Free The Wake of Forgiveness by Bruce Machart Page B

springs out west bubbled up through stone to feed the winding rivers in the hills.
    Karel let his cigarette drop from his lips and ground it into the floor with his boot before moving close enough to the boys to smell their sour breath. Onstage, the bandleader pulled a red kerchief from the back pocket of his trousers, mopping his forehead and the bridge of his nose before he announced an intermission. Karel found himself whispering: "If what folks says is true, then we'd all three of us be waiting for a turn in that new electric chair they got in Huntsville, sure enough. So either it ain't true or we ain't been so goddamned mindless enough yet to go flapping our gums about it at a church dance of a Sunday night. Besides which, there's a difference between killing a man and letting one die, so why don't you just take your seats there and let me buy you another beer and listen to what I'm wanting to ask you."

H ALF AN HOUR later, after the Knedlik boys had agreed to look after the Skala place for a day or two, and to stay on after that if they could agree on the terms, Karel saw them out to their truck and shook their hands, their breath steaming in the growing cold as they said their good-byes.
    And then he took to drinking in earnest.
    The beer did its work in much the same way he knew river water did, running through him and carrying away, grain by grain, the sediment of ill will that had embedded itself within him over the past year of hard work and worry. What was left now, he thought, as the night deepened and the hall thinned out, leaving only the most vigilant of dancers and drinkers, was nothing less than the very bedrock of him, deep and compacted such that neither plow nor music nor drink could unearth it.
    Karel's earliest taste of the bottle had come eighteen years back on the night of his first race against the Dalton boy. That night, beaming with victory and the whiskey his brothers had smuggled into their room from their father's stash, he had stirred in his bed, flushed so fully of his usual thoughts that it seemed to him there was nothing left of him but skeleton and skin and the tingling thereabouts that came from having done something his pop might praise him for and from having drunk something that might send the old man reaching for his strap.
    At first he'd kicked the sheets away and marveled at the novelty of it, of a night freed from the knot of longing he'd had cinched in his gut as long as he could remember, but then the room had begun its slow, almost reluctant turning, the way a windmill did sometimes when a trace of breeze crept up so softly overhead that it didn't even register on his sweat-glazed skin. He'd sat up in bed, alone in a room alive only with the sounds his brothers brought forth from their dreams, and though he couldn't have put it into words, what he knew somehow was that he'd been scooped clean inside of more than he might be able to do without, reduced to something so thin walled and brittle and hollow that it felt, any moment, like it was sure to cave in on itself if he didn't find some way, or someone, to fill it.
    He'd discovered on that night, and many like it afterward, that he could manage to stay upright on horseback even when he'd drunk himself incapable of walking a straight line between the back porch and the outhouse. Fumbling with the straps, he'd grabbed the saddle by the pommel and set it aside in the hay. Then he mounted the horse and rode with only a bridle. He cantered out past the cattlegate and slowed to a walk while crossing the south fork of the creek, and when he came up the far bank he gave the horse a heel and marveled at the solid resistance of the animal, that and the surging response that leveled off into a ride so fast and smooth that he could hardly tell himself from the animal or the animal from him. There was the controlled violence of the muscles rolling beneath him, the vibrations working through him so fully that the roots of his teeth tingled in