Lazaretto

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  Sylvia fixed her eyes on Nevada’s now. “I am willing to wager that if the one, Buddy, was already spoken for, Kojo’s back would not be in your conversation.”

  “What, Sylvia, are you trying to purport?” Nevada asked, as she ripped at a sapling with her free hand and threw it in the creek.

  “I am saying that you apparently have got some very strong feelings for this Buddy, this available man, but your feelings are so large that they frighten you, so suddenly Kojo, an already-spoken-for man, becomes a sufficient distraction.”

  Nevada sucked air in through her teeth. “You do not know half of what you think you do, Sylvia.”

  “I know Kojo’s wife set a woman’s hair on fire who she suspected of running with him.”

  Nevada looked stunned.

  “Yeah, she did. Hear she splashed the woman’s hair with kerosene and set a candle to it. Said the woman had a beautiful suit of hair. Straighter than yours, so it took its time burning.” She rubbed her hand over Nevada’s hair. “This thick head of hair you got will likely go up like kindling.”

  “Why you lying to me, Sylvia?” Nevada said, as she pushed Sylvia’s hand away. “She never tried to set nobody’s hair on fire.”

  “You can dare to think I am lying. But if I were you, I would wear a hat tonight, something made out of a slow-to-burn material, like maybe cast iron. Maybe you better get on over to the kitchen and find you a pot worthy of decorating to wear on your head.”

  “You know how full of mess you are?” Nevada said as she ran the palm of her hand over her hair as if considering how combustible it was. She’d rinsed it in henna earlier and it was now pulled back in a bun tied with a red ribbon. She took a deep breath then. “I had no intentions of allowing Kojo to whisper his man-lies in my ear, Sylvia, I swear to you, I did not. But I did think Buddy should have come here on the boat with the rest, and that this weekend likely would have helped with his grief over Sister. I guess when I gave Kojo the time of day, I was retaliating against Buddy for not coming to spend the weekend with me. Lord Jesus, so the woman used a candle?”

  “With an extra-thick wick. I’m told she travels with a canteen filled with kerosene.” Sylvia’s voice shook with laughter, and now Nevada laughed, too.

  They both laughed so hard that Bay, head of the cleaning staff, called from the other side of the creek.

  “Thought the party was over at the house,” Bay said. “Sylvia, you not even ready? They gonna be here directly.”

  Nevada held up her bandaged hand, practically wheezing from laughing so. “I’m wounded, Bay.”

  “So I guess I got to carry your load,” Bay said, as she made her way across the narrow, shallow creek, stepping from rock to rock that served as a bridge and then picked up the basket of roses.

  “Well, I would help her but I got to get cleaned up and dressed,” Sylvia said, moving for the creek, then asked if there was still water in the pump.

  “I saved you some,” said Bay. “You last.”

  Nevada called out for Sylvia to hurry. “I need you to come out to kitchen and help me coordinate my headdress,” she said, and that started another round of laughter that caused Sylvia to almost lose her footing. She laughed through her bath, laughed while she dressed, and even while she helped Bay and Nevada finish decorating. She especially laughed when Kojo showed up with his broad back and big hands. Sometimes she hated laughing this deeply, as if a part of her knew that she’d cry soon and the laughter was cutting a path through her chest to make way for the hurt she knew she’d feel. But right now she needed to laugh. She really did.

  19

  THE BOAT LINC had been on, but no longer was, arrived first at the Lazaretto. Linc had slammed around and in turn been slammed around by both men, eventually suffering a sound whipping. They threw him from the boat at Hog Island and told him he was lucky to still be alive. Then they made their delivery at the Lazaretto. They were delivering a nondescript crate that could have held blood-red oranges from Florida. They were such shoddy workers, having been hired from the bottom of the list last-minute by the hospital. They kicked the crate onto the Lazaretto’s pier and then just left it there. No notification to the guardhouse that stood only yards away, no reattachment of the sheet with the yellow markings to indicate the suspected contagion, no signature from the quarantine master or his substitute certifying receipt of the crate. The steady stream of delivery people who’d earlier deposited the side of steer for tonight’s feast, the fresh-killed pig, and double the usual order of meal and potatoes had taken greater care with their leavings than this one dropping off dangerous cargo. Any of the Lazaretto staff would have assumed that the crate was simply the final round of supplies.

