Coal Black Horse

by Robert Olmstead

  “Tell her the woman is dead. She’ll want to know.”

  “I ain’t telling her nothing,” Robey said.

  “My head is so heavy,” the man said. “Like lead.”

  Nothing more was said as they waited together. He thought to feel remorse for his actions. Had he now made enough of his own needless contributions to the world’s killing? No matter how just and righteous his actions? Had he not ended life the way others had ended his father’s life? He thought of guilt and invited it inside himself, but it would not enter his mind or heart and it remained a cold and dormant place inside him. Did he kill himself when he first killed and so was already dead?

  When his work was done he mounted the coal black horse, caught the polished reins of the sorrel, and rode toward home. As he traveled that thin stony path, he thought how a kind of wickedness had died, but what it left behind could not be undone or unremembered. Ahead could be seen the light from the flaring lantern shining through the windows. He thought how the wickedness lived inside his own house but could not be killed when it was born and must be loved without condition. He wished to shudder or tremble. He wished to regret his actions, to lament, to cry. He wanted to long for the past when he was a boy and lived as a boy.

  But he could do none of these. His bygone days were mere shapes and scenes played against a shadowy wall. He had no past because he was too young. He had no past, except the past of a child: hunger and satisfaction, heat and cold, wet and dry, squares of yellow light on a wooden floor, companionable animals, the love of a mother and father. There was no bite of conscience, no thought to retrace the life and live it differently from what was done before. He wanted nothing to do with such wandering thoughts or feelings. He was so minded as he rode through the evening vapors, away from the man he’d killed beneath the moon’s rising face.

  That night she wandered barefoot into the room where he sat. The only light was the nimbus of a tallow candle centered on the table where they ate their meals.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Can’t sleep?” he said.

  “My eyes won’t close when I sleep,” she said.

  She stretched until her body refused to go any farther and then she made a surprised sound and let it back. She came close to him and tapped his knees that he should make them a place for her to sit. She looked like a child with long tangled lashes that wove and unwove each time her eyes closed and opened. She scrutinized the palms of her small hands and then let them fall helplessly against the round of her belly.

  “You ought to put on your stockings,” he said. “The night’s cold.”

  “It is surely cold,” she said, and as if in agreement came a swoop of wind that scattered snow like buckshot against the cabin walls.

  “This is the cold that brings the warm,” he said, and she told him it was the same thing his mother said.

  He wondered what she might be tonight. Her mind seemed improved. Would he tell her? Could he not?

  “What’s your idea of heaven?” she said urgently. “Do you think we are saved by hope?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t have any answers like that tonight, nor no questions.”

  “Do you pray?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think I do.”

  “Well. If you decide to start, just don’t do it where I can hear it.”

  “I will remember that,” he said.

  “What is it?” she said again. “Are you going to tell me?”

  “I seen him,” he said, and she turned her eyes on him with all their clarity.

  “You seen him?”

  “He told me the woman is dead.”

  “Was it bad?”

  “He didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask.”

  “Where’d you see him?”

  “On the road. He’s dead too.”

  She then looked off to a place that was inside her mind. He watched her thoughts as they crossed her eyes. In her head were mysteries he could not decipher.

  “Are you sure he’s dead?”

  “He’s dead,” he told her, his voice resolute, and yet he realized that even in the state of death, life-blind and quelled, the man would haunt her and he would continue his possession of her forever. He wondered if there would ever be enough peace to stop this turning for the wound that had been cut into her memory.

  The room filled with a great pressure and it was as if the air was being squeezed through the cracks and jambs. The stove banged again as the fire’s temperature increased and there came the visitation of memory from Gettysburg, the portal through which the past might come into the present. The stove joints ticked with expansion and a beam in the wall pealed out as it chafed on a peg. Outside the wind was running and in the morning would be white sculpted fields, the ground swept bare and strangely grassy and in other places the earth would carry hanging drifts higher than his head.

  “His was the blackest soul,” she said as if the news of his death was all so long ago.

  She held out her hand, a fist unfolded, her mouth open and wordless. For days she’d struggled to find the strength to bear down on the pain. She thought she must get it stopped before it continued. For days she’d felt her tiny bones shifting and moving, finding positions of accommodation. She prayed for the strength, but it just hadn’t come. She suddenly groaned and cried out as her leg was seized by a cramp. She stretched the curled leg and held it in the air above the floor where its muscle quivered beneath her skin and finally loosened. The infant was ready to be born, and known only to her it was rushing its birth.

  “The pain when it comes is worse than knives,” she said. “I want to die.” Then she said, “Lift me up,” and when he did she said, “Come to bed,” and he followed her to bed where she asked he lay down behind her and press his knuckled hand against her back.

  “Don’t rub,” she said, her voice reed thin. “Just push hard. Push as hard as you can with your fist.”

  When the pain subsided she wanted him to hold her in his arms and rock her gently. He found the back of her neck with his face and breathed deeply her sleepy smell. She moved her back into his chest and pulled his arm to her chest, his hand to her breast. There was about nothing left of her, not back or shoulders or chest, her belly so huge. She moved his hand to her belly and there her skin was stretched and taut and it was holding her this way they slipped into the lull of exhausted sleep.

