The Wake of Forgiveness Read online

  The owl dips a wing and veers west. She clears the trees and glides over the pastureland toward the far southern fork of the creek, toward her hollowed oak and the three fledglings waiting there with eyes just newly keen enough to know the approach of trouble but helpless in all other faculties to defend themselves against it.

  Riding the familiar line of fencewires beneath her, she streaks low and level as she works her wings against the downward push of the rain and follows the mile-long fenceline toward home, squeezing her claws into the hot meat rhythmically with the upward pull of her wings. Beneath her, just to the east, there’s the dark movement of a horse and, with another hundred yards of wind and rain run through her feathers, another black and cantering shape, an animal too large for her consideration and too earthbound to trigger the panicked reflexes that urge escape.

  The wind gusts and propels the rain horizontally out of the west. The owl angles her coverts to the wind and gains loft, vectoring out and up toward the hardwood tops before her in the distance while below, weighted by the wet wool of his coat, Father Carew flails ineffectually, ensnared between the two barbed and topmost wires of the fence. His old bay shudders and sneezes, turning her head against the windblown rain in such a way that it appears, to the priest, as if she’s avoiding sight of him, of a man who is her master and yet so powerless against feebleness and gravity and fencewires and the simple predicaments they occasion. Struggling to free himself, the priest folds himself over at the waist, reaching out to the gritty mud of the road before him as he works his legs and his boots slide in the rain-glazed weeds and cut hay underfoot. He feels the points of the wire prick through his clothes into the aged and thin and tender skin of his belly, and as the owl alights a half mile away, unnoticed to all but her waiting young, the priest digs the toes of his boots into the soft, yielding earth and finds purchase enough to propel himself through the fencewires, tearing his coat and shirt as he goes.

  And then he’s facedown on the rutted muck of the road, and by the time he gets his boots free of the fence and works himself slowly to his feet, there’s a pointed pain in the loose skin over his ribs. He leans against Sarah, gathering his breath with his back to the weather as it hurls itself against him. He unbuttons his overcoat and shirt and finds there against his chest the hanging shattered glass of the phial and the burning laceration from which issues a cool and uncongealed stream of holy water and blood that slicks down his sternum and runs thin until it gathers at the cinched waistline of his trousers and pools in the shallow whorl of his navel.

  KAREL LETS HIS horse find the way, this landscape he knows so well grown foreign, his whole field of vision reduced to the opacity of black sackcloth. The rain comes on lightly but steadily, running beneath his clothes and down the ridge of his spine and into his britches. The horse moves slowly, following the scent of the animal it has spent the night trailing. Out west, a flash of lightning wicks into the low ceiling of the clouds and washes the plains in a muted glow that lasts just long enough for Karel to see the girl and the haunches of her horse out some seventy-five yards and closing on the creek. But this he expects. What startles him, illuminated in the short second of eerily white light, is the appearance of a man on the flooded road beyond the fence, a man with his arms thrown around the neck of his horse and a face weathered by time and weighted by a cross between sorrow and surprise. His eyes are pale and wide, the skin beneath them slung low and discolored. Here’s a man who, as if by intuition, turns toward Karel to reveal a muddied and open overcoat, a shirt unbuttoned and stained, something glinting and jagged hung round his neck. Unlikely and inevitable as the rising of the dead in one’s dreams, here stands the old priest, bleeding and clinging to his horse in the rain, and when Father Carew parts his lips to speak, the world is cast again in black.

  Whiskey takes no notice, moves forward, his hooves splashing in the standing water of the pasture, and Karel shudders against the cold, against the unexpected rise of penitential guilt. He has seen, he knows, something he was not meant to see, and on a night when all but the nocturnal are deprived of sight, and on the skin of his arms he wears the prickle of conscience-laden exhilaration, the same as he’d felt when, as a boy skipping rocks on a summer Sunday, he’d stumbled across three bathing schoolgirls in the swollen creek, their sun-flushed skin appointed with beads of water and a smooth newness from which Karel couldn’t pull his eyes—the arc of their spines when they bent to splash water onto one another, the dark mystery of their nipples, so different from his own, wind kissed and erect and upturned on their budding breasts.

