Bozeman News

New West Book Review

Bruce Machart’s “The Wake of Forgiveness”

By Jenny Shank, 11-01-10

The Wake of Forgiveness
by Bruce Machart
320 pages, $26

I tried to think of a way to approach writing about Bruce Machart’s debut novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, in my usual third-person book reviewer way, but I don’t come to this story of a grievous rift between Czech-American farming brothers in Texas during the early 1900’s with a blank slate, so it’s only right that I fess up. 

I’m Czech on my mother’s side—my generation is the first group Czechs mixed with something not Czech, even though the family has been in America for over 150 years.  At some point shortly after my ancestors, named Hotovy, arrived in America and settled in Nebraska near the “Bohemian Alps” that Ted Kooser has written about, there was a terrible argument between the brothers of the family, the upshot of which is that one branch disowned the other and changed the spelling of its name to Hottovy—that’s my line.  As the story goes, one branch of this family became known in the community as industrious and dependable, while the other one gained a reputation for being shiftless and lazy.  All the business owners in the area needed to know before they would extend credit to a person was whether he spelled his name with one T or two.  My family, of course, claims that the two-T Hottovys were the upstanding ones.

No one can remember what the cause of the split was, except to speculate that land was probably at the heart of it.  So it was with great interest that I read The Wake of Forgiveness, in which four Czech brothers suffer a rift in part over the acquisition of land.

The book opens in 1895, as Klara Skala has just died giving birth to her fourth son, Karel.  In this brutal scene, her devastated husband, Vaclav (Klara was “the only woman he’d ever been fond of"), drags the blood-drenched mattress that Klara died on outside, and disposes of it.  Machart writes, “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.”

Vaclav directs his anger over Klara’s death at his sons.  He never holds or touches Karel except to whip him, and Vaclav hitches his four sons to a plow and makes them furrow his fields, a job that leaves them with permanently bent necks. 

Despite employing this seemingly inefficient plowing method, Vaclav prospers as a farmer and businessman, so that by the time the second chapter opens in 1910, he owns more land than any other man in Lavaca County, Texas.  Fifteen-year-old Karel has become a crackerjack jockey, and Vaclav often wagers on his son’s proficiency, winning land from a Scots-Irish rival in a horse race. 

One day, the wealthy Spaniard Guillermo Villaseñor rides up from Mexico to Vaclav’s farm with his three beautiful daughters and announces that they need husbands, he hopes to marry them to Vaclav’s sons, and he will throw in two hundred acres of land per daughter as a dowry.  Vaclav informs Villaseñor, “I’ll break a heap more than their hearts if they go taking Mexicans for wives, you mark it,” but agrees to a horse race between Karel and the youngest girl.  If Karel loses, three brothers will marry the sisters.  The deal sounds dandy to the older Skala brothers, who are ready to put their plow-horse days behind them--the problem for Karel is that there are only three sisters.

Karel falls in love with the sister he races, Graciela.  His forbidden attraction to her is reminiscent of that between the 16-year-old cowboy and the daughter of a wealthy Mexican landowner in Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses, and Machart’s dense, descriptive prose style also emulates McCarthy.  Graciela and Karel’s brothers leave him behind to work the land with his father, and he develops into a bitter, emotionally-stunted man. 

The book skips forward to 1924, when Sophie, the woman who had the misfortune to marry Karel, is about to give birth to their third child.  Sophie insists they travel to mass in Praha, despite her condition.  To say that the next few days are eventful for Karel is an understatement—for the rest of the book, Machart skips back and forth between this handful of days in 1924 and other key moments from the past.  While Sophie is in labor, Karel, who has a sideline in selling bootlegged pilsner, gets spectacularly drunk, has sex with another woman, and hires some disreputable brothers to look after his farm.  It turns out that Villaseñor is also in the liquor business, which leads to a dramatic showdown.

The drama between the Skala brothers and the bootlegged liquor intrigue is gripping and intense.  Machart’s period details are precise and evocative, and his prose is rich.  The horse race scenes are especially vivid and lovely.  Machart also gets the beer, polka, and kolache enjoyment of the Czechs right. 

What seemed off to me was his depiction of Czech women, who are all portrayed as cowering in the wake of their husbands’ relentless neglect and abuse.  As this is fiction, Machart has the right to describe them any way he wants, but based on my personal, admittedly biased experience, the female characters didn’t ring true.  I’ve known many Czech-American women of the era Machart is writing about because they lived well into their nineties.  These were almost uniformly formidable, devout Catholic women, who ruled over their broods of nine to twelve children with absolute authority, and they bossed their husbands nearly as much as they bossed their sons, to such an extent that I always thought of the Czech area of eastern Nebraska as a matriarchal society. 

The community Marchart depicts couldn’t be more patriarchal.  Karel treats Sophie with callous disregard until he learns that she’s given birth to a son.  Machart describes another woman raped by her husband only a few days after she delivers twins.  Almost all of the Czech women that Machart depicts are the meek victims of men who were “eroded of kindness by the slow, interminable friction of their unrealized desires.” Maybe things were just different in Texas.

Machart is an excellent prose stylist and he’s come up with an involving, dramatic plot for The Wake of Forgiveness.  Hopefully his depictions of women will develop over the many future books he’s sure to write.

Bruce Machart will discuss The Wake of Forgiveness at the King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City on November 11 at 7 p.m.

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