22
SYLVIA WOKE WITH a jolt. The first light of day was pushing through the parlor, and a foul odor had overpowered the air in here. She sat straight up and took in a deep breath, and the odor assaulted her stomach like a fist. Carl, she thought first of Carl. His pain had been considerable when she’d last checked on him, just a couple of hours ago. She’d given him more morphine and left him in the chasm between sleep and delusion, and then returned here and nodded off on the couch, intending to help Nevada and Bay and Vergie and whoever else was in the kitchen, chattering away as they cleaned up after the party; told herself she just needed to sit still, rest her eyes, for the briefest period of time. The last thing she remembered, her moccasins were slid from her feet, her legs pulled up onto the couch, a pillow eased under head, a light sheet draped over her, and her forehead gently kissed. She’d fallen into a soft slumber and dreamed that she and Carl were dancing in the river, and then she was trying to remember why she’d ever quit such a man who could move so in the water. Then a gray octopus tangled her up and Carl disappeared under the water and the octopus began defecating all over her, and though the smell was nauseating, she clung to the octopus because the feel of his droppings was like silk. She threw the dream off with the sheet as she got up from the couch, but the odor hadn’t left with the dream. She thought then that the smell was inside her head, a warning to her of Carl’s infected leg. He would lose the leg, she was sure. She sighed heavily and slipped her feet into her moccasins and started for the stairs. She’d have to arrange transport for Carl back to Philadelphia as soon as possible. They were too short-staffed here to even consider a surgery as major as amputating a leg. No doctor really to speak of, and since Ledoff had given most of the staff leave, there was really just her, with Spence to assist, and though Spence would be an apt assistant, this was his wedding day, after all; and, besides, she wasn’t about to attempt it, she told herself, and that settled it.
She tiptoed into her bedroom, where Vergie was fast asleep. She went to her chest of drawers and pulled out a loose cotton dress. The aroma of pine greeted her, a relief from that other smell, and the dress that she changed into now smelled of the mint oil that Bay would drizzle in the basin where they washed their clothes. It both invigorated and calmed her.
She was halfway out of the room when Vergie stirred and was immediately fully awake, grinning in that way that showed all of her gums.
“Lookout, sunshine, your competition has arrived, because Vergilina is up,” Sylvia said, as she came all the way back into the room and laughed in spite of herself.
“Sylvia, you didn’t come to bed. I slept small so you’d have room.”
“You do not know the meaning of sleeping small. There is still a spot on my back from two years ago when we shared sleeping space at Nevada’s people’s house in Virginia.”
“Awl,” Vergie said, feigning remorse, then turned remorseful for real as she asked about Carl.
“Headed over there now to make sure he’s comfortable. He was comfortable when I left him, and Spence is with him now.”
Vergie sat on the side of the bed with her hands in her lap. She studied her fingers, fighting tears, Sylvia could tell. “Come hook the back of my dress and redo this bun in my hair and tell me about the party,” Sylvia said. “Did you behave at the party or were you full of your usual sass?”
“I was my typically well-behaved self,” Vergie said as she sniffed and jumped up and ran to Sylvia and hugged her. “Please tell me that he will live.”
“Only the Good Lord can make and keep such a promise. But as far as my trained eye can see, he does not appear to be dying at this moment. I’m going to arrange for him to be transported back to Philadelphia as soon as possible. Now hook my dress in the back, and tell me who all is here who I may or likely do not know, and describe who made a fool of themselves doing the cakewalk.”
Vergie fastened the dress and Sylvia sat at the vanity as Vergie removed the pins holding Sylvia’s bun in place. “Well, of course you know Miss Ma is here—”
“Lord, yes, thought I heard her laughing when I was all the way over at the hospital.”
“And Skell—”
“He is officiating the wedding, Nevada says—”
“And that frightful Lena—”
“Well, she is the bride’s sister, so I guess she thinks that gives her special license to be more intolerable than usual—”
“And there was a strange man who wandered into the parlor last night, tracking up the place with mud.”
“Stranger?” Sylvia thought immediately of her encounter at the creek. “Tall? Dark-haired white man? Proclaimed himself named for President Lincoln.”
“Sounds as you describe him,” Vergie said as she brushed Sylvia’s hair and tried to ignore her own quickening pulse. “You two crossed paths?”
“At the creek,” Sylvia said, as she closed her eyes and enjoyed the feel of the brush against her hair. “Supposed to have been looking for his brother sent here from the hospital. Though he’s either mistaken or loony, the hospital always alerts us. I directed him back to the other side of the creek. How did he end up here? Must have been before he met up with me near the barges. I took pity on him and allowed him to take sleeping space in the curing shack. ”
“He remains here?” Vergie asked, trying to slow her breathing down.
“Mnhm.” Sylvia bent her head so Vergie could brush her edges. She thought she might drift off to sleep, the brushstrokes were so relaxing.
“Well, are you aware that he’s black?” Vergie asked on a quick intake of air, giving her voice a breathy sound.
“We are not talking about the same man then,” Sylvia said as she opened her eyes and picked up Vergie’s reflection in the mirror. “This one is definitely white, tall, dark-haired.”
