Coal Black Horse (10 page)

He stood and formally apologized to the bay horse, asking that it might disremember his boyish thoughts and actions. He asked that it might forgive his momentary weakness, for they'd been on good terms since he'd stole it and then regretfully he collected himself and drew his pistol from his belt. He set the muzzle behind the horse's ear and held not a moment before pulling the trigger.

He wanted to rest after that because he was painfully tired and sore, but spiritless he shouldered his kit and took the bridle and trudged on for the duration of that hot day through a sparsely settled country, his sprained ankle paining him not a little. He was soon road-dirty and his soles blistered.

He followed the train tracks until evening shed a bluish twilight over the land and far off could be seen the white spire of a
church steeple and then the dim lights of a town. He climbed a grassy bank in the town's direction and stepped out onto a plank road running parallel with the rails below. The town, now within reach, glowed dully in the glove of the night. He took up the plank road and after not long his shoe broke open and began to flop as he walked. After so long his journey and however bleak his prospects, he knew he was arriving at a place significant. He felt it in the air, in his skin, inside his composing mind. He knew he needed to find another horse.

In the distance was the drift of small hills and green islands of pasture running into abrupt mountains and there was the cool dank smell of a flat river on the air, and even further, a purple line of forest between the mountains and the green islands of pasture. The country here was cultivated with prosperous farms and the low-walled buildings were of red brick or gray stone. The roadside was crossed by veins of limestone forming knotty points and there were thin cracks where artesian springs seeped water to the earth's surface. He thought how easy it would be to farm this deep fertile land. A warm rain had begun to fall on the dry land and then from out of the dark he heard the cadence of hoof beats pounding hard on the planks.

He stepped off the road and onto the soft ground where he stumbled across deep ruts and passed into a thicket of brambles in the twilight shadows of a little paintless house. Two dark riders swept through the gloaming, and then cavalry by twos passed the brake and then was the heavy sound of iron-shod wheels grating on the planks, and a wagon came jolting out of the darkness, winding through the trees, the lathered team flat-out for speed.

It was an open four-horse coach with seats across from door to door and nine men dressed in blue were riding the benches, and behind that wagon was another one and then came ten more after that. Without hesitating he stripped off his jacket and worked to turn it inside out blue. More wagons followed the coaches and cavalry and a battery of horse artillery. He climbed higher from the road, a steep ascent made craggy with broken rock and dark with pine trees.

From there he could smell wisps of smoke and cresting the low rise he could see the town sprawled out beneath him where a river made a great oxbow turn, and at the extreme arc of its curvature, crossing the river twice, were the railroad tracks nicking past beneath the night's first veil. There were engine houses, water towers, and fueling stations. There was the meander of inbound dirt roads feeding plank pikes cut straight as dies. Wagons and soldiers were converging on the town from all directions, their dashing black shapes spectral in the last bands of red light that seamed the western horizon. A cold fog was drifting in and had begun to numb and wet the empty fields.

The pain in his ankle dulled with the night's cooling and it no longer concerned him. He knew he was now near to something big, an army, a battle, a horse. He felt himself on the very edge of the fields of war, the ever-moving place of grinding violence whose turbulent wake he'd been following for days. The winding river, the rails, the hard-riding cavalry told him so, and he had little idea how deep he was or how far they sprawled before him. No matter the distance, no matter the depth, he'd come so far, and no matter what he'd been through he concluded he was at the beginning once again.

He did not know what to do right away, so he sat down and held his arms clasped round his folded legs, his chin on his knees. Where before he'd been desperate to travel and driven foolish in his decisions, he now felt a calming patience hard learned. The rain was falling more heavily and was cold and the air turned unseasonably bitter, and he had the passing notion he was going to freeze to death, but he knew it was fatigue and hunger and the lingering effects of his head wound. He felt the darkness pressing his eyelids and there unconsciousness momentarily caught him.

