The Wake of Forgiveness (2 page)

The boys are moving toward the carriage—which is coming toward them, coming to change everything—but at first they don't see it, don't see the horses or the puffs of dust coming up from their hooves, don't see these fine animals, longer of leg than any the boys have known before and higher of step, their withers soaked through and shining black with sweat despite the cool morning breeze, their carriage one of wealth and women and a future the boys could not have dreamed up if they'd been left, any short night of their lives, to their beds long enough to dream much anything at all.

Here in these parts, in the black-soil heart of Lavaca County, where the Czech farmers have run off all but the last of the red-haired and ruddy settlers who came before them; where, if a man has two bits' worth of good seed and a strong back and a certain degree of stubbornness—that and a good wife who lives long enough and with enough of God's favor to grant him sons—he might harvest two hundred acres of cotton without calling on even his neighbors for help; here, where men make their own worth, they don't have much use for outsiders, and until this week there's been neither a man nor woman in the county who's often laid either an eye or a thought on a Mexican.

I
N THE LAST
three days, Villaseñ and his two armed escorts have been busy throwing their weight—and nearly their weight in gold—around town. On Monday, in town at the First Federal Bank and Trust, where Lad Dvorak sat at his desk working through the inventory list of the Butler farm foreclosure, Guillermo came tracking mud through the doors with his men. His hair was black and oiled back and tinged with gray in such a way that he looked to have spent the duration of his life walking into the same wet and gypsum-laden wind. His spectacles he wore down low on his nose, and he spoke with an accent that sounded to the tellers more refined somehow than their own.

One of his men stood at the door with his rifle while the other brought in the saddlebags, some eight of them in all, and then they held the door open and refused to do their business until the rest of the customers were cleared out and the doors bolted. Guillermo's daughters were taking lunch at the inn, forbidden, as usual, to accompany their father on occasions where money changed hands, of which there had been hundreds over the years, and perhaps, had they been in the bank, Lad might have been rendered as slack jawed and inarticulate by their lovely Spanish features as he was presently by the weight of their father's saddlebags.

Lad lifted the first of them to his desk, saying, "Most of it's silver, I'm betting."

"A man should know better than to make his bets blind," Villaseñor said. "I wouldn't have my good horses shod with silver."

Lad laughed and worked his fingers through the patchwork of bristled hair on his chin while Villaseñor's men stood with their rifles held casually and crosswise beneath their bellies, their thumbs hooked behind their belts. Lad figured them for nearly forty, but they wore the mustaches of boys, combed straight and too thin to hide the skin of their upper lips. Their shirts were laundered, creases pressed in the sleeves, but their boots were caked with mud and, by the smell of it, dung. They were two of the shortest men Lad had ever seen, and he snorted and jerked his head at them and said, "If it's something worth protecting in these bags, mister, I'd expect your boys here to be a shake bigger than a pair of well-fed housewives."

The men didn't flinch, and Lad knew then that they didn't speak English. Villaseñor acted, too, like he hadn't heard. He took his spectacles off, pulled a folded handkerchief from the vest pocket of his suit coat, and when he replaced the spectacles, he squinted and a tight smile creased the corners of his mouth while he spoke to his men in Spanish. They laughed, turned their backs, and went toward the door. The two tellers backed away from their windows, eyes wary. One of Villaseñor's men unlatched the door and went outside. The other propped his gun against the far wall, pulled a cigar from his shirt pocket, and waved the chewed end beneath his nose before putting it in his mouth. He unbuckled his belt and dropped a hand down into the front of his britches to make some adjustments, and when he got himself situated to his liking he pulled the belt tight under the slump of his belly and buckled up. He had an audience in the two tellers, and he gave them a wink and went back to sucking on his cigar.

When his partner came back in the door, he carried a smallish box that looked, for all its varnish and shine, like a coffin built for a rich man's tomcat. He turned the bolt on the door and put the box beside the first saddlebag on Lad's desk.

"And what of this?" Lad said.

"That's
my
wager," the old man said. "I'm betting that after we weigh these coins and you hand me a voucher, you and your boys are going to need what's in this box."

