The Wake of Forgiveness (7 page)

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."

C
OME 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.

Now, after a final prayer together, she sopped Sophie's face with a new cool rag and pulled back the sheet. She checked between the suffering woman's legs, and then she struggled onto the mattress and positioned herself with her hands cupped on either side of Sophie's belly.

"I've waited as long as I'm willing to wait," she said. "Catch your breath, dear. I'm afraid this is likely to pain you something terrible."

A
T THE PARISH
hall, during the two further hours of the old widow Vrana's ministrations, and an hour longer of Sophie's grunting and pushing to expel this thing that had so beset her, Karel Skala would unhinge himself with drink.

It had gone full dark by the time he'd gotten Sophie and the girls over to the Vrana house and settled the little ones into bed. He'd kissed Sophie on the forehead, and the old woman had ushered him out the door as if he were no more welcome there than would have been a common cur. On the path through the thicket, without a lantern, he'd been grateful for the emerging moon, swept clean of the day's clouds by the push of cold weather from the west. It was too cool out for tree frogs, and Karel felt their absence. He'd grown up with the throaty urgency of their chirping, and a walk through woods with only the sounds of nested birds and insects was a fresh reminder of all the little disappointments that conspired to set a man to thinking about greater ones. He stepped quickly, wishing to rid himself of this thicket, and his boots crunched in the brittle leaves and pine needles underfoot until he emerged into the unhindered moonlight.

He was grateful, too, for the sight of the cemetery at the end of the path, for the muted animal sounds within the parish stables, then for the gleam from the hall's lighted windows and the muffled, brassy half step of the music that could be heard as he approached, all of which brought him closer to the promise of soft skin and hard drink.

Just outside the hall doors, Bohumil Novotny stood laughing and passing a half-gallon jug with a pair of boys who, but for the work a blade had done to one of their cheeks, could have each passed for the other. Karel stopped behind the trunk of the giant live oak so he could study them awhile. Judging from their caked work boots and oilcloth coats, they hadn't come for church, and Karel would have bet a dollar against a dime that they weren't yet sixteen. Still, here they stood, running their hands through their dark, closely cropped curls and taking seasoned, deliberate pulls on the jug. They made a habit, these two, of hooking their thumbs in their trouser pockets when they laughed. Karel noticed that they held themselves in the same way, upright and rigid as if they'd been skewered with cedar posts, but when they moved they did so leisurely, with loose-jointed gestures.

As for their company, he was about as complicated as cornbread. Between his feedstore and rail interests, Novotny had amassed as much of a fortune as one could in a town so small as Praha, and he was as well dressed as he was red-faced and overfed. Beneath his tailored and unbuttoned black suitcoat, his shirtfront had been freed from his trousers by the protrusion of his belly, and when he took note of Karel approaching from the shadows, he fell silent and scratched the underside of his down-slung stomach while the young fellows beside him toed the dirt and nodded their greetings.

"Damnation," Karel said. "You men so scared of touching a woman that you'd hide outside in the cold rather than take a turn around the floor?"

Novotny raised his brows at the others and took his handkerchief from his vest pocket to clear his nose. Then he took a pull from the jug and held it up as if raising a toast to something no less impressive than the moonlit sky itself. "I'd let you a drink of this corn here, Karel, if I thought it might quiet you down. Thing is, given your communion-time proclamations, I don't believe the last few drops I give you had that effect."

Inside, the band held the last long note of a schottische, and then came the vigorous applause from the dancers. "A few drops just ain't enough to do the trick is all," Karel said, "but I see you found a bigger portion now that the sun's not out to lay light on it." He nodded at the hall door. "Orchestra sounds lively tonight."

"Whole town's lively on account of that near beer you brung." Novotny winked at the boys and handed the jug to Karel. "You know these boys here, I believe, or did once. Villaseñ bought their pop's land down your way."

Karel bubbled the whiskey and took a cigarette from his case. When he lit the thing, the first pull of smoke fell slowly, as if of its own weight alone, from his nostrils, and then he gave these boys a look, one they didn't manage to return, as they appeared intent on studying the scuffed toes of their boots. Good-looking fellows they were, broad across the shoulders and bright in the eyes the way boys tended to be when they got the first scant sniff of their own manhood. If they had a whisker between them, Karel couldn't locate it. "Son of a bitch bought a passel of folks' land," he said, passing the whiskey back to Novotny and putting a hand out as the band took up a new number inside. "Only twins I recollect was the Knedlik boys, and they were still on the tit last time I saw them."

Now the boys turned their attention upward in unison, and the one with the scar stepped forward, smiling, and shook Karel's hand while indicating his brother with a tilt of the head. "Joe here ain't got off it yet," he said, a statement that earned him a hard elbow to the shoulder and smiles all around. "Name's Raymond."

Karel took note of the mark the boy wore, a thin and winding line of poorly mended flesh that ran from the swollen underside of his left eye to the corner of his mouth. "Someone mistake your face for a beefsteak, did they, Raymond?"

The boy put his hands in his pockets and gave his brother a glance through the corner of his unblemished eye. Novotny said the Knedlik troubles had made the paper more than once, and wondered how it was that Karel always knew the market prices of hay and cotton if he never unfolded the
Gazette.

Karel shrugged and kept his eyes on the boy to let him know he was still awaiting an answer. Before they went inside, with the moon flickering between a few remaining wisps of clouds, Raymond Knedlik worked his tongue around in his mouth awhile and spat between his front teeth. He took a step sideways to square his feet with his shoulders. "It was a family matter," he said.

Karel nodded and turned for the door, but the boy took hold of his shoulder and stopped him short.

"Seeing that we're talking appearances, Mr. Skala, I'm wondering who it was what nailed your ear to your shoulder and left it there until your neck growed that way. A family matter, was it?"