The Wake of Forgiveness (4 page)

"They're saying at the feedstore it's a Mexican in town passing time with Patrick Dalton, and I'm thinking if you're that Mexican then you can take your fancy buggy and your
enterprise
and your little split-tails there and turn them all
presently
around and go on back to town."

The man neither flinches nor frowns. He works at the cigar and lets the smoke roll in his open mouth and drift into the breeze. "Dalton's stabling my horses. Nothing more. And I'm Spanish, Mr. Skala. My ranch, sir, was down in Guanajuato, some three thousand hectares, beef cattle and horses, but that's finished now. Still, my family, I can assure you, is not of mixed blood, though that too will be finished, soon enough. Sometimes a man has choices in such matters and sometimes he has not."

"That's a fact," Skala says. "I'm expecting you've got a choice for me, then, am I right?"

"My girls," the old man says, "they're of age. They need husbands."

"Hell," Skala says, "it's a mess of needs go unmet around here."

"I'm willing to pay to see that this one doesn't. Two hundred acres per daughter, cash or land, if there's land enough around to be had."

Now Skala laughs and spits and turns to have a look at his boys, who are standing just this side of the furrows now and moving their eyes from the carriage to Villaseñ without moving their heads.
"Shit," he says. "What use is more land if I'm out the bodies to farm it?"

Villaseñor considers telling the man that he might buy some good workhorses instead of tethering his own flesh and blood to a plow, but instead he takes the cigar from his teeth, puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles sharply, waving his cigar at the carriage.

The girls climb down from the surrey and walk out front of the horses and stand there in a line like they're at auction and somehow prideful of it. They offer the boys closed-lipped smiles that appear soft and kindly but a far cry from shy, and they stand without moving their feet or swinging their arms and in this way they seem as at ease here in the bare daylight on another man's land as they might in their own bedrooms. The wind plays against their dresses, which flare out gently over their slight hips, and the hems fall a few inches below the knee and ripple there against their taut brown calves.

They do not avert their eyes, and neither do the boys.

Across the road, a threesome of Skala's shaggy heifers comes to pull at the brittle grass around the fenceposts, and then, taking note of the men, they push their square heads over the top wire of the fence and cross their eyes and commence to lowing.

Villaseñor raises a hand to his daughters and another out to the boys in the field. "They seem interested enough in one another," he says. "Why should we break their hearts?"

"
We
ain't doing a damn thing, not together we ain't. And I'll break a heap more than their hearts if they go taking Mexicans for wives, you mark it." Now he turns to make his way into the field, saying, "Boys, get back in front of that plow. I'm all talked out."

Villaseñor waves his cigar again at his daughters and then presses the kindled end dead against the heel of his boot while the girls climb back into the surrey. Stan runs a hand through his hair, takes another long look at the girls as they mount the carriage, and Villaseñor laughs when he catches sight of it. "Mr. Skala," he says. "I hear from Dalton you've got a pair of good-running horses."

Skala reaches the plow and takes his whip in hand and twirls it like a down-flung lasso in the furrows beside him. Without looking back toward the road, he says, "Well, he'd be one to know."

"Claims he does."

"I reckon he learns then, even if he learns slow."

"Perhaps, then, you'd rather wager than cut a deal. Win some land and keep your hands all the same—assuming you win, of course. Would you consider that?"

Skala coils the whip and hangs it on the plow handle. He clears his throat, turns to Karel, and looks a question at him. The clouds race overhead, and the hard wind blowing up cold from the west snaps the leather riggings against one another. Karel smiles, ducks into his harness, and tightens the straps.

Vaclav fingers the whip coiled up on the handle while the clouds throw their fast shadows onto his land, then he turns back toward the road and gives the Mexican a nod. "I just now did," he says.

I
N THEIR ROOM
after dark, while the three older boys lie back on their beds, bare chested in just their long drawers, hands clasped behind their heads, Karel sits on the floor working cottonseed oil into the horses' bridles. The moonlight slants its way into the room to play there against the lamp smoke hanging in the air.

