The Buffalo Soldier

  I wasn’t going to touch your precious beer. I was only getting the coaster, she said. Okay? When she said okay, she was mimicking him.

  So, Al...I can call you Al, right?

  I like Alfred better, he said, and he tried not to fidget though he knew that he was.

  Alfred’s an old man’s name. Al is the proper name for a tough kid like you, right? I mean, my God, Alfred makes you sound like somebody’s servant. And it seems to me that would be the very last thing you’d want. Am I right? You are nobody’s servant. No way. Right?

  Russell, lay off him, okay? Just stop.

  He looked toward Nicole and glowered for a long second, and then turned back to Alfred.

  How do you like my brother? Pretty slick, huh? Especially when he’s all dolled up in his uniform?

  Alfred could see the woman was leaving. She had turned on her heels and was heading back across the front hall and into the dining room or, maybe, the kitchen.

  I like him fine.

  I do, too. Most of the time. What about Laura?

  What about her?

  You like her, too?

  Sure.

  She’s pretty, isn’t she?

  Alfred knew now he needed to leave the room, too. There was no telling what Russell might say next. And so he started to walk past the man, careful to walk toward the far side of the couch, since Russell wouldn’t dare lunge across the cushions for him.

  He was wrong. Although the man never actually rose to his feet, he bounded across the sofa and stretched his free arm over the far side of the couch, and wrapped it around Alfred’s waist. Alfred started to pull away—he was aware that the beer can was now on its side on one of the cushions, but he couldn’t tell if there was enough left that some was spilling out onto the thick pillow—but Russell held him tight and looped his fingers through one of the belt loops on the side of his jeans.

  I am sort of like your uncle, you know, he said. There’s no call to be rude. I like you.

  In the hallway Terry and Nicole were approaching, and then Alfred saw them both jog the final half-dozen steps into the room. Instantly Russell released him.

  What the hell do you think you’re doing, Russell? Terry asked, and he seemed to tower over his brother. What the hell do you think you’re doing now?

  Russell stood, but he was no bigger than Terry and he lacked the trooper’s posture.

  Oh, we were just talking. Getting to know each other.

  Nicole looked down at the swirls on the carpet, and she seemed to be shaking her head just the tiniest bit. Then she noticed the beer can on the couch and grabbed it.

  That’s not what I hear, Terry said.

  I don’t know what you heard, but—

  Or what I just saw.

  Hey, you’re no saint, either, Russell said, raising his voice, and for a split second Alfred thought the man was going to cry. But the second passed, and he realized that Russell’s voice simply grew high when he got mad. You are no saint, he said again to his brother.

  The other adults started streaming in slowly from the dining room and the kitchen, and congregated in the hallway behind Terry and Nicole. When Laura saw Alfred by the side of the couch—only feet from where the brothers looked like they might square off—she went to him and put her hands on his shoulders. Her hands were damp, and she was still wearing the red apron she had put on when she volunteered to tackle the greasy, cast-iron roasting pans.

  I’ve never claimed to be a saint, Terry said, his voice even but clearly annoyed.

  You always take that tone with me, Russell said.

  Not always. Only when you’ve had too much to drink.

  You are such a hypocrite! So smug and self-righteous! Well, I got news for you: I know what you were doing at deer camp! We all did, we all knew exactly where you went!

  Alfred didn’t dare turn around to look up at Laura. He wanted to, he wanted to desperately, but he didn’t dare. He had a feeling if he did it would be a violation somehow, like the time he had heard her crying when Terry was gone, and he had made certain that she never knew he was awake that night. He wasn’t sure what Russell had meant just now, but it was clear it involved something bad, something Laura knew nothing about. And he sensed that if he turned his head the slightest bit in Laura’s direction, then she would know that he—and, therefore, every single person in the room—understood that Terry was hiding something from her.

  And so instead he kept his eyes on Terry. The look on the man’s face suggested he was merely disappointed in his younger brother—vexed by this adult man’s childishness—but his hands were balled into fists. Everyone remained silent, frozen in place, until their mother emerged from the crowd of older people in the hallway and said, forcing a small, unsure laugh from her lips as she spoke, You two will never grow up, will you? You’re having the same squabbles you had when you were children.

  She patted Terry, and Alfred saw his fingers unclench. She was not a frail woman, but Alfred had overheard enough to know that she was neither as confident nor as hearty as she had been before her husband died. Her hair was curly and short, and dyed a blond that looked a bit like the camel’s hair coat Laura sometimes wore. She was the only woman in the house who was wearing a dress.

  Alfred, Laura said, why don’t you join us in the kitchen? I could use some help drying the pans. There was an unfamiliar quiver in her voice: It wasn’t the tremor he’d noticed the few times her daughters had come up, or the tiny shudder that gave her words a slight waffle when she was worried about him. It was an inflection he’d never heard from her before, but one that had peppered the sentences of a previous foster mother—a woman whose husband would disappear less than two months after Alfred had arrived at their apartment in the building by the bus station.

  It was, he was quite sure, the sound of a person whose feelings have just been badly injured.

