Coal Black Horse (11 page)

Here they waited in the company of more guards, bored and hardened men standing at ease and, oddly enough, talking about shooting quail. Inside, the house was as if outfitted from the China trade. There were silver clocks and rosewood tables, enameled screens and porcelain vases blooming with peacock feathers. He imagined each room like this one: crystal chandeliers, dark paintings hung in ornate frames, the embossed spines of books, silver snuff boxes, upholstered furniture, and heavy curtains misty with condensation.

His brain began to unreel. The heated room was slipping from his mind. Could this be what people were fighting over, the many possessions that surrounded him? These objects with so much value and so little use? He thought how the sweep of a hand or the lick of a flame and they would be broken and burned. Maybe it was the weak and the fragile and the beautiful that made you the craziest and made you fight the hardest.

From the hallway came the commotion of opening doors and crossing the parlor's threshold, the words of an angry exchange. Robey was tired and hungry, but he was not concerned. He knew he would be delivered. He did not know why he knew it, but he knew this was not the end of his journey.

“What kind of dodge is this?” a voice came from the hallway. It was the young officer with the leather book of papers.

“He says he wants to hold a prayer meeting,” the old woman was saying, “and is here to seek the major for his permission.”

“He's the worst in love with God of any man I ever known,” said a woman's urgent voice. “He prays on his knees and sometimes his eyeballs roll around backward inside his head.”

“I'd like to see that,” the old woman said solemnly.

“But, ma'am,” the young officer said with all possible forbearance, “we don't want a prayer meeting.”

“Well, why not?” the old woman declared. “I can think of nothing more appropriate.”

“He has a mighty voice,” the woman said. “Sometimes when he prays it's so awful powerful he has to put his face in a cracker box.”

“Put them in the parlor,” the young officer said in exasperation, and then commanded that the guard in the parlor be increased.

When Robey saw the girl, she was following behind the man in all-black livery with white hair and white mutton-chops bushing his cheeks, and behind them was the blind woman, haggard and tired. The man was pink-faced and wore shoulders that rounded above his chest. He limped in one leg, but it did not seem the limp of a real injury. Robey could feel himself in the direction of the man's wicked little eyes as they scanned the room. The girl had lightened her skin with the slightest stroke of chalk powder and reddened her hard shallow cheeks but could do little about her broken lips.

The soldier guarding him leaned down and whispered how her appearance surely did not go against her. Another of the guards caught the eye of the girl, hooked a finger inside his cheek, and made a popping noise. He then smiled and kissed his fingertips. Her panicked eyes flew to Robey's where they stayed, and then they dulled and grayed.

W
HEN THE MAJOR ARRIVED
he was carrying his watch in hand and Robey was made to stand as the major, shedding his oilcloth, entered the parlor. The major's head was large and his face was shaped flat and pale. His eyebrows were great white wings that flared dramatically from his brow as if threatening flight from the surface of his forehead. He was by appearance a horseman, for he was bow-legged and walked with his legs turned outward and his toes turned in. He handed his sword to one of the guards, took off his cap, and said to the old woman shadowing him that, yes, a broiled chicken would delight him to no end if one could be found at such an ungodly hour.

“Is that altogether necessary?” he said, pointing to the bindings at Robey's wrist.

“He's a prisoner-spy,” the soldier said and tugged open the blue jacket to show gray.

“Please,” the major said. “Untie the young man. We'll just have to take our chances.” Then, to the young officer with the leather book, he expressed the sentiment that someday this war would be over and when it was they would all have to live with each other once again.

The woman directed her maid to immediately kill a chicken and broil it for the good major. She then told the major a fire had been built in the library and he should sit by the fire and warm himself as the night outside was turning cool and wet.

“It's spring nights like this that the cold can deceive you the most,” she said, to which he agreed. She then told him he should rest himself as the train was running late but should be along shortly, and when it finally arrived he would surely be busy with the off loading.

The major looked at his watch in the palm of his hand and asked her how she knew his train was late.

“I have ears to hear with,” she tried in her most alluring manner.

“Yes. Yes you do,” he said. He found the young officer's eyes with his own and communicated reprimand. He told the woman not to concern herself with the train. It was his business to know when the train would arrive as it was his train and then he disappeared through a doorway deeper into the house's interior.

It wasn't long before the young officer with the leather book came to the parlor and indicated they were to follow him. As he stood, Robey cut his eyes to the girl, but she sat quietly, her hands folded in her lap, her vision cast in the direction of a tall window.

The young officer led them down a long lamplit hallway, smoky and orange and hung with family portraits set in ornate gilded frames to a room that fronted the square. Inside the room, a gallery walled with books, was a fireplace and the major straddling a wooden chair close to the crackling wood. He'd removed his damp jacket. His collar was unbuttoned and he sat as one who wanted proximity to the fire. His arms
were hung off the chair back and in one hand he held a glass of amber-colored whiskey. He was teetering back and forth, letting himself onto the front legs of his chair and then the hind legs and closer to the flames where he was sweating and seemed to feel the strange need to do so.

In the doorway stood the old woman whispering to a much younger version of herself. She too wore pearls and a tightly bodiced peach dress with ample skirts. The woman's daughter, Robey concluded. Though they were whispering about the major, she seemed intent on another individual in the room, a black-haired cavalry officer.

“Too old,” the woman was saying, and Robey could see how right she was in her observation. However alert and vital the major at first had seemed, in repose he showed himself to be too old to be in a uniform, his smiling head perched on its stiff collar, his purple-spotted hands hanging from his shirt cuffs, tufts of white hair similar to his eyebrows rimming his red shell-like ears. His face, though elderly and care-worn, was the man's face returning, as some men's faces do, to its original boyish likeness.

