the Buffalo Soldier (2002)

by Bohjalian, Chris

  Anyone hear you?

  On the golf course? Oh, I doubt it. One time Russell screamed Fore! but I reminded him that people might frown on our little activity, and after that we weren't quite so hysterical. We were laughing pretty good, but at least we weren't screaming down the fairways.

  You stayed on the second hole?

  Yup. I tossed him a couple lobs from the ladies' tee so he could get a few good rips in with the baseball bat. But mostly we used our dad's golf clubs. It felt good. Juvenile, but worth every whack. Sometimes we'd hear the cans pop when we cracked 'em open, and the shake would spray like a Fizzie as it zoomed off the tee.

  Funny, I don't recall what we did with the cans we never used. I guess we donated them somewhere. Maybe to the hospice or the local food shelf. Wallace took care of that sort of thing for Dad. He got rid of all the signs of Mom's illness.

  We did that, too. Leah and me.

  On the street outside the coffee shop where they had met for a late lunch the crowds were starting to thin. Because it was Christmas Eve most of the stores would be closing soon--some had even locked their doors an hour earlier, at three P.M.--and most of the other people in the restaurant had left. There was another couple at another booth, great bags of presents in the aisle beside them, but otherwise the dining room was empty and quiet.

  What did your dad do? she asked him.

  He was the manager of the lamp factory in Saint J. It wasn't glamorous but it was lucrative.

  The brass lamps?

  Right. He always wanted to buy it--or at least a piece of it--so he could own a business himself, but the Bowen family never wanted to sell. Over the years he worked himself up from an eighteen-year-old guy on the line to the man in charge of the whole operation. Even did a little selling--got the lamps into a couple of very big hotel chains. Owning the company seemed the natural next step. But it never happened.

  She sipped the last of her tea and then asked, Will you and Laura and Alfred be going to church tonight?

  In all likelihood.

  Me, too. My dad and I will eat dinner as soon as I walk in the door, and then go to the early service so he can go to bed. He doesn't sleep a whole lot, but he likes to be in his bed with the radio on by nine-thirty or ten.

  We used to go to the early service because there was always a pageant the girls would be in. They'd be sheep or angels. One year Megan was a shepherd. But after they died Laura couldn't bear to see all their friends together like that in the church, so ever since we've gone to the late service. The thing is, I think she'd be okay with the pageant these days. After all, she teaches Sunday school. But now the late service is a habit.

  She nodded and he realized she was about to leave. He guessed her drive home was about ninety minutes. Maybe more. They could have had this whole conversation--the important part, anyway, the part where she told him that she'd decided she was definitely going to keep the baby--over the telephone. But they had both, it seemed, felt the need to see each other, and so they had tiptoed gingerly around the possibility of meeting in person and settled on the idea of coming back here to Montpelier: a city, albeit a small one, but still a place where they could be anonymous. They hadn't seen each other since they met nine days earlier at the bakery barely a block from where they sat now, and then wandered in the brisk air around the edge of Hubbard Park--the hilly patch of forest preserved just west of the state's gold-domed capitol building. He'd wrapped his arms around her when she cried and held her hand when the more dense clusters of hemlock and tamarack trees had shielded them from the nearby houses. They'd stayed on the sidewalk and never ventured inside the forest, and not simply because the inner paths would be slippery and cold: He feared they would kiss if they went there, and he did not want to repeat the mistake he had made at deer camp.

  I hope before too long we'll see each other again, he said, surprised at the small current of neediness he'd detected in his voice. He hoped she hadn't heard it. This was the third time they'd been together, and he realized that as he'd gotten to know her, he'd grown to enjoy her company--her odd sense of humor, the surprising number of things they'd discovered they had in common--more with each visit. He realized that he wanted them to remain friends (nothing more, that could not happen again, he reminded himself), and not simply because she carried within her his child--their child, the baby they'd made together--but because he liked her. It was really that simple. She made him happy.

  Oh, I'm sure we will, she said. After the New Year we should probably talk--but seriously, Terry, only if you want to.

  I understand.

  No pressure.

  None felt.

