The Wake of Forgiveness (24 page)

Karel wondered now, as he neared the line of water oaks fringing the creekbed and the sky darkened to a deeply bruised blue, if it was this aspect of brotherhood that had made it near on to impossible for boys like Billy Dalton to come home from the war, if the mud they had tasted and the gases they'd dodged in those trenches had hardened them together in the same way that countless grains of sand, compacted and fired so long underground, were baked together, in time, into stone. Dalton had lasted only a year back in town before clearing out to take a factory job in Kansas City where a pair of brothers from his regiment overseas had gone to work after their homecoming. Karel had seen him at the icehouse in town some four years back, standing at the bar, drinking alone, young still but no longer a boy. His red hair looked dulled as if by a wash with diluted lye, and the scar Karel had occasioned on his face had faded so that it appeared, in the lamplight, to be little more than a birthmark. Karel had bid him good evening, and the young man had nodded at him, and they'd had a drink together without saying another word, the deep-rooted rivalry of their history buried and smothered by all that had since been shoveled by time over the top of it. Karel hadn't seen him since. He'd left his father and mother and the town that carried his name, this for something akin to brotherhood that probably had no name at all.

Earlier in the day, sitting across the road from the Drycreek Saloon, this was the kind of thinking that had nearly spurred Karel out of his truck and onto the porch to have words with his brother. Each time, though, that he'd found his hand on the door, he'd seen his cigarette burning in his hand, and the red glow of the thing and its smoke had reminded him of Villaseñ's cigar, of all the business he'd threatened to take and of all that Karel had already lost—the girl, Graciela, whose loamy sweetness he could often smell in the air after a hard, cold rain; the exhilarating release of riding nights on a fine horse; the close, stale comfort of a bedroom filled with the loud breathing of brothers; the allegiance, bitter though it may have been, with the father who had staked his final wager with a family that he could never, whether he won or no, make whole. And this was the difference, after all, between Karel and his brothers. They had gone, and he had remained. They had found a way out, or it had found them, and Karel reckoned now that their destination had been one that allowed them to cull all the resentment from their respect just as surely as he now, reaching the creek, slid down from behind the steering wheel and unhitched the dead animals from the chain before climbing back onto the tractor and leaving them there to broadcast in the cool wind their reeking and indissoluble end.

T
HEY WAITED UNTIL
an hour after dark, when the nearby farmers were likely done with the evening chores and gone indoors for the night, and then they kindled a small fire beneath an overhang of sweet gum trees a mere twenty yards from the dirt road where they'd parked the truck. After leaving Gonzales, they'd driven north until they reached the Fayette County line and then turned back east to make their way through Flatonia and over into Praha. There they'd stopped into the druggist's and the general store where, while Joe gathered provisions of potted meat and canned beans and dried sausage and sweet potatoes, Raymond had struck up a conversation with Elizka Novotny. She offered that Karel had left for Dalton that morning, that his wife was recovering still from her labor at the Vrana house, and she wondered what it was that had brought the twins back so soon to Praha. Hadn't she heard that they'd hired on to help out around the Skala farm?

"We run some errands for him," Raymond had said, "over in Flatonia. But my brother there lost his footing beneath a load he was carrying and fell backward into a window. Cut his shoulder to ribbons. We're going to get him dressed up and head on back to Dalton."

"And the food?" she asked, following Joe with her eyes while he made his way around the store, filling a crate. "Won't Karel share meals with you?"

"We don't take liberties, ma'am. We tend to do for ourselves."

Now, with two opened cans of beans warming on flat stones near the fire, Raymond sat on a fallen timber beside his shirtless brother, cleaning his wounds with alcohol and dressing them in clean cotton bandages. When he'd finished and Joe had gotten his shirt and coat back on, they ate upwind of the fire and watched as smoke and orange embers swept up through the branches of the nearby trees. The moon had come timidly off the horizon to find the sky wide and cloudless, a few proud stars already shining.

Raymond fed himself a mouthful of beans, then sat with his eyes on the fire, pointing his spoon at Joe while he chewed. "I been thinking on what you said. If you got it in your mind to go west, that'll suit me fine. One place is as good as another, I guess."

