The Buffalo Soldier

by Chris Bohjalian

  When Ruth had left the paddock and was no longer within earshot, Paul asked—his voice a conspiratorial whisper—Think I should buy her?

  Yes.

  Me, too.

  Will she cost a lot of money?

  Some.

  I hope I get to ride her.

  I can tell, Paul said, and he realized that the boy was actually anticipating something with pleasure. He tried to recall if he’d ever seen that in the short time that he’d known the child, and he didn’t believe that he had.

  IN THE CAR on the way home, Alfred readily agreed to everything Paul suggested. Alfred would help him muck out the stable, check the bedding daily, and feed and groom the horse when he came home from school. He—Paul—would handle the morning routine, but he would expect Alfred to assist him in the afternoon.

  I’ll make a chart, he said aloud as he drove, his eyes on the road. That’ll help because some afternoons I might not be there.

  Where will you be?

  Good question. Damned if I know. But together the chores will probably take us an hour. Alone, give yourself an hour and a half. I’ll pay you four dollars a day, and I’ll expect you to keep up with your homework. And, of course, all this depends upon Terry and Laura’s permission.

  Four dollars?

  Four dollars, he repeated, unable to tell from the boy’s tone whether he was pleased with the sum or disappointed. It had seemed like a reasonable wage to Paul when he’d verbalized the amount, but he understood that because he was in his mid-sixties, there were times when he still expected things to cost what they had in the administrations of Presidents who’d been dead longer than this lad had been alive.

  And I can ride her?

  When I’m there.

  A buffalo soldier was supposed to exercise his horse every single day—when he wasn’t already out scouting, anyway.

  You started that book?

  Finished it.

  Good man, he said, at once pleased and impressed.

  A lot of buffalo soldiers weren’t much older than I am, you know. You only had to be sixteen to sign up.

  You’re ten.

  I just want you to know I can help exercise your horse for you, too.

  When I’m around, you can ride her plenty. When I’m not, don’t even think about it, he said, and then added quickly, Please.

  The boy was quiet, and Paul assumed his silence signaled his agreement. You did a nice job with Mesa, he said. I think she likes you.

  I like her, too. And I liked sitting on her.

  What did you like about it?

  I liked being tall, that’s for sure.

  Yes, I always liked that, too.

  Abruptly he felt the boy poking him in the shoulder, and when he turned toward him Alfred was smiling. You looked funny up there, he said.

  Me?

  You looked like an old army general, except you couldn’t believe you were on a horse. You looked like you were scared to death.

  Oh, not to death. That would be an exaggeration. But it did dawn on me when I was up there just how hard the ground is right now, and just how much havoc it would wreak on an old man’s hip if I fell.

  You won’t fall. Ruth said you had good form.

  It’s a bit like riding a bicycle: The muscles don’t forget. Of course, they also don’t forgive. I’m going to be sore as hell tomorrow.

  From riding a horse?

  You, too, my friend. Mark my words.

  Not me. I just sat on her.

  We’ll see.

  As they rolled through the village, Paul glanced at the bridge and he thought of the Sheldon girls. The sight of the bridge didn’t usually make him think of them, but it did now because he had Alfred with him. He assumed it would always remind Terry and Laura of their children, and he knew that Laura saw the bridge every Sunday morning because it was no more than a hundred yards from the church where she worshiped every week. Terry, on the other hand, only attended church on the major holidays, but Paul didn’t believe that had anything to do with the deaths of his children. He’d gone to church only two or three times a year even when his girls were alive. The boy, it seemed, usually accompanied Laura, but Paul had observed as well that at least once or twice he had stayed home with Terry.

  It would take more than a few minutes on Mesa to do me in, the boy was saying.

