the Buffalo Soldier (2002) by Bohjalian Chris

Author:Bohjalian, Chris [Chris, Bohjalian,]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-02-21T23:10:17.968000+00:00

SERGEANT GEORGE ROWE,

TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

LETTER TO HIS BROTHER IN PHILADELPHIA,

MAY 24, 1876

*

Phoebe

She watched her eight-year-old niece put the Tek safety vest on over her sweater, and her nephew--younger than Crystal by close to two years, but, still, almost as tall--pound the girl's shoulder pads with the pillowy flesh at the bottoms of his fists. His hands looked to her like a pair of small baking potatoes.

Stop it! the girl said, but it was clear that she wasn't all that annoyed. She liked the present, and she liked the proof that the shoulder pads cushioned the blows.

Her brother and sister-in-law's living room was still layered with the crinkled wrapping paper that the family had deposited there earlier that morning. Whole sections of the rug were hidden beneath crumpled red foil, some of which her brother had balled up and placed in a corner by the couch when she and their father arrived, but had since been reanimated into a pile that dwarfed the coffee table beside it. The tree in the bay window was massive, it must have been just inches short of ten feet: Someone had placed the star against the tip of the tree, rather than upon it, because the tip was almost touching the ceiling. She noticed there were far more ornaments along the bottom of the evergreen than the top, and she assumed this was because her nephew and niece had done most of the decorating.

We're supposed to get some snow tonight, maybe as much as six or seven inches, her sister-in-law was saying to the children. Tomorrow should be much better.

Apparently, earlier that morning her brother and sister-in-law had put the miniature snowmobiles in the back of the truck and tried to find a patch of ground outside of the town with enough snow to try the machines out, but they'd failed. There were long patches of rock-hard ice and the ground was pretty solid, but there just wasn't a lot of powder. The kids had been disappointed, and so their parents mollified them by reminding them every chance they got that the forecast included snow.

Her brother and sister-in-law lived in a stately brick house just up the hill from Main Street in Littleton. It always amazed her how well Wallace had done for himself--selling insurance, of all things. Veronica, his wife, had grown up just south of Littleton in a village called Sugar Hill, and came from ski money--her grandfather had helped open one of the resorts near Echo Lake--but Wallace took pride in the fact that they had bought this house entirely with the income they'd earned from his insurance company and Veronica's interior design business. In reality, of course, most of Veronica's clients were friends of her parents and grandparents in Franconia, Bethlehem, and Sugar Hill. No matter. It was still income instead of interest. Not a penny had come from a trust fund.

You're sure you wouldn't like a glass of wine or some eggnog? Veronica was asking her. Maybe a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.