The Buffalo Soldier

by Chris Bohjalian

  But when she broached the subject of a foster child again a few days later, she decided she should be honest with Terry about the money. Maybe if he didn’t want it, they didn’t have to take it.

  But he’d been fine. She noticed that he didn’t ask how much money was involved—his way, she decided, of making it clear that the money had nothing to do with either his interest or his consent.

  And so she had filled out a surprisingly short application (why, she wondered, had she been so sure there would be essay questions?), and she and Terry had both taken a brief course on how being a foster parent differed from being a regular parent: What, in essence, would be expected of them, and what was involved. How these kids might differ from the children they had seen on the school bus that for years had arrived at the end of their driveway twice a day. She gave something called the Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services the permission to do criminal background checks on herself and her husband, and to make sure that neither was a known child abuser.

  The irony was not lost on her: Her husband was a sergeant with the state police. In less than two years his lieutenant would retire, and in all likelihood he would be promoted and given command of the barracks—one of the reasons they’d decided to stay in Cornish after the flood.

  She was the possible wild card in their minds. Not him.

  Two weeks later, a woman from SRS came to their house at the end of the day, and she and Terry were interviewed together in the living room about child-rearing practices and discipline. About how their daughters had died. The woman tried to make sure they understood the program, and—depending upon the child—what they might be in for. She wanted to make sure they were ready. A few days after that another lady from the state came by for a visit, and this one wanted a tour of their home. It was clear to both Terry and Laura that she was impressed. She observed that the bedroom they would give to the child was airy and bright, and that one of the two windows was over the front porch and therefore could serve as an exit in the event of a fire.

  She noted that Terry’s guns were locked in a metal cabinet, and that the ammunition was kept in a separate sideboard—also locked—and she said that was proper. For a moment Laura feared that Terry was going to say something defensive, but he didn’t. He simply nodded.

  They both knew as soon as the woman left that they would get a child. It was, as Terry said, a slam dunk. A sure thing.

  They even assumed their child would be a girl, though they decided she’d be younger than Hillary and Megan had been when they died. They envisioned her at six or seven, and they imagined almost daily how gentle they’d be with her. After all, who knew what scars the child would be carrying inside her?

  They told themselves they were silly to anticipate with tangible certainty who their child would be, but it was hard not to hope for someone who might resemble the daughters they’d lost—especially after all they’d endured—and that this child would, as the SRS folks clearly hoped, be a youngster they would someday want to adopt. Still, when they discussed what sort of child would wind up under their roof, they were always careful to remind each other that this person might be nothing at all like their dreams.

  Nevertheless, they were caught completely off guard when, barely two months after they had entered the system, they were offered what was described to them as a quiet, slightly troubled ten-year-old boy with skin, they would see, as dark as their mahogany headboard.

  “Only a few braves went, but Lone Bear was among them. They took horses and mules from the ranchers, maybe some livestock. I don’t remember. It’s only the horses I can see now. The currents were always strong where the Pecos and the Canyon Creek met, but the men had been able to cross it before the thunderstorms. Then the rains came and the water rose. Two days it rained. Otherwise, the soldiers would never have been able to catch them. They were that close to the village.”

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  Terry

  Terry Sheldon—not tall in reality, but trim and athletic and with posture so impressive that he looked considerably taller than five-eight—watched the woman adjust the deer on the metal scale, pushing its haunches back onto the platform so she could get a more exact reading. The platform—a wire-mesh grill, actually, that dangled a good four feet off the ground—was hitched to a brace that extended out like a diving board from the red clapboard outbuilding just to the side of the general store.

  Beside him, his younger brother was sipping a beer and grinning. Russell had popped the top of the can the moment they slid the dead buck onto the scale.

  Hundred and eighty pounds, I say, his brother said. Maybe two hundred.

  Oh, please, Terry said, and he resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He’s healthy, all right, but you’re acting like you just brought down Big Foot. He wondered if that was a muffler clamp the store was using to link the scale to the brace above it. It was the only new metal anywhere on the device, the only alloy that still had a trace of sparkle.

  His brother shook his head and snickered. I should have entered the buck pool, he said. Just so I could take my loving older brother out to dinner and watch him squirm.

  You can take me out to dinner anytime, Terry said.

  But it would be so much better if it was with money I’d won in a buck pool.

  Cast out those little demons you got with being young and green?

  Squash ’em like grapes.

  The deer had ten points, and a hole right behind the shoulder where the bullet had penetrated the animal’s body. Near them two local dogs watched, hoping there would be some blood on the ground or on the scale when the two men put the buck back in Terry’s red pickup.

  Hundred and fifty pounds, the woman said finally, and she wrote down the number on a piece of paper on a brown clipboard.

  Terry couldn’t help himself, and he started to laugh.

  That scale can’t be right, Russell said, and then he turned to Terry. ’Cause if it is, we have gotten very lame in our old age. Hundred and fifty? Really?

