The Buffalo Soldier

In the ensuing months Terry and Laura will struggle to emerge from their shell of grief only to face an unexpected threat to their marriage; Terry’s involvement with another woman. Meanwhile, Alfred cautiously enters the family circle, and befriends an elderly neighbor who inspires him with the story of the buffalo soldiers, the black cavalrymen of the old West. Out of the entwining and unfolding of their lives, The Buffalo Soldier creates a suspenseful, moving portrait of a family, infused by Bohjalian’s moral complexity and narrative assurance.

With his trademark emotional heft and storytelling skill, bestselling author Chris Bohjalian presents this resonant novel about the formation of an unconventional family the ties that bind it, and the strains that pull it apart.

Book Magazine

Earnest, powerful, The Buffalo Soldier takes its time with ordinary lives: It's a long, involving tale of love and lamentations, home and heartache, written with intelligence and generosity of spirit. Those qualities, unflashy and dependable, typify the writing of Chris Bohjalian, a weekly columnist for the Burlington Free Press who hit it big in 1997 with his fourth novel, Midwives. Combining a legal thriller's momentum with a mildly provocative commentary on alternative medicine, that story was a ready-made selection for Oprah's Book Club. Midwives established Bohjalian as a chronicler of working-class life. The small-town Vermont in which his fiction is set is an intriguing one: of snow and rivers and roadside diners, yes, but also of characters, oftentimes tight-lipped and complex, who are gripped by private struggles. It's an off-kilter Norman Rockwell vision, with darker shadows.

The Buffalo Soldier takes us deeper inside. The story begins in anguish when twin nine-year-old girls drown in a flood of biblical ferocity. In extreme close-up, we witness the aftermath of tragedy: "Their eyes were closed, their hair was tangled with thin twigs and leaves, and there were great clods of mud in the small hollows cast by their joints. Their bodies were bent into shapes that no living person—even a contortionist—could bear." The girls are the only children of highway patrolman Terry Sheldon and his wife, Laura; Bohjalian's story will become one of coping, of coming to terms with the devastation.

Terry, stoic, macho, a kind of competent, hard-worked state trooper straight out of a Bruce Springsteen song, reels quietly and retreats intothe busy solace of his job. Laura simply retreats. A worker at the local Humane Society, she occasionally drags herself into the shelter, seeking the comfort of the orphaned animals. Mainly, however, she withers. "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."

It's Laura's idea to adopt a child. Into their lives, the couple brings ten-year-old Alfred, already a scarred veteran of foster homes. He's shipped to the Sheldons' hamlet from Burlington, a town big enough to have at least accommodated his sense of difference. He's an alien in this new place not only because of his history (the mother who abandoned him was a prostitute), but also because of his heritage. He's just about the only black kid for miles.

Around Alfred, secretive, shell-shocked, silent (his initial sullenness mocks the Sheldons' memories of their girls' bright laughter), a small world will explode. The boy is startled especially by Laura's kindness, but he's learned enough never to trust. One of the book's more affecting scenes finds Alfred hoarding food and utensils in his closet: He's never sure when he'll be forced to move again. "If you only took one or two things a week, the grownups rarely figured out that you were building up a stash," he reasons. While Alfred's relationship with Laura is strained, his relationship with Terry is virtually nonexistent. The two simply can't connect.

Terry's distance from the family only intensifies with yet another twist of fate. On a hunting trip, Terry indulges in an illicit tryst, a tumble less passionate than desperate. In a melodramatic turn of events, the woman becomes pregnant. Laura's discovery of the betrayal, Terry's eventual remorse and his new lover's alternating anger and clutching are all handled sensitively by Bohjalian. What elevates The Buffalo Soldier, however, is the presence of young Alfred. As the adults in his newfound home fret, dissemble and nearly disintegrate, the boy becomes stronger and eventually comes into his own.

He is helped by a neighbor, an old man who, like Alfred, feels out of place in the community. He gives Alfred a book on the buffalo soldiers of the 1860s, black riders in the U.S. cavalry. For Alfred, those riders become dream heroes, inspirations. An experienced horseman himself, the old mentor even teaches Alfred to ride.

The novel climaxes with a flood that echoes the book's beginning and provides both a catalyst for Terry and Laura's reunion and a moment in which Alfred's dreams of heroism become real. We see him on horseback at the end, achieving at least a temporary release: "His whole body starting forward with the big animal in two-point and then—the horse's legs extended before and behind her, a carousel pony but real, the immense thrust invisible to anyone but the boy on the creature's back—he was rising, rising, rising.... And aloft."

While Bohjalian isn't the page-turning storyteller that, say, Stephen King and Alice Hoffman are, he may be something rarer yet equally fine, a remarkably empathetic writer who cares sufficiently about his characters to invest them with genuine warmth, an almost tragic dimension that's rare in mainstream, accessible fiction. With this novel, he's again proved himself a valuable resource—an author of concern and attention. With imagined lives as real as Terry's, Laura's and Alfred's, he's given voice to grief, loneliness, hardship and, ultimately, hope.
—Paul Evans

Perhaps the San Francisco Chronicle said it best: "Bohjalian's hallmark: ordinary people in heartbreaking circumstances behaving with grace and dignity." Since the selection of his dark novel Midwives for Oprah's Book Club back in 1998, Bohjalian has enjoyed mainstream success as one of today's most poignant novelists.