The Buffalo Soldier

by Chris Bohjalian

  They built the display in the middle of the dining-room table, and Alfred liked the way you could see the Christmas tree he had picked out in the living room behind it. It looked like a mountain in the distance.

  That night, Laura had said, when Terry returned home from work, they would celebrate the first night of Kwanzaa—what Laura had called the ingathering.

  Ingathering? he asked as he flipped through the Kwanzaa book in search of the definition. It was only nine o’clock in the morning, but already Laura’s parents were gone. They’d left before eight, hoping to be far to the south before the storm hit in earnest and the roads grew slick with snow. He had to admit, he was relieved they hadn’t stayed longer, and he had the sense that Laura was, too. Laura’s mother was wheezing constantly from the animal fur that suddenly he and Terry and especially Laura were discovering everywhere, and Laura’s father was clearly uncomfortable with the drafts in the house. They both kept bringing up small homes, all charming, one or the other had seen for sale in Dedham and Newton and Wellesley. While the two women prepared dinner, the men—including Alfred—parked themselves in front of the television to watch a basketball game, and Alfred didn’t believe any of them said a word.

  Laura centered one of the candles and then sat in the ladder-back chair beside him. She was still wearing her red flannel nightgown and he was still in the navy blue pajamas that Laura’s parents had given him. Terry had left the house while the older couple were having their breakfast, and had already been at work for ninety minutes. I’m sure the book will explain it better, Laura said as she adjusted her headband, but I believe it has to do with building bonds between people and getting together. Family, maybe. Parents and children. She smiled and shrugged, and then added, You might say the ritual began yesterday with Christmas, though it’s pretty evident that some parts of this family are more comfortable with the notion of gathering together than others.

  He reached for the acorn squash nearest him and held it in his hand like a softball. He’d never really grown anything in his life; he wasn’t sure he had ever even worked in a garden. By the time he arrived here, Laura was already putting her vegetable garden to bed for the winter, and harvesting the final zucchini and squash. The gourd he was balancing that moment in his palm might have been among the very last vegetables she had brought into the house. He wondered if other kids—regular kids—gardened, and without thinking about whether this was a smart subject to broach, he asked Laura, Your girls like to garden?

  The smile instantly evaporated from her face and he regretted the question. Only a split second before it had seemed to him both an innocuous inquiry about a hobby and, perhaps, a safe way to begin to understand the children who had come before him and whose memory had such a hold on these grown-ups with whom he lived. A phrase Laura had just used echoed in his mind: parents and children. That was, she had said herself, a part of the ingathering. So why not bring up the girls? Wasn’t it time?

  For a long moment she sat there, saying nothing, and quickly he focused his attention entirely on the page that was open in the book. The words, the English as well as the Swahili—umoja, ujima, ujamaa—became a blur, and he stared at the image of a slim wooden statue of an African man. Finally he heard a small noise from her mouth, a sound so soft it could have been made by one of the cats, and then she answered him.

  Hillary wasn’t especially interested in gardening—not vegetables or flowers—but Megan was. A little bit. She didn’t like the weeding and planting parts, but she liked to be out there with me sometimes. She’d look for wildlife. Chipmunks. Toads. Bluebirds. Come March or April, you’ll see that we actually get a couple families of bluebirds in those birdhouses Terry put up in the side yard. She—and before you laugh at this, remember that she was younger than you are now—also liked to look for fairies. She claimed they lived under the largest leaves, like the ones on the pumpkin plants.

  As Laura spoke he glanced up from the book, and he saw that she was watching him. Her hands were perfectly still in her lap, and the corners of her mouth were upturned once again into a very slight grin.

  Megan didn’t contribute a heck of a lot to the final harvest, she continued, but she was great fun to have with me. Always.

  Hillary, too?

  Hillary, too. But Hillary was usually on the same planet with the rest of us. That wasn’t always true of Megan. Megan sometimes seemed to exist in her own little world. Megan-Ville, we used to call it. Especially when she’d be off on one of her searches for goblins or elves.

  What else did they like to do? Both girls?

  You mean when Megan wasn’t pawing through the pumpkin patch in search of make-believe creatures?

  Uh-huh.

  Oh, I could go on for hours, Alfred. I could show you pictures, I could take you to the attic and we could unpack cartons and cartons...their whole lives are up there. Well, not their whole lives. We gave a lot away. But we kept a lot, too. There are some things I couldn’t part with, even if I couldn’t bear to have them around where I could see them every day.

  Clothes and toys?

  Some. I know there’s a box of Barbies up there, and the books I couldn’t bring myself to give to the library. There’s even a couple pieces of furniture. But mostly it’s schoolwork and projects and the sorts of things they would do in art class. Things they drew or made with their own hands. Paintings. Little clay sculptures. Their stories and essays.

  But not their photos, he said, and he thought about the albums of pictures he’d studied in the den, and the one image he had taken for himself. They’re not in the attic.

  No, not their photos. You’ve seen them?

  He nodded, and he could feel his face flushing with guilt.

