Coal Black Horse

by Robert Olmstead

  Thereafter, they would call him captain, as they had called his father, and that night he sent off a letter to his mother but could not bear to tell her all he knew.

  As to Rachel, the men of the battery said nothing to him. It was a mystery to them what was between the son of their fallen comrade and this girl who traveled with him posing as a boy, but they made no judgment and spoke not a word of it among themselves.

  After Gettysburg the rain had resumed with a vengeance. Rolling thunder shook the night’s darkness. The rains were torrential and the lightning flashes left them momentarily blind. They sat in the rain with the water running from the cuffs of their jackets, waiting for the crossing.

  Finally came the nights of July 13 and 14, wet and black, and these were the nights they chose to escape across the pontoon bridge. Supplies were critically short. Men were hungry and picking kernels of corn out of the horse dung. With tarpaulins they sheltered their smoky fires of green and snapping pine logs, so they would continue burning and give the impression that men still fed them. All that day a line of the tallest men, their arms locked together, had stretched from bank to bank so others might make the crossing. Then the word went around that the river was falling steadily and that the thin line of the pontoon bridge had been completed.

  On a rainy and foggy night torches were lit and bonfires were built of fence rails to light the way to the other side. Robey and Rachel waited in the gravel at the dissolving edge of the river as the water rose and curled. When it descended, they rode the coal black horse onto the bridge, cut loose its mooring and under a wetting drizzle, the blossoms dropping in the water, they floated to Virginia.

  16

  A PERIOD OF SHADOW drapes from her shoulder to the swell of her small belly as if a length of long black hair. In a flawless china sky the sun is bright and coming through the panes of glass as it makes its crossing east to west.

  He is asleep, sitting up in a chair beside her. His hands are palms down on his knee caps. A loaded Springfield rifle lays on the floor at his feet and beside it the six-shot Remington. She thinks she’s had a dream and she’s frightened. She cannot separate what she dreams from what she thinks.

  They travel nights and sleep by day and it will soon be dark again and time to travel the twisting roads one day closer to home. Getting himself home. At night the darkening air brings silence before the walk of the predators, the hunters. For them the night will bring invisible passage for their escape.

  “Would you like to live here?” she said, turning her head slowly.

  “No,” he said, as a sleep-talker without waking. “I wouldn’t want to live here.”

  “Where would you want to live?”

  “Where I am from.”

  “There’s too much light out,” she said. “Can’t we sleep at night?”

  He’d already told her so many times before that they couldn’t sleep at night. They slept by day and at night they traveled to travel unseen. She pulled the blanket to her shoulders and moved her arms beneath its drape, and when she did she was strangely limbless and birdlike, her arms winged and flightless in the windless, airless room.

  “It ain’t safe,” he said, and stretched out his legs, a boot heel banging on the floor. It was getting late in the day, and now awake he’d not be able to sleep again before it was time to leave.

  “I dreamt we were asleep together,” she said.

  Her voice was matter-of-fact and he thought she meant him, in her dream, together with her. But he did not presume she meant him and so wondered whose dream company she was recounting. She carried her life with her and could not flee from it, even in her sleep. She tossed and turned and cried out in her sleep. She insisted upon sleeping with her knife and that he keep the blade sharp. It was inside her and knocking at her ribs and fluttering her lungs as if they were wings startled and throbbing with urgency.

  “You should try to sleep a little,” he said. He’d told her this so many times before and was beginning to understand that opposite his intentions, he was counseling her in the direction of her terror.

  “Where do you think she disappeared to?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, sitting up and looking about the room as if there were still the presence of a third person.

  In the house where they lodged was a raggedy old woman with a sun-stained and stroke-twisted face. One of her eyes was bloodshot and the other was as white and round as an ivory marble. She had welcomed them into her house and with a hand grinder she had made flour and with the flour she had made balls of dough as big as her gnarled fist. She fried potatoes for them to eat, and there was bacon, and she made up a sack of the same for them to take when they rode away. She had moved about the house as if a phantom impaired and more than once burned herself as she cooked and took an awfully long time to realize it. As her presence in the house seemed odd to herself, they inquired but could not sort from her if it was her house or not.

