The Wake of Forgiveness (6 page)

The girl, at three, was as fast as she was loud in her escape, and Karel couldn't help but laugh. "Let's to it, all you good-looking women," he said. "If we're going, we're going now."

This was a trip that gave Karel fits, that slicked his guts with a hot mix of envy and resentment and lust, and he tried, mile after slow mile, to keep his eyes only on the road, on the out-flung fencelines blurred by the dirty haze of the truck's front glass. Had it been a stranger at the wheel, someone from northern Fayette County or down near the Gulf Coast, that man would likely have taken note of the name on the passing cattlegates and assumed that he was rolling by one man's expansive spread of property. But the men of Lavaca County knew different. The land between the south and north forks of Mustang Creek, with its wire-fenced stretches of pastureland and black-soiled cotton fields, was the original Skala parcel, some of it bought and some of it won—all of it amassed by old man Vaclav before his sudden death and then deeded to Karel. Everything north, for six miles beyond the Shiner town limits, was the property of the older three Skala boys and their families. The northernmost plot, nearly four hundred acres that lined both winding sides of the Shiner-Moulton road, was the one that most made Karel wish he could drive blind.

Even with sweet little Diane in his lap and Sophie up against him, hip to hip, holding their two babies, one on her knees and one yet curled up and floating tethered in the soft and murky insides of her—even with all this family pressed so close to him—Karel couldn't keep his eyes from the stand of blackjack oaks about a mile up the road, from the farm road that ended at the gate amidst those trees. Nor could he keep his imagination from winding up that road to the house that sat, just out of view, a quarter mile from the gate, nestled among a grove of peach and pecan trees, its back porch steps leading up to the door that opened into Graciela's kitchen. Just last week, he'd seen her out front of the mercantile in Shiner, walking with her children, the little girls dressed in gingham and hair ribbons and clean white stockings, and for once he hadn't crossed to the other side of the road to avoid trading pleasantries with her. The truth was, talk or no talk, it took less than the sight of her to take him back all those years, to the wonder of her dark hair and the taut swell of her calves below the hem of her dress, to the sweet, earthy smell of her he'd taken in some fourteen years back, and to the desire that he'd begun to imagine he'd never again satisfy or suppress, either one.

It was a long trip, just shy of thirty miles to the church in Praha, and the unkempt road made the driving slow. The truck bounced and lurched, slipping into and out of the hard ruts, throwing packed clods of dirt and rock against the undercarriage. Karel steered with one hand and put his eyes back on the northernmost horizon and pulled his cigarette case from his shirt pocket. He flipped the top open with his thumb and pulled a cigarette out with his teeth.

"Time we get home," he said, "it'll be twice as much driving as praying."

Sophie turned the baby, who'd already taken to sleep, so that the little girl's cheek was against her chest. "It's always a ledger with you, Karel. You could pray now, I suspect, if you want so bad that things end up equal on both sides."

"I been doing just that," he said. "Ever since we left."

An hour later, up past the Columbus Road and into the slight swells of forested hills that rose up near the county line, Karel had yet to free himself from the thoughts of his brother's wife. He had yet to strike a match, and his cigarette still hung there, unlit, from his lips.

J
UST OVER THE
Fayette County line in Praha, there was medicine more than Mass at St. Mary's to be found, and by the time they arrived, both Karel and Sophie Skala were in need of one sort or another. A cool, parched wind had crept in behind the morning's clouds, evening was coming on, and Karel steered the truck behind the church and set the brake beneath an old live oak whose bare branches spanned the twenty-yard gap between the church itself and the adjacent hall, a new, two-story construction of stone and red brick where the dance would be held after Mass.

The long ride had been a rough one, rough enough that now, climbing from the cab, Sophie could tell the moment her feet touched the earth that her third child would be born in Praha, and on the day of the Feast, no less. In the shadows, the air carried a new chill, and Sophie was thankful for the warmth of her body, for the warmth of the body curled up within her. Resting Evie's sleeping weight on her hip, she pulled her shawl up to cover the back of her neck and then cupped her free hand beneath her belly, exhaling sharply.

