Lazaretto (15 page)

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.

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 one 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 tak
ing 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.

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 clerk 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.

Two of the three in the other boat, a river courier and his assistant, raised their tall bottles holding rum-colored liquid in salute to those on Carl's boat; the head man tilted his bottle and gulped. “Fucking darkies,” he called after he'd swallowed. “Go back to Afriker!”

The river rose up suddenly and slapped him in the face, and Linc, who had sat low against the deck with head hung, lost in thoughts of Meda, and worrying about Bram, called out, “Serves you right. They done nothing that warrants your taunting. Guess the river is on their side today.” The head man told Linc to shut his dumb-ass mouth or swim the rest of the way. Linc retorted that he'd more than paid for the trip with his timepiece, and that if he had to swim, they all would be swimming.

The occupants of Carl's boat had not heard the man's insult, except for Vergie, who felt it more than heard it, the way she'd always felt insults from white people. She was certain that anything coming from the ragtag trio in that other boat was sure to be disparaging. “I hope the river swallows you up!” she shouted. She spit into the river, intending it for them, then flicked her hand in the air at them and turned to rejoin the others as their hearty laughter went to nervous coughs over what she'd just done.

“You okay, Verge? What you doing?” Carl asked. He was protective of Vergie, a carry-over from her little-girl years, when he was first courting Sylvia.

“She just enjoying her lovely self,” Splotch said.

“I believe
I
asked Vergie.” Carl cut him off.

“I was just giving those in that raggedy boat the greeting they deserved,” Vergie said.

“Tain't so,” said Lena, sister of the bride. “She doing what she got no business doing.” Then Lena planted herself right in front of Vergie. She had already tired of Vergie's incessant chatter about how she couldn't wait to see Sylvia, and how Sylvia was promoted to head nurse, and Sylvia this, and Sylvia that. She resented Vergie for not acknowledging the real purpose of the trip, her sister's wedding. And then there was the fact Lena had been sweet on Carl for years but had been unable to capture his attention because he'd had eyes for nobody but Sylvia. Now she pointed her finger in Vergie's face. “Vergie, you know good as me you got no business taunting them in that other boat less you plan on passing today, and if that be the case, you need to be in that boat with them. Otherwise you need to swallow your tongue and sit on your childish actions and stop putting the rest of us in harm's way.”

Vergie stepped back to give herself room. “I'll do it to you, Lena”—she flicked her hand in Lena's face, then turned portside, in the direction of the other boat, and made the same move again—“and I'll do it to them. And I have never passed, and I do not plan on passing today. And I defy anybody to declare that I'm not as colored as Blue-Black Bob.”

“You ain't colored,” Lena said as she pushed Vergie hard, and before Vergie could recover herself there was a rush to get between them. One group pulled Vergie toward the bow, another nudged Lena to the stern; they were both consoled by their factions: “You know you're right, but not worth making a spectacle of yourself by fighting on this river like a hyena.”

The separation worked a miracle in that suddenly there was space in the boat for a sense of contentment to squeeze in right along with everything else they'd brought on board. Shortly, the atmosphere lightened as they marveled at the rainbow floating atop the river, and how low the rapturous red sky was hanging, and how intoxicating was the smell of the sea, which was a blend of
fish oil and bergamot and thyme. One man, Skell, short for Skeleton, owing to how thin he was, pretended to be Captain Ahab on the hunt for the great white whale and gave a dramatic recitation. Another blew a harmonica, another shook a tambourine. The married men told wife jokes, and even the women laughed, and had jokes of their own, communicated by their winks. The smell of cedar rose up from Carl's pride and joy of a deck, and a comment about how nicely it was planked made him smile. The sky seemed to be smiling, too, with its curvy red mouth, and now even Carl began to relax just a bit. A near-euphoria draped over them all and hung like the red sky, close and palpable, until the blue and black moved in.

In the other boat the courier-in-charge had watched in disbelief as Vergie flicked her hand at them a second time. He understood by association that she could not be white. He was from the part of Delaware below the Mason-Dixon and not accustomed to entertaining slights from those he reasoned were of the race that should still be bought and sold. He threw his head back and drained the rum from the tall bottle. “Mulatto wench!” he spit as a rage moved through him, amplified by the drink, and he called to his aide to ready his shotgun.

