Read, read, read, read, read.
That’s what one college professor urged my classmates to do on the final day of our meeting. And I have tried my best to follow his sage advice. All my life I have been a book worm, in love with the written word and the cosmic connection and conversation that takes place between an author and his reader. I look to reading as a shelter from the rat race; a place to withdraw and travel sometimes not far and sometimes to foreign lands, a sanctuary from the electronic distractions that seem to grow in number and intensity each day. Ah, but they are so tempting. Those so-called “social media sites” where on some days there seems to be such little amount of socializing that takes place, other than communication in sentence fragments.
Even as I type this it seems “they” are trying to take away our books, tempting us to use the iPad, or a dozen different types of electronic machines “where you can download all your favorite books in minutes.” Ah, but will you read them?
I don’t spend nearly enough time blogging about my great love of reading literature. I say literature, that’s what I try to read, avoiding if at all possible the glut of pulp novels, memoirs, and other works of non-fiction that are today’s bestsellers. You know the author’s I’m talking about. The ones that seem to have a new book every year and who leave you unfulfilled, malnourished and lacking in any kind of cathartic satisfaction.
I have a few favorites. Cormac McCarthy tops the list, but it extends to others like Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, the dearly departed David Foster Wallace and a new writer named Wells Tower, who I think is fantastic. Also Tom Franklin, Dave Eggers and dozens more. And I’m always on the lookout for young, new talent. The New Yorker recently ran a series called something like “The Top 20 Under 40 Writers,” and while I may be out of that demographic, I can still enjoy it, just like I can enjoy the music or acting of those ten or twenty years younger than me.
But today, rather than reviewing a book, I’d like to preview one that I just heard of. It is titled “The Wake of Forgiveness” (gosh, I love that title), by an extremely promising young writer named Bruce Machart. The book was excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, and I’m sure neither they nor the author would mind if I offered it here for your eyes. Machart is already being talked about in the same sentences as Cormac McCarthy and Charles Frazier, which in both cases, are pretty large shoes to fill. But the following excerpt reads so deliciously that I had to share it with you.
So find a quiet place, turn off those vulgar distractions, ignore the telephone for a few moments, take a few deep breaths and enjoy.
Happy Labor Day 2010.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704206804575467761836138680.html
A Winter Harvest – February 1895
The blood had come hard from her, so much of it that, when Vaclav Skala awoke in wet bed linens to find her curled up against him on her side, moaning and glazed with sweat, rosary beads twisted around her clenched fingers, he smiled at the thought that she’d finally broken her water. He pulled back the quilt, a wedding gift sent six years before from his mother in the old country, and kissed Klara on the forehead before climbing from bed to light the lamp. He struck a match, and there it was, streaked down his legs and matted in the coarse hair on his thighs – dark and half-dried smears of his wife’s blood.
.And it kept coming. He saddled his horse and rode shivering under a cloudless midnight sky to the Janek farm to fetch Edna, the midwife. By the time they made it back, Klara’s eyes were open but glazed in such a way that they knew she wasn’t seeing through them anymore. Her pale lips moved without giving voice to her final prayer, which entreated the child to come or her own spirit to stay, either one.
When the baby arrived, their fourth boy, blood slicked and clot flecked, he appeared to have been as much ripped from flesh as born of it. Klara was lost, and Edna tended to what had been saved, pinching the little thing’s toe to get the breathing started, cleaning him with a rag dipped in warm milk and water, wrapping him in a blanket.
Vaclav Skala stood at the foot of the bed, grinding his back teeth slowly against a stringy mash of tobacco he’d chewed flavorless half an hour before. He watched Edna, a slight young woman with narrow hips and long hair as black as her eyes. She bunched pillows beneath the dead woman’s shoulder blades and behind her head before resting the baby on his mother’s stomach. Taking one of Klara’s breasts between her thumb and finger, she puckered the nipple so the baby could get hold of it. The little thing threw his hands up about his face and worked his legs beneath the blanket, and Edna held him unremittingly to the breast until he hollowed his cheeks and found it with his mouth. “It’s no hind milk in her yet,” she said, “but he might get some of the yellow mother’s milk. We’ll be needing a wet nurse. It’s several up county who might do it.”
