Coal Black Horse (20 page)

She stamped the ground and cried that he should shut his praying mouth and should kill himself to death for all he'd done in life. His words continued on, penetrating the air with their ferocity, and were so like falling wood and she screamed at him to stop, but he wouldn't stop. A moan came from deep inside the barn. The woman had awakened in darkness and was calling out for someone to help her.

“Make him stop,” she told Robey. “Put him through,” she said, and grabbed for the Remington he held, but he would not let her have it. He'd stood by and watched this man harm her and he had done nothing when he could have. It was not so much that he felt guilt for not acting that night in the firegutted house. He was different then and now he was changed. Then he was a boy, and he thought like a boy. He angered and hated, but he thought the world still had a chance. He thought they all had a chance. Perhaps somewhere inside him he knew his fate and that night in the fire-gutted house it was not time yet for him to leave his past and enter his future, but only the damned can see their future and know nothing of their present.

No matter. He had already made his decision. What was another man like this man to him? The praying man wanted her forgiveness. It may have been true. But sometimes you have to revenge before you can forgive. Familiar to his ears was how loud and certain the mechanical sound at his thigh when he thumbed the hammer on the Remington. If the praying man heard the same sound, his voice did not betray him.

He raised his hand to sight the barrel with the praying man's
forehead and was to pull the trigger when the girl dashed in between them. With both her hands, she raised a long-handled implement above her right shoulder. At its highest reach she did not stop but drove it down with all her might and as hard as she could, and in that instant the three thin tines of a pitchfork pierced into the praying man's kneeling lap.

They were like fangs the way they entered into him. They were a sharp curving blink that found no bone in their sharp passage. They stopped his praying and opened his eyes with burning pain. His lap was suddenly on fire. She jumped her weight at the handle and drove it again and it was this second effort that overcame the silence of shock and delivered to the heavens the screams of the well stabbed.

He let down the hammer of the Remington, belted it, and pulled her away by her shaking shoulders. She fought him because she wanted to jump the fork a third time and send it deeper, even though deeper was not a possibility.

So much killing and so much violence. So much malice and fraud. He saw them. He saw her. He saw the praying man and he saw himself. How to explain the way violence needs violence? Is that the explanation itself? Violence demands violence. This was not the pagan retribution: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. This was the law before there was law. This was vengeance and a rebellion to law. How to explain the failure to understand this and the failure to not understand there are things that cannot be understood?

He knew in the end there were no answers. There was no illumination. The world was chance and was not revealed to us, but it revealed us to ourselves, our fragments of idea, our false memory. There was neither vision nor wisdom to be
discovered. We only became more seeing and less ignorant. Sin could not be washed away and minds do not heal except for the guilty and the foolish. Our confessions become our weakness and our wisdom our vanity and both our harmful fantasies. He looked at the praying man and knew one thing: we have chosen ourselves to be the chosen.

He thought his father's words and then he thought about the girl as she struggled in his arms to reach the handle and drive it again. He feared she would not return from where she had just been. He had thought that maybe she had a different way of looking at the world whereas he had none that he knew of anymore and just maybe she was a way back for him, but now he did not know. He only knew he could not let her kill the man any more than she already had. As he held her, he held the moment of life in his hands, his own life.

He looked to the praying man and he appeared to still be doing so. His hands were raised in supplication and his mouth gaped and tears streamed down his straining face. He fought movement for how consuming the pain that had discovered him, but his body could not endure the pain and wanted to reject its source and so the handle of the pitchfork quivered in the air as his body tried to tremble it out.

Robey pulled the girl away from the man to the side of the coal black horse. He took her foot and placed it in the stirrup and then with both hands he heaved her into the saddle. He began to walk and the coal black horse followed him.

THEY TRAVELED SOUTH
on the coal black horse, leaving that place of the dead. He could feel her body slumped against his back, her arms clasped around his waist. When they were
chased, she rapped on his head with her knuckles and he turned an ear to her speaking lips. She told him to ride into the fog, but the horse already knew to do so and was already disappearing inside a vast gray cloud come to earth.

On that ride to the river, all time was present time. There was no past and there was no future. They were beginning in their flight and rode the coal black horse hard like a fleeing deer. They might this time leave the earth, he thought. They might ride through the sky. They might ride forever until it was all behind them, until it was over.

What he remembered was the silence of that leaving and it was a very complete silence. He sensed that those men who offered blood and presented blood and threw blood were not ravaged by war, but for all the dirt and black powder and slick of blood they had been prepared by war, prepared for their irrevocable and irreversible deaths. The wounds were horrible enough, but only of a kind. They had their faces or did not by increasing degree until there were men with no faces at all and in the end it was remarkable to him how little there was that can be done to a man once all that can be done has been done to him.

He had experienced the horror that leaves you calm and unafraid, but for her something inside was broken and he did not know if it could be be mended. Her life, her horror, he could not tell.

As they rode out of there and down that road, the pink and green dawn came and the sun when it rose looked to be a globe of red-hot iron. The air was still and heated, and as if that were not enough, women and children could be seen piling wood on dead horses and setting them afire. Their
immense bodies lay on the ground, their elegant necks and finely shaped heads, the round spring of ribs. For miles were the collapsed and bulge-eyed beasts and in places the ground was blackened with their grease where someone had already burned one of them. He remembered also the sight of those two ladies sitting in their open doorway selling water and laughing as if nothing had happened and he thought what a strange world it had become and he could not understand it enough even to tell of it if someone had asked him.

