By this time four colored soldiers had caught up the horse for me, one of them being the sleepy-eyed fellow that was the colonel’s assistant. During the process, the would-be wranglers came close to losing an eye in the gathering, and all of them at one point or another got banged from side to side and rolled along the hot, dusty ground like doodlebugs. They finally looped the horse’s nose with a rope, got him bridled and saddled, and led him into an empty corral. When they come off the field of battle, so to speak, two of them was limping. The sleepy fellow was holding his head and looking amazed that he was still alive. They had tied the horse to the railing of the corral, and he was kicking at the wind like maybe he could knock it down.
“Go ahead and get on,” Colonel Hatch said. “Show us your Bellerophon to his Pegasus.”
I figured Hatch didn’t think I knowed who they was, but I had Mr. Loving to thank for the fact I did.
“I will show you my Bellerophon and my Perseus,” I said, just to let him know I wasn’t as ignorant as he figured I was, but he didn’t give any show that he thought a thing of it. My remark was as wasted as a nod to a blind man.
“I figure I’ll be on my way shortly,” the Former House Nigger said, leaning close to me, “and without a cooking job.”
“That ain’t any show of confidence,” I said.
“I am looking at a thing straight-on and seeing how it’s bound to turn out,” he said. “Have you got any last words?”
“Bury me under a tree, if you can find one,” I said. “Better yet, bury me with this horse, and him with a stake through his heart.”
Having bragged myself into a deep hole, I had no choice but to get on that beast.
7
I wasn’t stretching the blanket about how I was one fine horse rider. I had learned a lot from Mr. Loving on that matter. But I had never been given a mount like this one to ride. He was blacker than the bottom of a silver mine. Had muscles on top of muscles, had the air of the devil, and was scary just to look at.
I climbed onto the corral, and that monster turned his piggy eyes on me. I swear I seen sparks in them. As soon as I swung on him, he jerked his head, and them reins was snapped off the railing, and I went to grabbing at them. Now, I had been taught to ride Indian-style, using my knees to press in tight to the horse, but that was when a horse had been trained to know what you was doing. This one hadn’t been trained for nothing. He was a natural-born killer. But I managed to stay on and was able to grab the reins. Still, I was tottering from side to side like a whiskey bottle that had been whacked. I maintained the center of the saddle, one hand on the reins, the other clutching the saddle horn. My knees was turned into him so hard my nuts was swelling up.
And fellows, did he buck.
He went up so high and for so long I think I seen some ducks flying northward, though none of them mistook my ride for a horsefly, I will guarantee you that. Down we’d go to the pits of hell, among pitchforks and devils, and up again to the land of harps. Then it got so I couldn’t tell down from up. All I knew was my butt felt like I was bent over a stump and someone was beating me with a stick and my bones was jarred so bad I figured I’d be spitting teeth out of my asshole.
I come out of the saddle a few times, my butt going skyward, but each trip I was able to bring myself right back into the leather. Finally he took to another plan and come down on his side and rolled. This mashed my leg in the dirt, then my side and head. It was loose dirt that had been kicked up by a lot of horses, so it was soft, and when he rolled I rolled with him, losing my hat and keeping my head. Had that dirt not been spongy, my bones would have been mixed into it so close you couldn’t have sorted it with a flour sifter.
After that roll he came up, snorted, and run me along the corral railing, trying to scrape my leg off. I managed to swing my leg over the saddle horn and stay in the saddle. When that didn’t work, he run to the middle of the corral and made one more great leap skyward, this one so high I thought I wasn’t never going to come down and might bump my head on the moon. But come down I did and when I did I wished I hadn’t, cause it pained my rear something fierce; a bolt of lightning rode up my backbone and into my head and made my sizable ears wiggle like hummingbird wings.
When we landed he kind of stumbled a bit, gave a couple of sad bucks, and then started to trot around the corral, snorting as he went. I leaned close to his ear and said, “You call that bucking?”
He seemed to take offense to that and run me straight into the corral. He hit the rails with his chest, dug his feet in so tight they was as rooted as oaks, and I went sailing off his back and over the upper railing and landed on top of some watching soldiers, scattering them like quail.
Colonel Hatch come over, looked down at me. “Well, you ain’t smarter than the horse, but you can ride good enough. You and the Former House Nigger are in with the rest of the riding niggers. Get you a uniform and boots that mostly fit, and with those ears you got, I figure you can pretty much hold up any size hat. Get all that figured out and put on, and come the crack of light you start training to be a member of the United States Colored Cavalry.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Ain’t there some papers to fill out?” he said to that sleepy colored soldier.
“Yes, sir,” said the soldier.
“Well, then, fill those out, too.” He walked away, and the sleepy soldier and the Former House Nigger helped me to my feet.
Over the days we drilled with the rest of the cavalry recruits up and down that horse lot and finally outside and around the fort until we was looking pretty persnickety and thinking we was a lot sharper than we really was. I sure felt better about being part of the cavalry than being in the infantry, who always seemed to be tired and pissed on, sweating and fretting and looking as if they needed a place to lie down.
The horse they gave me to ride was that black ogre I had tried to break in and had done so enough to loosely call him a mount. He really wasn’t as bad as I first thought: he was worse. You had to be at your best and alert every time you got on him, cause deep down in his bones he was always thinking about killing you. If you didn’t watch it, he’d act casual, like he was looking at a cloud, a bird, or some such, then he would quickly turn his head and take a nip out of your leg. I still got scars on my knee.
Anyway, the months passed, we drilled, and my buddy the Former House Nigger became the second-best rider in the troop. Me being the first, of course. He also cooked, and wasn’t nobody died during that time, though there was some sickness of the belly now and then. We mostly had grits and an occasional potato. Thank goodness there was weevils in the grits, or we wouldn’t have had no meat at all.
I thought it was all good at the time. I was uniform proud, I’ll tell you that. I sat on that black horse, which I had named Satan, like I was something special.
My pride got washed over by boredom in short time, though. We mostly did a little patrolling. Sometimes we’d go out for a few days, leaving some soldiers to guard the fort. What we did was ride around and see the countryside and collect our thirteen dollars a month, which was just so much paper, cause there wasn’t any place to spend it. It was all pretty much of the same from day to day. I did get to know a few horny toads by name, and I could have sworn a couple of crickets I’d seen was familiar, too.
Colonel Hatch was our overseer, though most of the training and such was done by a white lieutenant and a colored sergeant everyone called Tornado, this being the fellow we had met that first day in Hatch’s office, the one who seemed sleepy and had tossed the fly away. He had got this name from when he first came there and rode a horse for the first time and could only make it go in circles. Even though now he was a good rider, the handle had stuck. Still, I always thought of him as Sleepy or the Fly Catcher.