the Buffalo Soldier (2002)

by Bohjalian, Chris

  Your feet must be cold, he said. He envisioned the man's feet were bare in the rubber.

  Not too bad.

  You wearing socks?

  Nope.

  Me, either. But at least I put on winter boots.

  You're a wise lad, he said, and then--as if they'd been talking about animals all along and his inquiry didn't reflect a change in the subject--continued in the same placid tone, You like horses?

  I don't know. I guess. I've never seen one, except from the road.

  Well, I'm getting a horse. If you want, I'll teach you to ride. It's not difficult.

  Where are you going to keep it?

  The man pointed at the meadow next to his house. The fencing will be here on Monday, he added. You can help me put that in, too--but only if you want to. And you don't have any homework. Homework has to come first, you know.

  They don't give you much homework, Alfred said, a half-truth. In actuality he received lengthier assignments here than he had in Burlington, but on those days he felt like doing it, he could knock the work off in half an hour.

  That's too bad. They should. They should give you mountains of homework. A daily avalanche. If you'd like, I can talk to your teacher. Tell her to give you some real work.

  Oh, you don't need to do that.

  Well, you tell me if you change your mind, he said, and then he went on about his horse. The animal will probably have a name by the time I get it--which is too bad. I kind of think a person should name his own pony. Might help them bond.

  Alfred tried to imagine the old man on a horse, and he kept seeing him astride an animal while wearing galoshes. Have you ever ridden a horse before? he asked.

  You sound like my wife.

  Just asking.

  I have. Thank you for your concern.

  It must have been a long time ago.

  He felt the man staring at him, and he found he had to struggle hard not to smile.

  I know what I'm doing, the man said evenly.

  So this is like, what, a toy? A hobby?

  You really have spoken to my wife.

  I haven't. I'm just asking.

  I guess it's between a toy and a whim--though I probably shouldn't use either of those words, given the fact that a horse is a living, breathing thing with a fine brain. It must be respected, and it will demand a lot of work.

  I once lived in a place that had a dog. That didn't demand much work. They just kept it tied to a clothesline. Alfred knew that a horse and a dog were very different animals, and he knew that the dog on the rope had been unfairly ignored. But he discovered that he liked tormenting this old professor with his feigned naivete.

  This will demand considerably more effort than a dog on a line. Trust me.

  And you want one, anyway.

  I certainly do. Very much. Suddenly they're popping up in my reading all the time. Every book I open, it seems, has a horse in it. I figure that's a sign. Don't you?

  Maybe, Alfred said, and then asked what he meant as a serious question: Is that how you got so interested in the buffalo soldiers?

  Through their horses? No, not at all. To be honest, the buffalo soldiers only interest me because of the larger historical context in which they lived. Let me rephrase that: I'm interested in the buffalo soldiers because they were successful black men in a white army that would have been very happy to see them fall flat on their faces. They just happened to ride horses because that's what we had to work with in the nineteenth century.

  Alfred thought of the image on the front of the cap the man had given him. They never rode buffalos, he said.

  No.

  I didn't think so.

  A buffalo wouldn't take kindly to carting around one hundred and forty pounds of human flesh on his back.

  He nodded to himself and then put forth the inquiry that had troubled him off and on for almost a month. Then tell me something, he began. How come they were called buffalo soldiers?

  It's not in that book we gave you?

  Suddenly he felt stupid. Of course it was in that book somewhere, it was just that the volume was thick and the type was small and there really weren't very many photographs. Briefly he considered lying--saying he didn't remember, or he was only on page seventeen, anything--but he knew he'd get caught, and he realized at that moment that the answer was more important to him than his pride.

  Maybe if it was a video or a DVD I would have watched it, he said finally.

  Haven't gotten to it yet, eh?

  I guess not.

  The old man sat up a little straighter and fixed the collar on his parka. He cleared his throat. The name, he said, was probably given to the troopers by the Comanches. Do you know who the Comanches were?

