The Buffalo Soldier

by Chris Bohjalian

  The girl looked nothing at all like Laura’s own daughters, and she was glad.

  For a moment she joined the group and watched as Caitlin, one of the women who worked at the shelter for Laura, took a massive gray cat from a cage and gently placed it on the floor beside the little girl.

  The cat was named Rikki, and Laura knew it wouldn’t be a good fit with this family. It was an ottoman and it was old. If this family really wanted anything, they wanted an animal that would chase string and jump after moths. Something cute. Rikki was eight, unfortunately, and pretty set in her ways. She’d been at the shelter close to three months now, and Laura knew she wouldn’t be there much longer: Either a miracle would occur and she would be adopted, or they would have to put her down. No animal should have to live that long in a cage.

  Nevertheless, she thought she should put in a good word for Rikki before returning to her office. She knelt on the floor and ran two fingers along the top of the cat’s head, and said to the mother, Rikki’s very good with small children. Sometimes the feistier cats will scratch a little one by mistake, but not Rikki. She is incredibly serene—perfect for a house with a little baby.

  The girl joined Laura on the floor and started to stroke the cat. The animal stretched out a paw and then glanced up at the child with a look of complete indifference on her face.

  LAURA FIGURED ALFRED would spend about ten or fifteen minutes with the Border collie before returning. She figured the next dog she would give him would be the sheltie, and after that it would be Gilligan—a mutt that was part black lab and part something considerably smaller. Gilligan looked a bit like a dwarf.

  If Alfred wanted to walk still more dogs after Gilligan, she’d have to give the subject a little more thought. The other seven dogs at the shelter that day included German shepherds, Gordon setters, and a couple of mongrel strays. The dogs were generally sweet-tempered and happy to be around people, but they were big and unused to being walked on a leash. And though Alfred was strong for his size, he was still only ten and he had never been around dogs this large in his life.

  One of his homes had had some breed of small dog, but it didn’t sound as if he was ever walked. Alfred said they only had him for a couple of months. The owners would tie the dog to a clothesline in the backyard in the morning and then bring him in at night. When Alfred and an older child who lived at the house came home from school, the dog would start barking, but the kids weren’t allowed to bring him inside the house. Until it got too cold, on occasion Alfred would go outside and play with the animal. But the dog wasn’t trained, and it didn’t sound as if Alfred spent much time with him. There wasn’t much you could do with a dog on a clothesline. Alfred was too young to have serious homework then, but an older child—a girl, Laura believed—said the dog’s yapping made it impossible to study. The neighbors complained constantly of the noise, and eventually the owners grew tired of the protests and got rid of the animal. Alfred had no idea what that meant. And so although Laura could only hope that what she was saying was true, she told the boy the owners had probably returned the dog to their nearby animal shelter, where the creature had, with any luck, found a good home.

  She wondered if the boy made any parallels between himself and these dogs. She hoped not, and they certainly hadn’t discussed it. Still, the boy could read, and each animal had a clipboard on the front of its pen that listed, among other salient details, why it had been brought to the shelter. Most of the time the staff simply wrote, “My owner couldn’t keep me,” their all-purpose explanation for a litany of reasons that usually had everything to do with the owner and nothing to do with the canine. Often people moved and the dog was no longer convenient, or they had a child and the dog abruptly became too much work. Sometimes the dog wasn’t belligerent enough for the sort of young tough who would return his animal to the shelter in the back of his pickup, or it was too aggressive for a home with young children—it wouldn’t tolerate the poking, prodding, and handling that even a well-meaning three-year-old will inflict upon a dog. Nine times out of ten, she guessed, the animals in the building had done absolutely nothing wrong to wind up in their four-by-seven pens. They’d simply been dogs.

  It was odd, but one of the first things she and Terry had discussed when SRS told them there was a ten-year-old boy in Burlington in need of immediate placement was the possibility that the child would want to bring home a dog from the shelter. They had both liked that vision very much—a boy and his dog—and had even said something to that effect to the woman from the state who had brought them the news. But then she reminded the couple that they should only get a dog for the boy if they themselves wanted the animal, because the boy obviously would not be taking it with him if—and Laura couldn’t tell for sure, but she thought that the woman had almost said when—the child was placed somewhere else.

  My owner couldn’t keep me. Suddenly Laura disliked their umbrella expression, and she worried about Alfred. She turned her attention to the handwritten messages on her desk, wondering if there were one or two there that could be dealt with in the time the child would be with the Border collie—anything to take her mind off those words. There really wasn’t, and so she carefully read the final draft of the shelter’s end-of-the-year fund-raising letter, and penciled in a pair of small changes she wanted as director. Then she placed a yellow Post-it note on the top of the draft with her approval.

  As she was about to start down the stairs to greet Alfred, her personal line rang. Instantly she knew it was Terry. She wasn’t sure how she knew, or why she was so sure. But she was. It was her husband. Ever since he returned from deer camp last week, he had been unusually solicitous and kind. Not that he had ever been unkind. But he had never before been this attentive, he had never before been so interested in the inconsequential nothings that comprised a life. He had never before seemed to listen so carefully to every single thing that she said.

