The Wake of Forgiveness Read Free Page B

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.
    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