Free Coal Black Horse by Robert Olmstead Page A

odd piece of indeterminate make and had been a gift from the maundering old man.
    He traveled on, following the rumors of great armies encamped to the east on opposite banks of a river, but in the days that came his long slow ride through the landscape of war became so like chasing the wind that when one night a cold wind swept the open land, he took refuge in the scorched shell of a burned house.
    The bay tethered, he entered cautiously, as if testing the floorboards. Outside its stone walls was a constant moaning of the soft wind streaming through the trees. He had at first mistaken the pump in the yard to be the black silhouette of a figure, and even after he knew his mistake he kept looking to the yard to assure himself it was not, kept looking to the trees where the bay was tethered.
    He lit a tallow candle inside a box lantern of punched tin and cautiously passed from one room to another and upon determining that he was alone in the house, he built a tiny fire in the hearth and it soon lit the room with a warm glow. He reclined on the hardwood floor and with the fire’s coax the aches of the day began to melt from his limbs. There was a burned stairway to the second floor and from the fire-gutted ceiling hung a beautiful chandelier, its pendants like carved diamonds.
    At first he had thought it a spangle of stars in the night sky and then he understood it was the stars through the room’s charred ceiling and the shaped and fitted glass that gave to him such a sparkling sight. He could only think that someone had hung the glass after the burning for how its icicles were clear and untouched and cast prisms of light from the fire.
    The wind outside died away and ceased its quiet moaning in the trees. The sound had existed beneath sound and he’d forgotten it until now it was disappeared. In the new silence came a ticktock sound, ticktock. He searched the room to find its source and then was a clean and unlikely striking sound and a tiny door unlatched and he found the source just as the cuckoo shot forth.
    Someone had wound the clock and hung the chandelier, and however pitiful the gestures, they were trying to return to a time that he was afraid they would never see again. It was a time on earth he realized that he himself had never witnessed because of his seclusion on the mountain, but was seeing it now in its havoc and devastation. What was life like before all this? What did people do and what did they think about before they warred and thought about war? He tried to remember what he did before he left the mountain and what he thought about in his seclusion. He recalled chores and quiet and solitude. He knew there was more than that, but he could not remember and he knew it had not been so far back in time. He tried hard to recall who he had been and what he was back then then, but however much he longed to he could find nothing to remember.
    He banked his small fire with the kindling he’d gathered, the wood spurting blue and red flame, and the room took onmore light and he found other moments of longing and desire. There was a wooden inlaid box filled with shiny stones. There were other boxes, tin and copper and lacquered, and woods he did not recognize and could not name. Inside their shells were coins and buttons, ribbons, marbles, pins, tiny bones, a doll’s leg.
    There was a mildewed bench with a hinged seat and while the inside was empty, its interior smelled of wool and lavender and contained a porcelain-faced doll wearing a blue felt hat and long hair made of straw-colored yarn. A leg had been torn away from the torso, but when he polished the dirty face with his sleeve it shown in the firelight as if newly made. In the silence, the burning wood made hissing and cracking noises and there was a sudden flicker of shadow in the air as vesper bats took flight and filled the chamber with their silent wing beats, black on black, spearing the air and fleeing the lighted room through the empty