Coal Black Horse by Robert Olmstead

I suppose there are more stories and histories of the Civil War than any other. Wars provide an endless tableau of lives lived in the extreme, facing moral choices that those of us living a relative peaceful existence never have to face, except through our imaginations. Only if we are brutally honest with ourselves, can we imagine ourselves facing the horrors of war and coming out unscathed, with our sanity intact; knowing, as Coal Black Horse vividly illustrates, that, to have survived at all would depend on luck at having avoided truly brutalizing conditions of war rather than as a confirmation of virtue or inner-strength that has withstood the flames.

A mother, Hettie Childs, sends her young 14-year-old son, Robey, from his home in what I believe to be the Shenandoah Mountains, to search for and bring home his father, who has gone off to fight in the Civil War. Hettie has a premonition that he has been killed in battle. She instructs Robey “to be safe, take no help from anyone” and “don’t trust anyone, not man, nor woman, nor child.”

Robey rides off on the back of their “cobby horse”, which grows lame shortly after he leaves home. He stops at a mercantile – the last familiar place in his universe, so far – where the proprietor, Mister Morphew, loans him a magnificent horse, the coal black horse that belonged to a man who had recently died while stopping there. Obeying his mother’s admonition, at first he declined Morphew’s offer, but Morphew persuaded him that it was the only way he would survive.

Robey departs and has many encounters with death, including one with a “goose woman”, a small, lice-infested man, a northern spy, dressed up as a woman surrounded by geese, who tricks Robey with food, then shoots him, almost killing him, and steals the coal black horse. Robey recovers from his wound, a nearly fatal crease to his scalp, and steals a succession of horses, guns and supplies, and witnesses many horrific scenes of war.

At one point, Olmstead declares, “When men go war, war wins”. He goes on to illustrate his point in evocative detail with some of the most vivid descriptions of war I have ever read. He asserts that in war, there are two wars; the one at the front and the one waged by the lawless, marauding profiteers, bounty hunter, battlefield scavengers and spies, like the spy who nearly killed Robey.

After weeks or perhaps months of wandering and searching, Robey finally tracks his father’s unit to Gettysburg and arrives just after that seminal battle is over, wandering amidst its carnage. “Sticking among the rocks and against trunks of trees were hair, brains, entrails, and shreds cooking black in the sun.”

After being attacked by a crazed, mortally wounded soldier, who he had to kick in the head to free himself, Robey realizes that “In war, even the dead will kill you.”

Olmstead’s descriptions of the survivors streaming south and the carnage of the battlefield itself are incredibly vivid, rich with indelible detail; details of the surrounding countryside and its inhabitants that paint a bleak picture of war and those who would profit by it. Chapters 9 and 10 are worth reading several times.

In a central event occurring along the way, well before reaching Gettysburg, Robey witnesses, and feels powerless to stop, a rape of Rachael, a girl just a year older than he is, by her guardian, a itinerant preacher. Rachael missionary parents have gone to Africa where they were killed by lions. During their absence, she was delivered to the care of the preacher and his blind, now pregnant and defenseless wife.

Rachael appears a second time at a Union Army depot-town where Robey is briefly detained by the Union Army as a spy, and again at Gettysburg, where he finds his dying father among the thousands dead and dying. In the interim, of necessity, Robey has been transformed by events into a man – or, at least, a boy with the lethal survival instincts of a man.

Too severely injured to be moved, Robey nurses his dying father on the field of Gettysburg. After several days of suffering, his father dies and Robey departs, but not before killing one of a pair of scavengers, who roam the battlefield extracting gold from the dead and dying; cutting off fingers for their rings, extracting gold fillings from teeth even from the living by hacking the jaws with a hatchet, and slitting pockets with razors to quickly extract their contents. I will always remember this sentence: They moved “like crows in the garden, skipping from one dead body to the next.”

He rescues Rachael from her tormentor and they make their way to his home in the Shenandoah, traveling at night for safety.

About the horse: The coal black horse rescues Robey from many encounters. It possesses a keen sense of danger before Robey does; and it is swifter and stronger than any other horse. Does it kill the spy who has stolen him, the “goose woman”, by running through woods to hang him up in the fork of a tree? Does the horse’s disapproval and then apparent forgiveness in the wake of Robey’s own brutality signify the response of a forgiving god? I don’t know. One reviewer describes this story as a fable. A horse, with an super acuity for sensing danger before it is apparent to its rider, saving him from death on several occasions, and the improbability of Robey having survived and returned home, as well as the many mythological and biblical references which, to be honest, I don’t recognize – as long as a label doesn’t diminish its effect, “fable” is as good as any; a tale rich in authentic detail and moral force.