The Wake of Forgiveness (8 page)

Karel held his cigarette between his teeth and shot Novotny a look that had both amusement and wonder in it.
Who in hell is this little green-ass?
he wanted to say.
And why is it that I want to kick him in the ribs and slap him on the back all at the same time?
Instead, he took a long pull from his smoke and did something he rarely did, something that had always proved as useless as sowing seed in September—he tried to straighten his neck so he could look this boy level in the eye without leaning.

He couldn't any better than he ever could, so he spat his unfinished cigarette from his lips and ground it asunder with his boot heel instead. "I ain't got a family no more," Karel said, "excepting my wife and girls."

"
Excepting?
" Raymond said. "Hell, you can feed me shit on a biscuit if you ain't got me beat. All I got left is Joe here."

"That a fact? Last I heard, your pop had bought a parcel up county from Flatonia."

"Yessir. And me and Joe here just sold it. Which, so long as we're on the subject of commerce, you reckon it's some of that beer left for sale inside? We wouldn't mind drinking one to your family, Mr. Skala. We hear it's getting bigger presently."

"It damn well better be," Karel said, opening the door. "On both counts."

T
HERE WAS BEER
left aplenty, and Elizka Novotny there to pocket Karel's coin and hand him the glass, making sure, each time, to brush his fingers with hers when she did.

The only child of the wealthiest man in town, Elizka had made use of her advantages. During the war, when enrollment fell and the University at Austin had opened its doors more readily to women, Elizka had left Praha for three years of book learning. When her mother fell to a crippling stiffening in her hands and feet, she came home before graduating to assist in the woman's care and ended up managing her father's business interests instead. She had a knack for numbers and negotiation, and once, when Karel had asked when she planned to settle down, Elizka Novotny had pulled a wisp of curls from the corner of her wet mouth and said, "I am settled. I didn't grow Daddy's business just to marry some dirt farmer who expects me to hand over the reins so he can make a wreck of it."

Now Karel gave her a wink, handed beers to the Knedlik boys, and turned toward the music. On a stage of pine planks laid over railroad ties, the five-piece band had come out of their suitcoats, and there was sweat showing beneath the arms of the bandleader's shirtsleeves and wicking into his vest as he kept time to the music with his foot. He handled his accordion with an oddly orchestrated violence, and when he stomped his boot heel sharply through a three count, the horns and drums met him on the third beat, striking up another polka.

Bohumil Novotny buttoned his suitcoat and made his rounds, shaking hands with his fellow townsmen before begging their pardon to carry a plate of food home to his ailing wife. When Father Petardus rose from a table in the back and raised his empty glass, wishing the parishioners a pleasant night, the band kicked into a droll march as the pastor walked for the doors to make his exit. The onlookers hooted and slapped at their thighs, the older among them throwing themselves forward until the laughing turned to wheezing and hacking.

Karel, for all his talk, spent most of the night on the perimeter of the dance hall, moving with the Knedlik boys in tow between the long tables, introducing them to the folks he knew while young suitors reached for the hands of their sweethearts and husbands danced with their wives, stirring the baby powder that had been sprinkled on the hardwood flooring to make shoe leather cooperate with the slide steps of the occasional waltz.

The hall had gone ripe with the smells of spilled beer and sweat and the lingering, fatty spices of the sausage and onions that had been served before the band had tuned up. Throughout the hall, between songs, rose frequent outbursts of laughter and the ivory clicking of dominoes being shaken between hands, but it was the music Karel wanted, and the band kept it coming while he drank and smoked and took a seat across from the Knedlik brothers near the door.

The boys took long drinks from their pilsners, but only Raymond studied Karel from over the rim of his glass. Joe kept his eyes on the table, his mouth pinched up between drinks like he'd been trying the whole of his short life to wash one bitter taste from his mouth with another.

Karel tapped his toe in time with the music and sat back in his chair with a groan. He hadn't found time to eat, what with all the commotion, and now his stomach was a sour swirl of beer and corn whiskey. "So, you boys in need of work?" he said.

Raymond smiled and licked a trace of beer suds from his upper lip. "It could be. You in need of help?"

