Coal Black Horse

by Robert Olmstead

  Sensing a presence and still in sleep, she finally did stir and sat up and opened her eyes, the spears of moonlight cutting across her bare neck. She raised a hand that held a knife and slowly it turned with her wrist as if it were the knife turning her wrist and not her arm. She concentrated on the faint sensation that had awakened her. She knew something was outside the wall and close beside it in the darkness, and if it should come inside she would fight it to the death.

  He watched her stand, a thin sliver of a girl in a dingy shift. Her hair fell past her shoulders and she held her crossed arms to her chest as if cold, the effect of which was to make the knife seem as if its blade was not attached to a handle but was a blade protruding from her body. She stared at the wall he was looking through but did not seem to understand that someone was actually on the other side. She stood erect and pulled her blanket over her shoulders. She stepped into the alleyway and after looking at the sleepers in their stalls she went outside where he met her and she was not startled to see him there but rather was as if she expected him. She let the knife slip from her hand, stepped close to him, and when she leaned in to whisper he could feel her warm sleeping breath on his face.

  “You were watching me sleep,” she said.

  “Yes, I was.”

  “I felt you,” she said, her eyes moving over his face, searching out what was wrong, as surely she knew something was.

  “Me?”

  “Yes. I felt you. I have been waiting for you.”

  “You knew I would come?”

  “Why the long face?” she said, and then touched her fingers to her lips. Over his shoulder she could see the coal black horse and it was then she knew what it was that had brought him to her.

  “My face ain’t long,” he said.

  “I know why you came.”

  “Were you sleeping?” he said.

  “I wouldn’t call it sleep.”

  “My pap died,” he said.

  “I am sorry to hear of your loss,” she said, and then she held open the blanket for him to walk into and he did so, without hesitation, and she closed the blanket and her arms around his shoulders. He let his face to her neck, let himself be held inside the blanket, let his body rest against hers. She smelled stale with sleep and sweat and days without bath water. She told him that everything dies and then, in time, it comes back. He felt her breath warm on his neck. Over their heads was the last slow wheel of the stars. Morning was only a few hours away and he had the sense it was a first morning, the morning of a beginning.

  “He’s not in this world no more,” she said as if it were a relief and a blessing visited upon him.

  “No,” he said. “He ain’t.”

  “Are you leaving?” she said.

  In answer he nodded his head, his cheek to her neck.

  “Take me with you,” she said. “I have to leave too.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Her arms tightened around his shoulders and he responded by drawing her body more closely to his own. He was here and he was leaving and he would take her with him. She asked that he wait a moment and when she returned she told him the man was asleep drunk. She then found for him a sweet potato buried in the ashes of the campfire. The skin was blackened and crisp, but inside the flesh was orange and still hot and steamed when he broke it open. Overcome with hunger, he could not help himself as he wolfed it down.

  “Stay where you are,” she said, pointing at him with her finger as if to fix him to the spot where he stood. When she returned this time she carried whatever kit she owned in a carpetbag and a small tight bundle of clothes tucked under her arm. She set these on the ground and then she held out a pair of scissors. He took the scissors from her, and when he did she bent at the waist, collected her hair in her hands, and held it from her scalp, telling him he should cut it away from her head.

  The scissors were sharp. He cut through her hair and she threw it away and then prepared another skein for him to cut and he cut that one too. Then she stood and he worked his way around, cutting her hair until it was short and tight to her head. She ran her fingers through her scalp and told him it was good enough for now.

  Then, standing with her back to him, she let the blanket fall and shed the dingy shift from her shoulders. Underneath the shift she was naked and the white skin of her body was blue in the night. Her body was thin and lithe and built with narrow hips. The bones in her long back were well defined, her shoulders, her ribs, the sunken shapes of her hind end, and there was a space between her legs made by how thinned and stick-like they were and he thought how much better he’d fared with his foraging than she had. But she moved with strength and sureness and without a single wasted gesture.

  She wanted to leave as quickly as possible, she told him, and she intended to do just that.

  She unrolled the bundle at her feet and it was a pair of boy’s trousers wrapped around a linen shirt and a moleskin jacket. There was a wide leather belt and socks and shoes and a forage cap. Before she dressed in the clothes she turned to look at him, her hands on her hips. There was a boldness in her stance, her telling him to take his look if he was going to. It was as if she were challenging him with her body, as if she was asking unspoken questions: What will you do with me? How will you be?

  He answered her when he did not move and did not look away. He then looked away to the east where the sun would soon rise and then to the horse which pawed the ground and then back at her as if to say, time is wasting and hurry with yourself and we need to get down the road.

  When he turned his look a second time in her direction she was pulling the trousers onto her hips and cinching them with the belt. She was telling him she would from now on not be Rachel to him but a boy just like he was and if it came down to it she was his brother. She would be Ray. It’s what her mother used to call her. At least it’s what she remembered. Then the shirt and the jacket. With the prospect of escape and her decision made, she now could not move fast enough. She could not stop talking. She insisted that he understand how important this was and he told her he did. He told her he understood.

