The Wake of Forgiveness Page 10

  For now, he’s simply thankful for the sudden turning of the weather, for the chance that the rain might fluster a girl who’s likely been kept under roof when the weather sours, who’s grown up riding only on ideal days at ideal times. Once the sweeping sheet of downpour reaches them, he feels the cool renewal of confidence at work in his blood, in the quieting of his heart and the stillness of his hands. The horse is all speed and momentum, a rolling and muscular extension of Karel himself, and the steam from the animal’s breath breaks over him like windswept fog. His hair is soaked and streaming from the teeming weather. He imagines Stan and Thom, wringing wet and walking all this way back, the comfort and easy confidence washed from their faces. He pictures each brother with his shoulders hunched against the rain, walking and frowning, looking at his sad and sopping cigar with all the puzzled dejection of a man come home from his fields to find his wife run off and the breakfast dishes still stacked in the sink, hard-caked with the reminder of all she was to him besides cold hands and warm legs in bed.

  He’s gaining now, but not nearly enough, and they’re close enough to see the lines of men hunched forward beneath the downpour, cheering with their hands on their knees as the fires fail in the pouring rain and shoot steam outward as if from the undersides of braking locomotives. He makes one last push, one of both desperation and obligation, swinging his crop and urging the horse on with sharp, vocalized exhalations—“Haa, boy! Haa, got-dammit.” Water seems to erupt from the hoof-struck ground, and the animal’s ears twitch and fold backward. Karel pulls within two lengths, but the girl is riding with ease, streaming water from her hair and rocking forward and back in smooth, effortless revolutions, and when she senses him making ground on her, she flips the crop around in her hand and waves the knot just in view over her horse’s eyes.

  And that’s all it takes.

  The animal lengthens its stride and drives forward with such immediate comprehension that even Karel can’t help but think it beautiful. Well, hell, he thinks. Would you look at that. She didn’t even touch him.

  Now he might as well sit back in the saddle, and he knows it, knows it’s too late, knows that his mind, this last half mile, has been too damned often clouded with matters other than the race. Still, he puts the whip once more to the horse and holds his crouch, feeling his eyes flood with saltier stuff than rainwater as he reaches the first of the onlookers.

  The Dalton boy is smirking, standing straight despite the rain, shouldering the affectionate weight of the arm his father drapes over him, the scar on his cheek faded into the slightest line and visible only because it stands pale on the boy’s wind-flushed and freckled skin. Dvorak has turned from the race and is walking back toward the cattlegate, against which Villaseñor leans with his hand cupped over his eyes and his dark brows raised in appreciation as his daughter crosses between the smoldering fires and comes upright in the stirrups, swinging her animal out into the pasture past all the horses roped to their fenceposts and bowing their heads against the rain.

  When Karel finishes, he avoids his father’s eyes as he passes him and reins his horse in the other direction, circling out toward the creek and the canopy of the treeline. His father looks his way with narrowed eyes, pinching his lips together and shaking his head as the townsfolk gather around the Villaseñor girl and her horse, slapping her father on the shoulder and shaking his hand. Beneath the shelter of trees, Karel sits the horse and marvels at how quick these men are to shift their allegiances, at how little it has to do with their admiration of these strangers. He’s known all his life that his father was the envy of his neighbors, that he was seen around the county as cold and self-interested, and now it comes so naturally, this celebration of his comeuppance. Hell, Karel thinks, if coyotes took every last one of our calves, these bastards would gather at the fenceline cheering the slaughter.

  Shifting his weight in the saddle, Karel turns his face up to the cold drops of rain that find their way through the pine boughs above. His mouth burns with its wound, and he runs his fingers through his wet hair, fingering the swollen knot on his scalp. The wind shifts, and out in the distance the falling rain sways and tosses all at once like sheer drapery hung from an open window on some moonless, gusty evening. The townsmen drift about, pushing their hats down over their ears and hugging themselves against the cold, moving in small groups toward the road and their horses, back toward the creek to fetch their whiskey. Karel watches Mr. Knedlik, wiry and weaving with liquor already, labor himself into the saddle with a groan. He’s a mean old son of a bitch, one whose wife has been seen about town for years with yellow bruises on her arms and eyes shot red with his handiwork. And now the poor woman has delivered twins, and it strikes Karel as telling that the man turns his horse for town, with the hope of finding the icehouse open late, rather than out through the western pastures toward home.

  From out of the crowd, Eduard comes beaten looking and sloshing through the mud, hunching his shoulders as if gravel rather than rain has been turned loose by the sky. When he stops beneath the trees, he wipes the water from his face with his coat sleeve and takes hold of the horse’s reins. He offers a conciliatory grin and says, “You reckon it’ll rain, brother?”

  The horse blows and sidesteps, and Karel leans back in the saddle, supporting himself with flattened hands reached back against the animal’s haunches. He’s quite certain he could go a week without saying a word and not miss the sound of his voice in the least, but somehow he manages. “Supposed to mean good luck for weddings.”

