Coal Black Horse (16 page)

“There is a law of nature,” his father said, “that produces rain or snow after a great battle. It is the same in France and Germany. I knew your mother would endeavor to find me.”

“She sent me when General Jackson died.”

“I was there,” his father said.

“When he were killed?”

“I was there,” his father said.

As the bandage came away, so too came more patches of scalp and shards of bone and necrotic tissue. Revealed to him was the black hole bored into his father's cheek.

“That does itch not a little,” his father said, fumbling a hand in the direction of his head but then giving up and letting it drop back to the ground. “Maybe another day for us and you will take me home to your mother.”

“Yes,” he said, and his throat constricted as he held the back of his father's macerated head and felt the maggots falling through his fingers and away into his lap.

His father gave off a convulsing shiver and then sighed and settled again, and it was as if another piece of him had died and departed and there was little hope of recovering it. He worked
quickly, scraping lightly at the wound rot with the knife blade. He then bound the wound with the clean linen he'd bought from the two women earlier that day and lay down beside his father and held his broken and ravaged head.

“Mayhaps, when it gets a little later, you could find a cart and a pony. I would not suggest you steal for they are something we could return.”

“I can do that,” he said, and he thought, This is my father and I am his son and it brought him a degree of peace.

“Or maybe tomorrow night,” his father said. “Another day's recuperation would make me stronger.”

“Tomorrow,” he said, and thought he might cry for the storm he felt in his face, but he didn't. “Now would be a good time to get you some sleep,” he encouraged.

“Soon,” his father said.

“Soon,” he said.

That night he awoke to the sound of a shot and a man crying out. The night had brought no relief to the day's heat and now a gunshot. He sat up to see the shallow graves in the moonlight giving off a phosphorescent glow. It radiated from the fresh turned earth above the burial pits, and passing through the light of the glow he could see low-running, slab sided hogs come to root out the dead bodies already inhumed. At the far end of the field of the dying came a scream and a scuffle and a cursing that awakened and traveled the length of the head wounded in a long mimic of moaning sound.

He took up a length of broken sword and went down the row until he came to a soldier propped up on one arm. He was gibbering and pointing in the distance with a revolver. His eyes, his nose, his lips, his face were shredded by shell fragments.

“It is my own leg,” the soldier kept saying, again and again.

The soldier waved the barrel in the direction of a nearby feeding hog and he did not understand the full import of that until, plaintively, the soldier explained, it was his very own leg the hog was feeding on and in his mind he knew the leg was no longer attached to his body, but however he tried not to, he could feel the teeth of the gnawing hog.

“I can feel the pain as that hog gnaws at my shin,” he cried, pointing the revolver into the darkness.

Beside the soldier was another, lying face upward taking breath in rattling snorts and blowing it out in sputters of froth which slid down his cheeks in a white cream, piling itself along one side of his neck and ear. A bullet had clipped a groove in his skull above his temple. From this opening his brain protruded in bosses dropping off to the ground in flakes and strings. Then he stopped breathing and then and there he was dead.

“Stay here,” the soldier said. “Don't leave me. I cannot see.”

“They are over there,” Robey said, pointing at the hogs' flat shadows crossing in the darkness.

“I am blind,” he said.

“My father,” he said.

“Stay until I die so as I will not to be eaten alive by that hog. It won't be long now.”

He did not want to leave his father's side, but still he took up the sword and for the next hour he guarded the field of the dying. Of all that he might wonder on, he wondered on why the blind soldier was blind.

“Why blind?” he whispered as he walked. “Why blind and still not dead.

He walked the fields length, turned smartly, and then returned to the soldier who'd endured the phantom pain, and after several such circuits he was tired and impatient, so he went into the field where the hogs were rooting and lay down on the surface of the flat wet grass with the sword at his side.

He waited and finally one of the curious beasts came close and nosed at him with its great tusked snout and when it did, he brought the sword up swiftly and skewered it through the neck. The animal screeched, and open-mouthed it lunged at him as he twisted the blade sharply and hot blood flushed from its neck and down his arm and it made no other sound again. He slaughtered it where he killed it, taking what fresh pork he could carry and leaving the rest for its own kind. In the morning he would fry its bacon and fat which had been nourished with the flesh and faces of dead soldiers and he could not but think that when he fed them, he would be returning them unto themselves.

When he returned to the soldier who had endured the phantom pain, he was going to tell him that maybe he was blind because God thought he'd seen enough for one life, but when he arrived at his side he found him to be dead. On his chest was the revolver, a six-shot Remington. It was loaded and he understood that the soldier had left it for him. He also came to understand that he was finally finished with his believing in God.

T
HROUGHOUT THE NIGHT HE
was restless and in the early-morning darkness he awoke to the silent movement of women. He sat up and without passage into wakefulness he was alert and saw them wandering from body to body in the field of the dead. They cried into handkerchiefs they'd scented with pennyroyal or peppermint oil. They were stark, tormented creatures with unpinned hair and bent shoulders, wandering in the dawn, kneeling beside bodies, and collapsing to the ground. He wanted to call out to them, to touch them, to be assured that he saw them and was not dreaming them.

He looked to the horse silently standing watch and sketched its face with his own sadness and drew strength from its passive and mannered distance. Surely the horse felt what he felt. Surely the horse knew what he knew. The women were sisters, or mothers, or lovers, he did not know. They wept and stumbled on and he wondered if they truly wanted to find the men they were looking for. He himself had found what he was looking for and wished he hadn't for how slender and proscribed hope was now.