  That was a poor assumption indeed. The crate contained the lifeless body of Bram. Though the doctors worked feverishly to save Bram’s life, they declared him expired shortly after the emergency wagon delivered him to the Municipal Hospital. They suspected he’d been suffering from yellow fever. In the prior century, the city of Philadelphia lost thousands of lives to the disease, an ugly disease. Beyond making the sufferers feel that their insides were on fire, yellow fever turned the skin and eyes yellow, caused severe abdominal distress and incessant vomiting; the afflicted would bleed internally, the bleeding so severe that it would spill out of every orifice, even the eyes. The mere thought of an epidemic could unleash hysteria: the panicked wealthy would surely flee the city; commerce would come to a startling halt; all that thrived about the city would surely be toppled, reducing it to a squat of smoldering rags. A previous yellow-fever epidemic had even caused Philadelphia to lose the honor of serving as the permanent capital of the United States.

  So the Board of Health regularly hushed suspected cases of yellow fever and shipped them off to the Lazaretto to be confirmed. As it did so now, with Bram. No toe tag identified Bram by name, no record of death was issued on his behalf. His body was still warm, though barely, when he had been hastily wrapped in thick muslin and packed in a sack and situated inside a nondescript crate.

  Here on the Lazaretto, only the doctor knew to expect the crate, that the crate contained the remains of a possibly infectious corpse. But the doctor was too compromised. He was severely addicted to opium. He’d already forgotten to expect the crate.

  THE DOCTOR HAD just lain on his side in his office and had Spence, the poor groom who should have been off somewhere practicing the cakewalk for the party tonight, administer the opium-stuffed pipe to him. Spence needed to tend to whisking his suit, buffing his shoes, and otherwise preparing himself for his nuptials. So instead of spending the next hour here, letting the doctor casually pull on the pipe, and nod off and then signal Spence that he was ready for more, Spence jammed double the usual amount of opium into the pipe. He lit the pipe and watched the doctor pull hard. There was no sound after a long exhalation of air save the thud of the doctor’s head falling against the cot. The low light of the bedside lamp cast an orange-tinged hue on the doctor’s face. His eyes were closed. His mouth gaped. Spence stood, not moving, afraid that perhaps he’d given him too much at once, perhaps he’d killed him. His mind immediately went to Mora, his bride-to-be. He imagined himself telling Mora that the wedding could not go on because the doctor was dead. Imagined the sense of relief he would feel telling her that. He remained motionless as he confronted himself with the guilty thought that he would rather this man be dead than himself have to say “I do.” He focused on bringing the doctor to. He sat him up and slapped his face and yelled out, “Doctor! Doctor!” Hissing sounds as the doctor drew breath, and Spence suffered a convolution of relief and disappointment.

  “That is it,” Spence said as he inspected the hull of the pipe. “Nothing left but ash.”

  The doctor blinked his eyes, and Spence commenced to clean the pipe and hide it away in the back of the shed where the leeches were kept. He removed the cotton mask from his nose and mouth that he wore to protect his lungs from the onslaught of smoke. He slid his arms from the white jacket that wa
s part of his uniform and always made him feel more like a house Negro than a hospital orderly. He could feel the sweat draining from his armpits as he inspected the jacket closely for signs of ash, then hung it on the hook reserved for him. He poured alcohol on his hands and rubbed them together furiously to clean them. He hurried through the outer office to get to the outside. The telegraph machine made a commotion as Spence walked past, but he tried to ignore it. He stopped, closed his eyes, as if that would close his ears. He went back into the inner office and grabbed the doctor by the shoulders, sat him up again, and shook him into focus. “Tele’s coming in,” he shouted in the doctor’s face.

  The doctor was limp under Spence’s grasp. He smiled a sloppy smile. “You’re one fine nigger, Spence, truly fine.”

