Coal Black Horse

by Robert Olmstead

  “There’ll be a black frost tonight,” the man said, and then surveying the empty room, he said, “I wonder where they went off to? They couldn’t have gone off for very long.”

  “They probably scared off when they heard us coming,” the girl said, her voice a bitter sulk. “There won’t be any frost,” she said, as if it was the most recent of crazy ideas.

  “Help me with these boots,” the man said, sitting on the bench. “Or I’ll lick you again.”

  The girl stood and approached him warily and then she was tugging at his boots and letting each of them drop to the floor. The man then paced the room in his stockinged feet, scratching at his leg again. He told the girl to get busy and gather up what would burn so at least they should not freeze to death on this cold spring night.

  “It ain’t gonna freeze,” she said as she found another of the boxes. This one she studied for a moment without opening it and then set it gently in the fire. She then found the cuckoo clock and this too she placed in the rising flames.

  “That there too,” the man said, indicating the bench with the hinged seat. “That’s wood. That’ll burn good.”

  The girl tipped the bench over and began kicking at it until its wooden pegs broke loose and it came apart at the joints. While she worked, the man stood in the center of the room drinking from the green bottle and to his own amusement began whistling poor imitations of night birds, the more complicated ones requiring him to pocket the bottle so to twine his fingers and cock his clasped hands. He waited, but he received no countercalls.

  Then, bored with that, he picked up a piece of lath and swatted at the chandelier, making a game of breaking its tiniest glass pendants. Then he stopped at the girl who knelt at the hearth feeding the broken bench into the fire. She stiffened as he lifted a lock of hair from her neck and whispered something into her ear.

  “You’re just a dirty dog,” she said, and swung around and hit him on the head with the iron rod she held. Stung so, he screamed and ran out of the house holding his head.

  “What happened,” the woman cried out, sweeping the air with her arms as if pushing the invisible. “What’s going on in here?”

  “It were just a dirty scoundrel dog,” the girl said with disgust. “Don’t be so nerve-raw all the time.”

  “A dog?” the woman cried. “What dog? How did a dog get in here? I don’t like dogs one bit.”

  From behind the stone of the gable wall, Robey could see the man in the yard where he skulked about in the darkness for a time. He wandered in the direction of the bay but stopped well short of its hiding place. He tried the pump and when the handle broke off in his hand he kicked at it and staggered.

  Below where he stood, the girl worked to make the blind woman comfortable near the warmth of the fire. The woman kept asking what of the dog, but the girl hushed her and would say no more about it.

  When the man returned, it was as if nothing had happened between him and the girl. He sat on the floor in the same place where Robey had fallen asleep and by primitive gesture appeared to sense there had been another presence resting in that same spot against the wall. But then he settled as the odd moment passed. From his pocket he produced a handful of hardtack and breaking off piece after piece he fed them silently into his mouth. The dry crumbs that flecked his black coat he plucked from the material and fastidiously licked from his fingertips.

  “If I had my choice,” he pronounced, “I would have goose and oysters and scrambled eggs and pecan pie.”

  “If,” the girl scoffed. “If frogs had wings they wouldn’t bump their asses every time they jumped.”

  The man cackled and slapped at his leg. Then he skimmed a piece of hardtack across the floor in the direction of the fire where the girl scrambled for it and held it to her chest.

  “What’s that?” the woman said, near hysterical, fanning the air close to the floor with her hands.

  “Nothing,” the girl said, sucking on the piece of hardtack so not to make noise.

  “Don’t you tell me nothing,” the woman said. “I am not stupid. I know there’s rats in here.”

  “We can spit-cook that chicken you got hid up,” the girl said to the man.

  “What chicken?”

  “The chicken what you got hid up.”

  “But it is my chicken,” the man said, philosophically.

  “I was the one that stol’d it,” the girl said.

  “I am so hungry,” the woman groaned. “Please cook the chicken.”