"Is that so," Lad said, winking at his tellers. "And what would that be?"

"Shoeblack. My men's boots need some attention."

Now they all had a laugh, and Lad called his men over to help weigh the gold, which they had to do in small batches because the old triple-beam scale on the premises was calibrated with only a five-pound counterweight. By the time they finished, Lad Dvorak was perspiring and salivating both. Here was a new account worth all the cotton in Lavaca County, and a fair share of the land, at that.

The men took the saddlebags to the safe, and before he wrote out the voucher Lad shook Villaseñ's hand and asked if he needed some of his balance in bills. The man raised his brows, pulled a fat fold of American currency from his coat, and removed the clip. "It doesn't seem so," he said, removing three five-dollar bills and letting them fall to the varnished bureau top.

Lad had his tellers sign as witnesses to the transaction and handed Mr. Villaseñ his voucher. "It's a pleasure," he said, "having your business. Did you need some smaller change for these?"

"The pleasure is mine," the man said. "And those bills are for you. And for your men."

"Beg pardon?"

Villaseñ lifted the lid of the box and removed two cans of shoe-black, a brush, and a felt strop. "My wager," he said, running his thumb through the stiff bristles of the brush. "The way I see it, I can leave my money here in your bank, or I can withdraw it tomorrow and do my business over in Shiner or Yoakum. I'm betting you'd rather I didn't, and I'm betting, because this is true, that when I get back in an hour from having a word with Monsignor Carew about my daughters' Nuptial Mass, you and your boys will be just about finished putting a shine to these undersized men's boots. Five dollars apiece is more than fair—don't you think?—all things considered."

Now Lad's fingers were back in his beard and his ears were flushed with blood. "I'm certain," he said, "that you would be happier with the twenty-cent shine they'll get around the corner at Wasek's barbershop, but let me be the first to congratulate you on your daughter's wedding. Who's the lucky man?"

"I don't believe I said." Villaseñ fished a cigar from his suit coat. "Not to you, I didn't. And I'd be happier, sir, if you didn't presume to tell me what would make me happy. That money there, it's yours. And so is my business, assuming these little farmwives here, who've put more men in the ground for me than yours have swindled for you, have, by hour's end, boots in which I can see myself well enough to shave."

Then he bit the tip from his cigar, ground the tobacco with his back teeth for more than a wordless minute, and sent from his lips onto the bureau top a long string of thick black spit. He lighted his cigar and the whole room went suddenly and sweetly ripe with its smoke. "There," he said, "another token of my generosity, Mr. Dvorak. If your spit's too good for my men's boots, then you can use mine."

F
OR TWO DAYS
thereafter, the talk about town was constant as the lowing of cattle in the pastures. While the townswomen sat together quilting or stood clustered in kitchens, polishing copper pots or latticing dough over pies filled with fruit canned the previous summer, their lips moved faster than their hands. Faster, their husbands said, than their minds.

Gathered in the icehouse, the men took long pulls on their pilsners and shook their heads, feigning indifference, but at home, even after sweating behind plows or beneath the weight of hay bales, they found themselves these days with more patience for their women's words. They'd sit at their tables long after they'd eaten, elbows on each side of their coffee cups, and they'd listen to the stories the women brought home.

The Mexican had rented the whole second floor of the Township Inn for a month. Paid in advance, he did. Then there was Sy Janek's wife, Edna, who claimed that, on her way home from delivering the Knedlik twins, she'd seen the girls, all three of them, riding black horses after dark, running the animals hard out behind Patrick Dalton's granary and into the pecan grove by the north fork of Mustang Creek. In dresses they were, with a foot in each stirrup and God only knows what, if anything, between their tender parts and the saddle leather. There was Father Carew, who'd canceled both Masses for this coming Saturday and would say, when pressed, only that this Villaseñ fellow had wedding plans, and for more than one wedding, and that to secure the church he'd brought with him a Papal Indulgence, the first Carew had ever seen, and three Sundays' worth of collections in cash. And then there was Patrick Dalton, who'd been seen taking lunch with Villaseñ and his men at the inn, and who had called Lad Dvorak to tell him that he'd run suddenly short of room at his stable, that the banker would have to come fetch the drays Dalton had boarded for him all these years in exchange for prime interest rates at the bank. These wives, the broad-hipped women who bore bad news and children both with a sad but softened look around the eyes, claimed Dalton had been seen smiling at the feedstore while he ordered two hundred pounds of molasses oats, smiling even while he shouldered them out to his wagon, two forty-pound sacks at a time.