  Indians.

  Right. Native Americans. They lived on the Great Plains, Wyoming to Texas. They had seen white troopers for years, but not many black ones. Then in the 1860s they started to see hundreds of them. Whole regiments. They were the ones who christened them buffalo soldiers.

  But why?

  Why the name? Their hair, probably. Their woolly hair reminded them of the buffalo.

  Alfred shook his head when he heard. It was even worse than he expected, because it was the Indians--and not the white men--who had given the soldiers the name. I figured it was all about hair, he said.

  You sound annoyed.

  It's always about what people look like. Their hair, their skin. Always has been, always will be.

  It was a term of respect.

  How you figure?

  The buffalo was a sacred animal to the American Indians. Revered. It was smart, strong. Dedicated to its herd. Good family values, you might say. The Indians depended upon the buffalo for an awful lot of life's little necessities. Food. Clothing. Shelter. There's no way they would have called the black soldiers buffalo soldiers if they didn't respect them.

  Alfred wanted to believe him, but he wasn't willing to give himself up to such a fantasy just yet.

  And think about this, the man went on: The black troopers in the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries liked the term. They knew it was meant respectfully, and so they commandeered it for their insignias--like the emblem on that hat of yours. They knew they weren't being insulted.

  The hat was upstairs in Alfred's room. He wished he had it with him right now so he could look at it.

  No, the old man remarked, being called a buffalo soldier was nothing to be ashamed of. They were a very proud bunch.

  I didn't really believe they rode buffalos, you know, Alfred said.

  I didn't think you did.

  When will you get your horse?

  Next week, with any luck. You want to come with me? I'm going to see a former student of mine. She's got two animals, and there's one she thought I might be interested in.

  I have school next week.

  We'll go after school. She only lives about thirty minutes from here.

  I'll have to ask Laura.

  You do that. And I'll ask Emily.

  You need your wife's permission?

  He stood up, and so Alfred stood with him. He watched the man shake out his leg as if it were stiff from sitting. Permission isn't exactly the right word, the man said. Tolerance might be more accurate. I need her tolerance. And on that note, my friend, I'm going to go home. Good evening.

  Then he gave Alfred a small salute and rambled down the walkway toward the street. When he reached the road, he stopped and called back in a stage whisper--loud enough for Alfred to hear, but not loud enough to wake Terry and Laura--Give that book we gave you a chance. I'm telling you, you won't regret it.

  He nodded and waited for the man to reach his house. Then, once Paul was inside, he quietly opened the front door behind him and decided he, too, would return to his bed for the night.

  *

  PART TWO

  Advent

  "I saw Night Bird and Moon of the Big Leaves die. I saw Red Sands and Lone Bear dive into the water. Did Lone Bear see us, too? Is that why he tried to cross the river
? I hope not, but I believe that's what happened. He saw us and dove into the river, and then Red Sands followed him because Red Sands always followed my husband."

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  *

  Terry

  He had turned his cruiser around even before the dispatcher finished her cool, evenhanded recitation of the facts, and switched on his siren and lights. It never ceased to astonish him that the news, no matter how bad, was always presented this way.

  He guessed he would beat the ambulance to the scene, because the accident had occurred in Leicester, on a strip of Route 7 a few miles south of Middlebury. The ambulance would have to wind its way through the college and the village and then the traffic that, inevitably, stalled near the commons this time of the day. The very beginning of rush hour. Dusk. He, on the other hand, was already south of the town, and no more than five or six miles separated him from the construction site where the accident had occurred. Other than a couple of dairy farms and a long stretch of forest, there was little between him and some wretched construction worker who'd managed to get himself impaled on a line of rebar spikes.

  The red taillights of the vehicles ahead of him moved to the right, and the white headlights of the oncoming ones edged to his left. He could have driven smack in the middle of the road if he'd wanted, he could have aimed his car straight ahead atop a pair of solid yellow lines.

