Coal Black Horse

by Robert Olmstead

  “I say we go to Harrisburg tonight and take the train back to Philadelphia,” the one said. “I say we got enough and we can’t be hogs about it.”

  “Why not?” the other said. “Hogs get fat.”

  “Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered.”

  “I stand corrected.”

  In the light of the cooling forge and the hardening metal, he could see the one to be a lynx-eyed man, the skin of his face scarred and pitted as if by fire or explosion. His ears were truncated and actually appeared to have been cropped. The other took up a hot glowing ember with the tongs, leaned into it, and lit another cigar.

  “They are backed up on the Potomac as we speak,” the other said.

  “Why are they there?” the one asked. “That ain’t very smart.”

  “The river is too high for them to cross,” the other said. He savored his cigar, rolling it in his fingertips, dipping the mouth end into the liquor bottle and sucking on it.

  “That could be the end?”

  “That is why we are not going to Philadelphia.”

  “I believe we should saddle the horses,” the one said, “and get out of here this very night.”

  “I believe,” the other said, “I will saddle the horses and I will be pointing them south. We aren’t done yet by a long shot. There will be another battle at the river and we are going to be there when it is over.”

  The other one then stood and brushed his hands over the seat of his pants. He made his way up the incline in a scramble of rubble and disappeared into the thicket where the horses were hobbled.

  Robey watched the one still sitting in the cellar, paring his nails with a penknife. He drew the revolver and cocked it, folding his body over the hammer to muffle the mechanical sound. He held it with the barrel straight up and could not recall how it was so very heavy to hold.

  He then worked his way along the side of the stone foundation to where he could see the other one saddling the horses and feeding bits into their mouths. One of the animals suddenly tossed its head in the air. The man stepped back and cursed it and when it had quieted he punched it in the side, causing it to squat and then tremble and tread on the ground where it stood.

  His work finished, the other man came back to the red-brick house. He spat in the dirt and took a step down into the cellar, ducking his head low. When his body filled the opening, closing off the light within, Robey stepped up beside him. He steadied the revolver on the bridge of his forearm, placed the tapered octagonal barrel at the man’s ear, and pulled the trigger. The lead bullet traveled in an instant through his brain behind his eyes and left the vault of his head out his opposite ear. He collapsed and tumbled forward with the gun’s explosion to sprawl across the legs of the one still sitting on the dirt floor.

  The light below ground went out with a flare as he stepped back from the opening and cocked the revolver again. Then there was a long silence and he could hear the hissing embers, could hear his own breathing. He and the one still alive both knew there was no way out of that cellar except through the opening he now covered.

  He waited, holding himself close to the stone of the foundation. If someone had heard the shot and came to investigate, he’d have time to slip away into the darkness, but it wasn’t likely. Shots in the night in those fields were not uncommon occurrences. Nightly, there would be the lone banshee wails of a crazed echoing across the fields, then a shot, whether accidental or intentional, self-inflicted or inflicted on another, and then there would be silence again. Then another shot without preface or consequence, the fields armed and that dangerous. War still not satisfied. War still lurking.

  “Who are you?” came the voice of the one from the black cellar. Acrid smoke from the smothered fire was beginning to wind in the air aboveground and mingle with the burned powder charge.

  “Nobody you know,” he said.

  There was another long silence. The smell of burned hair came to his nostrils. Soon enough he’d know if someone was riding out to investigate the shot, but he doubted it.

  “What do you want?” the one asked.

  “I don’t know yet. I just killed a man.”

  “You killed him all right.”

  “I was hoping to kill him,” he said. He felt no knocking in his body nor in his chest or head or legs. His arms had not weakened but felt stronger and his resolve fastened.

  “Well, that you did,” the one said.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “He couldn’t get deader.”

  “It weren’t hard to do.”

  “No. I’d say you have a regular talent.”

  He scanned the black line of the horizon for moving lights. He listened for the sound of horsemen. He could detect neither. Down below the ground there was only quiet.

  “What’s your name?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Tell me your name, friend. Everyone’s got a name.”

  “I don’t want your mouth on my name.”

  “You’ve got mustard, I’ll say that.”

  Again was the overwhelming silence. It held in the air as if the draping darkness was knit with yarns of glass.

  “Parley?”

  “What have you got?”

  “I got a sack of gold down here hid up in the wall. Silver too. Do you want it? It’s yours if you want it, friend.”

  “I hadn’t really thought in that direction.”

  “Anyone hear that shot, the provost will come.”

  “If he does, I don’t believe I will be the one they ketch.”

  “I have an idea.”

  “What?”

  “I will throw you up these sacks.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  The sacks came up out of the darkness and fell to the ground where he could see their black shapes in the moonlight. He moved to retrieve them and when he did the scavenger in the cellar shot. The bullet missed him wide and he returned to the wall with the heavy sacks.

  “Did I hit you?”

  “No.”

  “I had to try.”

  “I’spect that.”

