“The police?” Everything about Linc tensed. “Why are the police here?”
“Well, I suppose actually they are constables. I don’t know. I was wary of my ability to restrain myself, so I left.”
He stood quickly, not even trying to hide his angst. “I must go, Vergie, they are very likely here for me.”
“For you? Are you a wanted man? For what crime?”
“The crime I just told you about,” he said as he grabbed up his satchel. “The man I punched when I was defending the orphan boys had high reaches. He will not die, nor will his family’s want of revenge.”
Vergie was looking at him straight on again. He tried to avoid the sight of her mouth; her pouty lips scrambled all semblance of logic in him. He might well stroke her face, put his lips to her forehead as if they were accustomed to one another in that way. He reminded himself that he’d only seen her for the first time last night, yet he reached forward anyhow and touched her cheek with his thumb. She jumped then, though not from his touch. Someone was on the other side of the shack, and Linc jumped, too, with balled fists, poised for a fight.
“Who are you?” Vergie asked, agitated.
“Begga pardon,” he said, “but I am trying to hunt down Nevada—can you tell me where she might be?”
“First, can you tell me who are you?” Vergie asked and Linc restrained himself or he would have answered for him. It was Buddy. Buddy! He looked exactly as Linc had remembered. Same coloring that used to remind Linc of the hens the Benins’ cook roasted on Sundays, same stature, same eye that hung lower. Linc felt as if he’d been hit with a sandbag, all the air left him and he turned his back and pretended to wipe his face. He couldn’t let on to Vergie that he knew Buddy, he was supposed to be from New York, after all. He listened to Buddy identify himself to Vergie, explain that he’d recently lost his sister and had gone fishing to grieve, but he realized suddenly he didn’t want to be alone.
“Buddy?” Vergie said. “I am Vergilina, and I have heard Nevada mention your name once or twice.”
“Believe none of it,” he said and laughed. “You the nurse’s kin, right? Met her one time years ago, she threw a cake on my floor—long story for another time. I probably could not pick her outta a crowd today. Nevada goes on and on ’bout her, about the two of you, and ain’t none of it good.” He laughed again.
Linc pretended to be looking for something on the cot, his conscious mind finally grabbing a hold of where he’d first met Sylvia, even as he tried to process Buddy’s presence here and now. Sylvia was the nurse who’d treated his wound the night Splotch put a blade to his neck. “Hey, there, partner, sorry ’bout the intrusion”—Buddy was addressing Linc, so Linc had no choice but to turn around. Buddy’s hand was extended. “My name is Buddy, but you can call me Buddy.”
Vergie laughed. “You’re funny,” she said.
Linc shook his hand. “Lincoln,” he said, making his voice go deep again, to sound more like the black man he was pretending to be. Buddy’s grip was strong and tight as if he was trying to get Linc to look at him, but Linc did not.
“Now, where is Nevada, Miss Vergie? I do hope it is in that direction,” he pointed toward the guesthouse. “Place seem to be swimming with the law. And nothing worse than a colored man in the woods with some police on the loose. Though they claim to be looking for a white boy, so that counts me out. Don’t count you out, though, partner,” he said to Linc.
“I am headed for the ferry, so it does not matter one way or the other,” Linc said.
“And he’s not white, besides,” Vergie said.
“No? Sure look it,” Buddy said. “But who am I to say? Drop of colored blood, and so forth.” He had his good eye trained on Linc, a deep crease in his forehead. “I think the constables are waiting to take that same ferry. I wonder if it works the same as when they hunting down a colored, any one of us will do under those circumstance. But they probably more particular with white folk. They look to get the exact one they looking to get. So you may fare just fine. Me? I would lay low. Catch the next ferry. Now where did you say I could find Nevada?” He turned back to Vergie.
“I will walk with you to the guesthouse,” Vergie said. “Lincoln, you should walk with us as well, catch the next ferry. Let the police have this ferry to themselves,” she said, stressing her words.
