The Speckled Monster

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  She began rapping again, her wails rising in intensity. Zabdiel sighed, laid the book back down, and made his way downstairs, nodding to Jack to let Mary in.

  She nearly tumbled inside as the door opened. He helped her, heaving and out of breath, to a seat. She was a big boned and pleasantly fat woman who looked strong as an ox, but for all her bulk she had the delicate constitution of a consumptive. “Now, Mrs. Dixwell,” he said, “what’s the matter?”

  “Oh, Dr. Boylston,” she moaned, fanning herself, her chest heaving so that the gold chains around her neck glinted in the afternoon sun, “I’ve had such a fright, you don’t know.”

  She was certainly trembling all over. “Have the children taken a turn for the worse?” he asked quickly. All four of them were down with small-pox. At his recommendation, Mary had turned their care over to a nurse, but she had balked at either sending them away or removing herself. She had merely confined them to the upper floor, where she could at least hear her babies, and they could hear her, singing them lullabies.

  “No.” She shook her head and took a deep shuddering breath. “No. It’s old Mr. Johnson, two doors down from our house. I pass his place every day. He’s a bit of an invalid, you know, and we hadn’t seen him for a week, so Mrs. Franklin and I, we put together a basket and went to check that he was all right. We knocked but heard no answer, none at all, so we opened the door.” She clutched at Zabdiel. “Oh, Dr. Boylston,” she whispered, “he rolled right out atop us, though we leapt back, you can be sure. . . . Dead at least a week, and halfway rotted before that with the confluent pox. He looked to have died trying to crawl out his own door. The stench was loathsome.” Her throat moved convulsively, and she was turning green.

  Jack handed her a glass of water. She gave him a grateful look and took one sip, but then stopped. A sob welled up from deep within. “There—there were—there were maggots.” The last word rose and twisted into a shapeless wail.

  He sat down by her and took her hand. “Mary, hush now.”

  “No, no, no,” she shrilled. “Inoculate me.”

  “I cannot recommend that, my dear,” he said with a firm calm that reached her more clearly than his words. “You have had a great fright, and you know you are not strong. The Turkish doctors recommend a preparation of a thin, cool diet and a calm mind.”

  She tightened her grip on his arm. “Today. Now.”

  Hysteria rippled through her in waves. This time Jack brought a glass of wine. Zabdiel stirred in a good strong dose of laudanum and sent Jack for Mr. Dixwell.

  Mrs. Dixwell’s husband John was a puzzle. A sternly ascetic Puritan with regard to himself, he was also a goldsmith who had grown rich spinning gold into jeweled treasures that would have delighted the Queen of Sheba; he prized his wife as an obedient, pious, and decorative pet. Surprisingly, he sided with her in the matter of inoculation, even after having the dangers of her agitation pointed out. “There are those,” he said, “who argue that inoculation trespasses on the prerogative of Providence. But sometimes one must surely marshal the world into place, to make way for Providence.”

  “You have been listening to Reverend Webb,” said Zabdiel, as he cleaned his lancet with a sinking heart. Desperately embracing inoculation was no more rational than despising it unseen, and possibly far more dangerous: but how could he say no to those who knew the risks? Who weighed them against a real and known threat of smallpox, and begged for a chance for deliverance?

  Mr. Dixwell, a ruling elder of Mr. Webb’s New North Church, nodded. “I have. And no doubt the minister would agree, though too late, it would seem, for his own family—his wife, I have heard, has been taken sorely ill with the distemper.”

  Zabdiel knew that—he had seen Fanny Webb just that morning, after visiting her husband’s cousin Esther, who was slowly recovering, and her sister-in-law Abigail Webb, old John’s daughter, who was not. Abigail had chosen not to be inoculated, and now hovered very near death. But he said nothing.

  Mr. Dixwell paused only briefly; when it became apparent that Dr. Boylston was not going to discuss the Webbs, he pressed on. “That particular lesson, though, is a teaching from my father.”

  A formidable family, thought Zabdiel. Proud enough to make the marshaling of Providence an earth-shaking habit: John Dixwell’s father, of the same name, had been one of the fifty-nine men who’d signed the death warrant of King Charles I at the end of the Civil War. For a while, he had been hailed as a hero. But when England’s experiment as a kingless republic had foundered, the Restoration of King Charles II transformed him from hero to assassin. Regicide, hissed cruel shadows at his heels, and the whole family had slipped into hiding in America, under the name of Davis. John Davis’s son, however, was not a man to hide from man, law, or God; he seemed never to have tasted either fear or doubt, thought Zabdiel, uncorking his vial of smallpox. As an adult, Mr. Dixwell had moved to Boston and resumed his father’s rightful name.

  “Whenever you are ready,” said Zabdiel. The Dixwells clasped hands and prayed for an outcome pleasing to the Lord, and then Mary Dixwell rolled up her sleeves, and took the infection into her blood.

  Dr. Mather stopped himself just outside the door to his son’s chamber. He said a brief prayer to calm himself, and then he pushed open the door.

  Sammy was shivering with a fever as high as ever. “Let me be bled, Father,” he said through chattering teeth.

  Where God does not appoint a clear path, men must struggle as best they can through the darkness, Dr. Mather told himself. Aloud, he sent a maid running for Dr. Boylston.

  Dr. Mather crowded so close behind Obadiah as he opened the door that Zabdiel had a brief image of a two-headed footman, one head black and close cropped and one white with towering, feathery hair. Dr. Mather reached around to fairly pull Zabdiel inside. “Sammy has fallen into an unpacifiable Passion to have a Vein breathed,” he said, dispensing with the niceties of greeting.

  Where did the man get such phrases? Why, if you had to fight a stammer, would you put yourself through such hoops?

