Coal Black Horse Read online

  He did not call out his father’s name as he moved against the retreat, did not ask of those sunken and glassy-eyed men where he could find his father. He did not want to intrude on their suffering, but more so he did not want to be heard or to be seen by them. He wanted to pass through their gabbled ranks as if he were not there and as if he were something of an essence and was capable of splitting time and walking the seams of place unknown and unseen. He had done such before, walking quietly through the place of deer or bear, walking up to a rabbit and taking it by the neck as it watched him come on. He simply knew he would find his father because he knew his father would be where he went to find him.

  As he approached the town, everywhere the eye looked was the litter of war. There was paper torn from the cartridges rain-pasted to every surface, shreds of ripped clothing, blanket, and sack trodden into the ground. There were sprung watches, broken plates and shards of crockery. He saw a boot, and then he saw a boot with a foot inside, a sleeve and then an arm inside a sleeve, a glove and then a hand inside a glove. There were dead horses, splintered caissons, the litter of corn cob and the brass tubes of cannons seated in the earth with their white oak carriages staved and broken and the tubes of the cannons blackened and bulging and cracked. A white horse, its forelegs shot off, lay on its side calmly cropping the tufted and trampled rye.

  The trees were made white and glistening as bone where they’d been peeled of their gnarled bark and whole men lay in rigid contorted shapes and some others lay as quiet and as peaceful in death as if they truly were asleep on the picnic ground.

  In the deadened woods where the bullets had stormed and the air still crackled with the smell of heat, sharpshooters were hanging in the trees by their cinched leather belts. Their bodies were turned out and they occupied the air like great frozen birds intent on kill and in a flash their flights arrested. They hung dead and could not raise their bodies, but it was as if at any moment they would come to swift and fierce motion, and for anyone to pass under their bowers would mean certain death.

  Those were but the small images where his mind could isolate what it found and save it into memory, for about the fields of milo maize were fifty thousand casualties, fifty thousand men who were killed, and wounded and missing from the roles. They were in parts and pieces. They were whole and seemingly unscathed and wandering about as the future dead while others were vapor or grease or but rags of flesh and pulverized bone. Strewn over the few hundred acres was everything a man carried inside and out. There were enough limbs and organs, heads and hands, ribs and feet to stitch together body after body and were only in need of thread and needle and a celestial seamstress.

  Their blood, gummed and clotted, was beginning to draw flies in the wet air. They lay with their broken legs twisted and contorted so, to even unfold a man in the attempt to configure him as a man would be near impossible. It was a horrible scene to witness, replete with sorrowful pleadings for water and assistance, while the silent dead resided in strange repose, their stiffened arms reaching to embrace a heaven. He decided from that day forever after that there must live a heartless God to let such despair be visited on the earth, or as his father said, a God too tired and no longer capable of doing the work required of him.

  In places there were swarms of movement, bodies still wriggling as if with souls attempting flight, but in these environs he knew even the souls had been killed and he knew this down inside himself, though he’d been told by his mother when the body dies the soul is immortal. Then a head lifted and a death drawn face caught his eye. It smiled and called a name his way, its eyes large with recognition. He approached, and when he leaned closer hands took hold of him and tried to claw out his eyes and he could do no other than boot the man’s head to save himself, and he thought, In war even the dead will kill you.

  He continued on afoot, walking from face to face, the coal black horse following behind, stepping gently over the dead and not addled by the rank iron smell of cooling blood. In one field, he found a lineup of dead dressed in butternut uniforms. It was below the brow of a western ridge and their hands were tied behind their backs and a single bullet had passed through their brains. He didn’t know what it was and could only figure they had tried to run from battle. One had a handkerchief tied over his mouth, perhaps to shut up his whimperings. He too was wounded mortally through the brain and they must have done it to keep him from hollering on the occasion of his imminent execution. Or maybe he’d gone mad. Or maybe he’d been wise. It didn’t matter: he was dead.

  His blood went hot and pulsed in his veins as he determined this was not to be feared for its horrible import but to be embraced for the knowledge it imparted. It was something to learn and to depend upon, another rule of the chaos. It disabused him even further of what he’d brought with him from the mountains. He saw that even they will kill you and if that is so, then anyone will kill you and he was relieved to know such and could plainly see how simple an equation war was becoming to him.

  In one wood was collected a field of the dying, a long, sad row of men who lay on the bare ground, moaning and twitching fitfully, blubbering in wave and cadence. They were left wholly to themselves. These were men who’d been severely wounded through the head, some with both eyes shot out. They were all mortally wounded and had been put aside to die without hope as quickly and peacefully as they might.

  Not far away from them was a long table where the surgeons worked from first sun to twilight and through the night,lopping off arms and legs with the quick gnawing strokes of their bone saws. Wagons carted away the bloody limbs and came back empty, wet, and glistening in the blaze of surrounding lanterns and again were loaded and hauled away.

  It was as many and again and again into infinity as the most people he’d ever seen in one place — in his whole life together — and they were all limbed and dead and dying and their air smelled fetid as if an ocean shore captured for days at low tide, close and unmoving, quaked by no wind. He knew this was no brittle edge of the world he’d entered. This was the world itself.