  What they did learn was that her ears did not work too good and so it was hard for her to hear them from both sides of her head at once. They learned she had not seen a soul for months, not even a stray dog, and they learned she had a son named Horace. He was a crackerjack of a young man, but he had been killed by which side she did not know and what did it matter anyhow? She declared her heart and mind were broken by it. She knew this, she said, but she claimed love and prayer were enough to get by on. She declared herself a good saint of God regardless of what he had done to her. When she said these things there was a breath around her that shined as if it was not air or light but was something from within.

  “I can’t sleep without knowing where she’s at,” Rachel said. “Do you think she’s still wandering about? She gives me the cold shivers.”

  “Try counting,” he said. He rubbed his face hard, as if trying to rearrange his features. He wanted to comfort her, but she contained inside a wall of vigilance and suspicion she had built around herself. Not since she had comforted him upon the death of his father had she acted kindly toward him.

  “One, two, three,” she said. “It doesn’t work.”

  That was when he told her he loved her.

  “Why?” she said.

  “I just do.”

  She raised her draped arms and slowly turned her face to him. The point of her knife prodded the blanket material.

  “Don’t be such a straw-head,” she scoffed.

  She lay back down on the divan in the strange room, pulled the blanket to her chin. She turned to face the back of the divan and pretended sleep. She was exhausted for the weight she carried inside her and did not understand why she shouldn’t be able to sleep, why he should say he loved her.

  “I almost love you,” she said, relenting, and was to say more but was stricken by her own words and shook her head violently — no, she did not mean to say what she said. She seemed ashamed of her mistrust, or inability, he did not know which. As time had gone by his mind had increasingly become confused when it came to her. He wondered if the debt he was paying could ever be paid, or if she even thought about it that way, or knew how he thought about it.

  “How much longer?” she said.

  “A few more days,” he said softly. “Rest a while and we will go.”

  Their stay with the battery on the banks of the Potomac had been brief. He secured a hard-mouthed bay mare for her to ride, the rare horse that the coal black horse would tolerate, as well as provisions, ammunition, a brass telescope, and the Springfield. The army was still precariously encamped when he asked the men of the battery how far it would be home and how long it would take. They told him two days if he didn’t sleep and killed the horse in getting there. Otherwise it would take five days. He was to figure 150 mile as the crow flies and ride by night and each day rub down the horses.

  Hole up by day and sleep with the sun, they told him, and when there’s nothing left and there’s five miles to go, cut deep gashes in the horses’ shoulders and pour gun powder into their open wounds. Yessir, by the Jesus
, that’s what they would do to get home in a hurry. But then again, riding that black horse to death ain’t worth gettin’ to anybody’s home and who the fuck needs a home when you got a horse as fine as that one?

  They’d ridden hard the past days and in their imaginations it was as if the whole world was chasing them. They slept under rock ledges and in hollow logs and moved their position when he had the instinct to do so and each dawn they halted again. The highways were beset with a confusion of regular and irregular troops. There were partisans and bushwhackers. There were profits to be taken and old scores to settle. He’d learned in no uncertain way that this was war too, name it the war inside war. No matter, it was as much a part of war as war itself and in war you get killed just for living.

  Their shortest route was west by southwest but this took them against the intentions of all flowing water and the corrugated upthrust of every folded mountain. They crossed rivers and streams and waded dense sloughs and after a time he could glimpse the green front of the Alleghenies they would have to ascend. In places the front was ramped foothills and stone-bound windy gaps and in other places flat walls of forested stone and cobbly switchbacks and the whole effect was like that of a great resting beast, its legs tucked beneath its body and its paws extended from beneath its chest.

  “Two, three more days,” he said.