  Eduard studies the sod at his feet for a moment and makes a show of wincing, as if he’s grown cold to the idea he’d been so ready to banter about two short nights before in their room. “Just so you know,” he says, “it’s nobody here who thought you would lose,” but there’s something sidelong and searching in his eyes that doesn’t cotton to his words.

  Swinging down from the saddle, Karel takes the reins from his brother and looks out to the east where the distant stand of trees is masked by the darkness out of which his other brothers will shortly emerge. “It’s sure as shit some who did,” he says. “It’s some who were celebrating with cigars before the thing was half run.”

  From the overhang of pine boughs, rain spatters down onto the horse’s hot hide and steams there as the animal signals its impatience with sidesteps and quick tosses of its head. Eduard studies his brother. “I wouldn’t know about all that,” he says, then he points at the corner of his own mouth by way of indication. “You’re bleeding.”

  “Deserve to be,” Karel says, nodding his head out toward the oaks in the black distance. “It’s a Mexican up there with a tree growing out of his arm, and he ain’t bashful with it.”

  Eduard offers a confused look. The gray rain comes down as if flung from feed pails, and the pastureland looks to be sheeted in roiling water as the puddles are splashed by the new torment of drops. Some of the townsmen have short words for Karel, but most either touch the horse lightly and nod at him or pass without any acknowledgment whatsoever.

  Karel inhales hard through his nose and works the bitter result around in his mouth awhile before spitting it into the muddied earth. He matches eyes with his brother and plays down the whole thing with raised brows and crimped lips. Then he stands beneath the pines and looks around at the dispersing crowd of shadows as a few begin to unknot their horse leads and amble out into the darkness. Whiskey stamps and whinnies, and Karel settles him by slackening his hold on the reins and rubbing a flattened hand up and down the broad slope of the animal’s neck.

  Out toward the road, just this side of the cattlegate, Villaseñor is still huddled in congratulations with his daughter, the other two girls as yet sheltered from the rain in the backseat of the surrey as their sister sits wringing wet and smiling in the night while her father shakes her playfully by the shoulders and squeezes the top of her thigh and cups her cheek in his hand. And then, instead of heading through the gate out to the road, she turns the horse into the night-masked pasture
and glances back at Karel as she goes. She gives the horse a nudge and walks it into the darkness of the rain and cut hay to the south. Her father lifts up on the gate, unlatching it, and steps out toward his carriage, nodding to Karel’s father as he goes. Vaclav moves his head in acknowledgment without meeting the man’s eyes. They’re barely visible now except for the single carriage lantern throwing a pale halo behind them, and Skala stands there in the tumult of weather, leaning casually against a fencepost as if the sun and good fortune both were shining down on him. His face flushed by the weather and anger, he draws his knife from the sheath on his belt and busies himself cleaning his fingernails while Dvorak and the Daltons stand talking in the rain.

  The fires, burning hot and blue just minutes before, are smoking and black, and Karel catches a glimpse of his other brothers and both Mexicans walking with the lantern out of the distance. Karel studies Eduard for a long moment, watching him watch the girl as she canters into the shadows. “Where you reckon she’s off to?”

  Eduard shrugs. “It ain’t no telling.”

  Karel watches as the girl moves slowly into the dark downpour, and when Stan and Thom come sloshing up with the Mexicans, he makes a point of looking them each hard in the eyes. Stan doesn’t seem willing or able to hold his gaze for long, so intent is he on studying his muddied boots. But Thom, ever the most brazen, smiles brightly and slicks his wet blond hair back on his scalp with a flourish. “What say you make me a loan of that horse,” he says. “It’s time I go introduce myself to my bride.”

  Despite the weather and the wound, Karel finds his mouth inexplicably dry, so he parts his lips and gathers blood and rainwater on his tongue so he’ll have something to spit at Thom’s feet. But when he notes the men standing silent and armed behind his brothers in the dancing light of the lantern, he swallows the water and, with it, the impulse to ask why any man with a perfectly good rifle would have to secrete himself behind oak moss taking potshots with tree branches. Instead he shields the rain from his eyes with one hand and takes an exaggerated look out to the south where the girl has ridden into the night. Then he glances west to the cattlegate. Just this side of it, their father has put his knife away and now comes slopping through standing water with his fringe of curls hanging wilted about his ears. Karel turns toward Thom and mocks his vanity with a slow swipe of his own rain-slicked hair. “Ain’t my horse to lend,” he says, “but go on ahead and ask Pop if you want. He’s likely in a giving temper.”

  When Skala joins them there beneath the pine trees, the man lets fall from his lips a thick glob of tobacco juice. Fishing his handkerchief from his pocket, he studies the boys with a stern silence that dares them to speak, and when he looks toward Karel, his eyes narrow and he makes a low, deliberate sound in the back of his throat while he wipes his face dry. He takes the boy’s chin roughly in his hand and tilts his head back. “The hell happened to your mouth, boy?” he asks, but he turns his attention to the others without waiting for an answer. He scans their faces, stuffing his hands into his coat pockets and baiting them with his gaze, and when he takes sudden notice of the men keeping close company behind them, armed with their lit lantern and rifles, Skala snarls, his face deep-creased with disgust. “Oh, Jesus. Ain’t this rich,” he says. “I knew you boys had taken to Mexicans, but I didn’t expect you’d favor the ones wearing mustaches! Hell, what next? You all pull your peckers at night thinking about those darkies they hired on at the wire works in Shiner?”

