the Buffalo Soldier (2002)

by Bohjalian, Chris

  Oh, but she would worry, that was clear, and--if anything disconcerted him after his ninety minutes that night on the phone, it was this--now, his mother had said, honestly not trying to make him feel guilty, she was concerned about both her boys. It wasn't only Russell who was going to cost her sleep, it was her older boy, too.

  He never liked being paired with Russell. And so he tracked his brother down at his girlfriend's, hoping to regain a measure of separation by calling him up and checking on him. He guessed his brother saw through him, however, because even Russell--Russell with his empty beer cans rolling around underneath the driver's seat in his truck, his weed (and who knew what else) in the glove compartment, Russell with the beaker of anger inside him that seemed always on the verge of boiling over--could see through a need that transparent.

  You'll have to forgive me, Russell said, but I really can't chitchat tonight. I haven't been tomcatting around the state of Vermont, and so I actually have a girlfriend I should be paying attention to right now.

  When he went to bed that night on an unfamiliar mattress in an unfamiliar house, he told himself things would get better. He knew in reality this wasn't always the case, but he was sufficiently tired when he turned out the light that he was able to believe it and--unlike his mother, apparently--fall asleep.

  "Rule number seven: They are to carry with them extra horseshoes and nails on the march, even though it will add extra pounds to their pack. This is just one more of the ways I encourage them to think ahead at all times, and this simple precaution has saved the lives of both horses and men."

  SERGEANT GEORGE ROWE,

  TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  LETTER TO HIS BROTHER IN PHILADELPHIA,

  NOVEMBER 18, 1873

  *

  Alfred

  He thought the veins in the horse's forearms stood out like mountains on the topographic map of the United States in his classroom, and gently he stroked Mesa's leg. Then he adjusted the blanket over the horse's withers, careful to make sure it was flat across her back, and fastened the surcingle beneath her. She pounded her hoof on the barn floor.

  I know you're bored, he said. I'm bored, too.

  Actually, he was more than bored. He was frustrated--exasperated, to use a word Paul seemed to like--because he hadn't been able to ride in days. It was either too cold or too snowy or both. And the lessons that had seemed such a big deal to everyone after he'd fallen seemed to have been completely forgotten. Laura hadn't said a word about them, and he hadn't seen her write any reminders on that Humane Society calendar she kept on the corkboard in the kitchen.

  It was so very stupid of him to have allowed his foot to slip from the stirrup after permitting the girl to run a bit, because a second after that he had slid halfway off and it had taken only a small bump to send him flying.

  Of course, even if Laura had followed up on the lessons, he wasn't sure he wanted to ride any horse but Mesa. It seemed disloyal. Moreover, every day he had come by the barn this week to do his chores, he had worried that it might be the very last time he would see the animal. Terry had been gone a full week now. The last time he knew for sure that the man had been in the house was New Year's Day, when he'd come back late in the afternoon with some friend of his--a trooper, too--and piled a bunch of clothing into a pair of suitcases and wedged them into the passenger seat of his pickup. Then he'd driven off in the truck, while his buddy had driven away in the cruiser. He and Terry had spoken on the phone twice since then, not about much, and though the man had said he'd be back--and though both he and Laura had seemed as sad as he'd ever seen either one of them--there had been no signs yet that he'd be home anytime soon.

  He missed him, but only a little. Still, the fact that he missed Terry at all surprised him. But he did, he missed Terry's stories about work, he missed the times they'd thrown a football in the fall, he missed the way life became a predictable routine when Terry was around.

  Moreover, he feared the man's decision to leave put his presence here in jeopardy. Once before he'd been in a house when the man had lit out, and within days he, too, was moved. No reason to believe it wouldn't happen again, and so every day this week he had been careful to eat only the parts of his lunch that were perishable--the yogurt one day, the banana the next--while transferring the small bags of potato chips and snack cakes into his knapsack. (He no longer dared take anything from the kitchen, not after that morning Terry had gone ballistic.) He was usually starving therefore by the time he got home, but Laura hadn't commented on how ravenously he would attack the molasses Anadama bread she had baked one day for an after-school snack, or the fact that he was more likely to eat two apples than one when he'd walk in the door mid-afternoon.