  A day doesn’t go by when I don’t look at them, she said. I can’t have them up on the kitchen refrigerator or in a frame in the bedroom—I just can’t do it, I just can’t run into them casually when I’m supposed to be doing something else—but I also can’t last a day without seeing them. Visiting with them when I’m alone in the house.

  He thought about this, wondering what it must be like to lose someone you cared about. Really cared about. Especially if you weren’t used to such a thing. Is it as hard now as it was a couple years ago? he asked. When it happened?

  No, she said, the single syllable drawn out a tiny bit by her sigh. In truth, it isn’t. But it will never, ever be easy.

  You still miss them?

  One of the cats jumped into her lap, surprising them both, and she pulled the animal into her arms and against her chest. She raised her eyebrows into a tawny pyramid and looked at something in the distance far beyond Alfred, and murmured softly into the cat’s ear, Oh, I think I will miss them forever.

  “They issued an order to try and help them know who was hostile and who wasn’t. They used the river as the dividing line. I knew then I would never see my people again.”

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  Terry

  It would start to snow any minute, you could feel it in the crisp, moist air. Because Christmas had fallen on a Friday this year, the roads now—the day after Christmas—were particularly empty. Few people were going to work. Few people were going anywhere.

  Still, it was clear it was going to be one of those days when virtually every car or truck that he saw was going to be speeding. First of all, there was the imminent arrival of the storm. Second, a person could drive for long moments without seeing another vehicle, and that led almost everyone who didn’t have cruise control to press the pedal just a little bit harder. He did that himself on occasion.

  And third, and perhaps most important, he could just tell he was going to have a bad day. Whether it was because he, of all people, had conceived a child out of wedlock with Phoebe Danvers, or (worse, in so many ways, worse) because it had been little more than a day and a half since he was with the woman at the coffee shop and already he wanted to see her again, or wheth
er it was simply because he felt an ill wind blowing in from the west, he couldn’t say. Sometimes you simply had bad days, mornings or afternoons when every driver on the road was handling his car like a moron and endangering you as well as himself.

  And, of course, he thought this just might have had something to do with the girls. His girls. Christmas was hard without them. Maybe Alfred had helped Laura, but as much as he hated to admit it even to himself, the sad truth was he wanted his own children. Not some kid somebody else had deserted. He wanted something that was linked to him by genes and blood and the shape of a chin. The tint of the child’s hair in the sun. Somehow he had held himself together for Laura for over two years—kept both his anguish and his fury in check—but he had a sense that now, finally, his control was beginning to lessen, if only because his wife needed him less. At least it seemed that she did.

  Bottom line? The despair was starting to leach from that corner of his soul where he had managed to contain it for (he knew the number exactly) twenty-five and a half months, and he was angry.

  And so even though he’d only been running the roads for forty-five minutes, already he’d stopped four cars and issued four tickets—including one to a nice enough lawyer from Burlington, a guy who was on his way to Albany to see his brother and sister-in-law and their kids. Normally he gave out a warning for every traffic complaint, but not today.

  But it’s Christmas weekend! one woman—an attractive skier in a Saab who had maybe a year or two on him—had insisted, but even she didn’t have a prayer. Any other day she would have only gotten a warning, especially since she hadn’t a single prior and she was going just nine miles over the limit—fifty-nine in a fifty-mile zone—but not now. He was feeling ornery this morning, and though he understood why, there wasn’t a thing he could do to restrain himself.

  Ahead of him, coming north on Route 22A as he was motoring south, he saw an old Subaru station wagon, and even before he heard the radar’s audio start to whine—shrill, small, and annoying after a time, a noise that he had always associated with a mechanical monkey—he could tell the car was moving pretty damn fast. Instantly he froze the oncoming speed on the box just above his dashboard—the digital numbers showed seventy-one—and twirled the radar antenna around to see if the guy had bothered to slow down. A bit, but not a whole lot. Still rockin’ and rollin’ above sixty-five. And so Terry spun his cruiser and turned on his strobe lights. Though they were in the midst of relatively flat farmland, he’d had to travel a few hundred yards farther south before he found a spot level enough to whirl the Impala 180 degrees. That meant, he guessed, that unless the guy had slowed some more when he saw the trooper’s vehicle in the distance behind him, it would take him a good half a minute to catch up.

  He gunned the car, and was exceeding sixty, seventy, then eighty in seconds. Soon he saw the station wagon before him, a rusted-out piece of shit, dirty white with orange flecking and streaks, now motoring along a mere fifteen miles above the speed limit. It was exactly the sort of junk heap that Terry just knew was going to have registration and inspection tags that were out of date. No doubt a blinker or a light would be gone, too. And now this idiot thought he was going to see if he could feign ignorance: Gee, Officer, was I speeding? Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you behind me.

  He was about to turn on his siren, perhaps even use the two-tone to command the guy to pull over, when the station wagon slowed dramatically and coasted to a stop at the side of the road. Terry noticed that the brake lights had worked, but the driver hadn’t used his directional, so he decided he would have the guy test it while he was stopped. Just in case. Just to be a pain in the ass.

