Coal Black Horse (6 page)

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.

“No,” he said.

“I were in the army for a time,” the little man said wistfully. “I spent my days in the mud marching through wet corn-fields. I was trod on and ridden over by every big-mouthed son of a bitch who had a horse. I'll be hanged if I know anything more about the matter than that.” Then he paused and said, “I couldn't wait to get back home.”

The little man was funny to him and he began to take pity on him for how lost in the world a man so little as him must be when all other men were so big.

“Food?” the little man said.

“Lately I been kind of off it,” Robey said.

“Hungry then, ain't ya'.”

“I been feelin' like a walking belly,” he said.

“You afoot?”

He told him he wasn't and asked that he should wait while he forded the river to retrieve his horse and kit. The little man agreed to this and Robey slogged through the water to make the far bank. The horse was waiting where he'd left it but was
contrary this morning and had little intention of crossing. He patiently saddled the animal and slung his haversack over the pommel. He jammed a pistol in his belt and then coaxed the horse to the riverbank, but again it shied when at the water's edge and kicked that it should not get wet. He stopped to stroke the animal's eyes and soft muzzle.

“Can you handle it?” the little man yelled across through his cupped hands.

He spoke to the horse how they'd feed and water and get on their way, and only with the utmost of patience was he able to convince the horse across the river.

“Boy, I like the looks of that horse,” the little man said when they came up from the river.

“He's a good horse,” Robey said.

“I had me a good saddle horse I was riding,” the little man said. But by then he was back in the branches and was striking a path in the woods with the white geese waddling along behind him.

Robey followed the little man and the geese to his house where the window glass was broken and from inside there were more geese stretching their long necks and staring out from the jagged openings. Or they tottled on the wide veranda, curious and birdy about events they found significant, yet were invisible to the human eye. The little man told him to stay put and not to move while he fetched them food to eat, and he was to refrain from using the well as the well house was charred over from fire and still stank of wet smoke and its water was rancid.

The little man disappeared inside the house and it wasn't long before he came out carrying an immense platter heaped with half-warmed sauerkraut, fried onions, salt pork, and cold
beef. In his other hand he held a coffeepot. He squatted in the yard as he set the platter on the ground between them and after taking up a handful of kraut and a slab of beef, he urged Robey that he should also take some food and eat. He was so hungry he did not pause to reach into the plate after the little man.

They ate in silence, gorging their food and grunting the way dogs do. For Robey it was because he was so hungry, but for the little man it seemed to be the way he knew how to eat. Between mouthfuls the little man began telling Robey the long story of how he'd just come home from the war on furlough, the hounds of hell on his ass all the way, only to find that raiders and renegades had been at his house. When he told of their destructiveness his swarming eyelids quivered and his hooded eyes blanked with hatred.

“There is no sign of my family and I can only hope they are safe,” he said. But there was no hope in his voice, his affect flat and melancholy.

“You're going to look for them,” Robey said, sympathetic to the little man's plight.

“Why yes I am,” he said. “Thank you.”

The little man patted his full belly and belched and insisted Robey do the same and when he did the little man thought that hilarious. He slapped his thighs and insisted they do it again. Then they reclined in the grass and while rolling a cigarette, the little man told Robey that war had its other sides too.

“In war,” he said, “the best bad things are often obtainable,” and then he offered him the coffeepot, but when Robey thumbed the hinged lid it smelled of whiskey inside and he declined.

“Oh, go ahead,” the little man said. “Have you a little shot
in the neck. It won't hurt you none. They's a twenty-gallon demijohn settin' right inside the door.”

The little man took a long gulping drink as if to prove how abundant the amount of whiskey.

Robey thought how the little man must have had a rough go of it, being little and all and then to come home and find what he'd worked for wrecked and vandalized and his family missing and maybe dead. But now he was wary for the changes in the little man. Within short time of his whiskey-drinking, something had come over him, or had risen up from inside him. Either way he was being overtaken and it was coming on fast.