His short dream was the brief and repeated experience of falling without end. Each time he fell, he could not stop himself no matter how hard he tried. He was shot and falling to the ground. He was tumbling past the windlass and falling into the tomb of the well. He was falling from the coal black horse. He knew he was dreaming even as he dreamt. He murmured and called out to himself but could not break through to consciousness. When he did wake he did not know that he had even slept, but he awoke in darkness and a heavy shoe was kicking at his swollen ankle.

“What are you,” came a hollow voice from over his head.

The voice was coming at him from a great distance and he could not see its source. It was as if he'd awakened at the bottom of a pitch-black well. As he found wakefulness he felt himself arriving for a long time until he understood it was a soldier's voice asking the question and the soldier was now prodding him at the leg with the point of his bayonet. When he did not answer the soldier's question, the soldier set the point of a bayonet against his thigh and pressed. He could not feel the pain for how frightened he was at the shock of
discovery. The soldier leaned harder and his leg spasmed and kicked when the blade went into his skin.

“I know'd you weren't dead,” the soldier said with delight. “What's your purpose and I don't want to hear any lies come out of your mouth.”

He looked up and saw standing over him a man dressed in a blue uniform and his heart went cold. The soldier wore a thin black beard and gold-rimmed eye glasses and off his shoulder was the rising moon. The soldier stepped back so he might stand, and when he did the soldier flicked open the shell jacket with the point of the bayonet revealing its dyed interior. The soldier relieved him of the pistol he wore in his belt and his knife and then they waited not long before another soldier walked in on them.

Immediately the two soldiers disagreed over the appropriate password and this issue they debated between themselves for an inordinate amount of time. Each claimed his was the new password and the other was still using the old password. Without arriving at any satisfactory conclusion as to what course of events they should pursue, they finally lost interest and let it drop and turned their attention to Robey.

“You got any money hid?” the second soldier asked. “Got any ‘backy? You rebs always got ‘backy.”

Robey shook his head no, in reply.

“He don't talk?” the second soldier asked of the first.

“He ain't talked yet, ‘cept in his sleep.”

“What'd he say?”

“I don't talk sleep so's I don't know.”

“Cat got your tongue?” the second soldier said to Robey.

Again he shook his head and the second soldier snickered.

“Maybe he's got a head full of cotton,” the second soldier said. “By God, he'll talk when they stick a rope around his neck.”

“He's just a boy,” the first soldier said.

“A boy'll kill you as dead as anyone else,” the second soldier said. He then unfolded his pocketknife and slipped the blade into each of Robey's pockets and sliced them open.

“He ain't got nothing,” the first soldier said, impatient to be relieved of sentry duty and already tired of the responsibility of the prisoner he'd taken on.

They determined that maybe he was not the curiosity they'd thought he was, but still, the coat was suspicious enough and he was armed and so should be delivered to the major. The second soldier told him to cross his hands behind his back and then tied his arms at the wrist with a piece of twine and twisted the bindings tight with a stub of wood he carried. Then the first soldier indicated with his bayonet that he was to move in the direction of the town below where torches had been lit and the streets were bright and lined with wagons.

The walk down the hill was a torment to his swollen ankle now that it'd been put back to work. He stumbled in the tufted grass and tripped and the soldier accompanying him prodded him at times and at other times assisted him as if he could not decide which way to treat him.

Eventually they reached the town and as they passed through the narrow streets, curtains were folded back and squares of pale yellow light showed from small-paned windows. Soldiers were everywhere in the streets and wagons were positioned to barricade side lanes and alleys. Soldiers stood posted at the junction of intersections. They milled about in conversation
and squatted on the ground wrapped in oilcloths, hunkered against the rain.

Stable hands and draymen sat in the clutter of hand trucks and upturned carts, their shafts thrust into the air. They were eating crackers and cheese, scraping out cans of sardines with the backs of their crooked fingers, licking them clean and lighting cigarettes. A large poland hog, its throat already slit and blood gushing to the cobbles, was being clubbed to its side with an axe and slaughtered in the street under a dozen knives. Soldiers roamed in kitchen gardens, stabbing the earth with bayonets looking for silver plate, gold coins, and jewels. Many of the them conversed in languages he had never heard before and all seemed used to the chaos that swirled around them. Tonight this town and a few days ago it was another town and in a few days it'd be a third and they'd do it all over again.