  “Nights, you mean.”

  “Nights,” he agreed.

  He worried her mind would give out in that time. It had become that bitter and was that near to its breaking point. It seemed she had not slept as long as he had known her. She held to her fear and her mind would not give it up no matter how hard she tried to persuade it into a different direction. She began to tremble and then she sat up and let the blanket and then the dirty sleep shirt slide off her shoulders.

  “Lay on top of me,” she said, letting the knife slip to the floor from her hand and laying back and opening her arms to reveal her naked body. But he did not move. He was not sure he could move.

  She called to him again and told him what to do and when he still did not move she told him if he wanted to marry her he had better be nice to her.

  He was clumsy in his movement. He moved to sit beside her on the divan and then let himself forward to be caught by her and in a tangle of arms and blanket and sleep shirt he was pulled down against her body.

  “Don’t move,” she said, and held him to her shaking body.

  He let his face to her skin and breathed in the smell of leather and sweat and horse and wood smoke they both shared. He wanted his face against her skin and to not move it. He could feel something pulled from inside him and extending toward her. He wanted to say words that would tell her this, but his feelings were not clear to him and they would not be for a long time.

  “You aren’t the worst,” she said with sweet resignation, and pulled him even closer to her body than he already was. She stroked his back and kissed his cheek and neck.

  When they awoke the old woman was still absent the house and at first they did not talk about her and the longer they waited for the other to mention her absence, the more impossible it became to acknowledge she had even existed. He stepped out into the yard and scanned the circle of the horizon. He cradled the Springfield in the crook of his elbow. It would be dark soon. Sun-fires lit the western horizon as the sun in its setting was burning down the earth.

  He wandered the yard and there was still no sign of the old woman. Then the curl of a low branch at the edge of the porch caught his eye through the porch railing. At first he thought it the tiny face of a child peeking at him from the bushes or the tiny face of a shy wood sprite caught in mischief. He stepped onto the porch and cocked his head and saw what it was: a whorl of dried needles that looked nothing like the face of a tiny child or wood sprite. He tilted his head again and his eye could barely catch what he’d seen, but there it was again.

  “I see you,” he said.

  He played this game until his mind could find face and then left off to bridle and saddle the horses. When he went back inside Rachel was at the sugar chest, wetting her finger in her mouth and feeding sweet scrapings onto her tongue. He watched her eat the sugar and when she looked up he encouraged her to continue until she’d had her fill.

  “Have your dinner,” she said, and led him to the stove for potatoes and bacon. He was hungry and, no utensils at hand, he took up the plate and ate the heated food with his fingers.

  They mounted the horses in darkness and rode into the ink black night and when they stopped to rest the horses she told him she was in a better state of mind but still far from feeling the way she wanted to.

  “I thought it would get better by now,” she said, “but it hasn’t.”

  He made to speak, but the words would not come. He wanted to tell her it was a matter of time, but did he know this to be true? He carried his own sadness and hatred and to these his mind was fastened and enlivened. He did not want to forget, not ever. How could he suggest she move on from her own? He led with his hands, as if words were found by touch until finally he gave up and let his hands drop into his lap.

  She waited to see if that was all he had to say and then she laughed at him.

  He found for her a can of condensed milk, punched it with the point of her knife and this they shared beneath a grotto of stone where a spring ran out while the watered horses cooled in a stand of trees. His eyes searched the shadowy patterns of the starlit forest. He was calculating another move tonight, weighing the advantage of another mile against what it might cost to her and the animals. He knew the bay would soon give out, but they were close now. He did not know this ground, but he knew the terrain and recognized how it would lead them through.

  “The stars have moved closer,” he said, squatting beside her. He made up his mind; they would spend the duration of that night where they were and make one more move before daybreak.

  “Do you think she was ever there?” she asked of the old woman where they had spent the day.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I never thought she wasn’t.”

  “It’s probably just as well,” she said.

