Coal Black Horse

by Robert Olmstead

  He was still a boy and held the boy’s fascination for how light penetrates darkness, how water freezes and ice melts, how life could be not at all and all at once. How some things last for years without ever existing. He thought if the world was truly round he always stood in the center. He thought, Spring is turning into summer and I am riding south to meet it. He thought how his father was a traveling man and ever since he was a child he too dreamt of traveling most of all and now he was and he felt a sense of the impending.

  He let float in the dark air his free hand and then raised it up and reached to the sky where his fingers enfolded a flickering red star. The star was warm in his hand and beat with the pulse of a frog or a songbird held in your palm. He caressed the star and let it ride in his palm and then he carried the star to his mouth where it tasted like sugar before he swallowed it.

  2

  THAT MORNING OF HIS leaving there was no sunrise. There was no reddening in the eastern sky but rather a lessening of darkness from black to gray by degree. The dark hours played with the trilling calls and countercalls of wood frogs on the edges of ponds. A flock of blackbirds bound north traced the night sky with their arrowed wings. The ledges leaked thin runnels of trickling icy water. From somewhere deep in the sanctuary of the laurels a vigilant stag was belling the herd.

  Those close-walled hollows were deep and cold and sepulchral. Their towering bore in and seemed poised to close. The switchbacks were wet and their path of stones was smooth and slippery, and more than once the cobby horse slid and each time she did he tightened his legs on her stout barrel affording her what small surety he could. But frightened, she would halt and leg-stiff refuse to take another step. He sat her patiently and spoke softly into her flicking ears and after a while she would snort and begin to move.

  The path continued its falling for mile upon mile into the green of the rising springtime. He let his feet slip from the stirrups and he lay back until his head was over her croup. He could not imagine coming down this road in darkness and spring runoff, but tonight that’s what he was doing.

  To reach the bridge that morning was as if to return from a long journey that began beyond the rim of the world. Memory of his mother and the home place traveled with him in only the vaguest sense and his sudden concern was that if he crossed the bridge he would cease to remember them altogether. He turned in his saddle and looked back to the place where he’d come from. He angered over the distance, the fastness and the resistance of the home place. How could a night be so long? How could a few miles suddenly be so far? How could a place be so singular and so selfish as to deny itself to your mind once you have left it?

  His eyes were wet and for reasons he could not name his chest throbbed. He wiped at his stinging eyes and cursed out in the darkness, but he did not know what he was cursing. Just a boy’s last curse when he’s told he has to do something. Even if the boy secretly wants to do that something, by nature he will curse the redirection of his will. Where before he had possessed time, now time was no longer his. He was being sent into the world and him now fourteen years old and so ignorant of its ways.

  When he crossed the bridge the land opened and spread and lay flat as if a length of ribbon unfurled on a cobbled lane. On the densing air was the smell of leaf mold and opening buds. The sound of running water filled his ears and then receded and then increased again as he approached the junction of waters where the Twelve Mile doglegged and plunged into the turbulence of the Canaan. He continued southeasterly to the roar of the spring runoff and the boulders knocking in their chambered course.

  He’d not slept or eaten the whole of that night and his body was weak and qualmish. The land continued its widening and already the cobby horse was becoming too tired for the journey ahead. She blew heavy and shivered. The stones in her path were drenched with dew and her bare feet struck with increased concussion. Then she stumbled and stopped altogether and would not go forward. She snorted and tossed her head, slinging froth from her bit chain into the air. He kicked his heels into her flanks and slapped her rump, but she was unyielding. She cocked her head and flicked her ears forward and then back where they stayed.

  Then he heard what she was listening to — the pinging sound a hammer makes on an anvil. Ahead was the little timbering village where old Morphew’s mercantile stood on the way to the Greenbrier. He let her stand and shake out a repetition of long shivers that rippled her hide and once she settled he dismounted. He stroked her soft cheek and blew air into her wide waffling nostrils until she tossed her boxy head.

  Her mouth was worn raw and bleeding where she’d worried the bit through the night. He told her she was surely in a state and he understood why because he was in one too, but it was going to be all right. He leaned into her left shoulder and when she gave him her weight, he folded her leg up. Her foot was heated and tender and the frog bleeding where it was penetrated by a sliver of shale in the shape of an arrowhead. With his folding knife he removed the stone sliver and she was relieved, but the damage was done. He set her foot down and with a coaxing of words, he was able to lead her forward.

  Now he heard the squealing eeek of the wooden frame that held the suspended bellows, the rattle of chain as the leathers expanded and collapsed, wheezing spurts of pumping air. The ground of the forge was strewn with plowshares and coulters. Beneath the worktable was a comb of grass and on top was a clutter of hammers, chisels, and punches.

  The smith hovered over the fire, intent on the blue-straw color crawling up the metal from the depths of the forge. Then he turned at the shoulders and quenched it in a banging hiss of steam. The smith, a bent and hunchbacked German, had forged the iron hook that hung in their chimney. He pointed their turning plow. He made his mother’s knitting needles.

