The Wake of Forgiveness by Bruce Machart Page B

holding Evie in one arm while she clung to the kneeling rail with the other, her cheeks flushed and running with perspiration from her hairline. Karel brought his wife to her feet and turned away. The priest took a step back with the host yet in his hand and looked down at the couple rising from the rail. The altar boy stood blinking, a frightened grin focused on his own shaking hand and the polished plate held under the host, wondering, no doubt, just what under heaven to do now.
    Karel, with whiskey and smoke still on his breath, led his wife down the center aisle of the church toward the doors, a hand in hers and another around her waist. In the pews, Diane met her father's eyes with her own. He nodded toward the door, and she rose to join her parents in the aisle.
    Sitting back from the kneelers, making way for the girl, the congregants were pulled from the downcast gazes of their prayers by this unexpected procession. When he'd brought Sophie to her feet at the kneeling rail, Karel had inadvertently stepped on her hem such that now, as they made their belabored way out of the church, the back of Sophie's skirt dragged the floor and streaked the hardwood with her water.
    Outside, in the gloaming, the trees lurched and swayed, animated by the shifting winds, the air chilled and sharp with dry pine and chimney smoke. Karel breathed in deep through his nose the way he did when he butchered an animal or kindled a fire, and he laughed as he held his wife around the waist. "It's turning out about how you wanted it," he said. "Ain't it?"
    Sophie forced a smile between grimaces. "Not if you're meaning to let me labor in the back of that truck all the way home to Dalton."
    "Why, hell no, I'm not." His pale eyes gleamed with mischief, and Sophie recognized the look as the one, more than any other, she'd found irresistible when he'd courted her with dancing and dandelion wine, with kisses and wandering hands among the hay bales up in his loft, she the eighteen-year-old daughter of a father soured by his own determined and ill-humored devotion, Karel the wild-eyed and tough-skinned owner of a vast and growing, if begrudged, fortune in Lavaca County. He was irresistible then as he was now—prone to recklessness, yes, but thoughtful enough to touch her with only the backs of his fingers so as not to rough her skin with his leathery calluses. And he was wounded, too, as anyone could see, and his afflictions opened something wide in her that only caring for him could fill.
    When he looked into her eyes, he put the flat back of his hand smoothly against her cheek and pushed her face to the side so her head would match the permanent cant of his own, and in this way he seemed both to acknowledge and soften what his father had done to him with plow and harness and neglect. His smile was forever bent with a hint of impertinence, and he made it his way to say, always, any damn thing he felt like saying, as he did now when he pulled open the church door and called in to the congregation, "Is it a midwife on her knees in there somewhere, and someone to look after my girls? It's a long way back to Dalton, and my wife's taken a mind to farrow out here on these steps if she's not lent a bed instead."
    Inside there was the turning of heads and the scuffing of shoe soles on the hardwoods as the parishioners looked away from the sacrament before them and toward the voice at the back of the church.
    "Karel," Sophie whispered, pleading with her eyes.
    Little Diane was tugging his trouser leg, and he smiled down at her and widened his eyes in such a way that set her to giggling. He looked into the church, caressing Sophie's swollen belly with the backs of his fingers while he called, "Make you a deal, gentlemen. You tend to my wife, and I'll dance with your daughters."

C OME NINE O'CLOCK, in the front bedroom of her squat, lamp-lit house, the old widow Vrana had set her mind to it that they would not lose this child. She moved birdlike, shuffling