  She sat on the ground and dragged the socks and then the shoes onto her feet and it was when she was tying the laces there was a rustling inside the cow barn and a groan and the man came stumbling out. He was so desperate to relieve himself he did not see them until he’d unbuttoned himself and his piss was steaming on the ground.

  “Pay no attention to me,” he said, as if he found the moment amusing.

  He then finished his business and buttoned up after wagging himself dry. He approached the girl and when he reached to touch her clipped head she swatted at his hand and backed away from him.

  “What happened to your goldilocks?” he said, pretending a posture of meticulousness and refinement, his hand still raised. “You know you don’t sell for what you’re worth unless you look good.”

  Rachel seemed paralyzed by him, her words stolen from her mind, her determination vanished. He felt it himself, the honeyed voice and created gestures. The man’s size ran to proportion that was beyond his physical being. He asserted himself into the world, as if he should possess other human beings and they should willingly submit to him. Somewhere a cock began to crow and the light changed as if a first curtain had been drawn open on the day to come.

  “We have to go,” Robey said. He’d already drawn the Remington from his belt and the angle at which he held it, though not pointing at the man, declared his intention to use it.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “None of your damn business,” he said. He wanted to tell the man who he was and what he’d seen and what he’d endured and what he’d lost, but he had no reason to be known by him, to be known by anyone.

  “But you are going?” the man said to the girl, his voice demonstrating how incredible he thought the idea.

  “We’re going,” Robey told him.

  “I will come for her,” he said. “You know that.”

  “It’s a big country.”

/>   “It ain’t that big.”

  “No, I ‘spect it ain’t.”

  “Then take the horse,” the man said to her as if he were that generous.

  “I don’t want your god damn horse,” the girl spat out.

  “That isn’t Christian,” the man said.

  “You shut up your god damn mouth, you old blister.” She held her hands over her ears. She hated him. She did not want to hear what he had to say. “You sinned against my flesh,” she cried.

  “Rachel,” he said, her name in a voice sweet as the vine.

  “He wears a money belt of stol’d money,” she said, her eyes closed and her hands still clapped to the sides of her head. “Get it.”

  “Where is it?” Robey said.

  “Don’t be a dunce,” she told him. “It’s around his waist.”

  “I will find you,” the man said. “You know I will find you.”

  “Shut your hole,” she said, and this turned him mean as he understood his hold on her was breaking.

  “You will rue this day as long as you live,” he told her. “When I find you, you will regret you ever treated me this way.”

  “You did this to me,” she said, “and what did I do to deserve this. You are the one who’ll pay in hell.”

  The man suddenly went down on his knees in a stylish and practiced gesture. He closed his eyes and clasped his hands to his breast as if in prayer and his pursed lips began to pulse as if his silent prayer was so profound it required release. She paused in her anger for how dramatic an effect this had on her.

  “Please forgive me,” he said to her, and then he let his prayers be aloud and they came in a torrent, rote and passionately, about the sins of men and the frailties of human flesh.

  She told him to stop, to please stop and then to stop his jabbering, but his fervor increased as he struggled to reach dominion over her mind.

  “Don’t do that,” she cried, and kicked at him. “God damn you,” she screamed. “I hate you.”

  Robey stood witness to them in their opposite struggles, the crying girl who sought escape and the cruel praying man who had harmed her. He knew the scene had been played before in tents and sheds and under the bowers of trees. He could see the past, the power and belligerence of the man’s imprecations. He could see them wearing down the girl and turning her against herself and making her forget her own experience at his very hands and hostile to her own wishes.

  She stamped the ground and cried that he should shut his praying mouth and should kill himself to death for all he’d done in life. His words continued on, penetrating the air with their ferocity, and were so like falling wood and she screamed at him to stop, but he wouldn’t stop. A moan came from deep inside the barn. The woman had awakened in darkness and was calling out for someone to help her.

  “Make him stop,” she told Robey. “Put him through,” she said, and grabbed for the Remington he held, but he would not let her have it. He’d stood by and watched this man harm her and he had done nothing when he could have. It was not so much that he felt guilt for not acting that night in the firegutted house. He was different then and now he was changed. Then he was a boy, and he thought like a boy. He angered and hated, but he thought the world still had a chance. He thought they all had a chance. Perhaps somewhere inside him he knew his fate and that night in the fire-gutted house it was not time yet for him to leave his past and enter his future, but only the damned can see their future and know nothing of their present.

  No matter. He had already made his decision. What was another man like this man to him? The praying man wanted her forgiveness. It may have been true. But sometimes you have to revenge before you can forgive. Familiar to his ears was how loud and certain the mechanical sound at his thigh when he thumbed the hammer on the Remington. If the praying man heard the same sound, his voice did not betray him.

