The Wake of Forgiveness Read online

  The Blind Janus

  DECEMBER 1924

  OVERNIGHT, THE COLD had deepened, the mass of dry air descending as if to make amends all at once for the previous summer’s heat, and before the sun was up, when it was yet a glowing, cloud-streaked promise of pale pink beyond the trees to the east, Karel Skala stood beside his truck in the yard of St. Mary’s parish, smoking a cigarette and nursing a pain behind his eyes as surely as his wife, over beyond the cemetery in the old widow Vrana’s house, was now nursing his child. He’d woken with his boots still on, aching about the shoulders and slumped forward in the overstuffed chair that sat in the corner of the widow’s front room. Sophie had been sleeping still, propped up with pillows, the baby silent and swaddled on her chest, and the old woman stood over them, gazing down and sucking audibly at her own teeth, tucking the blankets around mother and child with her skeletal hands.

  Karel rose to his feet with a groan, and Mrs. Vrana turned toward him slowly, less startled than expectant, her wispy brows raised to beg questions of him that he felt certain he wouldn’t have been able to answer even had he known their content. When Sophie stirred, he told her that he had need to go check on the cattle. He didn’t mention the Knedlik boys. Didn’t mention the dream he’d had in which he’d arrived back at the farm to find everything in order, even improved, the fencewires strung taut and the Monitor windmill spinning productively and the cattle healthy and fat, ready for profitable slaughter, the entire operation running so smoothly that he’d recognized himself, at once, as wholly dispensable. No, he simply kissed his wife on the forehead and fetched his crumpled hat from the floor beside the chair where he’d slept. He gave the widow two dollars so she could purchase what she might need to provide for his wife and children, telling her that he’d be gone no more than two days, that he’d pay her well for her attentions when he returned, that he’d bring half a nice ham from his smokehouse, too.

  Afterward, out in the churchyard, despite the cold, Karel’s shirt was soured with perspiration, with the slow leaching of the previous night’s beer and corn mash from his body. Across the way, the windows of Elizka’s room above the store were dark, and he imagined her in there, lying awake in her bed, cursing him even more soundly than she had the night before. His stomach swirled, and he wished like hell there were somewhere nearby to take an early breakfast. As it was, he’d have to wait until he got back to Moulton, at least. He finished his cigarette, walked back behind the parish stable to relieve himself before the long drive home. When he unbuttoned his trousers to make water, dousing the thickly barked base of an old pecan tree, the smell all but knocked him over—not the diluted ammoniac odor of urine, but a biting, rank fermentation of his and Elizka’s congress, the turned scent of her embittered by the hard musk of his own sweat. He finished, buttoned up, and when he made his way back to the truck and got the engine running, he gave his fingers a smell and recoiled, shaking his head and wiping his hand on his pant leg.

  Well, hell, he thought, putting the truck into gear. I reckon that’s about how fast a woman will turn sour on you.

  Out on the road, without Sophie so big in the belly and wincing beside him, without the little one on his lap, he made better time than he had the day before, keeping the wheels in the ruts so that he hardly had to steer. After half an hour, the ride’s vibrations and the crunch of gritty, hard-packed earth beneath the tires and the chilled rush of air through the window had all worked well to clear his senses so that now, with the horizon turning loose of the sun, he could sit easily in the brightening light of dawn and smoke a cigarette to mask the acrid, pasty taste of his own mouth. Ahead, the road ran straight out of the little swells of hills, and the miles of well-kept fencelines stretched out, glinting sunlight and shimmering with dew on either side. It was good country, broken black soil, cemented with just enough sand and clay to keep it all from washing away come a hard rain, and Karel thought what a fine fortune a man could make if the seasons wouldn’t put an end each year to his industry, if he could take two or three harvests of cotton the same way he could get several cuts of hay.