  Spence slapped the doctor’s face again hard. “Tele might be urgent,” Spence said as he watched blood rush to the doctor’s face and settle under the skin where his hand had landed. “Urgent! Urgent!” he repeated, but the doctor’s head slumped into a nod, and Spence stared at his hand as if his hand had acted independently of his brain. The doctor started to cough, and Spence could tell he was trying to get his eyes to focus. Spence was relieved. If he had to hit him again, he thought his hand might totally disassociate from the rest of him and become a balled fist and not stop until the doctor was an unrecognizable pulp. He helped the doctor to his feet and led him to the outer office past the solid oak desk and the shelves with mammoth-sized books to the side of the room where the telegraph machine wheezed and stuttered. The doctor leaned against the table as he squinted to decipher the markings the machine made. “Spence, look at this, crate coming with suspected contents to be examined—holy shit, look at this, Spence.” Spence didn’t look at the telegraph. He studied his pinky finger instead. His finger was a misshaped mass of bone and gristle fused that way when he was eight years old after his mother doused his finger with acid for reading aloud. Told him that if he was ever tempted to let on to a white person that he could read, just look at his finger and imagine that it was his face. She’d witnessed such a horror perpetrated against her childhood friend where she’d grown up, in western Georgia; she’d been made to watch after he’d been caught reading aloud as sulfuric acid was splashed in his face. His screams, she said, were a part of her fiber after that, remaining with her constantly. The lesson stuck. Though it was twenty years since the Emancipation, his mother had already been a free woman for almost a decade when she’d melted away the skin on his baby finger—and though Spence was a prolific reader, he’d been rendered incapable of admitting to his literacy. He rubbed his finger now and allowed his eyes to retreat to their practiced blankness. The doctor waved him away. And in a flash Spence was out of the room, out of the house.

  The doctor mumbled as he maneuvered around the table, stepping with extreme care, as if walking a tightrope. “Ledoff, I must tell Ledoff. Crate coming.” He repeated it over and over, walking a line to the door, then onto the porch. He half-sat, half-landed on the porch bench. He vaguely remembered that Ledoff had left for the weekend, so what did it matter, what did anything matter? The mist was hanging in strings and he moaned and angled his face so that the mist could stroke his face and soothe some the stinging place where Spence had hit him hard. He looked out onto the Delaware and marveled at how smoothly the river coursed all the way to the horizon, where the sky and river appeared locked in an openmouthed kiss. “Ah, love,” he said, about to descend into another opium nod. But then he jerked up, because suddenly the sky and river parted lips and coughed out two boats. “Two boats?” the doctor whispered. “How many dead men are coming this evening?” He tried to get up. “I must tell somebody,” he said. But the mist was too charming now; and, anyhow, his chin was already at his chest as he lightly snored.

  The wedding guests arrived, shouting and praying and cursing and calling for help as they disembarked. Kojo was first on the scene and was immediately consumed by the chaos as his mind tried to put together what happened. Had they capsized? Were they all accounted for? His wife, Lil, where was his wife? Lord, please don’t punish me thus for taking up with Nevada, he screamed in his head when he didn’t see his wife among the first to have staggered in their hysteria from the boat. Then Lena was at his side. She yanked Kojo’s arm, and they began yelling at each other as Kojo asked what happened, where was Lil. And Lena just kept saying, “He’s gonna bleed to death, get us help.”

  “Who’s gonna bleed to death, and where is my wife?” Kojo yelled at Lena.

  Lena pointed in the direction of Carl being carried from the boat and stretched on the pier, and Kojo saw the blood pushing past the wrap around Carl’s leg. Kojo grabbed Lena by the shoulders and looked directly in her face. “Listen like you should but usually don’t, Lena. There’s a bell over there by the guard tower, a thick cord hanging. Get to it as fast as you can and pull the cord with everything you got.”

