The Buffalo Soldier

by Chris Bohjalian

  Certainly Peter Wolcott should have held up his palm and offered some skin. Both times Peter had been the teammate nearest him when he’d returned, victorious, with the opposing team’s flag. Instead Peter had ignored him.

  He wondered what would happen if he just gave them back the jersey and walked back inside the building to his classroom. A teacher would probably stop him—probably his own teacher, Ms. Logan—but there was no way one of the kids would make the effort. He felt himself growing angry, but he couldn’t stop himself and he didn’t care. Would it have been so hard for Peter or Schuyler or anyone to ask him for five? For Tim? Of course it wouldn’t.

  It wasn’t his fault that his mother had gone AWOL on him when she had another child, and that no one seemed to know who his dad was.

  And so after racing around Liam Freeland and a pair of girls who were offering next to no defense of the flag, he swiped the red smock from their goal, sprinted back to his side of the field, and then thwacked the cloth hard against Peter Wolcott’s fat back. The boy yelled, more in surprise than in pain, and when he turned Alfred thwacked him again. This one got him on the side of his head, and would probably redden that pale, pale ear in a matter of seconds. Alfred apologized—he knew how much an ear could hurt—and was about to say something more because he really hadn’t meant to nail the kid there, but he saw one of the teachers walking purposefully across the playground field toward him and he realized there wasn’t a thing more he could say at this point that would do him a bit of good.

  “I informed Sergeant Rowe of the order I’d received that henceforth the company would be kept fifteen yards from the white soldiers during inspection and would no longer march in review. He replied that they could live with inferior mounts (though not happily) and would continue to wait patiently for adequate Spencer carbines, but argued respectfully that they could not be separated during inspection and excluded from their place in review. It was clear he was prepared for disciplinary action, and was surprised when none was forthcoming and I agreed to speak on the troopers’ behalf.”

  CAPTAIN ANDREW HITCHENS,

  TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  REPORT TO THE POST ADJUTANT,

  AUGUST 18, 1869

  Terry

  He didn’t go back into the woods in the morning, but decided to leave the camp at first light and go home. Not straight home. He planned to stop at the barracks first and grab a shower. He would tell Melissa, their dispatcher, and any troopers who happened to be there that he still reeked of the woods and didn’t want to smell too earthy when he walked in the door of his house and was greeted by Laura.

  Still, he doubted Laura would smell anything on him, even if he didn’t go by the barracks. After all, he’d showered at Phoebe’s friend’s trailer.

  There had been something a little pathetic about the arrangement. Phoebe hadn’t wanted to bring him back to her father’s house, and so they had gone to some woman friend’s trailer instead. Phoebe had made a phone call from the bar in Newport where they’d gone from her store, and the friend had left a key under a flat rock by the front steps and then gone someplace else for a couple of hours. He had a feeling the friend was going to drive into Newport herself, perhaps to hang out in this very bar.

  Nevertheless, he took pride in the simple fact that he had managed to seduce this attractive woman who clearly, at first, had not wanted to get involved with a married man. Moreover, the sex had been good, even if it had been on a twin bed in a room likely to induce claustrophobia in anyone who hadn’t once worked in a submarine. He hadn’t been with a woman other than his wife since he started dating Laura years earlier, and the novelty of another woman’s smell alone had been appealing in ways he hadn’t expected. And Phoebe’s body was so very different from Laura’s, even though the two women were probably about the same size.

  He wondered what it was that he’d done or said that had pushed her over the edge, and changed her mind about him. Getting her to the bar had been easy: He figured she simply expected she would lead him on a bit, tease him. Make sure he understood exactly what it was that he wasn’t going to get. And for at least their first fifteen minutes at the bar, she really did little more than abuse him. She made fun of his small mustache, and how closely the regulations demanded he trim it. She teased him about the gray in his temples, and told him that she’d never had a drink before with a man so old who wasn’t a friend of her mom and dad’s.