  At least there were other ways, if your spine didn’t go soft at the thought of hard work or a risk worth taking, to turn a profit, and Karel smiled there in the cab of his truck, imagining the money he’d make at the cattle auction this spring, doing the arithmetic in his head, tallying his take on the feeder steers and young heifers alike. And then there was the beer, and the chance to outdo his brothers in the growing business of quenching the county’s thirst. Karel had an unspoken arrangement with them, one born out of necessity, since he wouldn’t exchange so much as a word with them if he could help doing so. He would run Spoetzl beer anywhere in Lavaca County, and he had customers as far north as the Fayette County line, as far-flung as Hallettsville and Yoakum and Moulton. Villaseñor and Karel’s brothers did their business over in Gonzalez County, where their facility with Spanish made it easier for them to deal with the growing population of Mexicans off to the west.

  Whenever he thought about it, he couldn’t help but laugh, thinking that his brothers, born bohunks like all the best men of the surrounding counties, had actually learned to speak that nonsense. Over the years, because their work was so cheap, Karel had hired the same four families of Mexicans to pick his cotton, and they made for strong backs that never wilted in the September sun the way the darkies might. But they sure as fire didn’t expect him to speak their language, and they got the hell off his property as soon as the work was done and the pay in their pockets. That was one thing, but speaking Mexican yourself, sometimes even in your own house, and letting your kids speak it, no matter how pretty and brown their mother’s skin—well, that was another thing altogether, akin somehow to sullying good polka music with something as silly as a goddamn banjo.

  Twenty minutes shy of Shiner, Karel caught sight of a father and his boy in the near pastures just west of the road, walking hedgerows with their shotguns at the ready. His head was clearing, the crisp morning air working cool in his sinuses and numbing the pain behind his eyes, and he pulled the truck over and parked it in the roadside weeds and got out to stretch his legs while he watched the hunt. They were a good hundred yards out, working without a dog, kicking along the brown outcroppings of brush and chokeweed and immature trees as they walked toward the fenceline, the boy out front of his father, turning over his shoulder every now and again to take some whispered instruction from the man. A slight breeze leaned the field of short hay eastward, and Karel thought he’d have better sense than to teach a boy to hunt from upwind, even if it was just a matter of bobwhites. Sound traveled as surely as scent, and if a windward covey couldn’t smell you coming, it could sure as hell hear you.

  Still, these were days of a generous, ever-yielding landscape, days of bright red wagonloads of tomatoes come summertime, of railcars piled with maize and dimpled, rust-colored sweet potatoes, of dense bales of cotton and hay, of cattle herds that had been spared the foot-and-mouth outbreaks that had so plagued the panhandle way up north, of steers so plentiful that the slaughterhouse pens down county stayed full and the stench of the Yoakum tannery could water one’s eyes from a half mile away. And so as much as Karel frowned upon the man’s methods, he wasn’t in the least bit surprised when a brace flushed low and with the wind, breaking and quartering to the south before the boy shouldered his gun. Karel felt the skin over his forearms prickle into gooseflesh, and when the birds were twenty-five yards beyond the barrel of the boy’s gun, Karel found himself whispering, “Now. Take them now.”

  By the time the boy got off his errant first shot, the birds were quartering above the hedgerow some thirty-five yards off, the white feathers about their heads and beneath their wings shining like an invitation in the morning light. And then the boy fired again, dropping the trailing hen, its smooth flight stopped so abruptly, the little bird seeming leaden in its plummet toward the pasture, that Karel marveled at both the shot and its result. It was something so simple, something he’d seen h
undreds of times in his life, but it was beautiful and hard to believe in a way that he likened to the onset of hard rain, to how astonishing it was that clouds could hold all that water inside and then, as if they’d been waiting for just the right occasion, turn it loose so suddenly, at once, and let it fall to the earth.

  The leading bird flittered safely into the distance some forty yards from where the other had fallen, and, just as quickly as it had come up from its hunkering covert amid the hedgerow, it alighted and disappeared into the vast field of brittle hay. At dusk, if it could keep itself hidden from the predators circling overhead, it would find its way back to the covey. As if conducted by the wan light, the cocks would commence with their melodic beckoning, and all the day’s dispersed survivors would reconvene. If the boy came out hunting tomorrow morning, he might have occasion to take another shot at this very same bird.

