The Buffalo Soldier

by Chris Bohjalian

  No, I haven’t seen them, he said. You looking for them? He was cradling a bag of groceries in one arm.

  They were with me on the bridge, she answered, and as the reality of what had happened began to grow concrete in her mind, she started to cry, swallowing the last word in her short sentence in her sobs, so once again she had to repeat herself for the adult. She went to wipe her eyes with her sleeve, but she was wearing a raincoat slick with spray, and she only made her face wetter. When she pulled her arm away, she realized that everyone was staring at her. Then, all at once, everyone started to move. Adrianna Palmore disappeared inside the store to call the rescue squad, and Alan Goodyear and Tad Russo began running toward the bridge. A man whose face she recognized but whose name she didn’t know snuffed out his cigarette on the cement step and murmured something about going to find Terry and Laura—Hillary and Megan’s parents. As he climbed into his SUV, he said to no one in particular that he thought Terry was at deer camp, but he wasn’t positive, and then he shut the car door and backed out of the small parking lot.

  For a moment she feared she’d been left alone, but that concern came and went fast: An older woman she knew named Sue Wallace was suddenly kneeling before her. Sue was wearing a heavy ski sweater, and when she wrapped her wet arms around her, Alicia could smell the damp wool as easily as she could feel it. But she didn’t care, she didn’t care at all, and she buried her face in the grown-up’s wet sweater and continued to cry.

  THE TWO BODIES hit a partial dam anchored by Will Richmond’s fourteen-foot motorboat and the trailer on which he carted it to and from Lakes Dunmore and Champlain. The boat and the trailer had been under a tarp in the Richmonds’ backyard.

  The dam was a mile and a half west of the bridge, but well east of the even bigger pileup that would occur further downriver at the site of the old generator. It was between the village and the first of the great chasms in the asphalt road. The dam cut the width of the channel in half, but it didn’t back up the water, and much—though far from all—of the debris either went up and over the boat and the bodies or around them.

  When the river was back between its banks by three-thirty, the bodies were buried deep in a partly submerged wedge that in addition to the small boat and trailer included bicycles, garden carts, and the remains of an ice-fishing shanty. There was shredded metal roofing that looked like crumpled tinfoil, piles of wooden shutters in desperate need of scraping and painting, and a pair of antique carousel horses that belonged to a retired IBM engineer who was planning to restore them someday for his grandchildren. They’d been stabled since the summer in an outbuilding that had washed away.

  For a time that afternoon there had been some hope that the girls would be found alive. Not much, but until the bodies were recovered, no one was going to tell Laura Sheldon that her girls must have died, and the mere act of verbalizing the notion that they might turn up at any moment kept the idea on a respirator.

  Terry Sheldon, their father, was indeed away at deer camp that weekend. It would be evening before he would know what had occurred.

  Laura, however, learned of the girls’ fate around sunset—or what would have been sunset if the sky hadn’t been an endless sheet of gunmetal gray. The bodies were not visible from the side of the river, but the rescue squad, the volunteer fire companies from both Durham and Cornish, and the state police moved methodically west from the bridge in their search, and started pulling apart the dam with the two carousel horses about a quarter past four.

  They might have been found sooner if the people who did not live in Cornish had been able to get there more quickly. But with the main road destroyed, they’d had to approach the town from Middlebury and Ripton, an eighteen-mile detour as it was, made all the more time-consuming by the fact that the roads were dirt and had become severely rutted quagmires from the rain.

  The bodies were first spotted by a volunteer firefighter from Durham who had never met the girls or their mother but knew Terry: Their paths had crossed at the scenes of numerous car accidents and fires, and even at a pair of hazardous-materials spills on Route 116.

  It was clear instantly that the children were dead. One of the girls—no one could tell if it was Hillary or Megan—was completely naked: Every piece of clothing she’d worn had been ripped off by the litany of obstructions against which the body had banged as it cascaded downriver. The other child still had on her jeans and her sweater, but she was barefoot and her raincoat had disappeared.