  Apparently the guy was still alive when the 911 was called in, but Terry couldn't imagine he would be by the time he arrived. He hadn't fallen far--no more than a couple of floors, it sounded like--but he had landed smack on top of a row of six-foot-high, inch-thick metal spikes. According to the site foreman, his body was hanging, skewered, three or four feet off the ground.

  The building wasn't going to be very big by most city standards, but it was for Addison County: three stories, and roughly twenty-two thousand square feet of space. It was going to be some kind of elegant executive retreat and small-business conference center, and so the developer had been able to get the zoning approvals and building permits he needed.

  When he reached the site, he parked as close as he could to the big hole at the bottom of the steel skeleton, pulling in between a pickup and a cement mixer. He saw people were shining lights down into the hole because the daylight, fading fast aboveground, was almost gone down there, and he saw the body--part of it, anyway--right away. He couldn't see the man's face and chest because two other workers were cradling the body like it was a huge piece of timber they were trying to carry. They had wrapped their arms around him as if they feared the body might slip down the spikes if they let it go.

  He climbed down a ladder into the pit and ran across the fresh cement to the two men and the victim. There were easily a dozen construction workers in what would eventually be the building's basement with the small group, and--like the cars on Route 7--they gave way the moment they saw him. Before he even glimpsed the fellow's face, he had a sinking feeling that the poor son of a bitch was still breathing--worse, he was still conscious--because he could hear one of the men who was holding the body murmuring, You're gonna live, man, I wouldn't shit you. I'm telling you, you're gonna make it.

  The victim was no more than nineteen or twenty, and his skin had gone as white as vanilla ice cream. His lips were blue. He was on his side on the bars, and his hands were wrapped tightly around the rebar that seemed to have speared him through his chest. It looked like he was holding himself up on it, as if this was some kind of gymnastic feat. A second rebar had stabbed him through his thigh and a third had pierced his abdomen. Because of the jeans jacket and sweatshirt he'd been wearing while he worked, Terry couldn't tell how badly the man--kid, Terry thought to himself, kid--was bleeding. But the outer jacket didn't look wet, and neither did the kid's jeans. The thing was, the spike in his leg looked pretty damn close to a femoral artery, and the one in the chest had to be near the guy's heart and the complex knot of blood vessels that surrounded it. They must have just missed them somehow. He wondered if the spikes had rammed through him so clean and fast that they were actually stanching the bleeding.

  Quickly Terry turned to look the kid squarely in the face, both because he could no longer bear to look at where the barbs entered and exited his body, and so that the young construction worker wouldn't gaze at them, either. He was a redhead, gray eyes and lots of freckles, and despite the cold, his hair was matted with sweat. Terry said who he was and then figured the best thing to do was to lie.

  We'll have you off there before you know it, son, he said, keeping his voice as even as he could. If you listen, you'll hear the ambulance.

  See? one of the men holding him said. We're in agreement here.

  What's your name? Terry asked him.

  The young man moved his lips but nothing came out, and one of the workers nearby said his name was Kevin. Kevin McKay.

  You can hear me, right, Kevin?

  The kid looked at Terry and nodded, and then rasped that he was about to puke.

  You go and do that, Terry said, and he held the young man's head in his hands. When he was through, Terry walked away and wiped his hands on his pants, and took his radio off his belt and asked the dispatcher to send a fire truck, too, if one wasn't already on the way. He had a sense that they couldn't possibly saw through the bars while the kid was still breathing, because the jostling alone would kill him. That meant that they'd have to use an acetylene torch to slice through the rods, but if they didn't do it right, the steel spikes would conduct the heat from the flame up into the body. Cook the kid from the inside, like he was a baking potato rammed through with a metal tine. And so they'd have to keep a stream of cold water on the bars above the torch to keep them cool, and that was where he anticipated the fire department would come in.

