Coal Black Horse (25 page)

Then he could see her in faint illumination lighted by the moon. She lay at the misted and unfrozen stream bank, where she'd carried herself to the place where the hot waters bubbled up from the earth. She was trembling and moaning and he began to run to her, but when she saw him coming she stood. She held up a hand and yelled at him, “Let me die,” but she did not speak whole words before they were torn with her cries of pain. He kept on, dragging the blanket he'd pulled from the bed. She waved her hands, no, telling him to stay away, and when he did not stop she turned and threw herself full body into the warm water.

He saw the flash of her white legs as she fell down into the pool. He was running across the frozen ground, so near the clouded and steamy shoals of the spring. She then stood upright, her wet shift a sheen in the moonlight and stepped into the eddy where the current circled a boulder before taking a sharp cooling swing, before quickening and roping with
heavy turbulence and troughy rapids, before falling off the mountain.

Here she let go from her grasp and there was a white bobbing that floated from the shallows and made for the current's catch. There was first one and then there was another one and both of them dunking and rising like tiny pumpkins, the second one floating after the first one.

He splashed into the shallows of the birth-stained water as the current carried them toward the falls. He threw himself forward, rasing a great flounce of water that swiftly closed to submerge him. He stood and ran and dove again, his thighs breaking the surface, and he was catching them in his hands, first one and then the other, their tiny faces red and soundless and contorted with the unimaginable terror of being born.

Afterward, he wished to console her, but she seemed to want nothing from him. She turned her back on him and in her stance was written the question why: Why did you do that? Why did you save them? Who gave you the right to do that?

She told him, “I want to hate you for what you have done, hate you as much as I hate him who did this to me,” but he made no reply.

For several days there was nothing of motherhood that kindled inside her, but Hettie would not relent and finally she gave in and let them nurse at her breasts. They were two little boys with fine downy birth-hair on their shoulders, backs, and their odd-shaped heads. Their faces were like those of tiny old men and they beat the air with their fists and their cries were hearty and healthy exercises. She refused to name them and they were not concerned because for this there would be time.

Then there was more cold and a chilling rain that turned to snow and lasted for days, and winter on the mountain that year seemed longer and colder than any winter before. The snow and cold, as if an edgeless sea, enveloped the dormant earth, the arrowed pines shrugged to the skirling wind. Hung in the sky was the white sun, the desolate glistering of far bright stars, the cooling remnants of old stars. Outside the candle-bright cabin was a tide of white-locked fields in deep suspended silence.

During these days of snow-pent darkness he was seized by a sleep with an iron grip, senseless, nameless, and peaceful sleep, and only afterward did he sense the flow of time gone by and feel what was inside him begin to ease. He had died a first death and a second and a third. He knew in this life he was not done with death and killing.

It was a sleeper's world frosted, silent, dark and starkly beautiful, and he remembered tranquillity. He remembered the days in the valley riding the coal black horse. The horse rising to the bit, its hot breath blowing back at him, the shedding sweat from its sleek black neck, flecks of foam from its quivering nostrils. He remembered his father. He remembered the dead. He remembered nothing moving in the darkness of those nights, but one night he awoke to a chorus of baby cries and Rachel cradling a baby in her arms and feeding the baby and then feeding the other baby, and when she lay down she lay down beside him, her belly tucked against his back and her face at his neck. He remembered her arm reaching across his chest and gently taking her wrist in his hand. Sleep, he remembered thinking, sleep a little while longer.

COAL BLACK HORSE

A Conversation with the Author

A Reading and Discussion Guide

Although the novel is largely about a boy's journey, it is also about a very particular moment in history. Much of its power comes from the Civil War battle scenes, which feel so real and visceral. What kind of research did you do to re-create those scenes
?

It began with a visit to Gettysburg. As a boy growing up in New Hampshire, my war of fascination was the American Revolution, but when living in southern Pennsylvania I began to wonder about the Civil War. So I went to Gettysburg to see the battlefi eld and slowly but surely began to feel myself drawn into that experience. I was trying, as a curious person, to learn about it and understand it. I began to read and one thing led to another. I visited other battlefi elds and somewhere along the way I decided I wanted to try to write this novel. Again, as a way to experience it. I was as ignorant of this world as Robey Childs and in a sense I invented him so that we could discover it together. I remember I was at Shiloh for a major reenactment and was standing inside a battery of cannons. I could feel the concussive force of the explosions against my body and coming up through the earth. My face felt wet and when I wiped at my nose it was bleeding. I thought how that
must have happened to the artillerists and for a moment I had the tiniest glimpse of their experience.

You're not from the South, yet you capture your characters' voices and diction so well. Did you read Civil War accounts or did it come by way of instinct
?

It's true, I'm not Southern born but was raised in the country in the northern reach of the Appalachian chain. A lot of similarities up north and down south along that spine of those mountains. And the mountains of West Virginia, the fi ctional setting of Robey's home, exists in a kind of not-south not-north ether. Even in ancient times it was a place where the northern tribes and southern tribes brushed up against each other and was a kind of no-man's-land, contested territory and a place where you could get killed. As to the voices, I think of them as rural and arcadian, naturally sardonic, and trenchant. My family had an amazing talent for the aphoristic and the epigrammatic. Th is went a long way in establishing authority in a character. When Hettie Childs fi rst spoke she came onto the page as if she'd been waiting 150 years and fi nally this was her moment. She is real to me in every way.