  Karel smiles and shakes his head. How is it that seeing the priest who baptized him could occasion memories of naked girls? How is it that anything ever gives rise to what it does instead of what it should?

  After half a mile spent all but blind on this horse, when the rain lets up further without stopping altogether, Karel’s eyes find some discernible depth in the darkness. Whiskey blows, his hide rippling beneath the saddle, and Karel breathes through his nose, inhaling the sweet, musky smell of wet horsehair. His eye is puffed up near to closed, aching still, but only as a muted throbbing deep beneath the skin. There’s something to be taken from this, he thinks. Something about the body, something about the eyes, about the flesh and the bones and the heart. About how they want to adjust, to heal, to see and feel. And they do, he thinks, if never entirely.

  At the southern fork of the creek, he makes out the girl and her horse silhouetted against the trees rising out of the slough. When he pulls the horse up a few yards from her at the water’s edge, he hears the swollen rush of the current over stones and the rain draining like endless handfuls of sand let fall between clenched fingers into the water. Just off his right flank there comes the creaking of the girl’s wet leather tack as she shifts her weight in the saddle. Karel points his toes downward in the stirrups and breathes only through his nose while he strokes his horse’s long neck. She’s near, and then she’s speaking, and at first Karel feels a pinch of guilt, thinking he’s come unbeknownst upon a girl telling private thoughts to her horse beneath a pall of unrelenting clouds and nightfall.

  “My father knows where I am,” she says, her voice nearly inaudible beneath the rainfall.

  “I suspect he does,” he says, but he wonders how this is intended—as a warning? As a simple, startled declaration?

  “He does.”

  “Doesn’t seem the sort who abides not knowing things he just as well might.”

  “Yes,” she says. “That’s right.”

  “He know the priest who’s set to say Mass at your nuptials is out on the road getting fresh with his horse?”

  She turns her head sharply toward him. “Please don’t speak that way.”

  Her voice comes at him so softly, but Karel can’t see her eyes clearly, can’t figure if it’s some tenderness in her or the faint sound of the rainfall that makes it so. Another strobe of light brightens the horizon and outruns its thunder. They wait it out and sit there awhile, watching the electricity do its work out west, and when Karel looks over at her again, the girl is sitting the horse with the reins in her lap and her hands reaching back over her shoulders, unplait-ing her wet hair. Karel can see rising from her collar the delicate slope of her neck. She’s squinting against the rain, looking away from him toward the creek while she works, and in another instant it’s full dark again and the thunder shakes the earth beneath them. The horses stamp the ground and voice their concerted complaints. Karel moves Whiskey forward toward the sound of running water and then stops when he feels the warmth radiating from her horse.

  “He may know you’re out here, but he’ll wish you hadn’t been all the same when you catch cold and can’t make your own wedding.”

  She turns her head and laughs, and Karel bites the inside of his cheek against the disappointment of not seeing clearly the wideness of her eyes when she does. “We’ve seen greater danger than rain,” she says.

  There’s a certain superior curtness to her
speech that Karel can’t reconcile with the smooth sweep of her voice, and all at once he supposes that she’s talking down to him, the winner of the race making light of the rider she’s outrun. He recalls her fall, feigned or not, the ease of her ascension back into the saddle, and it is this memory that worms itself around in his mind with enough torsion and convolution that he’s somehow firmly and unexpectedly sure of his suspicions. “I don’t doubt it, but then again I don’t reckon much of anything seems dangerous to you, Miss. You make falling off a horse look like a game at a play party.”

  The rain surges with a hard gust of wind and then falls to a sprinkle again. Karel combs his fingers through his tangle of wet curls. A nervous muscle pulses in the crook of his afflicted neck, and he shifts his wet weight in the saddle to have a fruitless, squinting look overhead. The rain needles his good eye, and the sky is dark enough to suggest that the moon has orphaned the heavens. She shivers beneath her wet riding coat, and now Karel feels the cold so suddenly that he thinks for a moment that, but for distracted riding and misfortune, it could be this way with her, that he could spend the rest of his life noticing his surroundings only as they pertain to her. He waits for her to speak, for whatever’s coming next of her cleverness to find words for itself, and when she sits silent for a long minute, before he can stop himself, he hears himself ask, “What’s become of your mother?”