When he awoke again it was in the morning and it was because someone was throwing pebbles at him. When he opened
his eyes it was to see the girl. He knew it was her before he saw her, but still he closed his eyes and opened them again and she was still standing there.

She stood looking at him without moving, her body in black silhouette against the sun, and he shielded his eyes to see her the better. He rolled to his side and could see that she was looking at him queerly. She was wearing a plain black dress with the sleeves cuffed in white lace and he made out she was carrying a drum on her hip. She stood beside the coal black horse and in her black dress was as if she was of the horse, born of the horse, and the thin sliver of yellow light expanding between them was their separation completing itself.

She cocked her head and squinted at him, studying him in her mind. Some part of her knew him, but she was not sure and he felt compelled to tell her in what ways they were acquainted. How their paths had crossed. He was tempted to say, Yes, you know me, but he did not. He returned her look and the guilt of their history must have been written in his face.

“You thought I wouldn't recognize you,” she finally said, her lip caught between her teeth. Her words held no accusation, but still he felt accused.

He stood and gathered himself and not knowing what else to do, he began walking away from her, but she followed him to the tree and then her voice was asking to his back, “Who are you?” And then her voice was rising and she was cursing him and saying, “You could have stopped him.”

“I could not help,” he said, turning to her sad and stricken face. “I had to find my father.”

She stood very still, disbelieving him.

He fought for control of the sound in his voice that it not be weak or pleading. He'd done nothing to stop the man and however much he tried to tell himself that he'd not known what to do, the after-knowing, the knowing that follows experience, was burned into him and what he'd thought before was slight and weak and not worth remembering. He could not deny that he'd become bound to this girl that night in the fire-gutted house. He could not deny that it'd been in his power to stop the man.

“And did you?” she said.

“Did I what?”

“Find your father.”

She had begun to cry and her tears were strangely wet and glistening as they streaked her dirty face. But she did not raise her hands to wipe them away. She stood in the black dress with the drum on her hip as if she were the one struck with accusation.

“Don't cry,” he said, wanting to console her, but his attempt only made her the more angry and he felt as if anything he might say she would think was lame and stupid.

“It ain't me crying,” she said. “It's my eyes.”

“My pap is under this dying tree,” he whispered, and pointed where the coal black horse stood watching them, making its long shadow in the light of the morning sun.

“What's your name,” she said.

“Robey.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes,” he nodded.

“How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

“You have not been broken yet, but you will be and when it happens you will know what it was like for me. What he did to me a animal wouldn't do to another animal.”

He wanted to tell her he'd been shot in the head and so had his father. He wanted to tell her he'd already been broken and he lived, but he knew his father would not be so fortunate. It was a thought he'd not yet allowed himself to have and felt something structured that he had depended upon fall apart inside him and it made his eyes burn.

“What's your name?” he said.

“Rachel,” she said. “Like in the Genesis.”

“How old are you,” he said.

“Fifteen.”

“People should be born twice,” he said.

“I'd rather not be born a'tall,” she said bitterly.

“How could he do that,” he asked foolishly, and a look crossed her face as if he were the incredible questioner and he prepared himself for another tongue-lashing, but her anger was too great for her to sustain. Her body wavered and he wanted to suggest she sit in the shade and rest, but his mind was made too awkward by her presence and he could not cobble his thoughts into words that made half sense to him.

“He thinks he's above ever'one else,” she said. They were words she'd had a long time to think about and decide upon in her struggle to understand. “He talks about turning over a new leaf, but he'll never change, not one bit. He carries snakes in his pocket and throws them at people. He claims he can't be killed.”

Speaking the words had the effect of sending her back
inside herself. He wasn't there anymore. It was just her and these words she was fashioning to express the thoughts of her mind that could not explain or escape the memory of what had happened to her.

“Ever'one can be kilt,” he said, and he waited for her to say more, but the girl named Rachel was now lost and confused, and however immediate and profound her surroundings she did not seem to know where she was. She lifted a hand and let the palm of it open, and that was the best she could do. He waited as she slowly made her return, looked at him, and sighed.

“We are lodged in that cow barn,” she said, and then, “You can see the roof over yonder.” She pointed across the hull of the battlefield and he could see the cornice of a roof, its dull surface flaring with muted sunlight.

She told him she wanted him to know.

She then stared in his direction, not focusing on anything, but weighing a thought in her mind. There was a long silence between them that neither felt the urge to break.

Then she told him she was tired and she needed to rest and turned and walked away.

THIS DAY BROUGHT MORE
of the scavengers and more of the relatives and citizens and now there were the tourists arriving by train to be added to their numbers. The air was bone dry and the heat of that July day was relentless beneath a high blinding sun, and soon after their arrival they became a vomiting lot, fainting and puking on the ground beside the dead.

He walked among them with a shovel over one shoulder and canteen straps slung over the other, the hollow sound of
the knocking canteens reminding him of his day's obligations. He wore the revolver tucked in the back of his trousers hidden behind his coattail and a knife in his new boots. He watched them as they went down on all fours like dogs and heaved their guts until their insides were empty and there was nothing more to heave. Then he'd move on, finding it increasingly difficult to extend sympathy or pity.

One old gentleman he encountered, wearing a sombrero hat and a short sleeveless cloak, was sitting on a large tricycle inside a circle of the dead and unburied and for no reason he stopped.

“Are you looking for anyone in particular, sir?” he asked.

“Thank God no,” the old man said, “but please give to me a shovel and I will help you with this terrible work for it is awful and shameful. There is no one here to cover these poor boys with even leaves.”

“They's grave diggers working,” he assured the old man. “They'll be along shortly.”

“The very birds would do that much for them if I did nothing and left them lying here so.”