  There, in that wood, in the fleeting light of a declining watery sun was where he found his father. He was lying there, in that field of the dying men under a purple sky. He recognized him and he clasped his hand and his father stared into him with the look of an expectation at long last fulfilled.

  A bullet had smashed into his father’s cheek where it had left a black hole. It had then made a circuit of his cranium and exited out the back of his head. He could feel the ruptured path of broken bone the bullet had left as it coursed beneath his father’s scalp before exiting through the wall of the parietal bone. When his father tried to speak, Robey encouraged him to remain silent. As they held to each other, all around them were the constant murmurations of the dying: giving orders, fighting, praying, calling out the names of women and children, gasping, gurgling, and throat breathing.

  “I came as quick as I could,” he said, fighting the panic that had seized his voice.

  “It’s a good thing it weren’t any quicker,” his father whispered.

  “I tried hard,” he said, his father’s head on his lap.

  “I know.”

  There was a low moan he could not contain cidering from deep inside his chest.

  “Hush,” he told his father. “Hush now.”

  The moan began to grow and overwhelm his body and take possession of him. He had no control over it because it was his heart and lungs and backbone and he fought hard to not fly away into the thousand pieces of a boy flung into the sky and through the air and down into the earth.

  His face burned with what he had discovered at the end of the road. He could never have imagined what he found, could not confront how terrible his failure. His mind fled from him and his body ached from trying to keep it somewhere inside his body — his arms or legs or hands if not inside his skull. The feeling ran the ridges of his spine like a dragging knife point. Then it passed and he was not panicked anymore.

  11

  WH
EN HE FOUND his father in the field of the dying, he tucked his jacket under his bound head and found another jacket, a blue one with torn yellow piping, so as to move freely about the fields. For several hot days and wet nights to come, the departing troops would be parched by the sun and pelted by the heavy rain that washed the soil where the stains of battle did not run too deeply. The days: a relentless baking sun, which sets cloaks of steam and breeding flies to rise in the air.

  That first morning he awoke before light and tied the lead of the coal black horse to his father’s wrist and pinned the major’s letter to his father’s blanket. His father roused and under cover of the blanket he let Robey curl his fingers around pistol grips and only then, with the horse standing sentry, did he set out to forage for food and water.

  As he wandered the fields, he thought himself to be in his ghost form, the died boy who lived with the dead and ministered to the dead. He was not yet dead, but was still young enough to not attract attention from the slowly gathering marshals who were intended to bring some order to the ravaged fields of the battle’s aftermath. He foraged for what nourishment he could find to sustain his father and his fallen comrades. Inside the scattered haversacks were crocks of butter, mutton, veal, lard, and jars of sweet preserves. There were bottles of wine and oddly enough to be found were old bonnets, baby shoes, women’s gaiters, feather pillows, silverware, and jewelry. He heard in the town there were cart loads of bread, but these were soon gone and in the days that followed no more was delivered.

  There was every imaginable form of wound to be seen, horribly mutilated faces and men without arms or legs, and yet they were still alive and floundering in the mud like something left by a great swashing tide. Men drowned in the puddles where they lay for lack of an unbroken bone in their extremities by which they might turn themselves over to face the sky. At night they lay out upon the cold and wet earth, staring into the glowering darkness of the sky as they whispered their final prayers. While the fortunate were bedded on straw and hay, a blanket, an overcoat, most were stripped and being robbed and had nothing, not shoes or boots, not hat or coat or tunic or trousers.

  In the first hours he wore a lady’s kerchief around his face, wrapped layer upon layer and would let it slide down when he went back to his father’s side but after a while he became used to the universal smell of death and gave up the kerchief and forever after was immune and not bothered by it again, the iron odor of blood outside the body, the living stink of the wounded, the peculiar smell of expiration and soul escape.

  As he walked, there were to be seen dead men, surrounded by scraps of writing paper, who’d torn up their letters and the images of their betrothed they carried against their bodies, lest they come into the hands of some uncaring individual and be published in the Northern newspapers. The still living beckoned to him and they thrust their last pages into his hands and he carried the letters to keep them from the scavengers moving about the fields.

  The scavengers came like flights of starving birds. They were collecting what tokens of affection they could find sewn inside pockets and talismans worn about the necks, for the soldiers carried into battle braids of hair, lockets, curios, and women’s scarves. The scavengers moved like crows in the garden, skipping from one dead body to the next, furtively going through each pocket and lining to steal what single item they could find. They twisted rings off fingers and with their single prize they shamefully slunk away. These were intended as the anonymous memento mori of one of earth’s great battles and were destined for a drawer, or a closet, some private museum, or to be sold as reliquies, ransomed to bereaved families. The more industrious collected blankets, harnesses, and rifles. They led off horses, cannon limbers, caissons, and even ambulances they would rebuild as milk trucks and forage wagons.