  He did not remember when he fell asleep but his gesture upon waking was to resume the pushing with his fist. Yet when he lifted his hand he found nothing to touch and when he crawled up through sleep, he could not find her and the bed was cold and soaking wet. He stood from the wet bed and with his first drink of water rinsed the taste of sleep from his mouth and with the second slaked the thirst brought on by the dry heat of the wood fire. He thought to have found her in the darkness by now, but he didn’t.

  Then he called out to her and tore the quilt from the bed and barefoot he was running for the door.

  Outside the night was blue and vivid and continuous with its blanket of scraping winter light. He could hear his mother come from sleep and calling out his name at his back. In the forest the pines wore their mantles of snow and from the barns and stables was drafted a strange and serene silence. He called out her name in the stillness and the sound of his voice ran out to distance across the brow of the snow-covered summit.

  “Rachel,” he cried. “Rachel.”

  He felt the sting of cold in his lungs. His heart was pounding in his chest, but there was no answer returned. In the sky Pegasus was due west and the Big Dipper stood upright on its handle. The flight silhouette of an owl, its shallow wing beats passed over his head and he looked off in its telling direction.

  Then he could see her in faint illumination lighted by the moon. She lay at the misted and unfrozen stream bank, where she’d carried herself to the place where the hot waters bubbled up from the earth. She was trembling and moaning and he began to run to her, but when she saw him coming she
stood. She held up a hand and yelled at him, “Let me die,” but she did not speak whole words before they were torn with her cries of pain. He kept on, dragging the blanket he’d pulled from the bed. She waved her hands, no, telling him to stay away, and when he did not stop she turned and threw herself full body into the warm water.

  He saw the flash of her white legs as she fell down into the pool. He was running across the frozen ground, so near the clouded and steamy shoals of the spring. She then stood upright, her wet shift a sheen in the moonlight and stepped into the eddy where the current circled a boulder before taking a sharp cooling swing, before quickening and roping with heavy turbulence and troughy rapids, before falling off the mountain.

  Here she let go from her grasp and there was a white bobbing that floated from the shallows and made for the current’s catch. There was first one and then there was another one and both of them dunking and rising like tiny pumpkins, the second one floating after the first one.

  He splashed into the shallows of the birth-stained water as the current carried them toward the falls. He threw himself forward, rasing a great flounce of water that swiftly closed to submerge him. He stood and ran and dove again, his thighs breaking the surface, and he was catching them in his hands, first one and then the other, their tiny faces red and soundless and contorted with the unimaginable terror of being born.

  Afterward, he wished to console her, but she seemed to want nothing from him. She turned her back on him and in her stance was written the question why: Why did you do that? Why did you save them? Who gave you the right to do that?

  She told him, “I want to hate you for what you have done, hate you as much as I hate him who did this to me,” but he made no reply.

  For several days there was nothing of motherhood that kindled inside her, but Hettie would not relent and finally she gave in and let them nurse at her breasts. They were two little boys with fine downy birth-hair on their shoulders, backs, and their odd-shaped heads. Their faces were like those of tiny old men and they beat the air with their fists and their cries were hearty and healthy exercises. She refused to name them and they were not concerned because for this there would be time.

  Then there was more cold and a chilling rain that turned to snow and lasted for days, and winter on the mountain that year seemed longer and colder than any winter before. The snow and cold, as if an edgeless sea, enveloped the dormant earth, the arrowed pines shrugged to the skirling wind. Hung in the sky was the white sun, the desolate glistering of far bright stars, the cooling remnants of old stars. Outside the candle-bright cabin was a tide of white-locked fields in deep suspended silence.

  During these days of snow-pent darkness he was seized by a sleep with an iron grip, senseless, nameless, and peaceful sleep, and only afterward did he sense the flow of time gone by and feel what was inside him begin to ease. He had died a first death and a second and a third. He knew in this life he was not done with death and killing.

  It was a sleeper’s world frosted, silent, dark and starkly beautiful, and he remembered tranquillity. He remembered the days in the valley riding the coal black horse. The horse rising to the bit, its hot breath blowing back at him, the shedding sweat from its sleek black neck, flecks of foam from its quivering nostrils. He remembered his father. He remembered the dead. He remembered nothing moving in the darkness of those nights, but one night he awoke to a chorus of baby cries and Rachel cradling a baby in her arms and feeding the baby and then feeding the other baby, and when she lay down she lay down beside him, her belly tucked against his back and her face at his neck. He remembered her arm reaching across his chest and gently taking her wrist in his hand. Sleep, he remembered thinking, sleep a little while longer.

  COAL BLACK HORSE

  A Conversation with the Author

  A Reading and Discussion Guide

  A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR

  Although the novel is largely about a boy’s journey, it is also about a very particular moment in history. Much of its power comes from the Civil War battle scenes, which feel so real and visceral. What kind of research did you do to re-create those scenes?

