Coal Black Horse Read online

  Robey lifted on his toes to damp the tremors circuiting the ground and a shock of fear went through him and it was like candied syrup running the lengths of his extremities. His belly swooped low and dashed at his pelvis where it fluttered. This night was war. The falling rain was war. The clipped moon was war. The earth where they stood and the sky they stood under was war. He had to fasten his mind to stave off the urge to piss himself and when the urge passed he armed himself with a dead man’s revolver and then a second one he jammed in his belt. He determined, as if it were his prerogative to do so, that he would not be shot again by any man on either side of that small earth if he could shoot the bastard first. War would not kill him.

  Horses reared and shrieked as the din of noise rose again and then surpassed itself. They kicked over the traces and kicking out with their hooves became entangled. A jack, braying and honking, plunged across the square, its ears swept back and its tail straight up in the air, a muleteer running behind, slipping and falling with broken leads still in his hands. Streamers of blood flowed from its nostrils, breaking and flattening and spattering its hide. It ran headlong through an iron fence and into a stone wall where it broke its neck and crumpled in a flower bed. Another soldier, his ribs blown out by an exploding shell, was revealed to him in lantern light, his throbbing heart, and he spoke on in delirium of a particular woman before he too expired.

  Sparks flew from minié balls and grapeshot that hit stones in the hard gravel yards. The major, now mounted and crying out a babel of orders, rode up in a flurry of lather and sweat and stopped where he stood, and he could feel the fling of heat from the horse, panting and about to drop as it skittered to keep its tangled feet under it.

  “Get down,” the major yelled at him, and when someone pushed him from behind he scurried for cover in the wet grass behind a spiked wrought-iron fence.

  Sharpshooters were now picking off the teamsters, the soldiers in the train yard and the soldiers in the tight confines of the streets, their flesh blurred by bullets. The major screamed out in anguish as a bullet passed through his black boot and entered his horse. A surgeon approached, dragged the boot from his leg and insisted upon immediate amputation, but the major kept him at bay with his drawn revolver, and the surgeon bound the wound while the major stayed in the saddle and continued his steady contribution of incoherent orders. Another bullet struck his wrist and his gauntlet filled with blood before he let it slip from his hand and slap to the ground where it lay red and bloated.

  Then, from back a lane unlit beyond the great fountained square, came the long dense sensation that comes in advance of a great force marshaling. Then there was the force itself and that alone was fearsome and powerful to witness and then he heard the officer’s command and the sound of slotted steel swords clearing their scabbards.

  “Form fours! Draw sabers! Charge!”

  Then came a sudden hurtling through space and behind it were the raiders materialized on horseback, kiting through the hedges and emerging from the alleys and gathering into the parallel streets where they charged like the bore from a burst dam, and then they were in their midst and abrupt explosions were erupting from the ends of their arms. Horses screamed and fell with groaning exhalations. A gush of blood spewed from another’s mouth as it whirled on its hind feet and bolted. A blade flashed and a hand was cut off at the wrist. Another flashed and a man’s head was nearly severed from his body and ropes of arterial blood tapped into the night’s darkness.

  There were now a hundred horses in the street, rearing on their hind legs, churning through the smoke and fire, the drizzle and blood. One soldier dropped his rifle and raised his hands and he was shot dead. Men were sitting up trying to staunch their own bleeding chests. A horse sat on its tail, both hind legs broken beneath it. With their swords the raiders slashed the gray canvas that covered the wagons and killed all who were revealed inside.

  From broken windows in the upper stories, soldiers continued to fire and when hit they collapsed where they stood, falling to the floor or tumbling out the window to the ground below.

  The major fought on, receiving saber cuts to the head and arms. His horse’s feet pounded the air at Robey’s face. The major grabbed a double-barreled shotgun from one who would shoot him and shot the man with his own load and then shot another and in short order he cut a third by the throat.

  “Close up,” he cried ferociously. “By God, close up.”

  But battles are determined by the soldiers fighting them and not orders from the top. The major was sitting bolt upright in the saddle when a minié ball came singing through the air and passed into his head and then he was dead and falling. The palings of the fence spit into his side and he was held there, stopped in his abrupt descent, his body pierced with black iron and dangling aloft like a great speared fish. His white face went blood red and gently came to rest in Robey’s lap where he sat on the ground. His head still smoked where he’d been shot and his eyes were mere glass as they’d had their last flickering before his body fell.

  Then it was over. And the air was possessed of an unnatural silence, but it was a silence that did not last long before it was replaced with hissing and roaring, with moans and screams. The enduring sound beneath sound. The silence had lasted for as long as it took the listening mind to return from where it had sought refuge from the gun’s detonations to the timeless human sounds of pain and expiration.

  On the ground around him came the moans and the sibilant cries of the wounded and dying men, the men stranded at the simple ends of lives. Horses had broken loose, and riderless they galloped about like the charge of a strange maneuvering ghost cavalry. He wondered what you did when a man shot in the stomach cried for water and you didn’t have any water to give him. He stumbled across the face of the young officer who carried the leather book. He sat crumpled, half upright, and stared mutely at the red bubbles frothing from a hole in his breast as if he were aware of watching his life floating from him, his comprehending mind understanding how soon it would be and his active mind helpless to do anything.

