Coal Black Horse

  Praise for Coal Black Horse

  “Gorgeous and moving. . . . With his lush, incantatory voice, Robert Olmstead describes a boy thrust into one of the war’s most horrific moments.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “With a horse like this, you just want to ride. And with the descriptive power such as he displays here, Olmstead makes the ride an exciting one—in lean prose, reminiscent of Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, with just the proper amount of sharp description. The special flavor Olmstead lends to the tale seems to come from a mix of ancient myth and our bloody history.”

  —NPR’s All Things Considered

  “A singular and poetic addition to the Civil War bookshelf. Like E. L. Doctorow’s award-winning The March, Robert Olmstead’s sixth novel ripples with with vivid war scenes and rich characterizations.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Magisterial. . . . Coal Black Horse is a remarkable creation. . . . Rife with the shattering lessons of war.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A riveting tale of the American past and a brilliantly realized journey into the heart of darkness. . . . It’s the kind of story telling that you will want to read once simply for the storytelling. . . . Then you will want to read it again to let Olmstead’s prose wash over you. It’s as muscular, sturdy, well hewn, and wise as the coal-black horse himself.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Gripping. . . . A mesmerizing, timely look at what war does to all of us. In stark, simple language, and a grammatical structure that echoes the work of Cormac McCarthy, Olmstead has found his own voice, one you will not easily forget.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “In no-frills prose, Olmstead deftly unspools Robey’s too-early loss of innocence and harrowing passage to manhood.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Exciting. . . . A grueling adventure.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Carries readers along as easily as the powerful, cunning coal black horse carries Robey Childs. . . . A taut, elegant novel of nearly flawless tone and structure—sweepingly descriptive, chock-full of unforgettable characters, authenticized with coarse country dialogue, satisfying on many levels. . . . A remarkable story of redemption carried on the strong back of masterful storytelling.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Coal Black Horse takes on the sheen of another Civil War masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage. Like Stephen Crane’s classic, Olmstead’s book is a harrowing tale of wartime horrors and deep human struggles, all sown within the American soil and spirit.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “Olmstead’s voice is clear, precise and vivid. . . Civil War buffs entraced by Cold Mountain will find Coal Black Horse a gallant equal.”

  —MSNBC.com

  “Olmstead’s powerful, spare novel takes a romantic tale of chivalry (a young knight, his horse, and a quest) and distorts it through the nightmare lens of war.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Olmstead makes the ride an exciting one, with just enough lean prose to keep the mystery an event both in time and out . . . and just the proper amount of sharp description to keep us bound to whatever piece of earth the particular moment of the story happens to be grounded in. . . . An effective mix of stark classic narrative and uncloying nostalgia.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A harrowing tale of wartime horrors and redemption set amid the gore and carnage that was the American Civil War. . . . Olmstead follows his true narrative voice and writes like a man on fire.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Compelling. . . . Suspenseful plotting, meticulous historical research and . . . equally lyrical descriptions of nature and violence.”

  —The Charlotte Observer

  “A powerful tale of the loss of innocence and the madness of war.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “A gripping read, with much extremely vivid rendering. . . . Sex, violence, revenge, sympathetic young protagonist, maiden in distress . . . it’s all there, enveloped in a plausibly dark take on life and death.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Both moving and inspirational. The tale also becomes a meditation on what war does to a man’s soul.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Profound. . . . Mesmerizing.”

  —The Columbus Dispatch

  “Robert Olmstead has created a compelling and beautifully written story that matches poetic and gritty writing with a page-turning plot.”

  —The Tampa Tribune

  “A haunting portrayal of the madness of war and its corrosive effects.”

  —The Salt Lake Tribune

  “The book’s powerful message lingers like the smell of wood smoke from a mountaintop cabin or an army encampment. The simplicity and endurance of the central characters leave the reader moved by the enormity of courage in a landscape of waste.”

  —The Star Democrat (Maryland)

  “Coal Black Horse is so tightly constructed that not a ray of sunshine pierces the solemn sky. The parched prose is black, brown, and gray exisiting within a world turned upside-down. Olmstead’s skill is considerable.”

  —Biloxi Sun Herald

  “A classic, timely tale of the cost of war, and the tragic toll it takes on individuals and their families.”

  —The Missourian

  “A stark, brutally lyrical Civil War novel.”

  —The Memphis Commercial Appeal

  COAL BLACK HORSE

  Also by Robert Olmstead

  River Dogs

  Soft Water

  A Trail of Heart’s Blood Wherever We Go

  America by Land

  Stay Here with Me

  COAL BLACK HORSE

  Robert Olmstead

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2007 by Robert Olmstead.

  All rights reserved.

  First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, May 2008.