  The father held a hand on the boy’s shoulder now, shaking him playfully and then pointing out to where the bird had fallen, letting the boy sight down the length of his arm until they’d agreed upon where the bird had gone down. Karel lit a cigarette and thought, That ain’t a half-bad shot, kid. Then he waved at the hunters, and, when he had their attention, he tipped his hat. Even from this far off, it was plain that the boy was beaming, and when Karel got back behind the wheel of his truck and steered it loudly back into the ruts in the center of the road, it struck him more fully than it had even last night, once he’d gotten his shirt on and found his way back through the thicket to the Vrana house, where he’d found the baby wrapped in a yellow cotton blanket and sucking softly at his mother, that he, too, had a son.

  In the indistinct haze of his drunkenness and the meager lamplight, the child had seemed unreal to him, even deformed, his little head hairless and tapered into such an unsettlingly sharp point that Karel’s first instinct was to take a step backward. But Sophie’s face was reassuring, even serene, flushed and beaded with the exertions of her labor, her eyes half-closed with exhaustion but still warm and attentive. She pulled the blanket back so that Karel could have a better look, stroked the baby’s hollowed cheek with her thumb.

  “It liked to kill me,” she whispered. “But just look, Karel.”

  He’d come toward them then, conscious of the sourness of his breath and the unevenness of his steps, and when he sat on the side of the bed, Sophie moved her hand from the baby’s face and gently took hold of Karel’s wrist.

  “He’s all right, then?” he asked. “His head looks like its been whittled down near to nothing.”

  “He’s perfect,” she said, closing her eyes. “Just wait. He’s perfect. You’ll see.”

  Karel sat for a while, wanting to light a cigarette but knowing he oughtn’t, watching until the child turned loose of the wet nipple and slept against it such that it dimpled his cheek. Without opening her eyes, Sophie pulled the blankets up close around her child, who twitched and sucked intermittently at air, dreaming already of the breast. Karel waited until Sophie’s breathing grew heavy and slow, and then he rose as quietly as he could manage, his hand held on the side of the bed for balance. He moved to the chair in the corner, to the discomfort of hunched, seated sleep and unsettling dreams.

  Now, on the road, Karel found that possibilities broke over him as coolly and continuously as did the wind working its way in through the truck’s windows. He had his own boy now, one he’d be able, in time, to take out early of the morning, their guns in hand, their breath steaming in the cold air, their stomachs warm and full of coffee and Sophie’s biscuits, their voices kept low and their steps careful and quiet as they worked through the tall grass that fringed the creekside trees of his property. He’d teach the boy to work from downwind, to swing his gun smoothly to his cheek with the first fluttering sounds of a covey’s flush. And when their work together gave rise to a pair of low-quartering birds, Karel would hold his own gun across his waist and watch his boy do as he’d been taught. Afterward, when they resumed their hunt after retrieving the harvest, Karel would walk behind the boy and muss the kid’s hair and smile at the sight of the four little twiglike legs sticking from the boy’s coat pocket. And, by damn, wouldn’t that be something?

  Even before he had a clear sense of what he was doing, Karel was applying the brakes and pulling the truck over once more into the thick hem of weeds on the side of the road, remembering Sophie as she had been the first time he’d seen her, all that sunlit hair spilling from beneath her new straw hat with its wide brim and bright yellow band. It had been a week shy of her eighteenth birthday, and her father had brought her down with him to the cattle auction in Yoakum, hoping to surprise her afterward by buying her a new dress in Shiner before heading home. When Karel saw her there, so at ease among the livestock, so full of light but so obviously not to be taken lightly—scrutinizing, as she was, a promising lot of sturdy black heifers that bellowed and stirred up dust in the corral before her—he lit a cigarette and started the bidding a little higher than he otherwise might have. Here was a girl stout enough to shoulder more than simple housework and easy enough on the eyes to make a man stop to watch her while she did. She’d whispered to her father, glancing at Karel just before she had, and the man nodded at the auctioneer. After sweetening his offer twice more, only to be outbid each time, Karel flashed her father a smile and shook his head, then tipped his hat at the girl. Go on and take the damned cows, then, he thought. I got my sights set elsewhere.

