Coal Black Horse

by Robert Olmstead

  “No,” he said.

  “I were in the army for a time,” the little man said wistfully. “I spent my days in the mud marching through wet corn-fields. I was trod on and ridden over by every big-mouthed son of a bitch who had a horse. I’ll be hanged if I know anything more about the matter than that.” Then he paused and said, “I couldn’t wait to get back home.”

  The little man was funny to him and he began to take pity on him for how lost in the world a man so little as him must be when all other men were so big.

  “Food?” the little man said.

  “Lately I been kind of off it,” Robey said.

  “Hungry then, ain’t ya’.”

  “I been feelin’ like a walking belly,” he said.

  “You afoot?”

  He told him he wasn’t and asked that he should wait while he forded the river to retrieve his horse and kit. The little man agreed to this and Robey slogged through the water to make the far bank. The horse was waiting where he’d left it but was contrary this morning and had little intention of crossing. He patiently saddled the animal and slung his haversack over the pommel. He jammed a pistol in his belt and then coaxed the horse to the riverbank, but again it shied when at the water’s edge and kicked that it should not get wet. He stopped to stroke the animal’s eyes and soft muzzle.

  “Can you handle it?” the little man yelled across through his cupped hands.

  He spoke to the horse how they’d feed and water and get on their way, and only with the utmost of patience was he able to convince the horse across the river.

  “Boy, I like the looks of that horse,” the little man said when they came up from the river.

  “He’s a good horse,” Robey said.

  “I had me a good saddle horse I was riding,” the little man said. But by then he was back in the branches and was striking a path in the woods with the white geese waddling along behind him.

  Robey followed the little man and the geese to his house where the window glass was broken and from inside there were more geese stretching their long necks and staring out from the jagged openings. Or they tottled on the wide veranda, curious and birdy about events they found significant, yet were invisible to the human eye. The little man told him to stay put and not to move while he fetched them food to eat, and he was to refrain from using the well as the well house was charred over from fire and still stank of wet smoke and its water was rancid.

  The little man disappeared inside the house and it wasn’t long before he came out carrying an immense platter heaped with half-warmed sauerkraut, fried onions, salt pork, and cold beef. In his other hand he held a coffeepot. He squatted in the yard as he set the platter on the ground between them and after taking up a handful of kraut and a slab of beef, he urged Robey that he should also take some food and eat. He was so hungry he did not pause to reach into the plate after the little man.

  They ate in silence, gorging their food and grunting the way dogs do. For Robey it was because he was so hungry, but for the little man it seemed to be the way he knew how to eat. Between mouthfuls the little man began telling Robey the long story of how he’d just come home from the war on furlough, the hounds of hell on his ass all the way, only to find that raiders and renegades had been at his house. When he told of their destructiveness his swarming eyelids quivered and his hooded eyes blanked with hatred.

  “There is no sign of my family and I can only hope they are safe,” he said. But there was no hope in his voice, his affect flat and melancholy.

  “You’re going to look for them,” Robey said, sympathetic to the little man’s plight.

  “Why yes I am,” he said. “Thank you.”

  The little man patted his full belly and belched and insisted Robey do the same and when he did the little man thought that hilarious. He slapped his thighs and insisted they do it again. Then they reclined in the grass and while rolling a cigarette, the little man told Robey that war had its other sides too.

  “In war,” he said, “the best bad things are often obtainable,” and then he offered him the coffeepot, but when Robey thumbed the hinged lid it smelled of whiskey inside and he declined.

  “Oh, go ahead,” the little man said. “Have you a little shot in the neck. It won’t hurt you none. They’s a twenty-gallon demijohn settin’ right inside the door.”

  The little man took a long gulping drink as if to prove how abundant the amount of whiskey.