“Why the fuck you calling for the shotgun?” Linc yelled.

“'Cause I don't tolerate no back talk from no niggers.”

“What back talk?” Linc said, trying now to calm the man down. “No need for waving around guns. You know how rum will put things in your head that are far from the truth.”

“What are you, some nigger-lovin' piece of shit?” the head courier said as he twisted a wrap of line around the tiller and moved back from the helm as his aide staggered toward him and handed him his shotgun.

“Stupid-ass lug, why the fuck you give him the gun for?” Linc said, horrified as he scrambled to stand to wrestle the gun away
before the man could take aim at the schooner. But he'd already taken aim, Carl's head in his sights as Linc lunged for him, and the boat pitched noticeably, and Linc fought with everything he had to shake off the younger man, who had Linc by his neck. And by the time he did, the other had already fired off both barrels and was fumbling to reload before Linc overpowered him and took him down.

The sounds of merriment had been at their height in Carl's boat when the courier took aim. Applause roared for Skell's Ahab soliloquy. The booms of laughter for the one wife's comeback to her husband's jibes were accompanied in time by the harmonica's trills and the jangles of the tambourine. At first the gun blasts seemed part of the merriment, too. But a second later a hole opened in the water and the river exploded in shock and Carl yelled for everybody to get down, though he could barely hear himself as he shouted; the sound of the second blast lingered and shimmied before it fell, and now he felt the sound that was a thunder ball of heat trapped in his leg that was louder even than the screams and shouts as the wedding guests scampered to get low on the deck.

“This all your fault, Vergie,” Lena sobbed. “You had no right provoking them. Now we all might die 'cause of it. Why are you even here, you like the albatross in Skell's recitation, just bad fortune strangling us with your white-lookin' self.”

The retort that would have been usual for Vergie under any other circumstances sat fully formed at the base of her throat. It threatened to choke her as it expanded, gathering all the guilt and shame she'd accumulated over the years about the way she looked. A plume of whispers and shrieks rushed to fill the hole left by her non-response. Some sympathetic to Vergie, other's pushing Lena's point as the boat rocked from side to side. Then Miss Ma's laughter got in between the dispute and Carl told them all to be quiet, he was managing to put some river between his boat and
the other one, and right now his singular goal was to get to the Laz as straightaway as he could, and their discord was making a wavy line of his concentration.

Carl thought that his leg would explode from the noise of the hot metal trapped there, and he gasped on his words, which amplified their power, and everybody swallowed their conversation, and the schooner was suddenly silent. The night sat directly on top of the silence. The red sky had fallen even lower and was now slipping below the boat, exhausted from trying to hold the night at bay.

Vergie was the first to notice the blood that had seeped through Carl's boots and accumulated in a puddle at his feet. He was standing at the helm, but barely. She yelled out his name. He tried to straighten himself up. “Skell, take the helm,” he managed to say. Skell commenced to crawl on his belly to get to the bow. Lena tried to beat him there, hollering, “Carl, mercy, he's shot, somebody help him.” There was a scramble and a tussle as half a dozen other people tried to get to Carl all at once. The boat tilted and Carl stumbled as he tried to stand straight up; his shot-up leg couldn't bear his weight and he fell forward at the very place where he'd not attached a railing. He grabbed at air to break his fall. The air couldn't break his fall. The river scattered to make way for his entry and descent. Once in the water, he fought with everything he had to stay afloat. His arms did well; it was too loud around his leg, though. A blow horn moved through his calf and he thought that it was the sound that had the power; the sound was pulling him under, multiplying itself in its reverberations. He tried to piece through the sound to get back to the top. Then he thought he heard Sylvia calling his name, saying hold on, hold on, Carl, hold on. Sylvia, Sylvia, such a sweet, soft, soothing sound to succumb to, he laughed to himself, as he thought of other
S
sounds: sumptuous, sensual, simply, surely, yes surely. And then even the commotion in his leg quieted down.