Coal Black Horse

by Robert Olmstead

  “And did you?” she said.

  “Did I what?”

  “Find your father.”

  She had begun to cry and her tears were strangely wet and glistening as they streaked her dirty face. But she did not raise her hands to wipe them away. She stood in the black dress with the drum on her hip as if she were the one struck with accusation.

  “Don’t cry,” he said, wanting to console her, but his attempt only made her the more angry and he felt as if anything he might say she would think was lame and stupid.

  “It ain’t me crying,” she said. “It’s my eyes.”

  “My pap is under this dying tree,” he whispered, and pointed where the coal black horse stood watching them, making its long shadow in the light of the morning sun.

  “What’s your name,” she said.

  “Robey.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes,” he nodded.

  “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “You have not been broken yet, but you will be and when it happens you will know what it was like for me. What he did to me a animal wouldn’t do to another animal.”

  He wanted to tell her he’d been shot in the head and so had his father. He wanted to tell her he’d already been broken and he lived, but he knew his father would not be so fortunate. It was a thought he’d not yet allowed himself to have and felt something structured that he had depended upon fall apart inside him and it made his eyes burn.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Rachel,” she said. “Like in the Genesis.”

  “How old are you,” he said.

  “Fifteen.”

  “People should be born twice,” he said.

  “I’d rather not be born a’tall,” she said bitterly.

  “How could he do that,” he asked foolishly, and a look crossed her face as if he were the incredible questioner and he prepared himself for another tongue-lashing, but her anger was too great for her to sustain. Her body wavered and he wanted to suggest she sit in the shade and rest, but his mind was made too awkward by her presence and he could not cobble his thoughts into words that made half sense to him.

  “He thinks he’s above ever’one else,” she said. They were words she’d had a long time to think about and decide upon in her struggle to understand. “He talks about turning over a new leaf, but he’ll never change, not one bit. He carries snakes in his pocket and throws them at people. He claims he can’t be killed.”

  Speaking the words had the effect of sending her back inside herself. He wasn’t there anymore. It was just her and these words she was fashioning to express the thoughts of her mind that could not explain or escape the memory of what had happened to her.

  “Ever’one can be kilt,” he said, and he waited for her to say more, but the girl named Rachel was now lost and confused, and however immediate and profound her surroundings she did not seem to know where she was. She lifted a hand and let the palm of it open, and that was the best she could do. He waited as she slowly made her return, looked at him, and sighed.

  “We are lodged in that cow barn,” she said, and then, “You can see the roof over yonder.” She pointed across the hull of the battlefield and he could see the cornice of a roof, its dull surface flaring with muted sunlight.

  She told him she wanted him to know.

  She then stared in his direction, not focusing on anything, but weighing a thought in her mind. There was a long silence between them that neither felt the urge to break.

  Then she told him she was tired and she needed to rest and turned and walked away.

  THIS DAY BROUGHT MORE of the scavengers and more of the relatives and citizens and now there were the tourists arriving by train to be added to their numbers. The air was bone dry and the heat of that July day was relentless beneath a high blinding sun, and soon after their arrival they became a vomiting lot, fainting and puking on the ground beside the dead.

  He walked among them with a shovel over one shoulder and canteen straps slung over the other, the hollow sound of the knocking canteens reminding him of his day’s obligations. He wore the revolver tucked in the back of his trousers hidden behind his coattail and a knife in his new boots. He watched them as they went down on all fours like dogs and heaved their guts until their insides were empty and there was nothing more to heave. Then he’d move on, finding it increasingly difficult to extend sympathy or pity.

  One old gentleman he encountered, wearing a sombrero hat and a short sleeveless cloak, was sitting on a large tricycle inside a circle of the dead and unburied and for no reason he stopped.

  “Are you looking for anyone in particular, sir?” he asked.

  “Thank God no,” the old man said, “but please give to me a shovel and I will help you with this terrible work for it is awful and shameful. There is no one here to cover these poor boys with even leaves.”

  “They’s grave diggers working,” he assured the old man. “They’ll be along shortly.”

  “The very birds would do that much for them if I did nothing and left them lying here so.”

  He felt no patience for the distress this old man was experiencing, so he gave him the shovel and walked on, securing another not far away. He too had been innocent. He too had believed.

  Today as he walked, there was a second landmark that kept him oriented. The first had been the comb of trees where his father lay dying at the feet of the horse and now there was the cow barn where the girl named Rachel was lodged, the cornice of its roof, its dull surface. He thought of her there, still with the man and the woman. He trusted they would meet again, trusted their lives had crossed for reasons he did not yet understand. The thought seemed natural to him. He would see her again because he’d seen her before.

