The Buffalo Soldier

by Chris Bohjalian

  And you can get up there all by yourself? she was asking, motioning at the top of Mesa’s back.

  Yup. Sometimes Paul helps and sometimes I use a block. But when I have to or want to, I can. The hardest part is getting the saddle on her and tightening the girth.

  Why is that?

  With the hand in which he was holding the curry comb, he pointed at the saddle on the wall. Lift it, he said.

  She did, and he could see that she was surprised by how heavy it was. She dropped it back on the two slender rods that extended from the wall like the front of a forklift. Okay, I’m impressed, she said.

  He nodded and considered asking her if she wanted to try brushing Mesa with him, but it was clear she was nervous around the horse and he thought she might make the animal skittish. Maybe in a little while, he decided. He wished he could take the mare out for a short ride so she could see how well he handled her, but he wasn’t allowed to ride without Paul.

  Laura said you were going to start taking lessons. When’s that?

  January, I guess. They’ll be after school.

  Are you looking forward to them?

  He shrugged. I think I ride okay. But I guess a few lessons wouldn’t hurt.

  You can always get better.

  Maybe.

  Laura showed me your report card. Nice. I mean there’s still plenty of room for improvement, but I saw a lot of B’s on there. Keep it up. Don’t let the lessons keep you from your homework.

  They won’t.

  Seriously, why do you think your grades improved? Is it the school? Your teacher? Or are you just working more?

  It isn’t my teacher, that’s for sure.

  No?

  No.

  Why’s that?

  Maybe I’m working more, he said, not exactly answering Louise’s question. I don’t know. It’s not like there’s a lot to do out here. Until Paul got the horse, most days I just went straight from the bus to Terry and Laura’s house.

  Home.

  He looked at her, understanding that the word, in her mind, was both a clarification and a desire. She had wished he’d called that house home. Without giving it serious thought, he figured he could oblige. Home, he said, repeating the word for her.

  It seemed to work: She smiled. Do you like your new friends? Laura tells me you’ve made some.

  I guess. But the kids here have known each other forever. They’ve been hanging around together since they were, like, two.

  Is that why you’d just go straight home after school?

  Mostly.

  You still think you stand out like a sore thumb?

  He scooted under the line that linked the horse to the post, returned the comb to the toolbox, and got out one of the dish towels that Paul had him use to polish the animal. Because it was cold outside he hadn’t moistened the towel the way he normally did, but he did scrunch it into a ball as if he had, and then he started wiping it gently along Mesa’s sides.

  Yup. This was something they’d discussed when she came by in November, and they’d gone into Durham for doughnuts and hot apple cider.

  You’re a smart kid—and handsome. That’s a rare combination. Trust me, I know.

  I know what I am.

  I understand. But sometimes I think you think about being different more than other people do.

  Yeah, right.

  The horse like that? she asked, watching him as he rubbed her down.

  Yup.

  Can I try?

  Briefly he considered the request, still concerned that her nervousness around the animal might get her in trouble, but in the end he handed her the dish towel. She was, after all, an adult. Just don’t be jumpy around her, he said. She’s big, but she’s a kitten. She won’t hurt you.

  Okay, she said as she mimicked his motions. I hear you’re celebrating Kwanzaa this year.

  Just one more way I can be different.

  Laura said you’re having a good time.

  Sure I am. But I probably like Christmas more.

  Of course you do. You get presents.

  I’ve gotten some stuff for Kwanzaa. I get a present a day from Laura.

  Laura and Terry, you mean?

  Uh-huh.

  Good stuff?

  Good enough. So far I’ve gotten a book that explains what Kwanzaa is, and a shirt with a lot of black and red in it. Those are the Kwanzaa colors. It’s only been two days. I’ll get something else at dinner tonight.

  Doesn’t sound shabby to me.

  No. It’s just a weird holiday.

  Why is that?

  Well, he said, it doesn’t make sense for me. Yeah, I’m black, but that’s about all I have in common with the values Laura and that book talk about. I’ve never been to Africa, and I probably never will get there.

  Maybe you will. And even I know there’s more to Kwanzaa than that.

  Right: Family. Community. Getting all the people together. What’s that got to do with me? What people do I have? What family? He realized he was talking too much and quickly quieted down.

  Don’t you view Laura and Terry as family?

  I don’t know.

  When Louise didn’t say anything for a few moments, he realized that inadvertently he had brought them to the serious part of her visit. There was always a serious part to these get-togethers, and over the years he’d come to recognize when the caseworker—Louise now, and Cliff and Sarah before her—wanted to shift gears and discuss what Cliff had always called the heavy stuff. What he thought of his current home, his foster parents. Whether he was listening to their words, and they, in turn, were doing right by him. Whether he was happy.

  It was always a pretty complex dance because you didn’t want to say something that might somehow get back to your foster parents and cause them to make things even harder, or get you moved someplace really awful. And, he knew, there was always someplace worse than where you were. It was inevitable. He knew what some foster parents were like, and what they would do. And he certainly hadn’t been happy inside the group home.

  But sometimes it was also just time to move on, and either you or your foster parents or the caseworker figured it out.

