Coal Black Horse

by Robert Olmstead

  The easterly roads turned swampy for some miles while to the northwest lay a range of blue mountains and these he kept to his left and fading behind him as he traveled in the direction of the the rising sun, the direction of the ocean. He rode on, and after the mud-tailed pony played out he left it tied in darkness, entered a banked barn, and stole his first horse, a copper-bottomed mare he quietly led away. After that it became easy enough to do and he felt the need to change mounts at every opportunity, and so by necessity he became an accomplished horse thief, exchanging the copper-bottomed mare for a big cream horse and then for a broad-shouldered, parrot-mouthed chestnut, and then for a sturdy bay with failing eyesight when the chestnut spavined.

  Each day his wound dried and knit shut and knotted with building scar that tugged at his scalp, and overly sensitive to light his eyelid would slowly close on him if he let it.

  Wounded and face-hideous riding the backs of common horses, he was afforded an easy passage through the places where people lived, a world of boys, old men, and women. They offered him food and water and so miserable he must have looked that if they recognized the horse he rode, they said nothing, so he took their food and asked after the armies and while news was inconsistent, the coal black horse was remembered more than once for its beauty and for the unlikely little woman with the cob pipe that rode its back.

  It was in these wounded days the beginning of the man he would grow to be. He bore his pain and endured his wound as if a sign he too had been blooded by the madness that’d taken ahold of the land. He no longer shied from people, from the lone riders, from the reenslaved herded South. He no longer feared their presence on the roads and his conversion was believable to him. He had lived and did not die. He was breathing. Still, it was only the beginning and he was not old enough to know these changes, did not even know enough to think this way yet.

  The land had taken on a haunted feel since meeting the goose lady. What had been new and beautiful was now old and strange, wrong and unfamiliar. In one town he sat on a low stone wall and watched boys his own age wearing fresh white linen shirts with hard, starched collars take copperhead snakes from a picnic basket and nail them by their tails to a barn wall. The barn wall had been painted with a black skull over a set of crossed bones. When the boy with the hammer and nails, a boy a head taller than the rest, gave the command each boy let go the copperhead he held by the neck, and yelling and hooting they all ran away.

  The snakes swarmed across the face of the door, twining and dangling themselves about each other, dropping their bodies and lifting again. They opened their mouths and bared their fangs. They bit each other thinking to find the source of their pain. The boys laughed and slapped their thighs. Then they began to stone the snakes from safe distance.

  An old man with tufts of gray hair springing from his skull, investigating the thumping noise, came to the corner of the barn. In one hand he carried a galvanized bucket and in the other a gutta-percha walking stick. He shook at the boys with his walking stick, castigating them for their grotesque play. They laughed at him and turned their stones on his person. The old man ducked his old head and stumbled in his escape, slopping his trouser leg with spilt whitewash that lipped from the rim of the bucket.

  He righted himself and hobbled away, coming in Robey’s direction where he sat beside him on the rumbled stone wall. Without introduction and as some people are wont to do, especially the old and foolish, he took up with a left-off and ongoing conversation. He told Robey his old wife had recently died and he was now sad in his heart and considered a lunatic by many in town and had nerve storms because he was alone and because he and his wife, he said, wanted to die together.

  “Her eyes were always the brightest,” he said.

  The old man still possessed his teeth, remarkable for one so elderly, but they seemed to protrude straight from his gums and closed in a beak that his thin lips rode. He paused to sneeze and when he opened the palm of his hand mucus webbed his fingers.

  “Those boys are quite exceptional in their stupidity,” he remarked, but Robey continued to make no response: no word, no nod, no shrug of his shoulders. Where they sat the stone was warm with captured sun and not uncomfortable. He did not mind the old man, and after a time in his presence the old man seemed calm and less agitated.

  “Their time is coming soon enough,” the old man added, his words swashing in his beaked mouth, but still Robey made no response. He thought, Let the old man talk himself out.

  But the old man persevered in his one-sided conversation, prattling on and occasionally pausing to ask Robey if he was listening. He took Robey for a young soldier and so talked about having fought in Spain with Napoleon when he was in his youth. He claimed to have eaten dead horses to stay alive and one time to have actually eaten the forearm of a dead man. He told how he found it very sweet and for that reason had to swear it off because he feared he would get a taste for human flesh.

  “More was not enough,” he said, and then he speculated on the hell he would surely go to after his death for eating human beings, as well as for other unnamed transgressions, and at this thought he laughed.

  From the barn door continued the hollow resounding of the thrown stones. From the inside came squeals of pigs and the fierce rustling of their bodies. One by one the snakes dropped their heads and their broken angular bodies hung limp. The boys carried on with pitching their stones, breaking the snakes’ bodies, until the cut bloodless pieces fell away and gathered on a bed of chaffy earth.

  “Are you listening to me?” the old man demanded.

  Robey took a deep breath to say he was.

  “You have also done bad things,” the old man said. “Bad men can talk to each other. Bad men can understand the other. For thousands of years we have understood this, but that doesn’t change anything.”