  “At least feed your woman,” the girl said.

  “Please,” the woman said again, and the man scratched his head as if it were a proposition that required deep thought. Eventually he must have decided because he opened his coat and took from inside the carcass of a chicken he wore strung on a rope around his neck.

  “Take the god damn chicken,” he said, throwing it to the girl.

  Robey watched as the girl plucked and gutted the chicken, setting its innards aside on the hearthstone. She then skewered the carcass with the iron rod and held it over the flames. As its skin heated and blistered, fats dropped into the flames where they hissed and flared. The man drew near to her and together they watched it cook.

  When the woman asked, the man took it upon himself to explain to her what was happening. She informed him that although she was blind, she could still hear and she could still smell. The man looked at her as if it was news to him while the girl snickered behind her hand.

  “What I’m asking is it done yet?”

  “Soon,” the man said.

  After they ate the chicken, the room became a pleasant scene as their need for anger and violence toward each other appeared to have been satisfied with food. The woman said something to the girl he could not hear but watched as the girl assisted the woman to her feet and guided her through the rubble into the yard where the woman gathered her skirts in her hands and squatted down to make water. Then the girl gathered her own skirts to her waist and did the same.

  When they returned, the man helped the girl make beds on the edge of the warmed hearth stones, close to the flames. The girl eased the woman to her side and covered her with a woolen blanket and then she let herself down not far away from the woman and pulled her own blanket to her chin. It was then she discovered the porcelain-faced doll and in an instant pulled it to her chest and had it hidden beneath her blanket cover.

  Once settled the man insisted they pray before sleep. His words were those of the sincere and well-practiced divine. Robey listened to the man’s holy and dramatic pronouncements. A strange man of the cloth. If only, when he ceased his praying, they would fall asleep, because Robey was tired and his legs ached for standing so still for so long. If they slept he could slip down the stringer and be gone in the darkness.

  But the man upon finishing his prayer took up his green bottle again and continued with his drinking. Still agitated by his leg, he shook it beneath his blanket, banging the floor with his heel. Then he stood and set to a fretful pacing again until finally some thought occurred to him and he took down his trousers to inspect the spot he’d been itching.

  “God damn tick,” he slurred.

  He shuffled to the fireside where he took the iron rod from the fire and held its red-hot point to his naked leg. The smell of burning hair and flesh rose to where Robey stood against the gable wall and in the closed light he could see the man, a grimace stretched tightly across his mouth and his eyes no more than black holes in his face as he held the red iron to his thigh, causing the tick to back out of his hide.

  Through the floor he watched the man who remained naked from the waist down. The man lolled his head back and forth like an angry bull slicing the air with his horns. He then tipped the bottle back and emptied it. He pulled up his trousers and resumed his pacing, from time to time raising his burned leg and shaking it. His leg now relieved, he seemed conflicted with some new thinking that was growing inside him. He lay down on his bedding, but he was too restless for sleep.

  Rob
ey waited patiently, hoping the man would settle as had the girl and the woman, and soon he would be able to slip down the stringer and away in the darkness. He looked to the rickety sawtooth he would have to descend and then looked off the gable wall in the direction of his anticipated departure and then back down through the floor. The man was up again. He was moving about the room. This time, he was on all fours and slowly scuttling toward the sleeping girl, tucking his legs underneath him, reaching forward and pulling his body to his reach. Turning in her sleep, the girl awoke as he made his approach. She watched him coming to her, a hand to her mouth.

  “Are you a-sleepin’?” he was saying as he crawled toward her. “Are you already a-sleepin’?”

  But she did not answer and when he was near enough she pulled back the blanket and kicked out at him. He caught her small foot as it struck into his head. He held that foot and when she kicked with the other one he caught that foot too and dragged her from her bedding and into him so quickly she seemed to have disappeared inside him.