  I would wager that I am less than a decade older than you are, he’d said defensively, and then added, and you are young and beautiful.

  At some point, however, the fact that he was a father came up. They never discussed Laura, but he did mention he had a foster boy living under his roof and they did talk about the girls. Everything changed when he told her they’d died. Suddenly his interest in her seemed to grow less sordid in her mind, and it became almost explicable. It wasn’t that tragedy justified adultery. But it did make certain needs more comprehensible.

  Still, Terry was absolutely positive that he had not told her the girls were gone because he thought he could use it, he was quite sure of that. Indeed, he had almost left after telling her what had occurred. (How many words had he needed? A dozen? A dozen and a half? You couldn’t use more, because if you did, he knew, you started to cry.)

  He was less sure, however, why he had then gone on to mention that the anniversary of his children’s death was the day after tomorrow. Wednesday, in fact. He hadn’t needed to add that little tidbit. But he had. He had looked into the beer foam that ringed the inside edge of his mug after speaking, because he knew he couldn’t meet Phoebe’s eyes.

  Later that night when he was lacing his boots and the two of them were preparing to leave the trailer in their separate vehicles, Phoebe asked him if he ever got to Montpelier.

  Sometimes Barre, he answered, referring to the city five miles south of Montpelier. Two or three times there have been changes of venue and I’ve had to testify in the courthouse in Barre.

  You do that a lot?

  Testify? Yes and no. Sometimes when I’m an arresting officer I have to testify. But the truth is, the better the affidavit, the less likely I’ll wind up in court. Whether it’s a speeding ticket or a B and E, you want it to be pretty darn cut and dried. And usually I’m not in Washington County, anyway. I’m in Addison. But you know what? Our headquarters are just north of Montpelier in Waterbury. I actually get there every once in a while.

  She nodded and looked at the cowboy boot in her hand as if she didn’t recognize it.

  Why do you ask? he said.

  She was wearing a pair of heavy wool tights, and it seemed to take a great effort to slip her foot—even though it had seemed so small and petite to him no more than an hour ago—into the boot.

  Well, she said finally, I was going to suggest you drop by when you’re in the area. But I’m not altogether sure that would be a good idea.

  Probably not, he agreed. But the moment he’d said it he wondered if his ready assent might have hurt her feelings. He’d never done anything like this before—and he vowed that he never would again—but maybe there was an etiquette here he didn’t fully understand. Maybe he was supposed to pretend this was more than it was, try to elevate it into something less tawdry than a roll in a twin bed in some stranger’s trailer. And so he waved his arm at the two of them and then at the narrow room with the fake wood paneling in which they were getting dressed and said, You know something, Phoebe? This whole evening wasn’t a good idea. But I’m glad we did it.

  Oh, I am, too, she said. Really. I am, too. But don’t do it. Don’t come see me when I move back to Montpelier.

  He considered asking her why she was so firm in her resolution, but he was pretty sure it was simply the fact that he was married. Still, when he thought back on their conversation and her admission only a moment ago that she had almost suggested he drop by when he was in the county someday, he realized there might be something more: He was a state trooper. Someone who was s
upposed to be righteous and upstanding, someone who was supposed to uphold the law. Someone who was actually a bit of a hero once in a while.

  Perhaps when he had mentioned the idea of testifying in Barre, he had reminded her of what he did for a living.

  IN THE SHOWER in the barracks he started to cry. This time he didn’t make a sound, it wasn’t like those afternoons in his cruiser, and he stared straight up into the cascading water with his eyes shut tight so the tears would roll down his body and disappear down the drain with the water.

  The girls—the word alone could unhinge him sometimes, the plural especially, because of the seraphic memories it conjured—had been named after their grandmothers.

