The Wake of Forgiveness Read Free

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