Coal Black Horse

by Robert Olmstead

  He wondered aloud if it was wind or mist or maybe someone had crossed in front of a window between them and the light that made it come and go. He wondered to himself how she must have known Rachel was going to have a baby and thought back to those days on the road and when he did his mind failed him. Could she have burned the stable? She was already a mystery to him and so the news of her having a baby made little difference to his mind. If she had tried to burn, what difference did it make now?

  Together they listened to the intermittent call of the night birds and the sawing sound that is made by grazing animals. For neither of them was the reunion complete and joyful, but they would gratefully receive what was left to them as they watched together the moon set beneath their feet, beyond the rim of the earth.

  THEY WERE NOW in the cooling weather of the fall and descending in the country was haunting autumnal stillness. The sky was high and smoky-colored and mornings the fodder was frosted with hoary crystals and steamed in the air when broke open. The sun came flat and its light was not warm but white and cold. From miles away plied the wet smoke of burned slash as somewhere in the country more land was being cleared with fire. However pleasant that summer had been, however abundant the crops and productive the stock, it was the harbinger of the darker days to come.

  It was not strange to him how his mother had grieved that summer as she experienced, drop by drop, the pain of pain remembered. Early morning, midday, and after supper she would disappear from their table, lost and broken-hearted, and into the fields, into the forest, into darkness, and he would hear her stirring in the night preparing to go and he would follow her into the night always at a distance and always she would be comforted by his watchful presence. He would cut the pain from her if he could. It was as if when she ate she fed grief into her mouth and when she walked she took it into her legs and when she carried, she bore it in her arms and shoulders and slowly and imperceptibly she was altered.

  It was during that summer Rachel’s belly began to grow and as it did her body diminished as if consumed and contained within her prodigious belly would be an astonishing yield and when delivered there would be nothing left of her and she would disappear. His mother engaged her with activity, prodded her when she moped, and by dint of will refused her the deep blueness she would surely have sunk into. He did not know what was between them. He knew it was not a peaceful understanding but was an understanding distant and by appearance respectful and at times was as if both women shared sorrow’s affliction, one in death and one in gestation.

  Each day he went out alone to the fields to work and to see what would come up the Copperhead Road. At first his mother urged the dogs on him in his daily rounds, but he wanted no warning from the dogs, either for himself or for who would come. The coming he looked for was a consequence he’d anticipated from the first time he saw the man. He carried the Springfield rifle with him and had long since determined never again would he wait to be called, to be told, to be steered in one direction or the next by any man.

  On rare days he could hear rumbles coming up the mountain from across the Twelve Mile and all the way up the Copper head Road. The sound, emanating from the dark clouds in the east, would rumble all day, and after it stopped rumbling, it would still rumble, echo over echo. At the time he did not understand the source of these detonations and explosions, but later he would learn it was the phenomenon of acoustic shadow, the traveling sound from a far distant battle skipping on air. But at the time he did not know this and thought a battle raged nearby and below and was drawn to it as if answering a call and was disquieted by these thoughts.

  What he had not anticipated coming up that road was the scavenger brother of the scavenger he’d killed behind the ear with the six-shot Remington. The morning he saw him was so quiet and still it was as if a murder had already taken place.

  He was lying in the dish of an ungrained, wind-scalloped stone, high above the mountain’s southern flank. He wore a blanket pulled over him and his cheek nested on the pillow of his clasped hands. Sprawls of needle-leaved juniper, knotted and stunted, scented the air. The Springfield lay beside him.

  The weather was seasonal that day and it had just broke noon. He had put up dried and dented corn in the crib that morning and in the afternoon he would complete the task. He’d drunk his coffee from a jar and was eating the hard bread and pork sandwich he made for his lunch, licking the grease from his fingers. He was at his leisure, visiting with infinity, wondering what was in the rock that made it dish this way. Or was it not the rock but volition latent in the wind that slowly razored stone in so tailored and peculiar a fashion? Or was it the ancient ice his father told him about?

  He was watching the mountain route that rose from the big bottom, the only way to arrive at the home place. He was nestled in a tiny high place that looked out through an ever-widening angle where it reached full degree at a hackly ridge two hundred yards very distant and then dropped off abruptly into a hollow, an inescapably tangled ravine bound with the interlocking trunks of laurel.

  He had taken several deer on that ridge when they crossed and it was not so much the challenge of taking the deer but in not shooting the deer so it would carry itself over the ridge and into the jumbled back side of that ridge. His father had always warned him, You carry a deer out of there one time and you learn it’s not something you ever want to do again.

  And this day was different in ways other than he could describe. Rachel had not slept and he had sat up with her through the night as she seemed to hold silent conversation with what was inside her. And he felt different that morning when he loaded the Springfield and capped the revolver and filled the jar with coffee and made the meat sandwich to take with him. He did not know why, but it was in his arms and across the width of his back, his shoulder blades in particular.

  He raised the brass telescope to glass again. Any other day he would have been back at work by now, but this day he lingered to watch an unfolding natural encounter on the hackly ridge.

