Lazaretto (27 page)

“Drink your medicine, Carl,” Sylvia said as she laid the instruments one by one on a towel. “Furthermore, I have no idea who you might be talking about.”

“Yeah you do, the one you told me about when I asked for your hand that day on my boat when I was bringing you here and you turned me down and then told me about the first baby you delivered.
You
know, Sylvia, the woman who was always drawing pictures of ole Abe Lincoln and claimed to have served him tea.”

Sylvia dropped her scalpel when he said that, and she said “Drats” out loud and leaned to pick the scalpel up with a big commotion, hoping to distract him from the story. She didn't want the details of the story to come out with Linc here, that she'd participated in separating a mother from her baby in the way that she had. She motioned to Linc, making a cup of her hand and putting it to her mouth, and telling him to get Carl to drink, thinking that he was useless to her right now if he couldn't even do that.

Linc approached Carl again. “Uh, sir, let me help you drink this,” he said.

Carl grabbed his arm this time. “I'm
talking
, partner,” he said. “You had a colored mama, I know she trained you not to interrupt people older than you when they talking.”

“It's the morphine,” Sylvia said, between her teeth, directing her words to Linc. “He needs to finish what's in the cup, else he won't go under anytime soon.”

“That was like something you see on a theater stage,” Carl continued. Some no-count rich lawyer white man with his fancy gold watch with bridges on it gonna force you and the midwife into telling the poor mother that her baby girl was dead—”

“Carl!” Sylvia said sharply as she scrubbed the scalpel with a ferocious back-and-forth motion. “Drink your medicine and drink it now. And your assistance would be more than appreciated this instant, Linc,” she said, irritation coating her words.

Linc's hands were sweating and he felt dizzy as he shifted the glass from his bandaged hand to the other. Now he tried to convince himself that it was in fact the appearance of the stump making him feel woozy, and not what Carl had just said about the woman who drew pictures of Lincoln and served him tea and had a baby! Told himself that surely Carl was not speaking of Meda, not his Meda. Surely Meda never had children. Surely Meda was not the only woman to have sketched drawings of Lincoln during that time. Half of the colored women in the Union likely indulged such a hobby. Many probably filled whole sketchbooks with their own renderings of Lincoln. Probably white women sketched Lincoln, too. And certainly other women may have been called upon to serve the president tea, any one could make that claim, whether or not it was fact. Besides, surely this man in a state of near delusion from a combination of the pain and the morphine could not even be fully aware of what he was saying. Linc thought that he could discount it all, but for the detail about the watch. Benin had owned such a rare gold watch with bridges on the face.

Still, he convinced himself, it was likely all a coincidence, and he tried to approach Carl again, tried to put the glass to Carl's lips, but Linc's hands didn't seem to accept that it was a coincidence; his hands were trembling. “You got the shakes?” Carl asked then. “Sylvia, you best come help this boy. What the matter is, partner? You coming down with something?”

Linc could feel sweat pouring from everywhere, his scalp, under his arms, the backs of his legs. All the blood seemed to drain from his head and settle in his stomach. He looked down at the glass in his hand; it seemed that he'd dropped the glass a thousand times by now.

Sylvia moved quickly to the bed. “Lincoln? Do you need to sit?” She took the glass from his hands. “There is a stool right there behind you. Sit and put your head down low and take deep breaths.”

He shook his head. “I'm well enough,” he said, though he did sit.

Sylvia took over the task and helped Carl sit up higher and got him to sip.

By the time Carl had drained the cup, Linc had recovered himself and was standing again. Carl smiled at him drunkenly. “Hey, hey there, buddy.” Carl's words slurred. “You feeling arright? The shakes let you be?”

Sylvia patted Carl's forehead and told him that she needed to do a procedure on his leg. “Anything for you, sweet cakes,” he said, as he smiled a sloppy smile. “But tell me, Sylvia, why you lie to me about that woman's baby?”

Sylvia talked over him as if she'd not heard the question. “Now Lincoln is going to wrap your arms nice and snug to hold them down just in case you start dreaming about any number of the pretty misses lining up to be your sweetie and you try to get up and get out of the bed—”

“Why you lie to me, Sylvia?” Carl asked again.

“I have never ever lied to you, Carl,” she said, as she turned and motioned to Linc and mouthed the word “straitjack” and pointed to the hook where the one Spence had fashioned earlier hung.