“He's a very important man,” the daughter was saying, impressed with the major, his staff and attendant military trappings.

“Not down here he ain't,” the old woman said, her voice betraying the truth and depth of her bitterness.

The major turned on the blabbing women and then smiled broadly to let them know he could hear their imprudent hallway whisperings. They fluttered at how unsettled they were made by the gaze of his clear blue eyes and the knowledge they'd been found out.

“It's a young heart that beats in this old body,” he told their
fleeing backs, and then he saw Robey and his guard and gestured with the wave of his hand that they should enter.

When they made their way into the room, there were two tall guards standing inside the entry and another officer lounging crossways in a reclined chair, his legs slung over an arm. This officer wore the gold braids of the cavalry and of all the men in the room seemed most secure in himself. His hair was black and glistened with oil, as did his tall shiny boots. He held a gold-framed hand mirror and scissors and was trimming his elaborate waxed moustache. On the floor beside him was a half-eaten bowl of buttered popcorn.

“I am tired to death,” the major said to no one in particular, and turned back to the fire that was reddening his face.

The guards took this as a sign, for they smiled and shifted to stand at their ease again. Then propping his arms on the chair back, the major turned his eyes on Robey and said to his guard, “Who is this young man you have for me and why so urgent?”

“He's a peculiar one,” the soldier said, prodding him forward with the stock of his rifle. “I sketch him a spy.”

The cavalry officer could not contain his laughter. “A spy,” he scoffed, and caught his image laughing again in the mirror glass.

“Don't be shy,” the major said to Robey. “Can I offer you a drink on this wet night?”

“It might help warm me up some,” Robey said, and gave off a shiver at the suggestion of how chilled and thirsty he might be.

“He talks,” the guard said, as if it were a suspicion confirmed.

“He talks,” the cavalry officer mimicked, and then made a sound of disgust in his throat.

“Has he not talked before?” the major asked.

“Nope, not a word come from him.”

“Then how do we know he is a spy?” the reclining cavalry officer said, without breaking concentration with his mirror.

“Are you a spy, son?” the major asked, looking again at the watch he held cupped in his hands.

“No sir,” Robey said.

The major continued to ask questions as if his aim was to ask a certain number in the shortest amount of time and the substance of the answers did not much matter to him.

Robey didn't know how to reply after the first question and so he clasped one hand in the other and said little more.

The major looked up from his watch and, seemingly taken by Robey's face, caught his eye and smiled and would not let go the stare. The major held the stare, looking him straight in the eyes and Robey met his gaze and would not turn away and before long it was as if neither one of them was located in the room. It was no longer night or day and neither of them was in the environment of war. The major was somewhere else—another place and another time and that's where he was seeing Robey.

“Have you had any formal schooling?” the major softly asked, and when Robey did not answer he explained how before the war he'd been a schoolmaster in Connecticut and he had taught boys much his own age and how much it saddened him to now see them in uniforms and carrying swords and rifles and slaughtered in battle.

Robey thought for a moment as to what he might say to
this man who was experiencing an occasion remote and ruminative. He folded his shoulders and out of respect he looked down at the worn carpet beneath his feet. The cuffs were worn from his trousers and the fabric ragged and thready. He'd not realized how tattered he'd become and had the odd thought it was time to find another pair of trousers. He was learning that fear was like danger and passed by those who faced up to it. The straying thought lingered: new trousers. He thought this day would not be his end. He decided he feared nothing from these men and looked up. He looked straight at the major, unmoved by the old man's rheumy solicitation.

“Well,” the major said, draining his whiskey glass and clumsily setting it to clatter on the stone floor of the hearth. “So be it. What do you have to say for yourself? Nothing at all?”

“I am searching for my pap,” he said.

“He is a liar,” the soldier bawled, and to this the major shrugged, still holding his gaze as he let the watch dangle on its short fob.

“Son?” the major said.

“I am to find my pap and bring him back to his home.” His voice became no more than a whisper on his lips when he said, “I were shot right here in the head and my horse were stole from me.”

“The bastards,” said the cavalry officer trimming his moustache. “They'll take the eyeballs right out of your face.”

Again the soldier guarding him called him a liar and the major informed the soldier that he was no longer needed. Disgusted and long since tired of the duty he'd assumed, he shouldered his rifle and stamped out of the room.

“Sit down,” the major said, pocketing his watch. “Let's have a chat.”

“It is the truth,” Robey whispered without moving.

“You wouldn't be pulling my leg?”

“No sir.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“A tiny little fellow back down the road. He was swum with skin fleas and dressed in women's clothes he stole'd off a woman he killed. He shot me here in the head,” he gestured, “and stol'd my horse. It was a very fine horse black as coal.”

“By gawd, that's the boy's horse,” the major shouted, and punched his fist into the palm of his open hand. “We found the fellow who stole your horse. He's in the hoosegow as we speak. He's one of ours and I assure you in no uncertain terms, he will be taken care of.”

“How do we know it's his horse?” demanded the cavalry officer. The mention of the horse had caused him to set aside his mirror and scissors and lunge to his feet. As he spoke he cut the air with his hand.

“No,” the major said, wagging a finger at the cavalry officer. “The boy speaks the truth and you, sir, are working on my last nerve. I think you like that ill-tempered horse better than you like people. The story is impossible to contrive. You will give the boy his horse.”

“I will not.”

“You will give back to the boy his god damn horse and you will do it now and that will be the end of the matter.”

What was between the major and the cavalry office was personal and what had been smoldering now burned hotly. The major was clearly pleased with his display of anger in
command. In a sulk the cavalry officer shook down his trouser legs and, hands clasped behind him, looked to the ceiling as if in supplication. After enough delay to communicate that the final decision was his and his alone he left through the door, the guards snickering at his back with full intention that he should hear them.