Joe nodded, tilting his can toward the firelight so he could see into it and scraping the bottom with his spoon. When he'd emptied it to his satisfaction, he tossed the can into the fire and tucked the spoon in the front pocket of his coat. Raymond had wrapped the dressing too tight, and Joe propped his arm on his knee to take the weight off his shoulder, which was throbbing at the joint and stinging still from the alcohol. He listened to the gusting of the wind, the rise and fall of it in the tree branches, and he imagined the ocean, wondering if that's how the waves sounded when they rolled up onto the land and slid back down. Somewhere shy of Flatonia, he'd finished the serial in the paper, and now he was glad to have used it beneath the kindling to get the fire started. Judith had let him down, growing soft when the neighboring rancher sweet-talked her, falling into his arms like some pitiful, spoiled, breathless woman in a picture show who'd taken faint upon the sight of approaching Indians or the receipt of a telegram bearing news of her doting father's death.

If he'd been there, Joe thought, he'd have made her look at his shoulder while he unwrapped his bandages and pulled off the scabs where they were stuck to the dressing, and then he'd have squeezed the flesh around the wounds until the blood came up from beneath the skin and rolled down his arm. He'd have accustomed her to the sight of pain and the sounds of danger until she toughened up, and then he'd have told her about the horses her handsome, sugar-tongued neighbor had bought from that son of a bitch, Bayne. After she came to her senses and remembered who she was, Judith of Blue Lake Ranch, not some little ninny who rode sidesaddle, they could have taken a ride together and crossed out to the westernmost meadow of her property. They could have sat horseback together, looking out over the cliffs that fell away down to where the ocean ran up onto the shore below. They could have grown the ranch and found some way to run her rotten neighbor out of business. But he was a long way yet from California, and the damned story was already written, and now it was ashes beneath the glowing kindling of the fire, where it belonged, and it was too late to change it, too late to save her or to remind her how to save herself, and this realization recalled to Joe's mind a picture of his mother, withered down near to nothing after three weeks in bed, the points of her hips and knobs of her knees sharp as sheared rock beneath the blankets, her voice the sound of two dry stones rubbed together, whispering in Joe's ear for water, more water,
just another sip of water, dear,
until, after three late-night trips out to the well, he'd fallen asleep in the chair beside her and awoken to find her dead with an empty glass beside her on the table near her bed.

Raymond stirred the ashes of the fire needlessly with a stick and said, "We'll just do this one thing tonight and then drive north a few days, into Oklahoma, maybe. Sell the truck there and catch a train."

"We could head out now," Joe said. "Drive all night to San Antonio and catch the Sunset Limited. Leave it be. You didn't have to spit on the man's floor, Ray."

Raymond looked up from the fire and then gazed at the moonlit sky, his eyes red and watery from the heat and smoke, his scar irregular and dead white on his flushed face. It was the third time Joe had spoken since sunup, and Raymond wasn't accustomed to his brother being so damned talkative. "I suppose I didn't," Raymond said, tossing the stick into the fire. "I might have spit in his face instead."

Joe hadn't counted on so many horses. In these parts, most of the small-plot farmers kept only enough mules and draft horses to plow and plant their cotton fields. Down south near Yoakum, where there were still sprawling cattle ranches, you might expect a full stable, but not one with horses the likes of these. Near on to midnight, the boys had smothered their little cook fire with handfuls of dirt and driven back south past Moulton until they reached the stand of blackjack oaks on the eastern side of the road, and Raymond swung the truck around so that it was pointing north and parked it in the weeds next to the drainage ditch between the road and the fenceline. Raymond climbed from the truck, tucked his pistol into the back waistband of his trousers, and closed the door softly. Peering up and down the empty midnight road, he walked around to Joe's side of the truck and then lifted the three cans of gasoline from the bed of the truck. The moon was up in earnest now, and Joe thought he might almost be able to read out here without a lantern, and when he looked at the worry on Raymond's face he could tell his brother was thinking too about the light, and not so kindly. Joe left his rifle in the truck and lifted one of the cans with his good arm.