  One end of Old Morphew’s porch was clasped in the branches of a lilac bush and backset; on the other end was a long lean-to stable and gray smoke purled from a smokehouse chimney. A boy, not much younger than himself, was walking across the porch floor on his hands, the unhitched galluses of his denim overalls clicking across the boards. An upside-down pocket was sewn into his pant’s leg and stems of black licorice sprang from it.

  The hiss of quenching heat blunted the air as the smith again plunged the working end of his pliers into the slack tub. The boy walking on his hands stepped aside for Robey as he mounted the porch and then followed him inside. In the air was the rank sweetness of molasses and coffee, cured bacons and ham.

  Old Morphew looked up from his ledger book as the door slapped shut but made no gesture of greeting. He was so much older than Robey remembered since last he had seen him, his chest now gaunt and his body cadaverous. His stertorous breathing came husky and tubercular. They held each other’s gaze.

  “Mister Morphew,” he said, and in the spoken name of the man was his question to the man: Do you remember me? Do you know who I am?

  Morphew let go his grasp of the plank table and made up his pipe with tobacco. For the pain of bursitis in his shoulder he lifted his arm over his head and stretched it out and then let it back down. Inside the mercantile the smith’s pinging hammer was only a pitched ticktack sound.

  “Get’cha some crackers and set down in that cane-bottom, soft-back chair,” Morphew said. He pointed to the cracker barrel with his pipe stem and then took a tin can and drew molasses from a black spigot bunged into a cask. Beneath the cask the wooden floor was puddled with a wide black stain where the spigot leaked.

  He took the offered can and dipped a cracker. He was hungry and his stomach had begun to gnaw. He ate another, but the gnaw would not be satisfied. While he ate, Morphew studied him from behind his ledger, and when he caught his eye Robey told him what he knew and what he was sent to do and asked where he might go to find the best fighting.

  “I know that’s where my father will be,” he said.

  “I ain’t heard about Thomas Jackson dead,” old Morphew said, pulling on his chin. “Thomas Jackson being dead is hard to imagine. I don’t know if I can feat
ure that.”

  “Ma says he’s dead.”

  “Your mother would know such a thing. She has the gift,” Morphew said. “Though I will say one thing to that.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Prophesying the death of a man at war seems a safe-enough adventure.”

  Morphew nodded toward the cracker barrel that he should fill his fist again, then told him what he had heard of the fighting but warned the news was a week old and even if it wasn’t it was unreliable at best. He hooked his finger into the spigot and licked them clean.

  “Where would I go to find the army?”

  “Which army?”

  “How many are there?” he asked. He felt his growing tiredness in the warm sweet room. He’d not slept the entire night and understood the ache in his belly to be as much of weariness as hunger. He settled more deeply into the soft-back chair, feeling as if heavy weights had been hung from his limbs.

  “There’s a lot of them,” Morphew was saying. “Last I heard they were in the valley and then they were on the Rappahannock. There’s a pile of newspapers there by your feet. You could read up on it, but I wouldn’t trust ‘em. It’s news what’s all thirdhand and second best, if you ask me.”

  “My mother told me to travel south and east to the valley and then down the valley.”

  “Far be it for me to contradict your mother, but that won’t put you on the Rappahannock.”

  “Where’s the Rappahannock at?” He could hear himself speaking the words. The river made sense to him. His father told him to always defend a river on the far bank rather than the near bank and if the near bank was to be defended then do it behind it rather than at the water’s edge.

  “You go east,” Morphew said, and pointed in the direction of east with his pipe stem with such precision that Robey thought east must be a place just outside the wall of the mercantile. That’s not so far, he thought.

  “Ma told him she’d whip him and hate him forever if he went to war, but he went anyways.”

  “You can’t pound out of the bone what’s in the blood,” Morphew said.

  “He said it was in in my blood too.”

  “Yessir, he’s the travelinist man I ever knew.”

  “You know you orta whittle a new bung for that molasses cask,” Robey said after a lull in the conversation, but already his brain felt thick with tiredness and collapse.

  He did not know how long he slept in the soft-back chair. It was a short dreamless sleep that concluded as quickly as it had begun. He could hear the ticktack of the hammer and smell the sweetness. The boy was staring at him upside down, his legs bent at the knees and thrown behind him.

  Old Morphew was still at his ledger book holding himself erect on his stiff arms. Again he said Morphew’s name as if he had just arrived.

  “You ain’t running away to fight, are you?” Morphew said sternly.

  “No sir,” he said, and he was beset with an urgency to get on his way. It was clear to him he never should have stopped. So early in his journey and already he’d conspired to delay himself at the mercantile. It was not his prerogative to doubt his mother’s advice, was not his to question or confirm the recondite principles of her clairvoyance.

  “You wouldn’t lie to me?” Morphew demanded.

  “I don’t lie.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you do.” He pushed a pouch of smoking tobacco across his ledger. “Take this here for your father. He’ll want it sure enough, and this too,” he said, and pushed forward another pouch full of coffee beans. “He can settle up when he gets back.”

  “I will be leaving now,” Robey said, and stood. “I have a long ways to go and I am anxious to get back soon.”