  The woman—thirty, maybe, with creosote-colored hair that fell to her shoulders, and a moist cherry lipstick that Terry thought was more than a little provocative—shrugged. It’s still big, she said, her voice cheerful and light. Biggest I’ve seen today.

  Well, thank you, Terry told her. That’s the first time a woman’s ever said anything like that to my kid brother. Do you have any idea how happy you just made him?

  The woman stood up a little straighter and smiled. You want me to take a picture for the wall? she asked. Beginning along the trim beside the inside of the front door and continuing into the store were columns of Polaroids of hunters and their kills, with the name of each hunter written in black Magic Marker on the white strip below the image. By the time hunting season was over, the pictures would have taken over a good stretch of that wall.

  You bet, Russell said.

  By the scale, or the truck?

  If you do the scale, Terry said, be sure to focus in on the weight.

  His brother glared at him. The truck will be just fine, thank you very much, he said.

  Terry helped his brother pull the buck from the rear of the scale, and they dropped it with a small thud into the back of the truck. The head bounced just a bit on the metal. The younger man then sat beside the animal, shifting the carcass slightly so that none of it would be hidden behind his orange vest, and held up the deer’s head for the camera. The woman reached for the boxy Polaroid on a rock by the outbuilding, took the picture, and then started back toward the store. She was waving the print in her hands, drying it despite the chill in the air. Both men followed her.

  Inside, Russell watched her tack the image to the wall and mumbled, Hundred and fifty. Yeah, right. Terry saw that his brother had left his beer in the back of the truck, and he was relieved. He certainly didn’t want him walking around the shop with an open beer in his hands.

  Maybe there is some
thing wrong with my scale, the woman said. Maybe a hundred and ninety will win this year.

  His brother studied each picture on the wall, and Terry figured he was trying to guess the weight of each animal. He came up here a lot more often than Terry did, and so he probably knew more of the faces in the Polaroids.

  The woman strolled back behind the counter and helped a friend of hers, another woman somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties but nowhere near as attractive, bag a small collection of groceries. A box of sugar doughnuts, some bread. Deli meat. Beer. A newspaper. Two packs of cigarettes. The customer was a man with hair the gray and black of the ash in a woodstove, and it was piled thick on his head. He was still in his camouflage jacket and pants, and, as the man was leaving the store, Terry wondered if he’d gotten his buck for the year.

  Unsure what he was going to say or why he was doing it, Terry asked the woman who’d weighed his brother’s deer what her name was. He’d noticed there weren’t any rings on her finger.

  Phoebe, she said.

  I’m Terry.

  She raised one eyebrow, a small movement that always impressed him because he couldn’t do it. Only Terrys I’ve ever known have been girls, she said.

  It’s short for Terrance.

  I see.

  You live around here? he asked.

  No, I live an hour and a half away, but I commute here for the benefits. Of course I live around here! She shook her head and grinned, and folded her arms across her chest. Briefly he imagined her breasts under her turtleneck shirt and denim jacket, and then he thought of Laura.

  It’s a beautiful part of the state, he said. My family has a camp just off the Lunenburg road.

  I saw you and your friend—

  Brother.

  I saw you and your brother over the weekend. As a matter of fact, there were four of you, right?

  Still are. Two of my cousins are in the woods right now.

  You got your deer yet?

  Nope. He didn’t tell her that he hadn’t even fired his rifle, despite ample opportunities. He understood that once he’d brought down his animal, he’d have to go home and face the anniversary of his little girls’ deaths.

  It is beautiful here, she said. I lived in Montpelier for seven years, and I was surprised by how much I missed it.

  What brought you back?

  She looked to Terry’s right, and he saw that two teenage boys wanted to buy a six-pack of Pepsi and a handful of Slim Jims. He took a step back so she could ring them up. The other woman, he noticed, was slicing sandwich meats in the back of the store.

  When the boys had moved on, Phoebe answered, My mom got sick.

  I’m sorry. I presume you mean seriously sick.

  Lung cancer.

  My father died of lung cancer, he said. How is she doing now?

  She died.

  He nodded. Recently?

  August.

  You’ve had a tough fall. Is your father alive?

  Yup. Healthy as a bear.

  How’s he doing otherwise?

  He’s okay. He doesn’t talk about it much.

  Are you going to go back to Montpelier?

  Probably after the holidays. I had a good job in Waterbury with the state. I can get it back whenever I want it.

  What part?

  Developmental and Mental Health Services.

  He thought instantly of Alfred because Mental Health Services and SRS were both part of the same massive state agency, and how quickly the foster family program had found him and Laura a child. He couldn’t believe that Phoebe could possibly have crossed paths with any of the caseworkers they’d met in Social Services: It was a small world, all right, but it wasn’t that small. Still, he figured he’d better find out.

  What did you do there?

  My business card said financial specialist. Translation? I’m a bean counter.