  At first she did not know to resist, but then she fought him, her body coiling and twisting on the wooden floor. She struck out with her fists and tore at his white face-hair and he fended her off, trying to quiet her, but she would not relent so he wrapped an arm around her neck and punched her in the face.

  Still, she kept struggling and so he punched her again until she groaned and folded in his arms. He punched her one more time and then let her onto her back where she did not move. He waited and then he lifted her skirts and tore away at her underclothes until she too was naked from the waist. But when he moved between her legs she roused herself and fought him again. She kicked her heels into his haunches, arched her back, and clawed at his face. He took her thin arms in his hands and twisted them until she cried out and then he stretched them over her head and held her arms as she continued to kick, but he was now between her legs and so wide was his body she could not find the angle to strike with her heels.

  “You help me here. Now,” he yelled out to the blind woman. “She has gone crazy in the head.”

  At first the woman cried and fretted and when he threatened her she dug more deeply into her bedding.

  “Take her damn legs,” he said, but the woman would not move.

  “You’re hurting me,” the girl moaned.

  “I don’t give a god damn if I am,” he said, and struck her a blow to the side of her head.

  Her cries of pain and her pleading with the man to leave off her rose up from the cold floor and filled the stone-walled chamber. The man pushed himself up on one hand and with the other he struck the girl a savage blow to the head and she went quiet again. He gripped her by the hair and pulled back her head revealing her white throat.

  Then the moon went behind the clouds and all was lost in shadow, and the wind came up and there were the faintest sounds of the man working and the girl whimpering beneath him like a small held animal. Robey let his head back against the stone of the gable, his hand on the butt of his pistol. The sounds from below broke inside him and then hardened and the hard pieces—they broke too. He banged his head again and this second time cracked open his wound. He began to bleed into his collar. He knew he should do something and he knew he would not.

  When the man was done he slumped and lay quietly across the girl’s trembling body and then he fell back from between her legs as if tearing himself from her. Panting for air, he crawled across the floor to lay on his pallet where he went into a fit of sneezing and cursing and then was silent. He reached down between his legs to cradle himself in his hand and soon harsh sounds of sleep came from his throat.

  The girl lay crumpled in the moonlight, her bare legs white as bone. Then she curled her legs inside her skirts and folded her knees to her chest and held them in her arms.

  Robey waited until he thought they were all deep in the sounds of their sleep and then catlike he went down the stringer where he paused over the sleeping bodies, scrutinizing one and then the next, the pistol in his hand, its barrel pointing the way.

  When he stood by the girl, he found her still awake and she raised to him a thin, worn and childish face. At first she seemed to have lost all touch with the earth. She just lay there staring up at him, staring at nothing, not blinking, or breathing, or speaking, or whispering. She had been so harmed, maybe she had died.

  As their eyes fixed on each other, the moon came out again and thinned the darkness near the floor and shone on her face. Her lips were broken and she was bleeding from her nose. She caught her lower lip between her teeth and he thought she did die and was just now returning herself to the living. In her eyes there was condensed hatred that had split off inside her and she could not return from, could not return to, sadness or pain or joy or any other emotion. It was there inside her where it would stay.

  She paled and her mouth opened as she stared at him, but her heart so full, her voice failed her, and in that stony world was only heard a moan of the soughing wind.

  Ashamed, he draped the blanket over her closed body. He then hastened from her side and passed silently among their bodies and left out of that place to find the bay horse tethered in the coppice of trees. All that night he followed the bends of the black road jeweled by starlight until the wan light of the dawn touched the east with red and the pastures turned green. The roads became white and then was the coming gold of the sun and that day’s worth of heat, and he was miles away before he stopped to sleep.

  7

  THEN, IN A RAILWAY CUT, the bed of cinders gave way and the bay horse, near to blind, went down, tumbling him to the ground and with its fall was the cracking sound of snapping bone. At the last instant he had pulled the animal’s head back and it had tried to check its fall on its stiff forelegs, but it was too late to stop what was already happening.