  “I am sorry to’ve tried, but he was my brother.”

  “I didn’t mean to kill no one’s brother.”

  “Ah, he didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain.”

  “He was a very bad fellow.”

  “Oh, he was all right, but you know what?”

  “What?”

  “You just can’t polish a turd.” The scavenger had a laugh at his own joke and then he said, “What are we to do now?”

  “I think I am going to take your horses now and slip away from here.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “I don’t need your ’preciation.”

  “Then I will wait to come out if you do not mind.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Hey, boy. What if, say, that you just lay back there in the dark and shoot me when I come out?”

  “I did not think of that.”

  “Boy?”

  14

  WHEN HE RETURNED to his father’s dying side, the coal black horse was restless and scolding. He muzzled it with his hands and it tossed its head and streamed slobber in the air when it smelled the scavengers’ horses on him. He’d sold the roan and the chestnut to the man who owned the well. He woke him from his bed and told him it was best to send them upcountry for their health and the man understood and bought them without asking any questions.

  He gentled the coal black horse and then he lay down on the warm ground with his head on his father’s shoulder. He felt his father’s arm lift and and his fingers fumbling until he hooked them to his belt. He lay quietly with his arm across his father’s chest and his father’s arm holding him. He felt the rise and fall of his father’s breathing and he wished that sleep would overtake him and painlessly carry him from that place. He now knew that when he left, his father would remain.

  He wondered would he remember all that he was experiencing. Would he remember these offense
s he was committing, these days on the road, his search for his father. Memories as terrible and horrible as these would make it all the more important to forget them if he could, forget the names and faces, the land and the objects upon the land, forget everything he had learned of what there was to know about war.

  “Where have you been,” his father asked, without turning his head. He thought his father had found sleep, but he hadn’t.

  “To fetch a pony and cart,” he lied.

  His father gave off a cough that rattled from deep in his throat. There was an unmistakable smell to him and when he opened his eyes they were filled with vision and urgency and his breathing was elevated. Robey unwrapped himself from his holding arm and took his father into his arms.

  “You have to know, son. What happened here was not enmity or brutality.”

  “Yes sir,” he said. “I know. Rest now.”

  “This was not the raving mad. This was not for love or greed or ignorance. These are the well bred and the highly educated. This is humanity. This is mankind, son.”

  “Yes sir,” he said, but he wondered, what about himself. Would he be able to face up to what he had done? Had his own actions not arisen from pride and righteousness?

  “This is the nature of man and this is the world and if you are to live in it, you need to know what you have to do.”

  “Yes sir,” he said, and he thought, Let the past go. Let it go. He thought, Be the judge inside your own mind and not let anyone else do that work. Determine for yourself because either side will kill you and those without a side will kill you and the women and children will kill you — all the instruments of war — and he had killed and he knew he would kill again without pause or hesitation or even thinking he had to before he did. In his bones he felt his lessons and once learned they would never be forgotten. They were lessons that could never be talked away or thought away. They were lessons as old as the history of the sun.

  “You have to do what I think you did tonight,” his father said.

  “I know, sir.”

  “You know that I will not be leaving here when you go.”

  “I know.”

  “When you go, you are to travel south. Find Moxley and Yandell and Tom Allen and Little Sandy. They are with the battery on the Potomac, for the water will be too high to ford. They’ll take you in. They will teach you. They’ll take care of you. Tell them you are me. Say you are me.”

  “I am you,” he said.

  “It is so cold,” his father said, and these were the first words he’d spoken that conveyed his pain and despair. “I don’t believe I have ever been this cold before and I have been cold before.”

  He gathered his father into his arms and held him. His father’s head was a great putrid mess against his chest. He held on to him, and as he did he cared little for all that had happened and cared not at all for what might come in the hours and days yet to be. They were here and alive together no matter how short the time, no matter how fast the moment that was approaching, and when it arrived it would be less than an instant.

  He held his father through the night and his father, already weak and frail, lost ground as the night bore on, but he did not let go his hold on him, as if it were possible that his holding could stave off the certainty of death. His father shivered and his body was cool to the touch and dry about the face and eyes. His father whispered something and he asked him please say it again and leaned in to hear better his voice.

  “Where did you go tonight?” his father asked, his voice clear and strong again, as if recovery were a possibility.

  “To find a pony and a cart to take you home.”

  “That’s a good son, but I say I don’t think I’ll be leaving this field.”

  “I know.”

  “I think this is the last day of my life,” he said, and then he made the abrupt sound of laughter halted. “Your mother won’t like this one single bit. You’ll have to tell her the news because I won’t be able to.”

  He then clutched at his son’s sleeve as he was seized by a great paroxysm that ran through his body more than once before leaving him alone. His breathing rasped and stopped and then it started again and he sighed. A heavy dew had fallen and the wetted field that stretched out before them beneath the moon was so like a wide path of white jewels on blue velvet.

  “Oh,” his father said, as if he were quietly relieved of another piece of his mortality.