"It don't matter to me which one I get," Stan says. "So long as I get one of them."

Thomàs rolls onto his side to face his brothers while he smiles and cups a hand over his crotch. "Generous of you, big brother. Then I'll have me the little one with the kissing lips. You boys see the brisket on her? Oh, Lord. I do believe she makes my sticker peck out."

Eduard sits up, his lumpy feather pillow in hand, and hurls it at Karel, who ducks out of the way and shoots his brother a look. "Poor little boy," Eddie says. "He's going to be stuck here with nothing but his own hand greased with cottonseed oil."

"Worse," Stan says. "Stuck here alone with Pop."

"It's your dream," Karel says, going back to his work, "so have it whichever a way suits you. There ain't no way I'm losing that race."

"I aim to have it a mess of ways what suit me," says Thomas. "I aim to have it sunup, sundown, and Sundays."

***

That night comes the first dream Karel will ever remember carrying with him past dawn, one that will visit him often enough over the years that he will come to wonder, when he wakes, why it so troubles him still. He's standing over his father in the barn while the man hunches forward to hold Whiskey's pastern bent back between two knees and pull from the hoof a shoe that is cracking in hairlines at the nail holes. It goes unstated, but it's clear that Karel has undershod the horse and that the hind heels are now underrun and that Vaclav Skala believes his son to be about the piss-poorest farrier on the planet.

Still, the job is routine. Karel has cross-tied the animal and now there's nothing left for him but to lean against the horse and breathe in the smells of animals and hay and sweat while he watches his father's deft hands at work. Whiskey stands patient as ever in this endeavor, but when the shoe is pried loose and Vaclav drops the hoof to the dirt unshod, the horse lifts it as if he's gone half lame and throws his head about, snorting and blowing. Karel keeps his hand on the animal's neck and talks to him softly, but when Vaclav reaches down again to have a look at the hoof, the horse sidesteps and kicks, and there's a sound like what you get if you stomp a boot heel down hard on a green pecan, only louder, much louder, when the hoof strikes Vaclav Skala's forehead and drives him back into the dirt and hay.

But this is not what jerks Karel awake in bed. Instead, he keeps dreaming as he always will, watching himself run over to his father, who lies groaning and facedown with his arms thrown out to each side, the horseshoe still in one hand, the hay dust borne up by his impact hovering over him, a thousand airborne particles glinting in a kind of murky and suspect halo over the man whose fall has given rise to them.

Karel bends over the old man, whose visible eye is open but rolling too loose in its socket, and when he stands straight again, the blood rushes to the boy's head and the whole world goes red of a sudden. He stumbles, lurching to one side to catch his balance, and there's that sick sensation you get when you're out along the creekbed and your boot comes down on a bullfrog, all that fleshy give before the abrupt and splintering and skeletal resistance.

And then his father is screaming, sitting up and cursing red-eyed and furious, holding before him an outstretched arm and a quivering hand, the horseshoe still flat, defying gravity, against the man's downturned palm despite his fingers, which are straightened and thick knuckled and now running with blood in thin streams from the back of the man's hand, a hand tufted with blond hair and run through such that the points of two shoeing nails have come up sickly between the bones and through the skin and show themselves nesting in the swollen and bloody punctures.

Upright in bed with sweat-drenched sheets adhered to his skin, Karel blinks the dream back and sits listening to his brothers' throaty breathing while his eyes try to find purchase in the darkness. The window is so black it appears to Karel the world outside has been reduced to two unlit dimensions, and because he knows himself awake now, he has no choice but to puzzle some sense out of it. He puts the night at some late hour after the moon has passed through its arc and gone on to brighten other dark horizons. After midnight, then, long after, and the horses, always still at this hour, are complaining such that he can hear them through the dense pear grove that stands between the back porch and the stable. What the devil, he thinks, and he throws back the sheets.

After pulling on his socks and trousers, Karel slips into an undershirt and slides the suspender straps over his shoulders before feeling his way down the hall with a hand on each wall and stepping into his boots by the back door. They've lost two calves in the last six months to coyotes, so Karel grabs the J. C. Higgins .22 they keep leaning and loaded against the backdoor molding. He checks his trouser pockets to make sure he's got matches, and then he steps out into the windless night that's loudly alive with tree frogs and crickets and with the panicked animals in the stables.

