Coal Black Horse

by Robert Olmstead

  He stepped forward and touched his hands to its long face. The coal black horse let his stroke to its cheek, neck, and muzzle. He then stroked its back and shoulders and worked his way down each leg, increasing the strength of his touch on the wide forearms and gaskins. He caught the horse’s eyes with his own and the horse seemed inclined to tolerate him, if not be actually fond of him. After working his hands firmly over the animal’s body, he bridled the coal black horse and set the blanket. He cinched the rig, and after telling the horse what he was going to do he caught the stirrup, swung up, and settled in the saddle. He then told the horse he was ready and the horse was willing.

  When he rode around front, old Morphew was sitting in a rocker he’d dragged onto the porch. The upside-down boy was playing his hands as close to the rockers as he could without pinching his fingers. Morphew had a gunnysack for him with cans of deviled ham, pork and beans, and condensed milk. He pulled himself erect and labored his body from the porch.

  “Don’t get cocky riding that horse,” he said as he adjusted the stirrup leathers. “A man rides a horse like that he begins to think he’s above every other man.”

  Old Morphew then stepped back from the horse’s side. Youthfulness twinkled inside him. He enjoyed the businessman’s satisfaction of a completed transaction well done. It was in seeing his pleasure that Robey determined the old man must have experienced a recent great terror inside his heart cage or the depths of his mind and only now, frightened and wounded, was returning to himself.

  “Rupert,” Morphew yelled over to the German, “how is it you’re not drunk today?”

  Without pausing in his work, the bent man thrust the middle finger of his right hand over his head. Morphew laughed at this — a mischievous little game they played.

  “Hunchbacks are often smarter than we are,” he said, as if it were a truth underappreciated.

  “Don’t that boy ever stand up?” Robey said.

  “No,” Morphew said, casting a glance at the boy walking on his hands. “As a matter of fact he don’t. He is an upside-down boy. Bet you’ve never heard or seen one of them.”

  “No sir. I don’t believe I have.”

  “Well, you are in for an education and I just hope you live long enough to tell about it.”

  “I will.”

  “That’s right. You find your father,” he said, waving him away, “and you bring him home and we’ll settle up.”

  With that, he rode off on the coal black horse with the heavy revolvers in the holsters at his thighs. As he disappeared from sight, Morphew noticed the German had wandered to his porch and was suddenly standing at his side. The German marveled on the beauty of the horse’s flowing movement, its grace in stride, and he commented with small wonder on the horse’s affinity for the boy.

  “It’s a horse that leaves quite an impression,” Morphew said.

  “It is the kind of horse that can get you killed.”

  “I thought about that.”

  “And what did you think when you thought about that?”

  “I thought a lot of things. I thought about his mother. I thought about how he’s his father’s son and he is a-goin’ either way he can. I thought how gettin’ in trouble ain’t hard, but gettin’ out of it is.”

  “I thought you’d think how where he’s going the horse might be smarter than him.”

  “I thought that too.”

  3

  It was beautiful to ride the back of the coal black horse and in those first days of journey they traveled constantly. The valley when he discovered it was luxuriant with grass and clover. The red-clay roads were wide and hard packed and the road cuts were dry and banked.

  As the days drew by they passed silently through fields, swamps, pastures and orchards. They rode through marsh where the water table was only a few spades deep, but the corduroyed lanes of passage were high set and well staked. They crossed acres of fresh turned earth, plowed straight and harrowed and sown with wheat, rye, and oats shooting the surface and knitting it green. They encountered walls of pine so thick it took days to skirt to find a throughway and when they did it was through a land of wind-thrown trees, or dead on the stump, the crooked and angled limbs bleached white with sun.

  In his urgency, sleep was Robey’s bane and he tried with all his might to stay awake days at a time, but finally he relented and learned to fall asleep on the back of the coal black horse as it seemed to share the same mind with him in the direction it maintained. From then on, when he grew tired, he merely pulled a blanket over his head and dropped his chin upon his rocking breast and slept and the horse would sleep too, walking on in its repose, covering a length of four miles every hour, its hooves invisible for the dust and gauze of heat, or veiled by lightning on the black path as the flashes directed their way in the electric, combusting, and starless night.

  Whole days and whole nights went by; how many he lost track of and could not tell. He’d not known there was so much country beyond the hollows and so flat and undulating and the deep-running streambeds, the dense thickets of wild rose, the sudden, vertical-walled mountains. Although with his own eyes he had seen the vast distances to be witnessed skimming across the mountaintops, he’d not seen so far inside the land, not seen such verdant meadows and lush pasturage and the great built houses he saw, ever in his life before.