  Still, I have to ask. Why?

  Why do I want to see you?

  Uh-huh, she said. Is this just about being responsible?

  He saw that she was reaching for her purse and the wallet inside, and so he motioned for her to put it away. Let me get this, he insisted, happy to have something to do with his hands as he stood and thought about what he wanted to say.

  HE'D TOLD LAURA he wouldn't be home until seven because he hadn't known what would happen with Phoebe. How long they would be together. Where they might go. Laura knew he was using a few hours of personal leave time to take the afternoon off, but he had hinted strongly to her that he was planning to go Christmas shopping. In truth his shopping was done, and since Montpelier was only about an hour from Cornish, he could be home by five-thirty if he wanted.

  But he didn't want that, and this reality disturbed him. He realized he didn't know what he wanted, and for a long time he simply sat in his cruiser in the large parking lot behind the hotel on Main Street. At that moment he guessed Alfred was finishing up with the horse and Laura was leaving the shelter. Maybe helping to clean up the plastic cups and spilled punch from the party.

  The trouble was that once again that day he had imagined all too precisely what would have greeted him at his home if a season of rain and a single wave on a river hadn't undone his life. In his mind he had projected the images, from the minute he pulled into his driveway and he heard--and sound, suddenly, was everything--his girls' voices when he opened the front door of his house, to that moment a little later when he'd hear the whine of the bureau drawers and closet hinges (it was the bureau in Megan's room that made so much noise, but it was Hillary's closet that squeaked) as they picked out their clothing for the Christmas Eve service at the church. He saw the four of them eating dinner together, and he heard Megan's high voice--higher than Hillary's, anyway--making fun of his belt as he passed her the mashed potatoes. She always made fun of his uniform, especially his regulation belt, because it looked as black and wide as a strip of new highway, and that, in her opinion, was a very bad fashion statement.

  Nothing would be like that now, even though they had a child inside their house once again.

  Yet he reminded himself that the only changes that should trouble him--there was nothing, after all, to be done about the fact that his daughters were gone and would never be back--were the changes that were looming outside his house. If he was going to focus on anything, he should stew about what he had done (was doing, he told himself quickly, was doing) away from the world of his wife and the boy.

  He tried to consider a way out, but he didn't like the shape of those words in his head, with their disturbing ring of culpability and guilt, and corrected himself quickly: He tried to imagine what would happen next. What he would decide. And surely something would happen now that Phoebe was committed to keeping the child, even if he himself did absolutely nothing. How could it not? In this case, doing nothing was doing something. Neglect. Desertion. Becoming, in essence if not in the literal-mindedness of the law, one of the deadbeat dads who drove him wild.

  But that was one of his options. He could ignore his real child--the one who would be born, he guessed, late the following summer--and, yes, this woman who was that real child's mom. This other woman who wasn't scarred like his wife, and who told jokes and made him laugh. He could do that, it was
a legitimate choice. She'd made that clear.

  Or he could leave Alfred and Laura. He could abandon a boy who had already been abandoned who knew how many times in his life, and a woman who'd lost both her daughters. That, too, was an alternative.

  Or--and he shook his head at the absurdity of the thought--he could juggle two families. Never tell Laura about Phoebe, but continue to be an element in this other woman's life. A part-time husband and father and, yes, breadwinner.

  Terry allowed his forehead to rest against his steering wheel. His salary--and Laura's--supported their household nicely, but a sergeant with the state police certainly couldn't afford to keep a second household in diapers and milk.

  It was a ridiculous notion, anyway. He knew the very last thing Phoebe wanted from him was money. The truth was, he wasn't sure she wanted anything from him at all. Maybe that was why he'd never given serious credence to the idea that the baby might not really be his.

  Besides, he'd seen enough liars in his life to single them out, and he knew Phoebe wasn't that kind of person.

  The words real child came back to him. It wasn't lost on him that he was perceiving a microscopic blob of cells in Phoebe's womb as a real child, while viewing the ten-year-old boy living under his roof as something else. Something impermanent. Something not his.