  “No,” Robey said, regretful at having spoken even as he spoke. “I haven’t,” he continued, and he knew the sound of his voice betrayed his words.

  “Maybe not yet,” the old man said. “But you will. You are experiencing one of life’s great lessons. Specifically which one, you do not know, but in time you will know.”

  IN ANOTHER TOWN was a baseball game and he had never seen such before so he stopped to watch. When he became noticed he moved on again, content with only the witless beeves and skulking dogs and mild cows watching his slow passage.

  He continued to think about what else the old man had said to him. The old man told how he was now worthless and no good to anyone anymore because he was filled with despair, and despair was useless in times such as these. He told him to remain angry, because anger was more useful than despair and would deliver him. But to despair would surely lead to failure and tragedy.

  They were the words of an insane, but he could not escape them. They were committed to his mind and once learned he could not unlearn them. It was fate, he thought. Then he thought how people loved to talk so very much and even had a weakness to talk. He himself had done so and it made him laugh at how foolish his gliding mind. The bay shortened and tossed its head at his sudden outburst. He quieted the animal and let his hand to the long-barreled pistol he wore in his belt. It was an odd piece of indeterminate make and had been a gift from the maundering old man.

  He traveled on, following the rumors of great armies encamped to the east on opposite banks of a river, but in the days that came his long slow ride through the landscape of war became so like chasing the wind that when one night a cold wind swept the open land, he took refuge in the scorched shell of a burned house.

  The bay tethered, he entered cautiously, as if testing the floorboards. Outside its stone walls was a constant moaning of the soft wind streaming through the trees. He had at first mistaken the pump in the yard to be the black silhouette of a figure, and even after he knew his mistake he kept looking to the yard to assure himself it was not, kept looking to the trees where the bay was tethered.

  He lit a tallow candle inside a box lantern of punched tin and cautiou
sly passed from one room to another and upon determining that he was alone in the house, he built a tiny fire in the hearth and it soon lit the room with a warm glow. He reclined on the hardwood floor and with the fire’s coax the aches of the day began to melt from his limbs. There was a burned stairway to the second floor and from the fire-gutted ceiling hung a beautiful chandelier, its pendants like carved diamonds.

  At first he had thought it a spangle of stars in the night sky and then he understood it was the stars through the room’s charred ceiling and the shaped and fitted glass that gave to him such a sparkling sight. He could only think that someone had hung the glass after the burning for how its icicles were clear and untouched and cast prisms of light from the fire.

  The wind outside died away and ceased its quiet moaning in the trees. The sound had existed beneath sound and he’d forgotten it until now it was disappeared. In the new silence came a ticktock sound, ticktock. He searched the room to find its source and then was a clean and unlikely striking sound and a tiny door unlatched and he found the source just as the cuckoo shot forth.

  Someone had wound the clock and hung the chandelier, and however pitiful the gestures, they were trying to return to a time that he was afraid they would never see again. It was a time on earth he realized that he himself had never witnessed because of his seclusion on the mountain, but was seeing it now in its havoc and devastation. What was life like before all this? What did people do and what did they think about before they warred and thought about war? He tried to remember what he did before he left the mountain and what he thought about in his seclusion. He recalled chores and quiet and solitude. He knew there was more than that, but he could not remember and he knew it had not been so far back in time. He tried hard to recall who he had been and what he was back then then, but however much he longed to he could find nothing to remember.

  He banked his small fire with the kindling he’d gathered, the wood spurting blue and red flame, and the room took on more light and he found other moments of longing and desire. There was a wooden inlaid box filled with shiny stones. There were other boxes, tin and copper and lacquered, and woods he did not recognize and could not name. Inside their shells were coins and buttons, ribbons, marbles, pins, tiny bones, a doll’s leg.

  There was a mildewed bench with a hinged seat and while the inside was empty, its interior smelled of wool and lavender and contained a porcelain-faced doll wearing a blue felt hat and long hair made of straw-colored yarn. A leg had been torn away from the torso, but when he polished the dirty face with his sleeve it shown in the firelight as if newly made. In the silence, the burning wood made hissing and cracking noises and there was a sudden flicker of shadow in the air as vesper bats took flight and filled the chamber with their silent wing beats, black on black, spearing the air and fleeing the lighted room through the empty doors and windows.

  He set a pot of coffee to boil and fried the last of his bacon in a tin pan. He made a thin dough of water and salted cornmeal and set that to bake in the open fire on the blade of a broken hoe. He thought how he’d boil his coffee and scumble his biscuit into it. That would taste fine and feel good in his mouth and warm his throat down into his belly. His hunger grew and as the food heated he fixed his gaze on the porcelain-faced doll he’d propped at the fireside. Absentmindedly, he rubbed his scalp where the healing skin felt as if pulled by tiny paws. He fit the doll’s leg to her hip and it matched.

  He wanted to feel the hatred that possessed him when he dragged himself off the ground that was drenched with his blood. He wanted the anger the old man told him he must have to survive. He wanted it lodged inside him like an iron spike, but tonight it wasn’t there. Tonight he was too tired to hate and hoped in the morning when he was rested he would hate again.