And this is where the men of Lavaca County stopped listening.

This is where they breathed in abruptly through their noses and pushed their chairs back from the table and took their coffee out into the swirling night air, which was growing cold of a sudden and sharp with pecan and mesquite and oak from the chunkwood fires smoldering in their smokehouses. They stood out on their porches or out back of their barns, and while the low moon slid behind thin bands of clouds and they pulled tobacco from the bib pockets of their overalls and rolled cigarettes with callused thumbs, they grew more certain than ever of their wives' willful foolishness, of their forthright and feminine need to believe the world a far more mysterious and alluring place than it was. Patrick Dalton, the men knew, hadn't smiled in coming up on four damned years, not since the night when he'd for the first time lost an acreage-staked race to Vaclav Skala.

They'd been there, after all, and in their memories they'd borne witness to the race the same way their wives had borne their children—with the assurance that they'd each played a vital and thankworthy role, and with the misguided confidence that, for having done so, they would remain forever attuned to both the memory of the bearing and the born alike.

And so it was that on this March night, smoking out behind their barns, the men of Dalton, Texas, and its hinterland drew from the oft-unswept corners of their memories dozens of mismatched and contradictory notions of a night four years back, a night that, by all accounts, had seen them standing in the shuddering light of two rock-ringed finish-line fires, their undershirts starched yellow with the dried sweat of an August day's work, their backs to the creek where they'd floated their jars of corn whiskey and beer bottles to keep them cool. They'd stood drinking and smoking, comparing crop yields and woman troubles, making half-dollar bets with their neighbors while the riders readied themselves.

Some forty yards to the west, just beyond the swinging cattlegate, Vaclav Skala's youngest, Karel, sat his pop's biggest roan stallion. The boy's neck, like his brothers', was kinked from so much time harnessed to a plow, warped such that his head cocked sharply to the left and made him look a little off-kilter in the saddle. Still, there was an ease in the way he handled the animal, a casual confidence that kept his boots slid back in the stirrups so that it appeared he rode only on his toes, the reins held so delicately between fingers and thumbs, held the way a lady might hold her most precious heirloom linens after washing.

He turned the horse a few times back beyond the gate and edged him up alongside the Dalton boy on the county's newest horse, a nervous, twitching red filly his daddy had shipped in from Kentucky or Tennessee or some-damned-where. The boys kept the animals reined in just the other side of the gate while their fathers shook hands.

These were the communal truths, the recollections the landowners and townsmen shared the way they kept in common a constant worry over rainfall and boll weevils and cotton futures. What they didn't know, though they might have suspected as much, was that Vaclav had taken in those days to praying shamelessly of a Sunday that pestilence might visit the Dalton herd, and that Dalton had once that summer crept in the moonlight among the outermost rows of Skala's melon crop, injecting the ripe fruit with horse laxative. These two, given a normal night, would have sooner sat bare assed on a cottonmouth nest than exchange pleasantries with each other, but here they were, something about the night and the onlookers and the improvident stakes pushing to each man's lips at least the pretense of sporting civility—
Good luck, then, neighbor—
before they went to inspect their animals.

Dalton pulled on the saddle straps and slapped his son on the leg, leaning in to offer some last bit of advice. As for Vaclav Skala, he didn't say a word to his boy. He'd said what he needed to half an hour before when he handed young Karel his crop. His mouth moved only to work the tobacco. He spat juice into the weeds and scratched at the arc of blond curls he had left behind his sun-speckled crown, pulled a nine-inch blade from the sheath on his belt and held it up to his horse's nose, letting it glint there awhile in the flickering hint of firelight while the animal got a good, strong smell of its steel.