The Buffalo Soldier Read online

  He wasn’t completely sure how he felt about that, even now after ten weeks.

  Occasionally he wondered if he might have been adopted by someone if he’d been white, and that uncertainty crossed his mind now. He was five when it first dawned on him that skin color was an issue, and he’d been living with the Howards for close to three years. Suddenly Mr. Howard became ill, seriously ill, and within weeks he was living in a group home in Burlington. Alfred thought there may have been a place between the man getting sick and his spending time in a group home—an apartment, maybe, somewhere in the city’s North End—but he couldn’t quite remember. It was in that brief period when he’d stopped talking completely, and in hindsight he’d come to suspect that the grown-ups around him must have feared he was truly fucked up.

  At some point since then he’d grown to believe—either because it was something someone had said to him or because it was something he simply had to assume was true to get on with his life—that the Howards would have adopted him if Mr. Howard hadn’t gotten so sick. How much was real and how much he was making up was unclear to him. But he was quite sure that he had loved living with the Howards, and he had been happy.

  He remembered the smell of the clean clothes that he wore, and the way Mrs. Howard always seemed to be dressing him straight from the dryer: The clothes were warm. He remembered a swing set made of wood, with a small fort beside the very top of a yellow slide. He remembered Mr. Howard driving him and a girl who was eight—a biologic child of theirs—to the elementary school in the morning on his way to an office nearby where he worked. He went to kindergarten in that school for a couple of months, leaving the class—and the Howards—either just before or just after Thanksgiving.

  The Howards were white, and he was with them since he was a toddler. In those days, Renee still showed up once or twice a year. He remembered moments from those visits, too, but only because she always ended up shouting at the Howards.

  Then she had another baby and moved to Jamaica, and gave up all her rights to him.

  He only spent a couple of weeks in the group home, but it was there that he first began to fear—and fear, at least then, was indeed the right word—that he might never be adopted because he was black. Apparently that was one of the first things he had told a social worker when he started to speak again. After all, the kids in the home were all either Asian or black, while most of the people he saw on the streets were white. White grown-ups with white kids. That’s what he saw out the window, at the playground, and in the kindergarten.

  For a time he had expected the Howards to come back for him, but they never did. He thought Mr. Howard had died, but he wasn’t completely sure. He knew he might have made that up to explain their disappearance from his life.

  He squinted, and the tree branches looked like pencil lines against the gray sky. A spider’s web, maybe.

  He was afraid of spiders, and so he quickly opened his eyes all the way. He liked the cemetery, and he didn’t want the place ruined for him. Here there was the undeniable relief that came with being completely invisible—of not being watched—and he wanted to retreat beneath the hydrangea until, at the very least, it was time to go back to the house for his supper.

  “[Rowe] spoke very well for a colored, and rode much better than most. A superior horseman, I’d say. Of course, the settlers didn’t much like him, but then he didn’t like them a whole hell of a lot, either.”

  LIEUTENANT T. R. MCKEEVER,

  TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  AUGUST 1937

  Laura

  Laura crumbled the toast over the macaroni and cheese in the casserole dish and slipped their dinner into the oven. Then she sat down at the kitchen table, a slim woman with hair the color of sand when the surf has just receded and a complexion as pale as the skin on the inside of her palms. She was still in her mid-thirties, but her face and her eyes had been aged prematurely by grief, and she hadn’t felt her age in two years. She’d felt, always, considerably older. She stopped in mid-turn and tried to remember what it was that she wanted to do next. Clear away the catalogs that had come with the mail? Set the table? Pour Alfred’s milk?

  No, the casserole needed forty minutes in the oven. If she poured his milk now, it would be warm when they sat down to eat. Maybe she should get the carrots up from the basement. They still had summer carrots left in the sand barrel.

  She wished she had remembered to ask Alfred about his day at school. What he’d done, who he’d talked to. What they’d studied in social studies or history. Anything. Even whether he’d done his homework.

