The Buffalo Soldier

by Chris Bohjalian

  Merry day after Christmas, my friend. I’m sorry we won’t be riding today.

  Alfred shrugged, not unhappily, let the hoof fall back to the ground, and patted the side of the big animal.

  Did you call to see about lessons yet? Emily asked her.

  I made a few calls. Most places were closed today, but I did find a couple that still picked up the phone. It sounds like the nearest place with an indoor ring will be up in Burlington. Are you still interested? she asked Paul.

  Of course he is, Emily answered for him. He’ll be happy to drive the two of them there and back for as long as the lessons last. Right, Paul?

  Absolutely. There’s nothing I want more than to have some nineteen-year-old kid teach me exactly what I already know.

  When she saw that Alfred was returning the hoof pick to a toolbox on a shelf along the side of the barn, she ventured up to the horse and ran her hand slowly along the long slope of her nose.

  She won’t bite you, Paul said. She might try and nuzzle you to death, but she doesn’t bite. Trust me, Laura, she’s a very good-natured horse. You don’t have to worry.

  I will always worry. I worry about...everything.

  Well. If you can find a way to keep Mesa off the list, you’ll be doing you both a favor.

  She took her hand from her mitten and ran her fingers over the winter coat that was growing fast now all along the animal’s body. It reminded her of the solid, bristlelike fur on a German shepherd or a husky.

  When is Terry due back? Emily asked. It had come up on Christmas Eve that he would be on duty the day after Christmas.

  Late afternoon, early evening. His shift ends at four, but with weather like this I’d be surprised if he gets home before six or six-thirty.

  Did your parents have a nice visit?

  As nice as they ever have here, I guess. They left early—in theory to beat the snow.

  And you?

  She could tell by the earnestness with which Emily had invested those two words that the woman wasn’t asking to be polite, but with Alfred nearby she decided she would answer the question as if it were a mere conversational pleasantry.

  Yes, she said. Very nice.

  Emily nodded and looked at her carefully, then stamped her feet against the cold. Would you like a cup of tea? she asked, without ever lowering her gaze or taking her eyes off Laura. Inside, maybe, where it’s warm?

  Okay, she agreed. She didn’t know what Emily wanted to discuss, but it was evident that she didn’t want Paul or Alfred around, and so for the second time in three days she joined Emily in the kitchen that looked out upon the barn.

  SHE SIPPED TEA from a mug that proclaimed Gallup, New Mexico, was the Pride of the Land of Turquoise Jewelry, and talked about the photographs she had shared that morning with Alfred—and, what was really the point of her story, how much she had enjoyed just being with the boy. It was warm in the kitchen, as warm as it had been in her own den earlier that day, and she found she was, once again, happy to relive her memories of her children.

  How are he and Terry getting along?

  The question felt sudden to her, but she told herself it had come to Emily because she herself had brought up Terry so often in her recollections. Terry taking the girls out for Halloween, each child a witch. Terry planting annuals in the garden while the girls stood beside him, supervising. A photo of Terry and her and the children—both girls in bonnets—was in the living room barely twenty feet away, a picture Paul had taken one Easter when the twins were in kindergarten.

  I think fine.

  Emily drizzled honey with a wand into her own tea, and seemed to be scrutinizing the translucent stream as she spoke. He struck me as a bit out of sorts on Christmas Eve. Maybe it was just me. But he seemed tired, and he almost never seems tired. Is he?

  Tired? Oh, he may be. It’s not easy to be a parent when you’ve lost the rhythm.

  Alfred is pretty self-sufficient. He might be the most low-maintenance child I’ve ever seen.

  She glanced out the window at the barn, but she couldn’t see either the man or the boy through the snow. She was wondering why Emily was disagreeing with her, and where this conversation was going. She couldn’t help but think of Terry’s admission that he had had a drink with some woman in a bar up in Newport in November, and she had to reassure herself that there couldn’t possibly be a connection.

  He is now, she said, referring to Alfred. But September and October were difficult. You know that. There was some adjustment. I told you about the time he just up and left for Burlington one Saturday morning. Terry and I were frantic. And then there was that day when he disappeared at the orchard. One afternoon we went to an apple orchard on the lake out in Addison, and Alfred just vanished on us. One minute we were walking back to our car and he was right behind us, and the next he was gone. He just hadn’t felt like leaving yet, so he didn’t. Went back to the lake to throw apples. You can imagine how much that little escapade endeared him to Terry.

  So that’s all it is, then? Terry’s tired?

  She tried to make light of Emily’s questions, but it was impossible not to wonder what Emily knew that she didn’t—and whether, perhaps, there was more to Terry’s indiscretion than a beer after all, and everyone in the town but her knew. God, this really is about Terry, isn’t it? she said. I thought for sure you wanted to tell me something about Alfred. Maybe something had happened when he was with Paul.

  I think Alfred is doing just fine.

  You’re not trying to keep something from me?

  You mean like a tumble?

  She nodded. Or acting up, maybe.

  Nope. No more tumbles. No acting up.

  And he hasn’t said something?

  About?

  I don’t know. About his past, maybe.

