Parting the Waters

High water does more in Chris Bohjalian’s eighth novel than flood basements, rip up roads and topple bridges. It also rearranges the characters’ emotional landscapes, imprisoning them in mourning and guilt and, sometimes, carving them an unexpected way out.

Two years before the action of “The Buffalo Soldier” begins, a flash flood in rural Vermont drowned the 9-year-old twin daughters of state Highway Patrol Sgt. Terry Sheldon and his wife, Laura, who works at an animal shelter. Bohjalian, the author of “Midwives” and “Trans-Sister Radio,” describes this tragedy in an interestingly detached way.

He doesn’t enter the parents’ minds, much less the girls’. He downplays the drama. He writes as if he were a journalist who has interviewed witnesses well after the fact. It’s a voice deliberately at odds with the story it tells, much as the narrator in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” brings logic to bear, too late, on events driven by irrational passions.

Laura is unable to give birth again, so after the numbness of grief has lifted a little, the Sheldons take in a foster child from Burlington, a 10-year-old African American boy named Alfred. A neighbor, retired history teacher Paul Hebert, lets Alfred ride his horse and gives him a book about the Buffalo Soldiers, black U.S. cavalrymen and infantrymen who helped patrol the Great Plains after the Civil War.

Alfred, a bright but very quiet boy who has shuttled though many foster homes and hoards food against the likelihood of another sudden move, warms slowly to the Sheldons but is inspired by one of the Buffalo Soldiers, Sgt. George Rowe, whose rules for his troops in the 1870s included: “They are to obey orders, but they are to remember they belong to no one but themselves. There is a difference between a good soldier and a slave.”

Each of Bohjalian’s chapters is prefaced with a quotation from Rowe’s letters, military reports of the period or a 1938 WPA interview with Rowe’s widow, Veronica, who was a 16-year-old Comanche mother of two named Popping Trees when her first husband, fleeing soldiers led by Rowe, drowned trying to cross a flooded Texas river.

Popping Trees, captured with her children, worked in the 10th Cavalry’s laundry and saw a gentler side of Rowe. “I knew he liked me,” she told the interviewer. “Maybe if I had been older it would have been harder to like him, given what his uniform meant to my people. But I ... was still so young. And he was very handsome.”

The Rowes’ unlikely love story unfolds in counterpoint to the Sheldons’ efforts to create a new family on the ruins of their old one. Grief has turned husband and wife into near-strangers. Terry is unable to get past his stereotype of what Alfred, the only black kid in town, should be--damaged goods. He discovers the food cache and concludes that the boy is a thief.

Terry meets an attractive young woman, Phoebe Danvers, on a deer hunting trip. They have a brief and seemingly casual affair--but then Phoebe turns out to be pregnant, and the previously faithful Terry is drawn, more than he would have thought possible, by the idea of starting all over with an unscarred mate and a baby who shares his DNA.

If “The Buffalo Soldier” has a villain, it would have to be Terry, but in truth Bohjalian invites sympathy for all his characters, muted with the same detachment with which he described the girls’ drowning. In the bulk of the novel, he does enter everyone’s minds, but the voice remains his own--varying only slightly from one character to the next. We notice this particularly in Alfred’s case: The expected slang is mostly absent, and the adult language reinforces our impression that the boy is mighty mature for a 10-year-old.

At his best, Bohjalian gives us fine-grained detail and beautifully observed domestic psychology that recalls Jane Hamilton (“A Map of the World”). His pace is leisurely, however, and his people are so unfailingly decent, intelligent and insightful that we come to long for some genuinely nasty behavior.

Relief comes, instead, from scenes of Terry on the job, coping with speeders and foul weather and bloody accidents. Terry may be in trouble at home, but in uniform he’s as brave and resourceful, in his way, as the other sergeant, Rowe, who Alfred imagines was his great-great-great-grandfather. Terry and Alfred need each other, though it takes a final flood--a deus ex machina--to make them realize it.