  Two barges sat symmetrically at the pier of the Lazaretto. After the sun set, a bargeman emerged on the hour to strike the bell, sending a pleasant series of chimes through the compound. A thick cord hung from one side of the bell, too thick to sway even. When yanked, as Lena did on Kojo’s frantic command, the cord activated not only the bell but forced the mallet to strike a massive circular gong. The hit against the gong caused the air to reverberate, releasing an air-splitting, urgent sound that stretched from the pier all the way across the creek to the staff house, where Sylvia had just now finished unwrapping the scarf from her head, and remnants of laughter from her earlier teasing of Nevada still hovered in her chest. She pulled her fingers through her hair. She’d plaited it before her bath to stretch it out, and it was now a thick and full halo. She smiled at herself in the square of mirror glass propped up against her bedroom dresser. That’s when she heard the gong.

  It had been weeks since the gong had been sounded, and that time a man had jumped from a ship originating in the Mediterranean and swam ashore and was running loose around the Lazaretto. She could tell by the splash of darkness outside the window that it was past time for the boat to have arrived. The boat carrying Vergie. She thought first of Vergie. She froze then. Uncharacteristic of her in the face of an emergency to freeze. Said out loud into the bedroom air, “Vergie, Vergie, my God, please don’t let that gong have anything to do with the boat carrying Vergie.”

  Nevada stuck her head into the room. “What’s the gong about?”

  “No idea,” Sylvia said. Her hands were shaking and she rubbed them along her dress.

  “You all right? Sylvie?”

  “Yeah, yeah, let me get down there and see what is going on.” She pushed past Nevada and was out of the room.

  The creek separated the staff’s living quarters from the other side of the compound. Sylvia slowed herself as she navigated the rocks that served as a bridge over the creek. She concentrated on the stew of sounds. The night clatter moving through the trees mixed with the water’s loud swishing over the rocks, and now the noisy crickets and frogs. She tried to focus on the frog sounds. She didn’t have her lamp, and she’d heard how the nurse who’d preceded her had once been running through this area in the dark and slipped on a frog and split her head wide open. She saw a sliver of light at her feet then. It widened into a band. Heard Nevada’s voice. “Don’t worry. She is unharmed, I am sure.”

  “Who?” Sylvia asked, not turning around.

  “Verge.”

  “What makes you think I’m worried?”

  “I know you all to pieces is what.”

  “You do not know most of what you think you do.” Sylvia stepped over a frog, grateful for the lamp Nevada carried.

  “I know you needing this light I’m shredding over your footfalls,” Nevada said as if on cue.

  “That would be shedding.”

  “Actually, my light is falling piecemeal, so what I said is what I meant. And furthermore you should step from outta your shoes and run, now that thanks to me you able to see where the hell you going. You know you want to.”<
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  “Yeah, but you could not keep up with me running. And now that I have the benefit of your scraggly lamp, I’m used to it.”

  “I shan’t only keep up, I’ll race you. And if I win, I want a piece of white lace to edge my curtains.”

  “And what I get if I win?” Sylvia asked as she bent to pull her shoes from her feet.

  “You already got the light.”

  Sylvia was out of her shoes, and she and Nevada jumped onto the final rock that bridged the creek. They ran then, through the area they all called “the hemorrhage” because the roses were blood red, then through the tangled understory of berry vines and oak saplings that edged the dead house and the crematory, then the perimeter of the cemetery. The earth was soft and warm under their feet, muddy in places, and they hoisted their party dresses as they ran past the patch of farmland with the hens and goats that kept them supplied with eggs and milk. Then the cook’s shed and the main house and the mansions where the doctor and quarantine master lived that looked out on the startling river just beyond the barges.

  They were at the top of the clearing. Then they slowed to a trot, their breaths responding in turn, their bodies trained for runs like this because they often needed to get from where they slept to the main house in a hurry. Especially Sylvia. They had an unobstructed view of the pier. The huddled party guests appeared to have been cast down from Heaven, the way the searchlight was turned on them. They resembled a flock of geese, wet and fluttering.

  “Sweet Jesus, what has happened?” Sylvia said, as much to herself as to Nevada.

  Now she saw the stretcher being carried; her heart stopped.