  He nodded and smiled, but he didn’t stop thinking about Alfred’s foster parents. He wondered if the girls’ deaths had been easier—marginally easier—for Terry because his job demanded he witness so much unpleasantness on such a regular basis. As the trooper had once remarked to him, Let’s face it. I seldom see people at their best. And though Terry had never shared many details of his work, Paul understood that the younger man saw regularly the battered women in their homes and the dying teenagers in their cars who frequently filled the small and large type in the local section of the daily newspaper. For all he knew, Terry might even have been with the young construction worker who’d died in Middlebury the other day after falling onto a line of the rebar spikes used to reinforce concrete walls.

  How are you getting on with Terry and Laura? he asked the boy now.

  Okay, he said.

  Okay? Is that good-okay or bad-okay?

  The child continued to stare out the window, silent now, the bridge and the church growing small in the distance. Paul realized that inadvertently he had brought the two of them back into the world of the one-sentence answer, and he quickly scoured his mind for a bit of historical minutia about the buffalo soldiers—clearly a more congenial topic—to pull the boy back from his shell.

  “Rule number three: They have to try to learn how to read. They don’t have to succeed, but at the very least they have to try.”

  SERGEANT GEORGE ROWE,

  TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  LETTER TO HIS BROTHER IN PHILADELPHIA,

  NOVEMBER 18, 1873

  Terry

  Christmas was less than two weeks away, and once again there was absolutely no snow on the ground. He guessed it had snowed three or four times so far that winter, but never more than two or three inches at once. And, each time, the snow had been gone a couple of days later.

  When people talked about the winter, either they murmured in rueful tones about global climate change or they shook their heads unconcernedly and observed that they would all have to pay for this warm and snowless December after the first of the year. Winter would simply be dragged out on the other side, and, in the end, they would get their annual hundred-plus inches of snow. It was inevitable.

  Snow or no snow, it was time to get a Christmas tree, and so Sunday afternoon, exactly twelve days before Christmas, he took Laura and Alfred into the spit of woods between their property and the Cousinos’ to begin the search for an evergreen. He’d been working hard at being both a husband and a dad for a month now—especially since Thanksgiving—and he wanted Christmas to be perfect. Laura hadn’t brought up Phoebe once since that night in their bed, and even his occasionally problematic younger brother hadn’t alluded to the woman when he’d seen him at their mother’s last week. He hoped this one stupid mistake was behind him, and he’d never have to speak of it again.

  As Laura and Alfred returned home from their separate Sunday-school classes, the three of them piled into his pickup and drove six hundred yards down the road. There he backed the truck up onto the brown earth at the edge of the forest, and they started their short hike through the trees. Alfred carried the bow saw, the metal blade effulgent as silver though Terry had brought it home when the twins were mere toddlers.

  Most years they’d taken a balsam from a cluster that grew perhaps a quarter of a mile in, but Laura had said she wanted a change of pace this Christmas, and so he had his eye out for a good cat spruce. Sunlight fell like flashlight beams along part of the path, and they clomped carefully through the wet leaves, because underneath were ones that were iced.

  When Alfred started walking further ahead of them, he took Laura’s
hand in his. She was wearing mittens, and the wool felt soft against his palm.

  How was Sunday school? he asked her.

  A little wild. The kids are pretty wired with Christmas coming.

  I’ll bet, he said, and he thought about the things Alfred wanted for Christmas. He had been surprised by how short the list was. The girls had always had lists that seemed endless, whether there was a list for Santa or, by their last Christmas, separate lists for their parents and the guy in the heavy red suit. Their last Christmas, when they were eight, neither he nor Laura had been able to tell whether the girls truly believed in Santa Claus or were simply pretending to because it was hard to give up such a fundamental cornerstone of their childhood.

  Laura had said that she found the boy’s few wants a bit disconcerting. It wasn’t the brevity of the list—the only items that Terry could recall were a backpack, a handheld computer game, and some CDs by groups whose music made them both deeply uncomfortable—it was her sense that everything they’d picked out for the boy when he first arrived had been wrong. They were toys for a boy who was younger. Less mature. Terry had noticed this, too, but he reminded her that, in all fairness, they’d never shopped for a boy before Alfred or thought about what a ten-year-old boy might want to play with these days.