“We are talking about one and the same. Lincoln. Did you just say he was named for the president?”
“And he claimed to be black?”
“He did indeed.”
“Explicitly?”
“Yes, and at first I doubted the claim but I spoke of it to Nevada and she confirmed it.”
“Does Nevada know him?”
“No, but she said that if the tips of his ears are black, then he is surely colored, and I do recall that they were—”
“What! Tips of his ears are black? Only Nevada could come up with such foolishness.”
“Well, she insists that she’s known many a light-skinned colored pass themselves off as white, but she’s never ever seen it happen the other way around. Which is a fact. Have you, Sylvia? Have you ever known of a white man who claims to be colored?”
“Just because I have no knowledge of it happening does not mean that it has not happened.”
“But what would a white person gain by doing such a thing?
“Depends on what they might be after—”
“Well, Nevada said that I should be the last somebody questioning a person’s race. To which I had to clamp my lips shut because she is justified in saying it.”
“And all of this about the man’s race, this matters to you why, Vergilina?” Sylvia asked. She could see even in the mirror the sudden change in the color of Vergie’s cheeks, her cheeks tinted the shade of a peach at full ripeness that hangs lower on the branch, begging to be picked. “How well do you know this Lincoln, after all?”
“I do not know a thing about him and I do not care a thing about him.”
“Who said a word about caring for him? Now you just went ahead and introduced that prospect. Do you care about him?”
“Sylvia! I only saw him for the first time last night, how much could I know him? And besides, your scalp is dry, where do keep your pomade?”
Sylvia pointed to the vanity drawer and Vergie retrieved the pomade and rubbed it into Sylvia’s hair and commenced to give her a vigorous scalp massage. She started at the nape of her neck and worked her fingers all the way to her forehead. Sylvia closed her eyes, enjoying it, Vergie could tell, as
she felt the tension in Sylvia’s scalp ease under the press of her fingers. Poor Sylvia, Vergie thought. How difficult the whole situation with Carl must be for her. She wondered if Sylvia blamed her the way that Lena and probably most of the people on the boat blamed her, the way she blamed herself. She felt herself about to cry again so she tried to change her line of thought since she considered it unconscionable to put Sylvia in the position of having to console her right now. She dragged her thumbs up and down the center of Sylvia’s scalp and then back and forth from ear to ear as Sylvia let go a whispered ahhh.
She swallowed the urge to cry and let herself think of Linc instead, and she was seeing him all over again, how sweaty and disheveled he was, and how sincere. She could tell that he was taken with her and she rushed to clarify her race. She was accustomed to white men assuming that she was white and doling out attention that they never would if they’d known that she was black. Accustomed also to the transformation in their demeanor when she’d let them know her true self. Their faces would suddenly redden, they’d cough, squint, their voices suddenly stuck in their throats, their heads drawn way in; then came the full body draw-back, the accusatory stance, the you, you said with a wagging finger as if she had committed a heinous crime. One even spit, and Vergie reflexively hauled off and slapped him, knocking a gold-capped tooth from his mouth; to her credit she’d had the presence of mind to run, about as fast as she’d hit him hard. As disparaging as the reaction to her race sometimes was, she was comfortable with it because she expected it. Her feelings never had to flow deeper than the top of her chest where all the loathing and disgust sat at the ready to be summoned. Linc’s reaction had been the opposite. He’d seemed to lean in even closer, and his manner was so respectful, so honest when he’d said he would have fought to defend their boat. It was so unsettling. She didn’t even know where to begin to piece things together, the opening in her chest for starters that managed to push through the top layer of loathing and disgust revealing a complex of unfamiliar sensations that both titillated and frightened her. And all that while she thought him white. What now that he claimed to be a black man? That should simplify things, she thought. Though it did not. It only made matters more complicated still.
Sylvia snored lightly as Vergie finished massaging her scalp and then twisted her hair in a bun. Vergie whispered her name. “All done,” she said. “You look as pretty as ever.” She smiled at Sylvia in the mirror and held herself back from asking where the curing shack was.
23
LINC SAT UP with a start. It took some seconds for him to realize where he was as he looked around in the lean-to of a shack and remembered then that Sylvia had taken pity on him last night when she’d finally gotten to the barge where she’d told him to wait. She’d insisted again that he must be mistaken about his brother having been sent there by the hospital. “We always get advance notification,” she’d said. She was civil, professional. But a storm was kicking up below the surface, he could tell. The same was true for him, though he guessed his inner turmoil was more evident because her manner had softened considerably from when he’d encountered her at the creek. He wondered if she’d gotten wind of his claim to be a colored man.