Linc stood a moment, thinking what he should do. He honestly could not tell whether Buddy had recognized him or not; though Buddy had always had the knack of holding his face exactly as he wanted to hold it—at cards, for example. He’d told Linc that it helped to think about not hiding whatever it is he might be trying to conceal. The thing you try to hide the most is the very thing you expose, he’d preached to Linc back when he’d instructed him on how to bluff at the card table. “Especially your hands,” he’d drilled into Linc. “Your hands give you away, because you not considering them, and they must close up to protect the lie you trying to tell.”
“I do not know about you, partner”—Buddy directed his words toward Linc—“but a pretty miss such as Miss Vergilina requests that I stay in place, I surely would stay in place.”
Linc forced himself to smile. “I suppose I will remain and catch the last ferry out.”
28
THERE WOULD BE no next ferry. Earlier, while the guests sat waiting for the wedding ceremony to begin, a series of telegraphs had come in that stunned Sylvia, mortified her. She blinked, thinking her eyes deceiving her. The first asked for confirmation of a Code Yellow corpse, to which she replied in the negative. The second indicated that such a corpse had been delivered, to which she requested further details. The third stated that an unlicensed courier confessed to leaving a body on the pier contrary to protocol, to which she replied with a request of further description. The next described the crate, to which she replied in the negative regarding receipt. The next was an official directive that the Lazaretto be placed on lockdown until further notice.
Lockdown! she shouted in her head. With the infection in Carl’s leg growing by the hour, with two dozen people here who did not even belong here and who surely did not want to remain past tomorrow. Lockdown?
No, no, no, she thought, as she tried to reason as much as one could through the confines of a telegraph machine. Just allow her the ferry she had already arranged to get this one critically wounded man back to Philadelphia. Please. Could she pile the guests on said ferry as well. Negative. Imploring. What about food, supplies? Confirm receipt of directive. Could she hear from Ledoff first. Confirm receipt of directive. Ledoff is the quarantine master, the doctor is indisposed. Might I hear from Ledoff? Confirm receipt of directive. Confirmed. Await message from quarantine master.
Spence had come into the room, a handsome groom on his way to be married, making a stop first to do his duty and feed the doctor the pipe. “Sylvia?” he said, surprised to see her leaning over the machine, her face stricken, her color drained.
“I came to summon the doctor on the off chance that he might be right-minded,” she said. “The machine was clicking away.” She collapsed in the chair. “I cannot fathom that this is happening on my watch.”
“What is happening?”
“Seems a body was delivered the past day sans protocol. We have not received it, but regardless, the Board of Health has declared us in a state of quarantine.”
“Us? The Lazaretto?”
“Do you believe it?”
“What about Carl?”
“Dear God, what about Carl? That is all I can think of beyond the twentysome people now trapped here. We are even running short on morphine! Dear Carl . . .”
“We have to get him back to Philadelphia—”
“There is no way out. Do you understand, Spence? Nothing in, nothing out. Not people, not supplies, not food.” She shook her head back and forth as if in a daze.
“Do they understand Carl’s condition?”
“Do they care? They would sacrifice him in an eye twitch. They would sacrifice any one of us, or all
of us, to save the populous of Philadelphia from another yellow-fever outbreak.”
“Hogwash about the populous. More to save the commerce, the reputation, the wealth of Philadelphia. The rich might flee, and where would that leave the city!”
“They have their priorities, we must establish ours,” Sylvia said, as she pulled a sheet of writing paper from the drawer and dipped the pen in the well of ink.
“So what we got, we got staff plus the twenty on the boat, the constables—”
“Are the constables still here?”
“Just saw them out the window, standing there, scratching their heads, I guess, since the ferry they planned to board has not arrived.”
“The ferry was likely held back in the port of Philadelphia when word of the missing body first broke.”
“Well, did the constables find what they were after?”
“I do not know, Spence. Right now I have much larger concerns than theirs.”
“Sylvia, part of your concern must be for the well-being of all of us suddenly locked in here. Those white men lurking around will throw everyone into even more turmoil.”