  He wondered if maybe the child would like something to do with horses. They’d bought him a helmet by that point so Paul could teach him how to ride, but little else. They hadn’t been sure how long his interest would last.

  I found one, Alfred called back, and he pointed at a thick and nicely shaped balsam that stood about nine feet.

  That’s a balsam, he half-said and half-yelled. Laura was thinking she wanted something—

  It’s perfect, Laura shouted, and he felt her squeezing his fingers in her hand.

  The boy looked back at them, and Terry could tell he was trying to read from their faces whether this was indeed a fine tree or whether he’d made a mistake of some kind.

  That’s the one, all right, he tried to reassure Alfred, that’s definitely the one. He jogged up to the boy to show him how to use the bow saw, and perhaps make the first cut in the tree so that it would be easier for the kid to keep the blade in the groove. He realized he was smiling: He never expected he’d have the privilege of showing a boy how to use a bow saw in the woods, and he was surprised by how lavish the small moment was with its pleasure.

  THAT NIGHT HE and Laura made love, and it was like the years before the girls had died. There was no desperation to the act, as if they were depending upon sex to compensate for a loss too big to be counterbalanced, and it was clear that neither of them were merely going through the motions. It didn’t even seem to him as if they were afflicted anymore by what had become their monumental “what if”: What if Laura hadn’t had her tubes tied? What might sperm and egg be doing now?

  Instead there had just been the two of them, their togetherness and their orgasms, and it all felt the way it once had.

  At least, he thought, it had been that way for him.

  He recalled Phoebe, but not as a fantasy or because he wanted someone other than Laura. A vision of their one night together crept into his head simply because he had been with this other person only a month before, and it was inevitable that for a time an intimacy so pronounced would come back to him.

  No, he reassured himself, Phoebe was an aberration. He had a wife. He had a boy. He had a life with some promise.

  THE NEXT DAY, Monday, his stomach jumped when he stopped by the barracks to eat his lunch and Melissa, their dispatcher, told him that some woman was trying to reach him. He’d spent a good part of the morning with an elderly couple in Orwell whose carriage barn had been burglarized in the night. Their grandchildren’s bicycles, two camping tents, and a chest of antique toy soldiers from the First World War had been stolen. The sense of violation coupled with the loss of their grandchildren’s bicycles had left the pair nearly hysterical. Then, on his first attempt to return to the barracks mid-morning, some idiot had tried passing one of the town’s sand trucks out in Shoreham, only to discover another car heading straight at him in the oncoming lane. He was actually pretty lucky. He’d wound up wrapping his uninspected Ford Escort around a tree, but the rescue squad figured he was going to get off with a couple of broken ribs and a concussion, and neither of the other two drivers had been hurt. Terry had expected a lot more gore when the radio call first came in and he’d spun his cruiser around, flipped on his strobes, and hightailed it southeast along the winding road that passed for a major artery in this corner of the county.

  She in my voice mail? he asked Melissa, referring to the woman who’d phoned.

  Nope. Didn’t want to leave a message. She said she’d call back.

  And she called twice?

  Yup. Nine forty-five and eleven-twelve.

  And she didn’t leave a name.

  Right.

  That’s odd.

  Maybe.

  Was she in trouble?

  No, this wasn’t an emergency call. I asked her. And she called on the regular line.

  He tried to look perplexed. She say why she was calling?

  Nope.

  She say who she was?

  A friend of yours.

  A friend of mine?

  Well, you know, a friend of yours and Laura’s.

  He nodded. Had he told Phoebe Laura’s name? Probably.

  Melissa put a manila folder into a tray behind her, and the diamond in her engagement ring flashed briefly when it was caught by the overhead light. She was twenty-two, and she was going to be married in May. I mean, she went on without looking at him, I assume she was Laura’s friend, too. She sounded like a friend of the family to me.

  He realized they were the only two people in the barracks at that moment, and he was glad. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone to overhear this conversation.