  HE WAS ALREADY nearing the massive blue silos at one edge of the Cousinos’ dairy farm when he decided to turn around. He drove back along the two-lane road linking Cornish with Durham until he reached the Durham town commons, and then he parked in one of the diagonal spaces in front of the gazebo. There was sun today, lots of it, more than there had been in almost a week, and the side walls of the gazebo—repainted that summer for the first time in at least a decade and a half—looked whiter than milk and too shiny for wood.

  He went first to the florist, because he knew what he wanted to get Laura. He asked the woman who worked there to prepare for him the most colorful bouquet of cut flowers she could manage.

  Make it cheerful, please, he said to Carol. Very cheerful.

  I think we can arrange that, Carol said, and she went to the refrigerator with the tall glass doors. Larkspur, she murmured, more to herself than to him. I love purple flowers. And some yellow lilies. Laura likes yellow, yes?

  Yes.

  And, let’s see...iris. Blue irises.

  What are those? he asked, pointing at a collection of flowers in a gray bucket on the bottom shelf.

  Oh, good choice. Gerbera daisies. Some hot pinks would be nice.

  And roses, too, he said. A couple red roses.

  Red means love, she said, and she added four sweetheart roses to the assemblage of flowers she was preparing.

  After he had paid for the flowers, he put them in the passenger seat of his pickup and went to the big drugstore next to the supermarket. It was the closest thing the town had to a variety store, and he thought he might be able to find something there for the boy.

  HE GOT HOME before lunch—hours before Laura would return from the animal shelter and Alfred would return from school. If he wanted, he knew, he could shower yet again. Three showers, he figured, and not even a bloodhound would be able to detect a trace of Phoebe Danvers on his skin. But a third shower seemed more than a little paranoid, even if the cats seemed more interested in him than usual, and so he didn’t bother to bathe yet again.

  He considered placing the wrapped flowers in the refrigerator, but Laura wouldn’t be back until somewhere around two-thirty. That meant they’d have to sit there for three solid hours. And so although he’d only put flowers in a vase a handful of times in his entire life, he did now. The arrangement wasn’t pretty—somehow the irises and the lilies kept hiding the daisies, and the roses kept sagging to the side—but at least this way the flowers would be alive when Laura got home, and she would know how to fix them.

  He’d bought Alfred a football kicking tee and a magazine about the NASCAR circuit. He didn’t know if the kid liked auto racing, but it was clear the boy was interested in his cruiser, and the glossy pictures of the race cars were pretty hot.

  And Alfred did enjoy football. It was, as far as Terry could tell, one of the few obvious things they had in common. The boy didn’t like shooting baskets with him, but they’d tossed a football together three or four times that autumn and watched a couple of Patriot games on TV.

  He grew a little annoyed at Alfred when he listened to the answering machine in the den. The kid had simply left a message announcing that he was going to stay in town after school and play with that Acker kid. The child’s mother would drive him home. The part that irritated Terry was the fact that Alfred had left the message on the machine here, instead of calling Laura at the shelter. Now she’d be racing home as usual to greet the boy when he got off the school bus, when maybe she would have done something else if she’d known she didn’t have to come straight home.

  Sometimes the boy just didn’t think. The girls would never have shown so little common sense.

  The girls. He found it interesting that since they had died he always viewed them as a pair, as if they had lacked individual personalities or were incomplete when they were apart. In reality, when they were alive they had done many things separately, and Laura hadn’t dressed them alike since they were toddlers. They wouldn’t have stood for it.

  The truth was they had very different interests, and you could see it in the “Try-It” badges that had monopolized so much of their lives during their last years. Both children had been Brownies and then Girl Scouts, and it would have been so much easier if they’d ever been interested in getting the same badges at the same time. But of course that hadn’t happened. Megan had been obsessed with the ones that seemed to demand hours outdoors, while Hillary always focused on those badges that involved cooking and clothing and manners.

  And yet it had been Hillary who was the jock. She was the one who’d played youth soccer and T-ball and Little League. Not Megan. No interest in sports at all. She liked to be outside all right, but it was always so she could look for birds’ nests and mole holes. Fairy houses, when she’d been younger. There had been a period when he and Laura hadn’t dared move a stone or a twig in their yard, because it might have had totemic importance for one of Megan’s secret, make-believe sprites.