  Lightning streaks silently across the distant sky and, before he can recognize it for what it is, Karel flinches at what he sees coming toward him—her hand, pulled from its glove and dripping with cold rainwater, cups the back of his neck, and there’s a shuddering of electricity in him that has nothing to do with the weather.

  “You’re asking if she’s alive?”

  As if in answer to her question, he leans his neck further into her palm, which is already growing warm against his skin. In part, his vision comes back to him, and he can see her there in the shadows, the taut line of her arm strung between them, bridging their bodies above the indifferent loitering of their horses.

  “My father says that if we look for ourselves in others, we’re likely to find someone we don’t recognize.”

  Karel stirs slightly in the saddle, uncomfortable but unwilling to pull away from the softness of her touch. He considers what she’s said, the meaning of which flits in and out of the limits of his comprehension the same way a flushed bobwhite will weave itself into a stand of trees to elude his shot. “I’m thinking there’s easier riddles than that one in the Bible,” he says, and her face, leaning toward him, is visible but illegible—bottomless black eyes weighted with sadness, lips curled into a smile—the whole of it more confusing than consoling.

  “It’s Graciela,” she says.

  “Do what?”

  “My name. It’s Graciela. And my mother is alive to everyone but my father. Now follow me,” she says, pulling her hand away and nudging the horse out into the creekwater.

  “Follow you? Hell, I have been.”

  Without turning in the saddle, she clicks her tongue loudly at the horse and calls back, “You ought to be accustomed to it then. Come. We’ll get the horses out of the weather.”

  ON THE EDGE of town, three poor horses stand tied out front of the icehouse, shuddering in their sleep. The building is the size of a modest barn, cobbled together of rough-hewn, unpainted pine. From the rooftop stovepipe coughs gray smoke, and the fogged windows glow with lamplight. Karel and the girl ride the horses by at a walk, keeping to the other side of the road beyond the meager reach of the light. Fifty yards into town, just beyond the druggist and the tack-and-saddle shop, they stop and secrete themselves beneath the eaves of the feedstore that stands next door to the Township Inn. The girl’s horse takes the opportunity to lift its tail, shining and black as blued gunmetal, and leave a steaming heap on the hard-packed road such that the night smells, to Karel, of home, of the outdoor comfort of woodsmoke and horse dung.

  With a hand held back to keep Karel still and quiet, Graciela peers around the corner and down the alley toward the inn’s stables. Toward Dalton’s town center, something moves slowly across the road, and Karel squints his working eye until he can make out the shape of the old priest, who glances back over his shoulder as he walks his horse around the corner of the church toward the parish stable.

  Turning back, a hand on the cantle of her saddle, the girl says, “Father and my sisters are indoors, but the inn’s stable boy is still tending to the carriage horses. It won’t be long.”

  While they wait, Karel runs his tongue along the jagged wound at the corner of his mouth, feels the cool seep of fluid down his cheek from his engorged eye. He watches the girl leaning forward over her horse’s neck, her hair falling crimped in wet ripples down her back. Even on a stationary horse, her weight is centered over her bent knees, her spine held straight. There’s a seasoned confidence to her, he thinks, and she carries it in her body, in her upright and unflagging posture, a solidness in her legs and shoulders that is almost masculine. But then there is the breathtaking taper of her back, its sudden slope into a waist so slight that Karel feels certain it’s smaller around than a man’s hatband. There’s the wide, smooth flare of her hips. If she were reclined such that you could run a finger along the side of her body from ribs to thighs, it might put you in mind of a single, perfect valley found in a landscape of irregular, rolling foothills, of a horizon you’d gladly ride all day to reach. Sure enough, she’s her father’s child. She has his olive skin, his dark hair and eyes, his easy assuredness, but one look at her would make any man wonder how lovely was her mother. As Vaclav Skala would say, she may have her father’s features, but she sure ain’t got his fixtures.

