If it didn’t, he didn’t know what to think. Sure, they didn’t scream at each other (though Laura had seemed pretty close to yelling tonight), and they didn’t hit him. They gave him clothes and toys and he had his very own bedroom. But they sure as shit weren’t happy, and every minute he felt like he was walking on glass. You moved slow in this house, as if everything—and that included the people—was just about ready to break.
He guessed it hadn’t been like that when the girls were alive. When he was supposed to have been watching the Macy’s parade and had gone through the family pictures instead, he’d learned that the house had been a different world then. Terry and Laura had looked younger—which, of course, they were. But they had looked a lot younger. More than just a couple of years. And the family had always seemed to be doing things. Several pictures stuck in his mind: Terry and a group of girls, including one of his daughters, playing T-ball at the Little League field. Terry was wearing shorts, and showing the kid how to hold a bat.
He wouldn’t have believed that uptight cop had ever owned shorts. And he was smiling. That was pretty rare for Terry, too.
Another picture he liked showed the T-ball twin’s sister using a spoon to sprinkle glitter on what looked like a foot-tall teepee made of twigs. She was probably six or seven, and her hair was down to her waist. It was taken in the house’s front yard, and he thought it was spring because there was the green of some flowers just starting to emerge through the pine bark in the garden.
The picture he found most intriguing, however, was a shot of the four of them taken at the peak of some little mountain, with little more than blue sky behind them. The girls were in blue jeans and windbreakers, and each one was sitting on top of a parent’s shoulders, their legs dangling like they were Halloween straw men. He guessed they were about five. What fascinated him was that everyone was not merely smiling in the photograph, they were laughing—laughing hysterically, it seemed, as if whoever was snapping the picture was the funniest person on the planet. They were all so happy, it was like they were stoned.
He’d considered taking that one, but he was afraid it would be obvious it was missing. And so instead he’d taken a photograph of the two girls dressed up as brides, one of about seven or eight pictures that had been snapped the same day and stored in the photo album. But it wasn’t merely the fact that there were many similar shots that had made the picture such a find: It was one of the few images on which someone—Laura, he guessed—had bothered to scrawl the girls’ names on the back:
Hillary and Megan, planning their weddings. Second grade.
Across the street Alfred saw the front door opening, and he saw the old man emerge on the porch. For a second he thought the man was wearing a dress under his winter coat, and he was about to race back inside Terry and Laura’s house. But then he realized that what he thought was a dress was merely the bottom half of the man’s flannel bathrobe. The guy had simply put his parka on over his robe.
With his hands in his pockets, the man shuffled across the street and up the walkway. Alfred watched his breath rise up into the night air like cigarette smoke. When he reached the Sheldons’ house, he sat down on the steps beside him.
Evening, Alfred, he said, without looking his way. He stared straight ahead at his own place.
Hi.
I’ve always suspected that you, too, are a night person. I don’t sleep much either these days.
I’ve seen your light on at night, Alfred said.
And I have seen yours. Of course, I have an excuse for not sleeping well: I’m old. You’re a growing boy. Your body is supposed to be hungry for sleep. Just crave it.
Alfred thought for a moment. Not mine, he said finally.
Well, all bodies are different, the man said. Some people just don’t need much sleep. He stretched his legs straight before him, and Alfred realized the man was wearing black rubber galoshes into which he had tucked his pajamas.
Your feet must be cold, he said. He envisioned the man’s feet were bare in the rubber.
Not too bad.
You wearing socks?
Nope.
Me, either. But at least I put on winter boots.
You’re a wise lad, he said, and then—as if they’d been talking about animals all along and his inquiry didn’t reflect a change in the subject—continued in the same placid tone, You like horses?
I don’t know. I guess. I’ve never seen one, except from the road.
Well, I’m getting a horse. If you want, I’ll teach you to ride. It’s not difficult.
Where are you going to keep it?
The man pointed at the meadow next to his house. The fencing will be here on Monday, he added. You can help me put that in, too—but only if you want to. And you don’t have any homework. Homework has to come first, you know.
They don’t give you much homework, Alfred said, a half-truth. In actuality he received lengthier assignments here than he had in Burlington, but on those days he felt like doing it, he could knock the work off in half an hour.
That’s too bad. They should. They should give you mountains of homework. A daily avalanche. If you’d like, I can talk to your teacher. Tell her to give you some real work.
Oh, you don’t need to do that.
Well, you tell me if you change your mind, he said, and then he went on about his horse. The animal will probably have a name by the time I get it—which is too bad. I kind of think a person should name his own pony. Might help them bond.
Alfred tried to imagine the old man on a horse, and he kept seeing him astride an animal while wearing galoshes. Have you ever ridden a horse before? he asked.
You sound like my wife.
Just asking.
I have. Thank you for your concern.
It must have been a long time ago.
He felt the man staring at him, and he found he had to struggle hard not to smile.
I know what I’m doing, the man said evenly.
So this is like, what, a toy? A hobby?
