The Wake of Forgiveness Read online

Sophie turned the baby, who’d already taken to sleep, so that the little girl’s cheek was against her chest. “It’s always a ledger with you, Karel. You could pray now, I suspect, if you want so bad that things end up equal on both sides.”

  “I been doing just that,” he said. “Ever since we left.”

  An hour later, up past the Columbus Road and into the slight swells of forested hills that rose up near the county line, Karel had yet to free himself from the thoughts of his brother’s wife. He had yet to strike a match, and his cigarette still hung there, unlit, from his lips.

  JUST OVER THE Fayette County line in Praha, there was medicine more than Mass at St. Mary’s to be found, and by the time they arrived, both Karel and Sophie Skala were in need of one sort or another. A cool, parched wind had crept in behind the morning’s clouds, evening was coming on, and Karel steered the truck behind the church and set the brake beneath an old live oak whose bare branches spanned the twenty-yard gap between the church itself and the adjacent hall, a new, two-story construction of stone and red brick where the dance would be held after Mass.

  The long ride had been a rough one, rough enough that now, climbing from the cab, Sophie could tell the moment her feet touched the earth that her third child would be born in Praha, and on the day of the Feast, no less. In the shadows, the air carried a new chill, and Sophie was thankful for the warmth of her body, for the warmth of the body curled up within her. Resting Evie’s sleeping weight on her hip, she pulled her shawl up to cover the back of her neck and then cupped her free hand beneath her belly, exhaling sharply.

  When Karel made it around the truck with Diane, his mind still miles back on the road in his sister-in-law’s kitchen, Sophie took her oldest girl’s hand and, before leading her around to the front church steps, said, “I’m needing to sit, Karel. We’ll keep a place for you inside.”

  Karel rubbed his arms against the cold and, as an afterthought, went back to the cab for his suitcoat. Stove smoke came swirling up from the houses hidden amidst the trees to the east. He wanted to clear his head, so before he rolled the kegs of beer into the hall and discussed price with old man Novotny, he walked out back of the church to the parish stables and smoked a cigarette there among the four horses and the smell of tack oil and oats. In the nearest stall, a roan gelding looked up from its bucket of feed and blew, blinking its eyes slowly, and Karel wished there was some immediate need that might keep him here—a hard foaling or a hay fire, either one—anything to keep him out of that church where he would have to sit in the gleaming pews and try to find a place for his eyes to fall without causing him pause or regret or something less forgivable.

  Now he held his cigarette in his mouth and scratched the horse behind its twitching ears before turning to watch as more families arrived, most in automobiles, a few yet in wagons, all wearing their finest clothes and tempered smiles.

  St. Mary’s was one of the three “painted churches” in the surrounding countryside, the ceiling brushed brightly with vivid images, the most unsettling of which was a gold triangle that framed a single unblinking eye, an eye that stared down on a full congregation or on empty pews with the same unflagging and illegible gaze. Even so, Karel thought St. Mary’s handsome—from the outside, at least. Erected the year of his birth, the church stood unassumingly enough between the clusters of white pine and moss-veiled oak. Trimmed in marbled stone and planked with simple whitewashed pine siding, the structure’s only exterior embellishment was its tall steeple, on top of which was a burnished bronze cross that the townsfolk had paid a young bohunk a keg of beer to mount in its lead pedestal.

  Karel had heard the story as a boy, had marveled at the man’s bravery. By all accounts, the week before Easter, he’d climbed out the topmost steeple window and shimmied up so that, perched with the toes of his boots on the windowsill, he could steady himself such that he might raise the cross high enough to slide the bronze tenon into the pedestal’s mortise. The parishioners stood below, calling up to him with encouragement and advice. Overhead, the sun flickered between passing clouds. When the young man raised the cross, one of its arms snagged on his shirt collar and, just as he worked it free, a gust of wind sent the leaves skittering across the rooftop from the nearby trees.

  More than one hundred feet above the ground, the man braced himself against the wind, leaning into the steeple the way a child will lean into his mother for the shelter of her body, but there was nothing of help to be had. With one hand on the cross, the other trying to take hold of the steeple, he pressed himself against the structure, swaying there until he looked down and his boots slipped from the sill.

