Coal Black Horse (7 page)

It was in daylight when he finally stood and climbed the porch and crossed the threshold through the broken door. Geese followed him, scrutinizing his every movement, as if he were the oddity entering their house and for reasons they neither trusted nor understood.

Inside, the house was in a shambles, the work of the little man. Fragments of utensils, boots, torn paper, and candle molds were strewn about as if disgorged from the open doors of the cabinets and hanging drawers by a furious wind that had been bottled up inside them until they exploded. A stove stood in the middle of the two rooms so to heat both the
big kitchen and the front parlor. On the wall was a tear-off calendar.

In the parlor there was a fireplace with a heavy oak mantel. Inside the redbrick fire chamber were the burned remains of a spitted goose. The carpet fluttered with down and was stained with geese droppings, and scattered about were shards of broken dishes and blue crockery. Each step he took raised a white floating in the air, enough down to make a bed mattress. The geese looked at what he looked at and poked their heads in the direction of his face and looked him in the eye as if an explanation would be forthcoming.

As he climbed the stairs he let his fingers drift over the embossed wallpaper. At the upstairs landing his vision blurred and a wave of pain sawed through his head and sat him down to rest. He looked below to see the geese gathering at the foot of the stairs. He closed his eyes and opened them and they cleared for the time. He pulled himself erect and continued on to the hallway.

In the bedroom, at the head of the stairs, was a corded bedstead with turned bulbous posts and a deep featherbed resting atop a thick straw tick. An overstuffed wardrobe stood in one corner. Its doors hung on broken hinges and its dresses, similar in pattern to the little man's disguise, bloomed in the door's opening. The bureau drawers had been dragged from their slots and their contents strewn on the floor. There were so many things in the room. There were more shoes and clothes than he imagined a whole family could own all by itself.

A woman's straw hat was lying on the bed, and a lace handkerchief and a scattered collection of briar and cob pipes and a wild-turkey-wing fan. On the other side of the bed he
found the woman who owned the dresses. She sat on the floor propped with her back against the wall. She'd been stabbed in the neck, the bone-handled knife left in the wound, and her swollen intestines filled her lap and spilled over her splayed legs. Her scalp had been cut and ripped away from her head. He felt no shock at what he saw. He felt no horror for what had happened. He was reminded of his own wound and tore a supply of clean garment material to wrap his head in the days to come.

In another room he found a variety of mechanical toys. There were painted cast-metal rabbits that beat tin drums, birds with keys beneath their wings, and when the key was turned and let go their wings beat and they sang tinny songs. There was a monkey who clacked brass cymbals, toy soldiers in flared red coats and blue pantaloons who played cornets, tiny clocks that chimed, and music boxes that'd fit in the palm of your hand. There were two tiny unmade beds against the wall that still held the shape of the small bodies that used to sleep in them.

Outside the air was pure when he staggered into it and he could not breathe enough of it into his lungs. In the barn he found a little mud-tailed pony that was fat and unworked. He found a pail of axle grease and slathered a handful into the wrapping that held his wound. He studied the charred remains of the well house and thought to pull an armful of flowers and drop them inside its column. He knew to do this without ever having done it before. He thought to go back into the house and maybe let toys to fall into its stony black maw. He wondered why he would be moved in this way after all that he'd seen. What was it inside him that would ask
him to pause and consider these gestures on behalf of this dead family? He did not know this woman or her children. He did not know whose people they were or if they had been good people or bad people. Surely the children had been good people and the woman had been a good woman, but what were they to him? If the lead ball had been better aimed, he'd be like them. He'd be dead too.

He took time to eat that morning. He killed a goose and pawed open its chest skin. Then he cut away a breast and this he spit-roasted in the fireplace while the other geese watched. He found mustard pickles and a crock of salt pork. He found caps and bullets of the necessary caliber, but he had no gun.

