto his side and put a hand on his wife, squeezing the solid round of her knee. "You want me to hold him awhile after he eats?" he whispered. "I'm not in any danger of sleeping anyway."

Sophie worked a finger gently into the corner of the baby's mouth to unlatch him, and then she turned him to the other breast, his tiny arms thrown up as if he'd found himself unmoored and falling from the night's only comfort when she did. "What I want, Karel, is for you to think about him if you have to."

"I have been," Karel said. "I am."

"That's not what I'm saying. What I mean is, I want you to try thinking about him when thinking about me isn't enough."

Two hours before the reluctant winter dawn, Karel pulled his trousers on and buttoned his shirt. Child and mother both were sleeping, and before he went to make the coffee and light the stoves, Karel stood over the bassinet where, in a sliver of moonlight, the child lay with his face pinched up and a fist at his mouth as if he were conscious, even in slumber, of his mother's distance from him. There was something familiar and unsettling in the seriousness of the boy's expression, and Karel couldn't help himself. He reached down and flattened a hand on the boy's chest, felt the faint, fluttering rise and fall of his breathing, and then, before he turned to the awaiting labor of a day not yet fully made, he traced a finger over the little furrows creased into the tender skin of the boy's fine neck.