  He sat back in his seat and started the cruiser. It was Christmas Eve and he had a wife and a child--real or not, what did it matter now?--at his home, and still he didn't have the slightest idea where he was going to drive. He knew only that he wasn't yet ready to head back to Cornish.

  IF THERE HAD been a tack shop still open, he might have stopped and gotten another small gift for the boy. One of those horse combs or something. Maybe some special riding gloves. The child's big Christmas present, of course, were the cowboy boots Laura had found at a leather store up in Burlington: They were a brownish red that reminded him a bit of his own leather wallet, and they looked nothing at all like Phoebe's black-and-white boots. Even the toe was different--less pointed. Almost blunt. But, still, he couldn't help but think of Phoebe's boots when he saw what Laura wanted to buy for the boy, and then--therefore--of Phoebe herself.

  He considered driving to the mall in Berlin Corners, guessing even now there might be stores open there. He was no more than fifteen minutes away, and he figured the mall would stay open till five or five-thirty at least. He might even find something more for Laura as well. A new sweater vest, maybe. Or perhaps one of those bulky knit cardigans she was so fond of when it was cold.

  But he couldn't bring himself to steer the cruiser onto the road that led south to Barre and Berlin, and turned instead up into the hills full of stately old homes just behind the capitol building. He drove down the white-pine- and maple-lined streets, reminded a bit of Saint Johnsbury and his mother's house--his house, too, of course, because it would always be the house in which he'd grown up. These houses would be noisy tomorrow morning. Christmas. They'd be like his house had been when he was a child, and like his current home in the hills over the mountain when his girls were alive.

  He wondered what Alfred would be like tomorrow--just after he woke up. He couldn't imagine the child getting up early to race downstairs to scope out the loot the way his daughters always had. It was so clear he was unfamiliar with the notion of generosity on any kind of scale--certainly not on the scale Terry's daughters had known and, in fact, taken for granted.

  Still, the house would be noisier tomorrow than it had been in the recent past, and that would be a welcome change. Most mornings were eerily quiet. That was, perhaps, the most disconcerting of the myriad small ways their lives had changed since the girls died. The house had become almost too quiet to bear, and Alfred's presence had done little to change that.

  He didn't know how Laura stood the place when she came home from the shelter. There was no Hillary taking the steps two at a time, pounding up the stairs like a sprinter. There were no wooden clogs--Megan's shoe of choice--scraping against the soft pine in the kitchen and the hall as she shuffled along in her own little world. There were no giggles, no fights, no squeals. No television. No CD player blaring the latest pop hit from that week's teen queen sensation.

  The girls made noise, and that noise, he understood now, was testimony to the fact that their house was alive and vital and well. His marriage to Laura, too: His children's vitality was one small barometer of that fact.

  He drove back into the business district and decided that what he wanted more than anything was a beer, but he was still in his uniform and so a bar was out of the question. So he decided that he would settle instead for companionship (not friendship, not really, because both he and Laura knew well that a parent's friends start disappearing about two or three months after a child has died, if only because the grown-ups now have nothing in common and it's unbearable to sit and talk only about the children who no longer are there) and drop in at the headquarters in Waterbury. He hadn't been to Waterbury in months, and a visit--regardless of who was there the day before Christmas--would kill at least another half-hour to an hour before he would have to head home.

  As he merged with the traffic on the interstate, a memory struck him with clarity. He wasn't exactly sure how he had arrived at it, but he believed it had to have something to do with the noise that had once filled his house, and, specifically, the music: It was an image of Laura and the girls dancing together in their nightgowns when Hillary and Megan were eight. He had missed dinner that night because of a B and E out in Waltham, and when he got home it was almost eight-thirty. And there were his girls--all three of them, really--prancing and capering in the den like go-go dancers to the energetic love songs of some rock and roll heartthrob.

  And then, trailing the memory by no more than a second, was a realization: If he ever told Laura the truth about Phoebe, his marriage was over. It was that simple. It wasn't a question of whether he could or would leave her for this other woman--because, most assuredly, he would not. The reality was that Laura would leave him first if she knew this Phoebe Danvers carried within her the child she herself could no longer have.