He pulls the lantern down off the nail that's driven into the door frame, and when he gets the wicking lit, he heads down the steps with the rifle in his right hand and the light in the other. The horses sound like they're all but gone mad, stamping and knocking themselves against the stall planks and speaking loudly out against whatever has come to torment them.

Karel moves through the grove rather than around it, hoping to conceal himself long enough to get a good bead on whatever it is he's about to shoot, but once he clears enough of the trees to get a view of the stable doors, Karel's guts flash hot with adrenaline. The slide-to door of the stable stands gapped open a foot or more, which would be normal enough, Karel knows, were there not a flickering and yellow light at work inside and a dark horse standing in the shadows between the stable and the water tank, its head sweeping back and forth as if listening at once to the other horses and to whatever it senses moving in the grove.

Karel leans his gun against a tree and blows out the lantern. He takes a knee behind the tree, one he's climbed dozens of times as a kid on account of its low berth of branches and its sweet summer fruit, and now he hunkers there with his rifle leveled at the open door and waits while his guts work against themselves in such a way that Karel wonders if a man can set himself afire with only the friction of his own fears.

He doesn't wait long there before the stabled horses grow muted and still and the entrance falls void of its glow so abruptly you'd swear there was a darkness inside capable of consuming even firelight.

Karel's eyes go useless and he thinks about how, in winter hay season, a day baling in the freezing wind can make it so even a tepid bath is too hot to sit down in all at once. Got-damn, he thinks, and he concentrates, tries to see with his ears, to find beneath the commotion of tree frogs and insects some more human and telling sound. At first he believes he's imagining it, dreaming it as acutely and convincingly as he's dreamed nails through his father's flesh,
but when the slightest of a breeze pushes through the grove and the critters stop their calling from the trees to take note, there they are—footfalls, out beyond the cattletank in the yard.

Karel tries to follow them with a gun barrel he can't quite see the length of, but then his eyes begin finally to find some depth in the darkness, to see into the black rather than only the black itself, and he leaves the lantern there among the surfaced roots of the tree and makes out across the dirt with his rifle raised.

When he comes upon them, the animal sidesteps and nickers and its ears come forward. The rider startles, lets loose the reins, and sits the horse staring at him.

She's beautiful, and he damn near shoots her.

"Get on down from there," Karel says, taking his finger from the trigger.

She widens her big black eyes at him and parts her lips and sits there running her fingers between the horse's ears and down its white blaze. "And if I'd rather not?" she says, her voice smooth and cool as river-bottom stones.

She's in the same dress she'd worn in the carriage, only now its hem is riding up on account of the saddle. He drops his eyes to her legs, bare to the thigh above her riding boots, and he feels like it's nothing inside him but hot liquid swirling around his bones. He motions at her with the gun barrel and tries to drop his voice low, tries to mean it when he says it: "Then I reckon you'll be the handsomest dead woman I ever see."

Her hair falls straight and dark in front of her shoulders, a few wisps pasted to the corner of her mouth. She looks down at the gun and works visibly to keep a smile reined in while she pulls her hair back behind her ears. Then she takes hold of the pommel and swings down from the saddle. She's slight enough that she scarcely ducks her head when she stands beneath the horse's throat to rub its neck. "Do I look so dangerous?" she asks.

Karel considers the question for a moment before he realizes the gun's still leveled at her. "Either that or you're lost," he says, and he drops the barrel and holds the rifle at his side. "The hell you think you're up to in there?" he says, nodding at the stable.

She steps from under the horse and it nudges at her with its great head and sniffs and nibbles at her hair, and Karel goes cool with something akin to envy, a kind of longing he feels often in the presence of animals. There's only the trace of a northern breeze, and he takes a sideways step, hoping he might get downwind enough of her to find her scent there in the air amidst the traces of woodsmoke and turned earth and cattle.