The Wake of Forgiveness (3 page)

The men of Lavaca County looked questions at one another and shook their heads, laughing together by the fire nearest the creek.
That Vaclav's a few deuces shy of a deck,
someone said.

But he's shored up straight compared to Laddie, ain't it? Where is it you're going after this, Dvorak? Bury a bishop?

And sure enough, Lad Dvorak had been there, all turned out in one of the suits he wore to work, his eyes wide enough with unease to give the lie to the rigid set of his jaw. He was holding a little .22 revolver stiffly at his side, and he looked, when he moved, like he considered his steps before taking them, each an act of pained determination, the walk of a man whose bowels had seized up on him, or who was heading to the confessional with something venial to cut loose from his conscience.

Suspect of anything that couldn't be learned from acreage or animals, the locals wondered if that's what education did to a man. Sure, he'd drawn up the papers for Dalton, making the whole wager legal as the sale of heifers or hay, but you couldn't trust a man who walked flat pastureland like he'd gone all day plugged up by his own turds. He might have held liens on half the acreage in Dalton and Shiner, but he sure looked a silly son of a bitch holding a gun.

Still, it had been left to him to fire the shot that would send the horses and their riders churning dirt through a half mile of dust and darkness, up around the thick and twisted stand of water oaks just shy of the parcel's far hedgerow, and back to the fire-lit finish line where now all the men stood waiting, pointing and laughing at Dvorak, who held his pistol so tentatively in front of him that the barrel drooped downward like the willow tip of a divining rod.

Got-damn, Lad, that ain't your dead daddy's pecker you're holding. Put a squeeze on it the way you do them purse strings of yours.

Lad squinted into the darkness and shrugged it off. There wasn't a man here who hadn't yet come to him for a loan, and if his position of power wasn't apparent in the way he held a gun, he more than made up for it with his willingness to foreclose on a loan, with the reticence of his Sunday smile, the simple withholding of which could set a man's wife to fretting in the pews, praying her husband hadn't missed a payment.

To be certain, as Patrick Dalton swung the gate out and the horses threw their heads around and lifted their tails to drop great clods to the turf, Lad would have his hand in this, too. He came out from the fenceline, watching, on account of his new shoes, where he stepped, and when he positioned himself a few yards out of the way near the pine saplings clustered alongside the creek, he waited for a nod from Dalton, one from Skala, and then he raised his arm and pointed the gun at a sky strung brightly with stars.

Since the first wagonloads of Czech settlers rolled onto the flat and fertile land of south Texas from the port of Galveston, folks had joked that if a sober man rode over these Texas plains from the coast, and if he thought, before nearing Lavaca County, that he saw in the distance even the slightest rise, even the gentlest hint of a valley, then what he was noting was nothing more or less than the very curvature of the planet. Here in Dalton, between the two forks of the creek, the land offered its first embellishment, a gentle swell that came to a two-hundred-acre plateau and then fell away to sloughs near the water's edge. And so it was on that night, despite the indecisive summer winds, that the highland discharge of such a small caliber gun brought farmwives even a half mile away to their kitchen windows and caused their sleeping children to twitch in their beds.

The horses reared and surged, and the smoke from Lad's gun flew up in a windswept whirl and circled itself like a confused spirit into the creekside trees. The boys got up fast in their stirrups, and by the time they urged their animals up to speed, hoof sod flying behind them as they tore past the cheering line of men and between the two fires and into the darkness, eleven-year-old Karel was laying it on thick with his whip.

This boy had been outriding his older brothers since he was nine, and when his old man bragged on one of his sons—which was rare and only brought on by drink and never within earshot of the boys themselves—the words he found himself slurring were always the same:
That youngest of mine, men, he could whip some fast into a common ass.

The truth, Karel knew, though he could not have yet put it into words, was that the horse wanted the whip, wanted it the same way Karel wanted his pop's strap, the stinging and unambiguous urgency of its attention, and, for Karel, the closest he got to his father's touch.