  He was careful to keep every penny of the money Paul paid him in his pants pocket whenever he left the house.

  And though he tried to pay attention in school, he was finding it more difficult now. Not one kid had called him between Christmas and New Year's--not even Tim, with whose mother he'd left messages twice--and he was finding it hard to view these people as friends during recess and lunch. Besides, Tim and Schuyler were in the math group that was focused on probabilities and beginning geometry, while he was with the kids who were still doing squared numbers and factors. He found this placement galling, because he knew that he could do whatever those two could in math, but his teacher still seemed to doubt him. Most days he didn't even see them a whole lot after lunch.

  He was careful not to act up, because he figured if he got in any trouble at all, he'd be out the door in a heartbeat. But he understood that he was angry--he was angry at Terry for leaving, because it meant he, too, might have to go, he was angry at his so-called friends for forgetting that he even existed, and he was angry at the weather because it had kept him off Mesa--and so he resolved to obey Sergeant Rowe's rules and think carefully before he spoke, even if it meant now that he hardly ever said a word.

  AND HE WORRIED about Laura. Though he understood Terry was gone because she wanted him gone, that didn't mean she was happy to see him leave. The first few nights she took her cats with her to bed, pulling them out from under the woodstove, where they seemed to sleep in the winter, and carrying them one at a time up the stairs to her room. He didn't hear her crying as she had that night in November when Terry was away at deer camp and she was alone, but he guessed that she was. How could she not? When she told him that she and Terry were going to spend a little time apart, there had been a balneal gauze across her eyes and her voice had been wan.

  Most mornings, however, before he would go to school and she would go to the shelter, she was able to rally. She talked freely with him about her children when he was eating his oatmeal and she was packing his lunch. She would chat about the kinds of things nine-year-old girls liked to eat, compared to a boy who was ten (almost eleven, she would add, since his birthday now was only two months away), or how jealous they'd be of the notion that the Heberts had a horse and he was getting to care for the animal and ride her.

  He noticed that he and Laura were eating dinner a lot with Paul and Emily--practically every other night, it seemed. Each time Laura would simply join him at the Heberts' house when he was finished with the horse in the afternoon, and the grown-ups would sit in the living room or kitchen talking while he'd watch TV or read or do his homework. He'd listen to the sounds of the voices, sometimes flipping the pages in one illustrated history book or another that Paul would find for him about the Wild West or the cavalry. Occasionally there would be a picture of a buffalo soldier, but most of the time it was as if the black horse soldiers had never existed.

  He liked those afternoons more than any other time of the day, though he wasn't exactly sure why. One time he wandered into the room Paul called his library and looked for a long while at the photographs of the Heberts' children and grandchildren, and wondered if the answer might not be as simple as the sensation normal kids had when they saw their grandparents--that Kwanzaa notion of assemblage, of getting all
the people together.

  He certainly hadn't gotten that feeling the two times Laura's parents had come north from Boston, since that pair clearly viewed him as a stranger. Terry's mother, too. She seemed nice enough--they all seemed nice enough--but none of them knew quite what to make of him. In the eyes of those old people, he was always the foster kid: the kid who wasn't Hillary or Megan, the boy who was only there because their real grandchildren had died.

  Not here, though, not in this house. Here was a place where he was accepted and he felt right at home.

  THERE WASN'T A lot of sun, but at least there wasn't any wind, and the temperature had climbed above freezing. He was staring longingly at the saddle and the girth, wondering if he should knock on Paul's door and ask if he could go for a ride, when he heard the old man clomp into the barn behind him. The horse was outside in the paddock.

  How was school? he asked, offering him a piece of sliced apple from the brown paper bag in his hand.