  Of course, it wasn’t as if he himself had any real control. Not really. He could watch his words and try to act as if he had some say in what was going to happen, but in reality he didn’t. He knew that. The grown-ups would do whatever they wanted, anyway; when they no longer had any need for you, or they just got tired out, they moved you on. It didn’t matter whether you liked a place. All that mattered was whether they liked you or they needed the money they got from the state.

  Here was a perfect example. He wanted to stay in Cornish, but it was pretty obvious that Terry didn’t like him and eventually he’d be gone. He’d pissed Terry off too much in the fall, and now the guy had gotten the idea into his head that he was stealing and planned to run away. It probably wouldn’t matter that Laura liked him or the Heberts liked him or this big old horse liked him. It didn’t matter that he liked all of them.

  An odd idea crossed his mind: Maybe he should tell Louise what had happened that morning, and the way Terry had misunderstood what he was doing. Maybe she could fix things. Quickly he pushed the notion aside: Terry had told him he didn’t want Laura to know anything about it, so Louise couldn’t talk to her. And if she tried to discuss it with Terry directly, the trooper would be furious because he would know that Alfred had snitched. Still...

  Family is complicated, Louise was saying. These days, there are lots of different kinds. It doesn’t have to be Mom and Dad and the two-point-four babies they had. You know that.

  I guess.

  You like Laura? I like her very much.

  I do, too.

  Good, good. Because she certainly seems to like you.

  When she had finished rubbing Mesa down, the horse turned her long head toward her—her nose almost in the woman’s face—and snorted, and he could see Louise flinch. She handed him the dish towel and he draped it over a wooden brac
e by the toolbox to let it air out. Later he’d fold it and put it away.

  She’s been through a lot, Louise went on, referring to Laura. You understand that, right?

  Yup.

  What about Terry?

  What about him?

  How are you two getting on? she asked, and he watched the lashlike, gray-blue fog of her exhalation rise up toward the loft in the barn and then disappear.

  Okay.

  He seems like a nice guy. Sometimes state troopers—all cops, actually—give me the creeps. All that paramilitary stuff. The uniform, the strut. The handcuffs and the baton. But he seems pretty down to earth. Is that true?

  He decided once and for all that he couldn’t tell Louise about Terry—not what Terry thought of him or, likewise, what he thought of the trooper. He wanted to stay in Cornish at least a little longer, if he could—with Laura and Paul and the horse—and that meant keeping quiet. Keeping his opinions, and what had occurred that morning, to himself. Besides, why should he tell her, anyway? She was just a social worker who understood family so well because she probably had one. A real one. She was just another adult who was paid to appear in his life every once in a while.

  Alfred?

  Yeah, he’s a nice guy, he said finally.

  You don’t sound convinced.

  He’s busy, he works a lot. We get along fine.

  Okay.

  Now you think something’s going on, but nothing is.

  She nodded and pulled the bridle and reins off the broad circle peg on the wall.

  Be careful that doesn’t get tangled, he said.

  These are the reins, I gather?

  And that’s the martingale.

  I’ve never heard of such a thing.

  It’s a strap that goes around the horse’s neck. It gives a beginner something else to hang on to.

  How have you learned all this?

  Paul. He’s a good teacher. He used to be a teacher.

  So I hear, she said as she looped the leather lines back on the wall.

  He used to have horses. When he was a kid, and when he had kids of his own.

  She smiled and leaned over, resting her gloved hands on the stored saddle. What exactly is the deal with you two?

  No deal.

  You like him?

  Sometimes he cracks me up. You should see him on Mesa. Goes about a mile an hour. Babies crawl faster than he rides that horse.

  Well, he is pretty old.

  Not that old. I heard him say the other day he’s only sixty-five.

  So you do like him...

  I like him fine.

  I understand he’s paying you to help care for the horse.

  Four dollars a day. I’ve already made almost a hundred dollars!

  You’ve got almost a hundred dollars?

  Not anymore, because I spent some on Christmas presents for Laura and Terry, and I even got little gifts for the Heberts: I got Paul some saddle soap and Emily some blueberry jam. But I still have over forty-five dollars, he said, and excited by the size of his savings, he went on without thinking, See, that was the dumbest thing about what Terry said this morning! I don’t have to steal any money. I got plenty. I—

  Instantly he stopped talking when he realized what he’d just told her. Louise’s face was impassive, a mask he couldn’t read, but he knew now he would have to tell her everything that had happened that day—everything, in fact, that was probably wrong with his relationship with Terry Sheldon.

  “At first, it was two Negro brothers named Edmonds who taught me English. They had not been with the soldiers who chased down my husband, and that made it easier. They were from Mississippi, a word that always sounded like the wind in my ear.”

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  Terry

  Monday afternoon he switched on his lights and his siren and pressed hard on the accelerator, savoring the fact that he was on the long straightaway just north of New Haven Junction on 7 and the snow and the ice had been cleared from the road. He would be at sixty-five, seventy miles an hour in an instant, and he glanced briefly down at his speedometer to watch the angular digits climb higher. The snow in the fields on both sides of the two-lane road was still pretty fresh, and the world around him became a white blur: He was going too fast to take note of the few houses and antique stores on this stretch, or the odd motel that dotted the landscape.