  The bouquet he’d brought home the other day had been the first flowers he’d given her since the one-year anniversary of the girls’ deaths.

  She picked up the phone before her voice mail kicked in, and sure enough it was Terry. Off and on over the past week there had been something in his voice that she found troubling, and she heard that something loud and clear now.

  How’s your day going? he asked.

  Where are you? she asked in return, a reflex, before realizing that she hadn’t answered his question.

  Just south of Shoreham, near the county line. You and Alfred having fun?

  Yup, we’re fine, she said, and instantly she understood why she’d asked a question before responding to his. It was as if she had suddenly stopped trusting him. These days, wasn’t she always asking him where he was the moment he called?

  What’s he doing?

  Right now he’s walking a Border collie. A girl named Rascal.

  Can he handle her?

  Yup.

  You need me to bring anything home for dinner? Pick something up in Middlebury, maybe?

  Dinner’s taken care of, she said, and a moment or two later they said good-bye and hung up. When the phone was back in the cradle, she stood for a moment next to her desk. Outside the window she saw the dog leading Alfred back to the shelter, the leash between them as taut as a tightrope. They were walking into the sun, and Alfred was wearing the cap with the cavalry insignia the Heberts had given him.

  She wondered if there was a way she could ask Terry’s brother if something had happened at deer camp. She didn’t think there was, but that didn’t stop her from pondering the idea.

  THE THINGS PEOPLE said to her about Alfred only drew her further away from the rest of the world, and closer to the boy—regardless of whether he talked or what he said when he did.

  You know, Laura, you can hardly tell he’s an African-American—he might just be a boy with a very dark tan! So said Abby Rousch that afternoon at the supermarket, when Laura realized that dinner was not completely taken care of, after all, and so she and Alfred had stopped
at the grocery store on their way home from the animal shelter. Alfred had been twenty-five or thirty feet further down the aisle, looking at the brightly colored cereal boxes, and so he hadn’t heard Abby—her long, pale, elderly finger resting on the side of her age-speckled jaw as she spoke—when she offered Laura the words that she presumed would be comforting.

  Laura nodded, wondering if she would ever get used to these remarks, and then said, He’s a beautiful boy, Abby, and brown is a beautiful color. I wouldn’t want him to be anything but what he is.

  Of course you wouldn’t, Abby said, as if she knew something that Laura did not, and she took that long finger of hers with the nail yellowed by age and tapped it gently on Laura’s wrist.

  Laura guessed that people said this sort of thing to her weekly, even people who she thought should know better. People like the boy’s teacher, a woman who couldn’t have been more than thirty-five. I am completely color-blind, she had said proudly the first day Laura brought Alfred to the school, I treat all my students as if they were white.

  The fact that the teacher had felt the need to say such a thing—and to phrase it so badly—discouraged Laura. One day some weeks later when she drove Alfred to school, her fears were confirmed. The buses hadn’t arrived yet, and so they were alone but for his teacher and a little girl whose name, she believed, was Kathleen. She watched Alfred boot up one of the two classroom computers, and saw he was having trouble finding his folder amidst the icons that appeared on the monitor screen. She realized, however, that she was at a loss as to how to help him. She looked to the teacher, but she was busy tacking posters about the rain forest to a corkboard, and seemed oblivious to the notion that one of her students might need some assistance. Yet a moment later when Kathleen merely glanced with raised eyebrows at the woman—before she had even opened her mouth—almost instantly the teacher put the posters down and was kneeling by the girl’s side, explaining to her exactly how to access her folder. Her heart sank when Alfred looked into his lap and then shut down the computer, and she wished she knew how to convey to the woman that the boy—her boy—needed help, too, without making a scene and antagonizing the child’s teacher.

  Even at church they weren’t exempt from well-meaning but ill-advised pronouncements. Their first Sunday, one of the deacons bent at the waist and stooped his ancient shoulders so that he was almost Alfred’s height, and with one hand on the boy’s arm informed him, God loves all children. Black. Yellow. Whatever. It’s good to have you here, son.

  During the moment that Sunday morning when the congregation greeted one another, she noticed that there were people around them who practically fell into her lap trying to shake Alfred’s hand and people who did all that they could to avoid the child beside her.

  Her own parents—no, anyone’s parents but hers—might have risen to the occasion and become surrogate grandparents, but they chose instead to remain almost predictably remote. They came north to meet the boy in the first days of autumn and then retreated south. They were going to come again at Christmas, but their plan was to stay a single night and then leave.

  Here, in their minds, was one more example of their daughter’s incorrigible lunacy. Going to college in Vermont, of all places, instead of to any of the more reasonable choices in the Berkshires, New Haven, or even right there in Boston. Marrying (and there was no distinction here) a policeman. Choosing to work at an animal shelter with all that noise and those smells, and trying to find homes for tick-heavy mongrels. Now agreeing to house this strange black child.

