Free The Wake of Forgiveness by Bruce Machart Page A

what God gave her. Died of the typhus last winter. The old man, he burnt up in his bed when the house caught fire. Just after the last cut of hay."
    "God bless," Karel said, feeling, at the word of the mother's death, some old, buried connection to her clawing at him like a blind, burrowing animal awakened to find its den collapsed around it. His words, he suspected, had betrayed nothing, and when Joe looked up at him, his bright eyes glassy and red with whiskey and fatigue, did Karel think how halfhearted it must have sounded, the invocation of God coming, as it had, from a man who'd not two hours ago interrupted a sacrament. "What I mean to say is, that's a sorry lot, boys. It was good fortune you managed to make it out."
    Now Raymond traced his scar with his thumbnail. He finished his beer and kept his lips closed while he held his stomach and muffled a belch. "We wasn't ever in anything what needed getting out of, Mr. Skala. We don't believe in fortune. Nor accidents neither."
    Karel frowned and lit a cigarette. He started to say that a man ought to watch how much he said, and when, but he thought the better of it, saying instead, "How about work? You believe in that?"
    "We ain't interested in farming, if that's what you mean. Joe here's good with animals. Sits a horse good as any. I can butcher damn near anything born with blood in it. But we don't tend to crops. We got enough money to get by a good while. Got a new truck. Got no use anymore for planting fields and mending fences. If we had, we'd have kept the land up county."
    "I expect you would have," Karel said. "Anything else you won't do, assuming there's good money to be made in it, of course?"
    "Just that. Crop farming. I reckon that's the whole list right there."
    Karel polished off his beer and grabbed the boys' empty glasses from off the table. And then, before heading toward Elizka at the bar, he clinked the glasses together and squatted down such that his haunches rested on his heels. Now that Sophie was laboring, they'd have cause to stay put in Praha for another day or two at the least, and he'd need someone to look after his heifers and smokehouse, and there were at least four kegs of beer that needed delivering to Hacek's Ice and Coal in Moulton, but first he wanted to see how much doing it might take to spook these boys.
    The orchestra held one last, long note of a polka, and when the dancers had spun to a stop and turned toward the stage to applaud, Karel put his cigarette to his lips and held it there burning orange at the ember while he leaned in close to Raymond Knedlik. "Set a house afire, would you, Raymond?"
    The boy glanced at his brother and then looked hard and without blinking through the rising smoke into Karel's eyes. His bad eye twitched, its bottom lid pulsing with the measured beating of his heart. Then he pushed his chair back and stood up, his brother following suit. They hooked their thumbs into their pockets and laughed while Karel came to his feet with the beer glasses still in his hands and his cigarette hanging from his mouth.
    "If what folks says is true," the boy said, "it's more than me and Joe here that's helped his old man into the hole he deserves."
    It had been a long time since anyone, friend or otherwise, had dared to mention Karel's father within earshot of him, and Karel noticed that his fingers were gripped around the beer glasses so forcefully that his veins bulged beneath the tanned skin on the backs of his hands. What I ought to do, he thought, is take you little shit-asses outside and stomp some sense into you, but the brothers held their ground, moving together in such a way that their shoulders nearly touched, and Karel found himself thinking of the days he'd been harnessed with his brothers to the plow. It had been hard work, but they'd suffered it together, shoulder to shoulder, and now there was something cool bubbling up inside him, working its way through him fresh and clean the way the waters of the cold