Coal Black Horse Read online

  “Tomorrow,” he repeated. Maybe tomorrow would be the day when he would find his father. But then tomorrow came and went and he felt no closer to the river where the army was said to be than he did the day before. He had no idea the land was so big and the many crosses its roads made.

  He was now in a hot and wet country ridden with flies and he often wished for flight and to enter the realm where the birds darted and sliced the air. He wished the coal black horse to grow the wings he dreamed and fly him through the air. The wind on the plain east of the valley was long and tangled and he was homesick, fatigued, and disillusioned. His strength was about gone and his limbs felt as if borrowed from a man a hundred years old.

  In darkness, he left the road and followed a stitch of path into the trees and then left the path and urged the horse to find a route in the pathless forest. He continued on, desiring distance from the traffic of humans. He wanted a place remote and undisturbed where he could collect himself, where he could lie down and sleep, lest he slide from the horse’s back and tumble to the ground. He needed to lie on the earth and rest his thin sore body and renew his thowless spirit.

  He unsaddled the coal black horse to let its back cool in the moon-dappled shade. He ran his hands over its legs and lifted each foot to check for cracks in the hoof walls. He sorted the cockleburs from its high-set tail. He wondered at how indifferent the horse was to pain, how immune to weakness. He had long since come to understand and accept how superior the animal was to him, and he did not mind this fact but appreciated it.

  “You are tough as a old ox,” he said, briefly catching an eye’s lateral vision with his own.

  He shook out the sweat-stained saddle blanket and lay down in front of the horse on a bed of green ferns and where arched fiddleheads unfolded and a lead tied loosely to his wrist.

  He looked up into the horse’s face and told the animal to be patient with him, that he was still a boy and that he should sleep awhile before they moved on. He did not want to slip off and break his neck in the dirt.

  “I am tired,” he said as if tiredness were a thing of longing. The horse responded by nosing his chest and blowing gently against his face.

  “I am dirty as a pig,” he said in agreement. The horse lifted a foot and set it down heavy. It grunted and then found bunches of grass at his side to enfold with its lips and tear free. Its head shot up as it chewed and it glanced to the rear.

  You eat a little bit, he thought. Just a bit of sleep for me and we’ll be on our way.

  But it was a troubled sleep waiting for him. That day on the road he’d seen something his mind would not let go of. It was not that they were men alive or dead. It was not that they were men torn or ravaged or made horrible. Then his mind did let go and his eyes closed and his breathing steadied and he listened to the horse cropping again and chewing what it’d found, its eyes, its ears, its nose always ready for reasons to fly.

  WHEN HE AWOKE, he was refreshed. He sat up and swept the May bugs from his face and hair. He stood in light and when he did he learned that beyond the small clearing and its edge of woods where he’d slept was a bow made by a flat river where swallows danced lightly on streams of air. The sunlight was clear and strong and he could see the river’s glaring sparkle without seeing the water’s surface. He led the horse in its direction where he found another green and there he tied the horse to a lead where it could browse the fresh grass.

  He proceeded on to the riverbank, wading through deep ferns and a flowering thicket, a hand held in front of his eyes for how bright the sun glare reflecting off the riffles. He stepped forward and then he sat down and let himself slide the bank on his backside to dangle his feet from the edge of the bluff overlooking where the broad flat river looped. His father told him rivers were difficult to defend. They created meanders and meanders needed to be closed and in doing so they tended to suck up troops.

  The bluff was littered with softened pine needles and the water under the sun was the color of caramel. He thought to dangle his legs in the water, but it ran too far beneath the rim of the bluff. His father said rivers break lines of sight and impede lateral movements. It was rivers where possibilities began and ended.