  He fell to the rooftop, sliding on his belly down the steep pitch with the cross gripped in one hand while the fingernails of his other raked over the cedar shingles as he slid. He flailed and kicked, his boots scraping, in search of purchase, as he descended toward the eaves.

  This, the onlookers would say, was a malediction, evidence more than ample of evil’s due influence in a world of fallen men, and when the young man flipped himself onto his back, planting his heels and stopping himself just short of falling, and lay there pumping hot breath from his lungs before crawling slowly back toward the steeple to complete the job, the cross leaning against his shoulder, the parishioners cheered before they fell silent in solemn recognition of the Lord’s intervention. They whispered, as they still did, of this act of grace, of the vision that had brought before their eyes and renewed in their hearts the savior’s struggle beneath the weight of his own glorious burden. An Easter miracle, a new testament of their faith, and all for a few gallons of beer.

  Now, as Karel ground the wet tip of his cigarette into the earth with the toe of his boot and walked back to his truck, the cross stood glistening against the darkening sky, and dulled only slightly by weather and time. Beneath it, inside the church, Karel’s wife was forcing smiles at the other wives from her pew while the painted eye gazed down on her, bearing muted, candle-lit witness to her own struggle against the onset of a hot and cramping wave of contractions. On Sophie’s shoulder, little Evie still slept, a thin ribbon of saliva strung from the corner of her mouth to her mother’s shawl. Beside her, Diane sat gazing up at the ceiling and the stained-glass windows, listening to the whispered prayers and conversations of the growing congregation. The youngest child, suspended head down in the red liquid glow of its mother’s womb, tucked its knees up against its chest and rolled the back of its head against the hard rope of its mother’s spine.

  The altar boys appeared quietly from the nave, genuflected and lit the altar candles while, in the sacristy, Father Petardus slipped into his fine white vestment. Outside, Karel rolled three kegs of beer from his truck into the hall and stood laughing with the men of the Jolly Club, taking Novotny’s flask of corn whiskey when it was offered, folding bills into his pocket. Novotny’s daughter, Elizka, wearing her Sunday dress and white stockings, managed a discreet fingertip wave from behind the bar where she was readying the glassware. Karel gave her a nod, his insides alive with a potent mash of whiskey and desire. He took another pull off the flask, swallowing with a grimace, while in the pews Sophie breathed hard through clenched teeth and thought, with a kind of willed determination that never fully blotted out the fear, of what lay in wait for her. She’d had hard labors with the first two, but this would be another thing entirely. The child would come from her, and she would survive it, but it would be hours yet, and the back of its skull would grind against her spine as it came.

  It had begun, she knew that, but she couldn’t know that it would progress in the way that it would, that the baby would be rendered from her in a fashion as protracted and inexorable as the way stones are tumbled, turned smooth by years of rushing water, and men are eroded of kindness by the slow, interminable friction of their unrealized desires.

  HER WATER BROKE at the kneeling rail.

  The church was quietly alive with the flickering of candlelight and the swirling haze of incense smoke, and Karel was on his kn
ees beside her, amazed as ever by the serenity that overcame his wife’s face when Father Petardus placed the Eucharist on her tongue. Holding Evie, who stirred now on her shoulder, Sophie kept her eyes shut, bowed her head, and when the altar boy moved the communion plate beneath Karel’s chin and the priest held the sacrament before him, saying, “The Body of Christ,” Sophie inhaled with a plaintive gasp and whispered, “Oh, Karel,” as if begging her husband to accept what he’d been offered.

  He did not.

  His hearing, after these five years of marriage, was attuned to her voice in the way common only to husbands who adore their wives and those who lie to them with regularity. To Karel’s mind, he practiced the latter because of the former, because Sophie was a good woman, kind and hearty and generous, so much so, in fact, that he suspected she knew when he was less than honest, less than wholly hers, and that she endured the indiscretions the way a good horse will endure shoeing and hard harness work, blinded to everything but the promise of brushstrokes and oats, of kindness and comfort. With eyes affixed only to a future worth forsaking the present for.