  Robey thought how the little man must have had a rough go of it, being little and all and then to come home and find what he’d worked for wrecked and vandalized and his family missing and maybe dead. But now he was wary for the changes in the little man. Within short time of his whiskey-drinking, something had come over him, or had risen up from inside him. Either way he was being overtaken and it was coming on fast.

  He told the little man whiskey was nothing he’d ever drunk before and at the moment it just didn’t interest him, but he was grateful for the food and thought he should consider being on his way.

  The little man laughed, as if satisfied with the logic of his answer, but it was an ill-tempered laugh. He continued to drink and then he tried again to interest Robey in joining him, but he declined.

  “But it ain’t no fun drinking alone,” the little man said, as if an appeal remembered, one made to him by another somewhere in his past.

  “No,” Robey said again. “I don’t want any whiskey, thank you.”

  “But it’s good whiskey. It slows time,” the little man said, his voice sweet and wheedling. He told him it made all your cares a will-o’-the-wisp. He drank off another full draft and then another until he was swirling his finger inside the empty pot to catch the dregs.

  “It’s time I was going,” Robey said again and he felt a flush of anger for how foolish he’d been and a sudden unreasoned fear came over him. He was now ensnared by the little man and he’d allowed it to happen.

  “Before you go, sell me that horse,” the little man suggested, licking his fingers. “So’s I can ride it to search for my family.”

  “It ain’t mine to sell,” Robey said, fighting to quell the apprehension in his voice. He knew he could no longer be timid, no longer hesitant and compliant. He didn’t know who this man was, but he knew this man’s mind was set and he would never give up the idea of possessing the horse.

  “You stole it,” the man said, and when he suddenly stood Robey pulled himself from the ground to also stand.

  “It was lent me,” he said.

  “You love that horse, don’t ya’?”

  Robey did not reply. His hand went to his waist where the butt of his pistol hung in his belt.

  “What every horse lover don’t understand is that every horse is someday gonna die,” the little man said. Inside his swirling complexion his eyes had reddened. His voice was shrill as a child’s.

  “There is other horses in the world, I’ll grant you that,” Robey said.

  “Sell it to me and tell your man it were killed.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “I say nobody lets out a horse like that.”

  “Mister Morphew let me that horse. I have a paper to prove it.” His face burned at the charge, that his honesty should be questioned and that he should stoop to defend himself. He also knew it made no difference to the little man that he should have such a paper to prove his word.

  “I could kill that horse,” the little man said, and drew the revolver he wore in his belt and aimed at the coal black horse. Robey knew it was true and he knew the only witness would be the wind and the trees. “Give to me that horse or I will blow the top of its head off.”

  Later, he remembered feeling a numbing shock to his skull and remembered singling out the shot that fired from the gun and then seeing in the rail of his vision the little man holding the gun. He knew he shook his head in disbelief when the revolver turned on him and at the same time knew his own hand held a revolver and that he fired his weapon into the dirt at his feet and then his brain conv
ulsed. His mind split open and without there being a sense of light, there was an eclipse of light and then there was only a throbbing blackness and then there was only blackness.

  When he finally came to consciousness it was in night’s darkness and the sky was lit with stars. He did not fully understand what had happened to him but understood there was nothing he could do. Days may have passed, but he could not tell because he had no idea of time. Neither did he have an idea of place — the sky above, the earth below. His head felt broken and seemed lifted from his shoulders and detached from his neck and yet it was the source of a great pain that held his entire body in an iron grasp.

  The bullet had cut a groove in his scalp and his head still bled profusely. His blood was everywhere, soaking his head and neck and shoulders and still leaking from his body, leeching into the ground.

  My blood is on the other side of my skin, he dumbly thought.

  He was dizzy and had no control over his stomach. In frightening moments his gut heaved and threatened to overtake his life with its launching. Then it did. The heaving motion would not relent and his body shook with paroxysms involuntary. The bouts came without regularity but were still chained with one inciting the next. When his stomach had emptied, the violent attacks continued until finally his stomach was played out and his muscles too exhausted. In the meantime he’d torn away his linen shirt and knotted it around his wounded head as best he could.