  Sounds like a stalker to me, he said offhandedly, trying to make a joke of the fact that a woman had called him at work—called him twice—and not left her name.

  That’s right, Terry, it was a stalker. There’s a woman out there who has a creepy thing for state troopers. She smiled at him to let him know she was teasing, and the woman who’d called hadn’t struck her as someone he should worry about.

  Well, I’ll be here for another half-hour if she should call again.

  Good enough.

  He went to the large office he shared with the two other shift supervisors, reached for a small sheaf of open case files and complaints, and sat down at his desk with the coffee and sandwich he’d brought back from the diner in Middlebury. When he was settled in his chair, it became plain to him just how badly his heart was racing.

  “My children were two and three years old, they were almost babies. How could we run? And I was only sixteen. At first the soldiers thought I was my babies’ big sister.”

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  Phoebe

  It seemed to Phoebe as if the whole world was pregnant. At the store that Monday that was all anyone wanted to talk about. Holly Sheahan had just found out that she was going to have a baby, and, of course, Eliza Gailmor was due any day now—certainly she wouldn’t last until Christmas. She was huge, and the due date was the eighteenth. Even the cover of the People magazines the store had received that morning featured four actresses who were pregnant.

  She had opened the small market that day, and so she was able to go home by three in the afternoon. But she decided to drive south to Saint Johnsbury to do some Christmas shopping instead and see what she could find for her father and her niece and nephew—Wallace and Veronica’s two kids. She didn’t want to feel rushed, and so she told her father that she wouldn’t be back for dinner.

  There were even fewer cars than usual on the interstate this time of the day, and she was able to drive for as long as half a minute without seeing another vehicle. There was still over an hour of daylight left when she
started off, but already the sky was growing dark over the White Mountains to the east.

  One time she pulled into a rest area to pee, and—given the kind of day that she’d had—she was only mildly surprised when she found even here evidence that the world was a very fertile place: Badly buried at the top of the trash can by the sink in the ladies’ room was an empty box from a home pregnancy test kit—though, clearly, this one hadn’t been used at home.

  Instantly she envisioned some poor high-school girl driving here alone, or perhaps with her best girlfriend, to confirm her worst fears. Maybe the kid had sat in the very same stall she had, and then waited there, staring at the damp little stick in her hands.

  Imagine, she thought, being so frightened that you wouldn’t do the test in your own home because you feared you couldn’t hide the garbage well enough, and so you went and tested yourself in the highway rest stop after school.

  She looked at herself in the mirror by the sink, shaking the water off her hands, and allowed herself a small smile: She’d actually taken the box and the instructions from her kit and tossed them into her dad’s woodstove. She’d then stood beside it for a good twenty seconds and watched the reinvigorated fire through the glass window, as if she needed reassurance that the evidence had disappeared completely into atmosphere and ash.

  When she got to Saint Johnsbury, she considered trying Terry once again from the pay phone in the Chinese restaurant. It was the most private place she could think of in the town, and there wouldn’t be a soul in the dining room at four-fifteen in the afternoon. It probably wouldn’t even be open for dinner yet, but the pay phone was in an anteroom that was accessible from the street.

  But then she wondered, as she had off and on that whole day, why she was even planning to tell Terry she was pregnant. Twice she’d failed to reach him that morning, and each time she hung up the phone, a part of her had been glad that he hadn’t been there. After all, what good could possibly come from his knowing? What did she really expect would happen? She didn’t want him to leave his wife for her, at least in part because she honestly didn’t want this other woman’s life to be any worse than it already was. She didn’t want to inflict any more pain on her—Was the woman’s name Laura? She believed that it was—than she must already be having to endure. Moreover, as much fun as it might be to fantasize about a very different life from the one she was living, the reality was that she and the trooper had spent about five hours together. She certainly wasn’t prepared to break up a marriage because one night in November she’d allowed her better judgment to go south and she’d wound up in bed with a stranger—a nice enough guy, yes, but still a virtual stranger.