The Wake of Forgiveness (9 page)

Elizka pulled the long curls of her hair back over her shoulders and moved toward him past the stalls. "If you were wanting to dance," she said, "you should have asked me an hour ago when the orchestra was playing."

He shrugged and sat up. She held his head in her hands, pulling him toward her, and he could smell her there in the dark, the bitter tang of perspiration and sour malt sweetened by the earthy, animal scent of her. Karel leaned forward and breathed in sharply through his nose. "You smell something of a horse," he said.

She went to work on the buttons of his shirt and shushed him, pushing him onto his back atop the hay. Above them, hung from nails in the joist timbers, was the old weather-checked tack that the parish had forever mended rather than replace. Elizka pulled a rusted martingale ring out so Karel could catch sight of it. "You imagine it has anything to do with this fancy inn you keep inviting me to?"

Karel held his tongue and kicked off his boots. After she'd gotten him out of his trousers, she worked her underclothes down over her hips and pulled her dress up around her waist to reveal the chill bumps rising there on the tops of her thighs. When she straddled him, he looked down as the soft cleft of her yielded to him in the shadows, and then he smiled at her with his eyes closed while she worked the slick and fragrant heat of herself against him. "No," he whispered. "I'm near certain it's you."

Elizka moved atop him for a long while, her hips shifting up and back in the smooth, rhythmic cycle of a seasoned horsewoman posting in the saddle. Karel lay there with his eyes clamped shut, remembering another astride him, the lather of her tracing cool trails down his thighs, until he could scarcely tell what among all this forgiving flesh was hers and what was his. The horses twitched and switched their tails in their sleep. Outside, the wind threaded its way through the thicket and swept leaves from the roof timbers while Elizka's breathing gathered into its own urgent cadence.

And then it was upon him, the same irrepressible breed of desire that he'd felt the night he left his father to expire in the mud after falling beneath the weight of his horse. A longing to turn loose of every damned handhold the earth afforded a man, a longing he'd managed, until then, to defy long enough to unlearn.

When it was time, he pushed himself into her and he held her hips as steadfastly as he was now held by this intoxicating urge, one stronger than the alcohol, one which compelled him to surrender to what beckoned him simply because it beckoned and he heard it. A summons as vital and insensible, Karel felt, as the one the very pull of the earth had on the unborn, that unanswerable force that landed foals and calves and infants alike in the world with the intention to let them fend, in the end, entirely for themselves.

When his body shuddered, Elizka stopped all at once and leapt off to find him smiling at her, his eyes wide with the kind of self-satisfied mischief his wife so often found endearing. "
Damn it, Karel,
" she said. "
You didn't.
"

He tried to follow her, but he had his trousers and boots to contend with, and by the time he made it to the stable door, she had cleared the churchyard and was pacing up the road, her arms stiff at her sides, toward the room she kept above the store beside her father's house. Karel stopped, and as he turned away there came a voice from out in the cemetery. He scanned the fenceline in the darkness to find the old widow Vrana swinging open the gate. She moved toward him with her shawl pulled over her head like a nun come out of the dark night to chasten him. Her face was creased by what Karel imagined were equal parts weather and contempt, and as she approached she kept her eyes fixed on the feedstore up the road.

When she was upon him, he shivered against the chill of her eyes or the winter air or both, and he looked down to find himself still shirtless, hay dust catching moonlight in his chest hair.

And what was there to say by way of explanation? No sense even in troubling with an attempt. Instead he said, "Evening, Mrs. Vrana," and he gave her a nod and a playful bow.

"Long past it," she said, glancing once more up the road, where now lamplight flickered in the second-story window of Elizka's room. "Your wife is wanting to introduce you to your son, Mr. Skala, if you can spare the time just now."

The wind gusted and then swirled so that it came, for a moment, out of the south. The enormous oak between the church and hall turned loose of a wind-snapped twig so slender and insignificant that it rustled down through the network of bare branches and landed soundlessly on the cool sod of the churchyard. Behind him, one of the horses shifted in its nervous, animal sleep, and Karel moved his toes around in his boots. "My
son,
did you say?"

