Book Report: Coal Black Horse

Coal Black Horse
By Robert Olmstead

From the flap:
When Robey Childs's mother has a premonition about her husband, a soldier fighting in the Civil War, she does the unthinkable: she instructs her only child to find his father on the battlefield and bring him home.
At fourteen, wearing the coat his mother sewed to ensure his safety--blue on one side, gray on the other--Robey thinks he is off on a great adventure. But not far from home, his horse falters and he realizes the enormity of his task. It takes the gift of a powerful and noble coal black horse to show him how to undertake the journey of his life: with boldness, bravery, and self-possession.
Yet even that horse is no match for the brutality and senselessness of war, no surrogate for the courage Robey needs to summon in its face. It's in the center of that landscape, as witness to the lawlessness and carnage around him, that he is forced to raise a gun for the first time in his life. When he returns to his mother, Robey Childs will be the best a man can be, and the worst, irrevocably scarred by all he has seen--and all he has done.

First line:
The evening of Sunday May 10 in the year 1863, Hettie Childs called her son, Robey, to the house from the old fields where he walked the high meadow along the fence lines where the cattle grazed, licking shoots of new spring grass that grew in the mowing on the edge of the pasture.

I nearly quit this book early on when I caught myself head-jumping between mother and son, but I'm glad I grit my teeth and kept going. This story is very simple, a coming of age tale in which a young boy realizes the world is not what he thought it was. I enjoyed the history and actually picked it partly to learn about the civil war--though through Robey's eyes most places and events were nameless and left to the reader to already know what part of the war was unfolding. While Robey might not spout off such details, he sees a great deal more--of finer focus.

This story puts the reader right in the heart of the war, dodging bullets and cannonballs and sword play and death, carnage and destruction in ultimate 3D effect. You can feel the bloodspray, hear the screams and tearing of flesh, breaking of bone, smell the rotting wounds as Robey tip-toes through morning-after battlefields littered with the dead and dying. The violence of it all actually gets hard to read, and I can tolerate just about anything. Nothing is safe as both humans and animals are slaughtered en masse.

The horses standing in harness held their heads high as their lathered flanks heaved with every breath. They danced and trod heavily and then they too began to fall onto their haunches and sides but not before eight or ten bullets found their wet-sleeked hides, their withers, their long necks, their ribs, their croups, their powerful beating hearts. It was never the intention to kill the horses, but that was how thick and crossed the fire was in those first minutes of chaos.
He could see a cannonball striking sparks as it bounced over the rounded cobblestone and then slowing and gently rolling his way. He jumped aside, but another soldier, his gaping mouth still gobbed white with a paste of crackers and cheese, held up his rifle as if stepping into water and put his foot out to stop the cannonball and in an instant his foot was gone and blood was gushing out the stumped end of his leg onto the street where his blood showed like red glass in wet sunlight. A second cannonball blew a soldier's head clean off and continued on to smash another man to death. The headless soldier walked three more paces before falling to the street where his dead body shook fishlike before extinguishing.

Throughout the story, the focus is on Robey and his encounters during his trip. He meets a collection of characters, each playing a role in his evolution into a man, forcing him to harden before his time. His morals begin to change and soon Robey is living by traveling from one abandoned house to the next, living on whatever scraps he can find. The journey to find his father turns out to be anything but the adventure he imagined, and seemingly at every turn a part of him dies or hardens.

The balance to all the darkness and destruction is the coal black horse who silently, and in that way than only an animal can, teaches Robey about himself. The horse is intuitive, brave, and noble. Such an outstanding creature it is, in fact, that it becomes his trademark. The coal black horse causes all other characters to take notice and be envious--even treacherous. As a character states in one of the last pages of the book: "That's a fine horse," the man said. "Any man who'd seen that horse once would know you again." Robey finds peace atop the horse, and I could almost feel the hoofbeats as he traveled...

"It was beautiful to ride the back of the coal black horse and in those first days of journey they traveled constantly. The valley when he discovered it was luxuriant with grass and clover. The red-clay roads were wide and hard packed and the road cuts were dry and banked.
As the days drew by they passed silently through fields, swamps, pastures and orchards. They rode through marsh where the water table was only a few spades deep, but the corduroyed lanes of passage were high set and well staked. They crossed acres of fresh turned earth, plowed straight and harrowed and sown with wheat, rye, and oats shooting the surface and knitting it green. They encountered walls of pine so thick it took days to skirt to find a throughway and when they did it was through a land of wind-blown trees, or dead on the stump, the crooked and angled limbs bleached white with sun."

The little girl in me is still in love with horses and while the coal black horse is a powerful presence, it is not an overwhelming one. Robey remains the main character and the coal black horse his catalyst, not just for the physical journey but the deeper one as well. I enjoyed riding along with Robey, seeing what he saw, meeting the strange (and sometimes frightening) people, experiencing the war that was played out in my backyard as if I were really there. There is a hint of tragedy to this story as Robey seems to deteriorate and become familiar (and comfortable) with death, but perhaps he started off naive and unrealistic. The ending does indeed see him back home, but far more mature--a man though still just a teenager--and lethal.

"This was not the raving mad. This was not for love or greed or ignorance. These are the well bred and the highly educated. This is humanity. This is mankind, son."

Four out of Five stars for a haunting basis in truth, vivid prose, creating an animal character that is truly just an animal, and illiciting reader empathy.