As he ate, he did not wonder on all that had happened thus far, but rather, he wondered how he should think about it. He knew what was in the well and he knew how close he'd come to being there himself. He'd been very stupid and it was a condition he now pledged to avoid. He remembered old Morphew telling him he was in for an education and how he hoped he'd live long enough to tell about it.

He decided he would live without actually deciding it. He just knew he would. Something inside him told him so. He could feel a distance inside his head. He was in pain and his mother always said that pain was weakness leaving the body. He would eat his meal and then he would continue to search for the army and if he should find the little man and the coal black horse he knew what he would do, but once he had, he'd not apologize to the horse. This he swore. He'd not apologize to the horse no matter how right the horse had been in mistrusting the little man.

When he was done eating, he caught onto the mane of
the mud-tailed pony, the children's horse, threw a leg over its back and swung upright. The pony shied and almost sat down for how spoiled it was, but his hands and legs and the words he spoke told the pony it did not belong to itself anymore. It belonged to him. He sat the pony, letting it build its strength beneath his weight. He wanted with all his heart to be past this moment and into the next when he would be healed and would be wiser than he was before. He was learning his lessons and he was still alive and he thought that was worth something.

“Walk,” he said to the pony. “Walk on.”

However unworked and lazy the pony was, the instant he dug his heels, the pony understood it was to obey and stepped off and then broke into a jarring trot.

In a sack he carried a jar of molasses, dried peaches, a haunch of venison, and handfuls of black walnuts. He had coffee beans and cornmeal. Behind each of his legs hung a goose by its neck. He started north, following the hoof prints of the coal black horse.

H
OT AND DRY
, the locusts were sawing the air and the roads were powdery and thick to breathe. He traveled all that day and then slept and woke at sunrise and traveled on again through a thinly settled country. So miserable was the sight of him, his head wrapped in a blood-crusted rag, he determined there was no need he should avoid people.

There were towns he passed through where people came out to watch his passing as if he were an army unto himself and there were other towns where his passing went wholly unnoticed for sakes of commerce or play or worship or conversation. Children older than he stood at the roadside and stared at his passing, and gaunt and pellicle dogs silently trailed him in the dust, lunging the sweltering air. The mud-tailed pony proved to be a sly and insolent animal by nature and sulked and like a spoiled brat exhibited displays of bad temper. It kicked at him when he gave it a chance and attempted to savage his knee with its teeth as he rode, but he remained patient and determined to persuade from it with his heels whatever miles he possibly could.

His head throbbed with pain in the dry heat. The pain wavered through him, consuming his head and neck and shoulders,
but he knew he was slowly healing. It was only common sense to him the way the pain made flash upon flash in his body and then peaked and lingered and in some days' time it began to dull and diminish. He discovered hidden beneath his experience of pain an unconfused state where his mind fixed on his mother's counsel and his father's existence and he found new clarity. He admonished himself for breaking every word of advice she'd given him. Except to have followed her imperatives to the letter would have left him afoot not a mile from old Morphew's mercantile. He determined that he would learn from the lessons taught him thus far and by gift of chance he was still alive and from now on he would be a fast and dedicated learner.

The land was beginning to crop with limestone and a darkening green and increasingly there were wells of cold water and burbling springs where he could drink and rinse his body. In the next days he stopped often to wash the wound, fix a new compress, and tie a clean bandage. His chest and back ached as they carried his head pain and each time he removed the wrappings he winced at how strange the sensation as he tore away scab and dried blood from his mending scalp.

The easterly roads turned swampy for some miles while to the northwest lay a range of blue mountains and these he kept to his left and fading behind him as he traveled in the direction of the the rising sun, the direction of the ocean. He rode on, and after the mud-tailed pony played out he left it tied in darkness, entered a banked barn, and stole his first horse, a copper-bottomed mare he quietly led away. After that it became easy enough to do and he felt the need to change mounts at every opportunity, and so by necessity
he became an accomplished horse thief, exchanging the copper-bottomed mare for a big cream horse and then for a broad-shouldered, parrot-mouthed chestnut, and then for a sturdy bay with failing eyesight when the chestnut spavined.