When they'd made it over the cattlegate and walked the quarter mile up the winding dirt road to find the dense grove of fruit trees standing bare between the house and the stable, they stopped and listened while the wind worked the tree branches together and drove the whirring blades of the windmill set out on the near side of the barn. The house rose in fine white siding from the bottom story up to a screened sleeping porch that ran the length of the second floor. Raymond put a finger to his lips, a gesture so pointless, given his brother's penchant for silence, that Joe stifled a laugh and shook his head. Raymond ducked through the grove and slipped between the barn and the new Ford truck that sat outside the sliding doors with Karel's trailer unhitched and empty beside it. Just beyond it,
the stable loomed quiet and twice the size of the barn, its new red paint visible beneath the unabashed moon.

Raymond slid the door open one slow inch at a time and marveled at how well greased and silent and true the runners were. The brothers set their cans down just inside the door and Raymond pushed it mostly closed. They stood for a while, letting their eyes adjust to the darkness and breathing the warm air rich with the sweet mix of manure and hay and damp saddle blankets and breathing animals, each scent distinct yet muted, overcast by the strong smell of fine, oiled leather.

Joe lit a match and cupped it with his hand, biting back the bone-deep throbbing in his shoulder as he walked past the loft stairs toward the stalls until he located a hanging lantern and pulled it down from its nail. He got it lit, dialed the wick down low, and then the brothers got their bearings in the new spill of light around them. Before the stalls, a wooden loft chute angled down to the floor from above and hay bales were stacked three high against the wall and beneath the steps leading up the loft. Raymond nodded and they walked down the wide alley, flanked on each side by stalls with brass door bolts and hardwood walls that gave way to polished slats rising from chest-high on either side of the opened feed doors, the horses within breathing and clopping softly in their fresh bedding. A few lumbered forward, blinking their enormous eyes and hanging their heads sleepily over the stall doors to see who had come to tend them in the night and what new comforts they had brought. Raymond pulled another lantern from the beam between two stalls and got it lit, and then they walked two abreast between the long rows, holding their lanterns up and peering into the stalls. Joe counted eight on each side, and only a few of them empty. A dozen horses at least, but really the same horse twelve times. Some mares, some stallions, a gelding or two and, in the last right-hand stall, a nervous little filly that shook her mane and paced within the confines of her enclosure, all of them black from hoof to head excepting their socks and blazes, which shone so white they made him squint even in the dim, oily light of the lanterns. He thought of Raymond's scar, the way it had looked too white to be real in the light of the cook fire, and then he turned to the back of the stable where the wide aisle opened into a wash-down and grooming area with stacks of nested pails on the floor and eyebolts secured in the load-bearing four-by-fours for crossties. On the crossbeams near the wall, an assortment of brushes and currycombs and hoof picks sat waiting for need of their services. Against the opposite wall, fine saddles, many of them strangely lacking pommels, sat atop what looked like wide, varnished hardwood sawhorses. There was tack strung from the rafters and two farrier's stools stacked in one corner beneath a wall hung with sets of new shoes and nippers and rasps.

Mindful ofJoe's shoulder, Raymond put a hand flat on the small of his brother's back to get his attention. Joe turned, the yellow lanternlight softening his features so that Raymond saw himself as he'd been years ago before his father put his face through a window the night he'd refused to surrender the pay he'd earned baling hay all one Sunday at a neighboring farm. "Quite an outfit," Raymond whispered, holding his lamp toward the swinging double doors on the back wall. "Crack them doors so we get a cross breeze. I'll go soak the loft."

Joe nodded, watching his brother's wiry frame move between the stalls until Raymond reached the fuel cans, bent to lift one and then rose, enfolded in soft light, up the loft stairs. He gave the filly another look, and she turned from him and pressed her side against the back wall of her stall. He set his lantern on the dirt floor and pulled the bolt from the back door, pushing it slowly outward until a hard gust of wind caught hold of it and Joe found himself going with it, clutching the thing with the wrong hand and dragging his boots in the loose dirt, the back of his shoulder shot through with a deep screaming pain that sucked the breath from his lungs and flashed a blanket of crimson over his vision so that he found himself, when his eyes cleared and he registered the moonlight on his shoulders and the wind whipping the hem of his coat at his back,
moaning with a long, throaty exhalation that rolled up into his sinuses until it came out, muted but audible, through his nose. Tears welled up hot in his eyes, and he stood there for a long minute, his forehead holding the door against the exterior wall of the stable, the paddock fenced and well tilled by horse hooves and empty behind him.