Lazaretto (24 page)

BY EARLY THE
next morning, Sylvia and Spence had done all that they could to stem the advance of dead tissue in Carl's leg. They'd cleaned the wound, drained it, wrapped and rewrapped it; they'd consulted and fretted and prayed and even applied maggots. They'd watched the flesh go blacker still. Nothing left to do but what they'd dreaded doing.

The doctor was in the room and Sylvia wanted to slap his useless face. He was sitting in the chair next to Carl's bed, head all the way back, as if pondering the ceiling; his mouth was wide open. She kicked the leg of his chair. He let go a loud snort and then sat up, suddenly awake. His pupils were dilated like a cat's eyes.

“So is it your opinion that the leg cannot be saved?” she asked him, the senselessness of asking him anything at all brutally apparent to her. She'd tried to inform him of the quarantine, and he smiled and started humming.

“He'll lose them both, for sure. Legs are sympathetic,” the doctor blurted to the mix of apprehension and disdain spreading across Sylvia's face that he would suggest something so preposterous. “One goes, the other quickly follows. Didn't they teach you that at that fancy colored nursing school you attended?”

“I must have been absent that day,” Sylvia said, swallowing the sarcasm so that it wouldn't coat her words.

“Well, get Spence over here to prep me,” he barked, as he stood and then leaned against the wall. He was sweating so heavily that
she thought his body might leave its print on the wall. He motioned to his forehead.

Sylvia clasped her hands in front of her.

“My forehead! Dammit, Nurse, swab my damned forehead!”

“With all due respect, I am only obligated to swab your forehead in the midst of a surgical procedure, sir,” she said.

“Well now,” the doctor said as he straightened himself from his slouch, seeming suddenly returned to his right mind, “Spence is assigned to me and works when I say he works.”

“Yes, yes, Doctor,” Sylvia said.

“And since your obligations do not begin until a surgical procedure, mine certainly do not start with weddings.”

“Sir?”

“I am only obligated to perform surgery on those here officially, either sent by the city's health administration or a part of a manifest seeking entry to the port. Amputating the legs of colored wedding celebrants, Nurse Sylvia, is not part of my obligation. Send him back to Philadelphia, let them treat him at the dispensary if he's got a patron, if he even lives that long.”

“Yes of course, Doctor,” Sylvia said as she looked down and loosened some the clasp of her hands. She was relieved. She didn't want him any closer to Carl than he was right now lest he also maintain that other parts of the body were sympathetic, like the manhood, and dismember that of Carl's, too.

“Furthermore,” he said, “I have got to leave. That dying leg is making it unbearably hot in here, and the damned smell, nothing worse than the smell of death.”

Sylvia flinched. “Yes, Doctor,” she said in a whisper, as she saw the shadow of Spence approach the door. She stepped out into the corridor and with her eyes told Spence to make himself scarce in a hurry. She'd noticed how the doctor had a knack for corralling Spence's time, Spence disappearing for stretches after the doctor
would summon him. Spence observed the look she shot him and darted into the room next door. Sylvia turned back to the doctor. “Yes, it is cooler in your house, Doctor,” she said. “I will see you out and then try to locate Spence, though it might not be easy with the quarantine.”

“Quarantine?”

“Yes,” she said, that's all she said as he offered her his bent arm and Sylvia ground her teeth so hard she thought they'd break. She slipped her arm in the crook of his and led him down the corridor toward the front entryway. He dragged his feet and began singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Sylvia sang along with him so that he wouldn't hear Spence as he crept back into Carl's room. Time came to a standstill as she ushered the doctor through the grand marble of the hospital's foyer. The infection was moving through Carl's body with greater speed than the doctor moved through the foyer right now. Sylvia wanted to yank him by the arm and fling him through the front door so that she could return to tend to Carl. Instead, she sang along with him and walked in baby steps.

Finally they reached the outside and she unlinked her arm from his and nudged him in the direction of his house. He walked a few feet and then turned and acted as if he would go back into the hospital. She grabbed his arm again and reversed his direction. He laughed a sloppy laugh. She sang louder still so that the irritation she felt for him, the pity, the revulsion, wouldn't choke her. The river sent up streams of silver and snagged rainbows. The air smelled of thyme and cod and mint. It changed her tune all of a sudden. Now she sang a song with no recognizable words, just a run of notes without order. “Za de bra da bre de de da dun,” she sang. The sounds centered her as she led the doctor up the hedge-bordered path to his house. She opened the door and encouraged him in. “Take a good nap, Doctor,” she said, then forced herself to smile. He blew her a kiss and she resumed her wordless song.