  When he had looked before, it was to see a young button-horned buck watching a red-tailed hawk perched on the open rib cage of a dead deer. The deer was old and must have broke down in the night because it’d not been there yesterday. It was different that the deer did not find a hidden place to do its dying but died there on the ridge. It is not uncommon for animals to make mistakes. Often they miscalculate in their leaps and bounds and rip their hides or break their legs. As with humans, animals are born and grow old. They are smart and some are stupid. They make mistakes. They have accidents. They live and die.

  But for some reason this was different and his skin warmed with the thinking and he lingered long after it was time to return to the cornfield. He didn’t know why he knew what he knew. He just knew to keep doing what he was doing.

  Through the glass he watched.

  The hawk was plucking shreds of intestine and gulleting them as if they were stringy worms. From the angle of his perspective the curious buck looked as if he was standing right next to the hawk rather than standing off. The bird raised its wings and flared them broad as a sail full of wind. It screamed from inside its throat. He smiled as the young buck feinted and fled.

  The ridgeline was now empty except the picked carcass. It was the middle of the day and the crest of that ridge was struck with light, as if it were flint and the sunlight were steel. He had wanted to see the red-tailed hawk one more time before it flew off. He had wanted to watch it eat and take flight and pivot through the air on its powerful wings, but it’d already flown away.

  Then he saw a man he recognized riding into the glass. He was riding a slowly walking horse, and though it was not the man he expected it was a man he knew, and only when he saw him did it make sense to him. The man paused within his round view to look at the carcass.

  “Don’t be hasty,” he whispered. He spit out the gobbet of sandwich in his mouth, pressed his body to the stone, and with total certainty pulled the butt plate of the Springfield into the cradle of
his shoulder. He eased the forestock onto its makeshift rest at a point behind the sling swivel and he found the blade of the front sight with the notched rear sight. He made his calculations instinctively.

  When he finally left his perch he went down to find the scavenger draped on the ridgeline. He lay on his back where he’d fallen as if struck by the arm of a gigantic. His head was balding and his nose beakish. He was sunken about the eyes and his skin was pale and from where he’d fallen he was bruised yellow and purple in the face and yet even in dying he wore the hungry vulpine look.

  “How’s it look?” the man asked, his teeth gritted against the pain that wreaked his body.

  “It ain’t pretty,” he said. “If that’s what you are asking.”

  “You’re a mean bastard,” the scavenger muttered. “That’s all you are.”

  “I ’magine there are some who have the exact same thing to say about you.”

  “I believe I asked one time your name?”

  “Robey Childs,” he said.

  “I’ll tell ’em when I get where I’m goin’.”

  “They’ll want to know.”

  “Jesus, that hurts,” he said. He did not motion to indicate, but clearly he spoke of the black hole in his chest.

  “You ought to have been more careful,” he told the man.

  Blood was milking from one of the man’s nostrils and in staggered moments the man did not seem to fully understand what all had happened to him. He reached his right hand in front of his face as if to clear his vision but then let it drop and his arm to dangle at his side.

  “Where’s my horse?” the man asked.

  “He run off.”

  “I guess there’s a lesson in this,” the man said wearily, and then he said Robey’s name, “Robey Childs.”

  “What would that lesson be?” Robey asked, but the man was now dead and thereby prevented from answering.

  He made a sound with his tongue and looked to the sky. What has happened has happened, he thought, and what will happen will happen, and when that happened he’d count himself fortunate because he could get on to the next.

  Overhead the thick leaves were daily turning red, orange, and yellow. The dusty water ran under black shadows and the dried corn shucks scraped and scuttled with the winglike breezes that cuffed the mountain. Those hot lovely days of July through September were now gone forever. Soon would be the driving wind, and the beating rain would become snow and the high mountains would become impassable, and in that fastness only then could he rest. He continued to stand by the scavenger’s body. Why, he did not know, but felt he should do so for a while before taking his guns and whatever else of value he possessed, before toppling him over the ridge. Then he would retrieve the runaway horse and go home.

  “Was it the one you’d been waiting for,” his mother asked him late that night as they sat outside bundled against the chill.

  “No. It weren’t him.”

  “It was someone else,” she said.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “How many more is there?”

  “Only one,” he said. “But then I thought that a’fore this one.”

  “I should have just had dogs,” she speculated. “At least they grow up in a year.”

  If there was whimsy in her voice he could not detect it.

  18

  WHEN THE END of the waiting time for the next one came it was months later and he was astride the coal black horse. They were riding the bed of the rock-bound Copperhead Road. Ice plated the slow water and eskers of snow fingered the cloud-shadowed ground.

  Cold and weary, he’d come down from this day’s aerie, an overlook made, he speculated, where rocks had gathered when rocks were sentient and moving, as pretime pilgrims had arrived and were exhausted from their difficult journeys and so slumped together against one another. Below this place was the concealing snow and above this place was the bottom of the wintry universe, and when he stood there he could not resist his desire to reach out with his hands in the hope he might touch them both.

