Coal Black Horse

by Robert Olmstead

  “Drink the water and go,” she said. “And take that with you. You can’t eat that here.”

  “Would you have some linen to bind a head?” he asked, after draining the water glass.

  “Two dollars.”

  He paid her this money as well and taking the rolled material he left out the gate. Behind him, they resumed their private laughing, at what he did not understand.

  Making his way back through the gathering crowds, he came upon a cemetery where a woman was digging a grave beside a file of dead men. Inside the wrought-iron gates the grass appeared blue and he was drawn to step inside and stand in that grass, and when he stood inside the fields of war beyond the fence appeared white in the bleaching sun.

  Possessed by the orderliness of the place, he walked among the riven stones of the cemetery. War had even been made upon the cemetery and in places the ground looked as if plowed. The tombstones were broken into fragments and graves had been turned up by plunging shells. The monuments had been toppled to provide cover for a time and so they were pocked and scarred by the scrape of bullets. The bodies slumped behind the stones had absorbed the bullets made of pure, hollow, soft lead, arriving to kill at a thousand yards, fracturing and shattering bones, blasting tissue, and causing large gaping wounds that draped like cut mouths in the sun.

  He counted there to be thirty-four of the dead that she was burying and when he asked if he could help he learned she was six months pregnant, but she made no mention of a husband or father to the baby she carried.

  “How did this happen,” he asked, not quite sure what he meant, even as he was asking the question.

  She looked at him oddly, her head cocked to one side as she leaned on her shovel.

  “You are not from around here,” she said.

  “No ma’am.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “My mother sent me to fetch home my pap.”

  “Did you find him?”

  “He is over thar. I was to get water, but I drank it all myself. Then I paid for a bandage and I did not have any more money to buy water for this canteen.”

  “You can help if you want to,” she said. “I will give to you water to take, or I’ll just give you water and you can go.”

  “I have never had money before.”

  “Then it will give me pleasure to pay you in water.”

  For a time he helped the pregnant woman plant the dead. Their various causes of death were most apparent as the minié ball was a terrible, crippling, smashing invasion of the body, shattering and splitting bones like green twigs and extra vasating blood in a volume of tissue about the path of its ferocious intention. The killing wounds were to the head, neck, chest, and abdomen. When the minié ball struck it flattened and tumbled, fissuring and comminuting bony structures. Shards of bone and broken teeth often flew from its path, wounding one body with the bones and teeth of another.

  Most of the killed in the cemetery had received long distance mortal head wounds in the lee of those signifying stones, as if the stones were waiting and would not be denied their purpose in life. Many had been shot in the left hand reaching up to slide the ramrod into their rifles.

  He silently dug into the earth, his hip close to hers. Stray hairs floated about her tired face. She would tuck them away and they would come free again and she would stop to rearrange her hairpins. He thought of his mother and for the time he was a child-boy again and he was home and they were working in the kitchen garden, digging, planting, and hoeing, and soon he would share with the world the advent of an infant brother or sister.

  When the hole was deep enough, together they would lift in a man and then beside that grave, they’d dig again, filling in that one with what they excavated from the next one. He worked his shovel hard so she might have that much less to do, but she dug steadily and held her own.

  As darkness came on that first long day, he stood up from the new grave to grasp the next man and he saw that it was a boy his own age. His teeth were broken in his mouth and the bone cup for his hip must have been shattered because his leg was extended at an odd angle from his hip. Simultaneously, he felt horror and dignity for how young the boy was. The woman began silently to cry, the back of her hand at her mouth and he knew it was not so much for the young boy as it was for the little straw he was and the weight he added to her already heavy burden. Her chest caved and her shoulders shook and she wept quietly into her hands. He helped her to sit and stood by her side while the anguish passed through her like a steady racking wind.

  “I am sorry,” she said, daubing at her wet face and leaving it smudged with graveyard earth.

  “He were a drummer boy,” he said, bending to take the broken sticks from the boy’s hand.

  “Dear God,” she said. “He was so young.”

  “Yes ma’am. Just a pony.”

  “You take his boots,” she said, tears filling her eyes again.

  “Ma’am?”

  “I think you will need his boots.”

  They buried the drummer boy with the earth of a new grave and when they had completed the mound, he took up the broken drumsticks and slid them into the black dirt.

  “That’s enough for now,” she said.

  Then she led him to a stone house that stood nearby, its walls pocked with bullets. From a cistern she took a jar of milk and made him drink from it until his belly ached and then she filled his canteen with fresh water and made him also take a loaf of bread. She continued to apologize to him for reasons he did not understand. There was nothing he could determine that was her fault, nothing she could possibly have done wrong. She told him with conviction that people should be born twice: once as they are and once as they are not. He did not understand this either, but the way she said it convinced him it was true.

  “Someone believes something that’s wrong,” she said, “and that person gets others to believe it too. And then everybody believes in the same mistake.”