  “What do you have to say?” he asked the porcelain-faced doll, and when there was no reply he whispered the word “nothing.”

  When the coffee was boiled he poured half a cup into the drippings and could not wait, but was so hungry he burned his fingers and mouth. He slid the cake off the hoe into the gravy and ate the slurry with his fingers. He scraped the sides and the rapidly cooling bottom of the pan with the backs of his fingers and licked them clean and wiped at his mouth and then licked the back of his hand and then it was over. He knew enough to know he’d eaten like a ravenous dog and how disapproving his mother would be if she had witnessed such and how nice it would be to someday again not eat like that.

  “Soon,” he sighed, and sat close by the fire, exhausted for how voracious his hunger had made him and still amazed at how quickly the food had disappeared. He knew he should climb the stairs to sleep, or crawl under the floor, or go outside and sleep with the horse. He could not help but mistrust the dead calm stillness of this night’s windless turn.

  But his belly was full and he was tired and wanted to sleep and for so long now he had been vigilant. He closed his eyes and bars of fire darted across his eyelids. Sleep came and overwhelmed him as if a slowly crushing weight, though he fought it the best he could. Its strong hand brought ache and defeat and then relief, and when he knew he could not hold it off any longer he finally collapsed beneath it.

  When he lurched forward he saw the fire in the hearth had died and gone to the an orange glow of mere embers. The porcelain-faced doll was slumped beside the fire as if she too had been asleep. He righted her and as he stood to stretch his aching body, he concentrated on the faint sound that had awakened him. A muscle in his stomach began to flutter. Then he heard the sound coming from outside the stone walls. It was a man goading an ox, and then came the scrape of a travois on the hard ground and then a woman’s voice, thin and plaintive, complaining how difficult her situation. He kicked at the fire and stamped out the sparks. He gathered his kit as quickly as he could and as they were almost in the yard, he could do no other than climb the charred stringers and escape to the second floor.

  6

  AT THE TOP of the stairwell, the roof was open to the sky and the weakened and ravaged second floor was cast in the shadows of the stone-built gable walls. Up there the night was not so dark under the sky, and from where he stood in the gable shadows he could see an ambling gaunted ox approaching the house. There was a man and a girl attendant. They were walking beside the ox, and riding on the jouncing travois was a woman. She was large and rode as if in repose, but when the ox stopped she slowly climbed erect and clasping her hands under her belly she lifted its weight as if she were lifting herself. The girl hastened to help the woman stand and the woman thanked her. The man told them this was the place from where he smelled the fire and the bacon and the coffee cooking. He made a show of sniffing the air and then a scraping cough from depths of his chest expanse doubled him over. The man was otherwise robust and wore a born thickness in his wrists and neck and shoulders. He was built wide and drumlike and conducted himself with raptorlike self-regard.

  “You get a fire started,” he said to the girl, pushing her in the direction of the doorway. The girl stumbled and cursed him over her shoulder as she went inside and then the man led the woman inside, and through the fire-ravaged second floor he could watch the progress of their spectral shapes passing underneath him, moving from place to place as if they were blown by a steady wind.

  The girl found embers in the fire he’d left and momentarily looked about but made no mention of them to the man and woman. She stirred the embers to red life with an iron rod. She fed the fire with one of the small wooden boxes and in the first light that held her he could not see her face because it was flanked by her hair, but when she drew her hair together and draped it to one side he could see how thin and hollow her young face.

  “I fear we’ve reached bedrock,” the woman moaned. She held her arms stretched out before her as if discovering her next place in the air while she moved in the direction of the fire’s warmth. Her hands found her way and she eased herself onto her knees on the bare wooden floor, touched the floor with her hands, and settled on her hip.

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p; “Get the parfleches,” the man said to the girl.

  He spoke to her harshly and she responded in kind, as if an old enmity festered between them. The man fished in a gunny-sack until he found a green bottle, which he held between himself and the firelight to measure its content. He then uncorked the bottle and took a drink. In the light of the fire he could be seen for his sparse white hair, his powerful neck, his white mutton chops and all black livery. Some minor affliction was tormenting his leg as he kept scratching and cuffing at it. After a second drink he gave a final cough and seemed content.

  “Get them yourself,” the girl said, not moving from the fire she was kindling to life.

  “If I have to get them you’re going to get it good,” he told her.

  “They empty,” the girl said, and the woman groaned, clutching at her swollen sides.

  “Don’t sass me,” the man said, crossing the room to strike the girl a fierce blow that knocked her down when she stood to meet him. Robey flinched, watching.

  “It’s her time,” the girl said, as she cowered on the floor.

  “It ain’t her time,” the man said, taking another drink. “It ain’t her time until I say it’s her time.”

  Robey’s body pressed more tightly to the stone wall of the standing gable as he watched them move underneath him. He let his hand to the grips of the pistol he carried in his belt, its long barrel extending past his hip. The wood of the grips was smooth and the chambers were recently primed. He would not be shot again. That knowledge was as deep in his bones as a knowing could possibly be.