  Okay.

  You feel like taking Mesa for a spin this afternoon?

  Yeah, I do. A lot.

  Thought so. Well, go ahead. You could both use the exercise, I imagine.

  Paul handed him the whole bag of apples now--they would feed most of the pieces to the horse--and then grabbed the saddle and a blanket. Alfred reached for the reins and the girth, and then together they started out toward the animal. She was on the far side of the small field, grazing on the hay he had brought her as soon as he arrived here and found her already turned out in the paddock. When Mesa saw them she lifted her long face from the feed, nickered once, and trotted over to the gate.

  I made a couple phone calls today, Paul was saying as he started offering the apple slices to the horse. Laura knows. I got our lessons scheduled. Group hour, every Monday afternoon, a place called the Equestrian. We begin next week.

  He hadn't expected a group and he grew nervous at the idea. He envisioned a lot of rich white kids who'd know all about horses. How big's this group?

  Just two. You and me, we're the group.

  Okay, he said, relieved, and he watched Mesa's mouth gnash the apple slices to sauce. She snorted, something she seemed to do when she particularly enjoyed whatever it was she was eating. Another question crossed his mind, and he decided this, too, was a safe one to ask.

  Will Mesa smell the other horse on me?

  You mean the one at the riding stable?

  Uh-huh.

  Perhaps if Laura chooses to stop washing your clothes, and you decide to stop bathing. Then, yes, she might. What's your concern?

  He shrugged. I don't know. I guess I don't want to hurt her feelings.

  The man opened the gate and draped the blanket over the horse. Alfred, my boy, if only grown-ups worried as much as you do about...

  About what?

  About everything. Don't you worry about Mesa's feelings. She won't take offense, I promise.

  He followed Paul into the paddock, and suddenly a realization hit him with such force that he stopped for a moment and smiled. If Paul was going ahead and scheduling riding lessons--and Laura knew all about them--that must mean they didn't plan on shipping him out anytime soon.

  "I know of three occasions when a white laundress married a colored. And I know of one time when an Indian laundress did."

  LIEUTENANT T. R. MCKEEVER,

  TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  AUGUST 1937

  *

  Laura

  She thought the phone was ringing, and she fought through the sheets and the pillows in the dark to reach it, rolling through the wide desert that once had been Terry's half of the bed. When she picked up the receiver she heard only the dial tone, and she realized she'd been dreaming. Something had been ringing in her mind, but not in reality. At least that's what she guessed had just occurred. But maybe somebody was trying to reach her and the phone would ring again in a moment. Maybe it had been ringing for a long while before it pulled her from some preternaturally deep sleep, and the person had hung up only a split second before she finally answered it. Maybe. But not likely, she finally decided.

  She fell back into the warmth in the half of the bed in which she'd been sleeping, and wondered at how bright the room was. The moon was not full tonight, but it was large, and a waterfall of light was streaming through the window that faced west. It must be early, perhaps five or five-thirty in the morning. Her alarm would have gone off in another half an hour in any case.

  She guessed that if anyone had tried to call her just now, it would have been Terry. Maybe he'd been unable to sleep. Maybe he wanted to talk.

  She doubted it was her mother or father, and that something tragic had happened. That was possible, but certainly not probable. If they weren't going to call her at three A.M., she figured, it was doubtful they'd have tried to ring her at five. At that point, they simply would have waited until seven, when they could be sure she was awake.

  She remembered vaguely when Terry had phoned her parents with the news that the girls had died. He'd called them the night of the flood, around nine-thirty, from the phone in this bedroom. The phone she'd just touched. She hadn't been in the room with him, she'd been downstairs in the den, surrounded by people. Not a lot of people, but enough. Reverend Cook, though always David or--verbalized in her mind with as much irony as reverence because he was such a down-to-earth man--Pastor. His wife, Barbara. The Heberts, Paul and Emily. Her friend Karen, and Karen's husband, Greg. It wasn't exactly a house call, but her doctor, Marion, was there, too--more as a neighbor than as a physician, though she had given her something strong to calm her.

