Coal Black Horse by Robert Olmstead

Author:Robert Olmstead [Olmstead, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, United States, Historical Fiction, Fathers and Sons, General, Coming of Age, United States - History - Civil War; 1861-1865, War & Military, Fiction
ISBN: 9781565125216
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

10

DAYS LATER AS HE neared the wide flat river of his destination, where the army of his father was said to be, there were fresh rumors of a movement in a northeasterly direction and it was as if the eddies of seventy-five thousand men up and tramping the dusty roads could be felt in the very earth itself. He was only days behind the march when he turned in its direction, following its tremors.

Long afterward, he would remember how fifty miles away he heard the thunder of cannons echoing through the blue mountains, the reverberations of the bombardment that preceded, as he was to learn, the final charge of the fateful battle. The next afternoon, he rode through a drenching rainstorm that leeched the July landscape of all color and after dark he met the saturated vanguard of the gray retreating south.

Another storm cut loose in the morning, one that was more vicious, and in moments the tide of men and horses, the drovers and their herds of braying beeves he was traveling against, were forced by the deluge to wade through the deep cloying mud like hogs, the turning wheels clogging from spoke to felloe and locked in its hold skidded over the ground. Insensate, he was drawn against the tide of sutlers and ambulances, the carriages and caissons, the long parade of the hip-shot, the mud-spattered, the blood-dirty, and the slaughter-gutted, the wheeling army of the dead and the dying. For twenty miles they came against him and the coal black horse in a relentless tide and he rode on without hesitation through their broken and driven ranks. Their calls of foreboding and their hollowed silences were a testament to the great killing and dying that had taken place where they had departed. They had died on the battlefield and now they died by the road and they died in the road and those that did were ground to pulp from the rolling iron-shod wheels, the treading of horses’ hooves, the tramp of so many barefoot men.

At the end of that road, it was as if evil had descended and taken up inside man and caused man to flail and step before the bullet and receive the bullet and receive the blade and man could not help but put up flesh as shield against metal. For man to enter those fields had been to give up all will but the will to kill, or be killed, and to survive those fields was somehow to be cheated of death. At the end of that road, he knew was his destination.

He did not call out his father’s name as he moved against the retreat, did not ask of those sunken and glassy-eyed men where he could find his father. He did not want to intrude on their suffering, but more so he did not want to be heard or to be seen by them. He wanted to pass through their gabbled ranks as if he were not there and as

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