  “There were no boulders on their side of the river, and no brush at all. And so they shot the horses and used them as cover. Then they fired at the soldiers until they had no bullets left.”

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  Phoebe

  Of course she couldn’t be pregnant. He’d worn a condom.

  But they’d made love twice, and they hadn’t showered in between. It was possible that...no, it wasn’t possible. She didn’t believe he’d ever been inside her without wearing a rubber.

  She reminded herself that she was a grand total of five days late. Five days, that was it. No biggie. Surely she’d been five days late before in her life. In fact, she’d probably been that late often in high school. It was really only over the last two or three years, as she’d begun to near thirty, that she had become as regular as a navy clock.

  Yet she kept replaying in her mind their time together in Rose’s bed, trying to recall in minute and chronological detail exactly what they had done. And, unfortunately, each time she could find a moment when his penis might have grazed her vagina during foreplay, or when either of their hands might have moved too swiftly between his genitals and hers. Each time she could see in her head pearl-colored semen—real or imagined—on the outer edge of the condom.

  Moreover, it was always possible that one of the rubbers had been defective. Maybe one had had a small tear.

  Upstairs she heard her father turn off the television set in his bedroom, and in a second, she knew, she would hear him turn on the radio. Since her mother had died, he fell asleep listening to talk radio.

  The farmhouse wasn’t small, but sound carried through the small rooms, and usually you knew what everyone else was doing. When she was growing up, she had always heard her brothers talking before they fell asleep, and before her parents had sold the herd—when she was a small girl—she had always heard her father and oldest brother tiptoeing down the stairs at five in the morning for the first milking.

  She realized that she hadn’t comprehended a word in the magazine before her. She had merely
been flipping the glossy pages, only vaguely aware of the photos and articles and the ads for lingerie, cigarettes, and perfume.

  Outside the back door she heard her father’s dog on the steps, and she rose from the table to let the animal in. She felt very tired when she stood up and decided that this, too, was proof that she was pregnant.

  IN THE MORNING, she knew, she would open the small general store for Frank and Jeannine. She would arrive there a little before seven A.M., brew a couple pots of coffee, and chat with the regular customers—some of whom, of course, she’d known her whole life because she had gone to school with them or they were friends or acquaintances of her family. There would be fewer people than usual, however, because it was the day after Thanksgiving and some folks would have the day off. Moreover, with the schools closed she didn’t expect she would see any of the moms who either dropped their kids off at the nearby bus stop in the morning or drove them to school.

  She wondered briefly if her father had any plans for tomorrow, but she couldn’t imagine he did. Most days he didn’t go anywhere, and she really wasn’t sure how he passed the time. In all fairness, he had gone hunting this year, but it didn’t seem as if his heart was in it. Sometimes he went for drives, and sometimes he went as far as Littleton, New Hampshire, to visit her brother Wallace, the second oldest of the small brood. Wallace now sold insurance from a little office on Main Street. Twice that autumn he had even stayed overnight with Wallace and Veronica and the grandchildren.

  Most days, however, he seemed to stay home.

  Wallace and his family had been back in Vermont that day for Thanksgiving, and Phoebe thought that was nice. A couple of kids running around the house and the yard, some other adults in the dark farmhouse for a change.

  Wallace and Veronica had both told her in the kitchen that they thought it was time for her to move back to Montpelier and resume crunching numbers for the state. Dad was doing fine now, they said, and it was clear that she had no life here: few friends, no boyfriend, and a job that could only be called inappropriate for a girl who had a two-year degree in accounting from a college in Burlington.

  She’d smiled and agreed with them when they said she’d done her good deed.

  She didn’t tell them that sometimes she fantasized about leaving Vermont. Perhaps even New England. She had a roommate from college who’d moved all the way to Santa Fe when she married an engineer who was going to work at the lab in Los Alamos. Imagine, New Mexico. Endless blue skies, hot and dry summers. Something completely different from all that she knew. Shauna, her friend, had mailed her photographs of her family’s townhouse, and of the glorious-looking day-care center where their toddler son spent most weekday mornings.

  Still, she loved her father and it was hard for her to picture him alone in this house in the nights as well as the days. Here was a man who had lived in these rooms for decades with a wife, four kids, and—when the herd was at its biggest—a hired man. What would it be like for him to be so completely alone? Even the cows were long gone.

  And what of her? Really, she’d just—well, maybe not just, but not even four months ago now—watched her mother die. Of all the siblings, she was the one who was there those last weeks, she was the one who helped her father adjust the oxygen prongs in her mother’s nose and, near the end, administered the morphine. She was the one who heard her mother’s occasional odd, incomprehensible murmurings when the painkillers kicked in, and listened in silence for signs of life from her grieving father. Yes, she had only done what many grown children did. But that didn’t make it easy.

  She rolled over in her bed—the very same bed in which she had slept as a child and a teenager—and inside her she felt something move. Intellectually she knew it was impossible. After all, even if she was pregnant (and she tried to reassure herself once again that she wasn’t), it would be months before she would feel something move.

  Assuming, of course, that she kept the baby.