  She wished, she decided simply, that she wasn’t so out of practice at this, she wished there was some sort of muscle memory that went with parenting. She knew she hadn’t wanted him to wander up to the cemetery right now—except for school, when he wasn’t in her sight she grew worried and frightened—but she also wasn’t sure she could have stopped him (or, for that matter, whether she should have). If she told him to stay around the house, she feared he would just ignore her and go anyway. He had done that a couple of times when Terry wasn’t home. He’d treated her like she was a giant paper doll and simply disregarded whatever she’d said.

  The worst had been that Saturday morning in early October when he hitchhiked to Burlington. Just up and left, and thumbed rides the thirty-plus miles to the city to see that girl named Tien and—if he could—find some apparently loathsome teenager named Digger. When he got to the apartment where the girl lived, however, he discovered that she, too, had a new home, and her old foster father wouldn’t say where. The man had called Social Services and the boy had been brought back to Cornish, and no one that day had looked very good. Certainly, Laura believed, she hadn’t. And yet she had offered to set up a play date with the girl, hadn’t she? And Alfred had declined. Afterward, he insisted he no longer had any interest in anyone he’d known in Burlington, and—she had to admit—from the little she knew of those friends, she was glad.

  She wondered now if the real reason why she didn’t want Alfred at the cemetery was her fear that he’d find the girls’ graves. She wasn’t sure why this idea disturbed her, but it did.

  She would have called Terry at the shack his family used as a deer camp so she could hear his voice, but there wasn’t a telephone. And, of course, there wasn’t a tower nearby, so the cell phone wouldn’t function.

  She tried not to be angry with Terry for going hunting, but it was inescapable: She was mad. Alfred had only been with them a couple of months, and they were all still getting to know one another. Figure each other out. And Terry had gone off to deer camp Friday night, as if it were just any other November, and he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Tuesday.

  Reflexively, she looked up at the Humane Society calendar on the corkboard on the kitchen wall. Terry had been gone a weekend and a day. She’d spoken to him twice when he called from the pay phone at the general store near the neglected cabin they called their camp, but neither time had Alfred been home, and so neither time had he and the boy connected.

  She and Terry hadn’t discussed it, but she knew the only reason he was going to be back tomorrow was that Wednesday was the anniversary of the twins’ deaths. Two years now. Far enough in the past that whole hours might pass without her thinking about them.

  Had last year not been a leap year, the anniversary would have been Tuesday. Tomorrow.

  She went to the den, a small room that faced north and so it was dark even at noon in the peak of the summer, and took a photo album out from a cabinet in the bookshelf a previous owner had built into the wall. Long ago she had taken down all the photos of the girls that once hung on the walls or sat on tables and bureaus in frames, because she couldn’t bear to be reminded of them every moment. She would pause before the images as she’d pass by them in the hallway or the kitchen, and grow oblivious to the grilled cheese that was burning on the stove or the bath that she’d started to run for herself minutes before. She had
never actually allowed the water to spill over the sides of the tub, but twice she’d stared for so long at a photograph of the girls in a tree in her mother-in-law’s yard that the hot water had run out and her bath had been tepid.

  Now, with the boy up the hill and her husband at deer camp, she sat on the couch beside the sleeping cats and flipped the heavy sheets that held the snapshots of the girls, occasionally dabbing at her nose with a Kleenex.

  SHE UNDERSTOOD THAT everyone responded to personal tragedies in personal ways. She understood firsthand the one universal: Grief comes upon a person in increments. Reality becomes more painful as the magnitude of the loss sets in, and the body slowly emerges from the shock that only briefly envelopes it. Things have to get a lot worse before they get better.

  But a loss this great? There were months when she didn’t believe she’d ever get better—and, what was more important for everyone around her, it was clear that she didn’t want to.