  If he has, Paul hasn’t told me. Really, Laura, I think the child is doing very, very well.

  Me, too. He’s spending Monday with Louise—the girl can’t be more than twenty-five or twenty-six years old, but she’s been his caseworker most of the fall—and I think she’s going to be thrilled with his progress.

  Good.

  Don’t you?

  Yes, but I don’t think you should worry about pleasing some twenty-five- or twenty-six-year-old social worker.

  I want her to know Alfred’s happy.

  I think he is. I think you are.

  She waited for Emily to add, I think Terry is, but Emily brought her mug to her lips and it became clear that this—this—was the reason she had brought her inside her house. It wasn’t meant as a warning or—as Laura might have viewed it had she been feeling more despairing—an indictment. It was merely an observation. She considered adding that final sentence herself, because Terry certainly had seemed happy through most of November. Yes, he had been preoccupied over the last couple of weeks, but he was entitled. After all the two of them had endured, wasn’t he allowed to be a bit moody?

  Would you like more tea? Emily asked after a moment.

  No, thanks. I think I’ll go see how Alfred’s doing.

  I hope I didn’t offend you, Laura. I’m so sorry if I did.

  I’m not offended. You’re concerned about my husband. I—

  Abruptly she cut herself off, unwilling to finish the sentence. If she had, she realized, she would have said, I am, too, and she told herself once again that she had no reason to be. She reminded herself that he had every right—every right in the world—to be a bit temperamental, and the worst thing she could do was not grant him that prerogative.

  “We stayed at the fort with the moacs and the brunettes—the buffalo soldiers—and I wouldn’t speak at first, except to my children. I wouldn’t even talk to the scouts who could speak my language. What would you expect? These people had fired the bullets that drove my husband into the river where he died.”

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  Phoebe

  By Sunday afternoon the snow had sto
pped and the roads were cleared, and she went to the discount department store in Saint Johnsbury to look at baby clothing and cribs. She was playing, really, because it was still so very early, but she told herself the coming year was all about education and preparation, and it couldn’t hurt to begin to familiarize herself with the latch mechanisms on cribs (learning, of course, which would be the easiest to operate with one hand), and to start thinking about the sorts of mobiles she would hang in the nursery (though where that nursery would be and what it would look like were still unknown and almost unimaginable). When an older woman in one of the store’s blue smocks asked her if she needed any assistance, she grew slightly uncomfortable because she realized she was wearing neither a wedding band nor an engagement ring, but she didn’t need any help and the salesperson didn’t stay long.

  When she left the store it was barely two o’clock, and the low winter sun was beginning to break through the clouds. There were even small patches of blue starting to appear in the west.

  She knew that Terry’s mother lived in this town, and she remembered that he’d mentioned she lived near the courthouse and the Fairbanks Museum. Church Street, she thought he had said. She pulled the map from the glove compartment of her tired little Corolla and found the street easily. If she could be sure that all the sidewalks had been shoveled by now, she would have walked there, but the city must have gotten sixteen or seventeen inches of snow altogether, and so she decided she’d be better off driving. She had no real plan—she didn’t even know what color the house was—but this was the street on which the father of her child had grown up. The street the baby’s grandmother lived on even now. Driving slowly down the road would be a bit like looking at cribs: innocuous fun that was also, in some way, educational. She’d learn a bit more about the background of the child inside her. Its roots, so to speak. She considered whether her behavior might also be viewed as a distant cousin of stalking, but she knew she was pretty harmless. In reality, she decided, she was just killing time on a Sunday afternoon.

  She drove carefully around the trailer-sized drifts of snow in the parking lot and started up the hill toward the mannered section of the city. Since Terry had grown up near the courthouse and the museum, he’d probably lived in one of those stately Victorian behemoths. Some were more run-down than others, and some were downright ramshackle, but once they had all been very elegant.

  Church Street looked a bit like a Christmas card from the 1940s, because everyone had pulled their cars into their driveways, garages, and little carriage barns so the plows could get through. The maples and hemlocks that lined the residential street were heavy with snow, further reinforcing in her mind the idea that the road was a place out of time. She noted that the two- and three-story houses sat close to the road and didn’t have a whole lot of land, but some had wrought-iron fences and each seemed a bit like a private enclave. She saw that a few of the properties still carried themselves with the grandeur of their early days.

  It was clear to her instantly which houses were most likely to have children, because those were the ones that already had snowmen and snow forts in the front or the side yards, and sleds, toboggans, or cross-country skis lined up along the porch.

  She slowed when she heard children laughing, and she rolled down her window to listen. There, at the end of the street, a snowball fight was in progress, and there must have been eight or nine children involved, none older than eleven or twelve. In their parkas and hoods it was hard to tell which were the boys and which were the girls, but she had brothers and she guessed by the way the combatants were hurling the snow that most of the group was male.

  She paused, her motor idling, the only car on the road. She envisioned Terry throwing snowballs on this street. Russell, too. Maybe in the very section where the small war was occurring right now. She imagined Russell surrounding a small rock of ice with snow, and then claiming innocence when he gave someone a black eye or bruised cheek. She imagined Terry trying to whip the lad into shape, and then just giving up.