  As the heat persisted, finding water to drink for the coal black horse and the men in the field of the dying had become a chore. When it rained the first night he had been able to collect rain water in gum blankets, but it had not rained in a while. He knew of a well where the owner had removed the crank handle to those who would use it except for those willing to pay a high fee and that morning he had worked up his resolve to shoot the man if he would not give up the handle to his well. So hot was the weather. So thirsty were the dying men.

  By the time he arrived to do the deed, a provost marshal was there and had taken the handle from the well’s owner. He was spinning it in his hand as he threatened him with arrest. However, if he should choose, he could file a claim and the federal government would pay him for use of his water. The provost then returned the handle to the well and posted an armed guard while the owner went to file the necessary papers for reimbursement. Robey was first to fill his canteens at the well and returned to his father who had not spoken since the night before.

  “ALL ABOUT US,” he said to his father with wonder, “there are niggers burying the officers.”

  “They followed them into battle,” his father said.

  “They cry a good bit. Some are old and some are young, but they all seem to cry a good bit.”

  Robey tipped the canteen and water ran into his father’s open mouth until he choked and it blew from his eyes and nose. His body was stiffened with an arrested fit of coughing and then he composed himself. He daubed at the beads of wetness on his father’s face and neck and emerging from the corner of his eye and then let him drink again.

  “Which ones cry the most,” his father asked.

  “I would say it were about even.”

  “When someone dies that you love it is a very hard thing. They were like brothers to those men who died to keep them in bondage. Who can figure out such a kinship?”

  “I asked of one fellow, ‘Where are you going, walking in that direction?’ I reckoned the direction he was going to be south when he could have just as easily have walked north.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told me he had to go back home to where he lived. I asked him why and he said, ‘I have to tell them what
has happened here. I have to tell his momma.’ So I gave him some bread I had and he told me his name were Moses. He seemed like a good enough fellow.”

  “He was a slave.”

  “He said he were slave of a captain, mortally wounded and not yet twenty-two year old. He buried him under an apple tree over there. He told me after the war he would come back and get him. ‘Why would you do that?’ I asked him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said to me his momma will want me to.”

  “You have never seen such gruesome sights and you so young,” his father said, and made a rattling cough.

  He took his father’s hand in his own and held it tightly to steady him and could still feel the strength in his father’s returning grasp. He didn’t tell his father what he’d seen on the road, the sight of the shackled slaves rounded up and herded south like cattle, the slave hunters in their garish dress, their plumes and cold-blooded horses, their hooves scuttling like crabs in the dust, the coiled whips lashed to their saddles.

  “I helped some fellows today and they gave me a handful of coins.”

  “What for?”

  “Over in the place with the big rocks. They were taking picture-photos of the dead and asked if I would help them and so I did.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I helped carry them where they wanted them to be for their picture-photos to be taken.”

  “It was good of you to help,” his father said, but was so tired he knew their conversation was ending for now.

  “I caught sight of those scavengers again. They’ll surely come to no good if they keep going.”

  “You stay clear of them,” his father warned, and the strength of his grasp made him know how strong he felt his imperative and he returned the grasp, strength for strength. They held like that until his father’s grasp weakened and released.

  Then his father said his name and then said to him, “Do you think you can make that kind of decision?”

  His words were as if a veil had been lifted on the moment. Their lives were in balance and asking and considering this question they were stepping back from fear and hopelessness and emerging into prospect. They were a teaching father and a learning son, timeless in their existence, the father born into the son as is the grandfather and the father before him and all the way back to the first. The father’s life is foreclosed and the son’s life is continuing and as always, only the unknown privileging one state of being over the other.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I feel like I have to do something.”

  “You’ve got to ration it out in your mind,” his father said. “I will not be there to help you.”

  “Yes sir,” he said. He then gently rolled his father onto his side and he added more letters from the dead at Gettysburg to thicken his father’s mattress.

  13

  WHILE HIS FATHER SLEPT, he could not help but be drawn to where he anticipated the scavengers’ next foray among the dead and dying soldiers. It was a place he knew well with a curious array of round boulders wedged beneath a ridge with a stream falling from a saddle and passing through to course the orchard fields. It was the place where he helped the photographer position the bodies and set their rifles to their shoulders as if just shot.

  He slipped away and it was this deep rocky place he went to, far distant from the town where the hospitals had been sited. The ground there was gullied and barren, and the fitted boulders seemed tumbled into place and seated in the earth at improbable angles. Some were strewn and others were cropping from the earth and others of the boulders could not be understood for how they came to be there. For days the stream had run red through that place and still it was not clean, but brown and murky.

  The ground there was too difficult for burial, too distant from the hospital tents, and besides, the dead in that place were from the South and so they still lay out on the field of battle where they’d fallen. The few yet living were gathered on a scattering of straw under a canopy and were tended by kind women and their children who came out from the town during the light of day and went back home in the evening before dark.