You really have spoken to my wife.
I haven’t. I’m just asking.
I guess it’s between a toy and a whim—though I probably shouldn’t use either of those words, given the fact that a horse is a living, breathing thing with a fine brain. It must be respected, and it will demand a lot of work.
I once lived in a place that had a dog. That didn’t demand much work. They just kept it tied to a clothesline. Alfred knew that a horse and a dog were very different animals, and he knew that the dog on the rope had been unfairly ignored. But he discovered that he liked tormenting this old professor with his feigned naïveté.
This will demand considerably more effort than a dog on a line. Trust me.
And you want one, anyway.
I certainly do. Very much. Suddenly they’re popping up in my reading all the time. Every book I open, it seems, has a horse in it. I figure that’s a sign. Don’t you?
Maybe, Alfred said, and then asked what he meant as a serious question: Is that how you got so interested in the buffalo soldiers?
Through their horses? No, not at all. To be honest, the buffalo soldiers only interest me because of the larger historical context in which they lived. Let me rephrase that: I’m interested in the buffalo soldiers because they were successful black men in a white army that would have been very happy to see them fall flat on their faces. They just happened to ride horses because that’s what we had to work with in the nineteenth century.
Alfred thought of the image on the front of the cap the man had given him. They never rode buffalos, he said.
No.
I didn’t think so.
A buffalo wouldn’t take kindly to carting around one hundred and forty pounds of human flesh on his back.
He nodded to himself and then put forth the inquiry that had troubled him off and on for almost a month. Then tell me something, he began. How come they were called buffalo soldiers?
It’s not in that book we gave you?
Sud
denly he felt stupid. Of course it was in that book somewhere, it was just that the volume was thick and the type was small and there really weren’t very many photographs. Briefly he considered lying—saying he didn’t remember, or he was only on page seventeen, anything—but he knew he’d get caught, and he realized at that moment that the answer was more important to him than his pride.
Maybe if it was a video or a DVD I would have watched it, he said finally.
Haven’t gotten to it yet, eh?
I guess not.
The old man sat up a little straighter and fixed the collar on his parka. He cleared his throat. The name, he said, was probably given to the troopers by the Comanches. Do you know who the Comanches were?
Indians.
Right. Native Americans. They lived on the Great Plains, Wyoming to Texas. They had seen white troopers for years, but not many black ones. Then in the 1860s they started to see hundreds of them. Whole regiments. They were the ones who christened them buffalo soldiers.
But why?
Why the name? Their hair, probably. Their woolly hair reminded them of the buffalo.
Alfred shook his head when he heard. It was even worse than he expected, because it was the Indians—and not the white men—who had given the soldiers the name. I figured it was all about hair, he said.
You sound annoyed.
It’s always about what people look like. Their hair, their skin. Always has been, always will be.
It was a term of respect.
How you figure?
The buffalo was a sacred animal to the American Indians. Revered. It was smart, strong. Dedicated to its herd. Good family values, you might say. The Indians depended upon the buffalo for an awful lot of life’s little necessities. Food. Clothing. Shelter. There’s no way they would have called the black soldiers buffalo soldiers if they didn’t respect them.
Alfred wanted to believe him, but he wasn’t willing to give himself up to such a fantasy just yet.
And think about this, the man went on: The black troopers in the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries liked the term. They knew it was meant respectfully, and so they commandeered it for their insignias—like the emblem on that hat of yours. They knew they weren’t being insulted.
The hat was upstairs in Alfred’s room. He wished he had it with him right now so he could look at it.
No, the old man remarked, being called a buffalo soldier was nothing to be ashamed of. They were a very proud bunch.
I didn’t really believe they rode buffalos, you know, Alfred said.
I didn’t think you did.
When will you get your horse?
Next week, with any luck. You want to come with me? I’m going to see a former student of mine. She’s got two animals, and there’s one she thought I might be interested in.
I have school next week.
We’ll go after school. She only lives about thirty minutes from here.
I’ll have to ask Laura.
You do that. And I’ll ask Emily.
You need your wife’s permission?
He stood up, and so Alfred stood with him. He watched the man shake out his leg as if it were stiff from sitting. Permission isn’t exactly the right word, the man said. Tolerance might be more accurate. I need her tolerance. And on that note, my friend, I’m going to go home. Good evening.
Then he gave Alfred a small salute and rambled down the walkway toward the street. When he reached the road, he stopped and called back in a stage whisper—loud enough for Alfred to hear, but not loud enough to wake Terry and Laura—Give that book we gave you a chance. I’m telling you, you won’t regret it.
He nodded and waited for the man to reach his house. Then, once Paul was inside, he quietly opened the front door behind him and decided he, too, would return to his bed for the night.
PART TWO
Advent
“I saw Night Bird and Moon of the Big Leaves die. I saw Red Sands and Lone Bear dive into the water. Did Lone Bear see us, too? Is that why he tried to cross the river? I hope not, but I believe that’s what happened. He saw us and dove into the river, and then Red Sands followed him because Red Sands always followed my husband.”
VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),
WPA INTERVIEW,
MARCH 1938
Terry
He had turned his cruiser around even before the dispatcher finished her cool, evenhanded recitation of the facts, and switched on his siren and lights. It never ceased to astonish him that the news, no matter how bad, was always presented this way.
He guessed he would beat the ambulance to the scene, because the accident had occurred in Leicester, on a strip of Route 7 a few miles south of Middlebury. The ambulance would have to wind its way through the college and the village and then the traffic that, inevitably, stalled near the commons this time of the day. The very beginning of rush hour. Dusk. He, on the other hand, was already south of the town, and no more than five or six miles separated him from the construction site where the accident had occurred. Other than a couple of dairy farms and a long stretch of forest, there was little between him and some wretched construction worker who’d managed to get himself impaled on a line of rebar spikes.
The red taillights of the vehicles ahead of him moved to the right, and the white headlights of the oncoming ones edged to his left. He could have driven smack in the middle of the road if he’d wanted, he could have aimed his car straight ahead atop a pair of solid yellow lines.
Apparently the guy was still alive when the 911 was called in, but Terry couldn’t imagine he would be by the time he arrived. He hadn’t fallen far—no more than a couple of floors, it sounded like—but he had landed smack on top of a row of six-foot-high, inch-thick metal spikes. According to the site foreman, his body was hanging, skewered, three or four feet off the ground.
The building wasn’t going to be very big by most city standards, but it was for Addison County: three stories, and roughly twenty-two thousand square feet of space. It was going to be some kind of elegant executive retreat and small-business conference center, and so the developer had been able to get the zoning approvals and building permits he needed.
When he reached the site, he parked as close as he could to the big hole at the bottom of the steel skeleton, pulling in between a pickup and a cement mixer. He saw people were shining lights down into the hole because the daylight, fading fast aboveground, was almost gone down there, and he saw the body—part of it, anyway—right away. He couldn’t see the man’s face and chest because two other workers were cradling the body like it was a huge piece of timber they were trying to carry. They had wrapped their arms around him as if they feared the body might slip down the spikes if they let it go.
He climbed down a ladder into the pit and ran across the fresh cement to the two men and the victim. There were easily a dozen construction workers in what would eventually be the building’s basement with the small group, and—like the cars on Route 7—they gave way the moment they saw him. Before he even glimpsed the fellow’s face, he had a sinking feeling that the poor son of a bitch was still breathing—worse, he was still conscious—because he could hear one of the men who was holding the body murmuring, You’re gonna live, man, I wouldn’t shit you. I’m telling you, you’re gonna make it.
The victim was no more than nineteen or twenty, and his skin had gone as white as vanilla ice cream. His lips were blue. He was on his side on the bars, and his hands were wrapped tightly around the rebar that seemed to have speared him through his chest. It looked like he was holding himself up on it, as if this was some kind of gymnastic feat. A second rebar had stabbed him through his thigh and a third had pierced his abdomen. Because of the jeans jacket and sweatshirt he’d been wearing while he worked, Terry couldn’t tell how badly the man—kid, Terry thought to himself, kid—was bleeding. But the outer jacket didn’t look wet, and neither did the kid’s jeans. The thing was, the spike in his leg looked pretty damn close to a femoral artery, and the one in the chest had
to be near the guy’s heart and the complex knot of blood vessels that surrounded it. They must have just missed them somehow. He wondered if the spikes had rammed through him so clean and fast that they were actually stanching the bleeding.
Quickly Terry turned to look the kid squarely in the face, both because he could no longer bear to look at where the barbs entered and exited his body, and so that the young construction worker wouldn’t gaze at them, either. He was a redhead, gray eyes and lots of freckles, and despite the cold, his hair was matted with sweat. Terry said who he was and then figured the best thing to do was to lie.
We’ll have you off there before you know it, son, he said, keeping his voice as even as he could. If you listen, you’ll hear the ambulance.
See? one of the men holding him said. We’re in agreement here.
What’s your name? Terry asked him.
The young man moved his lips but nothing came out, and one of the workers nearby said his name was Kevin. Kevin McKay.
You can hear me, right, Kevin?
The kid looked at Terry and nodded, and then rasped that he was about to puke.
You go and do that, Terry said, and he held the young man’s head in his hands. When he was through, Terry walked away and wiped his hands on his pants, and took his radio off his belt and asked the dispatcher to send a fire truck, too, if one wasn’t already on the way. He had a sense that they couldn’t possibly saw through the bars while the kid was still breathing, because the jostling alone would kill him. That meant that they’d have to use an acetylene torch to slice through the rods, but if they didn’t do it right, the steel spikes would conduct the heat from the flame up into the body. Cook the kid from the inside, like he was a baking potato rammed through with a metal tine. And so they’d have to keep a stream of cold water on the bars above the torch to keep them cool, and that was where he anticipated the fire department would come in.