The Buffalo Soldier

by Chris Bohjalian

  In his classroom Ms. Logan was talking to the librarian about the book fair the school would be having in February, and a small cluster of students was already gathered around one of the computers in the corner. What he noticed more than anything, however, was the low rumble that for a moment he presumed was merely the overhead, fluorescent lights, but then realized was the river. Despite the fact that the windows were closed and it was raining outside, despite the fact that the river was across the street from the school, the water was so high he could hear it.

  “[I was] no admirer of the African, believing he would ultimately destroy the white race...[Now I] think the world of the men of my company, and I am proud of what we have done.”

  ANONYMOUS LETTER,

  ARMY AND NAVY JOURNAL, FEBRUARY 19, 1887

  Phoebe

  She listened to Keenan Hewitt and Clark Adams talk about the sand truck that had actually wound up off the road, as they poured their coffee into Styrofoam cups and took doughnuts off the wide plate at the far end of the store’s front counter. Clark was a warden with Fish and Wildlife, and his uniform looked a bit like Terry’s. She knew he was married, and she was pretty sure he had teenage children at home. She guessed he was in his forties. Keenan had run a lathe at the furniture mill until he retired a couple years back at sixty-five, and was a man her father considered a friend. Once when she was in high school she’d gone to a movie with Keenan’s son, Tommy, but the boy hadn’t been as bright as he was handsome, and she’d been careful to make sure there was no second date. Still, even now—or at least until she’d told him she was pregnant back on Christmas Day—her father would ask her why she never saw that Tommy Keenan.

  Likewise, Clark had a nephew just about her age, and every time he was in the store, he would mention how well the boy was doing at the construction company where he was working, and how everyone guessed he’d find a woman soon and settle down.

  She wondered now if either of them would try to play matchmaker this morning, or at the very least bring up one of the young men she should consider dating. She hoped not, and when she listened to the wind outside rattle the trees and cause Clark’s four-by-four to sway in its spot by the front of the store, she took comfort in the idea that these were the sort of men who found a late January storm—and a sand truck off the road—infinitely more interesting than romance.

  SHE WATCHED THE sleet outside the store’s big glass windows, occasionally glancing at her watch. It was barely ten-thirty. She was working until three today, and so she wouldn’t arrive at the camp where Terry was staying much before six even if the roads were any good—which, today, they most certainly were not. She’d be lucky if she got there by seven or seven-thirty. The streets this far north were sheets of black ice and the schools were closed. Only twenty minutes further south it was raining and the schools were open, but other than the interstate (which, alas, she wouldn’t be on), even there the roads weren’t going to be a whole lot better: In some cases, she knew, there would be small ponds of slush on the pavement, and in other cases the streets would simply be closed and she would have to make short (and, perhaps, long) detours where the culverts were clogged with ice and sludge and the water was streaming over the asphalt.

  And, of course, if she was on the road too late into the evening, there was always the chance that all that water on the roads would freeze. Then she’d be in real trouble.

  If she hadn’t taken that vacation earlier in the month, she probably would have asked Frank and Jeannine if she could leave early, but she didn’t want to impose on their good nature again. She’d just have to call Terry so he wouldn’t worry, and then take it slow. She’d get there whenever she could, and it was better to get there late but in one piece than to wind up hydroplaning into a ditch or, worse, another car. The last thing she wanted was to get in a car accident with a baby in her tummy, while on her way to—finally—doing the right thing.

  Trying to, anyway.

  As much as she enjoyed Terry’s company—as much as she might even love him—she had vowed that this was the very last time she would see him, at least while he was married. This was it, it had to be. She and her father had fought again last night, this time not because she was pregnant but because, for the third time this month, she was refusing to tell him where she was going. He—her whole family, actually—knew she was going to visit the man who was the father of her baby, and the idea that she still wouldn’t tell them who it was was beginning to infuriate them.

  As, she realized, it probably should. And while she was able to give lip service to the notion that it was none of their business, the reality was that there couldn’t be much future in any activity you couldn’t talk about. And so she’d decided, once and for all, there was already too much pain in the world, and she simply would not be responsible for causing this woman who was Terry Sheldon’s wife any more hurt than she had already endured.

  “Honorable discharge: Rowe, George, Sergeant, B Company, October 13, 1877.”

  U. S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE,

  TENTH CAVALRY MUSTER ROLLS,

  1877

  Terry

  He was exhausted by early afternoon, it had just been that kind of day. Still, he hoped he’d be able to get to Laura’s—his house, too, he reminded himself, it was still his home, too—before dark. It wasn’t merely the ice jams that concerned him, it was the reality that the river was probably roaring by now, and it was only going to get worse, and that would surely make Laura’s day particularly difficult. There hadn’t been snow the day their daughters died, but it had been exactly this sort of cold, heavy rain.

  Today he’d already been on the site of three nasty car accidents, each one triggered by the slippery roads and the bad visibility: There were thick pockets of fog on top of everything else, a result of the warm front hitting all that cold on the ground. There were flood watches across the state, and he just knew there would be whole wading pools of brown water in an awful lot of basements.