  “Good luck,” Morphew told him and, stump-legged, followed him onto the porch, with the upside down boy tagging along. The sun had lifted from the horizon and held at a quarter in the sky — he’d slept that long. The cobby horse was lathered and woebegone, her head hanging on her neck. Parked beside the road was a work-sprained ox cart and the teamster carrying a bucket of water to the team. Roped inside the bed of the cart was a nailed coffin made of undressed white-bleached poplar.

  “Who you got there?” Morphew yelled out from under the porch roof.

  “Mister Skagg’s boy,” the teamster said, after he located the voice calling him.

  “He used to live around here,” Robey said.

  “Wal’, he don’t no more,” Morphew said.

  They watched the teamster deliver another bucket to the thirsty oxen. He wore a black felt hat, a bright red shirt, and trousers ragged at his ankles. His unlined skin was the color of coffee.

  “Where you bound from?” Morphew yelled.

  “We come up from Lynchburg. Mister Skagg’s boy died in hospital there and I am to bring him home.”

  “How’d he die?”

  The teamster dragged his felt hat from his head and held it to his breast. He rubbed at his head trying to figure an answer.

  “I just don’t know, sir. He was asleep when it happened and didn’t tell.”

  “Damned old fool,” Morphew muttered, and then turned his attention to Robey. “It looks to me like you got to the bottom of that horse. How you gonna get where you’re going on that ride?”

  “I’ll just have to walk when the time comes,” he said, experiencing an awful sinking of the heart. One look at the cobby horse and he knew that time had come indeed.

  “It’s a long ways from here and it looks to me like the time is closer than you think. Maybe I can fix you up.”

  He looked to the teamster and then to the smith down the road at his forge and gestured that Robey should follow him. Behind the mercantile in the lean-to stable, a horse could be heard thrumming through its nose and stamping the wall. Morphew entered the shadowed light of the lean-to and when he returned he was leading the horse forward. It was coal black, stood sixteen hands, and it was clear to see the animal suffered no lack of self-possession.

  “That is an oncommon horse,” Robey said, unable to help himself in his admiration.

  “He’s a warm blood,” Morphew said, “and I will tell you one thing. When he goes, he goes some bold.”

  “Who does he belong to?”

  “The man who rode him in here died in that cane-bottom soft-back chair not a week ago and I buried him in the cemetery. That’s to say the horse’s ownership is in limbo but in my possession, so you can say he’s mine right now.”

  “I have never seen a horse like that.”

  “The German says he’s a Hanovarian. He’s a fine horse, with an equable disposition, but I’ll warn you, he don’t much like other horses.”

  “Which side were he on?”

  “The man or the horse?”

  “It don’t much matter, does it?”

  “Not if you’re dead now, does it?”

  From the darkness of the stable’s interior, Morphew fetched a bridle, blanket, and saddle with holsters draping the pommel. He then fished into the black space where the rafters crossed the beam.

  “You know what these are?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What are they?”

  “Army Colts.”

  “Of course you do. They are .44 Army Colts. Do you know how to use them?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Show me how.”

  Robey cradled one of the the revolvers in his hands, hefting its weight and sighting along the length of its barrel. He deftly knocked out the pin and removed the cylinder and then looked to Morphew who produced a box of cartridges, percussion caps, and grease. Robey tore the covering from one of the cartridges and poured the powder into the chamber and then seated the bullet. After he loaded the cylinders he greased the head of each bullet. He then set a brass cap at the rear of each chamber. Then he repeated the process with the second revolver.

  “Take them,” Morphew said. “The horse and the pistols.”

  “I can’t do that,” he said. “Ma said I warn’t to ask for no help.”

 
Morphew thrust out his lower lip and scrutinized him before he spoke and when he finally did he began in anger and with impatience.

  “Talking like that tells me you ain’t got half sense to be out here doing what you’re doing.”

  Morphew’s breathing caught in his throat and he had to draw down into his lungs to find it again. His face reddened and his words became dull mutterings as water slid from his right eye. A pain passed through him taking the color from his cheeks. When he spoke again his throat was constricted and his words were as if winnowed in his throat channel.

  “I respect your mother. She is an uncommon woman among women, but you just can’t go boggling around the countryside. Things out there ain’t like they used to be.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You used to be able to trust people.”

  In old Morphew’s urgent composition were unspoken words: But I still trust you.

  “You saddle and bridle this horse and you meet me out front. I will write you a paper saying this horse is mine, which by rights it is, and that currently it is in your custody.”

  Morphew turned his back and stumped over the worn ground, making the short distance between the stable and the mercantile.

  He was alone with the horse and as he studied it, he understood the horse to be making decisions about him as well. He’d not known such a horse as this had ever been made and could not help but feel inferior to the animal. He was a young stallion and through his body he was deep and big set. His head was light in build and his eyes were large. His neck was long and fine and his tail set high, but his shoulders were built massive. His muscles were dense and ran strong and wide in the loin. His legs were short in the cannon bones but his joints supple, strong, and substantial. His hoofs were high in front, behind and below, and the frog carried well off the ground.