  For a time, for her, there had been Prozac. And there had been the church, though she wasn’t exactly sure there had been God. She was haunted by, among other Sunday-school memories, the Lord God’s dictum to Ezekiel that though his wife was about to die, he might sigh, but not aloud, and he should make no mourning for the dead. Still, she had found it helpful to sit with the pastor on weekday mornings before she would go to the animal shelter where she worked. The two of them would find seats in the last pew in the sanctuary, completely alone in the big room, and she would cry and talk and he would listen.

  One time she went to a bereavement group for parents in Burlington, but it had been a long drive for little comfort. She hadn’t found it helpful to hear other women—and the group was entirely female—talk about the deaths of other children, and she hadn’t returned for a second visit. Certainly some of her friends had tried to be there for her, but without children of her own anymore, her connections to them began to fray: She would never see these other women at the weekly Girl Scout meetings or T-ball practices or the annual “authors” tea at the elementary school. She would never run into them at the kids’ swimming lessons or ballet, and there was no longer any need to speak with them to coordinate play dates and sleepovers.

  Besides, she didn’t want their sympathy. She wanted only one thing in the world and that was her children, and no one could give her that. And so she retreated completely into a space that consisted only of the animals at the shelter and the work they demanded, her talks with the minister, and her evenings and late afternoons with her husband. She saw nobody else, and for another period after the girls’ deaths there had been the rediscovery—the reinvention, actually—of sex with Terry. About six months after the flood, when the days were long and the summer still stretched out before them, she decided to stop taking her antidepressants, and suddenly she and her husband entered a phase in which they were having sex all the time. She was behind it, and that made it even better. She had felt incredibly powerful, because the sex was not for one minute about trying to re-create a family or have another child. They both knew that wasn’t going to happen. She’d had her tubes tied when the girls were three, after she and Terry concluded that their particular family unit worked well with four people. There were two grown-ups and there were two girls, and this meant that (as Terry put it, only half-kidding) you could play a man-to-man defense. If they had another child, however, the grown-ups would be outnumbered and reduced to a zone.

  For a while, the sex alone had gotten her through it, and she was doing things she had never before imagined. She would surprise Terry in the shower and lather his penis with soap till he came, she would be waiting for him in only a slip or a G-string when he’d come home from work. She wouldn’t care that he hadn’t bathed since that morning, and he’d spent the day in his wool uniform. It didn’t matter that he might smell like his cruiser. They’d make love on the couch, and sometimes when he would kneel on the floor and lick her, her orgasms would be so long and intense that she would cry out and fear that she had peed on the cushions.

  She felt (had she heard the term on the radio?) deliciously slutty.

  But then the days grew short once again, and the first anniversary of the girls’ deaths began to draw near. And she could no longer sit in the den in only a slip or a chemise, because it was simply too cold. She tried waiting for him in the bedroom but it wasn’t the same.

  By Halloween, they were rarely having sex—two and three weeks would pass between couplings—and she considered calling in another prescription for the antidepressant. But she already felt dazed, and she hadn’t liked the drug’s side effects: She was sure it had been the pills that kept her awake at night, and given her an upset stomach almost daily.

  She was aware that her mood swing had badly confused her poor husband. He’d gone from sleeping with a vital, sensuous woman to living with a zombie. Some nights that winter he tried to seduce her, and she did her best to respond. But it was clear that she was, literally, just going through the motions, and by the middle of January he, too, grew disinterested. He grew tired of trying.

  Once, near Valentine’s Day, they fought about her sterilization. She understood they were both being unreasonable, that this was a decision they’d made together, but it had seemed to her at that moment that she’d only done it to please him. Maybe this wasn’t true, but she was also confident that she would never have minded a third child or being a family of five, and she told him so. And then after she added how she wished it wouldn’t be so difficult—if not impossible—to reverse the procedure, he responded in a way that really set her off, because she realized on some level he was dead-on: He told her she couldn’t handle a child right now, she wasn’t ready. He added that he wasn’t ready either, but that second part didn’t matter. She’d barely been listening by then.