There was a commotion on the dance floor, and Karel looked out to find a young girl sprawled out on her back beneath her red-faced dance partner, who was struggling to bring himself back upright after their tumble.
Hell, boy,
someone called out.
It's a dance, not a circus!

Karel turned back to the twins, who were chuckling into the foam of their beers. "I might could use a hand or two," he said. "Your folks is gone then? I didn't hear."

"Ashes to ashes," Raymond said, and then his smile turned in on itself at the corners of his mouth. "Mother was a good woman. Deserved better than what God gave her. Died of the typhus last winter. The old man, he burnt up in his bed when the house caught fire. Just after the last cut of hay."

"God bless," Karel said, feeling, at the word of the mother's death, some old, buried connection to her clawing at him like a blind, burrowing animal awakened to find its den collapsed around it. His words, he suspected, had betrayed nothing, and when Joe looked up at him, his bright eyes glassy and red with whiskey and fatigue, did Karel think how halfhearted it must have sounded, the invocation of God coming, as it had, from a man who'd not two hours ago interrupted a sacrament. "What I mean to say is, that's a sorry lot, boys. It was good fortune you managed to make it out."

Now Raymond traced his scar with his thumbnail. He finished his beer and kept his lips closed while he held his stomach and muffled a belch. "We wasn't ever in anything what needed getting out of, Mr. Skala. We don't believe in fortune. Nor accidents neither."

Karel frowned and lit a cigarette. He started to say that a man ought to watch how much he said, and when, but he thought the better of it, saying instead, "How about work? You believe in that?"

"We ain't interested in farming, if that's what you mean. Joe here's good with animals. Sits a horse good as any. I can butcher damn near anything born with blood in it. But we don't tend to crops. We got enough money to get by a good while. Got a new truck. Got no use anymore for planting fields and mending fences. If we had, we'd have kept the land up county."

"I expect you would have," Karel said. "Anything else you won't do, assuming there's good money to be made in it, of course?"

"Just that. Crop farming. I reckon that's the whole list right there."

Karel polished off his beer and grabbed the boys' empty glasses from off the table. And then, before heading toward Elizka at the bar, he clinked the glasses together and squatted down such that his haunches rested on his heels. Now that Sophie was laboring, they'd have cause to stay put in Praha for another day or two at the least, and he'd need someone to look after his heifers and smokehouse, and there were at least four kegs of beer that needed delivering to Hacek's Ice and Coal in Moulton, but first he wanted to see how much doing it might take to spook these boys.

The orchestra held one last, long note of a polka, and when the dancers had spun to a stop and turned toward the stage to applaud, Karel put his cigarette to his lips and held it there burning orange at the ember while he leaned in close to Raymond Knedlik. "Set a house afire, would you, Raymond?"

The boy glanced at his brother and then looked hard and without blinking through the rising smoke into Karel's eyes. His bad eye twitched, its bottom lid pulsing with the measured beating of his heart. Then he pushed his chair back and stood up, his brother following suit. They hooked their thumbs into their pockets and laughed while Karel came to his feet with the beer glasses still in his hands and his cigarette hanging from his mouth.

"If what folks says is true," the boy said, "it's more than me and Joe here that's helped his old man into the hole he deserves."

It had been a long time since anyone, friend or otherwise, had dared to mention Karel's father within earshot of him, and Karel noticed that his fingers were gripped around the beer glasses so forcefully that his veins bulged beneath the tanned skin on the backs of his hands. What I ought to do, he thought, is take you little shit-asses outside and stomp some sense into you, but the brothers held their ground, moving together in such a way that their shoulders nearly touched, and Karel found himself thinking of the days he'd been harnessed with his brothers to the plow. It had been hard work, but they'd suffered it together, shoulder to shoulder, and now there was something cool bubbling up inside him, working its way through him fresh and clean the way the waters of the cold springs out west bubbled up through stone to feed the winding rivers in the hills.