Each day his wound dried and knit shut and knotted with building scar that tugged at his scalp, and overly sensitive to light his eyelid would slowly close on him if he let it.

Wounded and face-hideous riding the backs of common horses, he was afforded an easy passage through the places where people lived, a world of boys, old men, and women. They offered him food and water and so miserable he must have looked that if they recognized the horse he rode, they said nothing, so he took their food and asked after the armies and while news was inconsistent, the coal black horse was remembered more than once for its beauty and for the unlikely little woman with the cob pipe that rode its back.

It was in these wounded days the beginning of the man he would grow to be. He bore his pain and endured his wound as if a sign he too had been blooded by the madness that'd taken ahold of the land. He no longer shied from people, from the lone riders, from the reenslaved herded South. He no longer feared their presence on the roads and his conversion was believable to him. He had lived and did not die. He was breathing. Still, it was only the beginning and he was not old enough to know these changes, did not even know enough to think this way yet.

The land had taken on a haunted feel since meeting the goose lady. What had been new and beautiful was now old and strange, wrong and unfamiliar. In one town he sat on a low stone wall and watched boys his own age wearing fresh
white linen shirts with hard, starched collars take copperhead snakes from a picnic basket and nail them by their tails to a barn wall. The barn wall had been painted with a black skull over a set of crossed bones. When the boy with the hammer and nails, a boy a head taller than the rest, gave the command each boy let go the copperhead he held by the neck, and yelling and hooting they all ran away.

The snakes swarmed across the face of the door, twining and dangling themselves about each other, dropping their bodies and lifting again. They opened their mouths and bared their fangs. They bit each other thinking to find the source of their pain. The boys laughed and slapped their thighs. Then they began to stone the snakes from safe distance.

An old man with tufts of gray hair springing from his skull, investigating the thumping noise, came to the corner of the barn. In one hand he carried a galvanized bucket and in the other a gutta-percha walking stick. He shook at the boys with his walking stick, castigating them for their grotesque play. They laughed at him and turned their stones on his person. The old man ducked his old head and stumbled in his escape, slopping his trouser leg with spilt whitewash that lipped from the rim of the bucket.

He righted himself and hobbled away, coming in Robey's direction where he sat beside him on the rumbled stone wall. Without introduction and as some people are wont to do, especially the old and foolish, he took up with a left-off and ongoing conversation. He told Robey his old wife had recently died and he was now sad in his heart and considered a lunatic by many in town and had nerve storms because he was alone and because he and his wife, he said, wanted to die together.

“Her eyes were always the brightest,” he said.

The old man still possessed his teeth, remarkable for one so elderly, but they seemed to protrude straight from his gums and closed in a beak that his thin lips rode. He paused to sneeze and when he opened the palm of his hand mucus webbed his fingers.

“Those boys are quite exceptional in their stupidity,” he remarked, but Robey continued to make no response: no word, no nod, no shrug of his shoulders. Where they sat the stone was warm with captured sun and not uncomfortable. He did not mind the old man, and after a time in his presence the old man seemed calm and less agitated.

“Their time is coming soon enough,” the old man added, his words swashing in his beaked mouth, but still Robey made no response. He thought, Let the old man talk himself out.

But the old man persevered in his one-sided conversation, prattling on and occasionally pausing to ask Robey if he was listening. He took Robey for a young soldier and so talked about having fought in Spain with Napoleon when he was in his youth. He claimed to have eaten dead horses to stay alive and one time to have actually eaten the forearm of a dead man. He told how he found it very sweet and for that reason had to swear it off because he feared he would get a taste for human flesh.

“More was not enough,” he said, and then he speculated on the hell he would surely go to after his death for eating human beings, as well as for other unnamed transgressions, and at this thought he laughed.