the Buffalo Soldier (2002)

by Bohjalian, Chris

  Family is complicated, Louise was saying. These days, there are lots of different kinds. It doesn't have to be Mom and Dad and the two-point-four babies they had. You know that.

  I guess.

  You like Laura? I like her very much.

  I do, too.

  Good, good. Because she certainly seems to like you.

  When she had finished rubbing Mesa down, the horse turned her long head toward her--her nose almost in the woman's face--and snorted, and he could see Louise flinch. She handed him the dish towel and he draped it over a wooden brace by the toolbox to let it air out. Later he'd fold it and put it away.

  She's been through a lot, Louise went on, referring to Laura. You understand that, right?

  Yup.

  What about Terry?

  What about him?

  How are you two getting on? she asked, and he watched the lashlike, gray-blue fog of her exhalation rise up toward the loft in the barn and then disappear.

  Okay.

  He seems like a nice guy. Sometimes state troopers--all cops, actually--give me the creeps. All that paramilitary stuff. The uniform, the strut. The handcuffs and the baton. But he seems pretty down to earth. Is that true?

  He decided once and for all that he couldn't tell Louise about Terry--not what Terry thought of him or, likewise, what he thought of the trooper. He wanted to stay in Cornish at least a little longer, if he could--with Laura and Paul and the horse--and that meant keeping quiet. Keeping his opinions, and what had occurred that morning, to himself. Besides, why should he tell her, anyway? She was just a social worker who understood family so well because she probably had one. A real one. She was just another adult who was paid to appear in his life every once in a while.

  Alfred?

  Yeah, he's a nice guy, he said finally.

  You don't sound convinced.

  He's busy, he works a lot. We get along fine.

  Okay.

  Now you think something's going on, but nothing is.

  She nodded and pulled the bridle and reins off the broad circle peg on the wall.

  Be careful that doesn't get tangled, he said.

  These are the reins, I gather?

  And that's the martingale.

  I've never heard of such a thing.

  It's a strap that goes around the horse's neck. It gives a beginner something else to hang on to.

  How have you learned all this?

  Paul. He's a good teacher. He used to be a teacher.

  So I hear, she said as she looped the leather lines back on the wall.

  He used to have horses. When he was a kid, and when he had kids of his own.

  She smiled and leaned over, resting her gloved hands on the stored saddle. What exactly is the deal with you two?

  No deal.

  You like him?

  Sometimes he cracks me up. You should see him on Mesa. Goes about a mile an hour. Babies crawl faster than he rides that horse.

  Well, he is pretty old.

  Not that old. I heard him say the other day he's only sixty-five.

  So you do like him...

  I like him fine.

  I understand he's paying you to help care for the horse.

  Four dollars a day. I've already made almost a hundred dollars!

  You've got almost a hundred dollars?

  Not anymore, because I spent some on Christmas presents for Laura and Terry, and I even got little gifts for the Heberts: I got Paul some saddle soap and Emily some blueberry jam. But I still have over forty-five dollars, he said, and excited by the size of his savings, he went on without thinking, See, that was the dumbest thing about what Terry said this morning! I don't have to steal any money. I got plenty. I--

  Instantly he stopped talking when he realized what he'd just told her. Louise's face was impassive, a mask he couldn't read, but he knew now he would have to tell her everything that had happened that day--everything, in fact, that was probably wrong with his relationship with Terry Sheldon.

  "At first, it was two Negro brothers named Edmonds who taught me English. They had not been with the soldiers who chased down my husband, and that made it easier. They were from Mississippi, a word that always sounded like the wind in my ear."

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  *

  Terry

  Monday afternoon he switched on his lights and his siren and pressed hard on the accelerator, savoring the fact that he was on the long straightaway just north of New Haven Junction on 7 and the snow and the ice had been cleared from the road. He would be at sixty-five, seventy miles an hour in an instant, and he glanced briefly down at his speedometer to watch the angular digits climb higher. The snow in the fields on both sides of the two-lane road was still pretty fresh, and the world around him became a white blur: He was going too fast to take note of the few houses and antique stores on this stretch, or the odd motel that dotted the landscape.

  He didn't think the accident would be bad, because the dispatcher had said everyone was outside of their vehicles. But half the equation was a tractor-trailer--its cab was nose-down in the snow in a ditch, and the mass of the truck was blocking most of both lanes--so he wouldn't know for sure until he got to the scene. The other half of the equation was a county van that took seniors grocery shopping. Fortunately, the driver had just dropped the group off when he and the truck had their run-in, so he didn't have any passengers, frail or otherwise, in the van with him.

  The accident was in Ferrisburgh. Six miles north, and still he'd be there in five minutes--five and a half if some self-absorbed moron didn't pull over in time and he had to slow down.

  He came up over a ridge, and in the valley before him he saw the water tower and the opera house that marked Vergennes, once the self-proclaimed smallest city in the country, and Lake Champlain just to the west. Not frozen yet. Maybe never this year, because every cold snap seemed to be followed by a warm spell. The ground sloped steeply below him, and in the distance at the base of the hill he saw a neon blue SUV coming south and a small conga line--a pickup, an Escort, a UPS truck--heading north, and gingerly they all pulled over into the plowed muck on their separate sides of the road. They heard him, they saw him, and the waves were starting to part.