It seems as though the coal black horse is equally real to you. Did you grow up with horses
?

Horses, cows, pigs, sheep. Yes. Th e farm is still there and I get home every chance I can. Th e coal black horse began as a simple means of conveyance. Th e boy needed a good horse if he was to carry out his mother's imperative. He needed a horse with experience he lacked. So I came up with the coal
black horse and then the strangest thing happened. With each draft the horse became more and more prominent. Th e horse grew in my mind and grew on the page and in time the horse was the same to me as it was to Robey Childs. I mean that literally. Such a horse as I imagined was lustrously iridescent. Like coal when turned to the light. I was amazed when I fi rst saw the hardcover jacket my publisher did for the hardcover. It is so arresting. It really took my breath away. And of course there is something ancient and timeless about the horse and the rider. Th e horse is consort and for thousands of years we have lived together by agreement. I think they are very beautiful. Sometimes I think, like Hettie, the coal black horse was out there the whole time and just waiting for Robey and me to come along.

In the process of writing the book, did you think about how warfare has changed since the Civil War
?

Combat actually changed during that war. Take for instance the minie ball, invented by Captain Claude-Étienne Minié of France. Th is was a high-caliber grooved conical lead bullet. It could be loaded quickly, and because it was grooved, when fi red from a rifl e it was very accurate over a long distance, and yet the generals still believed in massed lines of men in close formation charging over open ground. New weapons, old tactics. Wounds were especially horrible and so many wounded required amputation because the minie ball did not just break bone but actually shattered whole sections of bone, and the bone could not be mended.

But however terrible and chaotic war is, I think instances of courage and dignity and sacrifi ce in warfare are timeless
and universal. I am not sure if it's true, but I read that the men who retreated aft er Pickett's famous charge walked backwards because it would have been ignoble to have been shot in the back.

Even now I think the reasons why boys and men go to war haven't changed. We must recognize what a great adventure war is. If not for the Civil War thousands and thousands of young men were destined to live their entire lives in the same place, the same town. Th ey saw the war as an escape from daily lives that were relentlessly boring and tedious. War is extremely liberating and purifying and for so many men, they were never so alive as when they were at war. It is not acceptable to talk about this love of war, but I think it's real. I do not think this has changed. William Faulkner wrote, “Th e past is never dead. It's not even past.”

What was the biggest challenge for you in writing the novel
?

I think all writers are more interested in what they don't know than what they do know. Naturally, helplessly, hopelessly curious about everything. Research is so fascinating. I just loved all that reading and those experiences, but ultimately I am a dramatist, not a historian. So, two things: First I had to acknowledge how inexhaustible the information is and literally begin to turn away from it. Second, I had to fi nd a way to animate the story I wanted to tell. But, where to start? And how to start? And where to go from there? In a sense, all stories are about what we mean to ourselves and what we mean to each other. It's really that simple, but every one of them has to be diff erent. I thought about the boy leaving home and entering
that landscape. He was really quite the innocent. He was born in remoteness. It was his story I wanted to tell—a boy sent out to bring his father home, a boy looking for his father. I think for all time mothers have been sending their sons to bring home their fathers. I think about how hard it was for her to send him. I assumed a vein of iron in these people. I think there are people who have such faith in each other.

Your characters do seem to retain faith under very diffi cult circumstances. Did any of them surprise you
?

Yes, late in the novel, at Gettysburg when Robey takes justice into his own hands. I remember the days when writing that scene. I do not approve of what he did, but I could not stop him. It was as if his will was discovered and he became a powerful infl uence in every rewrite thereaft er, and there were quite a few. Hettie seemed to come onto the page all at once and it was only aft erward that I realized how powerful her presence is throughout the book. She is present in the opening and the ending, but for me she was never very far away. She possessed a kind of strength and wisdom and equanimity that the world so lacked. And of course the coal black horse becoming more prominent by increments until fi nally it became the title. I still have dreams about them.

Are there any other characters who are entering your dreams? Is there another novel unfolding in your mind
?

I have never thought of writing as something I do but as a place where I go. Th ere I fi nd a community and a language and an experience of totality. So, yes. Th e event at the end of
Coal Black Horse
, the birth. When I fi rst realized that Rachel was pregnant, I felt an overwhelming responsibility and only later, when she eventually gives birth, did I know she was having twins. As I have mentioned, there are days you remember when you are working and these were two of them: her being pregnant and then having twins. I just couldn't let that go, so in the book I'm working on now, I am telling their story, only it is years and years later and they are grown men.

1. Why do you think Robey's mother sends him on a dangerous journey to fi nd his father? How do you feel about her decision?

2. Robey is reminded of his mother as he travels. For example, when he is shot: “He was in pain and his mother always said that pain was weakness leaving the body” (page 53). Where else in the story do you fi nd her presence? How would you characterize their relationship?

3. In what ways does the landscape at the farm, on the road, on the battlefi eld, and in Gettysburg inform the story and aff ect Robey and the people around him?

4. In his travels Robey sees a lot of strange, beautiful, and gruesome things. For example, the horse skeleton covered with vines and fl owers (page 26) and then the description of the man's skeleton a few pages later (page 29). What other examples of this juxtaposition can you fi nd? How do they aff ect how you understand Robey's journey?