  In moments he thought he’d have seen the ocean by now, or the majestic cities his father talked about. He thought he would have crossed shiny iron rails or entered the funnels of tree-lined boulevards terminating in the grand squares where government and business did their work. His father had told him of how broad and limitless the world, how close the woods, how endless the tidy green forest, how steep the climbs and sharp were the switchbacks’ rocky descents. Out west, his father had told him, nature’s work was as yet undone. The rivers still sought their beds and in their seeking they swelled to measureless proportions and were as if vast inland seas appearing and disappearing. The mountains were high and tumbled and rose to invisibility. There was desert land and canyon land. There were trees so wide at the stump they were impossible to chop down and in some places there were no trees at all as far as the eye could see. The weather was big beyond the Mississippi and angry and lasted for weeks. The cold was too cold, the hot was too hot, the water was too much or none at all. Nature was laid bare naked: sparkling sand, wind-scored stone, leeching mineral, hanging and split rock dividing the buffeting wind. Wetness sought dryness and the wind the tallest trees to strike down and the lightning the flattest land. Out west was the mine, the quarry, the nursery, the smithy of a maker.

  At first he collected what he could of food and weapons and there was plenty to be found and picked over. But then he stopped his hoarding and rode on with only a blanket, oilcloth, loaded pistols, a knife, and a canteen and managed to find a handful of parched corn, or buttermilk, ginger snaps, a sack of navy beans whenever he needed to satisfy his hunger and often there was to be found in the ruins of the army’s plumbeous-colored wagons such odd fare as sardines, pickled lobster, canned peaches, and coffee. He thought he’d starve before he’d steal, but that was before he was faced with starving.

  As the days went by, he began to attend the smells of frying bacon and stalk the cow paths spattered with fresh dung. When necessary, he filched field corn from the cribs or caught stray chickens, a cooling pie, a ham hung in a smokehouse, and when there was none of this to be found he ate berries, ramps, and wild garlic. He ate watercress and drank tea he boiled from acorns.

  He left the valley in an easterly direction and he crossed again where mountaintops were wreathed by terrible winds, where mountains were heaped on mountains whose cloud-capped summits seemed to call him and he thought someday he’d like to return to them and search through their aerie mists to stand on their peaks.

  There were also beautiful and isolate moments in his searching days. He followed deer paths into their notched parks where thirty or fifty head grazed like cattle. He saw pools of water whe
re there were so many fish they climbed on each others’ backs, sparkling in the sunlight, to tongue the hatch. Down lanes he traveled there were estates, brightly lit against the night’s darkness and untouched by war or the news of war. He saw tiny villages set in mountain glens, pretty farms and houses whose existence was pristine and without evidence of what was overcome to be so pure.

  One night in the twilight world of an early evening, he heard organ music playing in the trees and could smell the heavy scents of burst pine pollen. Somewhere there were people gathered and they were worshipping and their choral voices hymned in the darkness. His mother had beliefs, but his father was a freethinker and was fond of saying that with soap, baptism could be a good thing. He suspected that his beliefs fell somewhere in the middle between his mother and father. Curious as to the music’s source, he suggested the horse in its direction and anticipated arriving at its source, but it ebbed and then disappeared as mysteriously as it had occurred and he wondered, What could it have been?

  He continued on until he found wedged in a declivity of stone a standing horse that’d hung itself up a long time ago. It was made of white bones whose ribs grew moss and legs sustained runner vines and the bone of its skull was a garland of white-flowered creepers. The horse must have plunged through and broke itself and become trapped and could not escape, and now when the wind was right it sounded music in those bones.

  HIS FACE ALTERNATELY wind galled and sunburned and his limbs numb with cold and listless with heat, he had descended into the vast green northeasterly valley, crossed the upheaved blue mountains, and descended once again onto the piney plain, where the air quaked and trembled as it endured its own heated weight. His mother had told him to continue up the valley, but by all other accounts it was to the east where the army was to be found.

  By now he was joined as one with the horse. His thighs and legs were soaked with its lather, his clothes stained through with its sweat. So too his hands and where he rubbed his face and finger-combed his hair, and he could not imagine ever parting with the jewel of it. The horse held possession of both his waking and sleeping mind. He dreamt of the horse and in each sleep the horse multiplied until they became so many horses he could not keep count of them. The coal black horses were the first horses and the only horses ever to have been. They were not horses, but like something of the other — the man-eaters: the lion or wolf or bear, or man himself. Only they were more true, more noble of birth, more singular of purpose and intent. When they ran, they ran in a glorious periphery of whiteness that disappeared the earth beneath them and the air above the earth to the spring of their ribs. There were no legs on boy or horse. He was blank from the knees and the effect was that of riding light, as if light were spindrift and he was borne in its froth and was swept along on the horse he rode: the winged horse, the born horse, the horse out of the blood, the horse pulling the light of day across the sky.

  He thought to tell the horse of these events visiting his mind in dream, but could not bring himself to do so for how weak and lovesick they left him. Every time he tried he felt as if he would collapse to the ground. He thought if he were to tell he would lose what little there was left of him. To tell what he believed the horse already knew would be to lose himself forever in the horse.

  It was during this time that he resolved he would keep the horse and by whatever means possible he would pay Morphew the price of its purchase and he would find the heirs to the dead cavalryman who owned the horse before Morphew and he would pay again.

  HE RODE ON THROUGH the snarled forests of the flat land, rough and bluntly savage, and over sweeps of inexplicably burned and gouged terrain, and it was here one day when he came upon death.