  “It’s the best I can do,” he gasped, appealing to no one but desperately pleading none the less.

  A sickness passed through him and then dizziness. Jittery, he lay back in case he should fall. He wanted to curl up in innocence, but knew he never would again. He settled into the cool ground and the world stopped turning and he waited to slip from consciousness once again.

  It was in daylight when he finally stood and climbed the porch and crossed the threshold through the broken door. Geese followed him, scrutinizing his every movement, as if he were the oddity entering their house and for reasons they neither trusted nor understood.

  Inside, the house was in a shambles, the work of the little man. Fragments of utensils, boots, torn paper, and candle molds were strewn about as if disgorged from the open doors of the cabinets and hanging drawers by a furious wind that had been bottled up inside them until they exploded. A stove stood in the middle of the two rooms so to heat both the big kitchen and the front parlor. On the wall was a tear-off calendar.

  In the parlor there was a fireplace with a heavy oak mantel. Inside the redbrick fire chamber were the burned remains of a spitted goose. The carpet fluttered with down and was stained with geese droppings, and scattered about were shards of broken dishes and blue crockery. Each step he took raised a white floating in the air, enough down to make a bed mattress. The geese looked at what he looked at and poked their heads in the direction of his face and looked him in the eye as if an explanation would be forthcoming.

  As he climbed the stairs he let his fingers drift over the embossed wallpaper. At the upstairs landing his vision blurred and a wave of pain sawed through his head and sat him down to rest. He looked below to see the geese gathering at the foot of the stairs. He closed his eyes and opened them and they cleared for the time. He pulled himself erect and continued on to the hallway.

  In the bedroom, at the head of the stairs, was a corded bedstead with turned bulbous posts and a deep featherbed resting atop a thick straw tick. An overstuffed wardrobe stood in one corner. Its doors hung on broken hinges and its dresses, similar in pattern to the little man’s disguise, bloomed in the door’s opening. The bureau drawers had been dragged from their slots and their contents strewn on the floor. There were so many things in the room. There were more shoes and clothes than he imagined a whole family could own all by itself.

  A woman’s straw hat was lying on the bed, and a lace handkerchief and a scattered collection of briar and cob pipes and a wild-turkey-wing fan. On the other side of the bed he found the woman who owned the dresses. She sat on the floor propped with her back against the wall. She’d been stabbed in the neck, the bone-handled knife left in the wound, and her swollen intestines filled her lap and spilled over her splayed legs. Her scalp had been cut and ripped away from her head. He felt no shock at what he saw. He felt no horror for what had happened. He was reminded of his own wound and tore a supply of clean garment material to wrap his head in the days to come.

  In another room he found a variety of mechanical toys. There were painted cast-metal rabbits that beat tin drums, birds with keys beneath their wings, and when the key was turned and let go their wings beat and they sang tinny songs. There was a monkey who clacked brass cymbals, toy soldiers in flared red coats and blue pantaloons who played cornets, tiny clocks that chimed, and music boxes that’d fit in the palm of your hand. There were two tiny unmade beds against the wall that still held the shape of the small bodies that used to sleep in them.

  Outside the air was pure when he staggered into it and he could not breathe enough of it into his lungs. In the barn he found a little mud-tailed pony that was fat and unworked. He found a pail of axle grease and slathered a handful into the wrapping that held his wound. He studied the charred remains of the well house and thought to pull an armful of flowers and drop them inside its column. He knew to do this without ever having done it before. He thought to go back into the house and maybe let toys to fall into its stony black maw. He wondered why he would be moved in this way after all that he’d seen. What was it inside him that would ask him to pause and consider these gestures on behalf of this dead family? He did not know this woman or her children. He did not know whose people they were or if they had been good people or bad people. Surely the children had been good people and the woman had been a good woman, but what were they to him? If the lead ball had been better aimed, he’d be like them. He’d be dead too.