  There were a variety of reasons why Terry had phoned her parents instead of her, not the least of which was the simple fact that she had been incapable. She couldn't have made the call. But she had feared also that in some small, unpleasant crevice in her parents' brains--a kind of lobe the two shared after so many years of marriage--they would have been so desperate to find someone to blame that they would have forced her to share with them more details than she could possibly have beared to repeat. Their way through the forest of grief that loomed before them all would be to find culpability--not a reason, because the deaths of nine-year-old girls are always beyond reason--and they would ask and listen and ask and listen until they had a path that would get them through it.

  And would they then, in the end, blame her? They'd never say so, even to themselves. Even when the two of them were alone in their house in Dedham, they wouldn't give words to such a thought. She knew that. But she knew also that they would each believe separately that a tragedy such as this would never have befallen their granddaughters had they not lived in Vermont. After all, girls don't get washed over bridges near Boston. Their fathers aren't away at deer camp when it's raining like hell, leaving their poor, fatigued wives alone with the children.

  She considered how she should tell her parents that she and Terry had separated for the moment, and whether they would ask her if she wanted to return to Massachusetts to live for a while--come home, they might say, regain your bearings a bit. But then she remembered Alfred and doubted they would suggest that as long as she had the child. And while she did not believe the news of the separation would make them happy, they did not particularly like Terry and they would not be devastated.

  She decided she might as well get up a few minutes early, and so she climbed out of bed and went quietly down the stairs. In the kitchen she fed the cats and started to make Alfred's lunch for school, and thought about the coming day at the shelter and the animals there in her care. The Saint Bernard who'd been brought in only yesterday by a loathsome breeder, emaciated and limping because as a puppy something had crushed a front paw and the bones hadn't healed properly. The deaf white cat with a real attitude problem named Josie. The exuberant but wholly undignified stray dog they'd renamed Alexis, in the hope it would give the animal at least the vague aura of a pedigree.

  She looked at the line of food she had amass
ed on the counter--the sandwich she'd made, the bag of potato chips, the pop-top can of fruit cocktail--and started dropping the items into the boy's lunch bag. One of her own cats jumped onto the counter and rubbed up against her arm. She stroked it, and decided she would call her parents before she left for the shelter that morning with the news that she and Terry were spending a little time apart, and Alfred was about to start formal riding lessons. It was an odd commingling, but these were the occurrences that summarized her life at the moment.

  The harder call, and one she was less sure how to handle, would be to Louise. At some point she would have to alert Social Services that her--and therefore Alfred's--situation had changed. And though she figured that Louise would be an ally, that call still wouldn't be easy: She felt Terry had let the woman down, and therefore she herself had let the woman down. She reminded herself that her marriage wasn't over, and a little distance now was not an unreasonable need.

  Unless it jeopardized the boy.

  But even that was a complex issue in her mind. The main reason she was so unhappy with Terry was exactly because he didn't seem to care for the child. Despite his assertions to the contrary--halfhearted, truly, he hadn't even mustered the passion he'd had when she confronted him that night in their bed about what may (May? May? Who was she kidding!) have occurred when he was away at deer camp--more times than not he was either frustrated by the boy or uninterested in him, and so his presence in the house wasn't necessarily the best course for Alfred, either.

  And so she grew anxious. She wondered if she had lost her husband and next she would lose the child. Her child. The boy she was beginning to love.

  "The newspaper reporter wrote that we rode and marched and fought splendidly, in some cases as well as the white regiments he had visited on his tour. He attributed this to his belief that it is easier to recruit the best of our race than his, because we have fewer options. If I see him again, I may offer my opinion that though he is correct we have fewer options, he is wrong in his belief that this company's superiority is the result only of the inferior breed of white man that is enlisting. I am confident we could outride, outmarch, and outfight the very best of his race."