  Now, in the truck cab, he lit another cigarette, the last he had with him, and smiled as he blew smoke from his nose and nodded in approval of his own fine idea. He spun the wheel hard to the left, eased the truck out across the road in a wide U, and gave her more gas than he had to as he made his way back to Praha the way he’d come.

  By the time he made it back, the small town was alive with the workaday business of its citizenry. He parked in the same spot beside the parish stables that he had left just over an hour before, and after he’d set the brake and worked his hand around inside his hat to tidy its shape, he fixed the thing on his head and made out across the lot and up the road to the Novotny store. Inside, Elizka sat behind the counter working figures in her ledger, a cup of coffee curling wisps of steam into the dark ringlets of her hair. She looked up with only her eyes, keeping her chin tucked down against the ruffled collar of her blouse. “I thought you’d gone,” she said.

  “I did. Just didn’t stay gone long.”

  And now she raised her head and squared her jaw. “Might have been better for my disposition if you had, Karel.”

  Karel recalled the smell against which he’d recoiled before dawn. Even this early, with her hair strung in greasy curls from the perspiration of the night before, she was lovely. Her cheeks smooth and tan, a few freckles faint and alluring across the bridge of her slender nose. But this was a trip to Praha that he hadn’t made for her, and he was restless now with the desire to see his offspring. “It’s just some smoking tobacco I’m wanting,” he said.

  “Is that so?” she said, rising to her feet behind the counter and smoothing her skirts against the backs of her thighs. “It always is something you’re after, now isn’t it?” She squatted beneath the counter, and when she stood, she slid a pouch of Bull Durham toward Karel. “Twenty-five cents,” she said.

  Karel laughed without showing his teeth, weighing the pouch in his hand as he ran his thumb over the black label. “Two bits for tobacco?” he asked. “Is it something rare about it?”

  She smiled now, twisted a curl of hair around her finger and looked down at the tobacco on the counter. “There’s nothing common in this store, Mr. Skala. You come to Praha from now on, you better come prepared to pay dearly for your needs.”

  IN THE FRONT ROOM of the old widow Vrana’s house, the reception was also one of astonishment, but in this case the surprise was unbridled by contempt and instead strung wide with smiles. Sophie was introducing the girls to their brother, pulling back the blanket so that Diane and Evie could sit on the edge of the bed and run th
eir fingers down the wrinkled red skin of the infant’s legs. The girls were wide-eyed in their excitement but they caressed the child gently, and Karel recognized in their comportment a greater comfort in the company of the newborn than he had ever felt when they had themselves been just hours or days in the world. Even little Evie seemed to understand that a well-enough intentioned touch of a loved one could be cause for pain, and with only a single, feathery finger, she traced her brother’s leg from the dimpled knee down to the tiny curling toes. Karel stood in amazement of them, his hat still on his head, his eyes shifting from face to face, and when Mrs. Vrana came stiffly into the front room from the kitchen out back, she offered Karel a brusque nod and then shooed the girls from the room. “It’s breakfast on the table, girls. Go eat while it’s hot, and let me tend to mother now.”

  Karel helped Evie down from the bed, watching as the girls went barefoot across the worn floors toward the back of the house, and when he turned back toward his wife, Sophie blinked slowly and smiled at him. “We hadn’t thought to see you today. Is it you forgot something?”

  This was Sophie’s way, to greet the uncommon kindness with a teasing question, and Karel had come to expect it with the same brand of anticipated relief as he felt when, after a long day of work and the night’s last cup of coffee, he slid himself into bed to find waiting beneath the sheets the cool and calloused bottoms of her feet at work against the tired muscles of his calves. And the feeling that now surfaced in him was a cool one, too, but one that went to work at the hard center of him and swept the heat from his body, a late winter breeze that began in his bones and rustled out through tissue and sinew and muscle and blood to give rise, finally, to a welcomed chill and the gooseflesh it occasioned.