Lazaretto

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  LINC SETTLED THE clouds in his chest and was on his way back to the table when he saw a woman in the alley struggling with a container of trash. Her cheeks were red, her swollen ankles peeking from under her skirt, and he guessed she was the age his mother would have been as she huffed and puffed, and there was no way he could not help her, and so he offered his arm to escort her back across the alley. She pushed him away on a laugh: “With those charming looks, go break the heart of someone closer your own age. Try my daughter, she’s not spoken for, you know. Yoo-hoo, get here, Maggie!” she called, and a younger woman sauntered toward them with cheeks as red as hers, though she had markedly slimmer ankles. Linc was polite. He took the younger woman’s hand in a gentle press between his own, called her “my lady” as they embarked on the timeless two-step of him pretending that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and she with lowered eyes, fingers pressed over lips to suppress a giggle as if she’d never been addressed in such an unfathomable way. He was not aware of the commotion out in front of the tavern, of the shrieks and then the urgent clang of the emergency wagon. Workmen had been laying tracks for the new horseless trolley, so there were bursts of that ear-splitting noise; otherwise his senses were engaged back in this alley, where the air was hot and close and smelled of granite dust and rotten peaches. Pigeons circled overhead dropping white smatterings, butchers on a break two doors down argued loudly, and Linc felt himself weakening under the sway of the young woman’s shyness. Though it was feigned shyness; she was a forward one, he could tell. She asked him if he was Black Irish, as his lovely eyes and hair were so dark, and he told her that his mother died birthing him, his father had been killed in the war, and that he was likely a mongrel. Her cheeks bloomed even redder as she whispered that she had a mongrel dog once that loved to be stroked, and she’d taken great pleasure in obliging. “Such great pleasure,” she said as her voice dipped into a moan and her hooded eyes opened wide for the briefest moment as she looked at him directly. He went into a tug-of-war then with his own arousal—on the one pull of the rope was the thrill of being enticed into her softness, on the other was past experience, which told him that she’d soon make demands that he’d be unable to meet. But as she talked, he realized that she was hinting that she wanted no other time than this time. She was smart, he could tell. And their repartee got hot as the sun back there as he looked around for her mother. “Mum is left,” she said then. “Put in her day’s work and gone to make her cabbage stew. I like cabbage thrust in the hot pot until it softens. You?” she asked.

  “I confess, I do,” he said as he felt his discretion fall away such as it had never done while in a sober state. She put her fingers to her lips, motioning for him to be quiet, and led him to the end of the, by then, desolate alley, where a broken-down carriage with three wheels sat propped on its axle. She climbed into the seat and pulled him to her. He expected at that moment for her to name her fee. Reasoned that the one she called her mum was but a poor excuse for a madame. But it didn’t matter at that point. He’d already crossed that line where he’d grown two more legs and lost the use of his rational mind. She curled her finger, demurred a “Come on here,” as they squeezed into the floor of the carriage, at which moment she took complete control. Controlled the moves and the tempo, controlled when he squeezed and arched his back and even covered his mouth to quiet the uh, the ah, all gaspy sounds he made. She took care of things the way no woman ever had, rendering him a sap with no spine, no constitution, no brain to speak of. He was just an explosion of sensation, whipped round and round, and she owned him completely.

  Afterward, he was dazed, lying on his back on the floor of the carriage, watching the cumulus clouds point down and laugh. He didn’t move at first, too drained and satisfied to move. When he felt the blood flow back into his head, his brain, when he was thinking relatively clearly, he gathered himself, pulled his clothes back together, and stumbled out of the carriage.

  The alley was eerily empty. He felt his pocket then. His billfold was gone. He yelled out, “Hey, Maggie, you dirty thief!” He ran from one end of the alley to the other. Then stopped himself, reasoning that she and her so-called mum likely did this all the time, surely they had an escape route. He started walking toward the back of the tavern. Felt a lump of rage in his throat at her, at himself for being such an ass. The lump exploded in an unexpected eruption of laughter. He thought he was on the verge of hysteria, he laughed so hard; he was out a week’s wages, and still he laughed, the laughter seeming to come from the same deep place that throbbed painful over the sad fact of Meda’s death. Remembered suddenly how Meda used to tell him that although she wasn’t wholly certain at all times that there was a God, she was pretty sure about the matter—when in the midst of heartache there was suddenly presented a reason for laughter.