  Most of the time Laura wasn’t completely sure how much Alfred heard or understood, but she feared that he grasped a very great deal, and that only made her all the more determined to view the woods and the farm that separated their house from the village as a buffer zone—a barrier—that would keep all that meanness and hurt at a distance.

  “Indians had been raiding the more outlying ranches for weeks, stealing horses and mules, and we knew they had murdered five settlers. It was with this knowledge that Sergeant Rowe’s detachment began its pursuit of the marauders.”

  CAPTAIN ANDREW HITCHENS,

  TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  REPORT TO THE POST ADJUTANT,

  MAY 11, 1876

  The Heberts

  A horse? A horse, he said. I’ve wanted one ever since we sold Archie and Rex and moved out here. You know that.

  It had snowed earlier that week, but the day was warm for Thanksgiving and the snow had largely melted. At that moment the sun was as high as it would climb that day, and so the old couple had chosen not to don hats or gloves or their winter coats before venturing outside. They didn’t need them. They were able to stand comfortably on the edge of their lawn and discuss his idea wearing instead the matching Route 66 warm-up jackets they had bought that autumn in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Each jacket was black with a big red convertible patch on the back, and the old highway’s number presented in turquoise beading over the heart. They had cost—like so much other merchandise in the shop—sixty-six dollars apiece.

  You haven’t ridden a horse in ten years, Paul.

  Eight. Barely.

  When Paul was a boy, he had actually ridden fairly well. His family had lived in southern Vermont, and they’d always had horses. Then when their own daughter, Catherine, had grown interested in riding as a little girl, they’d gotten a pair of cob horses cheap from a friend, and their children—and Paul—had ridden them daily for over a decade. When their youngest child, Andy, had gone off to college, however, they’d decided to move to a small house with slightly less land, and that had meant selling the two animals. They were a lot of work, and Emily had never shared her husband’s or her children’s interest in them: They were big and smelly, and you could read a newspaper article in the time it took one to pee.

  You’ll probably fall off the damn thing and break your hip, she said. And I will have an invalid for a husband.

  Nah.

  And the animal will outlive us both, you realize.

  He nodded, and a response passed through his head that he kept to himself: Then I’ll get an old one, he thought. But he didn’t say that because it would have been merely glib—and untrue. He was not going to get an old horse. He might not get a young one, either...but he was definitely not going to bring home an animal as geriatric as he was, that was for sure. With a pair of living antiques in the house, they didn’t need a third one in the meadow that was about to become a paddock.

  I spoke to Chip Pearson. He’s actually finishing up a project at the Goodyears right now and can give us a little time next week. Squeeze in three days, maybe, which he says is about all he should need to get the side of the barn ready for a horse.

  That barn hasn’t had anything in it but automobiles since we’ve lived here! It’ll take more than three or four days to get the stalls ready—

  A stall, he said, emphasizing the word A. I’m not getting a herd. I’m getting a single animal.

  The barn is a disaster, she went on.

  It’s not. Chip looked at it last week. Three days, and it’ll be a dandy home for a horse. Warm and cozy. Downright palatial.

  You had Chip here last week?

  Yup.

  So you’ve been thinking about this awhile.

  I have. Got the idea when we saw those horses in Junction City.

  Kansas? she asked, meaning, in essence, You’ve been considering this since we were in Kansas?

  That’s right.

  She shook her head. Can’t this wait until spring?

  It could. But that would mean giving up between one-tenth and one-twentieth of the riding longevity that remains to me. I am most decidedly not prepared to do that.

  You’re going to ride in the winter?

  When it’s not too cold, yes. We used to do it all the time, remember?

  You’ve thought this through.

  I have. I can have the posts and the electric fencing here Monday morning if I want. And so long as the ground doesn’t fr
eeze, even an old fart like me can handle the props for electric fencing.

  In his mind, he knew exactly the design of the paddock—the shape of that fencing if viewed from the sky—and where the horse would graze. The animal would have just under two acres of space in the day, and a warm barn to sleep in at night. There would be patches of trees: the maple and ash, which would offer plenty of shade, and the line of pine, which would screen the worst of the wind. And though the horse probably wouldn’t care, the views of the mountains would not be shabby—even at night. When there was sufficient moon and few clouds in the sky, a man could see clearly the silhouette of Mount Abraham, a profile that had always looked to Paul a bit like a toppled, though gargantuan, pear. Once that great mass of granite and dirt had been called Potato Hill, an oddly diminutive designation for so much earth, but not inappropriate given the number of hardscrabble farmers who used to plant and dig potatoes easily two thousand feet up the mountain’s sloping sides.

  He glanced at the barn, noting the slight bow along the north and south walls—the walls parallel to the structure’s steep pitch. He liked the notion that once again there would be hay in that loft, as well as heavy bags of grain.

  You’re lucky the ground hasn’t frozen already, Emily murmured.

  I am. People younger than us worry about global climate change. When you’re our age, it’s a blessing.

  She sighed. Couldn’t you just take up golf? Isn’t that what most old men do?