  Now, because Sophie was speaking at the communion rail, speaking to him in an attitude she would normally reserve for her queries of God, Karel turned from Father Petardus’s offering. He leaned toward his wife, his hand reaching down to support himself, and, in doing so, touching the wet hem of her skirt.

  When, for years afterward, he told this story to his child, he would say that the birth had begun at the precise moment that the body of Christ had touched his tongue, that it was as if the sacrifice of one son had allowed for the arrival of another.

  This was to become Karel’s way, the stretching of truth in an effort to instill in the workaday the wonderful, and this was especially true in the stories he would come to tell his children. His own upbringing had been one of quiet exclusion, his father moving through the rooms of the house and the rows of the cropfields in what seemed a determined if not wholly unnatural silence. Year after year, the rain would batter the cedar shingles overhead, the sun would bake the black earth to a hard ceramic sheen around the rigid cotton stalks, the quail in the pastureland would covey and nest and hatch and fledge, each season born naturally of the one before, but on the rare day that Vaclav Skala would gather his boys behind the barn or on the tree-lined banks of Mustang Creek with fishing rods and tin pails of grubs, the very earth would cease, in the boys’ minds, its slow, secretive turning, and they’d stand eager and mute, dumbstruck by the anticipation of their father’s words.

  Usually the stories were brief, meant to impart some lesson, and while Karel might laugh or grow solemn at the stories his father told—of his stormy voyage over high seas from the old country to Galveston, of the wolves he’d hunted alongside his brothers in the hills of Bohemia, lessons about hard work and fields sowed with stubbornness and sacrifice—he never found in these moments any new revelations that could dispute what he’d been told, since he was old enough to comprehend, by his brothers: That he’d killed their mother; that their father despised him for it and had refused, on the day of Karel’s birth and thereafter, to hold him.

  Now Karel realized that Father Petardus was still extending the Eucharist toward his lips, and Sophie was holding Evie in one arm while she clung to the kneeling rail with the other, her cheeks flushed and running with perspiration from her hairline. Karel brought his wife to her feet and turned away. The priest took a step back with the host yet in his hand and looked down at the couple rising from the rail. The altar boy stood blinking, a frightened grin focused on his own shaking hand and the polished plate held under the host, wondering, no doubt, just what under heaven to do now.

  Karel, with whiskey and smoke still on his breath, led his wife down the center aisle of the church toward the doors, a hand in hers and another around her waist. In the pews, Diane met her father’s eyes with her own. He nodded toward the door, and she rose to join her parents in the aisle.

  Sitting back from the kneelers, making way for the girl, the congregants were pulled from the downcast gazes of their prayers by this unexpected procession. When he’d brought Sophie to her feet at the kneeling rail, Karel had inadvertently stepped on her hem such that now, as they made their belabored way out of the church, the back of Sophie’s skirt dragged the floor and streaked the hardwood with her water.

  Outside, in the gloaming, the trees lurched and swayed, animated by the shifting winds, the air chilled and sharp with dry pine and chimney smoke. Karel breathed in deep through his nose the way he did when he butchered an animal or kindled a fire, and he laughed as he held his wife around the waist. “It’s turning out about how you wanted it,” he said. “Ain’t it?”

  Sophie forced a smile between grimaces. “Not if you’re meaning to let me labor in the back of that truck all the way home to Dalton.”

  “Why, hell no, I’m not.” His pale eyes gleamed with mischief, and Sophie recognized the look as the one, more than any other, she’d found irresistible when he’d courted her with dancing and dandelion wine, with kisses and wandering hands among the hay bales up in his loft, she the eighteen-year-old daughter of a father soured by his own determined and ill-humored devotion, Karel the wild-eyed and tough-skinned owner of a vast and growing, if begrudged, fortune in Lavaca County. He was irresistible then as he was now—prone to recklessness, yes, but thoughtful enough to touch her with only the backs of his fingers so as not to rough her skin with his leathery calluses. And he was wounded, too, as anyone could see, and his afflictions opened something wide in her that only caring for him could fill.