Vaclav stepped back into the doorway and looked down the dark hallway toward the room where his other three boys were sleeping. “We’ll be needing a hell of a lot more than that,” he said. “Let him get what’s left of her if he can. He’s done taken the rest.”
Just before dawn, after Edna had washed the body and wrapped it in clean bedding, Vaclav carried it out and up into the loft of the barn so the boys wouldn’t find her when they woke. Then he dragged the drenched mattress from the house and out through the young pear grove to the hard-caked plot of earth where he planned one day to build his stable. There, beneath the wash kettle, he kindled a fire with last year’s fallen mesquite branches. The mattress was soaked through and heavier than Klara’s body had been, and Vaclav found himself cursing its weight even while he recalled how Klara had stitched the ticking and stuffed it with goose feathers before their wedding night; how, when he lay pressed for the first time between her tender skin and the soft warmth of the bed she’d made for him, he’d startled his bride, so loud was his laugh.
Now, as the horizon gave way to the pink glow of another south Texas dawn and the mockingbirds came to life in the pear grove, Vaclav worked his knife along the mattress seam, undoing his wife’s work, as he would find himself doing for years. With several inches of the stitching cut away, he reached in and pulled out the feathers, one bloody handful after another, and fed them to the fire, which spat and sizzled before blazing into yellow flames and thick white billows of smoke.
In the near pasture, the cattle stood lowing against the fence, and had Vaclav been paying attention the way he usually did, he would have puzzled at their behavior, wondering what it was that kept them clustered against the fenceline instead of in the center of the parcel near the three square bales of hay he’d set out for them the day before. Instead, he stood staring into the fire, adding the steady fuel of feathers, looking into the flames so he wouldn’t have cause to look at his hands, which were chapped and creased deeply with calluses and stained with the blood of the only woman he’d ever been fond of.
The townsfolk would assume, from this day forward, that Klara’s death had turned a gentle man bitter and hard, but the truth, Vaclav knew, was that her absence only rendered him, again, the man he’d been before he’d met her, one only her proximity had ever softened. He’d known land in his life that, before a few seasons of regular rainfall, had been hard enough to crack a plow point, and he knew that if, by stubbornness or circumstance, that earth became yours to farm, you’d do well to live with the constant understanding that, in time, absent the work of swollen clouds and providence, your boots would fall loudly, giving rise to dust, when you walked your fields.
With the sun breaking clear of the horizon and the ticking gutted of its down, Vaclav whittled his knife against a brick of lye soap and added a handful of shavings to the boiling kettle water. He squinted against the sharp fumes of Klara’s strong soap, and when he got the bloodstained ticking into the kettle, the water roiled and frothed red like so much sick stew.
Softly, a cool wind came up from the north and swirled the smoke around the kettle and out into the newly lit morning. Across the pasture, hidden in the far hedgerow near the creekside stand of trees, three half-starved coyotes raised their twitching snouts to catch a breeze laced of a sudden with the hot, iron-rich scent of blood. Their mouths flooded with anticipation as they hunkered their bellies low and inched forward, shifting their feet beneath them and waiting, their reticence born more of caution than patience. In the pasture, the cows went to lowing again, pressing themselves together against the fencewires.
With a twisted mesquite branch, Vaclav moved the ticking around in the boiling liquid and then threw that wood, too, on the fire. When he turned toward the house and weaved his way through the grove, he found the back door swung open, his three young boys standing just inside wearing nightclothes and wet cheeks. The oldest, Stanislav, was only five, but he held on to his brothers’ shoulders the way a father would. The wind gusted enough to ripple -Vaclav’s shirt, and when it calmed he heard the baby crying inside. Standing in the bare yard, he took his plug of tobacco from his shirt pocket and tore off a portion with his teeth. Edna appeared behind the boys and turned them away from the door. “Their breakfast’s gone cold on the table,” she said. “They’re asking after her.”
He nodded and spit tobacco juice into the hard earth near the porch, and then, without washing his hands or taking off his boots, he stepped into the house where, for all but one wailing newborn, as in the pasture and the hedgerows, even hunger had been plowed under by fear.
If you’d like more information on this book or the author, his official website is: http://brucemachart.com/ and the novel will be released late next month.
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This Hard Land 