  He sat for a long time, resting on a bed of pine needles in the cool shade. He knew he needed to be on his way and soon enough he would mount the coal black horse and follow east into the sun. Behind him he could hear the horse snuffing and tearing grass. He realized he’d not eaten in several days and needed food as well as he needed travel. Lately the byways had been clogged with the traffic of refugees, mule drivers cursing, men teaming haggard draft horses, high-piled wagons teetering with trunks, home goods, and furniture. There were women with green hides sewn to their feet who drove cows and pigs before them and there were barefoot boys and girls cutting the air with switches behind flocks of imperious geese and waddling ducks who griped like spoiled children. He saw a lone man shabbily dressed with a kid goat slung over his shoulders, a little boy carrying a rabbit by its ears. They pushed wheelbarrows and pulled handcarts that were laden with carpet sacks, churns, hand tools. For the most they were poor and motely. Their bodies were thin and drawn in stark contrast to the fattening food stock — the beeves, hogs, and milch cows that were leading them south and west.

  And there were the lone teamsters with their cargo of the maimed and dead. He wondered if they were the same drivers he’d seen in the far distance from the high place above the Twelve Mile, old men with their rude wagons and broken horses hauling the casualties of war back to their homes, only to return again for another load of the torn and shattered. Sometimes there was a box and other times there was tightly bound swaddling in the shape of a man. Some men waved to him and others just stared as if he were the strange one who’d crossed by accident into the land of limbless men. Maybe these teamsters were but a few in number, the designated, and this was their mission, their destiny — freighting the damaged from the sundered world. Two days ago it was a black phaeton with glass sides pulled by a matched pair of carriage horses. It didn’t matter, the old man at the footboard holding the reins and whip, the box inside the glass walls, it was still the same.

  There were other travelers also to be seen on the roads and byways and on first occurrence he did not completely understand who these strange bands of men and women were, and these his mind could not let go of. It seemed common enough to him that he should see black men wearing checkered homespun and walking behind the horses the white men rode and not so unusual that the black men themselves would sometimes be riding. But he’d not seen before in his life a black man with a leather strap collaring his neck and being led down the road by a chain. His quickest thought was that the man was a criminal, but in the next instant he knew better.

  These encounters, they increased in number and frequency until yesterday. He did not know what told the horse there was a strangeness approaching from the north, but it stopped and raised its head and directed its ears forward. He pressed with his left thigh and clucked in his throat and they stepped off the road and into the tree shade and waited. He was not so intent on hiding as he was avoiding being seen by the silent, alien caravan that was approaching, for advancing on him was no jingle of harness, no rattle of a bridle, no cough, no muffled tramp of feet or plodding hooves. There was no gabble of voices or creaking wheel axles, not even the silent approach of the lone rider he’d learned to detect in the extension of his mind. There was not a sound or feeling he could name, but an eeriness. It was as strange as the birth of an unnatural — the oncoming surround of utter silence they carried with them as they moved down the road, as if a troupe escaped from hell, seemingly without motion and heated and on the edge of burning.

  When the vanguard hove into view they were the roughest men he’d ever seen. They rode all manner of horse and rig. They rode gaunt horses with pinch-nosed hackamoors that wrung their tails alongside warm-bloods wearing blinker hoods and four-reined bridles. There were wild and bony horses snubbed short that didn’t so
much walk as they skittered and pawed across the ground sideways the way an insect does. Some of these men were shirtless and rode without blankets or saddles. Their faces were painted and their long hair knotted with leather. He wondered on the vanity in these men as some wore feather plumes in the bands of their slouch hats and red and paisley kerchiefs at their necks. Others wore ropes of shells around their necks and their heads were made up with blue and vermillion. There was also a black man, face tattooed and wearing a beaver hat, who rode among them, the silvered butt of a short-barreled muskatoon bouncing on his thigh.

  Following behind were runaway slaves that’d been rounded up and formed into coffles and marched back south. When the chains had run out they’d been yoked with forked branches cut from trees and lashed at their necks. They were a silent dusty procession and fantastic in appearance. Their clothes were often a flannel patchwork, or torn calicoes or canvas cloth, or cut-up blankets sewn into smocks and trousers suspended at the waist. They wore coverlets gashed in the center, dropped over their heads, and closed round them with a belt. The children were dressed in overshirts with no underclothes beneath them. While most wore rags and castoffs, a few were better dressed than the riders. One chained man wore a smart black suit and a low-topped bowler hat.