She walked trancelike back to Carl's room. Neither did her hands shake nor her knees buckle as she turned into Carl's room with its heat and foul odor and the sweet sad sight of him snoring, water draining from his eyes. He was tied to the bed, held securely under a straitjacket Spence had fashioned out of sheets. It was as if Spence had read her mind, knew that it had to be now, right now.

She cleared her throat and watched Spence's back stiffen. “It looks like it falls to me to do the—”

“Amputation,” Spence finished her sentence.

“Amputation,” she said with finality. He turned and faced Sylvia, his mouth and nose already banded with cotton; she could only see his eyes; his eyes like sweet drops of black molasses. She was a jumble of emotions as she nodded, tried to pick through the noise of all of her thoughts right now, to quiet them some. Suddenly rage predominated as she thought of the hate-filled men who'd done this to Carl. Too much rage. It was debilitating. She breathed deeply to try to calm herself. Spence had arranged the implements she'd need, the knives and scalpels, the saw, tenacula, artery forceps, even a hatchet. What a smart man Spence was, Sylvia thought to herself. How wise. Too wise to be marrying the likes of Mora, with her trite conversations about such things as who has the prettiest hair between the Indians and the Italians, or what complexion somebody's new baby was; before Mora even asked the gender, was it healthy, did the mother survive, she'd first ask: What color is it? Now Sylvia's rage found a more manageable object in Mora. She couldn't stand Mora for the way she had gone after Spence so shamelessly. He had barely arrived on the Lazaretto before Mora was making him tea, batting her eyes in his direction, asking him to walk with her to the creek so that she could gather pond lilies to make perfume, feigning a sprained ankle so that he would carry her in his arms to her room. Sylvia had watched and held it all in. Didn't even mention to Nevada
how maybe she herself would have liked a chance to know Spence better. Didn't even realize, until this second, as Spence held open a surgical gown and she allowed him to slip it onto her arms. He tied the gown in the back in neat bows, and then cleaned her hands. Finally the cap over her head, and the mask. “Damn you, Mora,” she whispered, almost inaudibly, as she studied the leg, the markings Spence had drawn.

“Pardon?” Spence said.

“Nothing, just checking your work,” she said as Spence stood next to her, and she now felt a wide swath of heat rising from his body. Part of her wanted for him to gather her in his arms and comfort her, to prepare her for what they were about to do; part of her wanted for him to take the lead, while she followed his instructions. Part of her wanted to suddenly become the type of woman she'd typically disdain, a woman who'd subjugate her own talents in an effort to snag a man. She'd never known that part of her existed until now. Though even now she couldn't allow it free reign, as she called for a scalpel and he asked what size.

“You going in from the side, I take it,” Spence said.

“Of course, lateral, what do you think?” she snapped. “First I need to make a slit so they'll be a flap of skin left over to cover the stump.”

He handed her the scalpel and she pushed and dragged it along Carl's skin. Carl cried out and tried to move, but the straitjacket-sheet kept him secure.

Sylvia turned a deaf ear to Carl's moans; she knew that the slit she'd just made was the least of it, like pulling back a flap of a turkey's skin to push a sage leaf under for flavor. It was easier to think about Mora right now, it helped her get to the part that she had to get to. “Bitch,” she muttered under her breath as she deepened the incision and blood leaked out in a line, then a puddle. Carl's moans gave way to choking sounds as Spence encouraged
his swallows of morphine-laced brandy. Then Spence was next to her, sopping the blood as she cut and pulled, moving through the pulpous layers of flesh and fat and muscle. “Thread ready?” she asked.

“Here and waiting.”

She lifted an artery. It was warm and pulsed softly. “Right here, quick,” she said to Spence, who was there with a length of thread, wrapping, then knotting the artery with the thread as Sylvia severed the tied-off vessel and moved deeper into substance of the leg, and together they tied and snipped the other principal arteries, then the veins. Then Sylvia scraped through the flesh to get to the bone.