  Both girls were a mass of deep red scratches and cuts, and there were lengthy gashes along the legs of the twin who was nude. Her skin had a crimson cast to it, because of the way the cold water had caused the blood to settle near the surface after death.

  Their eyes were closed, their hair was tangled with thin twigs and leaves, and there were great clods of mud in the small hollows cast by their joints. Their bodies were bent into shapes that no living person—even a contortionist—could bear.

  Nevertheless, an EMS technician took the pulse of each girl just to be sure.

  Then, much to the despair of their mother, the bodies were left where they were until someone could reach the state’s attorney—and by the time someone was able to get to a telephone that worked (radios and cell phones were always useless in the spoonlike valley of the Gale), it was already five-thirty.

  But the rescue squad and the volunteers and the state police hadn’t a choice. It was against the law to remove the bodies without the state’s attorney’s explicit authorization.

  As a courtesy to Laura, whose friends were keeping her home so she was far from the spot in the river where her children’s damp bodies had grown cold, one rescue worker suggested they claim they had a pulse so they could cart the girls away in the ambulance. But there must have been twenty-five people at the scene by that point, and so no one took the idea seriously. Instead they gently covered each body with one of the blankets that were stored inside the rescue vehicle.

  The person who told Laura that her children’s bodies had been found worked for her husband—or, to be precise, reported to him. Terry was a sergeant with the state police, and it was one of his very own troopers, Henry Labarge, who stood in the kitchen in his boss’s house with his winter campaign hat in his hands and told his boss’s disconsolate wife that her children had drowned.

  Later that evening he would also be the one to inform Terry. There was some talk that the station commander up in Derby would track Terry down and tell him, but Henry would have none of that idea. Though he was so fatigued his lids would loll shut and he would have to clutch the steering wheel to wake himself up, Henry drove all the way to the Sheldon family’s deer camp in the northeast corner of the state to tell his sergeant in person, and then in that cruiser he drove him home.

  PART ONE

  Deer Season

  “I have no idea who my father is and I was very young when my mother was given or sold to Mr. Rowe’s brother. Sixteen dollars a month may sound like a meager wage to you, but it’s more, I believe, than your newspaper would pay me.”

  SERGEANT GEORGE ROWE,

  TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  QUOTED IN THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH,

  AUGUST 11, 1869

  Alfred

  The boy sat on the wooden porch steps, his back flat against the peeling white column. He was oblivious to the paint flecks that surrounded his sneakers like gravel. In his hands was a black-and-yellow ball cap with the insignia for the Tenth Cavalry, a buffalo, stitched above the bill on the front. Along with a book about the buffalo soldiers, the old couple across the street had brought it back to him from Kansas, where they had recently been on a trip.

  Behind him he heard the woman in the front hallway, just inside the glass storm door. For a long time she stood there, watching him, but he was resolved to neither look up nor turn around. She was being needy again. Needy, he knew, was a hard place to be and he had always avoided it at all costs. Instead of turning around, he focused on the embroidered a
nimal on the cap, and the hump on its back that looked like a mountain. He knew he was making her uncomfortable.

  Are you hungry? she asked after a moment, opening the door and leaning outside. I know it’s early, but I can make us supper. Her voice was light—almost chipper—and a ripple of annoyance passed through him because it always seemed she was trying so hard.

  Okay.

  What would you like?

  Whatever, he said. He told himself he was trying to be easy, but he knew after the word had escaped his lips that he’d sounded only difficult—which, on another level, had been his intention.

  You like my macaroni and cheese, right?

  Sure.

  It’s going to rain, the woman said, clicking her tongue in her mouth after she’d spoken. The boy could hear concern in her voice—needless, in his mind—but he’d heard enough in his ten weeks in Cornish to know why it was there: Two years earlier it had rained throughout the fall, and in some nearby pond or river her children had drowned. Two girls. He slept in the room that had belonged to one of them, probably in the very same bed.