  He asked her which mistake she was talking about and his question made her voice go cold to him. She told him he could just about take his pick if he wanted and then she warmed again and her voice pitied.

  “You be careful,” she said, her hand on his shoulder.

  “Yes ma’am,” he said, relieved that she had recovered herself.

  “You will take your father home?”

  “I promised my mother.”

  “A broken promise is worse than a broken bone.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  It threatened to rain again as he made his departure, the dry lightning illuminating the faces of the unburied dead at the cemetery gates. He hastened back to his father to cover him with gum blankets he’d secured. His father was sleeping as a soft, insignificant rain began to fall, and was at peace and only woke when he tucked the blankets to his sides. The coal black horse shook out a muscle in its shoulder and blew. For the horse he’d found a feed bag full of oats and its contents he spilled out on the ground.

  “Son,” his father said, pleased to see him. “I should say I am feeling a little puny tonight.

  His father smiled up at him as he lifted his head so that he might have a sip from the canteen. He tipped the canteen and let the water leak into his father’s mouth. He then let his father’s head back down to rest on the jacket his mother had sewn.

  “The church pews is full of wounded men,” he told his father, “and outside the window is a wagon where they toss the arms and legs. They say they’ve run out of chloroform and sharp saws there’s so many. Near twenty thousand.”

  “Oh, it was a big thing,” his father said of the late fought battle. “Biggest thing you ever saw in your life. Some of the boys had to get drunk three times just to get through it.”

  “There’s rows and rows of ‘em laying dead,” he said, trying to understand what he’d seen.

  “When they advance, they are afraid and they want to be close to each other,” his father told him. “They want to feel the cloth of the next man, but they need to spread out.”


  “They need to spread out,” he said, repeating the words to himself.

  “It was a terrible event,” his father said. “It was as if whole brigades disappeared in a cloud of smoke.”

  “I have a clean bandage.”

  “Yes. The bandage should be changed. We will rest tonight and in the morning we will go home with a fresh bandage.”

  He touched at the crust of the bandage wrapped about his father’s head. It was black and hard.

  “Where was the sun today,” his father asked. “Did it not come out from all the clouds?”

  “It was sunny all day,” he said, and it had been, hot and rainless.

  “Not here,” his father said, and he could only think it was the coal black horse who had walked the sun from east to west and made a shadow that shaded his father from its rays.

  He cradled his father’s shoulders in his lap and with a pocketknife he began cutting at the old bandage as gently as he could. The horse stopped its feeding as the bandage came away in chips as if it were tree bark and he could not tell what was skull bone or rotted bandage as it came away in his hands. He looked up to see the horse watching them with what seemed like mild curiosity while it ate.

  “There is a law of nature,” his father said, “that produces rain or snow after a great battle. It is the same in France and Germany. I knew your mother would endeavor to find me.”

  “She sent me when General Jackson died.”

  “I was there,” his father said.

  “When he were killed?”

  “I was there,” his father said.

  As the bandage came away, so too came more patches of scalp and shards of bone and necrotic tissue. Revealed to him was the black hole bored into his father’s cheek.

  “That does itch not a little,” his father said, fumbling a hand in the direction of his head but then giving up and letting it drop back to the ground. “Maybe another day for us and you will take me home to your mother.”

  “Yes,” he said, and his throat constricted as he held the back of his father’s macerated head and felt the maggots falling through his fingers and away into his lap.

  His father gave off a convulsing shiver and then sighed and settled again, and it was as if another piece of him had died and departed and there was little hope of recovering it. He worked quickly, scraping lightly at the wound rot with the knife blade. He then bound the wound with the clean linen he’d bought from the two women earlier that day and lay down beside his father and held his broken and ravaged head.

  “Mayhaps, when it gets a little later, you could find a cart and a pony. I would not suggest you steal for they are something we could return.”

  “I can do that,” he said, and he thought, This is my father and I am his son and it brought him a degree of peace.

  “Or maybe tomorrow night,” his father said. “Another day’s recuperation would make me stronger.”

  “Tomorrow,” he said, and thought he might cry for the storm he felt in his face, but he didn’t. “Now would be a good time to get you some sleep,” he encouraged.

  “Soon,” his father said.

  “Soon,” he said.

  That night he awoke to the sound of a shot and a man crying out. The night had brought no relief to the day’s heat and now a gunshot. He sat up to see the shallow graves in the moonlight giving off a phosphorescent glow. It radiated from the fresh turned earth above the burial pits, and passing through the light of the glow he could see low-running, slab sided hogs come to root out the dead bodies already inhumed. At the far end of the field of the dying came a scream and a scuffle and a cursing that awakened and traveled the length of the head wounded in a long mimic of moaning sound.

  He took up a length of broken sword and went down the row until he came to a soldier propped up on one arm. He was gibbering and pointing in the distance with a revolver. His eyes, his nose, his lips, his face were shredded by shell fragments.

  “It is my own leg,” the soldier kept saying, again and again.

