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.
18
THE LAZARETTO RESEMBLED more a country estate than a quarantine station. Gracious walkways hedged with azalea and rhododendron cut a path to the mansion-sized main house where a porch looked out on the splendid river view. The setting gave the workers here something soft and beautiful to focus on when they took a break from protecting the Port of Philadelphia from plagues. It was thick work: receiving and inspecting the steady stream of vessels that had to first stop here to get permission to enter the city’s bustling port, then processing the immigrants, holding over the potentially infectious to nurse them back to health or, in the worst cases, rock them as they die. But tonight and for the weekend the relief would be better than even the stunning river view as they prepared to welcome the wedding guests.
Sylvia was especially excited because Vergie was on the way. She’d been in a bright mood all day just anticipating seeing Vergie. Adding to the mood, Ledoff, the quarantine master, was soon to take weekend leave from the Lazaretto along with most of the rest of the white staff. Ledoff had been alarmed that such a large contingent of family and friends of the bride and groom were about to converge on them; he’d consented to a similar arrangement for a white couple the year before and only four people had come. Still, he allowed the plans to stand, as he was from a long line of abolitionists and did what he could for the sake of parity. So for everyone’s comfort he directed all of the white staff to take weekend leave except for two people—his nephew, Son, and the Lazaretto’s doctor. Son was a hulking, genial man with the intellectual capacity of an eight-year-old. He took expert direction from Sylvia and Nevada and the rest of the staff. Ledoff did the staff a favor by allowing Son to remain. The same could not be said about the doctor. The doctor was next in line to run the quarantine station when Ledoff was away, but both Ledoff and Sylvia understood that in Ledoff’s absence, Sylvia was in fact in charge.
She’d been humming all morning as she and Ledoff worked to clear the final ship of the weekend, likely the final ship of quarantine season. The vessel filled with immigrants from Germany appeared in good order; it was clean and spacious, no more than two to a berth. The passengers presented in reasonably good health, no elevated tempertures, no pink-eye, no thrush, no yellowed eyes or skin, no open boils. Sylvia had had to tussle with the mother of an infant boy in order to examine the child. The mother spoke no English, so Sylvia made a baby-rocking gesture with her arms to let the mother know she meant the child no harm. The woman relented, but soon stretched her arms out, reaching for her baby, and there it was all over again, that image of Meda that refused to stay submerged, that would float to the top and invade Sylvia’s conscious mind. Even now, more than two decades later, the image carried the whole jumble of feelings associated with that night.
She tried to stifle the memory as she hurried back to her room to get cleaned up and dress for the party. She was approaching the tiny creek hedged with scandalously hued roses, and now Nevada’s back was in view as she clipped roses to fill vases for decorating the food tables. Sylvia was glad to see Nevada. She’d missed her. Nevada had been in Philadelphia all week helping her new man friend, Buddy, make arrangements for his sister’s burial. Nevada was already dressed for the night-before-the-wedding celebration in a black lacy dress that fell from her shoulders and skimmed close to her hips and flared out around her calves.
“They let the German ship go on, am I not correct?” Nevada called over her shoulder.
“You correct, Nevada, and how did you know it was me?”
“The heavy sighs,” Nevada said, a chuckle to her voice.
“I was not sighing, and let me see if the thorns got you.”
Nevada looked down at her hands. Her thumb and middle fingers were bloody. “Drats,” she said as she put the rose basket down and reached into her dress pocket for a handkerchief. Nevada had no feeling in her fingers. When she was a toddler in Virginia, the wheels of a runaway wagon crushed her spine and she’d been given up first for dead, and then for immobilized from the cheek down. But she had enjoyed a miraculous recovery, claimed to have been brought about by her devastated father who imagined himself to be like Abraham as he’d stretched his baby girl on a warm bed of dirt under Orion’s bow and offered her up, feather pillow poised to gobble her final gasps. Then through his tears he saw her feet move, and then her arms, and then, so he swore, Nevada laughed and sat up and began to play in the dirt that was to have been her dying bed. The only lingering effect of the accident had been a deadened sense of feeling in her fingers. Nevada often joked to Sylvia that other parts of her body more than compensated for her no-feeling fingers by having too much sensation, way too much for just one man alone, which is why she had to play the field.
“Why they let the Germans go with swiftness and they held that ship from the West Indies for a year?” She tried to hide her hand from Sylvia.
“It was not a year, and half of the West Indians were hot with fevers besides. Now let me see your hand.”
“Felt like a year, burned all their belongings, bet they don’t burn that brown whiskey loading down the Irish ships. Have not seen Irish vessels in a while, guess Boston is favoring the Irish, Philadelphia seems to favor Italians of late—”
“Your hands, Nevada.” Sylvia cut her off. “Do not try to change the subject with your rant on immigration practice, or quarantine practice, or wherever your mouth is headed.”
“You know it true, you said yourself that when they bring in rags or sugar their cargo is as good as burned to ash. Plus, don’t you have a life somewhere to save?”
“Maybe yours since you seem to enjoy staying unobservant around sharp things coming in contact with your fingers.” Sylvia pulled Nevada’s hand to her and lifted the handkerchief. “Nevada, these wounds are ugly and deep. Are you trying to get gangrene?” she chided Nevada as she went into her bag and lined her supplies on the rock serving as a table and a seat.
Nevada interrupted Sylvia’s chastising, “Either give me a big wad of cotton to put in my ears to blot out your sermon, Sylvia, or let me stuff it in your mouth to stem it at its source.”
“The house ready?” Sylvia ignored Nevada as she dressed her fingers.
“All set up. Son and that one with the broad back, Kojo—Lord Jesus, that man has a good-looking back—they moved all the furniture against the wall so there should be good dancing space.”
“What you doing looking at that man’s back?”
“Why should I not? The good Lord fashions such a back, He means for it to be admired.”
“Admired by his wife.” Sylvia laughed as she wrapped a band of the cotton around Nevada’s rose-thorn-punctured fingers. “You know his wife coming for the weekend with the others on the boat.”
“I know, he told me, we got an understanding betwixt us—”
“Happened that fast, you already got an understanding with the man? Mnh, always happens fast with you, Nevada.” Judgment laced Sylvia’s tone. “What about Buddy? I thought that wa
s actually going somewhere. He been widowed for how long now? Plus, he seems decent enough, at least to my short but explosive encounter with him that night I tried to deliver your birthday cake.”
“But Sister died—”
“And that changes matters how?”
“They were close.”
“The correlation is lost on me, Nevada.”
“Leave me alone, Sylvia. Go correlate with Carl.”
Sylvia stopped and looked at Nevada. “Oh my, seems as if your fingers are not the only thing punctured. Seems I have struck a nerve as well.”
“Well, if you claim the right to pick a man for me, that river runs both ways. You quit Carl for no good reason that I could see, other than the wooing attempts of that high-yellow son of those highfalutin people who run the school down south. You were too pretty for him, besides. And you are pretty. You scrunch your face whenever I remind you of that. I don’t know who put it in your head that you had to choose between being pretty and smart, so you decided on smart and then just deny—”
“Stop, Nevada.” Sylvia cut her off. “I shall not allow you to turn this table,” she said, thinking that it was a fact that she wasn’t pretty in the way Nevada was with her soft red-toned complexion and softly formed features. Nevada’s eyes were light brown—too light for her skin color, she’d joke when a person complimented her. “These eyes are the symptom of a confused Indian and a colored in love and some kind of mishap with a white man.” She knew how to use her eyes for play, the way she batted them around, or held them half-closed, or in a wide-open come-’ere-baby stare.
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