  He recognized the crew from the rescue squad that was arriving, and briefly watched Kristin Engels, a volunteer like the vast majority of EMTs in the state, take the kid's vitals while he hung on the spikes. Then he saw Henry Labarge climbing down the ladder into the hole, too. Henry was not simply one of his troopers, he was the man who'd driven all the way out to deer camp some two years earlier to tell him his daughters had died. Briefly--for a month, maybe--Terry had been unable to have this younger man in his presence, not exactly hating him for being the messenger, but unwilling to be reminded whenever he saw him of the moment he'd learned what had occurred back in Cornish. Like so much else that brought back images of Hillary and Megan, however--school buses and bridges and the sight of a group of kids playing T-ball--eventually the connection faded, and he grew to like Henry once again.

  Sounds pretty gruesome, Henry said.

  It is. I guess the poor kid just slipped and fell.

  He gonna die?

  I presume. Help me find someone who's got a torch.

  A light?

  No, a torch. An acetylene torch. These people are building a building, so somewhere around here there's got to be one. Let's face it, we sure as hell can't use a saw to get him down. A thought crossed his mind, and he asked, Anyone doing traffic up there?

  Yeah, a pair of volunteer firefighters from East Middlebury.

  Soon there were more men and women in uniforms in the pit--the khaki and green ones that Terry and Henry wore, the blue and gray of the officers from the county sheriff's department, the yellow bunker coats the firefighters were wearing--than there were construction workers, and everyone stood in a tight sickle moon around the two men holding Kevin McKay. Though it seemed to take hours for the site foreman to bring a torch and a tank with some fuel, Terry guessed in reality it hadn't taken more than two or three minutes. The foreman held the torch in his hands and asked, You want me to do it? I've at least got some experience with one of these.

  What's your name?

  Ed Whittemore.

  Terry looked him over. He was in his mid-forties maybe, and he looked pretty trim. Competent. He pulled aside Kristin Engels and the
paramedic from the hospital, some young buck named Brent who right now looked a sick shade of green, and said, Seems to me old Ed Whittemore here is as qualified as any of us to cut the kid down. You okay with that?

  I'm in no hurry to do it, Kristin said.

  Brent?

  Hey, I've never even held one of those things, he said, his voice weaker than Terry had heard it the three or four times their paths had crossed since Brent started working at the hospital.

  Okay, then. Ed Whittemore's our man.

  Henry ushered in a pair of firefighters, and he was relieved to see they'd brought in a small booster hose instead of one of the massive attack lines: The last thing Kevin McKay needed right now was to experience 250 pounds of water pressure sprayed through a hose with a two-and-a-half-inch diameter. Someone up at the truck turned on the water, and briefly they all felt the cold spray as it bounced suddenly up and off the cement ground, before slowing to the trickle they wanted.

  We'll feather the valve, Terry heard one of the firefighters saying as he turned toward Ed Whittemore.

  You know what you're doing, right? he asked him.

  Fuck, no! Whittemore snapped. This isn't something they teach you. But at least I know how to use the torch.

  That's a start.

  I mean, I guess I should keep the flame as low on the rebar as I can. I can probably run it along the metal three or four feet below him.

  Think three feet. Not four. I don't want us getting the kid up to the ambulance only to find out he won't fit through the back doors because he's still got so much pipe coming out both sides.

  Eighteen inches above the ground? Whittemore suggested.

  Okay, Terry said, and he led him back to the bars. On the way, he grabbed another volunteer firefighter he recognized--he believed his last name was Mikkelson--and told him to clutch each spike above where Whittemore was running the torch and let them know if he felt it getting hot.

  A part of him hoped that McKay had died while they were tracking down a torch so his suffering would be over, but the fact that he wasn't dead yet was beginning to give Terry some small measure of hope that they might actually manage to save the guy's life. Wasn't likely, of course. But stranger things happened, and he grew excited at the prospect that the young man might live.