"I did. Delivered so near on to midnight that I can't be certain which day. But he's a boy, Mr. Skala. I'm confident I've kept the difference straight in my mind."

Karel reached for the woman's hand. She allowed him to take it, and then she took a step back toward the cemetery.

"I'll be goddamned," Karel said.

The old woman let go of his hand, began shuffling along toward the gate, and without so much as turning her head she said, "I can't speak to that, Mr. Skala, but I suspect you can. Either way, your wife's waiting on you, and she's likely expecting you to have your shirt on when you get there."

A
LL OF THE COOL
afternoon, a steady wind has swept across the brittle pastureland and bristled through the needles of the spindly creekside pines, and now, with the two finish-line fires whipped alive and spitting embers, a sliver of moon flashes behind the low scrim of clouds with all the coy promise of a woman's pale skin showing itself beneath the sheer guise of worn stockings. Near the creekbed, in the shadows beyond the firelight, Villaseñ's men stand watching as the onlookers arrive, the hint of moonlight glinting off the blued receivers of their rifles, which they cradle in the crooks of their arms with a collective if tentative tenderness, the way they might hold their sons, had they any to hold.

In two days, news of the wager has outrun the county mail service, finding its way north to Shiner and Moulton as if conveyed by wire, and when Vaclav Skala leads his sons and his fine snorting stallion out of the darkness of his acreage and through the gate at the pasture's westernmost fenceline, he takes slow notice of the congregation of animals tethered to fenceposts. He reckons there's fifty of them at least, two to each cedar post—workhorses, most of them, with some finer breeding and a few common asses among them. Surveying the ones nearest him, he notes a few in gleaming oiled tack embellished with polished brass rivets and hardware, others haltered in fraying rope and unsaddled, all of them steaming from the nostrils and tossing their heads against the sharp and shifting scents of nightfall. Vaclav stops of a sudden just inside the gate and runs his hand down the twitching flanks of his horse, smoothing the roan hide's confusion of colors as the animal works a hoof halfheartedly in the winter sod and browses the occasional tufts of dried turf. The boys ask wordless questions of one another with their eyes and stand at the ready while their father bites a new portion of tobacco from his plug and works it back into his molars with a finger before spitting a loose string of the stuff from his tongue. Then he turns to them and tilts his head toward the long line of horses tied up and nervous in the night as if staged for some inhumane procession. "If that sight there wouldn't stiffen a horse thief's pecker, boys, I don't reckon any pretty little thing's teats would do the trick neither."

The boys laugh and give the horses a look, but Karel is scanning the shadows for another animal altogether. Two nights in a row now it has worked him awake, the sight of the Villaseñ girl with her knees bare above her fine, polished boots in the stirrups, her hair sweet smelling and black and falling toward him. Stan grips his shoulder and gives him a playful shake, but Karel knows that even his brothers are wishing failure upon him, bearing in their chests, as they surely do, the hot burden of hope.

And they are not alone.

Men are milling about everywhere. Farmers and townsfolk, tradesmen and ranchers, and Karel can't remember a time when he's ever seen so many men he recognizes standing unwarily amidst so many he doesn't, all of them telling jokes and swapping stories and smoking cigarettes, toeing the black earth and warming themselves near the fires. There are better than four dozen, Karel guesses, and there are others he can't see. Out from beyond the stand of pines rise the muffled conversations of those who are newly arrived and as yet planting sixpenny nails in the hard, dark clay of the creekbank with boot heels and securing their jugs of corn whiskey with double-knotted twine and floating them in the cold running water as if fishing for the county drunks.

Just this side of the trees, two squat Mexicans with thin mustaches and expensive rifles stand eyeing Karel and smiling, stubs of cigars planted and smoking in the wet corners of their mouths. One of them winks at him and elbows his partner, who laughs and scratches his low-slung belly and then pulls the cigar from his mouth so he can purse his lips into a mocking kiss that sours Karel's guts and slicks his palms with sweat. And then there's Lad Dvorak, laughing with Patrick Dalton and his boy, the three of them huddled close to the fire farthest from the trees, and when the banker catches sight of the Skalas, he turns and moves toward them with his lips crinkled into a smile and his trousers stiff and creased hard with starch. He makes a point of fingering the silver chain slung from his vest as he walks, and when he stands before them, he pulls the watch from his fob and looks Vaclav in the eye before springing the thing open.