“Everyone, or you?” she asked, as she dipped her pen in ink and started writing again.
“Me, yes, me. I do not trust them. Any of them.”
“Well, they are here, we are here, no one is going anywhere—”
“What about that white-looking colored man?”
“Lincoln?”
“I do not remember his name. Although Kojo swears he is up to no good.”
“I believe he was on the last ferry goin’ out of here,” Sylvia said, as she wrote furiously now on the paper. “Least I hope he was. I would hate to be the one to break it to him that the brother he is here to locate is likely the missing corpse.”
“So for how long are we quarantined?”
“They will not say. Unless we can locate the body and determine that it was not yellow-fever-contagious, or, if it was, that it posed no threat—”
“What about the doctor?”
“What about him?” Sylvia looked at Spence as if he were a lunatic for mentioning the doctor right now.
“Protocol says he is the next in line absent Ledoff.”
“Do you want to explain that to him? Better yet, are you prepared to acquiesce to any plan he should put in place?”
Spence breathed in deeply, then looked out the window at the river, which seemed to languish suddenly. He felt his stomach drop. As if being quarantined was not bad enough, he was thinking also about supplying the doctor’s needs; with no shipments getting in, he wondered how long he would be able to fill that long, heavy pipe. “What is your plan, Sylvia? What do you need for me to do?”
“The first thing we need to do is gather everyone in the guesthouse and I will do the dishonor of informing them of this drastic situation. I have made notes of what I will say. But we will not—I emphasize, we will not—mention the missing corpse. We will say only that a crate with potentially infectious contents was scheduled to be delivered here, and its whereabouts are not known, and as a result we are quarantined.”
“So we are committing the sin of omission?”
“It is better than a sin of commission. To cause hysteria around here over a missing dead body would be a sin indeed. Half of them will suddenly claim to be seeing ghosts.”
“And then what?”
“Then we discreetly query each one about anything they may have noticed suggestive of the errant crate. Beyond that, we need to inventory our stocks of medical supplies, of food, of other necessities, and determine how long, how far, they will stretch. Through it all, Spence”—her voice shook—“we do all that we can to keep Carl alive.”
Spence just stood there, nodding, after Sylvia had finished. “I am with you, Sylvia,” he said with conviction. “I will get word to Mora that we have to delay our nuptials.”
“Your escape hatch finally opened for you,” she said, not looking up from her paper. If she had looked up, she’d have seen the sudden sense of relief widen across his face.
AFTER NEVADA MADE her announcement and the two white men with billy clubs came and left, the jilted wedding guests streamed into the house. They looked ready to sashay in an Easter Parade: the ladies in their taffeta and lace and silk, the bustled dresses, cinched at the waist and spread out wide, many to the floor, their hair in high bouffant styles with curlicue bangs; the men in finely cut dinner suits with silk-faced lapels, meticulously ironed, their shoes buffed, their hair trimmed and stricken with a boar-bristle brush to encourage their waves to show. The parlor was done up, too, in anticipation of the wedding feast that would now just be dinner since there had been no nuptials. The bows that had adorned the outside seating hung from the archway between the parlor and the dining room. Roses in a variety of arrangements dressed the tables and the side board and were gently strung around the chandelier and lent a heavy sweetness to the air. Most everyone whispered in groups about the travesty of the white men barging in on their gathering. “We might have been having church for all they knew—unconscionable!” said the tailor’s wife, Ella, to her cousin, as they marveled, reluctantly, at the quick thinking of Miss Ma—of all people—to lead a chant of Praise the Lord that had confused the white men. They later learned that the men were constables. They’d shown to Skell and Nevada a paper affixed with an official seal. Nevada had looked at the paper and said an emphatic no. Skell did the same, while Miss Ma’s laughter provided background sounds. Now Ella and her cousin, along with everyone else, tried to guess at the contents of the paper. Nevada would only say afterward that she was not obliged to speak on the contents of the paper, with Skell divulging only slightly more when he said they were hunting a bandit who was not in their midst.