  She told herself she was thinking way too much: It didn’t make sense to start weighing motherhood and abortion on some scale in her head. At least not yet.

  She tried not to hear the low rumble of the men talking on the radio in her father’s bedroom, but the noise was inescapable, and so, as she did some nights, she propped herself against the fluffiest pillow and tried listening carefully instead. Anything, she decided, was better than lying in your bed attempting to convince yourself that you weren’t pregnant, when you knew in your heart that you were.

  “We killed two warriors and sustained no casualties ourselves. Two other warriors drowned in the river when they tried to flee.”

  SERGEANT GEORGE ROWE, TENTH REGIMENT,

  UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  REPORT TO CAPTAIN ANDREW HITCHENS

  AFTER THE ENGAGEMENT AT CANYON CREEK,

  MAY 9, 1876

  Laura

  They drove home in the dark, though it wasn’t even six-thirty when they left her mother-in-law’s house. The drive from Saint Johnsbury to Cornish was a solid two hours, but still she found herself wishing it was longer: She needed time to think. It didn’t matter that she was confined with him right now in the Taurus, because the vehicle was dark and they were listening to country music on the radio. They didn’t have to speak—though Terry had made easily a half-dozen overtures when they first left, trying to assess the damage. Finally he’d gotten the message that she wasn’t talking.

  A few times the notion that her marriage might be over crossed her mind, but the thought made her a tiny bit nauseous and she would try to remember how loving he’d been lately. Yes, that kindness had made her slightly wary, but it also suggested that whatever Terry had done or was planning to do, it did not involve leaving her.

  She figured she would confront him once Alfred was asleep, and he would either deny that something had happened and offer an explanation—perhaps fabricate some lesser transgression—or confess.

  She realized that she wasn’t sure she wanted him to confess. Would it be to a one-night stand? A weekend? Or would it be to something more profound? A long-running affair, perhaps? She wasn’t convinced that she wanted to know.

  A question occurred to her: How in the name of God did one have an affair at deer camp? The place was a dump, and the men degenerated into wild beasts when they were there. They rarely shaved or bathed, and they spent their days tromping around the woods.

  Maybe that meant nothing had happened. Maybe Russell was just being Russell at her mother-in-law’s tonight: Difficult and argumentative. A troublemaker.

  And after losing as much as she had, was it even possible that she could lose her husband, too? Would she really be expected to endure that as well?

  She wondered what would happen to Alfred if she kicked Terry out—or he left on his own. Right now the two of them had care of the boy, but there would be something called a case review in two or three months. Probably February, Louise said, and definitely no later than March. If their home was perceived as unstable—if she was suddenly a single mother—would she lose the boy?

  Certainly she could not allow that to happen. It wouldn’t be fair to Alfred, and it wouldn’t be fair to her. She had no idea if the two of them had made any real progress in their relationship, but she was sure that eventually they would. Positive. It was only a matter of time.

  She turned around, expecting to see a small boy asleep in the backseat of the car. She already had the picture in her head: seat belt still snug around his waist, but his body on its side on the couch, his feet drawn up onto the long cushion. She was smiling at the image. Instead, however, when she turned she saw Alfred upright and awake. At some point he had put on his CD headset, oblivious to the music on the car radio, and started listening to something else. He was staring straight at her, his face completely impassive. For a second the surprise caused her smile to wilt, and she had to will it back for the benefit of the boy.

  WHEN THEY APPROACHED the turnoff for Cornish, Terry veered up and off the main road, planning to drive th
e final four miles via the notch way instead. It took a couple of minutes longer to loop home along this route because a part of the road wasn’t paved, but it also meant that they wouldn’t have to drive past the spot where their daughters’ bodies had been recovered from the river. In the days after the flood, this hadn’t been an issue: The River Road had had such yawning chasms that it was closed for months while it was rebuilt, and they couldn’t have driven past the spot even if they’d wanted to. Soon, however, this alternate route had become a habit, a way home so ingrained in the muscle memory in their hands that most of the time neither of them even thought about why they were spinning the steering wheel to the left as they approached the notch, carefully avoiding a long stretch of the River Road.

  Most of the time. Not all of the time. That night Laura thought about how she hadn’t driven home along the River Road—the road she’d always taken prior to the girls’ death, and the road most people used to reach Cornish—more than a half-dozen times in two years. She knew the dam was long gone, and the place where the battered bodies had lodged with the riverbank flotsam looked like nothing more than another bend in the river, but she understood also that in a heartbeat she could locate the exact spot where a pile of sepulchral debris had briefly entombed both her daughters.

  She thought of Hillary and Megan’s friend, Alicia Montgomery, and tried to conjure a picture in her mind of the little girl—what she looked like now. She was in the sixth grade. The family had moved to Rutland soon after the flood, and she hadn’t seen any of the Montgomerys in well over a year. She knew that Alicia had been badly shaken by her friends’ deaths, and had endured sweat-causing nightmares for months after the flood. Supposedly, that was why the family had moved. They wanted to get Alicia away from the sound and the smell and the sight of the nearby Gale River.