“You did, on my new boat that day when you would not accept my hand and you told me why—”

“I was as honest as I know how to be, every fiber of my—”

“Most of it, but not all of it, Sylvia. You broke my heart that day, Sylvia.” He started to cry.

“It's the morphine, sweetie, you're not thinking—”

“It is
not
.” He said it with determination, his eyes suddenly focused, his voice suddenly clear; the morphine-induced stupor seemed suddenly lifted and Sylvia got a chill at the dramatic transformation.

“I believed every word you said when you explained why you could not be my wife. I accepted how important you being a nurse
was to you being alive. I felt it, Sylvia. I felt your whole truth, but then you let a lie sneak in. And I felt that, too. And it hit me that I wasn't up to the high standards for your whole truth. You couldn't trust me enough—”

“Carl—”

“Let me finish, I might die before I ever get off this Lazza place; I had a lotta years to think about this. And a lotta hours laying up in this bed with nothing else to think about 'sides the fact that I got to go through the rest of my life a one-legged man. I have always thought if you coulda just admitted the whole truth of that story, and trusted me enough to say what really happened—I mean, it was a small thing, after all. I remember it clear as day: the nice flow of the river, the gulls playing around in the sky, that nice cedar smell drifting up from my new boat. ‘What happened to that baby?' I asked you. That's all. Such a simple thing. Not that it mattered to me one way or another what happened to one little baby. But it mattered to you, Sylvia. It mattered so much that I thought I could hear the clamps falling around your heart when you said you didn't know. But you did know. I felt your knowing, that's how large it was.” Carl was straining to keep his eyes focused. His voice came from higher in his throat. “And I'm of the mind that had you kept the truth going in that instant—just a simple question, Sylvia, so simple—you also woulda accepted my hand. All you had to do was hold the truth with us in that boat, that's all.” He repeated the words “that's all, that's all,” and gave it tune and tried to sing. But then he could not. His mouth drooped as he yielded to the morphine and Sylvia breathed a relieved sigh.

Linc cleared his throat then and Sylvia turned around to find him standing there, holding the straitjacket. His eyes were round with curiosity, and that irritated Sylvia as she thought,
What does it matter to him?
She told Linc that they had but a small window of time before the morphine wore off. She showed him how to tie
the jacket and knot the ends around the bedpoles. Then they hung a sheet from the poles over the bed so that it fell to Carl's waist and acted as a curtain to block Carl from seeing what Sylvia was doing should he wake. She told Linc to bring over the towel that contained her instruments, and the mat for catching the debris. She pointed to each instrument and whispered its name and said that she would call for them as needed. She had him tie a mask to cover her nose and mouth, said the last thing they would do would be to wash their hands once more. Linc surprised himself with his deftness, given his bandaged hand.

Sylvia moved right into the gangrenous portion of Carl's leg, snipping away at the rotted parts. Linc found the stench almost unbearable as he handed Sylvia each instrument she called for, and Sylvia congratulated him for being such a fast learner. Still, he found it easier to look away, up at the hanging sheet rather than at what Sylvia's hands were doing. Blood-tinged detritus had accumulated on the mat and Sylvia motioned to him to get rid of it. He did and was on his way back to the bed with a clean mat when he glanced on the other side of the sheet and saw what Carl's face was doing; his face was contorted, and Linc placed the mat down and whispered to Sylvia that Carl appeared to be waking up.

“Drats,” Sylvia said. “Not already. There's more here than I expected. I need you to talk to him.”

“Me?”

“Either that or I shall, in which case you can finish cutting the infected tissue away.”

Carl let out a yell, then a full holler, then a rumbling moan, and Linc rushed to the head of the bed even as he tried to close his ears to the sound of a man in such anguish. Now Carl was trying to sit up, and Linc checked the ties against the bed to make sure that they were secure. “Uh, sir,” Linc said.

Carl gasped and moaned and writhed as much as the straitjacket
would permit, and Linc could see that Carl was trying to focus. “Sir,” Linc said again. “You hurting. I know. But I'm gonna stand here with you and help you through this.” Carl squeezed his eyes shut and Linc grabbed a square of cotton and wiped at the fluid draining from Carl's eyes.

“Where is Sylvia?” Carl gasped. “I cain't see her.”

“I am right here, baby, just behind this curtain at the foot of your bed.”

“What did she say?” Carl asked. “I cain't hear her.”