  They wait there a solid fifteen minutes, and when the girl swings down from her saddle, she holds a finger over her lips and tilts her head toward the small stable set back from the road behind the inn. They walk the animals down the alleyway, the hollow sound of the horseshoes on wet stone bouncing between the brick walls of the inn and the solid planking of the feedstore. Slowly, Karel slides the stable door open and inhales the smell of animals and dry hay. The girl hands him her reins and slides beneath his arm as she slips inside to light the lantern.

  When they get the horses inside and dried and curried, she scoops oats into the feed buckets and they hasp the horses into the two empty stalls. Only then does Karel get a good look at the other twin black animals, warm now and switching their tails in the opposite stalls. If anything, they are more impressive than the one the girl has just stabled, taller and hard-ridged with muscle, painted with the same distinctive and shockingly white blazes, and Karel wonders how any man could bear to harness such a horse to a carriage. He turns to the girl, who sits beneath the lantern on a farrier’s stool, blond hay bales stacked two high behind her. She’s removed her riding jacket, hanging it from a crossbeam to dry among odds and ends of tack. Her white blouse is buttoned to the throat, pleated and blooming across the rise of her breasts, and thin enough that Karel can see, beneath it, the lacy filigree of her camisole. Her hair falls over her shoulders, and it calls to Karel’s mind shallow black water running over a gentle outcropping of stone. She’s smiling up at him, her skin dark and damp still with rainwater and gleaming in the dancing yellow lanternlight. There’s a pinch at the scabby hinge of Karel’s lips, and he realizes his mouth is open. “Graciela, huh?” he says, and she laughs a little and nods. “You ever ride those monsters yonder?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Your father, then?”

  “Not anyone. They’re carriage horses.”

  “The hell they are,” he says. “Just look at them.”

  Outside, the rain is still coming down sparingly, but the wind throws itself in dithering gusts against the cedar shingles and whistles loudly beneath the eaves. She stands, stray wisps of hair strung in wet threads about her cheeks, her eyes deep and studious, moving up and down the length of him, settling back on his eyes as she approaches him. “I’ve seen them, Karel,” she says
, and his name on her lips sets loose something warm and liquid beneath his skin, a rush of comfort that seeps into him and swirls around his bones. “I saw them born. All of them, and the best of the stable are boarded over at the Dalton place. But tell me, if horses are only ever used to pull a carriage, how are they anything but harness horses?”

  Karel gives that some thought, and it reminds him of his least favorite arithmetic lessons at school, the long and pointless story problems Miss Kubek always asks last, knowing that even the brightest among her pupils will puzzle over them. But these are horses, he tells himself, not numbers, not something dreamed up to exist only on slate or paper. “Because you can look at them and tell,” he says. “It’s that damned simple. You can tell within an hour after they’re foaled. The second they can stand without a wobble. There ain’t but three kinds of horses, Miss. Those made for the harness, those made to run, and those made so poorly that you know how lucky you are if you own one of the first two kinds.”

  She’s standing so near to him that he can smell her breath, not sweet like he might have expected, like her hair, but earthy and clean, slightly metallic, the scent of wet, mineral-rich soil at the edge of running water. As he breathes her in, she touches him again, this time with both hands cupped about his neck while she brushes her lips against the swollen mass of his wounded eye in a kiss so light that Karel thinks it either accidental or imagined.

  It is neither, and when she leans back to show him her smile again, he feels as he had as a young boy when, on some rare occasion, a woman had shown him affection. What he wants now, as he wanted then, is to take hold of her, to hide his eyes in the curve of her neck and feel her fingers in his hair, her arms around him, and in this way lay claim to the moment so that it cannot be taken from him. What he wants is to accept and possess the tenderness all at once. Instead, he stands with his arms at his side and wills it to continue. Overhead, the rain spatters on the shingles while here, inside, the lamplight flickers against the rough woodwork of the stalls and crossbeams while the horses switch their tails and empty their buckets of feed.