When Karel made it around the truck with Diane, his mind still miles back on the road in his sister-in-law's kitchen, Sophie took her oldest girl's hand and, before leading her around to the front church steps, said, "I'm needing to sit, Karel. We'll keep a place for you inside."

Karel rubbed his arms against the cold and, as an afterthought,
went back to the cab for his suitcoat. Stove smoke came swirling up from the houses hidden amidst the trees to the east. He wanted to clear his head, so before he rolled the kegs of beer into the hall and discussed price with old man Novotny, he walked out back of the church to the parish stables and smoked a cigarette there among the four horses and the smell of tack oil and oats. In the nearest stall, a roan gelding looked up from its bucket of feed and blew, blinking its eyes slowly, and Karel wished there was some immediate need that might keep him here—a hard foaling or a hay fire, either one—anything to keep him out of that church where he would have to sit in the gleaming pews and try to find a place for his eyes to fall without causing him pause or regret or something less forgivable.

Now he held his cigarette in his mouth and scratched the horse behind its twitching ears before turning to watch as more families arrived, most in automobiles, a few yet in wagons, all wearing their finest clothes and tempered smiles.

St. Mary's was one of the three "painted churches" in the surrounding countryside, the ceiling brushed brightly with vivid images, the most unsettling of which was a gold triangle that framed a single unblinking eye, an eye that stared down on a full congregation or on empty pews with the same unflagging and illegible gaze. Even so, Karel thought St. Mary's handsome—from the outside, at least. Erected the year of his birth, the church stood unassumingly enough between the clusters of white pine and moss-veiled oak. Trimmed in marbled stone and planked with simple whitewashed pine siding, the structure's only exterior embellishment was its tall steeple, on top of which was a burnished bronze cross that the townsfolk had paid a young bohunk a keg of beer to mount in its lead pedestal.

Karel had heard the story as a boy, had marveled at the man's bravery. By all accounts, the week before Easter, he'd climbed out the topmost steeple window and shimmied up so that, perched with the toes of his boots on the windowsill, he could steady himself such that he might raise the cross high enough to slide the bronze tenon into the pedestal's mortise. The parishioners stood below, calling up to him with encouragement and advice. Overhead, the sun flickered between passing clouds. When the young man raised the cross, one of its arms snagged on his shirt collar and, just as he worked it free, a gust of wind sent the leaves skittering across the rooftop from the nearby trees.

More than one hundred feet above the ground, the man braced himself against the wind, leaning into the steeple the way a child will lean into his mother for the shelter of her body, but there was nothing of help to be had. With one hand on the cross, the other trying to take hold of the steeple, he pressed himself against the structure, swaying there until he looked down and his boots slipped from the sill.

He fell to the rooftop, sliding on his belly down the steep pitch with the cross gripped in one hand while the fingernails of his other raked over the cedar shingles as he slid. He flailed and kicked, his boots scraping, in search of purchase, as he descended toward the eaves.

This, the onlookers would say, was a malediction, evidence more than ample of evil's due influence in a world of fallen men, and when the young man flipped himself onto his back, planting his heels and stopping himselfjust short of falling, and lay there pumping hot breath from his lungs before crawling slowly back toward the steeple to complete the job, the cross leaning against his shoulder, the parishioners cheered before they fell silent in solemn recognition of the Lord's intervention. They whispered, as they still did, of this act of grace, of the vision that had brought before their eyes and renewed in their hearts the savior's struggle beneath the weight of his own glorious burden. An Easter miracle, a new testament of their faith, and all for a few gallons of beer.

Now, as Karel ground the wet tip of his cigarette into the earth with the toe of his boot and walked back to his truck, the cross stood glistening against the darkening sky, and dulled only slightly by weather and time. Beneath it, inside the church, Karel's wife was forcing smiles at the other wives from her pew while the painted eye gazed down on her, bearing muted, candle-lit witness to her own struggle against the onset of a hot and cramping wave of contractions. On Sophie's shoulder, little Evie still slept, a thin ribbon of saliva strung from the corner of her mouth to her mother's shawl. Beside her, Diane sat gazing up at the ceiling and the stained-glass windows, listening to the whispered prayers and conversations of the growing congregation. The youngest child, suspended head down in the red liquid glow of its mother's womb, tucked its knees up against its chest and rolled the back of its head against the hard rope of its mother's spine.