  Originally published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2007.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by April Leidig-Higgins.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary

  perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters,

  places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or

  are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Olmstead, Robert.

  Coal black horse / Robert Olmstead.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-521-6 (HC)

  1. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 2. United States—History—Civil War,

  1861 – 1865—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3565.L67C63 2007

  813’.54—dc22 2006042914

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-601-5 (PB)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Paperback Edition

  Hast thou given the horse strength?

  Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?

  He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage . . .

  —BOOK OF JOB

  1

  THE EVENING OF SUNDAY May 10 in the year 1863, Hettie Childs called her son, Robey, to the house from the old fields where he walked the high meadow along the fence lines w
here the cattle grazed, licking shoots of new spring grass that grew in the mowing on the edge of the pasture.

  He walked a shambling gait, his knees to and fro and his shoulders rocking. His hands were already a man’s hands, cut square, with tapering fingers, and his hair hung loose to his shoulders. He was a boy whose mature body would be taller yet and of late he’d been experiencing frightening spurts of growth. On one night alone he grew an entire inch and when morning came he felt stretched and his body ached and he cried out when he sat up.

  The dogs scrambled to their feet and his mother asked what ailed him that morning. Of late she’d become impatient with the inexplicit needs of boys and men and their acting so rashly on what they could not fathom and surely could not articulate. In her mind, men were no different than droughty weather or a sudden burst of rainless storm. They came and they went; they ached and pained. They laughed privately and cried to themselves as if heeding a way-off silent call. They were forever childish, sweet and convulsive. They heard sound the way dogs heard sound. They were like the moon — they changed every eight days.

  He scratched at his head, knotting his long hair with his fingers. He felt to have been seized by phantoms in the night and twisted and turned, and his body spasmed and contorted.

  He told her that he did not know exactly what it was possessed him, and did not even understand what happened enough to be dumb about it, but thought it was a condition, like all others, that was not significant and with patience it soon would pass.

  “That seems about right,” she said.

  As he walked the fence lines that cold, silky spring evening, he let a hickory stick rattle along the silvered split rails. He was thinking about his father gone to war. Always his father, always just a thought, a word, a gesture away. He spoke aloud to him in his absence. He asked him questions and made observations. He said good night to him before he fell asleep and good morning when he woke up. He thought it would not be strange to see him around a corner, sitting on a stool, anytime, soon, now. He had been born on the mountain in the room where his mother and father conceived him, but it was his father who insisted he was not really a born-baby but a discovered-baby and was found swimming in the cistern, sleeping in the strawy manger, squatting on an orange pumpkin, behind the cowshed.

  Swarming the air about his head that evening, there was a cloud of newly hatched mayflies, ephemeral and chaffy, their pale membrous wings pleating the darkening sky. Not an hour ago he’d watched them ascend in their moment, like a host of angels from the stream that bubbled from a split rock and pooled, before scribing a silver arc in the boulder-strewn pasture, before falling over a cliff, and then he heard his mother’s plaintive voice.

  When he came down from the high meadow, the dogs were standing sentry at her sides, their solemn stalky bodies leaning into her.

  She said softly and then she said again with the conclusion of all time in her voice when he did not seem to understand, “Thomas Jackson has died.”

  “It is now over,” she said, not looking at him, not favoring his eyes, but looking past him and some place beyond. There was no emotion in her words. There was no sign for him to read that would reveal the particulars of her inner thoughts. Her face was the composure of one who had experienced the irrevocable. It was a fact unalterable and it was as simple as that.

  He held his bony wrist in his opposite hand. He shuffled his feet as if that gesture were a means to understanding. He patiently waited because he knew when she was ready, she would tell him what this meant.

  “Thomas Jackson has been killed,” she finally said. “There’s no sense in this continuing.” She paused and sought words to fashion her thoughts. “This was a mistake a long time before we knew it, but a mistake nonetheless. Go and find your father and bring him back to his home.”

  Her words were as if come through time and she was an old mother and the ancient woman.

  “Where will I find him?” he asked, unfolding his shoulders and setting his feet that he might stand erect.

  “Travel south,” she said. “Then east into the valley and then north down the valley.

  She had sewed for him an up-buttoned, close-fitting linen shell jacket with the braids of a corporal and buttons made of sawed and bleached chicken bones. She told him it was imperative that he leave the home place this very night and not to dally along the way but to find his father as soon as he could and to surely find him by July.

  “You must find him before July,” she said.

  He was not to give up his horse under any circumstance whatsoever and if confronted by any man, he was to say he was a courier and he was to say it fast and to be in a hurry and otherwise to stay hush and learn what he needed to know by listening, like he was doing right now. She then told him there is a terror that men bring to the earth, to its water and air and its soil, and he would meet these men on his journey and that his father was one of these men, and then she paused and studied a minute and then she told him, without judgment, that someday he too might become one of these men.