Now he kept his crouch tight and marveled as always at the way the ride smoothed out the faster the horse ran. He would come, in later years, to find the same comfort in hard loving, in the convergence and confusion of violence and tenderness, but tonight he knew only the nervous thrill of it, the hot smelter of fear and joy found only in this kind of abandon, in riding for a stake in another man's land, in riding for the father who had refused to hold him on the day of his birth, or any day thereafter, in riding into a darkness that his adjusting vision was only now beginning to brighten, and while he alternated pops of his crop on the animal's hindquarters, he kept Billy Dalton in the corner of his eye, making sure to hold him close and on his outside flank as they approached the quarter-acre stand of oaks they were to circle before heading back to the fires and their fathers at the finish line.

The horse, Whiskey, the youngest and fastest of his father's prized pair, wanted to turn it all loose, wanted to shred acres of sod with his hooves and fill the night with the hot breath of his nostrils. Karel could feel it as he squeezed his thighs to bring the horse into the left-hand turn, the rippling ribbons of muscle beneath the animal's hide, the quivering resistance to the slightest tension on the reins. And then, just before the moss-veiled cluster of trees with their low-hanging, skeletal branches, the Dalton boy stood in the stirrups and cut back behind Karel to take the turn clockwise instead.

Whiskey threw his head to the left and broke stride, and Karel snapped the crop across the right flank and crouched into the turn, keeping the horse tight against the treeline and, because of the cant of his neck, squinting his eyes against the branches that reached out, slapping at his shoulder and face, snagging and snatching clumps of hair along the way.

The Dalton boy was out of sight, orbiting the same sizable stand of oaks in the opposite direction, and for Karel, now, there was only the sound of wind and hoof strikes, the hot pumping of breath from the horse, the memory of his old man's words when he'd handed him the crop half an hour before, the stuttering seconds before two horses would meet headlong at all but full speed.

Sooner than he expected, Karel looked up to find the Dalton horse coming on hard, Billy tucked forward and low behind the filly's windswept mane, his look one of tight-eyed determination. It was a matter of who would hold his ground and who would veer to the outside, and it was, Karel knew, one horse or the other, rather than the rider, that would likely make the decision if left to the last second.

It was Karel, too, who knew that wasn't going to happen.

When the horses were ten yards shy of colliding, Karel dug a knee into Whiskey's left flank and the horse swung out to the right, away from the trees, and then, as the Dalton boy's lips turned up at the corners and he leaned in harder, thinking he'd gained an irremediable advantage, Karel pulled his crop back sharply and, just as the horses passed, he did what his father had told him to do.

What the men of Lavaca County remember correctly is that Karel Skala broke first into the firelight, and that he blew past them at full stride before standing in the stirrups, his head cocked, as always, so far off-kilter, and slowing the horse into a wide circle out beyond the cattlegate before cantering back to where his father and brothers awaited him. Patrick Dalton went red-faced with disbelief as he stood taking it in, watching his landholdings dwindle, sucking snot up through his nose and spitting it, one last time, into the soil he'd just lost. And then waiting, waiting while Karel dismounted and handed the reins to his father, waiting while the older Skala boys gathered around their brother, slapping him hard on the shoulders and laughing. Waiting a full minute or more until the other boy, his own son, came ambling atop his filly out of the night, his right arm twisted into his lap, the shoulder hanging loose of its socket, the left side of his face puffed up and split open from cheekbone to chin.

The men standing creekside, they either pulled forth or pocketed coins, crept back to the creek for their jugs, circled around the horses, and watched while Lad Dvorak handed over both fifty-acre deeds to Skala. The Dalton boy, he was protesting, his eyes awash in tears, his face gone to a sickly blue around the wound. "The son of a bitch," he said. "I was winning."

Skala took the deeds, folded them into the back pocket of his trousers. One of the men handed him a bottle of whiskey and he bubbled it good before offering it to Dalton. "Looks like your boy caught a tree branch," he said. "They hang low around that turn, ain't it?"

Dalton refused the bottle, took his son's arm and pulled down on it and then raised it straight-elbowed until it popped back into the joint while the boy howled, crying in earnest now. "It's more than enough of that," Dalton told him, and he grabbed Billy by the hair and dragged him out into the saplings by the creek. There was some breathless whispering out there, more of the boy's complaints, and then Dalton, loud enough that everyone could hear: "It's worth fifty goddamn acres, then, is it? That's what you'll have me believe, boy? A stripe on the face?"