  I’m sure counting beans can be very satisfying work, he said, surprised by how much her short, crisp answer had relieved him. The woman spent her time with numbers, not people.

  She leaned against the shelves behind the cash register and then rested her hands on the wood. You do ask a lot of questions, Terry...

  Sheldon. Terry Sheldon.

  Any special reason you’re so inquisitive?

  He shrugged. I’m a state trooper. I guess I’m just likely to ask questions. Force of habit.

  She glanced at his hand, and reflexively he followed her eyes. He realized he was still wearing his gloves. You married, Terry Sheldon? she asked.

  I am.

  Then I’m just going to assume you’re inquisitive by nature, and there’s nothing more to it. Okay?

  There probably isn’t more to it than that.

  Uh-huh, she said.

  Then she did something, and he realized that she was doing it to punish him for flirting with her despite the fact that he was married. She took a small matchbook-sized packet with a wet wipe inside it, tore it open, and reached toward him across the counter. So close to him that he could smell the floral odor of the powder or antiperspirant that she had used under her arms, she unfolded the wipe and ran it along his cheek at the edge of his immaculately trimmed mustache. She concentrated on his face, and her lips were within inches of his.

  Then she pulled away. I thought I saw a smudge there, she said, or just maybe something of interest. But I guess I was mistaken.

  His brother came up beside them and clapped him on the shoulder. I got nothing to be ashamed of, he said to Terry. That buck is just fine.

  Terry turned to him and nodded. He realized his legs were a little bit shaky.

  HIS COUSINS AND his brother were listening to the Celtics on the portable radio and playing cards, but Terry was annoyed by the static and had decided to leave the game. The cabin still smelled of fried meat, and Terry was grateful because the earthy smell of the venison was considerably better in his opinion than the earthy smell of the three other men.

  A part of him was relieved that Laura hadn’t let him bring Alfred along. She said it was because the boy would have had to miss two days of school, and that was, probably, a factor. But he knew there was more to it than that. She lived in fear that something awful would happen to the child when he was out of her sight, and she wanted him nowhere near four men with a small arsenal in the woods. Still, he, too, was glad that the child wasn’t with him: Deer camp was always a gamier place than he remembered, and though he always tried to recapture the joy he’d felt here as a boy, it just hadn’t been the same since his father had passed away.

  There was little light in the corner of the room he had staked out with the newspaper, but he wasn’t doing much more than scanning the headlines and daydreaming. He’d spread the paper out on the massive picnic table that for two generations had been the table on which they’d butchered the animals and eaten their dinners. They usually ate by a kerosene lamp someone would place in the middle, or by candles in the two glass-enclosed hurricane lamps. They’d always played hearts or pinochle on the folding card table they set up near the woodstove, some years squeezing seven or eight men and boys around it.

  He’d thought of Phoebe off and on since he and Russell had left the store, and the smell—was it roses?—that he’d taken in when she leaned toward him. He didn’t feel guilty, reminding himself that thoughts weren’t actions. Isn’t that what the radio shrinks he sometimes listened to always said? Nope, thoughts were definitely not actions, and he knew as well as anyone that you certainly didn’t arrest anyone for a thought.

  Still, a part of him wasn’t proud of himself. He loved Laura, they’d been married for almost fifteen years.

  Yet he also felt that once again there was a distance between them, once more she was shutting him out. As soon as the boy had come into their lives, she’d fallen back inside herself—or, to be precise, away from him. It was not unlike the way she had been right after the girls died. But then at least he had understood what she was experiencing. He had known as well as she had the way the frus
tration and the anger could cause the adrenaline to rush through you in waves, make you frantic for a time, and then leave you only exhausted, despairing, and sad. He knew firsthand what it was like to sit in a cruiser on the side of Route 7 with your radar shut off, and wail so loudly that you half-expected some entitled son of a bitch in a sleek SUV to hear you and stop.

  But this was different. Now that they had Alfred, Terry felt completely irrelevant. He’d never been able to help her before, that was clear, but at least he hadn’t felt irrelevant.

  He wished he understood the boy better, he wished the boy enjoyed the same kinds of things he did. But it just wasn’t happening. The kid had absolutely no interest in Scouting, wouldn’t even talk to the local troop leader. Didn’t want to play soccer after school, even though there was a pretty good program, or go to the gym to shoot baskets. Disassociative was the word Louise, the caseworker, had used. Mostly he just groused that there was no cable in Cornish, and so he couldn’t watch music videos and trash TV. Big loss, that, it seemed.

  Sometimes Terry wasn’t even sure that he liked the child, and that thought always made him feel guilty. He didn’t believe it had a damn thing to do with the fact that the boy was black. Still, he’d probably said about a thousand words to black people in his whole life. When his lieutenant— a guy pushing forty-nine who’d be gone in fifteen months—had called him a multicultural wanna-be one afternoon in the barracks, he’d taken great comfort in the remark. It suggested that he was well-meaning and big-hearted.