  He held his father’s head in his lap with an arm across his chest. His father clutched that arm and would not let go his grasp. He felt his father’s fingers curl and a strength transmitted.

  “I am very tired,” he said, and then another convulsion swept through his body, lifting him into the air as if a man fighting inside his dreams and then he was quiet again.

  “It is time,” he finally said.

  “No sir. I don’t think it is time yet.”

  “It is.”

  “No.”

  “It will be today.”

  “Not today, sir. Please.”

  “We will meet again in the old fields,” his father said in his shallow fast breathing.

  He knew his father’s time was at hand, for he was assuredly on the path of the dying. He now knew everything died sooner or later and knew life meant little. He knew everything that was had been before. He knew the lives of men were mere and fragile wisps regardless of action, declaration, and self-opinion. He knew the earth was angry and evil was as alive as any man or woman. He knew life meant little to him, but this was his father’s life.

  “I am passing myself into you,” his father said, “and you are already an old man.” And then he said, “I will be coming.”

  However strange the metamorphosis of the son receiving the father into himself and in turn the son becoming the father, it was substantial and whole and he could feel it inside himself. He could feel it fastening its hold as the words were spoken. Then it was over and he was no longer a boy because his father was dead.

  That night, when he cut a lock of his father’s hair, he felt strangely calm and the reason was because he’d experienced the horror that left one so. When the experience began, he could not say. Was it a week ago or a month ago? How long he would be haunted by shadowy sadness he did not know. He wondered who could explain a world where human words and human bonds and human thoughts had so profoundly failed. He had the feeling of an inexorable tide rising up inside him. His eyes had seen so much death so near to him. He had the feeling he’d been just a hollow, hungry, empty boy held on the mountain waiting and waiting until the call came, until it was his turn to become one of these failed humans. But in the cradle of the mountain he’d never felt hollow or hungry or empty. He did not understand it, but he knew he was no longer afraid of death. He knew he no longer felt the half of something but felt whole and finished in his making.

  15

  HE WATCHED AS THE MOON slid into the woods. His father’s grave lay beside him. In the last hours he’d wrapped his father in a gum blanket, folded its ends and bound them with twine. He then dug a deep grave, carried his father to its opening, and eased him inside, and around him he placed the sacks of gold and silver, the letters from the dead. He then returned the earth and replaced the sod and broadcast a scattering of twigs and branches that no one should ever find him until someday he might return and take him home.

  Done with his work, he saddled and bridled the coal back horse and gathered his kit. He calculated he had but a few hours before sunrise cracked the horizon with its red. There would be heated air and a dense fog that would not burn off until late morning. That was if this day was like the day before it and when it came to weather, he reckoned it usually was.

  He walked alone with the coal black horse across the open ground, its size and strength and equanimity becoming his own. He passed the ever-lengthening earthen mounds that had swept over the dead and swallowed them under. He remembered where the bodies lay, the thrown-over, the back-arched, the headless, the drowned, the sundered,
the men held tightly in each other’s arms. He did not care that war should be so terrible. He’d had no choice and still he had chosen it. In one hand he held the reins and in the other he carried the capped and loaded six-shot Remington. It was his hand. It was his arm. Should he meet anyone this morning, he knew what he would do.

  The cow barn was where she told him she would be. There was no stock, but there was oats and oat hay and straw, and implements were strewn about the ground. The walls had been shot through and at first the bullet holes were not apparent to him as in the darkness they were so like black knots in the rough pine boards. He picked his way through the rubbish and litter, scattered tools, milk cans, stools, buckets, harness, barrels, a dung cart, torn and broken and shattered, the hot sheen of a small dying campfire.

  He found the man. He was in one of the stalls sleeping the sleep of the dead. His body was gray and slumped and his mouth sagged open with great exhausts of air and the guttural noise of his breathing. His broad chest moved slowly up and down, lifting the blanket that covered him and the stems of straw he’d tossed over himself in finding his sleepful repose.

  He shook out an armful of feed for the horse and then a scoop of oats. The horse had become impatient and ready for flight. It had indulged him long enough. He promised soon and went back to the barn wall where he made his way along its splintered surface.

  In the next stall was the blind woman. Her size had increased evermore since last he’d seen her. She lay on her side, her vast belly in front of her and her arms and head and legs made small by how huge with her belly she had become. Her face was misshapen and bespoke a grave and internal malady. What did the blind see in their sleep, he wondered. He remembered feeling kindly toward the woman before and even after what he’d witnessed in the shell of the burned-out house so many weeks ago, but now she was just another being in the shape of a human. She meant nothing to him and he knew if he allowed himself she would mean less than nothing.

  He moved on and when the shadows shifted he could see her. She was in a last keyhole of moonlight that entered through a rent seam in the board wall. She lay under a blanket in a bed of straw in an empty stall. Her loose hair fell ragged across her bare arm. He patiently watched her sleep, waiting for her to awake and look in his direction.