  Stan fidgets and can’t will his eyes upward, and when the sting of his torn lip throws a shiver through him, Karel realizes he’s smiling. His oldest brother has never fit his role, though he’s never stopped trying. Ever the peacemaker, ever the one who would relent to kitchen chores and hard labor alike rather than listen to the rest of them squabble about whose turn it was to shuck the corn or scrub the floors, Stan is a born mother hen. At nearly twenty years of age, he’s been marrying age for better than two years, but he’s never so much as mentioned leaving home, leaving his brothers, and he’s never once outwardly crossed his father.

  “Ain’t no one leaving until one of you little sugar tits tells me why this boy looks like he’s been chewing barbwire.”

  Stan swallows, shifting his weight on his feet while the Mexicans eye each other with wry looks. Eduard shrugs awkwardly, his neck as bent as his brothers’, and in his gesture is a hint of relief and resentment. He’d been left behind to stand in wait with his father by the finish-line fires, and if something happened out on the course behind those trees, he damn sure hadn’t had the privilege of seeing it. As for Thom, he rolls his eyes and casually plucks a string of tobacco from his tongue before speaking up over the rain. “I reckon losing gives him an appetite.”

  Something twitches in the ropes of Karel’s guts, and Stan jerks his head toward his brother in disbelief, his head cocked sharply on his cambered neck, his brows up and his jaw locked like he’s taken the tetanus. If Thom has astonished himself, he doesn’t show it. He squares his feet with his shoulders and stands there pleased with himself, his arms crossed smugly across his chest. Vaclav feigns amusement, holding the buckle of his belt like he’s just pushed back from a Sunday meal, nodding in mock appreciation of the boy’s wit.

  When he stops smiling, he hurls his arm backhanded across his body and drops the boy with a single blow that crashes into the side of Thom’s face with the sharp sound of dry kindling popping in the woodstove. There is a frozen moment of adrenaline and traded gazes while Thom slops around in the mud on all fours, and then he’s up on his knees, pulling a hand from his face. The chapped skin is split open along the cheekbone, blood running thin with rainwater and streaming from his chin. He studies the flat of his hand with the confused look of a lost traveler, studying the map-work of blood in the lines of his palm. Karel recognizes the look on his brother’s face, knows that the shock will be short-lived, that the disbelief will sink fast beneath a blank and impenetrable gaze, his expression hardening over like the frozen surface of a pond until there’s a whole undercurrent of dark and teeming things at work beneath a frigid skin that deceives as surely as it obscures. Beneath Thom’s feet, a gnarled and twisting tree root juts from the wet sod like a fossilized cottonmouth. Soon enough, the boy begins to right himself, planting the toe of his boot against the thing for leverage.

  “You rotten son of a bitch,” he says, and he lunges, throwing himself forward, driving his head into his father’s ribs and hooking a hard, stray fist into Skala’s nose. A mist of blood sprays down across the man’s lips, over his chin and into his son’s hair, and then they’re both going down, falling until the boy lands atop his father. When they hit, a rasp of hot air kicks from their lungs, and they gasp and flounder there like angry conjoined fish until Thom finds his breath and steadies himself with one hand on the ground, cocking his elbow to throw another punch. It never lands. Before it can, the man rears back and throws himself forward at the waist, his forehead slamming into his son’s mouth.

  Now a roar goes up from the townsmen as they rush from their idle banter, pulled by some irresistible gravity to circle around the action and cheer this perverse spectacle of a family’s hell-bent dissolution. As if cued by these new, loud encouragements, Thom rolls away from his father and sits up to reveal a grimace of torn gums running dark with blood, his top front teeth folded back toward the roof of his mouth.

  What happens next comes so naturally that, later, Karel won’t be able to recall dropping the horse’s reins, won’t know if his actions were driven by some innate if misguided compulsion to protect his father or by some long-stabled animal urge toward violence, won’t remember even if he lashed out first or was spurred into the fight by a blow from one of his brothers. What he will summon in his mind is the way his brother puts a hand to his own mouth and, feeling the damage his father has done there, rolls onto his side, screaming and kicking back at the man like a branded mule.

  Faces aglow with amusement, the Mexicans step backward to dodge the flailing l
imbs, and the moving lantern throws an erratic tide of yellow light over the fight while Eddie and Stan rush in to put an end to it. They reach down to haul their father up, but Skala is having none of it. He comes up in a blind, swinging rage and catches Stan in the neck with an elbow that drives the boy staggering backward and wheezing, clutching his throat.

  Beyond the cattlegate, Villaseñor finally takes notice. He rises from his seat up front in the surrey and pulls his coat tight across his chest. The wind stirs the carriage lantern, and he shields his eyes with the awning of a flattened hand held above his spectacles, then he peers out at a night of gaming turned fierce. Out in the pasture, even the girl takes note of the sudden cheering, turning her horse to give this new, disquieting diversion her audience.