  He pulled the collar of his jacket up over his neck, radioed in that he was leaving his cruiser, and started toward the old couple by the side of their gray Lincoln. He could see right away they were chilly and wet and annoyed, but otherwise they looked unhurt. The rear of the car looked pretty banged up, and he was almost upon them when he realized that although the front of the vehicle was in the remains of a snowbank, it was the left taillight and that corner of the bumper that were most mangled. He understood then that the couple was not simply frustrated because the man had been driving and lost control of their automobile and they’d had a close call; they were upset because someone else had careened into them, and then driven away and left them by the side of the road.

  He shook his head and realized his day was just going to get worse and worse. Phoebe was coming over that night, but even that realization was causing him more stress than pleasure: He really did want to take care of the house first, and he really did want to do a good job. Moreover, how could he possibly go straight from his wife to his...lover? Some guys could probably do that, but could he?

  He’d have to, he guessed.

  Moreover, he’d seen Alfred exactly once in the last month, when he watched the child’s riding lesson one afternoon and then gone out for pizza with Paul Hebert and the boy. And though he felt guilty about his almost repellent lack of involvement—especially with the child’s case review next week—his life already seemed an unwieldy tangle of relationships (all of which, he had to admit, he was completely mismanaging), and he didn’t see how he could find the time to see the boy more. Still, he felt bad. He felt bad about Laura and he felt bad about Alfred, and he couldn’t stop thinking about them while he stood in the rain with the older couple as they described the teenagers in their sporty Grand Am who’d been tailgating them for at least two or three miles. When the kids had finally tried passing them, they sent them sliding off the road, banging into the left rear of their car in the process, before speeding away.

  According to
the woman, they’d never even looked back.

  You get a license plate number? he asked, but—as he’d expected—their eyesight wasn’t that good. Still they had a description of the car, and they were pretty sure it was from Vermont. That would help. They’d find the kids eventually.

  When the wrecker arrived, the fellow from the service station asked them if they’d heard about what was happening over the mountains in Montpelier. Apparently the Winooski was over its banks, and there was a foot of water in the streets within a block of the capitol. Worst flooding since 1991. Then he towed the Lincoln from the ditch, and Terry climbed behind the wheel to make sure it was still working. It was, and so he sent them on their way and continued running the roads himself. He hadn’t been driving long when the radio calls started to come in en masse, a deluge from every corner of the county, it seemed, where there were people and there was water. The Otter Creek had taken down a bridge in New Haven, and a part of Route 17 was impassable; the waters were over the top of two stretches of 125, making the strip of highway between East Middlebury and Ripton particularly treacherous; and an ice dam had built up just east of Durham, and the water was pouring into the first floor of a small company that made candles and the Italian restaurant just beside it. There were power lines down and there were phone lines down, and he was one of exactly three troopers in the county on the road at that moment. Three. No one was hurt, at least not yet, and that gave him some small measure of relief. But he also realized the odds that no one would be hurt when he logged off his shift were probably too small to calculate.

  “I don’t have keepsakes or souvenirs, not a single one. I’m bringing with me a family instead.”

  SERGEANT GEORGE ROWE,

  TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  LETTER TO HIS BROTHER IN PHILADELPHIA,

  OCTOBER 14, 1877

  Laura

  The puppy was an Alaskan husky and it sat in her lap in her office at the shelter, attacking the buttons on her heavy cardigan sweater and occasionally looking up at her with its single eye. The woman who brought it in had claimed that the other dogs in her house had attacked the poor thing because it was the runt of the new litter, but Laura hadn’t believed that and neither had the veterinarian: The vet had guessed someone with a boot on had kicked the puppy in the head. Still, aside from the reality that the dog was going to go through life with one eye, it was unhurt and as happy and playful as any of the puppies she saw. She’d named the dog Anya, and she knew both that the animal would find a good home and before it did the photographs of the pup in the Humane Society’s newspaper ads would raise the shelter a fair amount of money.

  Only one of the three volunteers who were scheduled to walk dogs that day had come in, and Laura was astonished that even one person was willing to walk dogs in the rainstorm, with the roads as bad as they were. The dogs today were being walked on the main street in front of the shelter, rather than the old logging trace behind it: The trail was impassable, a quagmire of melting snow with knee-deep mud underneath.

  She tried hard to focus on the animals, which was the reason she was keeping Anya in her office with her, so she wouldn’t think about the river and how high the water was, because it was impossible to envision the rapids right now in the Gale without thinking as well of her daughters. She looked at her watch and saw it was almost one-thirty. Normally it was only a half-hour drive back to Cornish, but with the roads as slick as they were, it had taken her forty-five minutes to drive here in the morning. If she wanted to be home when Alfred got off the school bus—and with Paul and Emily gone until tomorrow, she did—she’d have to bring Anya into her assistant’s office in another twenty minutes and leave work no later than two.