"I've never known you to be early, Skala. That or late, either one."

"Never known you to give a great goddamn one way or the other," Vaclav says, "unless you're carrying a note and expecting payment, which I'll remind you ain't the case." He takes a look around, squinting into the darkness beyond the reach of the firelight and testing the scant weight of the horse crop in his hand. "What's keeping the Mexican?"

Off to the east and well out of sight, roosted mourning doves project the last of their day's lamentations from the dense and tangled stand of moss-draped oaks. Dvorak clears his throat and puts his watch away. "I don't suspect anything is, Skala. Seems to me he's unaccustomed to being kept by anyone other than himself."

Karel takes Whiskey's lead when his father hands it back to him, and then he stands, his feet squared with his shoulders and his stomach fermented by nerves, as his father forces a smile to his lips and scratches the bald and sun-spotted skin of his scalp and then smoothes the fringe of unkempt curls on his head. "Well, hell then," says Vaclav, "I reckon it might just as well be me what accustoms him to it."

"Might as well be you who tries," Lad says, then he locks eyes with Karel and opens his coat to reveal its green silk lining and a folded bundle of parchment secreted there in the monogrammed pocket. "The papers are all in order, boy, excepting your father's signature. You ready to ride?"

Karel spools the leather lead tight around his wrist and reaches out instinctively for the long neck of his father's horse, working his fingers there such that the bristles of the animal's coat prick the tender flesh beneath his fingernails in a way that is both painful and reassuring, and he's about to tell Dvorak that he's sure enough ready when his father raises the riding crop and snaps it sharply against his trousers before handing it over. "He calls you
boy
again, son, you got my permission to sign the family name for me. In welts on his hindquarters."

In the distance, coyotes have found their voices in the damp promise of weather, calling out as if in answer to the inconsiderate onset of cold. Visibly agitated along the fenceline, the horses blow and complain, their hides shuddering violently with the worried work of their muscles. To the west, when Villaseñor's surrey rolls dark and polished as a hearse to the gate, the sky hangs swollen and sickly above the distant horizon as if the whole mass of the heavens has been wounded and gauzed with clouds and backlit feebly by the diminishing moon. The coach rocks on its springs, and when it comes to a stop, the twin carriage lanterns swing in illuminated arcs from their chains. Guillermo Villaseñor ties off the reins and sets the brake. He climbs down from the seat as the onlookers stand casting long shadows in the firelight. Still others emerge unsteady and quiet as spotted fawns from their drinking amidst the trees by the creek. They watch silently as the man buttons his fine otter-skin coat against the growing cold and tilts his unlit cigar up and down playfully in his mouth. The two girls in the covered rear seat of the carriage are visible only as indistinct but animated shadows, and in the moments it takes for Villaseñor to strike a match and puff his cigar lit and take down one of the lanterns and amble to the gate, his men are there waiting, their rifles at their sides, until they exchange some words in Spanish and the two guards cast quick looks over their shoulders at the assembling crowd. They nod, and Villaseñ puffs his cigar and lets the smoke roll from his mouth and swirl out into the night before pulling the thing from his lips. He hands the lantern to one of his men, slides two fingertips into his mouth and whistles sharply.

Out west, a coyote answers and a wet gust of wind scours the pasture and swirls the fires, which throw glowing ash yawing out into the clusters of men. And then the girl rides out of the darkness with her feet high in the stirrups, her black hair roped into a single swaying braid and her face rapt in a solemn beauty that reminds Karel of a memory he can't possibly have, one he's kindled to life since the other night out by the stables. He's seeing his mother, blond and lovely and sitting a horse in the night, and he can't help now but imagine himself curled up and floating inside her, his blood an extension of hers, his bobbing movement a function of her horse's gait, his heart beating only so long as hers refuses to stop. He hears the sharp inhalation of his oldest brother beside him, and then Stan and Thomas are whispering.