  He stepped back into the tavern, where the air was cool the way that stone buildings felt cool. He would tell Bram about what just happened to him, give them both some reasons for laughter.

  But the table was empty when he returned. He looked around now and noticed suddenly that the entire tavern was empty, just the wide slats of dust hanging in the air. Bram’s ale glass had been tipped over, its contents puddled on the sawdust-covered floor. Linc just stood there, the thought trying to nudge into his consciousness that the commotion out front—a large crowd had gathered—had something to do with Bram. But what were the chances of that, he asked himself, meaning to settle himself, as he picked up his satchel from the chair, stepped outside, and looked around for Bram—even called his name as he moved through the crowd, asking “What’s happened out here?” of no one in particular.

  16

  BRAM HAD ALREADY been scooped onto the emergency wagon by the time Linc stepped outside of the tavern. Linc was still calling Bram’s name, his anxiety beginning to mount when he asked a waif of a boy who was standing in the crowd what had happened.

  “I looked over and he was leaving the tavern with a staggering gait. His body shook, and I thought he was laughing. Then he bent and upchucked a ocean. See?” He pointed toward the ground. “Must be everything that was in his gut.”

  “What was his appearance?” Linc asked, trying not to see the black-colored blood seeping into the cobblestone.

  “Blond hair, it was pulled back in a ponytail. And he had a scar on his crown like this,” he made a W shape with his fingers and Linc felt as if a cannonball had formed in his chest and dropped all at once to the pit of his stomach. “Yer know him, do you?” the boy asked, noticing the cloud that fell over Linc’s face. “He already been scooped onto a wagon, already at hospital, I’d say.”

  The boy continued talking about the horrid spectacle of all that Bram had brought up from his gut. But Linc had already started running up the street, was already at Pennsylvania Hospital. The hospital had him wait, and then relayed that Bram had already been transported to Philadelphia Hospital, where they told Linc that Bram was not there.

  Linc’s frustration turned almost to violence when he stabbed two fingers into the chest of a tight-lipped clerk, at which the man pleaded, “Sir, please, I know nothing of your brother. And I need my employment here, and my wages, after all.”

  Linc was almost relieved when several orderlies converged and surrounded him and proceeded to manhandle him. He could at least punch and kick and curse and push back and wrestle and expend the energy building up inside of him, which was his fear that something devastating had happened to Bram. He’d just lost Meda. Not Bram, too, he wanted to shout, as one of the orderlies said that a constable was coming over to query him.

  “For what cause?” Linc shouted at him.

  “For assault.”

  “I assaulted no one.”

  “I got a hospital clerk that say otherwise,” he said, then asked Linc his name.

  “What does my name matter?” Linc spit out.

  “Because you look like a man with a bounty on his head. And the constable gives us a cut of his commission every time we reel on
e in. What crimes you committed in the municipality of Philadelphia?”

  “Ain’t from here.” Linc put on his Italian accent. “This is my first time in this filthy shithole of a city.”

  “Well, the constable got the sketchings of every ugly face wanted in the municipality seared in his brain, and once he looks at you, he shall know, without a doubt, whether yer ugly face is on one of the wanted posters crowding his wall.”

  Linc continued to no avail to try and wrestle his hands free. They pushed him through an archway that led to a tunnel. Told himself that he surely must be dreaming when he heard a voice penetrate the tunnel’s thick black air. It was a woman’s voice, smooth and resonant, bouncing around in the tunnel. “Dey taking him to da house named for da one Jesus woken from da dead,” the disembodied voice said. “Lazus house.”

  “Is that that crazy nigger bitch?” one of the orderlies said as the woman came into view, her face practically indistinguishable from the tunnel’s air, though her dress certainly was not, her dress a cornucopia of colorful patched-together rags.