  He took time to eat that morning. He killed a goose and pawed open its chest skin. Then he cut away a breast and this he spit-roasted in the fireplace while the other geese watched. He found mustard pickles and a crock of salt pork. He found caps and bullets of the necessary caliber, but he had no gun.

  As he ate, he did not wonder on all that had happened thus far, but rather, he wondered how he should think about it. He knew what was in the well and he knew how close he’d come to being there himself. He’d been very stupid and it was a condition he now pledged to avoid. He remembered old Morphew telling him he was in for an education and how he hoped he’d live long enough to tell about it.

  He decided he would live without actually deciding it. He just knew he would. Something inside him told him so. He could feel a distance inside his head. He was in pain and his mother always said that pain was weakness leaving the body. He would eat his meal and then he would continue to search for the army and if he should find the little man and the coal black horse he knew what he would do, but once he had, he’d not apologize to the horse. This he swore. He’d not apologize to the horse no matter how right the horse had been in mistrusting the little man.

  When he was done eating, he caught onto the mane of the mud-tailed pony, the children’s horse, threw a leg over its back and swung upright. The pony shied and almost sat down for how spoiled it was, but his hands and legs and the words he spoke told the pony it did not belong to itself anymore. It belonged to him. He sat the pony, letting it build its strength beneath his weight. He wanted with all his heart to be past this moment and into the next when he would be healed and would be wiser than he was before. He was learning his lessons and he was still alive and he thought that was worth something.

  “Walk,” he said to the pony. “Walk on.”

  However unworked and lazy the pony was, the instant he dug his heels, the pony understood it was to obey and stepped off and then broke into a jarring trot.

  In a sack he carried a jar of molasses, dried peaches, a haunch of venison, and handfuls of black walnuts. He had coffee beans and cornmeal. Behind each of his legs hung a goose by its neck. He st
arted north, following the hoof prints of the coal black horse.

  5

  HOT AND DRY, the locusts were sawing the air and the roads were powdery and thick to breathe. He traveled all that day and then slept and woke at sunrise and traveled on again through a thinly settled country. So miserable was the sight of him, his head wrapped in a blood-crusted rag, he determined there was no need he should avoid people.

  There were towns he passed through where people came out to watch his passing as if he were an army unto himself and there were other towns where his passing went wholly unnoticed for sakes of commerce or play or worship or conversation. Children older than he stood at the roadside and stared at his passing, and gaunt and pellicle dogs silently trailed him in the dust, lunging the sweltering air. The mud-tailed pony proved to be a sly and insolent animal by nature and sulked and like a spoiled brat exhibited displays of bad temper. It kicked at him when he gave it a chance and attempted to savage his knee with its teeth as he rode, but he remained patient and determined to persuade from it with his heels whatever miles he possibly could.

  His head throbbed with pain in the dry heat. The pain wavered through him, consuming his head and neck and shoulders, but he knew he was slowly healing. It was only common sense to him the way the pain made flash upon flash in his body and then peaked and lingered and in some days’ time it began to dull and diminish. He discovered hidden beneath his experience of pain an unconfused state where his mind fixed on his mother’s counsel and his father’s existence and he found new clarity. He admonished himself for breaking every word of advice she’d given him. Except to have followed her imperatives to the letter would have left him afoot not a mile from old Morphew’s mercantile. He determined that he would learn from the lessons taught him thus far and by gift of chance he was still alive and from now on he would be a fast and dedicated learner.

  The land was beginning to crop with limestone and a darkening green and increasingly there were wells of cold water and burbling springs where he could drink and rinse his body. In the next days he stopped often to wash the wound, fix a new compress, and tie a clean bandage. His chest and back ached as they carried his head pain and each time he removed the wrappings he winced at how strange the sensation as he tore away scab and dried blood from his mending scalp.