  He didn’t think the accident would be bad, because the dispatcher had said everyone was outside of their vehicles. But half the equation was a tractor-trailer—its cab was nose-down in the snow in a ditch, and the mass of the truck was blocking most of both lanes—so he wouldn’t know for sure until he got to the scene. The other half of the equation was a county van that took seniors grocery shopping. Fortunately, the driver had just dropped the group off when he and the truck had their run-in, so he didn’t have any passengers, frail or otherwise, in the van with him.

  The accident was in Ferrisburgh. Six miles north, and still he’d be there in five minutes—five and a half if some self-absorbed moron didn’t pull over in time and he had to slow down.

  He came up over a ridge, and in the valley before him he saw the water tower and the opera house that marked Vergennes, once the self-proclaimed smallest city in the country, and Lake Champlain just to the west. Not frozen yet. Maybe never this year, because every cold snap seemed to be followed by a warm spell. The ground sloped steeply below him, and in the distance at the base of the hill he saw a neon blue SUV coming south and a small conga line—a pickup, an Escort, a UPS truck—heading north, and gingerly they all pulled over into the plowed muck on their separate sides of the road. They heard him, they saw him, and the waves were starting to part.

  FORTUNATELY, ALL HE would have to do with this mess was conduct a few roadside interviews, fill out some accident report forms—granted they would include both the long form he loathed and a commercial vehicle supplement—and stand in the cold directing traffic. But no one was hurt, and neither driver was even badly shaken up. The van had hit a patch of black ice and careened across the yellow line, dinging the side of the tractor-trailer before skidding off the road forty yards further south. The tractor-trailer, trying to avoid the van, had slid away into the ditch.

  And so while the tow truck pulled the van from the snowdrifts and they waited for a heavy-duty wrecker from Bridport to hoist the tractor-trailer back onto the road, he stood on the pavement and helped the cars snake their way through the thin strip of asphalt that remained between the rear of the truck and the piles of snow off to the side. At this stage in his career the work demanded only minimal concentration, and—as usual—his mind wandered. It wandered first to Sunday night, the day after his in-laws had left, and how Laura—sweet, sweet Laura—had tried like hell to draw him out during dinner, and though there was nothing he needed more than to be drawn out, he couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t bring himself to reach back across that divide—no chasm, this, the divide was really no wider than the kitchen table—and accept her offer. All she wanted to do was listen, all he needed to do was talk. But he couldn’t do it. He loved her, he would not forget that, he loved her. But at that moment, he knew, he wanted something—someone—else.

  He realized he was thinking about Phoebe more than was healthy or right, and he wished he could go back in time to the evening he went to her store and they wound up at her friend’s trailer. No, that wasn’t exactly true. If he could go back in time, he decided, he needed to go back further than that: A full two years and two months was more like what was required, so he could stay home from deer camp and prevent his little girls from going anywhere near the bridge on the day of the flood. After all, if he wanted anything back, it was his life then: When he had Hillary and Megan and he wasn’t married to someone who had been, for the better part of two years, an emotional wreck. When he himself wasn’t crying alone in his cruiser or sobbing like a madman in the shower. When he wasn’t pic
king up young—younger, anyway—things at deer camp.

  In a way, he realized, the last thing he wanted was to go back a mere two or three months. Was he any worse off now than he was, say, on Halloween? Arguably, he wasn’t. If he didn’t want to, he never had to see Phoebe again. That was pretty clear. On the other hand, if he desired such a thing, there was a beautiful woman just waiting for him to leave his wife, a woman who was already carrying his child: his second chance at a family. There inside Phoebe was the baby he could help to raise right, as he had his own daughters, not some kid who was so screwed up by the time he was brought into his and Laura’s life that he was incapable of communicating properly with his foster parents but quite willing to steal from them. Unbelievable. He hated to imagine what else the kid might try, especially if he ever had a gun and a horse at his disposal.

  He made a mental note to ask Paul what was in that book about the buffalo soldiers he and Emily had given the boy, and that had now grown to interest him so. Certainly it was meant as a harmless gift, but he knew nothing about what the buffalo soldiers actually did, and the last thing the boy needed right now was to have all kinds of renegade ideas put into his head.

  He waved for an oncoming pickup to slow down to a crawl, and decided the woman behind the wheel looked a bit like Laura had when they first met. Slightly darker hair, he decided when the truck got close enough for him to see, but she was even wearing the sort of beret that his sister had given her one Christmas soon after they got married, and Laura had worn for a couple of years when the weather was right.

  Leaving Laura, of course, was just a dark fantasy: He didn’t think he ever would or could do such a thing. He didn’t believe he was capable of that kind of cruelty.

  But if she left him? Well, that was another story. He knew he wasn’t always an easy person to live with, especially right now, and one just never knew.

  No, if he could go back in time, it would have to be two-plus years, not merely two months. There was still no doubt in his mind that what he had done with Phoebe was wrong, absolutely wrong. But he decided he no longer regretted it.