So they had this on their minds, and also the fact that the wedding had not taken place, and they whispered about the propriety—or lack thereof—of taking their gifts back home.
Vergie had taken Buddy out to the foyer to try to locate Nevada, and Linc stood alone in a corner of the dining room. He sensed that some of the whispered chatter might be about him. He felt awkward, lowly, like a field hand amidst gentry when he measured his dress—he was even without a jacket—against their own. He balled his fists in response to the way that Splotch looked at him from across the room. He looked down at his hands; his knuckles were prominent, white, too white, and ugly. He was remembering all over again how Mrs. Benin used to tell him that he had the ugliest hands she’d ever seen, that he’d never excel at piano the way Bram did because of his short, ill-formed fingers that lacked any hint of grace. Said he must have been spawned from a gorilla with those fingers. She would hit his hands with her pointer. Standing here now, his knuckles throbbed as if the skin had just been stripped, over and over, from the landing of that stick. He unballed his fists and hid his ugly hands behind his back. Now he thought he looked like a thief. His discomfort was swelling to overwhelming. He walked through the dining room and into the kitchen. The air was warm, aromatic with an intermingling of sage and rosemary and burnt sugar. Bay softened the space with the low melody she hummed, “Go Down Moses.” The sounds of the spoons hitting the oversized kettles as she filled bowls with string beans and candied sweet potatoes kept time with the melody. Linc started to ask Bay if he could help her with anything, such as cleaning ash from the stove, bringing in wood, lifting heavy pots. But then he looked around the door and saw Buddy heading in the direction of the kitchen. He walked through to the outside, where he’d left his satchel. The air was sappy. He reached for his pouch to roll a cigarette. The back door opened and now Buddy was out here, too.
“Getting crowded in there,” Buddy said.
Linc nodded.
“And you ever look at me again like you don’t know me, I promise to whup your ass.”
“Damn, Buddy . . .” Linc felt his voice shake.
“And you cry right here and now, I will whup it even more. I thought I raised you that a man do not cry. You a man, or a little boy?
”
“Meda’s gone, man, it hits me all of a sudden like a typhoon and I am drowning all over again.” Linc was crying, he was shaking as he tried to get matches from his satchel. Buddy took the satchel and fished out the safety matches and lit the smoke Linc had rolled. They were quiet as they passed the smoke back and forth between them, save the intermittent sniffing sounds they both made.
Buddy broke the silence first. “You look good, Linc. God, Sister loved you, both of you.”
“There was talk of her at breakfast, and I barely held myself together. I did not expect to show up here and be met with people who knew her.”
“How did you show up here? Bram is missing? Is that what I half-gathered from Vergie?”
Linc sighed. “He is.”
“And you got these people here believing you a colored man?”
Linc hunched his shoulders. “It just happened, Buddy, I do not even know how.”
“Well, I looked at you out there in that shack and I knew you had a reason for pretending not to know me. So, like any cardplayer worth his salt, I played along with your bluff. I figured it had sumpin to do with Robinson’s people still hunting you. So tell me about Bram.”
Linc told Buddy all of it, beginning with how he’d come to Philadelphia to be with him, to stand over Meda’s grave and say his last goodbyes. Buddy listened intently. When Linc had brought him up to the point when he arrived at the Lazaretto, Buddy asked him if he and Bram had traveled to Philadelphia together.”
“We did not. He came the day before.”
“The day before? For what purpose?”
“He went to the Benins’, he wanted to spend time in Meda’s room. He converted, you know, to the world of spiritualism.”
“So Meda told me,” Buddy said, as he got that pointed expression on his face he’d get when he was figuring out an opponent’s hand based on the cards that he himself held.
“What are you thinking, Buddy?”
Buddy blew a long stream of smoke and then finished the cigarette and crushed it under his foot. “And no sign of Bram here at this place?”
Lazaretto Page 23