  The horse’s hind leg was trapped under the rail where the ballast had eroded, but still it thrashed and pawed to right itself. Its shod hooves struck sparks on the parallel rail and thudded on the ties. The bay’s right front leg was as if jointed between the knee and fetlock, and it swung wildly as it heaved its body, trying to stand until finally the splintered cannon bone stabbed through the leg hide, white and ragged and sharp as a pickax.

  He stood a ways off and spoke to the horse, telling it to settle, and when it did not he moved in to take the horse’s tossing head in his arms and cover its terrified eyes. He held on as the strength in its neck dragged his feet and lifted him off the ground. Then it did settle and there was a panting silence between them and he let go his hold. The horse stretched its neck and sniffed him. He stroked the horse’s cheek and forehead and did not let go his touch.

  “You have gone and broke your leg,” he whispered into its ear, his face that close.

  The horse lay on its side staring at him. Its skin quivered and it snorted and he took this as a sign of understanding. He knelt down in the cinders and put his face to the horse’s soft neck, his hand to the velvety muzzle and he told the horse how not to be afraid and it was only then he felt his own ankle begin to throb inside his shoe and he silently cursed.

  The horse raised its head and then let it down again in the cinders where its wet breathing made gusts of dirt and grit. He told the horse it had been a good horse and a loyal horse and a noble horse and when he found the coal black horse he would tell it so, and when he returned home he would tell the other animals and then he felt foolish and tears welled in his eyes. A shank of anger entered his chest and the tears began to sting his eyes.

  He stood and formally apologized to the bay horse, asking that it might disremember his boyish thoughts and actions. He asked that it might forgive his momentary weakness, for they’d been on good terms since he’d stole it and then regretfully he collected himself and drew his pistol from his belt. He set the muzzle behind the horse’s ear and held not a moment before pulling the trigger.

  He wanted to rest after that because he was painfully tired and sore, but spiritless he shouldered his kit and took the bridl
e and trudged on for the duration of that hot day through a sparsely settled country, his sprained ankle paining him not a little. He was soon road-dirty and his soles blistered.

  He followed the train tracks until evening shed a bluish twilight over the land and far off could be seen the white spire of a church steeple and then the dim lights of a town. He climbed a grassy bank in the town’s direction and stepped out onto a plank road running parallel with the rails below. The town, now within reach, glowed dully in the glove of the night. He took up the plank road and after not long his shoe broke open and began to flop as he walked. After so long his journey and however bleak his prospects, he knew he was arriving at a place significant. He felt it in the air, in his skin, inside his composing mind. He knew he needed to find another horse.

  In the distance was the drift of small hills and green islands of pasture running into abrupt mountains and there was the cool dank smell of a flat river on the air, and even further, a purple line of forest between the mountains and the green islands of pasture. The country here was cultivated with prosperous farms and the low-walled buildings were of red brick or gray stone. The roadside was crossed by veins of limestone forming knotty points and there were thin cracks where artesian springs seeped water to the earth’s surface. He thought how easy it would be to farm this deep fertile land. A warm rain had begun to fall on the dry land and then from out of the dark he heard the cadence of hoof beats pounding hard on the planks.

  He stepped off the road and onto the soft ground where he stumbled across deep ruts and passed into a thicket of brambles in the twilight shadows of a little paintless house. Two dark riders swept through the gloaming, and then cavalry by twos passed the brake and then was the heavy sound of iron-shod wheels grating on the planks, and a wagon came jolting out of the darkness, winding through the trees, the lathered team flat-out for speed.

  It was an open four-horse coach with seats across from door to door and nine men dressed in blue were riding the benches, and behind that wagon was another one and then came ten more after that. Without hesitating he stripped off his jacket and worked to turn it inside out blue. More wagons followed the coaches and cavalry and a battery of horse artillery. He climbed higher from the road, a steep ascent made craggy with broken rock and dark with pine trees.