Dalton stomped back out into the firelight, his shoulders forward. On his face, fitful furrows. He was heading straight for Karel, who took a step or two back before standing his ground beside his father.

"Skala," Dalton said, sucking more snot. "Can I make loan of your boy's crop for a spell? My boy can't seem to keep a bead on his."

Karel looked up at his father, who was working a big wad of tobacco with his molars, nodding. Karel handed over the crop and Dalton snatched it, heading back toward the trees, snapping it against his thigh until he was once again out of sight but not nearly out of earshot: "Now, you chickenshit. You little pigtailed sister. You tell me when it feels like fifty acres' worth of hurt, and we'll see when I agree."

I
T'S KAREL WHO
first sees the carriage, who stands straight against the weight of his brothers' progress and brings the plow point to its sudden and subterranean stop. "Shit, boy," his father says. "Is it someone told you to quit?"

The boy jerks his head up toward the road where the wheels and horses are stirring dust in their slow approach. The carriage is a two-seat covered surrey paneled in dark hardwood, varnished and gleaming and coming forward in the midmorning light. Harnessed abreast, the two sizable horses step with such a regulated cadence that their hooves hit the ground in tandem.

"Couple fine horses," Karel says.

"Talking when you should be listening," Skala says, "ain't it?" But he, too, is taking note of these animals, both of them shining oil black with broad blazes white as bleached cotton. The four boys stand transfixed, their necks cocked such that from the carriage they appear to the girls each to be puzzling some monumental and impenetrable question.

Guillermo Villaseñor brings the surrey to a stop and gives Skala a nod before setting the brake and climbing down. He smoothes the sleeves of his dark suitcoat and produces a handkerchief with which he cleans his spectacles. The three girls stay in the shaded back seat while the horses blow and tramp idly in the dirt. Karel's eyes move from horse to girl, girl to horse, awed in equal parts by each of these striking animals, the stallions with their brushed black manes and long forelocks, the girls in their flowered dresses that scoop down at the neck just enough to afford a boy a view of their delicately ridged clavicles and the tanned topmost slopes of their breasts.

My
word,
Karel thinks, and his father lets loose the plow handles, hangs his whip there, and bends forward to swipe the spent tobacco from his mouth with a finger before pulling his plug from his bib pocket and biting off a new portion. He sets to chewing, then he heads out to where Villaseñ is waiting by the road in a tailored suit, his hands held out from the waist with the palms open to the fields as if to say that he's brought nothing of harm or help, either one.

The boys free themselves from the harnesses and Stanislav runs his fingers through his hair and tucks his shirt into his trousers. And then they stand there, toeing the soil with their boots, crossing and uncrossing their arms while their father walks to meet the Mexican at the edge of the cropfield.

All of the morning there's come a cool breeze just strong enough to rustle the mesquite trees up the road and ripple the boys' shirts, and now the sun works its way in and out of the clouds. Out east toward the creek, a red-tailed hawk has been circling and gliding, circling and gliding, and when it tucks its wings and drops to the earth in its swooping dive, a covey of quail bursts from the scrub grass and all of them make their escape but one. The boys, they have their backs to it, but the girls see it, and the youngest one, the one sitting closest to the field, the one with lovely full lips and wide animal eyes, opens her mouth slightly at the sight, and Karel stands straight and locks his knees against these new stirrings in his stomach, and those below. He has seen the wet tip of her tongue.

On the road, Villaseñ puts his hand out and Skala looks at it and spits into the dirt. "You needing directions?" he says.

Villaseñ smiles and pulls his hand back and narrows his eyes as if he's studying a man across from him at cards. "Not in the least," he says. "I'm precisely where I mean to be."

"Well, I mean to be plowing my fields, not standing around like an old woman on the church steps, so why don't you let me to it."

"I will, sir. I will. Thing is, I've got an enterprise in mind that could leave you with twice the fields you have presently. I've heard it in town you've more land than anyone in Dalton, perhaps more than anyone in the county, and I'm thinking you wouldn't mind having a good deal more." He pulls a cigar from the breast pocket of his coat, turns his back to the breeze, strikes a match with his thumbnail and puffs the thing lit.