Jessaka's Reviews > Coal Black Horse

A Civil War Ride


He sits at his desk writing by candle light, a fire burning in the fireplace. He writes of darkness, of days when there was no sunlight, and the picture he paints is so dark that the coal black horse disappears into it, but you know that he is always there. Waiting. Running. Escaping.

He writes about a boy's mother and his father. His father is off in the civil war and wounded, but he doesn't know this just yet. He doesn't know a lot of things, things he has never seen but will see and try to forget. His mother says, just ride; please find him. Bring him home.

Riding on the coal black horse though the darkness, he thinks of Ichabald Crane, of the headless horseman, and he is frightened. He knows where he is going, and yet the road that he is following leads him further into that darkness to places he cannot escape.

He is now in a house where a family was murdered, a doll on the floor, a women dead in the upstairs bedroom. People are coming inside, a man, a woman, and a young girl. They have a meal, and then the blind woman sleeps while the girl is being harmed. The boy watches in fear and waits and then silently slips out the door, but the girl knows that he was there and was not moved by her terror; he did not help. This she never forgets.

The writer sits at his desk and weeps for what he has just written, and he thinks of writing it out but he doesn't. He must tell what once had happened, but even he doesn't know until he once again puts his pen on the paper and writes, writes of things that he somehow knew long ago.

The boy watches the battles and hides. He hears the soldiers' cries and the horses' screams. Broken bodies, torn off limbs. Again he does nothing; he doesn't know how. The scavengers come to steal possessions from the dead, to torture the dying who are suffering, suffering now for days. The medical students come to take the bodies, to even boil the flesh off the bones on this christened land.

And when the writer is done with his story, he looks up, and I see the fire light reflected in his eyes, and I am frightened for all the truth that he has written and because it could happen again. This is the war that men see and cannot forget. I walk out of the house and onto the porch into the sunlight. This the most light that I have seen in days.