  It began with a visit to Gettysburg. As a boy growing up in New Hampshire, my war of fascination was the American Revolution, but when living in southern Pennsylvania I began to wonder about the Civil War. So I went to Gettysburg to see the battlefi eld and slowly but surely began to feel myself drawn into that experience. I was trying, as a curious person, to learn about it and understand it. I began to read and one thing led to another. I visited other battlefi elds and somewhere along the way I decided I wanted to try to write this novel. Again, as a way to experience it. I was as ignorant of this world as Robey Childs and in a sense I invented him so that we could discover it together. I remember I was at Shiloh for a major reenactment and was standing inside a battery of cannons. I could feel the concussive force of the explosions against my body and coming up through the earth. My face felt wet and when I wiped at my nose it was bleeding. I thought how that must have happened to the artillerists and for a moment I had the tiniest glimpse of their experience.

  You’re not from the South, yet you capture your characters’ voices and diction so well. Did you read Civil War accounts or did it come by way of instinct?

  It’s true, I’m not Southern born but was raised in the country in the northern reach of the Appalachian chain. A lot of similarities up north and down south along that spine of those mountains. And the mountains of West Virginia, the fi ctional setting of Robey’s home, exists in a kind of not-south not-north ether. Even in ancient times it was a place where the northern tribes and southern tribes brushed up against each other and was a kind of no-man’s-land, contested territory and a place where you could get killed. As to the voices, I think of them as rural and arcadian, naturally sardonic, and trenchant. My family had an amazing talent for the aphoristic and the epigrammatic. Th is went a long way in establishing authority in a character. When Hettie Childs fi rst spoke she came onto the page as if she’d been waiting 150 years and fi nally this was her moment. She is real to me in every way.

  It seems as though the coal black horse is equally real to you. Did you grow up with horses?

  Horses, cows, pigs, sheep. Yes. Th e farm is still there and I get home every chance I can. Th e coal black horse began as a simple means of conveyance. Th e boy needed a good horse if he was to carry out his mother’s imperative. He needed a horse with experience he lacked. So I came up with the coal black horse and then the strangest thing happened. With each draft the horse became more and more prominent. Th e horse grew in my mind and grew on the page and in time the horse was the same to me as it was to Robey Childs. I mean that literally. Such a horse as I imagined was lustrously iridescent. Like coal when turned to the light. I was amazed when I fi rst saw the hardcover jacket my publisher did for the hardcover. It is so arresting. It really took my breath away. And of course there is something ancient and timeless about the horse and the rider. Th e horse is consort and for thousands of years we have lived together by agreement. I think they are very beautiful. Sometimes I think, like Hettie, the coal black horse was out there the whole time and just waiting for Robey and me to come along.

  In the process of writing the book, did you think about how warfare has changed since the Civil War?

  Combat actually changed during that war. Take for instance the minie ball, invented by Captain Claude-Étienne Minié of France. Th is was a high-caliber grooved conical lead bullet. It could be loaded quickly, and because it was grooved, when fi red from a rifl e it was very accurate over a long distance, and yet the generals still believed in massed lines of men in close formation charging over open ground. New weapons, old tactics. Wounds were especially horrible and so many wounded required amputation because the minie ball did not just break bone but actually shattered whole sections of bone, and the bone could not be mended.

  But however terrible and chaotic war is, I think instances of courage and dignity and sacrifi ce
in warfare are timeless and universal. I am not sure if it’s true, but I read that the men who retreated aft er Pickett’s famous charge walked backwards because it would have been ignoble to have been shot in the back.

  Even now I think the reasons why boys and men go to war haven’t changed. We must recognize what a great adventure war is. If not for the Civil War thousands and thousands of young men were destined to live their entire lives in the same place, the same town. Th ey saw the war as an escape from daily lives that were relentlessly boring and tedious. War is extremely liberating and purifying and for so many men, they were never so alive as when they were at war. It is not acceptable to talk about this love of war, but I think it’s real. I do not think this has changed. William Faulkner wrote, “Th e past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

  What was the biggest challenge for you in writing the novel?

  I think all writers are more interested in what they don’t know than what they do know. Naturally, helplessly, hopelessly curious about everything. Research is so fascinating. I just loved all that reading and those experiences, but ultimately I am a dramatist, not a historian. So, two things: First I had to acknowledge how inexhaustible the information is and literally begin to turn away from it. Second, I had to fi nd a way to animate the story I wanted to tell. But, where to start? And how to start? And where to go from there? In a sense, all stories are about what we mean to ourselves and what we mean to each other. It’s really that simple, but every one of them has to be diff erent. I thought about the boy leaving home and entering that landscape. He was really quite the innocent. He was born in remoteness. It was his story I wanted to tell—a boy sent out to bring his father home, a boy looking for his father. I think for all time mothers have been sending their sons to bring home their fathers. I think about how hard it was for her to send him. I assumed a vein of iron in these people. I think there are people who have such faith in each other.