Olmstead's angels and demons vie at Gettysburg

Coal Black Horse
By Robert Olmstead
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 218 pp., $23.95

It's said that the sound of the artillery barrage on the third day at Gettysburg was heard 150 miles away. It opened the final act of the bloodiest battle ever fought on the North American continent. And in "Coal Black Horse," Robert Olmstead's fine new novel, it warns young Robey Childs that he is stepping into one of the inner circles of hell.

Robey does not arrive at Gettysburg until the fighting is over. By then, hell has devolved from ordered lines of soldiers facing fire to a festering wasteland where thousands of dead and dying are tended by too few gravediggers and good Samaritans, picked over by too many scavengers and thieves. The horror of it all convinces young Robey "from that day forever after that there must live a heartless God to let such despair be visited on the earth."

This scene unfolds at the midpoint of "Coal Black Horse," which follows 14-year-old Robey on the treacherous journey toward manhood. In English classes, they call a novel like this a bildungsroman. It's a form as old as storytelling, but as Olmstead proves, sometimes the old forms work best. In his steady hands, Robey 's journey is at once fast-moving yet carefully measured, a riveting tale of the American past and a brilliantly realized journey into the heart of darkness.

It begins with the simplicity of a folk tale.

A mother calls her son in from the field:

" 'Thomas Jackson has been killed,' she finally said. 'There's no sense in this continuing.' She paused and sought words to fashion her thoughts. 'This was a mistake a long time before we knew it, but a mistake nonetheless. Go and find your father and bring him back to his home.' "

That's all. Go and find your father.

The sharp-eyed reader will recognize Thomas Jackson as Stonewall, who dies at Chancellorsville in May 1863. It is one of the few early hints at which side the Childs family is on, perhaps because Olmstead doesn't care about the ideologies of North and South. He is after more.

The mother gives her son a reversible coat -- one side blue, one gray -- and a bit of advice : "Danger passes by those who face up to it." She tells him how to get to the fighting. "Travel south. Then east into the valley and then north down the valley."

And Robey sets off. Before long his horse goes lame. But a family friend lends him a beautiful coal-black horse. Robey had "not known such a horse as this had ever been made and could not help but feel inferior to the animal."

Through all the travails to come, the horse is Robey's companion, source of strength, and refuge. He is not a magical beast. He performs no extraordinary feats. But there is something preternatural about him. He seems to know. And he stays. And he endures. And those may be the finest qualities that man or beast displays in Olmstead's world gone mad.

Olmstead shows us a society so broken by warfare and bloodshed that it seems all law and most standards of decency have been forgotten. What does such derangement do to people? To civilization? To a single boy searching for his father?

Robey might say, " Nothing good," because much of his education comes at the hands of those who would do him harm, or to whom he must do the same to survive. Even nature is malevolent, a swirl of rising rivers, pounding thunderstorms, and "a relentless baking sun, which sets cloaks of steam and breeding flies to rise in the air."

The characters Robey meets -- the scoundrel who befriends him only to betray him, the preacher more familiar with his base instincts than his better angels, the waif of a girl who carries within her hidden wellsprings of rage and promise -- have appeared in fiction before. And Robey himself reminds us of other boys. (Imagine a more dangerous Huck Finn.) But Olmstead brings them to life in vivid strokes and makes them new again.

"Coal Black Horse" does what good historical fiction should. It shows us the world as it was to those who inhabited it. It gives us the ground-level perspective of people who made history simply by living their lives. It tells us something we didn't know about the past, and in the telling reminds us that despite great distances in time, space, and technology, we are like them, because human nature never changes.

And all good historical fiction gives us the sense that if those characters could endure the trials of their time, we can endure whatever history throws at us. Robey endures, like the coal-black horse. And he finds cause for hope, though it is, at best, a bare glimmer, and it's only through killing that he finds peace.

Robey' s passage from 14-year-old to maturity demands resourcefulness that few of his age possess, and it's accomplished in about six months, but it seems as real as if it had unfolded over a decade. Of course, maturity here is best described as experience that leads to self-knowledge that echoes with themes from that other Gettysburg novel: If man is an angel, he is a killer angel. And even if he isn't an angel, he must surely be a killer.

It's the kind of novel that you will want to read once simply for the storytelling. Will Robey rescue his father? Will he find cause for hope? Then you will want to read it again to let Olmstead's prose wash over you. It's as muscular, sturdy, well hewn, and wise as the coal-black horse himself.

William Martin is the author, most recently, of "The Lost Constitution."