The altar boys appeared quietly from the nave, genuflected and lit the altar candles while, in the sacristy, Father Petardus slipped into his fine white vestment. Outside, Karel rolled three kegs of beer from his truck into the hall and stood laughing with the men of the Jolly Club, taking Novotny's flask of corn whiskey when it was offered, folding bills into his pocket. Novotny's daughter, Elizka, wearing her Sunday dress and white stockings, managed a discreet fingertip wave from behind the bar where she was readying the glassware. Karel gave her a nod, his insides alive with a potent mash of whiskey and desire. He took another pull off the flask, swallowing with a grimace, while in the pews Sophie breathed hard through clenched teeth and thought, with a kind of willed determination that never fully blotted out the fear, of what lay in wait for her. She'd had hard labors with the first two, but this would be another thing entirely. The child would come from her, and she would survive it, but it would be hours yet, and the back of its skull would grind against her spine as it came.

It had begun, she knew that, but she couldn't know that it would progress in the way that it would, that the baby would be rendered from her in a fashion as protracted and inexorable as the way stones are tumbled, turned smooth by years of rushing water, and men are eroded of kindness by the slow, interminable friction of their unrealized desires.

H
ER WATER BROKE
at the kneeling rail.

The church was quietly alive with the flickering of candlelight and the swirling haze of incense smoke, and Karel was on his knees beside her, amazed as ever by the serenity that overcame his wife's face when Father Petardus placed the Eucharist on her tongue. Holding Evie, who stirred now on her shoulder, Sophie kept her eyes shut, bowed her head, and when the altar boy moved the communion plate beneath Karel's chin and the priest held the sacrament before him, saying, "The Body of Christ," Sophie inhaled with a plaintive gasp and whispered, "Oh, Karel," as if begging her husband to accept what he'd been offered.

He did not.

His hearing, after these five years of marriage, was attuned to her voice in the way common only to husbands who adore their wives and those who lie to them with regularity. To Karel's mind, he practiced the latter because of the former, because Sophie was a good woman, kind and hearty and generous, so much so, in fact, that he suspected she knew when he was less than honest, less than wholly hers, and that she endured the indiscretions the way a good horse will endure shoeing and hard harness work, blinded to everything but the promise of brushstrokes and oats, of kindness and comfort. With eyes affixed only to a future worth forsaking the present for.

Now, because Sophie was speaking at the communion rail, speaking to him in an attitude she would normally reserve for her queries of God, Karel turned from Father Petardus's offering. He leaned toward his wife, his hand reaching down to support himself, and, in doing so, touching the wet hem of her skirt.

When, for years afterward, he told this story to his child, he would say that the birth had begun at the precise moment that the body of Christ had touched his tongue, that it was as if the sacrifice of one son had allowed for the arrival of another.

This was to become Karel's way, the stretching of truth in an effort to instill in the workaday the wonderful, and this was especially true in the stories he would come to tell his children. His own upbringing had been one of quiet exclusion, his father moving through the rooms of the house and the rows of the cropfields in what seemed a determined if not wholly unnatural silence. Year after year, the rain would batter the cedar shingles overhead, the sun would bake the black earth to a hard ceramic sheen around the rigid cotton stalks, the quail in the pastureland would covey and nest and hatch and fledge, each season born naturally of the one before, but on the rare day that Vaclav Skala would gather his boys behind the barn or on the tree-lined banks of Mustang Creek with fishing rods and tin pails of grubs, the very earth would cease, in the boys' minds, its slow, secretive turning, and they'd stand eager and mute, dumbstruck by the anticipation of their father's words.

Usually the stories were brief, meant to impart some lesson, and while Karel might laugh or grow solemn at the stories his father told—of his stormy voyage over high seas from the old country to Galveston, of the wolves he'd hunted alongside his brothers in the hills of Bohemia, lessons about hard work and fields sowed with stubbornness and sacrifice—he never found in these moments any new revelations that could dispute what he'd been told, since he was old enough to comprehend, by his brothers: That he'd killed their mother; that their father despised him for it and had refused, on the day of Karel's birth and thereafter, to hold him.