  It was long before he arrived at the shattered and blown house, long before he even knew it existed that he was drawn in its direction. Perhaps it was the eerie silence in the place he sensed beyond the tree line. Perhaps it was the emptiness he felt in the atmosphere. He felt a falling-off inside himself and a telling in his mind that he was entering a place of grave dedication. Then there was a flush of vultures and on the shadowed ground movement into light, and a pack of dogs slunk by and with the dogs was carried the unmistakable smell. It was in their jaws and chests and soaked into their shamed faces.

  For no apparent reason, men had been killed here, their souls set astray and their bodies left piled like rotting cord wood in ditches and behind files of sharpened stakes. The men’s bones wore tatters of flesh and cloth and where they were piled it was difficult to tell how many men there were. He had no one to guide him through these ghostly regions of horrible event and him with so little understanding of how many people on the earth, in this moment it seemed as if half of them were dead and left unburied. Their smell was like a fresh poison possessing the wind to become the wind. Though he had never smelled the death of men before, he knew the smell as if it were a knowledge born into him.

  He dismounted for vague reasons of respect and together with the horse he walked across the battlefield to its border and into the dark woods. When he turned to mount the horse his foot sank into the ground and his ankle became trapped in the rib cage of a single man buried alone in a shallow washed-out grave. The man’s bones were chalky and withered and broken and one arm was raised to his gray skull as if in salute and his finger bones were clenched in the fist of a painful death. The man’s death must have occurred so long before the others. Had this clearing seen war before? Was this a place where war resided like a natural animal in wait?

  He did not know the answers to his questions and did not even care to think about them for very long. He simply knew with all these men dead he must be getting close. He thought with all these men dead fighting war, it must be that war was winning.

  AT NIGHT MOST PEOPLE went to bed, but not all. To be encountered on the roads was the sound of pounding hooves and to be avoided were bands of armed men on the backs of their hard-ridden horses. This was easily done, but not so easy to avoid were the lone riders slipping along silently in the dark. He met such riders on the road, men whose violence always seemed to be within them, violence that was convulsive and dangerous. They rode with their reins loose in one hand and with the other they held a carbine or a double-barreled shotgun, upright, with the butt resting on their thigh.

  When he could not avoid these encounters he slowed and half-raised an arm in the common gesture of lone riders meeting on back roads. Most often they were as wary as he was and wanted as little to do with him as he wanted with them. They had their own secret fears and reasons to avoid being seen on the roads. They were on their own private missions. But then seeing the coal black horse materialize from the shadows and grow upon approach, they’d swivel in the saddle for the better look and he could feel their eyes on his back.

  Then came one late evening when he was riding down a deep-cut bowered lane with a snake-rail fence running along both its sides. The air carried heavy and was too dense to carry much reach of surrounding sound. From ahead there came the profile of a dark rider in relief from a dogleg bending the road. The dark rider paused to consider them and then came on. He grew as he made his approach and when they passed on the lane the dark rider pulled rein and hailed him by a name that was not his own. Fooled by this trick of mistaken identity, he stopped in the road and turned, but the coal black horse did not want to stop and he quickly wised up to its misgiving when he heard the muffled sound made by the rider’s thumb drawing back the hammer on the shotgun he carried. His heels raked hard, but it was not necessary. The coal black horse was already driving into a sudden run. The horse broke fast and drove all out for the dogleg ahead and he held as tight as he could because the horse was making for it with a power he did not know it possessed.

  Bent to the horse’s neck, he clung hard so as not to be unhorsed and still had little hope for when they made the sharp corner. He feared for how fast the ground would rise because he knew he’d not be able to hold on when the horse set left and threw right to make its turn. But rat
her than drop its shoulder to make the turn, the horse continued to climb in stride and at the last instant made a great winging leap out of the cut and over the high snake-rail fence and into a wall of briars that grew on the other side. His body whipped in the saddle but he clenched up and held with the last he had. In that same moment the shotgun fired, and simultaneously a covey of quail went up in their wake. There was a raucous thrashing as the briars tore at them for some distance until they burst free onto brushy ground and then across a cutting, where they disappeared into a wood on the other side.

  But it was not this dangerous encounter that lingered in his mind. Rather, it was the poise and equanimity of the horse that he wondered on, its sense and knowledge of men. Afterward, there would be other episodes, but he did not need to wait to hear the hammer drawn back or to feel the spray of buckshot falling on his shoulders before they were dodging into the next bend in the road. It would happen again and again, but by then he was digging his heels into the horse’s sides and it was rising into the bit on big floating steps and they were disappeared.

  ANOTHER DAY PASSED and then another and he could feel the urgency of his mother’s imperative weighing on his mind and body. He could feel the responsibility of the promise he’d made her. He was to find his father and bring him back to his home where he lived. And he remembered she said he was not to dally along the way but to find his father as soon as he could and to find him by July. But why July? What did she know about July before it even happened? Or had it already happened? He wondered what month it was. Surely it was not yet July.