  He raised his hand to sight the barrel with the praying man’s forehead and was to pull the trigger when the girl dashed in between them. With both her hands, she raised a long-handled implement above her right shoulder. At its highest reach she did not stop but drove it down with all her might and as hard as she could, and in that instant the three thin tines of a pitchfork pierced into the praying man’s kneeling lap.

  They were like fangs the way they entered into him. They were a sharp curving blink that found no bone in their sharp passage. They stopped his praying and opened his eyes with burning pain. His lap was suddenly on fire. She jumped her weight at the handle and drove it again and it was this second effort that overcame the silence of shock and delivered to the heavens the screams of the well stabbed.

  He let down the hammer of the Remington, belted it, and pulled her away by her shaking shoulders. She fought him because she wanted to jump the fork a third time and send it deeper, even though deeper was not a possibility.

  So much killing and so much violence. So much malice and fraud. He saw them. He saw her. He saw the praying man and he saw himself. How to explain the way violence needs violence? Is that the explanation itself? Violence demands violence. This was not the pagan retribution: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. This was the law before there was law. This was vengeance and a rebellion to law. How to explain the failure to understand this and the failure to not understand there are things that cannot be understood?

  He knew in the end there were no answers. There was no illumination. The world was chance and was not revealed to us, but it revealed us to ourselves, our fragments of idea, our false memory. There was neither vision nor wisdom to be discovered. We only became more seeing and less ignorant. Sin could not be washed away and minds do not heal except for the guilty and the foolish. Our confessions become our weakness and our wisdom our vanity and both our harmful fantasies. He looked at the praying man and knew one thing: we have chosen ourselves to be the chosen.

  He thought his father’s words and then he thought about the girl as she struggled in his arms to reach the handle and drive it again. He feared she would not return from where she had just been. He had thought that maybe she had a different way of looking at the world whereas he had none that he knew of anymore and just maybe she was a way back for him, but now he did not know. He only knew he could not let her kill the man any more than she already had. As he held her, he held the moment of life in his hands, his own life.

  He looked to the praying man and he appeared to still be doing so. His hands were raised in supplication and his mouth gaped and tears streamed down his straining face. He fought movement for how consuming the pain that had discovered him, but his body could not endure the pain and wanted to reject its source and so the handle of the pitchfork quivered in the air as his body tried to tremble it out.

  Robey pulled the girl away from the man to the side of the coal black horse. He took her foot and placed it in the stirrup and then with both hands he heaved her into the saddle. He began to walk and the coal black horse followed him.

  THEY TRAVELED SOUTH on the coal black horse, leaving that place of the dead. He could feel her body slumped against his back, her arms clasped around his waist. When they were chased, she rapped on his head with her knuckles and he turned an ear to her speaking lips. She told him to ride into the fog, but the horse already knew to do so and was already disappearing inside a vast gray cloud come to earth.

  On that ride to the river, all time was present time. There was no past and there was no future. They were beginning in their flight and rode the coal black horse hard like a fleeing deer. They might this time leave the earth, he thought. They might ride through the sky. They might ride forever until it was all behind them, until it was over.

  What he remembered was the silence of that leaving and it was a very complete silence. He sensed that those men who offered blood and presented blood and threw blood were not ravaged by war, but for all the dirt and black powder and slick of blood they had been prepared by war, prepared for their irrevocable and irreversible deaths. The wounds were horrible enough, but only of a kind. T
hey had their faces or did not by increasing degree until there were men with no faces at all and in the end it was remarkable to him how little there was that can be done to a man once all that can be done has been done to him.

  He had experienced the horror that leaves you calm and unafraid, but for her something inside was broken and he did not know if it could be be mended. Her life, her horror, he could not tell.

  As they rode out of there and down that road, the pink and green dawn came and the sun when it rose looked to be a globe of red-hot iron. The air was still and heated, and as if that were not enough, women and children could be seen piling wood on dead horses and setting them afire. Their immense bodies lay on the ground, their elegant necks and finely shaped heads, the round spring of ribs. For miles were the collapsed and bulge-eyed beasts and in places the ground was blackened with their grease where someone had already burned one of them. He remembered also the sight of those two ladies sitting in their open doorway selling water and laughing as if nothing had happened and he thought what a strange world it had become and he could not understand it enough even to tell of it if someone had asked him.

  It was days afterward and miles south when the rain-washed air began to clear of its death smell and they were at the banks of the Potomac where they stole their way into the lines. On their heels, as if in pursuit of their own persons, the Federal Army had finally mustered and appeared in the fields and woods beyond the sentries.

  By then the field works were up and the engineers were completing a pontoon bridge to make the crossing. They were as if an ancient forlorn people gathered on the grim shore of an old river. He found Moxley and Yandell and Tom Allen. They were with the battery as his father had said they would be. He told them he was Robey Childs and they told how his father was good as gold and if anybody ever needed him he always came a-runnin’. He was the bravest man any of them ever knew.