  They dragged into the light of the lit fires the cavalry officer with the elaborate moustache whose hair was black and glistened with oil. He no longer wore the gold braids of the cavalry but was wearing civilian clothes instead. He had been wounded slipping out the back door of a house on his way to escape.

  “Put him through,” one of them said, his voice half lit with whiskey, unable to stop what had been started.

  “He ain’t hurtin’ nobody.”

  “It’s a ugly bull that never hurts anybody,” the first one said, and drew his pistol and shot the officer in the forehead.

  “He’s dead,” the second observed, bending down and dumbly peering at the body before stripping it of boots and spurs.

  “He is indeed dead,” the one said, and freely conceded the hell he was already destined for. He then congratulated himself on how consistently true his shot and rode away.

  “He loves to kill them,” the second one said to another.

  What soldiers had not been killed or wounded were gathered into the train station and made to huddle on the floor where the mutilated and dying lay packed together. Those who had fled were taken after by raiders on horseback and for some minutes after the battle came the sound of single shots from deep in the night’s gloom as the hunters found their prey.

  The blood was already turning black as the peddlers reappeared and began hawking their wares to the customers newly arrived. The raiders hardly paused in their killing before they attacked the slat-sided army wagons, where they dis -covered bologna sausages, hardtack, and sponge cakes. They turned the muzzles of a cannon on the train engine and blasted holes in the boiler. The water jacket ruptured and steam geysered into the air. Another round went through the cylinder and still another destroyed the crank pin and the driving wheel as curtains of water rained down on the cross ties.

  After the battle, it was not long before he could hear the clack of dice inside a cracker box and a
fter the battle there was food: milk, butter, eggs, and chickens brought from their hiding places and into the kitchens and onto porches. Stoves were fed with wood and pots set to boil. Afterward, doors and windows were flung open and invitations to eat were extended, and from a chapel the mounting voice of a choir followed the building strains of a pipe organ.

  He walked the streets in search of the coal black horse. He thought too he might see the girl. He ate while he wandered, crossing street after street, discarding chicken bones in the gutters as he walked, but he could find neither the horse nor the girl.

  These men he now walked among carried a sudden fatal danger with them. They seemed without cares and seemed as capable of turning on each other and even their own selves as they were of killing their enemies. They wore low crowned, broad-brimmed hats. They were long-haired and unshaven and their overshirts were dirty with camp grease and fire smoke. Their gray trousers were black stained with saddle sweat and horse lather. They wore three and four Navy Colts in their belts and carried shotguns slung on their backs. Their faces were darkened with sun and gunpowder. They did not walk but loped the canted walk of traveling wolves.

  “Murderers,” the veiled old woman in pearls said to a passing raider wearing a gold cord wrapped around his black slouch hat.

  “Just murderers, ma’am, every one of them,” the raider said, without hesitating and without looking her way.

  THAT NIGHT HE SPENT what passed for sleep in a shed while a dog nearby sent up an intermittent barking and howling. During his wanderings he had learned that a regular army, one he concluded to be his father’s, had crossed back into the valley at Front Royal and when he inquired he learned he was just days behind. A voice in the night told the dog to shut up its yap, but it continued its noise until there was the sound of a single muffled shot and then there was silence. Morning was only hours away when he could no longer hold off the crush of sleep and later it was still dark when he awoke, and in that short time the raiders had departed. They had disappeared as silently as they had appeared.

  The morning air was damp when he came to and a dense grimy river fog rolled in across the grain fields. While the rest of the town slept, he hurried through the compact streets under the colorless sky, the faint light of morning still on the river. The gutters were now dry of runoff, but the damp was running from the walls and fences as if it were spring’s last thaw. A keen northeast wind was sweeping the stony streets and at each corner a hot wet draft struck his body and cut into him. He was well armed and past the want of hunger and thirst. His clothes were mildewed and rotting on his body, but that could wait. His ankle was swollen and ached to his leg and into his hip and he felt his thin body was down to nothing but muscle and bone, but he did not care.

  In the train yard were the dead buildings and there were the boxcars and there was the engine and the twisted trucks and all were shrouded in the wet acrid smoke of their burning. The streets were strewn with debris and mottled with swatches and runs of cracking blackness and he knew they were the bloody stains of the fallen soldiers. He needed a horse and he found one, a big cream workhorse with knotted shoulders cropping a trampled kitchen garden. It still wore a collar and the last vestments of a broken harness draped from its neck and dragged on the ground. It was a wounded and sorry mount, one jaded and abandoned by the hostlers, but it was stout, clear-eyed, and of even breath.

  He mounted the horse and beat its hind end and jabbed his heels into its sides. The cream horse remained obstinate and heavy as a log as it slowly understood its charge. He jerked the makeshift bridle he’d fashioned and swore and slowly the horse understood and began ahead. It crossed over the tracks, its wide hooves grating on the ballast of broken stone and gravel between the ties. On the other side was a deep ditch and instinctively the animal sat as they plunged into it, stood, and bounded up the other side. Then they were on the brambled and nettled waste ground beyond the station and cindered rail bed and the cream horse, encouraged and not finicky in the least, breasted through them.