  Nevertheless, as the second summer after the girls’ deaths approached, her spirits once again lightened. She found herself planting a vegetable garden for the first time in two years, and she began to care for the flower gardens that had been left largely to their own devices the previous summer. She pulled up the grass that had migrated into the beds and ruthlessly yanked from the soil the Johnny-jump-ups that had overrun entire sections. She cut back the phlox that lined the walk from the end of the driveway to the front door, and added a pair by the steps that were a gray-blue that matched her little girls’ eyes.

  Then, when she found two ornamental clay tubs at a lawn sale, she brought them home and filled them with pink ageratum. They were, she decided, the rural Vermont equivalent of stone lions, and she placed them at the end of their driveway.

  The house sat just beyond the village, midway up a small ridge that offered magnificent views of Mount Ellen and Abraham to the east, but was so sheltered by the bluff and the high trees behind it that evening always came early. Good sunrises, bad sunsets. They were separated from the rest of the town first by the Cousinos’ dairy farm, and then by a wide finger of forest that snaked into the valley and hadn’t yet been logged or cleared for another of the small clusters of houses that seemed to be springing up everywhere within thirty-five miles of Burlington. When the Cousinos would spread manure, she was grateful for those trees and the buffer they offered. There was a house across the street that belonged to a retired college professor and his wife, but otherwise there were no buildings in sight—really no structures even, except for the shed for the cemetery up the hill.

  By the Fourth of July that year she was even seriously considering the possibility of bringing a child into the house via adoption or a foster care program. Maybe, she thought one day as she painted tiny flags on her fingernails, she and Terry might wind up with a little baby, and together they could rediscover the hard work that came with an infant. The girls had been nine when they died, and so their parents’ memories of colic and sleep deprivation were sketchy at best.

  Laura was so inspired by the prospect of another child that she agreed to teach Sunday school the following autumn, giving her at least an hour a week around kids
. She couldn’t have handled such a thing the previous year, but she could now. When the fall arrived, she would teach the first- and second-graders in a classroom in the wing off the sanctuary, using a standardized curriculum that seemed to stress word games and coloring and snacks. She wouldn’t, as she had feared at first, need a degree in theology or the ability to make sense of the prophets. Mostly, she was told, she would just need patience, and she had plenty of that now.

  It had actually been the pastor who suggested a foster child. He’d offered his idea toward the end of May, presenting the notion to her as if she were a wounded bird in his palm, but one he was sure he could heal: He spoke quietly, but with great concentration and will. He said the kids—some of them, anyway—were less troubled than one would imagine, and in many ways they were easier than a baby. After all, they were older. But, he had stressed, they were no less in need of love.

  At first Terry had been tepid to the idea. He said he wasn’t sure how emotionally invested he could become in a child who wasn’t going to be his.

  Sometimes foster children become yours, she explained.

  Not the older ones, I expect.

  Maybe sometimes.

  So how should I view it, then? As a trial adoption?

  I guess if you wanted to, you could.

  He admitted that he could get used to the idea that there wouldn’t be any diapers to deal with, and he said he certainly liked the notion that she’d be happy. Happier, anyway.

  She wasn’t sure if he understood that the state would help subsidize any child they agreed to take in, and she wasn’t sure she should tell him. Terry had a lot of pride, and she didn’t think he’d appreciate public assistance. Moreover, she wasn’t completely sure what she thought of the money, either. She feared that it made them seem mercenary, and their intentions look suspect. She didn’t like herself much when she took a calculator from the kitchen drawer by the refrigerator and multiplied out thirteen dollars and eighty cents, the per diem stipend they’d receive from the state, by the thirty days that fell in so many months. But she also couldn’t stop herself. And while a little less than fourteen dollars a day didn’t sound like a lot of money, it added up quickly—especially since it was all tax-free, and none of it would have to go toward health insurance. Apparently that would be covered by the state.