  With all stealth he moved on to this place and stood high over it in the shadow of a boulder. He could not sort the scavengers from the boulders and the black trees. White vapors that rose from the earth drifted the land in slow tatters.

  He moved slowly, ten paces at a time, and then waited and listened. He moved forward again and listened and then heard a high faint wailing cry he at first mistook for a night bird, but it was not. He glimpsed a light and went down flat in that dense place on the duff of the forest floor. As he did, another light that came from behind him swept the ground where he’d stood and pointed into a ravine before descending. He watched the light dodging in accordance with the gait of a running man who carried it and remembered the lay of terrain as it was momentarily sketched in light before it went to dark again in the trees.

  The moving light went down into the deep ravine and converged with a second light.

  “What the hell,” an angry voice panted.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “The bullet-hit son of a bitch bit me in the hand.”

  “Well, whack him. One good rap to the back of his head and he’ll be dead as a doornail.”

  There was a pause and then he could hear the dull thud and crack of a flat object striking what he took to be head bone. He slowly crawled into the place where they were and suddenly he was on the periphery of the intersecting lights that came from the scavengers’ heads and pooled on a fallen officer crumpled at their feet.

  “Did you kill him?” the one said.

  “How the hell do I know?” the other one said, holding a hatchet in one hand and nursing the side of his other hand.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I tol’ you the son of a bitch bit me.”

  “Get it done, god damn it,” the one side. “We have got to get out of here.”

  “I will do as I damn well please.”

  The one leaned over and poked at the officer laying at his feet. He hooked his fingers in the officer’s nostrils and drew back his head until his mouth gaped open and filled with the yellow light that came from the head lamp. He then let go and the officer closed and groaned.

  “Well,” the one said, “I shall be very happy if you’d please get that gold plate out of his mouth.”

  The other one took the hatchet to the mouth of the officer for the sake of the gold plate it contained and to which a set of false teeth was attached. He raised it over his head and then it flashed down through the yellow light. With a single chop, he sliced through the side walls of the officer’s mouth, separating the mandible from the maxilla and leaving the officer’s mouth a gaping and bloody maw.

  “He’s a rascal, that one.”

  “I’d like to see him bite someone now,” the one said.

  “He will not bite again,” the other said. He then reached down and drew a straight razor under the officer’s mangled jaw and cut his throat. His razor hand dallied in the sully of gurgling blood and when it came to light it held the dripping gold plate.

  He followed the two scavengers that night as they continued their bloody work and continued to follow them as they took what they’d stolen back to a redbrick house a half mile from the battlefield. It was no bigger than a one-room cottage, built of stone and roofed with tin. The doors and windows were missing. and the north side collapsed into rubble.

  From outside the small house, they entered into a small shallow cellar, no more than four feet high, and from under the floor came a light and he could soon hear the wheeze of a bellows. He did not think to leave off. He did not ponder his father’s question, could he make that kind of decision? He had no choice, but thoughts such as these never entered his mind. It was as if what he was doing had already been decided for him and to not question them was part of that decision.

  The dim yellow light built beneath the floor and began to
glow from the cracks in the foundation. He found an opening where the sill had rotted and closed in on it, crawling to the light on hands and knees. When he lay flat on his belly he could see into the cellar and he could see them and when he did, a nameless emotion passed through him. It was the mere wisp of a feeling and he was galvanized by it.

  They sat cross-legged on a dirt floor, a light between them, as men have for thousands of years, but this light was a small forge and it heated a crucible and into the crucible they were feeding, one by one, the gold teeth and the wedding bands and the gold plate just taken from the mouth of the murdered officer. One after another they emptied their pockets of the gold tokens, sentiments, declarations, intentions, and cures they’d scavenged.

  “I don’t like killing,” the one said, working the hand bellows. “But what else can you do?”

  “It is done,” the other said. “In the morning we will follow the army when it moves south. I’ve had my fill of this place. The smell of it could bend nails.”

  Robey studied them for a long time through the foundation wall and he was not appalled but intrigued by their methods. Behind him a horse snorted, and startled, he rolled away and reached for his revolver. Back in the trees was hobbled a long-legged roan and a second horse stood beside it, a white-faced chestnut tearing at leaves.

  Down below, the men were not concerned as they’d not heard the anxious horse. They unstoppered a liquor bottle and passed it back and forth and smoked cigars, and when the metal was molten the one took up iron tongs and lifted the tiny crucible while the other pushed a sandbox forward, its insides just big enough to hold a deck of playing cards. The one with the tongs poured off the liquid metal and it formed a rectangular light more lustrous than the sun, more lustrous than any light he’d ever seen before.

  The two continued their drinking and smoking their cigars while the yellow light cooled, but his mind never seemed to lose the memory of how brilliantly it glowed. With their bloody hands, they flicked at the dirt on their trousers, inspected their buttons, and straightened their lapels. He concluded their work was done for this evening.