  As to staying where they were, he suddenly changed his mind and they climbed into their saddles once again. He needed to get home. He needed to return to his mother to know she was safe.

  EARLY IN THE MORNING they saw turkey vultures sailing the uplifts, the air above the air, and their eccentric rises and descents were slow and screwlike. Old wood smoke still filtered through the pines, a stove fire let slowly to die. There was an old woman wearing a shawl and carrying an umbrella. Beside her was an old man leaning on a walking stick. They were watching the sunrise from a hilltop and then they moved on and disappeared behind the hill. He took them to be more of the nice women and good men staggered and shattered by the spiral of events begun and that once begun begat their own private, terrible, and willful force.

  When they reached the place, it had the look of abandonment after years of decline. For some reason he had the instant passing memory of a complete story his father told him about an ancient athlete who ran up a mountain with a newborn bull calf on his shoulders. He did this every day in the belief that as the bull calf grew he would likewise build himself and become a stronger man. His father declared it to be an impossibility but an idea capable of dogging the mind. Maybe bull calves didn’t grow so fast in ancient times as they did now. No matter. His father said that he could never give up the thought of that man and despite what he knew to be true about growing bulls, he sometimes still wondered why it couldn’t work.

  Aside from the obvious reasons, why not? his father had opinioned. It’s the kind of idea that holds sway on the thinking mind. Maybe all people were this same way. Maybe they carried on in belief against a bad idea but nevertheless carried on until it collapsed them.

  The cabin door bore a huge iron padlock, sized for an armory or a ship, and the cabin seemed to wear it not for its security but as if in punishment for grave transgression. Likewise, t
he shutters were nailed fast, but contrarily the kitchen garden had been recently tended and what used to be flower beds of considerable proportions still bloomed with garish heads tottering above new weeds. Wild roses chafed at the log walls. There was a cistern filled by a wooden pipe with amber-colored water. There was a neatness that made him think the old people would be returning in a day or so.

  He called out, and as he expected he received no reply. The only sound to be heard was that of the horses tearing and champing sweet clover and the trickling of the water’s ropey fall from the pipe’s end.

  The sty they found empty and overgrown with thistle and the sty’s earth was dry and settled. There’d been no rooting hog that season and runner vines had curled and woven the barked and gnawed logs. Orange trumpetlike flowers toppled on their green stems. They moved on to the stable searching for inhabitants. Inside its board walls it smelled of mildew and clay, the ferment of manure and hay. In one stall was the rotting smell of seed potatoes gone unplanted.

  Out the back door on a grassy sward they discovered the attraction of the gyring vultures. In the trampled grass was a maiden mare and a new foal lying beside each other as if died in parturition. The mare had thrown down the foal bed and her shrunken pear-shaped womb lay to her hocks, blackening in the switch grass and pea-vine. The feet of the newborn foal were frayed and flaky and still wore a fringe of soft horn so young he speculated it was preborn.

  “She were a very fine horse,” he said of the mare.

  “Do you think they’ve gone somewheres?” she said, her throat constricted with the grisly spectacle they witnessed but did not want to acknowledge.

  “Recent,” he said, and told her how he’d seen them through the telescope departing on their approach. He speculated the death of a mare such as her was enough to break a frail spirit.

  The sun was most risen when they washed in the cistern and fried bacon and onions they took from the garden. There were also baby carrots and tomatoes. After they ate she undressed and rinsed her clothes in the cistern and then she decided to climb in after them and wash herself. There was no suggestion that he look or not look and in her immersion she found peaceful occupation. She let the trickling water run through her hair and splashed him and told him that he ought to take a bath because he stank to high heaven. He kicked off his boots and still wearing his clothes climbed in too. She thought this funny and laughed and then coaxed them from him and as he gave her each article she scrubbed and beat and wrung the water from them. His hands and neck and face were burned nut brown from the wind and sun. She inspected his head wound and declared it to be nicely scarred.