Coal Black Horse by Robert Olmstead Read Free Book Online

themselves would sometimes be riding. But he’d not seen before in his life a black man with a leather strap collaring his neck and being led down the road by a chain. His quickest thought was that the man was a criminal, but in the next instant he knew better.
    These encounters, they increased in number and frequency until yesterday. He did not know what told the horse there was a strangeness approaching from the north, but it stopped and raised its head and directed its ears forward. He pressed with his left thigh and clucked in his throat and they stepped off the road and into the tree shade and waited. He was not so intent on hiding as he was avoiding being seen by the silent, alien caravan that was approaching, for advancing on him was no jingle of harness, no rattle of a bridle, no cough, no muffled tramp of feet or plodding hooves. There was no gabble of voices or creaking wheel axles, not even the silent approach of the lone rider he’d learned to detect in the extension of his mind. There was not a sound or feeling he couldname, but an eeriness. It was as strange as the birth of an unnatural — the oncoming surround of utter silence they carried with them as they moved down the road, as if a troupe escaped from hell, seemingly without motion and heated and on the edge of burning.
    When the vanguard hove into view they were the roughest men he’d ever seen. They rode all manner of horse and rig. They rode gaunt horses with pinch-nosed hackamoors that wrung their tails alongside warm-bloods wearing blinker hoods and four-reined bridles. There were wild and bony horses snubbed short that didn’t so much walk as they skittered and pawed across the ground sideways the way an insect does. Some of these men were shirtless and rode without blankets or saddles. Their faces were painted and their long hair knotted with leather. He wondered on the vanity in these men as some wore feather plumes in the bands of their slouch hats and red and paisley kerchiefs at their necks. Others wore ropes of shells around their necks and their heads were made up with blue and vermillion. There was also a black man, face tattooed and wearing a beaver hat, who rode among them, the silvered butt of a short-barreled muskatoon bouncing on his thigh.
    Following behind were runaway slaves that’d been rounded up and formed into coffles and marched back south. When the chains had run out they’d been yoked with forked branches cut from trees and lashed at their necks. They were a silent dusty procession and fantastic in appearance. Their clothes were often a flannel patchwork, or torn calicoes or canvas cloth, or cut-up blankets sewn into smocks and trousers suspended at the waist. They wore coverlets gashed in the center,dropped over their heads, and closed round them with a belt. The children were dressed in overshirts with no underclothes beneath them. While most wore rags and castoffs, a few were better dressed than the riders. One chained man wore a smart black suit and a low-topped bowler hat.
    Bringing up the rear was another knot of the manhunters and a two-wheeled dog car with penned and slobbering hounds riding beneath the driver’s high seat. The dogs looked his way with their drawn red eyes but didn’t make a sound. They were dogs trained to hunt what they hunted without a care for anything else, and their chained and yoked quarry walked the road before them.
    After that, he wanted distance from human beings and the roads they traveled. He wanted the ancient overgrown animal paths found in deep and trackless country. He wanted the parallel roads traveled by the drovers and the livestock, the poor, the runaways themselves.

4
    T HERE WAS A RARE SETTLING accomplished by a silent concert of light, air, and water. His still-tired mind lulled into repose where it stayed for a time until disrupted by a thrashing in the leaf mold beneath the brush. He smiled at how a foraging squirrel could make more of a