  The sun was lost in the sky, eclipsed by the deep cut he rode and had been so for several days, as if it was ruled by darkness this winter and so it was cold and frosted and the rock walls were blackened with frozen water. It was early evening still, and already the lights of the night had been set in motion.

  The winter thus far had been the one he wished for: prolonged cold, snow and ice and a penetrating darkness that came in the late afternoon and the body never so tired as to sleep through it. There was nothing but long dark winter and the endless evergreen forest that fell from sight to the horizon miles away. There were cows to milk and feed in the wet barn and there was waiting while Rachel changed daily before his eyes as her time grew imminent.

  These months spent in gestation she had remained for the most part closed to him, dark and angry and forlorn, yet she needed to be near him and always know where he was. She told him of the strange-bodied feeling of her ribs un-sticking and spreading to accommodate her belly. The pains that flashed through her like wildfires. Her small bones stretching. Her faints and haunts, and sins. At times she did not seem to know where she was or how she got there or what day of the week it was and when she did know she did not care. He’d come to know fear again but not for himself. It was for how dear her life had become to him.

  Last night, her voice ragged with tears, she told him she was ready to die and wanted to do so. She told him if she could not go back to the beginning she would just as soon get this life over with and be born again. He felt a shiver working into his chest bones.

  The coal black horse suddenly snorted and tossed its head and scraped at the ground in stride. Robey had heard nothing odd on his own ear but retrieved the Springfield from the saddle scabbard and slipped off the road and dodged behind a dense screen of root-sprouted coppice shoots.

  “This could be a bad day for someone,” he said to the steady horse. Then he could hear the snow-muffled stride of a rider approaching. He did not know the outcome and that moment did not care in the least. He knew he had found what he was looking for. What would follow would be a rest of one kind or another.

  He made a sound and the coal black horse rose and pitched forward into the road. The horse wheeled as he drew rein and then willfully spun in place one more rotation, jumped straight sideways, and held. He sat the horse barring the road with no perceptible movement to be seen in the hands or bit, the rifle balanced as if a scale across his lap.

  The man was coming on, riding a sorrel with a white mane and four white feet. After his long search the rider was bringing conclusion as fast as he could without even knowing it. He did not stop until he brought the sorrel abreast of the crossed coal black horse.

  Beyond mild surprise, the man had nothing in his eyes, but the face of him recalled the bone midden of those killing fields he’d ridden away from so many months ago, leaving his father dead and buried beneath the signifying tree. It recalled to him the night in the fire-gutted house and Rachel and the blind woman and his own head wounded by the little goose man and dressed in the torn garments of a murdered woman.

  “I know you,” the man said, and at first seemed pleased to have suddenly met up with him. “I been looking for you,” he said.

  But it went without saying. There was only one reason to be on that road and being lost wasn’t likely. The man’s eyes were now lively and fleeting about their sockets and it was then he determined they were not the eyes of the killer but the eyes of one fleeing sin and consequence and death.

  “That’s a fine horse,” the man said. “Any man who’d seen that horse once would know you again.”

  “The hell with you,” Robey told him.

  “But I have caught you,” the man said, setting his jaw on the words, cold and fixed. He then smiled in an attempt to take back a degree of his provocation.

  “What part have I in your life?” Robey asked.

  “That is what I am here to talk about.”

  Kill him, he thoug
ht. Put him through, he told himself, and a prefigured order of ideas deep in the map of his mind illumined as if divine. There would be no discernment, no discretion, no proportion to his justice.

  “We are already dead,” the man said, “you and I,” and he swept a hand to indicate the high stony walls of the narrow sepulchral hollow. “Ours are the souls of the ruined,” he observed with delight.

  Then the shot rang out in that sunless, starless, timeless place, but by then the man was collapsed upon the neck of the sorrel horse and the unchecked horse was rising up and the man was sliding off the back of it and falling heavily to the beaten ground as if thrown down from the highest place. Midway to the snowy earth the man turned his body and folded and he landed on the point of his shoulder and with a great exhalation of pain he slumped to his back.

  And it was only then the shot Robey fired across his lap was heard shattering the air.

  Before dismounting he stepped the coal black horse forward and horse and rider stood over the man’s fallen body. The bullet had entered his chest but had not come out. It had traveled bone and lodged in his shoulder. Eely blood trickled down his face where his skull had broke open when his head bit the stony road. An incessant groan was the best the man could do in the furor of his pain. He breathed heavily as his mind was delivered a commotion of messages that did not conflict. In his agony was the escape of his earthly and spiritual power, the tenebrous and the menace and the dark energy that ruled his life.

  “I believe you hit the mark,” he gasped, and tried to look down at the bubbles that pocked his chest.

  “You believe that?” Robey said, dismounting and standing over him.

  “Yes, I believe I do.” Blood was fogging the red wheels of his glassy eyes. His colorless lips tried to shape more words, but it took several tries. “Should I not?”

  “You should.”