  Could it snow? the boy asked. It was cold, and in the distance they could both see the front coming in with the wind, and the rain—or, perhaps, the snow—falling like lead pencil shading to the west.

  It’s November, she answered, it always might snow. But I didn’t hear anything on the radio about a storm. No one was talking like that.

  You must get a lot of snow this high up.

  I guess. Probably a little more than you’re used to.

  He heard the storm door glide shut. She hadn’t left the doorway while they’d decided upon dinner and discussed the weather, and he hadn’t looked up from the cap. He found himself wondering why they called them buffalo soldiers, and for a moment he worried that it might have had something to do with their hair.

  DINNER WAS GOING to be an hour away since Laura had to boil the macaroni before baking it. And so he came inside and asked her if he could go to the cemetery up the hill.

  Do you think you should? she asked. That sky looks awfully nasty.

  I’ll put on those mittens, he offered, referring to the hunting mittens he’d come across in the hall closet that he had commandeered as his own. Each had a single long slit midway up the inside of the wide pocket, parallel to the joints, that allowed a hunter to expose his fingers when he needed to point and shoot his gun.

  I know you will. Still...

  The kitchen cabinets were painted white, but they were built of metal instead of wood, and they made a tinny ping whenever the woman closed them. The handles were metal, too. Already there was a pot of water on the stove, with a flame below it gas blue.

  And I’ll wear a hat, he said.

  She was standing on a ladder-back chair when he entered the kitchen, rummaging among the tins and cake mixes on the highest shelf for a can of Cheddar cheese soup, and he was embarrassed that he could see so much of the backs of her legs. She was wearing a corduroy dress that fell to just above her knees when she was standing but climbed higher now that she was stretching her arms high over head. Her cats—two girl cats she’d brought home from the shelter soon after she started working there, a pair of common-looking black-and-white kitties with markings that looked vaguely tuxedo-like—were watching her from the kitchen counter.

  Okay, she said finally. Just come right back if it starts to drizzle—or snow! Don’t wait. Okay?

  He nodded and took the parka they’d bought for him off the cherry coatrack across from the door, and replaced it with the blue-jeans jacket he’d been wearing. The coatrack had feet that looked like tree roots, and he knew it was one of Laura’s favorite things in the house. Certainly it was one of the most elegant. He figured she would prefer that he wear a wool hat—that was actually what he’d had in mind when he offered—but at the last moment he decided to wear the souvenir ball cap with the buffalo on it instead. It wouldn’t keep his ears as warm, but he liked the way it felt on his head. Then he reached into his school backpack for his portable CD player—it wasn’t much bigger than a CD case and had a clip on the back for his belt—and left the woman alone in the kitchen.

  IN THE CEMETERY he scuffed his way through the fallen leaves, kicking them before him as he walked. The wind was picking up, but it still hadn’t started to rain.

  When he reached a monument in the old section for some family named Granger, he pushed aside the tendrils and twigs from the massive hydrangea tree and crawled underneath. It was like being inside a cave, except that it was neither damp nor musty nor dark. At least not too dark. Though some of the conical flowers had turned brown and fallen off, many of the dead blossoms still clung to the talonlike branches of the tree. Enough foliage remained both to offer him the illusion that he was completely hidden and to keep him dry if the rain didn’t become more pronounced than a shower.

  He placed the headphones for the CD player over his ears as gently as he could, because his right lobe and the cartilage that ran like a seashell up the side had never healed properly, and would still smart if he failed to slip the headset on carefully. He didn’t miss the studs he’d worn there that summer as much as he’d thought he would, but there had nevertheless been moments when he wished he still had them. They hadn’t simply looked cool, they’d looked scary on a kid his size, and he knew that made him look tougher. Bigger.

  When the earpieces were comfortably in place, he rested the cap loosely on his head.

  He wished Terry or Laura smoked. If they did, he could have swiped a cigarette and had one right now. The Pattersons—the older couple he’d lived with in Burlington until they’d grown tired of chasing him down—had smoked, and he’d found that on any given day he could take a cigarette or two from the opened packs that littered the house and no one was ever the wiser.