Karel let his cigarette drop from his lips and ground it into the floor with his boot before moving close enough to the boys to smell their sour breath. Onstage, the bandleader pulled a red kerchief from the back pocket of his trousers, mopping his forehead and the bridge of his nose before he announced an intermission. Karel found himself whispering: "If what folks says is true, then we'd all three of us be waiting for a turn in that new electric chair they got in Huntsville, sure enough. So either it ain't true or we ain't been so goddamned mindless enough yet to go flapping our gums about it at a church dance of a Sunday night. Besides which, there's a difference between killing a man and letting one die, so why don't you just take your seats there and let me buy you another beer and listen to what I'm wanting to ask you."

H
ALF AN HOUR
later, after the Knedlik boys had agreed to look after the Skala place for a day or two, and to stay on after that if they could agree on the terms, Karel saw them out to their truck and shook their hands, their breath steaming in the growing cold as they said their good-byes.

And then he took to drinking in earnest.

The beer did its work in much the same way he knew river water did, running through him and carrying away, grain by grain, the sediment of ill will that had embedded itself within him over the past year of hard work and worry. What was left now, he thought, as the night deepened and the hall thinned out, leaving only the most vigilant of dancers and drinkers, was nothing less than the very bedrock of him, deep and compacted such that neither plow nor music nor drink could unearth it.

Karel's earliest taste of the bottle had come eighteen years back on the night of his first race against the Dalton boy. That night, beaming with victory and the whiskey his brothers had smuggled into their room from their father's stash, he had stirred in his bed, flushed so fully of his usual thoughts that it seemed to him there was nothing left of him but skeleton and skin and the tingling thereabouts that came from having done something his pop might praise him for and from having drunk something that might send the old man reaching for his strap.

At first he'd kicked the sheets away and marveled at the novelty of it, of a night freed from the knot of longing he'd had cinched in his gut as long as he could remember, but then the room had begun its slow, almost reluctant turning, the way a windmill did sometimes when a trace of breeze crept up so softly overhead that it didn't even register on his sweat-glazed skin. He'd sat up in bed, alone in a room alive only with the sounds his brothers brought forth from their dreams, and though he couldn't have put it into words, what he knew somehow was that he'd been scooped clean inside of more than he might be able to do without, reduced to something so thin walled and brittle and hollow that it felt, any moment, like it was sure to cave in on itself if he didn't find some way, or someone, to fill it.

He'd discovered on that night, and many like it afterward, that he could manage to stay upright on horseback even when he'd drunk himself incapable of walking a straight line between the back porch and the outhouse. Fumbling with the straps, he'd grabbed the saddle by the pommel and set it aside in the hay. Then he mounted the horse and rode with only a bridle. He cantered out past the cattlegate and slowed to a walk while crossing the south fork of the creek, and when he came up the far bank he gave the horse a heel and marveled at the solid resistance of the animal, that and the surging response that leveled off into a ride so fast and smooth that he could hardly tell himself from the animal or the animal from him. There was the controlled violence of the muscles rolling beneath him, the vibrations working through him so fully that the roots of his teeth tingled in the hard bone of his jaw. In the distance, mesquite and pecan trees cast their erratic black shapes against the bruised sky that hovered over the solid line of the horizon. It was a wonder, and Karel relished the mystery of it—all these acres, so familiar beneath the bald sun, now rendered foreign as provinces in the Bible. All he needed, it seemed, was night air made fast in his hair by an animal run hard in the night, and he could find the loud landscape of his father lulled quiet by something so simple as the absence of light.

In the end, such a ride had only once failed to right him, to restore in his echoing hollows the weight of all the worry he couldn't seem to feel whole for long without.

Now, near midnight in the parish stables, a soft diffusion of moonlight found Karel leaning against a stack of square hay bales and listening to the idle tramping of the horses as they shuffled and sighed in their sleep. Outside, the thicket was loudly alive with the work of insects and wind. When Elizka Novotny came to meet him there, as she'd done twice before in the course of the last year, Karel tried to stand upright and, in the attempt, lurched forward in a fashion so sudden and awkward that at first he imagined one of the horses had worked its way free and come up to nudge him between the shoulder blades. He swung his arms back to compensate, sliding around in the loose hay underfoot before falling back against the rough bedding of the bales.