  There was one house in particular that showed no signs of small children and looked slightly weary: It was gray but the paint was peeling, and the clapboards along the porches were in desperate need of repair. She decided this was probably the home of a widow. Perhaps even Terry’s mom. She parked her car against the sidewalk before it, pulling up smack against the snow that had been pushed off the road, and watched it for a long moment. She looked at the windows, trying to guess which was Terry’s bedroom—assuming, of course, this was even the correct home—and she was surprised when a vision crept into her head: She was sitting on a sofa inside that house with her little baby in her lap, and placing the infant’s minuscule fingers into its grandmother’s hand. She wondered if she was concocting this fantasy—if she was on this street, in fact—because her own family had been so monumentally unsupportive on Christmas Day.

  The door of the house opened and an older woman with curly sand-colored hair—dyed, she decided—ventured out onto the porch. She stood in her cardigan sweater, her arms wrapped around her chest, and seemed to be studying the car to see if she recognized it or knew the driver.

  Her instinct was to slam the car into drive and pull away fast, but she didn’t want to frighten the woman. Maybe this really was Terry’s mom, maybe not. Either way, she didn’t want to scare her. And so she left the motor running and climbed from the seat and called out, I’m looking for the best way back to the interstate. I think I’ve gotten a little lost.

  The woman nodded and smiled, and started down the walk to the car.

  WHEN SHE TOLD her ob-gyn she was pregnant, the woman made sure that Phoebe knew what to eat and how to take care of herself, but she said that she didn’t really need to come in for an examination until she was a little further along. They scheduled an appointment for the middle of February, when she would be just about through the first trimester.

  Though she figured she knew the basics—no more long-necks at the bar, plenty of spinach, lots of rest—she concluded that it couldn’t hurt to do a little more research, and so on Monday afternoon after work she drove directly from the general store to a bookshop in Newport. There she picked out a pair of books that offered both practical advice and time lines that chronicled how the baby inside her would grow and her body would change.

  Her father was still barely speaking to her, and so at dinner that night she told him she was seriously considering having the baby at home. In her bedroom. She wasn’t, but she wanted to get a rise out of him, and she did. He picked up his plate with the beef stew she had made the day before after returning from Saint Johnsbury, and he went into the living room to eat his dinner in front of the television news.

  In truth she might have had her baby at home if she had a husband and her very own house. But she had neither, and so in her mind a home birth wasn’t an option.

  When she was alone she reached into the shopping bag, opened one of her two books on the kitchen table, and started to read as she ate.

  THE NEXT MORNING she threw up for the first time. Somehow she got to the general store and managed to open its doors and sell the first customers their coffee and cigarettes, but as soon as Frank arrived—about a quarter to eight that day—she disappeared into the small bathroom in the back of the shop. When she emerged she told Frank she wasn’t feeling well and had to go home, and even in the dim light of the store in the dead of winter she must have looked green, because Frank asked her if she’d gotten a flu shot that autumn.

  She tried to keep down the saltines she had placed in the front seat of her car for exactly this sort of emergency, but she hadn’t a prayer and she threw up again on the road halfway back to her father’s house. She kicked snow—brown now from car exhaust and the sand the plows sprinkled—onto the vomit before climbing back behind the driver’s seat and soldiering on.

  Mid-morning she felt a little better. A little less nauseous. But even in her bed with the door closed she could feel her father’s contempt. He certainly didn�
�t want her to get an abortion, but he couldn’t understand how in the world she could have gotten herself into this situation in the first place.

  On the nightstand by her bed was another letter from her college friend Shauna, her old roommate who had moved to Santa Fe. She reread the letter to take her mind off her father, and lost herself in her friend’s pictures of the desert, Anasazi ruins, and her young son creating a soap bubble the size of a beanbag chair at the local children’s museum.

  She put the photos back in the envelope and found herself wishing that she’d never told Terry she was pregnant, because then she would not have seen him again. Each time they’d been together, she’d found herself more attracted to him—and this, she knew, was not a good thing. Not a good thing at all. What was it they’d said to each other on Christmas Eve, right after they discovered that they both liked to hike? She’d asked, half-kidding, Are we getting to know each other? and he’d answered, Yes, I think we are, and the realization had made them both sit quite still for a long quiet moment.

  She hoped wherever he was that morning he was happy and well. She knew she shouldn’t see him again, but that didn’t stop her from thinking about him.

  “Rule number five: They are to look white soldiers and white civilians in the eyes when they speak to them. They are to stand tall.”

  SERGEANT GEORGE ROWE,

  TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  LETTER TO HIS BROTHER IN PHILADELPHIA,

  NOVEMBER 18, 1873

  Alfred

  He sat on the bed before breakfast with his headset over his ears and a new CD in the small player on the mattress beside him. He thumbed slowly through the pages of one of Terry and Laura’s photo albums, and thought how different the bed felt to him now that he knew it had been Megan’s and this room had once belonged to her. Hillary, Laura had said, had slept in the other room—the room that he heard referred to now as the guest room. They’d chosen this room for him, she’d added, because it was sunnier.