  Sticking among the rocks and against trunks of trees were hair, brains, entrails, and shreds of human flesh cooking black in the heated air. There were men and horses swollen to twice their size, and in the days that followed he witnessed the shocking distension and protrusion of their eyeballs and he would eventually see them bursting open with the pressure of foul internal gases and vapors, their bloomings like horrible flowers exploding their petals and leaves and spewing them across the ground.

  Grave diggers came to work, men hunched over their shovels and the earth they turned in plodding fashion in every place heaving the ground uneven. There were two he watched as they filled one grave with the turned earth of the next. He thought they must have been at it all night for how long the sweeping, lifted mound of rolled soil they’d already left in their wake. He watched them until they paused with fatigue and one of them hoisted a jug to his shoulder only to find it empty. He wasn’t close enough to hear their exchange of words, but apparently it was an argument over the empty jug. One of them dropped his shovel and doubled his fists, whereupon the other lifted his shovel in the air and slammed him on his shoulder cuff. They closed in a hold and struggled against each other, while beneath their feet were dead men, their eyes white as milky glass, until finally the grave diggers fell among the dead where they did not move except for their breathing chests.

  In a peach orchard, he came across young men gathering up the amputated limbs and filling wooden barrels with them. When he asked them what they were going to do with all that limbage, they said they were medical students and they were going to bury the barrels in the ground until the limbs had decomposed and then ship them to Washington to the medical college to use in their studies. Another team of students was boiling the flesh from the skeletons of the fallen gray soldiers, working diligently with paddles and hooks as the flames licked at the sides of the steaming black iron kettles.

  There were two scavengers he followed that first day and studied for especially how they worked. Over the course of time he learned how they were unlike the others in that they were not interested in keepsake or memory or usefulness but rather had a professional way about them. They arrived with the same tools as those of the surgeon or mechanic. They would wear carbide lamps to move about the field at night and maintained a variety of disguises. They camped a safe ways off and were not greedy for the accoutrements of war, and what they did take of war’s implements they were selective about the pieces they stole. The two were searching for jewelry and certain personal items. They wanted anything with an inscription or an address which they might then sell to loved ones back home. They did not go through the pockets or the linings of the dead but slit them with razors they wore in their sleeves to be the quicker about their business. They carried iron shears in their pockets for cutting off fingers to get rings and wielded jawed pliers to remove gold from the mouth.

  By that afternoon, the citizenry had begun arriving in flocks and tramping out to tour the battlefield. They were old fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters hunting for their wounded and dead. The fields were strewn with rifles and all manner of outfit, and these likewise were collected up as trophies by the citizens and more than one of the innocent and curious was killed by the accidental discharge of a rifle still loaded and cocked.

  Side businesses sprang up. Women were charged twenty dollars to move a husband or a son from the ground into a wooden box and onto a cart, and he took advantage of this opportunity and his arms ached so for helping that day he could not lift them from his sides. When the women tried to pay him, he refused at first, but finally he relented, whatever they wished to give, and accepted the few coins they left for him on the ground for fear of touching his blood-slick and fat-greased hands.

  With the money he walked into town to buy water and a clean dressing for his father’s head. He saw two women, one older and one younger. They were sitting in the open doorway of a gray stone house. By their doorstep, the syringa bushes were in bloom and white lilies had unfolded on bowed stems. He took their relationship to be that of mother and daughter. They were laughing as if nothing had happened and he could not help but smile at how happy they appeared in spite of their surroundings. He opened their
gate and his throat parched, he called out to them for a sip of water.

  “Water,” the mother said. “You want water after what you did?”

  He slowly shook his head. As hard as he tried he could not think what he had done.

  “You can’t tell?” she asked, and then answered her question for him. “You scared all the birds away and they won’t ever come back.” Both women laughed at this for how funny it was to them.

  “A sip of water is five cents and by the glass is fifty cents,” the younger woman called to him.

  He held out his hand to show her the coins he possessed and she motioned for him to approach. He went to them along a path of red bricks lined with trampled yellow flowers. She was a blue-eyed strabismal woman with a high color in her vein traced cheeks. She held her legs clasped in her arms, her chin hovering her knees. The older woman had a boiled look to her face, as if she’d been burned, but she wasn’t burned. Sweat ran down the sides of her thin face and collected in the bones of her shoulders and chest. They each clutched a square of cloth to their face from which they inhaled deeply and between them sat a stoppered bottle of rose water. He held out the silver coins again and the younger woman indicated he should drop them in the berry pail at her feet. When he did, the older woman stood and disappeared inside the house.

  “Bread?” he inquired.

  “A loaf of bread cost two dollars,” the younger woman said, growing impatient with his trade.

  This money he also let drop into the hollow of the berry pail and this time when he did he leaned forward and looked down and saw it to be full of coins and greenbacks.

  “You stay back there,” she said sharply. “Don’t get so near. Bring a loaf of bread,” she called into the house.

  The older woman returned with a glass of water and a loaf of bread less than the size of a muffin. She waved him off and when he stepped back to the gate she set them on the bricks in front of him. She then returned to the step and nodded him forward after she sat.