  The soldier waved the barrel in the direction of a nearby feeding hog and he did not understand the full import of that until, plaintively, the soldier explained, it was his very own leg the hog was feeding on and in his mind he knew the leg was no longer attached to his body, but however he tried not to, he could feel the teeth of the gnawing hog.

  “I can feel the pain as that hog gnaws at my shin,” he cried, pointing the revolver into the darkness.

  Beside the soldier was another, lying face upward taking breath in rattling snorts and blowing it out in sputters of froth which slid down his cheeks in a white cream, piling itself along one side of his neck and ear. A bullet had clipped a groove in his skull above his temple. From this opening his brain protruded in bosses dropping off to the ground in flakes and strings. Then he stopped breathing and then and there he was dead.

  “Stay here,” the soldier said. “Don’t leave me. I cannot see.”

  “They are over there,” Robey said, pointing at the hogs’ flat shadows crossing in the darkness.

  “I am blind,” he said.

  “My father,” he said.

  “Stay until I die so as I will not to be eaten alive by that hog. It won’t be long now.”

  He did not want to leave his father’s side, but still he took up the sword and for the next hour he guarded the field of the dying. Of all that he might wonder on, he wondered on why the blind soldier was blind.

  “Why blind?” he whispered as he walked. “Why blind and still not dead.

  He walked the fields length, turned smartly, and then returned to the soldier who’d endured the phantom pain, and after several such circuits he was tired and impatient, so he went into the field where the hogs were rooting and lay down on the surface of the flat wet grass with the sword at his side.

  He waited and finally one of the curious beasts came close and nosed at him with its great tusked snout and when it did, he brought the sword up swiftly and skewered it through the neck. The animal screeched, and open-mouthed it lunged at him as he twisted the blade sharply and hot blood flushed from its neck and down his arm and it made no other sound again. He slaughtered it where he killed it, taking what fresh pork he could carry and leaving the rest for its own kind. In the morning he would fry its bacon and fat which had been nourished with the flesh and faces of dead soldiers and he could not but think that when he fed them, he would be returning them unto themselves.

  When he returned to the soldier who had endured the phantom pain, he was going to tell him that maybe he was blind because God thought he’d seen enough for one life, but when he arrived at his side he found him to be dead. On his chest was the revolver, a six-shot Remington. It was loaded and he understood that the soldier had left it for him. He also came to understand that he was finally finished with his believing in God.

  12

  THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT HE was restless and in the early-morning darkness he awoke to the silent movement of women. He sat up and without passage into wakefulness he was alert and saw them wandering from body to body in the field of the dead. They cried into handkerchiefs they’d scented with pennyroyal or peppermint oil. They were stark, tormented creatures with unpinned hair and bent shoulders, wandering in the dawn, kneeling beside bodies, and collapsing to the ground. He wanted to call out to them, to touch them, to be assured that he saw them and was not dreaming them.

  He looked to the horse silently standing watch and sketched its face with his own sadness and drew strength from its passive and mannered distance. Surely the horse felt what he felt. Surely the horse knew what he knew. The women were sisters, or mothers, or lovers, he did not know. They wept and stumbled on and he wondered if they truly wanted to find the men they were looking for. He himself had found what he was looking for and wished he hadn’t for how slender and proscribed hope was now.

  When he awoke again it was in the morning and it was because someone was throwing pebbles at him. When he opened his eyes it was to see the girl. He kn
ew it was her before he saw her, but still he closed his eyes and opened them again and she was still standing there.

  She stood looking at him without moving, her body in black silhouette against the sun, and he shielded his eyes to see her the better. He rolled to his side and could see that she was looking at him queerly. She was wearing a plain black dress with the sleeves cuffed in white lace and he made out she was carrying a drum on her hip. She stood beside the coal black horse and in her black dress was as if she was of the horse, born of the horse, and the thin sliver of yellow light expanding between them was their separation completing itself.

  She cocked her head and squinted at him, studying him in her mind. Some part of her knew him, but she was not sure and he felt compelled to tell her in what ways they were acquainted. How their paths had crossed. He was tempted to say, Yes, you know me, but he did not. He returned her look and the guilt of their history must have been written in his face.

  “You thought I wouldn’t recognize you,” she finally said, her lip caught between her teeth. Her words held no accusation, but still he felt accused.

  He stood and gathered himself and not knowing what else to do, he began walking away from her, but she followed him to the tree and then her voice was asking to his back, “Who are you?” And then her voice was rising and she was cursing him and saying, “You could have stopped him.”

  “I could not help,” he said, turning to her sad and stricken face. “I had to find my father.”

  She stood very still, disbelieving him.

  He fought for control of the sound in his voice that it not be weak or pleading. He’d done nothing to stop the man and however much he tried to tell himself that he’d not known what to do, the after-knowing, the knowing that follows experience, was burned into him and what he’d thought before was slight and weak and not worth remembering. He could not deny that he’d become bound to this girl that night in the fire-gutted house. He could not deny that it’d been in his power to stop the man.