Carl's cries were higher-pitched now, and more desperate. Though Sylvia was entirely disassociated from Carl right now—who he was, what he meant to her—just as Dr. Miss had taught her all those years ago; he was a life she was attempting to save, and life had moments that, when they arrived, they did so with naked brutality. “Hatchet,” she said.

Spence looked at her quizzically, his eyebrows raised. “Hatchet? You're going all at once?”

“All at once,” she said. And Spence placed the handle of the hatchet in the curve of her fingers. It was large and cold. It felt right, cold. She focused on the separated flesh and aimed beyond the separation, beyond the leg. She aimed for the floor, the foundation, the creek that rushed beneath the Lazaretto. Then she went all the way down, hard, so hard that she felt it in her own chest. “A-
hack
,” she said out loud, mimicking the sound the blade made.

“A-
hack
,” Carl responded, drunk and high and in shock. “Ahhh,
hack
, ha, yah,” he said as he slid into blessed oblivion.

Sylvia stood back as Spence used a sheet to soak up the blood. “The bone's still intact,” he said.

“You lying to me?”

“Wish I was. “

“I coulda felled an oak with that strike.”

“It was a beautiful strike, for sure, but you pulled back.”

“Did no such thing,” Sylvia replied as she stepped back to give him room to wipe away the accumulations of flesh.

“I'm not criticizing, but as hard as you started down, you coulda gone all the way through the table if you had not pulled back.”

“Is it possible you handed me a dull blade?”

“There are no dull blades among the instruments I spread out for use. You pulled back.”

“I guess you suggesting you could do better?”

“Not for me to suggest a thing,” he said.

“I wonder if you would accuse Mora of pulling back. What do you and Mora even converse about?” she said then, surprising herself.

“We find our topics,” he said as he whisked away the blood-soaked sheet.

Sylvia moved back in toward the bed and pondered the half-severed leg. The bone glistened. “I need more light,” she said. “Get me more light.”

“Cannot improve much on what is hanging already,” he said as he motioned overhead, to where light from a canopy of lanterns flowed unimpeded.

“It's not enough. It feels dark in here. I need more.” She felt her stomach spinning, as if a storm was brewing in it. She couldn't look at Carl's leg for the moment, couldn't bear to see the way she was botching the task. She watched Spence walk to the other side of the room to get a lamp from among several lined on the bottom shelf of the supply case. He had a nice back, sturdy, the outline of his shoulders pressed against the white jacket he wore.

“Is Mora with child?” she called across the room.

“Need oil,” he said, as if Sylvia hadn't said what she just said. “Every last one of these lamps is empty of oil. You'd think those aides could at least keep oil in the lamps, at least they could do that.”

“Mora's with child,” she said then, with a certainty to her tone, “and you have been feeding the doctor opium. That's why he summons you so often.” But she was speaking only to the air; Spence had already left the room, and now she allowed herself to lean against the edge of the table. She pressed her eyes shut. When she opened them she could see that the room was well-lit and she wondered if perhaps she'd had her eyes closed all along so that she wouldn't have to be her own witness. She was, after all, amputating the leg of the man she'd once purported to love. Loved him still, it was the desire that had always been absent. Or maybe Spence's presence, her focus on Spence, her desiring Spence, had dimmed her view. She situated the saw's blade in the ridge the hatchet had made. The ridge was shaped like a smile, and she widened, deepened the smile with the saw as she drew it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth in a steady rhythm. And then the snap. As with the first hatchet strike, she felt the snap first in her chest. She gasped. The fibula completely severed from its contiguous self. “Help me, Jesus,” she muttered as she moved on to the more formidable tibia. She grunted in time to the saw, putting the full force of her body into working the blade. Bone pieces swirled around, and then bone dust. The dust darkened the more she worked the saw and she knew that was good, she was all the way into the marrow. Lord Jesus, she thought—the marrow. Her shoulder was on fire; her wrists throbbed; her fingers ached. She could no longer see, the bone dust having found its way into her eyes, making a storm in her eyes. She couldn't even tell how far into the bone she was. This bone was impenetrable. Where the hell was Spence? She needed her eyes flushed. “Shit. Where the fuck are you, Spence?” She called out.