  Bringing up the rear was another knot of the manhunters and a two-wheeled dog car with penned and slobbering hounds riding beneath the driver’s high seat. The dogs looked his way with their drawn red eyes but didn’t make a sound. They were dogs trained to hunt what they hunted without a care for anything else, and their chained and yoked quarry walked the road before them.

  After that, he wanted distance from human beings and the roads they traveled. He wanted the ancient overgrown animal paths found in deep and trackless country. He wanted the parallel roads traveled by the drovers and the livestock, the poor, the runaways themselves.

  4

  THERE WAS A RARE SETTLING accomplished by a silent concert of light, air, and water. His still-tired mind lulled into repose where it stayed for a time until disrupted by a thrashing in the leaf mold beneath the brush. He smiled at how a foraging squirrel could make more of a racket than a mast-rooting hog. He knew he had to be on his way and, this morning, ached with the guilt of recalcitrance. He wanted his days back. Wanted time to be his again. He idly tossed a stick in the direction of the racket. There was a long silence and then a scraping sound and then from a branch high over his head the squirrel began to chatter, scolding him for throwing the stick in its direction, scolding him for his presence on the cutbank.

  The sun soon shifted in the sky and found the patch of ground where he sat and he was blotted with light. He thought what sport it would be to fish this river. From the hard-twigged bushes came the chit notes of songbirds. Swallows were diving for the riverbank below his feet, building their nests. In the tops was a breeze combing the spiring trees and then it was quiet again as if a hand suddenly raised had been let down. Behind him he could hear the horse tearing away tussocks of grass.

  He tried to recall having slept the night through but could not.

  On the far bank emerged the figure of a human, a bent little woman. A cob pipe protruded from the shaded confines of her bonnet. A length of braided hair extended down her back. She carried a wooden bucket and a cane fish pole rocked on her shoulder, no more than a harmless curiosity. She stepped down from the grassy mull bank to the stony shore, the toes of her shoes poking from beneath her gingham skirts.

  He thought to slide away into the woods, but following her was a gaggle of squat white geese and this was walking food. A duck was selling for twenty-five cents and a goose was fifty cents or about that.

  He watched as she studied the water downstream and then wandered back upstream along the stone-cobbled shore. The geese followed her in both directions, bumping into each other as they toddled to turn and catch up. He didn’t have any coins. Maybe she’d take trade, but what to trade? He could steal just one, but in his thieving to date he’d never stole from anyone he’d seen to be an owner.

  The little old woman did not seem intent on fishing and after a while she dropped the fishing pole, sat down on her bucket, and concentrated on smoking her pipe. The geese wandered about in idleness and mild confusion until the little woman spat. They gathered on the spot, bumping into each other, inspecting her phlegm for some time. Then a goose found a grub and drew the attention of the others and they gathered there next. The woman continued to enjoy her pipe, sending a steady succession of gray puffs into the air. Over the pines, crows in flight made their raucous calls. Their sound came on suddenly like a snapping bough. A mobbed owl hove into view and crossed his vision over the river’s surface. The owl slid low, found the dark understory on the near bank, and disappeared. The crows, having never shown themselves, broke off their pursuit.

  It was then he noticed the lazy water browning in color and beginning to rise. At first it was slow and he did not know if it was happening at all, so slow was its beginning, but then it rose more rapidly. The current quickened and there came wreaths of feather-white foam swirled about the edges of vortexes that made ripping sounds as they sucked shut. Stems and leafy branches followed and then a broad limb of dried wood.

