Read Online The Wake of Forgiveness by Bruce Machart - Free Book Online
Authors: Bruce Machart
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about the room on arthritic bare feet, wringing cotton rags in a basin of cool well water and folding them onto Sophie's forehead as the poor woman labored beneath a single sheet.
The children had been lulled to sleep in the widow's bedroom where, sixteen years before, her husband had coughed blood so violently that it had misted the walls, and where he had died when he'd coughed his last. She had checked on them, these two darling little girls asleep in the bed of her long and fruitless marriage, and the traces of moonlight through the windows reminded the old woman of the nights of her own childhood, nights nearly seventy years gone when, wintering for the first time in this strange new country, in the one-room shelter her father had thrown together when it got too cold to sleep in the wagon, she'd awoken long before morning to the sounds of indecisive winds and coyotes and her two sisters' breathing to find their faces graced by ribbons of light that found their way in through the joints of the hastily hewn roof timbers.
But that had been so very long ago, and they were all buried, father and mother and sisters alike, in the St. Mary's cemetery, not a quarter mile from this house with nothing but densely clustered trees and a narrow footpath of fallen leaves and the indeterminate remainder of her own mortal life between them, and she could make that short walk through the little thicket with a pail of sudsy water and wash their headstones with these same cotton rags, and she could do so any time at all that she liked, excepting now, when both she and the rags had a more pressing purpose.
This baby wasn't turning, and Sophie Skala was one of Praha's own. As a girl, before her father moved the family south into Lavaca County, Sophie had run ponytailed and sun flushed through the thickets and creekbeds of Praha, and a much younger Mrs. Vrana had often taken note of the girl at Mass, sitting so prim and fair, that ponytail tucked up into her Sunday bonnet like a sweet, if poorly kept, secret. Widow Vrana, who now sat on the edge of the bed whispering Hail Marys with the woman that girl had become, helping her pray her way through these violent contractionsâstrong but unproductive these last two hoursâthis old woman, she'd pined in those long-gone days for a little girl like the one Sophie had been, one so sweet and well mannered, one so at home all the same in her best dress or in the little smocks she wore while traipsing barefoot around the countryside. It had not come to pass, and it had tested Mrs. Vrana's faith more than even she believed it was meant to be tested that, over the years, in a land of farmers and tradesmen whose wives had little money for physicians and even less faith in their science, she had attended to perhaps four hundred births, and still, no amount of her garden's herbs or store-bought tonic or time spent splay-legged and praying beneath her husband's weight had yielded so much as a short pregnancy, much less a child of her own.
And so, by her will, if not by God's, this child would live. The water had come hours ago, and she'd seen both babies and mothers lost to less dangerous labors. Already she'd applied onions to Sophie's feet and a poultice to her lower back to calm the spasms. She'd purged her with a tea of mugwort and sorrel, and now, to her mind, time was a creeping and persistent rival. The widow knew well, as did all the midwives in three surrounding counties, of the death, nearly thirty years back, that had taken Klara Skala, and needlessly so, she thought. Edna Janek was an able practitioner, and it would not have happened, she believed, had Klara been attended to sooner.
Now, after a final prayer together, she sopped Sophie's face with a new cool rag and pulled back the sheet. She checked between the suffering woman's legs, and then she struggled onto the mattress and positioned herself with her hands cupped on either side of Sophie's belly.
"I've waited as long as I'm
The children had been lulled to sleep in the widow's bedroom where, sixteen years before, her husband had coughed blood so violently that it had misted the walls, and where he had died when he'd coughed his last. She had checked on them, these two darling little girls asleep in the bed of her long and fruitless marriage, and the traces of moonlight through the windows reminded the old woman of the nights of her own childhood, nights nearly seventy years gone when, wintering for the first time in this strange new country, in the one-room shelter her father had thrown together when it got too cold to sleep in the wagon, she'd awoken long before morning to the sounds of indecisive winds and coyotes and her two sisters' breathing to find their faces graced by ribbons of light that found their way in through the joints of the hastily hewn roof timbers.
But that had been so very long ago, and they were all buried, father and mother and sisters alike, in the St. Mary's cemetery, not a quarter mile from this house with nothing but densely clustered trees and a narrow footpath of fallen leaves and the indeterminate remainder of her own mortal life between them, and she could make that short walk through the little thicket with a pail of sudsy water and wash their headstones with these same cotton rags, and she could do so any time at all that she liked, excepting now, when both she and the rags had a more pressing purpose.
This baby wasn't turning, and Sophie Skala was one of Praha's own. As a girl, before her father moved the family south into Lavaca County, Sophie had run ponytailed and sun flushed through the thickets and creekbeds of Praha, and a much younger Mrs. Vrana had often taken note of the girl at Mass, sitting so prim and fair, that ponytail tucked up into her Sunday bonnet like a sweet, if poorly kept, secret. Widow Vrana, who now sat on the edge of the bed whispering Hail Marys with the woman that girl had become, helping her pray her way through these violent contractionsâstrong but unproductive these last two hoursâthis old woman, she'd pined in those long-gone days for a little girl like the one Sophie had been, one so sweet and well mannered, one so at home all the same in her best dress or in the little smocks she wore while traipsing barefoot around the countryside. It had not come to pass, and it had tested Mrs. Vrana's faith more than even she believed it was meant to be tested that, over the years, in a land of farmers and tradesmen whose wives had little money for physicians and even less faith in their science, she had attended to perhaps four hundred births, and still, no amount of her garden's herbs or store-bought tonic or time spent splay-legged and praying beneath her husband's weight had yielded so much as a short pregnancy, much less a child of her own.
And so, by her will, if not by God's, this child would live. The water had come hours ago, and she'd seen both babies and mothers lost to less dangerous labors. Already she'd applied onions to Sophie's feet and a poultice to her lower back to calm the spasms. She'd purged her with a tea of mugwort and sorrel, and now, to her mind, time was a creeping and persistent rival. The widow knew well, as did all the midwives in three surrounding counties, of the death, nearly thirty years back, that had taken Klara Skala, and needlessly so, she thought. Edna Janek was an able practitioner, and it would not have happened, she believed, had Klara been attended to sooner.
Now, after a final prayer together, she sopped Sophie's face with a new cool rag and pulled back the sheet. She checked between the suffering woman's legs, and then she struggled onto the mattress and positioned herself with her hands cupped on either side of Sophie's belly.
"I've waited as long as I'm
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