  FORTUNATELY, ALL HE would have to do with this mess was conduct a few roadside interviews, fill out some accident report forms--granted they would include both the long form he loathed and a commercial vehicle supplement--and stand in the cold directing traffic. But no one was hurt, and neither driver was even badly shaken up. The van had hit a patch of black ice and careened across the yellow line, dinging the side of the tractor-trailer before skidding off the road forty yards further south. The tractor-trailer, trying to avoid the van, had slid away into the ditch.

  And so while the tow truck pulled the van from the snowdrifts and they waited for a heavy-duty wrecker from Bridport to hoist the tractor-trailer back onto the road, he stood on the pavement and helped the cars snake their way through the thin strip of asphalt that remained between the rear of the truck and the piles of snow off to the side. At this stage in his career the work demanded only minimal concentration, and--as usual--his mind wandered. It wandered first to Sunday night, the day after his in-laws had left, and how Laura--sweet, sweet Laura--had tried like hell to draw him out during dinner, and though there was nothing he needed more than to be drawn out, he couldn't do it. He just couldn't bring himself to reach back across that divide--no chasm, this, the divide was really no wider than the kitchen table--and accept her offer. All she wanted to do was listen, all he needed to do was talk. But he couldn't do it. He loved her, he would not forget that, he loved her. But at that moment, he knew, he wanted something--someone--else.

  He realized he was thinking about Phoebe more than was healthy or right, and he wished he could go back in time to the evening he went to her store and they wound up at her friend's trailer. No, that wasn't exactly true. If he could
go back in time, he decided, he needed to go back further than that: A full two years and two months was more like what was required, so he could stay home from deer camp and prevent his little girls from going anywhere near the bridge on the day of the flood. After all, if he wanted anything back, it was his life then: When he had Hillary and Megan and he wasn't married to someone who had been, for the better part of two years, an emotional wreck. When he himself wasn't crying alone in his cruiser or sobbing like a madman in the shower. When he wasn't picking up young--younger, anyway--things at deer camp.

  In a way, he realized, the last thing he wanted was to go back a mere two or three months. Was he any worse off now than he was, say, on Halloween? Arguably, he wasn't. If he didn't want to, he never had to see Phoebe again. That was pretty clear. On the other hand, if he desired such a thing, there was a beautiful woman just waiting for him to leave his wife, a woman who was already carrying his child: his second chance at a family. There inside Phoebe was the baby he could help to raise right, as he had his own daughters, not some kid who was so screwed up by the time he was brought into his and Laura's life that he was incapable of communicating properly with his foster parents but quite willing to steal from them. Unbelievable. He hated to imagine what else the kid might try, especially if he ever had a gun and a horse at his disposal.

  He made a mental note to ask Paul what was in that book about the buffalo soldiers he and Emily had given the boy, and that had now grown to interest him so. Certainly it was meant as a harmless gift, but he knew nothing about what the buffalo soldiers actually did, and the last thing the boy needed right now was to have all kinds of renegade ideas put into his head.

  He waved for an oncoming pickup to slow down to a crawl, and decided the woman behind the wheel looked a bit like Laura had when they first met. Slightly darker hair, he decided when the truck got close enough for him to see, but she was even wearing the sort of beret that his sister had given her one Christmas soon after they got married, and Laura had worn for a couple of years when the weather was right.

  Leaving Laura, of course, was just a dark fantasy: He didn't think he ever would or could do such a thing. He didn't believe he was capable of that kind of cruelty.

  But if she left him? Well, that was another story. He knew he wasn't always an easy person to live with, especially right now, and one just never knew.

  No, if he could go back in time, it would have to be two-plus years, not merely two months. There was still no doubt in his mind that what he had done with Phoebe was wrong, absolutely wrong. But he decided he no longer regretted it.

  HE STOOD BEFORE the pay phone at the general store in the center of Orwell, wavering. He knew he shouldn't touch it. He should just return to his cruiser and resume running the roads. But there was an odd symmetry here, and that alone caused him to remain: It was, after all, the pay phone at another general store--hours and hours to the northeast--that had first brought him to Phoebe. And so he did reach for the receiver, and then like a teenager he hung it up. Then he grabbed it again. He wasn't sure how many times he had done this--three, four, did it matter?--when he finally kept it in his gloved hand and called her. He heard her move with the cordless phone away from the cash register when she heard it was him, and he could tell that she wasn't alone in the store. There was someone else working with her, a man, bantering with the customers as they arrived and paid for their groceries.

  For a few minutes they talked about their lives--she told him she had broken the news to her family that she was pregnant, he told her his in-laws had come and gone--and then, unsure how she would respond to his honesty, he told her he wanted to see her.

  She was quiet for a moment, before murmuring, That wouldn't be a good idea. He was just about to agree and hang up--perhaps that would be that--but she continued, Of course, I remember you telling me once that none of this was a good idea. Montpelier, again?