  “Thought she was warned to stay out of this tunnel,” said another.

  One of the orderlies pushed her aside. “Get back in the crazy house where you belong,” he said.

  “Yer listen to her at your own peril,” another said to Linc. “She charged with cleaning the shit off the wall in the crazy house, and the stench has gone to her brain and made her crazy, too.”

  “Only keeps her employment here,” said another, “because every time they try to release her one of the head blokes loses a son to diphtheria, so they fear she might be casting around spells.”

  They joked about that prospect now even as they pummeled Linc until they kicked him through the door into the rear courtyard of the hospital, where vats of burning rags gave off gray plumes that smelled of human waste. “Constable be here in short order to nail yer ugly ass,” one of them said, as they laughed, and then silence after the door smacked shut.

  Linc massaged his sides as he looked around and saw that he was completely fenced in, the wall at least ten feet high, smooth and unscalable, he thought. Then the woman from the tunnel appeared again, as if the putrid, smoky air had formed her. “You be searching for da one wid da rings, I hid dem rings.”

  “Rings?” Linc asked, moving closer. “You mean the scars on his forehead? Yes, do you know where he is?”

  “Lazas house,” she said. “Dat’s where he goin’.”

  “The Lazaretto? Quarantine? Why quarantine?”

  She put her hands to her temples and made small tapping motions. “Say he got da fever. Say dey pile him on da boat wit da rebel shitheads.”

  “Is he alive? Was he talking? Breathing?”

  “Dey’s shitheads drivin’ dat boat. Dey not da ones who usey show up to take a one to Lazus house. But dey say dat’s where dey go. I hear it sure as I hear da one shithead call me nigger hag. ‘What cho lookin’ at, nigger hag,’ he say to me? No need for him to talk to me in dat way. Why? Why?” She looked directly at Linc when she asked it. “Dat’s why I holds onto da rings.” She rubbed her temples in ferocious circles. Her skin was smooth even where the creases were. Linc touched her shoulder, told her that neither did he understand why someone would talk to her in that way, which at least seemed to calm her.

  “How did you get out here?” he asked her.

  She pointed to a corner of the courtyard cut out in square that the cats used to come and go.

  “Where does it lead?”

  “The tunnel you just came trew.”

  He sighed and looked from the cut-out square to the top of the fence, trying to decide.

  She seemed to read his thoughts. “I seen rats big as jackals come and go ober dere.”

  She walked across the courtyard, close to the smoldering vats of trash. Linc followed; he nearly gagged from the smell. He kicked at a rectangle of red bricks stacked against the wall. The bricks separated easily and he was staring at a jagged hole. She sat down next to the hole and crossed her legs in a bow and fixed her hands as if she was praying. She breathed deeply, audibly, and Linc wondered how she endured the stench. He lay flush to the ground and pushed his head through the opening and was staring at a mound of hay. He inhaled a waft of horse manure that was as perfume after the stench of the smoldering trash. He struggled to maneuver through the hole but his shoulders were stuck. “Turn yourself,” he heard her say. Her voice seemed to come from the other side of the fence, and he wondered if she was an apparition, though he was certain about the nonexistence of such things. She was leaning over him, pushing against his shoulder. Do one, den da oder one. He did. Shards of wood punctured his skin, ripping it, as he thought he heard the door open. He bent his knees and with a final thrust was on the other side. A stable. He rolled through the hay; he wanted to yell from the burn of the hay against his raw skin. He managed to stand and start running in one quick move. He was through the stable, back out on the street. He leaned and gasped to catch his breath. Then he started to run again, looking toward the river. Made his way to the pier. He walked up and down the pier, calling out, “Lazaretto! Any boys pushing off for the Lazaretto?” though he knew he had no money for fare. Had only the contents of his satchel, his timepiece the only thing of worth.