  "I expect soon enough the three of them will be sent to Fort Sill. After all, they're prisoners."

  SERGEANT GEORGE ROWE,

  TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  LETTER TO HIS BROTHER IN PHILADELPHIA,

  MAY 24, 1876

  *

  Phoebe

  She watched her eight-year-old niece put the Tek safety vest on over her sweater, and her nephew--younger than Crystal by close to two years, but, still, almost as tall--pound the girl's shoulder pads with the pillowy flesh at the bottoms of his fists. His hands looked to her like a pair of small baking potatoes.

  Stop it! the girl said, but it was clear that she wasn't all that annoyed. She liked the present, and she liked the proof that the shoulder pads cushioned the blows.

  Her brother and sister-in-law's living room was still layered with the crinkled wrapping paper that the family had deposited there earlier that morning. Whole sections of the rug were hidden beneath crumpled red foil, some of which her brother had balled up and placed in a corner by the couch when she and their father arrived, but had since been reanimated into a pile that dwarfed the coffee table beside it. The tree in the bay window was massive, it must have been just inches short of ten feet: Someone had placed the star against the tip of the tree, rather than upon it, because the tip was almost touching the ceiling. She noticed there were far more ornaments along the bottom of the evergreen than the top, and she assumed this was because her nephew and niece had done most of the decorating.

  We're supposed to get some snow tonight, maybe as much as six or seven inches, her sister-in-law was saying to the children. Tomorrow should be much better.

  Apparently, earlier that morning her brother and sister-in-law had put the miniature snowmobiles in the back of the truck and tried to find a patch of ground outside of the town with enough snow to try the machines out, but they'd failed. There
were long patches of rock-hard ice and the ground was pretty solid, but there just wasn't a lot of powder. The kids had been disappointed, and so their parents mollified them by reminding them every chance they got that the forecast included snow.

  Her brother and sister-in-law lived in a stately brick house just up the hill from Main Street in Littleton. It always amazed her how well Wallace had done for himself--selling insurance, of all things. Veronica, his wife, had grown up just south of Littleton in a village called Sugar Hill, and came from ski money--her grandfather had helped open one of the resorts near Echo Lake--but Wallace took pride in the fact that they had bought this house entirely with the income they'd earned from his insurance company and Veronica's interior design business. In reality, of course, most of Veronica's clients were friends of her parents and grandparents in Franconia, Bethlehem, and Sugar Hill. No matter. It was still income instead of interest. Not a penny had come from a trust fund.

  You're sure you wouldn't like a glass of wine or some eggnog? Veronica was asking her. Maybe a beer?

  She knew she shouldn't have wine or beer because of the baby, and so she considered asking whether there was any rum in the eggnog. But she had never shied away from booze of any kind before, and she assumed that Veronica would figure out instantly why she was wondering--or at least want to know more. Besides, Wallace and Veronica always put rum in the eggnog, so why bother asking?

  Coffee is really what I'm in the mood for today, she answered.

  Decaf?

  Yeah, that would be great.

  She wasn't sure when she would tell her family she was pregnant. She had already called Nancy Fleming, her ob-gyn, but she hadn't decided how she would tell her father. Or, for that matter, her brothers. They'd all think she was insane. Irresponsible and insane. And what of her resolve to keep the name of the father a secret? They'd be annoyed by what they would interpret as a self-imposed martyrdom.

  But that wasn't it, that wasn't it at all. As she watched her niece and her nephew running around the living room with their safety vests on, she didn't feel a bit like a martyr: She felt joyful and, truly, expectant. The world was filled with single mothers, and somehow they got by. And most of those single mothers wouldn't have the support that she had. She imagined her father baby-sitting the child some days, weekends at her brother Wallace's fine house with her little one and these energetic, older cousins. Maybe when she got her old job back with Developmental and Mental Health Services, she'd rent a nice place in Montpelier. Her old apartment certainly would have been big enough. She saw herself walking into the bakery just off Main Street with a toddler--in her imagination, a little girl--and buying the child one of the long biscotti that sat in the glass jar, and watching her daughter gnaw at the cookie as if it were zwieback.