  Here the land settled to the river bottom and was bathed in runners of fog and mist, and the wind was now slicing over his head in hot gusts. The horse slowed and stepped gingerly as the ground disappeared in the gauze of whiteness below its chest. He kicked the horse, but still it stepped no more quickly for his efforts, picking its way over the rough and uneven ground. From the east came broad trails of pale silver presaging the advent of another day’s light. Then rising to his nostrils in a sweep of dank air from the earth below came the sweet cloying smell of newly wrought death.

  His craw surged and he tried to bend away as he retched a clear fluid, but it drenched his knee and pant leg and when he opened his eyes he could see revealed in the passing windows of tattered fog, the soldier with the thin beard and gold-rimmed eye glasses who’d taken him prisoner and then the kind old major surrounded by his guard. His face was gray and his large head seemingly misshapen in the bone plates. All about him were the men in blue where they’d been carted and strewn for burial and the sight of them was as eerie as drowned fish. They were dead and face up and their eyes were open, as if watching his departure, as if they’d momentarily paused in this low wet place to witness his leaving before resuming their own eternal travels. He understood if he had to be dead to keep his eyes open and not forget to do that because that was the habit of dead men.

  As he left that dead ground he entered a forest on a path that the cream horse found and it wasn’t long before he heard a whickering in the trees distant, and pulled up. The fog was so dense he could not see what was before him and he leaned forward and stretched his neck and waved his hand before his eyes as if fog could be sorted away.

  The whickering came again and it was close and then he found its shape and he could see it was the coal black horse. It had been watching him as he rode in and now snorted and pawed the ground. It tossed its head and made a sound as if impatient and even castigating. In disbelief he called out to it and it tossed its head again and then beside it he saw two legs dangling from the round bottom of a white dress. On the ground beneath the feet was a straw hat and a parasol. It was the little goose man and he was hung by his broken neck. He’d been unhorsed in the fork of a low branch. His tongue was purple and swelled from his mouth and spread across his chin. His eyes bulged from his face like hen’s eggs and he smelled from where he’d pissed and shat himself.

  At first he thought to apologize to the horse and would have except for fear the horse would not accept his supplications. He slid from the back of the cream horse and his face stinging with tears of restraint, he spoke gently to the coal black horse as he led it away from the little man’s hanging. They walked slowly at first and then he stopped and pulled himself into the saddle. Then he urged the horse on and it hesitated before responding as if to acknowledge that its rider had learned some valuable lesson and should now be rewarded for such.

  They bore off from the river and struck the forest. They came to rails and crossed them and descended the other side. It was a gradual descent but a continual bed of rocks or large stones. In some places, the horse was at a loss how to proceed through the wild and dreary land but figured its path on the move and pursued it with abandon. Throughout the hilly land was a profusion of springs where the water came from beneath the limestone ground, clear and fresh. The timber grew large and the woods became crowded with underbrush and fallen trees and rocks, and more than once the coal black horse found passage that would have scraped him from its back had he not lifted his legs or bent low on its neck. But it did not matter. Nothing mattered as they traveled deeper into the North to intercept the army.

  10

  DAYS LATER AS HE neared the wide flat river of his destination, where the army of his father was said to be, there were fresh rumors of a movement in a northeasterly direction and it was as if the eddies of seventy-five thousand men up and tramping the dusty roads could be felt in the very earth itself. He was only days behind the march when he turned in its directio
n, following its tremors.

  Long afterward, he would remember how fifty miles away he heard the thunder of cannons echoing through the blue mountains, the reverberations of the bombardment that preceded, as he was to learn, the final charge of the fateful battle. The next afternoon, he rode through a drenching rainstorm that leeched the July landscape of all color and after dark he met the saturated vanguard of the gray retreating south.

  Another storm cut loose in the morning, one that was more vicious, and in moments the tide of men and horses, the drovers and their herds of braying beeves he was traveling against, were forced by the deluge to wade through the deep cloying mud like hogs, the turning wheels clogging from spoke to felloe and locked in its hold skidded over the ground. Insensate, he was drawn against the tide of sutlers and ambulances, the carriages and caissons, the long parade of the hip-shot, the mud-spattered, the blood-dirty, and the slaughter-gutted, the wheeling army of the dead and the dying. For twenty miles they came against him and the coal black horse in a relentless tide and he rode on without hesitation through their broken and driven ranks. Their calls of foreboding and their hollowed silences were a testament to the great killing and dying that had taken place where they had departed. They had died on the battlefield and now they died by the road and they died in the road and those that did were ground to pulp from the rolling iron-shod wheels, the treading of horses’ hooves, the tramp of so many barefoot men.

  At the end of that road, it was as if evil had descended and taken up inside man and caused man to flail and step before the bullet and receive the bullet and receive the blade and man could not help but put up flesh as shield against metal. For man to enter those fields had been to give up all will but the will to kill, or be killed, and to survive those fields was somehow to be cheated of death. At the end of that road, he knew was his destination.