“She said to tell you she's right here,” Linc said, as he dabbed away the sweat crowding Carl's forehead.

“Oh Jesus,” Carl said and then let out an extended moan.

“It will be over soon,” Linc said.

“Not soon enough,” Carl managed to say between gasps. “Tell her, tell Sylvia”—his words filled with cries and mumbled expressions of pain and he struggled to talk. “It was such a simple thing. The baby, that's all I asked her. What happened to the baby?”

“He's asking what happened to the baby?” Linc said, relaying the question, because Linc himself needed to know. “He says he's dying and he doesn't want to die with a lie between you.” Linc watched Carl drift off to sleep. “Well?” Linc said now to Sylvia's silence. “He is waiting. No, do not try to move,” he warned a sleeping Carl, as Carl's breathing yielded to a light snore.

“All right then,” Sylvia said, her voice filled with agitation. “All right.” She took a deep breath and started to talk; she went back to the beginning, describing Meda that day, without saying her name, what a pretty woman she was with her polite nose and sad, dreamy eyes, her soft hair pulled back in a bun. Described how poised she was, saying that she carried herself as did the girls who had gone to finishing school, and that her speech had that quality, too, like the girls in Sylvia's social clubs who would put on French airs or otherwise display their learnedness.

“Had she?” Linc interrupted her.

“Had she what?”

“Gone to finishing school, uh, Carl is trying to ask.”

“Oh, he can hear me now?”

“Can you hear her, Carl?” Linc spoke to Carl's closed eyes, and hoped that Sylvia could not hear Carl's gentle snores. “He is nodding,” he said to Sylvia, and then pretended to talk to Carl: “I know it is painful, sir, but it will not be much longer. Yes, I will ask her to get on with the story.”

“I am getting on with it. Stop interrupting me and I will be done with it. And, no, she had not been to finishing school, she was a poor girl, but she had been well schooled by the Quakers, and apparently she'd absorbed it all. In any event, she arrived too late for the procedure she was scheduled to have. She was much too far along.”

Linc started to interrupt her again to ask if the woman had arrived alone, but then he thought better of it, so he settled in to hear the story in whatever circuitous way Sylvia chose to render it. He dabbed the sweat from Carl's forehead and then Sylvia answered his thoughts anyhow.

“She arrived with her employer in all of his fancy livery,” Sylvia said, her voice gaining momentum, “his impressive two-horse carriage, his finely threaded topcoat, his showy gold watch with bridges on the face that he kept pulling out and looking at as if he had someplace more important to be. It was a despicable display of wealth, given the circumstance. But that young miss was composed throughout as I led her back to the whitewashed room that we reserved only for those other procedures. I knew as soon as I helped her out of her cape that she would in fact be having a baby that day and no other procedure. She had already dropped. And she seemed happy about it as she chattered on about having felt it kick, and that it was likely a boy because she had not had
heartburn, and heartburn, they say, means a girl. She was talkative, telling me personal things the way that those who came into that whitewashed room often did, a consequence, I suppose, of knowing that I would see all there was to see about their physical person, and that I was to be party to an act that they would be able to share with no one else, so they may as well reveal their other parts as well, their feelings, their pasts—oh, their pasts, the stories I have heard!”

Sylvia stopped to catch her breath. She could see a mass of gangrenous flesh. It was tough as gristle as she snipped at it, then tore it away with her scalpel. Just beyond that she thought she had finally reached healthy tissue, but this section, too, was blackened, yellowed, fetid.
How deep did it go,
she wondered. Beyond the knee? “Drats,” she said, thinking that he might need to lose even more of the limb. She tried to calm herself; forecasting doom would not help her with the task at hand. She resumed the story then. The telling of it calmed her at least, took her over as she cut through the essence of this dead and dying tissue, cut to the retelling of the story as she moved beyond the descriptions of the flickering candle, the astounding darkness once the baby slid into her hands, the heat of the baby's first breaths against her neck, the assaulting emptiness when Dr. Miss snatched the newborn from her arms, its tiny fingers reaching, reaching toward the sound of its mother's voice; then the trembling of the lawyer's hands as he touched the midwife's elaborately carved desk, to support himself, as if he might pass out otherwise, Dr. Miss's head wrap that had come undone, and the long sash that fell down the side of her face and moved back and forth as she stood there, deflated at the knowledge that she would not be the one to decide the baby's fate.