It was days afterward and miles south when the rain-washed air began to clear of its death smell and they were at the banks of the Potomac where they stole their way into the lines. On their heels, as if in pursuit of their own persons, the Federal Army had finally mustered and appeared in the fields and woods beyond the sentries.

By then the field works were up and the engineers were completing a pontoon bridge to make the crossing. They were as if an ancient forlorn people gathered on the grim shore of an old river. He found Moxley and Yandell and Tom Allen. They were with the battery as his father had said they would be. He told them he was Robey Childs and they told how his father was good as gold and if anybody ever needed him he always came a-runnin'. He was the bravest man any of them ever knew.

Thereafter, they would call him captain, as they had called his father, and that night he sent off a letter to his mother but could not bear to tell her all he knew.

As to Rachel, the men of the battery said nothing to him. It was a mystery to them what was between the son of their fallen comrade and this girl who traveled with him posing as
a boy, but they made no judgment and spoke not a word of it among themselves.

After Gettysburg the rain had resumed with a vengeance. Rolling thunder shook the night's darkness. The rains were torrential and the lightning flashes left them momentarily blind. They sat in the rain with the water running from the cuffs of their jackets, waiting for the crossing.

Finally came the nights of July 13 and 14, wet and black, and these were the nights they chose to escape across the pontoon bridge. Supplies were critically short. Men were hungry and picking kernels of corn out of the horse dung. With tarpaulins they sheltered their smoky fires of green and snapping pine logs, so they would continue burning and give the impression that men still fed them. All that day a line of the tallest men, their arms locked together, had stretched from bank to bank so others might make the crossing. Then the word went around that the river was falling steadily and that the thin line of the pontoon bridge had been completed.

On a rainy and foggy night torches were lit and bonfires were built of fence rails to light the way to the other side. Robey and Rachel waited in the gravel at the dissolving edge of the river as the water rose and curled. When it descended, they rode the coal black horse onto the bridge, cut loose its mooring and under a wetting drizzle, the blossoms dropping in the water, they floated to Virginia.

A
PERIOD OF SHADOW
drapes from her shoulder to the swell of her small belly as if a length of long black hair. In a flawless china sky the sun is bright and coming through the panes of glass as it makes its crossing east to west.

He is asleep, sitting up in a chair beside her. His hands are palms down on his knee caps. A loaded Springfield rifle lays on the floor at his feet and beside it the six-shot Remington. She thinks she's had a dream and she's frightened. She cannot separate what she dreams from what she thinks.

They travel nights and sleep by day and it will soon be dark again and time to travel the twisting roads one day closer to home. Getting himself home. At night the darkening air brings silence before the walk of the predators, the hunters. For them the night will bring invisible passage for their escape.

“Would you like to live here?” she said, turning her head slowly.

“No,” he said, as a sleep-talker without waking. “I wouldn't want to live here.”

“Where would you want to live?”

“Where I am from.”

“There's too much light out,” she said. “Can't we sleep at night?”

He'd already told her so many times before that they couldn't sleep at night. They slept by day and at night they traveled to travel unseen. She pulled the blanket to her shoulders and moved her arms beneath its drape, and when she did she was strangely limbless and birdlike, her arms winged and flightless in the windless, airless room.

“It ain't safe,” he said, and stretched out his legs, a boot heel banging on the floor. It was getting late in the day, and now awake he'd not be able to sleep again before it was time to leave.

“I dreamt we were asleep together,” she said.

Her voice was matter-of-fact and he thought she meant him, in her dream, together with her. But he did not presume she meant him and so wondered whose dream company she was recounting. She carried her life with her and could not flee from it, even in her sleep. She tossed and turned and cried out in her sleep. She insisted upon sleeping with her knife and that he keep the blade sharp. It was inside her and knocking at her ribs and fluttering her lungs as if they were wings startled and throbbing with urgency.

“You should try to sleep a little,” he said. He'd told her this so many times before and was beginning to understand that opposite his intentions, he was counseling her in the direction of her terror.

“Where do you think she disappeared to?”

“I don't know,” he said, sitting up and looking about the room as if there were still the presence of a third person.

In the house where they lodged was a raggedy old woman with a sun-stained and stroke-twisted face. One of her eyes was bloodshot and the other was as white and round as an
ivory marble. She had welcomed them into her house and with a hand grinder she had made flour and with the flour she had made balls of dough as big as her gnarled fist. She fried potatoes for them to eat, and there was bacon, and she made up a sack of the same for them to take when they rode away. She had moved about the house as if a phantom impaired and more than once burned herself as she cooked and took an awfully long time to realize it. As her presence in the house seemed odd to herself, they inquired but could not sort from her if it was her house or not.

What they did learn was that her ears did not work too good and so it was hard for her to hear them from both sides of her head at once. They learned she had not seen a soul for months, not even a stray dog, and they learned she had a son named Horace. He was a crackerjack of a young man, but he had been killed by which side she did not know and what did it matter anyhow? She declared her heart and mind were broken by it. She knew this, she said, but she claimed love and prayer were enough to get by on. She declared herself a good saint of God regardless of what he had done to her. When she said these things there was a breath around her that shined as if it was not air or light but was something from within.

“I can't sleep without knowing where she's at,” Rachel said. “Do you think she's still wandering about? She gives me the cold shivers.”

“Try counting,” he said. He rubbed his face hard, as if trying to rearrange his features. He wanted to comfort her, but she contained inside a wall of vigilance and suspicion she had built around herself. Not since she had comforted him upon the death of his father had she acted kindly toward him.

“One, two, three,” she said. “It doesn't work.”

That was when he told her he loved her.