  He saw they were in a houseless stretch in the midst of two dormant cornfields, the earth this time of the year a series of waves of solid brown curds. He called in the stop, including the numbers on the car’s tag, and told dispatch his location. Then he pulled his baton from the floor at the side of his seat and pushed his campaign hat further up on his head so whoever was driving could see his eyes. It was always good to remind the person behind the wheel that you were a human being, too—just in case. He noticed that the first specks of snow were starting to fall, small white crystals that grew into droplets the moment they hit the warm windshield on the front of the car.

  He kept his baton flat against his left leg as he approached the driver. He had never once been attacked while issuing a traffic complaint, but that didn’t make the moment any less stressful. He knew what could happen. As soon as he reached the driver’s window, however, he relaxed a tiny bit. The guy looked annoyed, but he had his hands on the wheel at ten and two o’clock, with what looked like his license and car registration pressed between his thumb and the wheel. The fellow was heavy—more fat than muscle—and he had a closely trimmed beard that rounded his face like the fuzz on a tennis ball. Terry guessed he was in his mid-thirties, which might also have been the rough age of the badly battered parka that hung off him like a quilt. He saw a cigarette was burning in the ashtray.

  I was speeding, I know it, he said, shaking his head, but he didn’t move a muscle in his arms. Was clearly not going to hand over the small rectangles of paper until he was asked, as if...as if he’d been busted before. Initially Terry had assumed the fellow would simply prove to have a couple of points on his license, and that was why he was so familiar with the drill: both hands in clear sight on the wheel, license and registration out. Now, however, Terry began to wonder if there might be more to it than that, and he felt himself tightening his grip on his baton. The notion crossed his mind that it hadn’t been simple stupidity or arrogance that led the man before him to continue cruising over seventy, even after observing a state trooper in the oncoming lane.

  Any reason you didn’t slow down then when you saw me?

  I didn’t see you, he said.

  Terry nodded, and he scanned the passenger seat, the floor, and the back of the car. He wasn’t looking for anything specific—drug paraphernalia, a weapon maybe, even something as simple as a computer or CD player that didn’t look as though it had come from underneath a Christmas tree. He thought he smelled beer on the guy’s breath, but he couldn’t be sure because the stench of tobacco was strong.

  When he saw nothing more incriminating than some candy bar wrappers and a carton of cigarettes, he asked for the man’s license, registration, and proof of insurance, and started back toward his car. He could feel the chill wind on his face, and thought the sky looked almost as white as the ground would in a couple of hours.

  For a long moment he simply watched the fellow smoke a cigarette in his seat, reassured now that the guy was harmless. He might have been irritated because he’d been pulled over, but that made him no less pathetic. In the end he didn’t even have the balls to ask what the radar had just shown—although that was never the way they phrased the question. Never. Instead they asked, Gee, Officer, how fast was I going? As if they didn’t know, which was, of course, ridiculous. The first thing a person did when he saw a trooper behind him or before him was brake, followed almost instantaneously by a glance at the speedometer. And so what that question—a universal, really—actually meant was, How fast was I going according to your radar? Just how badly fucked am I? No, Terry decided, when he finally got around to calling dispatch about the guy, he would discover only that the man had a good many points on his license and perhaps a couple of warnings to boot. That was the only reason he knew to have his hands on the wheel and his papers handy when a trooper approached.

  Nevertheless, Terry continued to sit in his seat, immobile and watching, waiting, he realized, for nothing more than another car to pass so the fellow’s humiliation would be complete: There he’d be, off to the side of the road, the first crystals of snow sticking to his windshield and hood, while his license was checked, and the complaint—coupled with a nice, hefty fine—was written. Finally Terry saw another vehicle approaching over a small ridge perhaps a mile distant. He thought there might even be a second one behind it. In so
mething less than sixty seconds—maybe seventy if the first one slowed to a crawl because its driver saw the flashing lights up ahead—the loser before him would have his moment in the pillory. Head and arms through the stocks.

  At last he pulled the radio from the dashboard and called in the license of one Francis B. Hammond, requesting as well a list of any prior convictions or involvements. He watched the two cars pass, slowing both because of the blue lights on his cruiser and the opportunity to gawk at the individual inside the beaten-up station wagon. Soon he heard the low, static-covered voice with the information he had requested: Hammond had no priors and no points on his license. Not even a warning. Terry was both surprised and disappointed. He had been positive that the fellow would have a solid number of points, and there was even an outside chance that the ticket he was about to issue would cost Hammond his right to drive for ten days. After all, ten points in two years and you were out for a week and a half.

  No such luck, however, the guy was clean. Completely clean. A Boy Scout.

  He took the metal notebook in which he kept his pad with the complaint forms and a pen and wrote out a ticket. Even on a good day he doubted he would have issued a warning, given the fact that he’d clocked the car going twenty-one miles over the limit and Hammond hadn’t slowed till he had to. But he didn’t believe he would have been as angry as he was now. He left the cruiser, the complaint in his hand, and marched up to the Subaru.

  Any reason you were going twenty-one miles over the speed limit? he asked.

  Not a good one.

  Try me.

  I have to pee. Badly. And my home’s all the way up in Burlington.

  Terry remembered the slight odor of alcohol he thought he might have detected on the man’s breath.