  She shuddered when she thought about the amount of water that was dribbling that moment inside the walls of her house. Terry wouldn’t get there until at least four, when he came off his shift, and so he wouldn’t have more than an hour to work on the roofs before dark. She certainly didn’t want him up there after nightfall. He’d done that once when they were both much younger. The girls had been no more than toddlers, and they were both asleep. For a few minutes she and Terry had watched one of the leaks in the kitchen, and when it became clear that the Sheetrock on the ceiling would have to be retaped in the spring, he had gotten out the ladder and gone to work on the roof with a snow rake and an ax. He’d been standing on the roof over the front porch and slipped, and though he hadn’t fallen off the roof—he’d fallen instead into the pile of snow he’d pulled off the higher pitch and was planning next to shovel into the yard—he’d reflexively tossed his ax into the air and it had conked him on the side of his head when it fell to earth. He was lucky it was the blunt edge that hit him, and so he’d wound up neither disfigured nor dead. But he learned from that lump—they both did—that you didn’t climb onto a roof in the dark in the rain, no matter how bad the leak was or how competent you believed that you were.

  She wondered if Terry would want to stay at the house when he was through, and whether she would let him. She knew that over the last couple of weeks he had had a fair amount of company at the camp where he was staying: His brother had been there a few nights, and though she didn’t know it for a fact, she believed that this woman he was seeing had been there, too. It was almost a certainty in her mind.

  She was still angry with him, and more hurt than she’d ever been in her life. But she missed him—the Terry, that is, with whom she had fallen in love and who had helped her to raise Hillary and Megan. Even during the past two years she had seen glimpses of that man, though he had all but disappeared in the grief that had enveloped them both. She still liked hearing his voice on the telephone, if only because he always sounded so capable and confident.

  Moreover, she believed that he missed her, too—or, again, the woman he’d initially known. Not the woman who, faced with the single worst thing that could happen, she had become.

  In the end, she knew that while there may very well have been a part of him that would want to remain in Cornish when the ice and the snow were gone from the roof—and there was clearly a part of her that would like that, too, if only so they could talk in person about Alfred’s upcoming case review—it wasn’t going to happen. Not yet, anyway, not tonight. Not while he was focused on this person named Phoebe, who, for whatever the reason, had such a hold on his emotions.

  SHE HAD JUST ventured into the rain in the shelter parking lot when she heard the siren. She thought it belonged to a state police cruiser, and she turned her head just in time to see one speeding south on Route 7. She wondered if it was Terry, but she didn’t consider the idea for long because a moment later, before she had even gotten into her car, she saw a second cruiser, this one without its lights or its siren on, turning onto the access road that led to the Humane Society. Clearly this was her husband.

  He coasted to a stop right beside her car, climbed from the cruiser without turning off either the engine or the wipers, and motioned toward her Taurus. Let’s get out of the rain, he said, and opened the driver’s-side door for her.

  He was sopping wet, she realized when they were both settled in the front seat of her car: It was as if he had jumped into a swimming pool in his uniform and his parka.

  It’s a tad nasty out there, he said, and he gave her a small smile and surprised her by taking her hand.

  You’re a maniac, she told him.

  Nah. It’s just water.

  Freezing cold water.

  I’m okay. More important, how are you?

  I want to go home, she said. That’s all. I just want to go home.

  Well, I’m glad I got here before you left. Be careful.

  Are the roads that bad?

  They are, and he paused briefly before adding, And while I don’t think the town has anything to worry about, I understand the Gale is very high.

  The news didn’t surprise her, but she still felt a tiny pulse of trepidation when she visualized the roiling brown water, and the foam where it col
lided with boulders or had to hurtle the massive slabs of ice. She understood he was telling her not simply because he was worried about the condition of the River Road, the road the Gale had torn apart with unfathomable fury just over two years ago now: The reality was she rarely took that way home. He was here because he understood that the very idea that the water might flood would be unnerving, and he wanted to warn her—tell her himself so she wouldn’t be cudgeled by the news when she heard it on the radio, or witnessed the high water firsthand because, for example, she simply drove by the general store on her way home to pick up a quart of milk.

  Seriously, he went on, his eyes fixed on her, I can’t believe it will cause any real trouble again. But, just so you know, the river is—most rivers in the county are—at flood level.

  She thought of her girls and she had an image of them on the bridge the day they died, and her anxiety grew more pronounced. And then she thought of Alfred. Anyone hurt? she asked.

  No, believe not. She felt him squeeze her hand and then he said, I’m actually going to head up there and check on the roads, so I just might get to swing by the house after all. If you’d asked me an hour ago, I wouldn’t have guessed I’d have a prayer in hell. But who knows? There might be a silver lining in all this high water.

  I should get going, she said. I want to make sure Alfred’s okay.

  Don’t worry, Paul and Emily will look in on him if the roads slow you down.

  They’re not home. They’re visiting Catherine.

  Still, you don’t need to fret. He’s a big boy, he’ll be fine.

  I know, that’s what I keep telling myself. It’s just...it’s just everything.

  He took back his hand and said, Look, I have to go close the road that runs by the quarry in New Haven. That’s next. As soon as that’s done, I’m going to shoot into Cornish and see about the bridge and the River Road. Then I’ll come by the house, I promise.