Lazaretto

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  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.

  Sylvia rebalanced the scalpel in her hands, her hands so bloodied she could not tell where her fingers ended and the living substance of Carl’s limb began. She looked around for the salt solution. It was not on her cart. It was on the other side of the room, next to the basin. She started to fault Linc, but of course she could not. He was just a confused young man, a tortured soul; he was hiding from himself, she could tell. How could she expect for him to put the salt solution on the cart with her other supplies if she had not specified that to him? She walked across the room. Her movements were wooden, as if they were being managed by a novice puppeteer. She rinsed her hands and retrieved the salt solution. She did not glance beyond the sheet as she walked back to the bed. She did not want to see his face just yet.

  She poured the solution onto the remains of Carl’s leg. “The midwife had been such a beacon of power to me until that moment,” she said, as she watched the solution work its way through. “But at that moment she appeared crushed, broken, though I wanted her to fight for the baby, to say no, we will handle its discharge. To tell him that he was the one in a compromised situation. That he had been paid well to have the woman he’d escorted here to be no longer with child. And that result had been satisfactorily accomplished. I wanted her to tell him to take his damn carriage and political connections and be gone, that we would send word when she was well enough to travel back to his fancy house and do his bidding once again. That child had been my first. So of course I wanted her to fight for it. But I knew that the midwife would not as I watched the sash of her head wrap swing back and forth. Perhaps on another night she may have, but this night we had just learned that the president had been shot. Who can say how that may have sapped her ability to push back?”

  Sylvia paused. The mat had filled again with the morbid cuttings she’d excised from Carl’s leg. She did not want to call out for Linc to empty it, did not want to interrupt herself to walk it to the vat. She just wanted to get through the mass of seemingly never-ending dead flesh. She dumped the contents of the mat on the floor. They would clean it later. She slowed herself; she flexed her fingers and repositioned her scalpel. Her cuts into this section of flesh were precise as she snipped away at more deadened flesh, and then more, and then more still.

  “Since Dr. Miss would not take charge, I knew that I must,” she said as she resumed her narrative. She could feel her voice change as she talked, her tone lower, coming from a deeper, an almost haunting place now. “Yes, I knew that I must,” Sylvia said. “I knew that I was risking my employment with the midwife, perhaps all future employment, as she would never produce a letter on my behalf if she knew, and would likely tarnish my reputation any way that she could, but I followed behind Dr. Miss when she went to deliver the baby to the waiting carriage. It was already full morning, so I kept my distance, that she would remain unawares. The streets were bustling with further news of the president’s death. A crazy chorus of church bells rang out willy-nilly, and the cacophonous clangs matched the scratchy, grating feel in the air as women cried and men pushed their hands against their brows, and there was a palpable sense in the air of what will happen now, what will become of things, of us. Through it all I could hear the baby cry.

  “I watched the midwife tap on the carriage door. The door opened and I crept around to the other side. She did not see me; my hooded cape was around my face, and besides, there were too many people about. I crouched on the side of the carriage until I reasoned she had slid the cradle onto the seat next to him. I waited until I thought she was likely gone. The blood pulsed through my head, and with the sound of all the church bells crying I thought my head would explode. I pulled on the carriage door then. I pulled on it with all of my might, but I could not open it. I heard the horses begin to pick up their feet and I ran to the front of the carriage and signaled the driver. ‘Please, please,’ I called to him. ‘I must speak with your mister. It is a matter of life and death.’ He peered down, and I could see his eyes soften for me. He whispered to his horses to hush and be still and then climbed down from his perch and walked to the side of the carriage where Dr. Miss had just been. He pulled open the carriage door for me and extended his hand to help me up. The baby had a rousing cry going, and the lawyer seemed almost relieved to see me. I lifted the baby from the cradle and pushed the cradle to the carriage floor and sat. I rocked the baby and cooed that everything would be fine. Dr. Miss had thankfully packed a feeding bottle in the cradle, and I offered it, and the baby pulled it hard and drank.

  “I focused on the baby. The baby was so easy to look at as it settled into contentment and drank. It opened its eyes and looked at me, and its eyes were dark as tar. But then I turned to look at the lawyer. He was staring at me, waiting, but when I looked at him he turned away, though not before I saw the torment in his eyes; his eyes held dark circles beneath, and the whites of his eyes were red and almost, but not quite, washed clean of their true color, which was an ocean blue. I told him that the baby was special to me because it was my first and I just wanted to know that it would be well cared for.

  “He looked s
traight ahead, seemingly not affected by anything, not by me, by what I’d just related, the baby I held, or the commotion just outside of his carriage. His words were wooden as he spoke. ‘And what would you do should I release it to you?’

  “I told him that I knew of a home for orphaned children where my classmate used to work after school. He asked its location and I told him it was less than a mile from where we were. And he leaned forward as if to prepare to signal his coachman. But I told him I would transport the baby right then. I was afraid he might change his mind in the time it took to travel that mile. I promised him that I would give them an acceptable story. I swore to him on everything that I held dear in this life and the next that I would never speak of his identity, of hers, of the baby’s to a living soul. He flicked his wrist in my direction as if saying, ‘Be gone,’ and I did not wait for him to change his mind. As quickly as I could, I pulled open the door and propped the feeding bottle under my chin and nestled the baby so close that I could feel its fast heartbeat. I climbed down to the ground and ran. I ran away from the carriage, away from the direction of Dr. Miss’s house. I ran and cried and held the baby close as I listened for the sound of the horses as the carriage sped away. A group of women had gathered near the corner, and one of them reached out to me. ‘And you with the newborn. To have to learn of the president’s death when you have not long ago issued forth life. Come settle yourself down, child.’

  “I tried to explain that I had not just given birth, but I was crying too hard, and in any event she had already pulled me to her, she was already swaying from side to side, and it felt good to be rocked in such a way at that moment. I just fell into the rhythm of her motion, and even the baby stopped crying. When I had settled myself, I walked the rest of the way to the home.

  “The woman who’d opened the door was tall and thin and with a mass of dark hair that fell into her face and I was startled by her appearance. She apologized, said that she was so distraught over the president, she’d not concerned herself with even combing her hair. I just pushed the baby into the woman’s hands, and at first she would not accept it. She said that they were beyond capacity and had just taken in another infant not two days before. But I pleaded with her, told her the story I’d contrived, that a constable had been setting up a blind in the alley a block away to catch tax cheats and had heard this baby’s squeals and thinking it a rat had almost bashed its head with his billy club. That the baby was otherwise unwanted. The woman’s eyes softened and filled with tears. She called into the house then and an older woman, squat and graying, ambled to the foyer, and gently took the baby from me. She spoke with a brogue so thick that I could hardly understand her, but her tone was calming, sincere, as she cooed at the baby and held it close, and that satisfied me, so I left.”