He told the little man whiskey was nothing he'd ever drunk before and at the moment it just didn't interest him, but he was grateful for the food and thought he should consider being on his way.

The little man laughed, as if satisfied with the logic of his answer, but it was an ill-tempered laugh. He continued to drink and then he tried again to interest Robey in joining him, but he declined.

“But it ain't no fun drinking alone,” the little man said, as if an appeal remembered, one made to him by another somewhere in his past.

“No,” Robey said again. “I don't want any whiskey, thank you.”

“But it's good whiskey. It slows time,” the little man said, his voice sweet and wheedling. He told him it made all your cares a will-o'-the-wisp. He drank off another full draft and then another until he was swirling his finger inside the empty pot to catch the dregs.

“It's time I was going,” Robey said again and he felt a flush of anger for how foolish he'd been and a sudden unreasoned fear came over him. He was now ensnared by the little man and he'd allowed it to happen.

“Before you go, sell me that horse,” the little man suggested, licking his fingers. “So's I can ride it to search for my family.”

“It ain't mine to sell,” Robey said, fighting to quell the apprehension in his voice. He knew he could no longer be timid, no longer hesitant and compliant. He didn't know who this man was, but he knew this man's mind was set and he would never give up the idea of possessing the horse.

“You stole it,” the man said, and when he suddenly stood Robey pulled himself from the ground to also stand.

“It was lent me,” he said.

“You love that horse, don't ya'?”

Robey did not reply. His hand went to his waist where the butt of his pistol hung in his belt.

“What every horse lover don't understand is that every horse is someday gonna die,” the little man said. Inside his swirling complexion his eyes had reddened. His voice was shrill as a child's.

“There is other horses in the world, I'll grant you that,” Robey said.

“Sell it to me and tell your man it were killed.”

“I can't do that.”

“I say nobody lets out a horse like that.”

“Mister Morphew let me that horse. I have a paper to prove it.” His face burned at the charge, that his honesty should be questioned and that he should stoop to defend himself.
He also knew it made no difference to the little man that he should have such a paper to prove his word.

“I could kill that horse,” the little man said, and drew the revolver he wore in his belt and aimed at the coal black horse. Robey knew it was true and he knew the only witness would be the wind and the trees. “Give to me that horse or I will blow the top of its head off.”

Later, he remembered feeling a numbing shock to his skull and remembered singling out the shot that fired from the gun and then seeing in the rail of his vision the little man holding the gun. He knew he shook his head in disbelief when the revolver turned on him and at the same time knew his own hand held a revolver and that he fired his weapon into the dirt at his feet and then his brain convulsed. His mind split open and without there being a sense of light, there was an eclipse of light and then there was only a throbbing blackness and then there was only blackness.

When he finally came to consciousness it was in night's darkness and the sky was lit with stars. He did not fully understand what had happened to him but understood there was nothing he could do. Days may have passed, but he could not tell because he had no idea of time. Neither did he have an idea of place — the sky above, the earth below. His head felt broken and seemed lifted from his shoulders and detached from his neck and yet it was the source of a great pain that held his entire body in an iron grasp.

The bullet had cut a groove in his scalp and his head still bled profusely. His blood was everywhere, soaking his head and neck and shoulders and still leaking from his body, leeching into the ground.

My blood is on the other side of my skin, he dumbly thought.

He was dizzy and had no control over his stomach. In frightening moments his gut heaved and threatened to overtake his life with its launching. Then it did. The heaving motion would not relent and his body shook with paroxysms involuntary. The bouts came without regularity but were still chained with one inciting the next. When his stomach had emptied, the violent attacks continued until finally his stomach was played out and his muscles too exhausted. In the meantime he'd torn away his linen shirt and knotted it around his wounded head as best he could.

“It's the best I can do,” he gasped, appealing to no one but desperately pleading none the less.

A sickness passed through him and then dizziness. Jittery, he lay back in case he should fall. He wanted to curl up in innocence, but knew he never would again. He settled into the cool ground and the world stopped turning and he waited to slip from consciousness once again.