  He liked to hike—along with hunting and pickup basketball one night a week, it was about the closest thing he had to a hobby—and the summer before the girls died, the family had gone on some nice, long hikes together. Hillary had seemed to enjoy them because of the effort the walks demanded, while Megan had derived her pleasure from the wonders—real and imagined—that she would insist lived beneath every leaf.

  About twenty to three, he poured himself a glass of apple cider. The cider was pungent and thick, and reminded him of the day that autumn when he and Laura had taken Alfred to the orchard. The boy had never been to one before, despite living almost his entire life in Vermont. It had been a perfectly fine day until it was time to leave, and the boy refused. Just wouldn’t budge. Then, when they thought he’d finally agreed to return with them to the car, he disappeared the moment they’d turned their backs. One moment he’d been a dozen steps behind them, and the next he was gone. It had taken them twenty minutes to find him, and Laura had grown so frightened that she started to cry. The orchard bordered Lake Champlain, and the kid had wandered all the way down to the shore, where he was looking at the boats and throwing rotten apples as far as he could into the lake.

  He said he missed the water. Said he used to hang out by the waterfront sometimes when he lived in Burlington.

  Just after Terry had poured the glass of cider, Laura pulled into the driveway. He heard the car and went to the front steps to greet her. As she emerged from her little gray Taurus, a massive wave of guilt rushed over him: Here she was, the woman he’d fallen in love with and married. Here by the carriage barn they used as their garage was his wife. Her hair was held in place by the thinnest of headbands, and it was blowing in all directions as she walked up the bluestone toward the front door. He saw wisps of animal fur on one of the sleeves of her jacket, fluff from the white coat of some very big dog.

  She smiled and waved, and pulled the strap of the wicker tote bag she used as a purse up over her shoulder. She was, he decided, as fragile as she was beautiful, and she must never, ever know what he had done the night before. Never. And so in case he was wrong about Phoebe Danvers—in case the scent of her perfume or her skin or that woman friend’s trailer had indeed come home with him, despite two showers in half a day’s time—he took the glass of apple cider he was holding and spilled it down the fr
ont of his red-check flannel shirt.

  “And so I have begun to post rules for my men. Rule number one: They have to care for their horses as well as they care for themselves, since a good horse can mean the difference between life and death out here, and a mount’s best days are probably behind it by the time it reaches us.”

  SERGEANT GEORGE ROWE,

  TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  LETTER TO HIS BROTHER IN PHILADELPHIA,

  NOVEMBER 18, 1873

  Phoebe

  In September there were the mannered strangers from Connecticut and New Jersey who bought maple syrup, sometimes two and three half-gallons at a time, and in October there were the busloads of elderly from New York. They bought maple syrup, too, but almost always in pints. They were also likely to buy a good many postcards.

  In November the hunters arrived, joining the local boys, and they were some of the biggest spenders the store would see in the course of the year. They viewed the place as a small supermarket, and planned to fill their refrigerators and coolers with provisions for a weekend or a week. They didn’t seem to mind paying an extra dollar for a can of coffee, or an extra seventy-five cents for a jar of peanut butter. They were happy to pay for bologna as if it were roast beef, either because in their minds they were now on vacation or because their wives usually did the shopping and they didn’t have the slightest idea what things really cost.

  In December the skiers would start coming in with some frequency. At least that’s what Frank and Jeannine told her. She hadn’t worked at the store yet in December. But Frank and Jeannine had owned the place for almost two decades, and they said the store could expect to sell a lot of wine in the heart of the winter, and easily a case of lip balm a day. They didn’t get as many skiers, of course, as the towns closer to Burke and Jay Peak, but they still had their share. The store was located about a half-hour from one of the mountains, and forty-five minutes from the other.