  Had he gotten to the pier just a few minutes earlier he likely could have talked his way onto Carl’s boat. Carl, still the generous person he’d always been, was ferrying a boatload of people to the Lazaretto for, of all things, a grand wedding celebration for two of Lazaretto’s live-in staff. Since high-quarantine season was winding down—ships were already being directed farther upriver to the Port of Philadelphia, and the hospital was all but empty; and since the Lazaretto was a lush backdrop for a wedding, with its stunning overlook of the river and its formal gardens, the quarantine master consented to them inviting a few family members to sit in witness. But once word of the wedding spread, people signed on to attend whether or not they had affection for the couple because the trip would give them the weekend with their own loved ones who lived and worked at the quarantine station. Like Vergie, for example, eager for the chance to see Sylvia; like Miss Ma, because Nevada now worked at the Lazaretto as the head cook; like Carl, who offered to transport them all because, well, because Sylvia was there; like Splotch, who’d been nursing an intense desire for Vergie of late and hoped the weekend away with her might deal him a lucky hand.

  But Carl and his crammed vessel had just pushed off. And the few remaining ferrymen declined Linc’s request, his offer of his watch. Until he approached a couple of half-drunk men who said they were moving in that direction. “Gittin’ on to Wilmington but got te pause by the leper house to deliver cargo stored below. Show me what yer got.” Linc gave up his timepiece. And then he was Lazaretto bound.

  PART II

  17

  IT WAS LATER than it should be for a river ride, particularly for a boatload of twenty black people traveling the Delaware in a southerly direction. The sky was already dressed in evening red, its purple and black lining beginning to show. But Carl and his passengers had pushed off from the dock a full hour past their departure time because many had overpacked and it had taken time to accommodate their cargo: their presents for the bride and groom; their own plaid vests and taffeta skirts and crinoline slips and cuffed-bottom pants, and shoes for doing the cake walk; even the attitudes some had managed to squeeze on board because this assemblage was ripe for disharmony.

  The groom, Spence, was an orderly at the Lazaretto’s hospital whose aunt lived in close proximity to Sylvia’s family. The bride, Mora, the facility’s processing clerk, hailed not far from Fitzwater Street, where Miss Ma and Nevada and Buddy lived. So those they’d invited already came from different worlds. The teachers avoided the gamblers; and there was even dissension within like kind: the one didn’t like the other because their child outlasted the other at the Coachmen’s Association–sponsored spelling bee promenade; or the member of First African felt put down by the church cler
k at Mother Bethel A.M.E.; or the one’s Virginia-born husband had ruined the new brocaded couch of the native Philadelphian by spilling hot pipe ash upon it. And if they needed yet another strain of contention, those related to the bride and groom resented the whole field of opportunists who had taken the trip just to be with kin. These were trifles back home, where their differences receded in the face of them all being black in Philadelphia. Though in the confined space of the boat, their differences were dramatic and their personalities were popping like firecrackers, and Carl warned that their discord would surely make them capsize.

  Fortunately the weather was pleasant and the trip not very long since Carl was worried about the weight. He’d constructed the boat himself over several years from the scraps and throwaway pieces of other shipbuilders down at the waterfront. He called it a schooner, though it was smaller than most schooners, two-masted, with only a small cube of below space, which was now packed with the things they’d carried on board. As the boat groaned and creaked like an arthritic mule on its way down the Delaware River, Carl noticed another boat traveling in the same general direction. The other boat was the one Linc, with the promise of his watch, had talked his way onto. It was a yawl, smaller and lighter, and it had come to within a few meters of the wedding guests and was now floating alongside. When Carl saw that there were white men in the boat, his discomfort mounted over their intentions after their sudden change in velocity. He’d heard stories about black boaters terrorized on this river by white men. He was just about to call to his assembled passengers standing portside to tell them to step back from the rail. The railing was low and he didn’t want any passengers tumbling overboard. But they were already waving out how-dos to those in the other boat, and at least for the moment they weren’t going after one another. He convinced himself to settle down, reasoned that it was just his day to be on edge. He was on edge about the weight they carried, on edge about the approach of the other boat, and now even on edge about the height of the railing. At least there was a railing, he told himself. Where he stood at the helm, there was no railing. The only place he’d scrimped was the area around the helm, because that was his space, and he knew where to step and where not to step.