In one garden there were soldiers eerily lit by an oil lamp and tied to a tree branch by their wrists and gagged with bayonets.

“They're drunkards,” the soldier told him without being asked.

From an alley came a shriek that stopped them and when they looked into its darkness they could see a cabal of soldiers lifting the skirts of a servant woman to see if her master had hidden any money or jewels close to her body. When they found none they still did not let her skirt down, but began to cut away its folds with their clasp knives.

“You're too young to see that,” the soldier said, and prodded him in the back that he should continue along.

More cavalry were arriving by the minute, unsaddling their
lathered mounts and tethering them to bayonets stabbed in the ground. The soldier stopped him, handed him his rifle, and held to his shoulder as he bent to pick some gravel out of his shoe. Where they paused, a shutter flapped open and a woman's head filled the opening, her hair let down and draping her shoulders. Soldiers milled at the wooden steps to the side entrance of her house. A sentry, sitting by its closed door, occupied himself by tossing his hat in the air and catching it. One soldier laughed and observed to another that he didn't think the town would have any old maids left after tonight.

Peddlers moved amongst the soldiers and queued at the women's doorways, hawking their common wares of writing paper, sewing kits, candy, and tobacco. Knots of teamsters paced about, smoking and restless with their prolonged wait while the draft horses stood shifting in harness. Ahead of them lanterns hissed as their reflectors threw coves of light that cut into the cold and drizzle and showed stockpiles of lumber, kegs of nails, horseshoes. Sacks of oats, potatoes, and flour were already loaded in the wagons. There were ducks, chickens, and turkeys in slatted crates. Beef calves blatted for their feed of milk.

The light they passed through showed a gang of black men dressed in rags and cast-offs standing quietly on a long expanse of railroad platform. The men of the perimeter were made to hold up a rope that encircled the lot of them and outside the rope there were soldiers with sharp-edged bayonets fixed to form a hedge of steel blades pointed at their chests.

A soldier with a megaphone was warning them that if a single nigger hand should ever let go the rope and it should fall below their waists, they'd all be shot where they stood.

They continued to wind through the back streets, seemingly lost in their maze, when finally they came to a large square, the majority of which was taken up by a dry stone fountain and at the head of the square, behind a tall wrought-iron fence, was their destination. An immense house glared with white lights that emanated from three tall windows across each story. Rising to the house's deep-set front door was a half-story granite stoop manned by guards and under which was an entrance below ground for tradesmen and servants.

They climbed the stairs and entered into a foyer where the light softened and filtered through an interior door's glass panel. A guard opened the interior door and told them to wait where they were and shut the door on them. Then the guard came back, opened the door, and led them into a hallway, where an old woman greeted them. She wore a white veil and white gloves. Around her neck was a string of pearls and each pearl was the size of a marble. Behind her stood a maid and coming up behind the maid was a young officer. He carried before him a wide leather book stuffed with papers.

The old woman told them they'd have to wait as the major had yet to arrive but was anticipated shortly. She told them there were others seeking an audience with the major and she was looking forward to meeting him herself, as if the occasion was not military occupation but one of a social nature. His guard and the young officer with the book of papers exchanged irritated looks and exasperated, the young officer swirled a finger next to his head.

“Go ahead,” the young officer said, resigned to the old woman's hospitality. “It's her house. We are here as her guests.”

Her intentions affirmed, the old woman glowed. Gracefully she showed them down the hall and through a doorway where
inside the parlor, the blended fumes of tobacco and whiskey and the heat of the room's wood fire overwhelmed him. There were other people in the room, standing and sitting, and these he avoided with his eyes. He asked his guard that he might sit and the guard agreed to let him.