The Buffalo Soldier (13 page)

ANONYMOUS LETTER SIGNED "11TH INFANTRY,"

ARMY AND NAVY JOURNAL,
MAY 19, 1876

*

Alfred

He'd heard other grown-ups use the word
fuck,
but never Laura. He wasn't sure he'd ever heard her use any swear word before. Not even
damn.

He climbed back into his blue jeans and left his pajama bottoms on the edge of his bed. There was a New England Patriots sweatshirt on the floor in the corner of his room, and he slipped that on over his pajama top. He considered filling his knapsack with the food in his closet--and maybe adding something more from the kitchen, just in case--but his plan certainly wasn't to leave. He hoped he wasn't going anywhere. He just needed to get out and wander around for a couple of hours. Like he did in Burlington. And so all he took with him was his CD player.

His boots and his jacket were by the front door, and when there was only silence in Terry and Laura's room, he tiptoed down the stairs to put them on, too. The house was darker than he would have liked, but he didn't dare turn on the hall light.

Outside, the branches on the cat spruce near the edge of the driveway moved like sleepy fingers in the breeze.

He had expected a direction would occur to him once he was outdoors, but now he was there and he still didn't have a clue where he might walk. This place wasn't like Burlington: There weren't lights on every corner, and rows of apartment houses filled with college students who were still wide awake. There weren't bars and restaurants open well past midnight some days. He was actually rather scared of the dark, and the only street lamp out here was at the bend in the road near the Cousinos' dairy farm--and that was at least a quarter of a mile away, on the other side of the patch of woods that bordered the street. The other direction led up the hill toward the cemetery, and although he liked the graveyard a good deal during the day, there was no way he was going to go there right now.

He considered listening to some music, but he decided he should be able to hear the strange noises that seemed to mark the night here in the middle of nowhere, and so he kept the headset draped around his neck like a horseshoe.

The cement steps before the house were stone cold, but he sat down on them anyway and stared across the street at the old people's place. He saw there were rooms in the house that were lit, despite the fact it was late and most everyone else in Cornish was probably sound asleep. He wondered if they also slept with lights on, or whether one or both of them were awake right now, too.

He thought of Terry and Laura in their big bed in their room. Once before he had been living in a home when the grown-ups decided to get a divorce. He'd been five and a half, and he hadn't been there all that long. It had been the Ryans, those two people who lived in the apartment by the bus station. The man left, and soon after that he was shuttled to the north end of the city to live with two older foster kids--a boy and a girl--at the Fletchers', where he would sleep for close to three years on the pullout bed in the living room and wear the older boy's clothes when he outgrew them. Mrs. Fletcher was a soap opera fiend. She was also a hard drinker, and she used to whale on Isabel, the oldest child in the house and the only girl. But she never touched the boys, and only rarely did she ever stop any of the kids from roaming around Burlington.

He feared that if Terry left--if Laura kicked him out--he'd be sent back to the group home until they could find another placement. The group home was the world of the real losers. Bed wetters. Kids who'd do really weird shit, like set things on fire. One girl there had once carried all her foster dad's pants and shirts and underwear into the backyard, soaked them with the gasoline the family had in the garage for the lawn mower, and burned them up. Made a big bonfire out of them. A neighbor called the fire department, but the girl had the blaze under control and knew exactly what she was doing.

There was a rumor that the man might have touched her, but no one ever said anything for sure.

Although at first he had figured Cornish was just a temporary placement at best, he was pretty sure now that Louise--his latest caseworker--thought she'd found the promised land with Terry and Laura. Louise had lots of studs and rings in her ears--even more than he'd had the previous summer, when he and Tien convinced Digger to do their ears in the bathroom in the basement of the shopping mall. He had a sense that Louise viewed Terry and Laura as the perfect family for him. Tough cop for a dad, sweet lady for a mom. Home nowhere near the city. Maybe she was right. Maybe it didn't get any better than this. But if it didn't--

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 naivete.

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?

Suddenly 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.