  “Be aware of who you take help from,” she told him, “and who you don’t take help from.” Then she eyed him coldly and told him, to be safe, he must not take help from anyone.

  “Don’t trust anyone,” she said. “Not man, nor woman nor child.”

  The jacket on the one side was dun gray in color, dyed of copperas and walnut shells. When she turned it inside out, it showed blue with similar braids of rank. She told him he was to be on whatever side it was necessary to be on and not to trust either side.

  “Secure pistols,” she said, “and do this as soon as you can. Gain several and keep them loaded at all times. If you must shoot someone, shoot for the wide of their body, and when one pistol is empty throw it away and gain the pistol of the man you have shot. If you think someone is going to shoot you, then trust they are going to shoot you and you are to shoot them first.”

  Her voice did not rise. It betrayed no panic. She instructed him with calmness and determination, as if the moment she’d anticipated had finally arrived and she was saying words to him she had decided upon a long time ago.

  “Yes ma’am,” he said quietly, and repeated her words back to her. “Shoot them first.”

  The dogs shivered and mewled and clacked their jaws. “Remember,” she said, reaching her hands to his shoulders, “danger passes by those who face up to it.”

  He remembered too how she had told him at twelve years of age he was old enough to work the land, but he wasn’t old enough to die for it. To die for the land, he had to be at least fourteen years old and now he was.

  When she finished her instructions, he drew a bucket of icy water from the well and splashed himself down to the waist. He toweled himself dry and unfolded a clean linen shirt. He dressed in black bombazine trousers and a pair of his father’s flat-heeled leather brogans and then he donned the shell jacket. His square hands and bony wrists extended beyond the jacket’s cuffs while the trouser legs gathered at his shoe tops. He plucked at his cuffs and tugged at the bones to make room for his chest.

  His mother observed to him that he had growed some on top, as if it were a mystery to her and his face colored in patches for in her voice was carried a mother’s tenderness, but for the most she remained distant and did not change her mind and did not suggest he eat and sleep and wait until morning light before he departed.

  After a time, long and purposeful, she cast her eyes on him, but she did not gift him with her smile. She reached up and he bent down and she hesitantly touched him at the side of his face. Her fingertips lingered on his cheek and neck as if she were not one with eyesight but was a blinded woman seeing with her fingers, and then she held a button and tugged and he felt as if she was pulling the inside of his chest.

  It was then he realized just how sad and how futile his journey was to be. She was sending him in the direction of his own death and she could see it in no other way and she could do nothing else than send him off. Even if he was to return alive, s
he’d never forgive herself for risking her son’s life for the sake of his father’s life.

  “You take off the coat,” she said, changing her mind, and she helped him free the buttons and shuck the coat sleeves from his shoulders and arms. “Be a boy as long as you can. It won’t be that much longer. Then use the dyed coat. You will know when.”

  “Yes ma’am.” “

  You are not to die,” she said, though in her face loomed darkness.

  “No ma’am.”

  “You will be back,” she said, her eyes suddenly alive, as if they were eyes seeing the life past this life.

  “Yes ma’am. I will be back,” he said, glancing toward the darkness of the open door.

  “You will promise,” she said, commanding his attention.

  “I promise.”

  “Then I will wait here for you,” she said, and reached her other hand to his face and drew him to her as she raised her body to his and kissed his lips.

  In that kiss was the single moment she reconsidered her imperative. It passed through her as if a hand of benediction. He waited for her to say more words to him, but she did not. He felt her blue eyes wetting his face. She kissed him again, more urgently this time, and they both knew she had to let him go and then she let him go. He stepped away, gave a final wave of his hand and then he left out the door.

  Outside, in the cooling, anodyne air of the mountain reach, evening was fading into night. His mother’s touch still warmed his neck, his lips still heated from her kiss. He bridled a cobby gray horse with pearly eyes, saddled up, and rode from the home place and down into the darkness that possessed the Copperhead Road. If he had looked back, he would not have seen his mother but the dogs sitting in the still open doorway, their cadent breathing slow and imperceptible.

  It took half that night to leave the sanctuary of the home place, to leave the high meadow, the old fields, and descend the mountain switchbacks into the cold damp hollows and to leave the circuits of the hollows and ride through the river mists of the big bottom. The trees and ledges sheltered the starlight as he passed beneath them. The mountain night was uncommonly still and the moonlight eerily shuttered by drifting scud, but in unshrouded moments the moonlight broke through and found the hollows and in long moments he was bathed in its white light as if the hollows were not made of stone but were channels of mirrored glass. So bright was the light he could read the lines in his hands and the gritted swirls in his fingertips.