  Upstream, there must have been a powerful rain as the river continued to swell until it had become a black muddy wash. The little woman stood, took her bucket in hand, and walked backward as the water followed her, nagging at her feet with every step she made. The geese assembled on her steps, flustered and squanking in confusion. She stepped cautiously and he wanted to yell that she should run. Then she did. She turned into a trot that took her to higher ground where the sand and gravel was closed over by hummocks of grass sewn into the red earth. She jumped the grassy step, the flustered geese climbing behind her, and watched as the river gently heaved and cuffed its high-water mark.

  It occurred to him, as it continued its rising, that it just might not stop, so fast and powerful was it coming on. He left off his concern for the little woman and began to scamper backward on his palms and heels. But this was not quick enough, so he stood to run, and it was in that moment of standing that a great chunk of earth the river had slowly been carving began to subside. The bank gave way beneath his feet and he was being let down into the caramel water on a slab of red dirt collapsing into the river.

  His descent was slow and inexorable, and however hard he strained to scuttle the falling bank he could not keep himself from being shrugged away. He went under the dirty surface and even as he pushed the bottom to rise for air the deluge was already receding, and when he stood he found himself standing waist deep in muddy water. His wetted body cooled and yet was heated as if hornet-stung in the sluggish frothy water. His clothes skimmed with a slick of red clay and sluiced from his fingertips as if milk or blood.

  “Yo, boy,” a voice called out. It was the little woman with the cane fish pole coming down to the water’s edge from the dry bank. Other than her nose and the bowl of her pipe, her face was shrouded in bonnet. “You drownded yourself?” she inquired.

  He cleared his burning nostrils and spit. He dragged himself into the shallows and pawed his way through the flooded briars, his shoes slogging through the scum until he reached a hard bed of silt and stone. He pawed at his face and eyes again. He shook out his arms, shucking their wetness into the air.

  The little woman was laughing at his calamity. She was a strange and ugly woman with narrow shoulders and a long beakish nose that ran constantly. Just as she’d wipe at it, another drip would form. About her being was the rank smell of old sweat that surpassed even the stagnant earth of the riverbank. With her geese jostling to flank her at the water’s edge that they might stare at him too, he thought she also made quite the comical.

  “Don’t you look a picture,” she cackled. “You have got to be careful. Accidents happen out here.”

  “Is this the Rappahannock?” he asked as he climbed the bank to stand at her feet. Hers was not a very kind face. Her face actually
made him dizzy to look at as her skin seemed to run in the sunlight with a swarming fluid like vibration. His body iced as he realized that she was crawling with lice. They were running her skin in streaming volutions that swirled her cheeks and forehead and across her lips and yet she did not seem to notice.

  “This little trickle?” she said. “Don’t be a ignoramus.” And then she said, “What do you want with the Rappahannock?”

  “You ain’t a woman,” he said, before he could stop his voice in his throat. “You’re a man.”

  “Every beggar’s got his stick for beating off the dogs,” the little woman said.

  She then swiped the bonnet and braided hair from her head in a single motion and she was indeed a man. The little man then unbuttoned the dress and shed it from his shoulders. Without the dress he was a queer, spindly little man, built like a boy with a boy’s frame and a boy’s muscles, but in the light his face skin revealed to run evermore with the motion of vibrating water. His bare neck and the wisps of hairs at his collar were beset. His naked arms and the backs of his hands were likewise a struggling infestation, but beyond belief he seemed to pay it no mind. Still, there appeared nothing to fear from him except his infestation.

  “You really never know a man’s true nature.” The little man laughed.

  His face held an expression behind which little could be seen for the crawling mask he wore. The little man rooted in his ear with his finger, as if there could possibly be something that would irritate him, and then looked at it.

  His voice turned to sharp rule and still looking at his finger he said, “You intend to jine up, or what?”

  Robey shook his head. His stomach had become a turning of knots. He could not look at the man’s crawling skin and he could not look away from it for how mesmerizing. He was not afraid, but he felt better when he knew where the little man’s face was, the same way he wanted to know where a disappeared snake crawled to when he came across one in the forest.