The Wake of Forgiveness Read Free Page A

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