Pink and yellow daylight plowed through the window that was really just a square cut out of the side of this wooden shack. His eyes traced the spot that his fingers had traced before he’d fallen asleep, chains bolted to the wall, chains that ended in wrist shackles. He’d fallen asleep imagining what it must feel like to live chained to a wall. He woke every hour, it seemed, his wrists throbbing, his thinking weighted down by his mounting desperation over Bram’s condition. And now he had further complicated his situation by claiming to be a black man. Asked himself now why’d he even made such an outrageous claim. Tried to convince himself that he’d mainly told that lie so that he would not be taken for one of those who’d terrorized that boat yesterday, even though he knew that was unlikely; then told himself it was so, that the people here would take pity on him and help him find Bram; and certainly them believing him black would hamper him being recognized as the violent orphan with the large bounty on his head. He couldn’t yet admit to himself that his say-so of being black, the way the words had slid out so soft and easy, as if they’d been greased down with lard, had everything to do with Vergie. Even as he realized that no woman had ever affected him so, he couldn’t yet allow his conscious mind to accept that he might be smitten. Now he convinced himself that he was just caught up in a whirlpool of emotion over Meda’s death, Bram’s disappearance, returning to Philadelphia; it was everything else going on, not this Vergie, not the nearness of her that had made the earth tilt, rearranging everything about him so that he’d said with such ease, yes, I am in fact a colored man.
He rubbed his wrists, thinking that as soon as he found Bram, he’d tell him about how he’d slept in a slave shack. When they were young boys they’d been riveted by Meda’s stories of people who’d escaped from slavery and fled north. Their favorite story was about the woman who’d climbed into a pine box and had herself mailed north to freedom. That one at least had a somewhat happy ending, because Meda didn’t sugarcoat the stories. She’d once told them about a young woman who looked something like her and had no skin on her back because every night her back was whipped raw. She’d described the whipping in all of its brutality and they started to cry and Bram even covered his ears, saying that he couldn’t listen anymore. But Meda insisted that they listen. She maintained that they needed to understand how ugly evil was so that they would never be so ensnared. “You’re white boys who will be white men, and on every side you will be seduced to have dominion over colored people in one form or another. Think instead about Mr. Lincoln’s heart,” she’d say, then she’d go on an extended riff about something Abraham Lincoln said about equality.
Linc sighed at the memory and rolled a cigarette and stepped outside of the shack into the blazing pink and yellow. He could hear the loud churning sounds of the river as it tumbled over itself. He walked farther toward the patch of farmland. More voices, a man and a woman this time, the rhythm of their interaction so familiar to him. The man pulling on the woman, pleading. Her pushing him away, calling him a low-down dirty scoundrel. “Get from ’round me,” she yelled. “Go have your wife.”
Linc winced as he watched the man go lumbering off, shoulders hunched as the woman stood there, unwavering; nothing about her moved. By the time he’d finished his cigarette, he could hear her sweet-talking the hens as she collected their eggs. Now she felt his presence and turned and squinted.
“Who you?” She threw her voice up the hill.
“Ah, Lincoln, my name is Lincoln. I am here at Nurse Sylvia’s invitation,” he rushed to say it to prove he had license to be here.
He braced himself as Nevada walked up the hill toward him, dragging the fallen pink remnants of the daybreak with her. He thought her pretty with her round face and light eyes. “You the guilty man?” she asked.
He managed to hold his expression together as he gathered words from the back of his mind, words that he’d held there for a decade. I am not guilty. I was justified. Then, shifting his thoughts to the present: I tried with everything I had to stop them from firing that gun at the boat.
“The one who tracked mud through the foyer last night?” she continued, as he managed to keep the spread of relief from taking over his face.
“I offered to clean it, I did.”
“So Vergie informed me.” She was right in front of Linc now; her head tilted, studying him as if he were a curiosity.
“Something amiss?” he asked.
“No, just seeing,” she said. “Vergie told me that you are a colored man. So I am just trying to see. Though to my mind, a man is a man is still a man. And you look fairly standard to me, could go either way. No offense. Race a matter of geography, anyhow.”
“Ma’am?”
“To my way of thinking, the worth of one skin color versus another was conjured up by man. The sun dar
kens the faces it kisses and it kisses the ones closest to it. The sun act just like many a man I come to know, a lazy suitor content to select its lover from the block it live on rather than venturing out of the neighborhood.” She moved in closer and peered up at him. “I see that your ear tips are dark, that must be where the colored part of you hides, in the tips of your ears.”
Linc resisted the temptation to grab his ears, even as he tried to figure out what she’d just said. “My mother used to tell me the same thing about my ears.”
“Did she now? She from Virginia?”
“No, no, ma’am.”
“What’s her name?”
“Uh, Alma,”
“Mnh, I knew a Meda, though everybody called her Sister. Wonder if her given name was Almeda and they shortened it. She just died the other day; her brother’s sweet on me, at least he claims to be, though if that be true, I aver he would have taken the boat ride with the others to spend the weekend with me.”
“But did you not say his sister just died?” he said, stiffening as he realized that she was talking about Meda, his Meda, and Buddy. Realized that this was the Nevada that Meda had spoken of, this was Miss Ma’s granddaughter. “He may be too grief-stricken to be with people at this time.”
“I believe I could have given him respite.”
“From what I hear about the boat ride, he may have fared better on dry land. As my mother always said, an unseen protector keeps us from unseen dangers.”
Lazaretto Page 19