  A cigarette, the music cranked up loud on the CD player, a little peace. Not a bad moment to imagine. Still, he was vaguely content even without the cigarette.

  He leaned against the boxy monument, wondering if other boys in the fifth grade knew of this spot. None of them ever talked about hanging out at the cemetery. The few afternoons he’d wandered aimlessly around the town with Tim Acker, another boy in the fifth grade, they’d never even considered heading up the hill to the graveyard. Maybe it was just too far, but maybe it was something more. For an instant he grew alarmed that his presence here was a sacrilege he didn’t quite understand. After all, the other boys had family buried in this graveyard, grandmothers and grandfathers and great-aunts and -uncles. Schuyler Jackman’s granddad was buried no more than forty or fifty feet from where he was sitting right now: Alfred had studied the headstone a half-dozen times, he’d even touched the cold marble. Tim Acker’s cousin was here somewhere, too, a much older boy—a teenager—who’d died in a car accident further up the mountain near the gap. He figured that tombstone had to be in the new section, a part of the cemetery he rarely visited. It wasn’t as interesting there. The tombstones were more recent, and there were no Civil War soldiers with their rusty G.A.R. stars.

  Maybe, Alfred worried, it wasn’t right for him to be here now. Or, perhaps, ever. He could be violating some country code or local tradition.

  In Burlington no one would have cared if he and Tien—a Vietnamese girl who’d become his best friend in the year he was with the Pattersons—had felt like hanging out in the graveyard. It was a real city, and they went wherever they wanted. He figured the high-school kids there went to the cemetery all the time, especially when they needed a quiet place to get high. But never once had he met a soul in the cemetery in Cornish during the many times he’d roamed inside the wrought-iron fencing.

  He decided he’d allow himself a few more minutes of solitude—that was something he had here that he’d never had anyplace else—and in one almost simultaneous motion he pulled his knees up to his chest and his cap down as far as his eyebrows. It was odd being the only kid in the house, and he wasn’t sure what he thought about it. Often he felt lonely. It was, as far a
s he knew, a first for him since he’d been a baby with Renee. At the very least, it was the first time that he’d been alone in Vermont. Maybe when he was very young and they still lived in Philadelphia there’d been a time when he was the only kid around. But who knew? Maybe Renee did, but he had no expectations he’d ever see her again, and it probably wouldn’t be the first thing he’d bother to ask her if he did.

  One good thing about being the only child was that it meant he wasn’t at the absolute bottom of the pecking order. In almost every other house where he’d lived, he had been. First there were the biologic children, and then there were the foster kids who’d gotten there before him. At one place—two houses ago—there had only been foster kids, but he was the last in and so he was still the low man on the totem pole. Not that it mattered. There they were all just a money-making scheme, anyway. They all knew they were just income so the woman could stay home, watch her soaps, and drink long-necks.

  Yet even though he had more space now than he’d ever had in his life, he didn’t feel as if he had much privacy. Here—at first he meant only the house, but as the word formed in his head, he realized he meant the town—he felt as if he was constantly being studied. Inside, outside. Everywhere, it seemed. It was the exact opposite of being ignored, which was something he was used to and understood. He knew how to get by on his own.

  But between Terry and Laura and the neighbors and the teachers and the pastor and the kids at school, he felt like a zoo animal—and maybe not even a zoo animal you liked. More like a zoo animal you didn’t quite trust. It was like they always thought he was up to something.

  Maybe that was how come he felt lonely.

  He was, as far as he could tell, the only black child for miles, and that didn’t help, either. He wasn’t just the new foster kid, he was the black foster kid. He couldn’t begin to figure out what the deal was with that, or what the people who shuffled him around were trying to do now. At first he had figured this was just an emergency placement because he’d pissed off the Pattersons once and for all, but then he realized he was expected to stay here awhile.