Lazaretto by Diane Mckinney-Whetstone Page A

with a polite nose and thin lips and ocean-blue eyes. They were close. Babbled to each other before they could even talk;always aware of the other’s presence; always looking around to know where the other was. And always looking for Meda.
    When they were old enough to question how they could be brothers and only days apart in age, Meda concocted a fairy tale of a history. Explained to them that they’d been fathered by the same man whose young wife—Bram’s mother—was with child when he deployed for battle in July of 1864. He’d taken cannon fire and was being cared for at the home of Union sympathizers and in his delirium mistook the young woman tending to him for his wife. He begged for her to lie down with him, and when she would not—Meda would allow her eyes to mist up at this point in the story—he wailed so plaintively that even the sparrows flocked to the bedroom window, wishing that they could stem his suffering. In the hours before he died, when she was cleaning his wound, she was so taken by the longing in his eyes that she could not deny him. And so, Meda said, as she’d stop as if trying to choke back sobs, he died peacefully that day, leaving another seed—Linc—who would become his second son. Both of their mothers, Meda told them, had died in childbirth.
    She could not tell them the truth of their early hours, that one of them had been put out with the trash and almost mistaken for a river rat, and the other came from who-knows-where. So she’d imagined for Linc and Bram a history that they could latch on to, related that history to them over and over as they grew into young boys. Over time, she made that tall tale of a history so real for them that it became part of their fiber, and in the process, part of hers, too, understanding as she did the tragedy of a life with no history at all.

7
    IT HAD BEEN two years since Sylvia ushered Meda’s baby into the world and that image of the baby reaching for its mother still haunted her, lying dormant for months at a time and then emerging, rankling her. It helped that she stayed busy. Between school and hours with Dr. Miss and the social commitments that her mother insisted on, the teas and cotillions and gatherings sponsored by her mother’s Ladies’ Literary Society, her father’s Pythian Baseball Club, her attendance at the grand wedding and anniversary affairs that her parents catered, she had little idle time. And when she did have time not otherwise spoken for, she’d visit with Nevada, to her mother’s chagrin, because Maze didn’t think Nevada had sufficient pedigree. But even Maze had to concede that Nevada’s free-spirited nature might be good for Sylvia, who tended toward the serious. And their affection for each other was palpable. They were close and confiding one minute, sniping at each other the next; they were sisters, without the bloodline.
    Right now Sylvia and Maze were in the yard, retrieving clothes from the line. Sylvia had just handed her mother the white gloves her father wore when he set up the tea service. Maze had just placed the gloves in the basket of the folded garb when she gasped and let the shirt Sylvia was handing her fall to the ground. Maze’s brother, Mason, had just stumbled into the yard. He dangled a baby, a practical newborn, though to his credit he managed to support the infant’s head. “You got to takeher, Maze,” he said, hysteria running through his voice. “Her mother’s no good to her, no good at all.”
    â€œWhat—who—what the—” Maze matched his hysterics with her own. “Where did you get this child, Mason? Who’s the mother?”
    â€œSome ole gypsy gal I took up with over on Ridge Avenue. I swear it, Maze, she don’t wanna do nothing but drink rye all day long. Liked to roll over on the baby and dern near crushed her. You gotta take her. Please, you gotta help me, just till