begun, she knew that, but she couldn't know that it would progress in the way that it would, that the baby would be rendered from her in a fashion as protracted and inexorable as the way stones are tumbled, turned smooth by years of rushing water, and men are eroded of kindness by the slow, interminable friction of their unrealized desires.
H ER WATER BROKE at the kneeling rail.
The church was quietly alive with the flickering of candlelight and the swirling haze of incense smoke, and Karel was on his knees beside her, amazed as ever by the serenity that overcame his wife's face when Father Petardus placed the Eucharist on her tongue. Holding Evie, who stirred now on her shoulder, Sophie kept her eyes shut, bowed her head, and when the altar boy moved the communion plate beneath Karel's chin and the priest held the sacrament before him, saying, "The Body of Christ," Sophie inhaled with a plaintive gasp and whispered, "Oh, Karel," as if begging her husband to accept what he'd been offered.
He did not.
His hearing, after these five years of marriage, was attuned to her voice in the way common only to husbands who adore their wives and those who lie to them with regularity. To Karel's mind, he practiced the latter because of the former, because Sophie was a good woman, kind and hearty and generous, so much so, in fact, that he suspected she knew when he was less than honest, less than wholly hers, and that she endured the indiscretions the way a good horse will endure shoeing and hard harness work, blinded to everything but the promise of brushstrokes and oats, of kindness and comfort. With eyes affixed only to a future worth forsaking the present for.
Now, because Sophie was speaking at the communion rail, speaking to him in an attitude she would normally reserve for her queries of God, Karel turned from Father Petardus's offering. He leaned toward his wife, his hand reaching down to support himself, and, in doing so, touching the wet hem of her skirt.
When, for years afterward, he told this story to his child, he would say that the birth had begun at the precise moment that the body of Christ had touched his tongue, that it was as if the sacrifice of one son had allowed for the arrival of another.
This was to become Karel's way, the stretching of truth in an effort to instill in the workaday the wonderful, and this was especially true in the stories he would come to tell his children. His own upbringing had been one of quiet exclusion, his father moving through the rooms of the house and the rows of the cropfields in what seemed a determined if not wholly unnatural silence. Year after year, the rain would batter the cedar shingles overhead, the sun would bake the black earth to a hard ceramic sheen around the rigid cotton stalks, the quail in the pastureland would covey and nest and hatch and fledge, each season born naturally of the one before, but on the rare day that Vaclav Skala would gather his boys behind the barn or on the tree-lined banks of Mustang Creek with fishing rods and tin pails of grubs, the very earth would cease, in the boys' minds, its slow, secretive turning, and they'd stand eager and mute, dumbstruck by the anticipation of their father's words.
Usually the stories were brief, meant to impart some lesson, and while Karel might laugh or grow solemn at the stories his father toldâof his stormy voyage over high seas from the old country to Galveston, of the wolves he'd hunted alongside his brothers in the hills of Bohemia, lessons about hard work and fields sowed with stubbornness and sacrificeâhe never found in these moments any new revelations that could dispute what he'd been told, since he was old enough to comprehend, by his brothers: That he'd killed their mother; that their father despised him for it and had refused, on the day of Karel's birth and thereafter, to hold him.
Now Karel realized that Father Petardus was still extending the Eucharist toward his lips, and Sophie was
H ER WATER BROKE at the kneeling rail.
The church was quietly alive with the flickering of candlelight and the swirling haze of incense smoke, and Karel was on his knees beside her, amazed as ever by the serenity that overcame his wife's face when Father Petardus placed the Eucharist on her tongue. Holding Evie, who stirred now on her shoulder, Sophie kept her eyes shut, bowed her head, and when the altar boy moved the communion plate beneath Karel's chin and the priest held the sacrament before him, saying, "The Body of Christ," Sophie inhaled with a plaintive gasp and whispered, "Oh, Karel," as if begging her husband to accept what he'd been offered.
He did not.
His hearing, after these five years of marriage, was attuned to her voice in the way common only to husbands who adore their wives and those who lie to them with regularity. To Karel's mind, he practiced the latter because of the former, because Sophie was a good woman, kind and hearty and generous, so much so, in fact, that he suspected she knew when he was less than honest, less than wholly hers, and that she endured the indiscretions the way a good horse will endure shoeing and hard harness work, blinded to everything but the promise of brushstrokes and oats, of kindness and comfort. With eyes affixed only to a future worth forsaking the present for.
Now, because Sophie was speaking at the communion rail, speaking to him in an attitude she would normally reserve for her queries of God, Karel turned from Father Petardus's offering. He leaned toward his wife, his hand reaching down to support himself, and, in doing so, touching the wet hem of her skirt.
When, for years afterward, he told this story to his child, he would say that the birth had begun at the precise moment that the body of Christ had touched his tongue, that it was as if the sacrifice of one son had allowed for the arrival of another.
This was to become Karel's way, the stretching of truth in an effort to instill in the workaday the wonderful, and this was especially true in the stories he would come to tell his children. His own upbringing had been one of quiet exclusion, his father moving through the rooms of the house and the rows of the cropfields in what seemed a determined if not wholly unnatural silence. Year after year, the rain would batter the cedar shingles overhead, the sun would bake the black earth to a hard ceramic sheen around the rigid cotton stalks, the quail in the pastureland would covey and nest and hatch and fledge, each season born naturally of the one before, but on the rare day that Vaclav Skala would gather his boys behind the barn or on the tree-lined banks of Mustang Creek with fishing rods and tin pails of grubs, the very earth would cease, in the boys' minds, its slow, secretive turning, and they'd stand eager and mute, dumbstruck by the anticipation of their father's words.
Usually the stories were brief, meant to impart some lesson, and while Karel might laugh or grow solemn at the stories his father toldâof his stormy voyage over high seas from the old country to Galveston, of the wolves he'd hunted alongside his brothers in the hills of Bohemia, lessons about hard work and fields sowed with stubbornness and sacrificeâhe never found in these moments any new revelations that could dispute what he'd been told, since he was old enough to comprehend, by his brothers: That he'd killed their mother; that their father despised him for it and had refused, on the day of Karel's birth and thereafter, to hold him.
Now Karel realized that Father Petardus was still extending the Eucharist toward his lips, and Sophie was
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