  When he looked into her eyes, he put the flat back of his hand smoothly against her cheek and pushed her face to the side so her head would match the permanent cant of his own, and in this way he seemed both to acknowledge and soften what his father had done to him with plow and harness and neglect. His smile was forever bent with a hint of impertinence, and he made it his way to say, always, any damn thing he felt like saying, as he did now when he pulled open the church door and called in to the congregation, “Is it a midwife on her knees in there somewhere, and someone to look after my girls? It’s a long way back to Dalton, and my wife’s taken a mind to farrow out here on these steps if she’s not lent a bed instead.”

  Inside there was the turning of heads and the scuffing of shoe soles on the hardwoods as the parishioners looked away from the sacrament before them and toward the voice at the back of the church.

  “Karel,” Sophie whispered, pleading with her eyes.

  Little Diane was tugging his trouser leg, and he smiled down at her and widened his eyes in such a way that set her to giggling. He looked into the church, caressing Sophie’s swollen belly with the backs of his fingers while he called, “Make you a deal, gentlemen. You tend to my wife, and I’ll dance with your daughters.”

  COME NINE O’CLOCK, in the front bedroom of her squat, lamp-lit house, the old widow Vrana had set her mind to it that they would not lose this child. She moved birdlike, shuffling about the room on arthritic bare feet, wringing cotton rags in a basin of cool well water and folding them onto Sophie’s forehead as the poor woman labored beneath a single sheet.

  The children had been lulled to sleep in the widow’s bedroom where, sixteen years before, her husband had coughed blood so violently that it had misted the walls, and where he had died when he’d coughed his last. She had checked on them, these two darling little girls asleep in the bed of her long and fruitless marriage, and the traces of moonlight through the windows reminded the old woman of the nights of her own childhood, nights nearly seventy years gone when, wintering for the first time in this strange new country, in the one-room shelter her father had thrown together when it got too cold to sleep in the wagon, she’d awoken long before morning to the sounds of indecisive winds and coyotes and her two sisters’ breathing to find their faces graced by ribbons of light that found their way in through the joints of the hastily hewn roof timbers.

  But that had been so very long ago, and they
were all buried, father and mother and sisters alike, in the St. Mary’s cemetery, not a quarter mile from this house with nothing but densely clustered trees and a narrow footpath of fallen leaves and the indeterminate remainder of her own mortal life between them, and she could make that short walk through the little thicket with a pail of sudsy water and wash their headstones with these same cotton rags, and she could do so any time at all that she liked, excepting now, when both she and the rags had a more pressing purpose.

  This baby wasn’t turning, and Sophie Skala was one of Praha’s own. As a girl, before her father moved the family south into Lavaca County, Sophie had run ponytailed and sun flushed through the thickets and creekbeds of Praha, and a much younger Mrs. Vrana had often taken note of the girl at Mass, sitting so prim and fair, that ponytail tucked up into her Sunday bonnet like a sweet, if poorly kept, secret. Widow Vrana, who now sat on the edge of the bed whispering Hail Marys with the woman that girl had become, helping her pray her way through these violent contractions—strong but unproductive these last two hours—this old woman, she’d pined in those long-gone days for a little girl like the one Sophie had been, one so sweet and well mannered, one so at home all the same in her best dress or in the little smocks she wore while traipsing barefoot around the countryside. It had not come to pass, and it had tested Mrs. Vrana’s faith more than even she believed it was meant to be tested that, over the years, in a land of farmers and tradesmen whose wives had little money for physicians and even less faith in their science, she had attended to perhaps four hundred births, and still, no amount of her garden’s herbs or store-bought tonic or time spent splay-legged and praying beneath her husband’s weight had yielded so much as a short pregnancy, much less a child of her own.

  And so, by her will, if not by God’s, this child would live. The water had come hours ago, and she’d seen both babies and mothers lost to less dangerous labors. Already she’d applied onions to Sophie’s feet and a poultice to her lower back to calm the spasms. She’d purged her with a tea of mugwort and sorrel, and now, to her mind, time was a creeping and persistent rival. The widow knew well, as did all the midwives in three surrounding counties, of the death, nearly thirty years back, that had taken Klara Skala, and needlessly so, she thought. Edna Janek was an able practitioner, and it would not have happened, she believed, had Klara been attended to sooner.