  That was indeed what he had pictured. But when he envisioned his cruiser parked once more in the parking lot behind the hotel on Main Street, as it had been on Christmas Eve afternoon, he knew instantly he didn't like that image very much. The thing was, a state police cruiser stood out like a palm tree in Vermont. Especially one in a hotel parking lot. He'd gotten away with it before, and he could probably get away with it again. But why test fate? Why go anyplace in Montpelier? The reality was that anyplace he parked outside of his district could become a problem if someone--a storekeeper, a building owner, or (worst of all) another police officer or trooper--asked him why he was there. Or made a phone call to see why a cruiser was parked on the street.

  The truth was, if they were going to meet again, they should find a location that was not merely equidistant but appropriate. Logical. One that made sense. He wished it were the middle of March, when he was scheduled to be teaching for two days in Pittsford at the academy. He could spend the night away from home, and maybe...

  He pulled the thought back. Just because he didn't regret what he'd done didn't mean that he was prepared to do it again.

  How about Waterbury? he offered instead. I worry about what people think when they see a cruiser in a new spot.

  Waterbury?

  Headquarters are there. Someone from the barracks is going to need to visit the quartermaster in the next week or so, anyway, to pick up a couple new uniforms and some campaign hats. They may be ready right now, for all I know. I'll offer to go.

  He heard her laugh on the phone. Well, I can't think of a better place for us to have a clandestine little conversation than the headquarters for the Vermont State Police.

  We won't talk there.

  Oh, we'll only have sex?

  I didn't mean that, I--

  She giggled. I know what you meant. We'll just meet there and go someplace else. In my car, I suppose?

  If you don't mind.

  Hell, I don't care. I kind of like the idea of having a state trooper trapped in my car beside me. Will you keep your hat on?

  Excuse me?

  In a mock whisper, she said, Can't let anyone see I have Smokey Bear in the passenger seat, now can I? Every trucker in the state will get reckless if they know I have you otherwise engaged in my car.

  I see. He smiled and suddenly, without warning, gave out a little puff of laughter, a tiny yelp of percolating happiness. Yes, I will take my hat off.

  And anything else I request?

  We can talk about--

  I'm teasing you, Terry. This is not a clothes-optional rendezvous.

  I agree.

  They decided they'd meet Wednesday and have lunch at one of the restaurants in the town.

  You know, I used to work in Waterbury, she said.

  I remember.

  Aren't you worried we'll run into someone I know?

  I guess. Maybe we'll have to head up 100. Find a restaurant in Stowe, instead.

  All these logistics for a little lunch, Sergeant Sheldon. You must really want to see me.

  A couple of teenagers emerged from the Orwell store and eyed him nervously--most people did--and then climbed into a blue pickup with some major dents on one side, and the massive off-road tires he despised. He knew the kids were going to try to keep the car quiet when they turned over the ignition, and he knew also it was going to roar like a jet.

  He sighed. Yes, I do, Phoebe Danvers. I want to see you very much.

  "Rule number six: They have to exercise themselves as well as their horses."

  SERGEANT GEORGE ROWE,

  TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  LETTER TO HIS BROTHER IN PHILADELPHIA,

  NOVEMBER 18, 1873

  *

  Laura

  Here was this woman named Louise before her once again, this time at her kitchen table, the ladder-back chair between them filled by her little boy--the little boy in her care, she corrected herself quickly; she shouldn't be so bold as to consider him hers, especially since it was clear that this social worker was in her house now because something was amiss (perhaps even tr
oubling her) and she wanted to discuss it. The three of them were sipping hot chocolate (real hot chocolate, made from real milk, not the weak stuff that was concocted from warm tap water and a mix that came in a foil packet), and she knew this amiable conversation was going nowhere good.

  In so many ways, things had been going well, so very, very well. She should have known it couldn't last.

  The young social worker (too young, Laura decided, to be knowledgeable or experienced or familiar with pain on a personal level) was saying something about how the horse had come right up to the stall guard (she said she had learned that term from Alfred) the instant they opened the barn door and he said her name. She was saying she thought the horse was a very good thing for Alfred, and asking Alfred if he agreed.

  He nodded, but he looked nervous to Laura as he stared down at the marshmallows that floated at the top of his mug.

  Anyway, I was hoping I could come back later this week and watch him ride, since I didn't get to today. Maybe have dinner with the three of you, she went on.

  The three of us, Laura said, and for a very brief moment she wondered if Louise actually meant that she wanted to have dinner with her and the boy and the horse. But then she understood that Louise was including Terry in the group--she wanted to have dinner with her husband and her and the boy--and almost reflexively she added, Terry and Alfred and me.

  Yes. If that would be all right. Forgive me, Ms. Sheldon, I don't usually invite myself places for dinner, but I just think it would be so much fun to see Alfred up on that animal, and then get the chance to, I don't know, just connect with you and Sergeant Sheldon.

  When?

  When? Oh, I was thinking Wednesday, maybe. I'll be in this part of the county early that afternoon, anyway, and I could rearrange my evening easily enough and drop in here--that is, if it's okay with you.