  “Qu-quite unpacifiable,” Dr. Mather continued. “I beg, Doctor, that you will gratify him.”

  Zabdiel ran lightly up the stairs three at a time. He liked to at least glimpse the boy before the father smothered all possibility of an objective interview. Just that morning, the boy’s fever had been brisk, as it had been for two days, but unless something drastic had changed, it was moderate. By no means dangerous, and certainly not the worst-ever smallpox fever—not even the worst-ever inoculation fever, as Dr. Mather, in his proud need for his family always to be best or most, had hinted he wanted Zabdiel to say. On the days he came to the Mathers from Esther Webb’s bedside, Zabdiel had sometimes found it difficult to keep his temper in the face of Dr. Mather’s tangle of morbid fears and desires.

  Now, striding into Sammy’s chamber, Zabdiel shook his head. For once, it was worse than the boy’s father had said. Sammy was curled in a corner of his bed, weeping and shaking, plucking at the bedclothes and muttering. The moment he saw Dr. Boylston, he scrabbled toward him, crying, “I am burning up, I am burning to death. Let me be bled, oh, let me be bled!”

  What the boy has fallen into is hysterics, thought Zabdiel. Maybe that will be our next epidemic. He took hold of the boy’s wrist with one hand and felt his forehead with the other. The fever remained brisk, but it was not appreciably different from before. His pulse, though, was rapid and jittery. What was starkly different was his fear.

  Dr. Mather arrived huffing behind Zabdiel. “An impression of such violence, you see, as if it came from some superior Original, I am sure of it.”

  Zabdiel threw a sharp look over his shoulder. The last thing he needed was for Dr. Mather to be divining medical directions from angels. It was the last thing Sammy needed too. Zabdiel did not like to be overly skeptical on the subject of the heavenly host; angels no doubt abounded. He hoped there might be several breathing the light of God into the room right at this moment. But really, on the subject of di
vining superior but invisible forces, Dr. Mather had been misled badly in the past.

  On the other hand, a light bleeding could do no harm to the boy at this point, since the eruption was well out. And it might do some good.

  He let a few ounces and added to the boys’ self-prescription another small glass of wine laced with laudanum. Soon afterward, the boy slid into a sweet sleep.

  “And now, sir,” said Zabdiel, as they left him, “if you have a moment, I should like to show you the fruits of our labor.” They went upstairs to Dr. Mather’s library, and Zabdiel pulled his book from a pocket and opened it to the title page:

  Some ACCOUNT

  of what is said of

  Innoculating or Transplanting

  THE

  Small Pox.

  By the Learned

  Dr. Emanuel Timonius,

  AND

  Jacobus Pylarinus.

  With some Remarks thereon.

  To which are added,

  A Few Queries in Answer to the Scruples

  of many about the Lawfulness of this Method.

  Published

  By Dr. ZABDIEL BOYLSTON.

  BOSTON: Sold by S. GERRISH

  at his Shop in Corn-Hill. 1721.

  They celebrated over their own glasses of wine, minus the laudanum. For it was the work of both men, though Dr. Mather had withheld his name: it set forth his transcriptions of the Royal Society’s inoculation papers, followed by Zabdiel’s carefully polished rebuttals of Dr. Douglass’s and Dr. Dalhonde’s arguments against the operation, as well as forthright rejection of the Courant’s nattering. It finished with a few of Dr. Mather’s learned musings on inoculation’s lawfulness with respect to piety and Providence.

  “A trifle, a trifle,” said Dr. Mather with a bow, as Zabdiel thanked him for his help. But the minister was obviously gratified. “Let us hope it may move men to consider the subject rationally.”

  At dawn a few days later, Zabdiel saddled up Prince for a long morning ride. Except for the weather, which was miserably wet to the point of threatening to rot the crops in the fields, he dared to hope that things were looking up as they trotted out of town and the stallion stretched into a canter. Esther Webb had survived, and all the people who really mattered—herself and her parents, most of all—believed strongly that her case of confluent smallpox had not been caused by the inoculation, but by nursing her parents while they were under inoculation.

  It did not, by any means, lessen Zabdiel’s guilt for his part in causing her suffering and her ruined face, but it did both exonerate and implicate inoculation quite usefully. Inoculation had not produced any more than a light case of distinct pocks in any of the patients who undertook it. On the other hand, those who would argue that their cases were so light as to not count as smallpox at all were handily contradicted by Esther’s experience. For if her parents’ inoculated pocks were not true smallpox, then how did Esther come to catch it from nursing them?

  Then there was the issue of trust. The morning after he’d inoculated Mrs. Dixwell and bled Sammy Mather, Mr. Samuel Jones had asked him to stop by his smithy and inoculate him—a family man, in the prime of his life—and a blacksmith too. Not likely that he’d calmly take such a step if he thought he might die—or that ulcers would rot his arms to the core, laming him for life. Most importantly for Zabdiel, Mr. Jones had married into the tight-knit Webb-Adams clan. He was an emissary of sorts; his inoculation served as a quiet shout to the world: We believe in Dr. Boylston.

  His own son Zabby had erupted, and looked to do well. All his other patients were doing well too. They were growing in numbers, at any rate. And in desperation: Take the twenty-year-old daughter of Joe Dodge, the Salutation Inn’s publican. She had been determined to be as brave as her friend Esther Webb at first; she had undertaken to nurse her own sister, though she herself had never had the disease. By the seventh day, though, she was terrified by the bubbling and bloated monster that lay in the bed where her sister had been; she and her mother fled to him in tears, begging for his help.

  Best of all, since the inoculation of Samuel Valentine, the cloud of a murder charge had lifted.

  He rode through the gate and out onto the Neck, forcing himself to veer close by the gallows once again. But Joseph Hanno was gone and so was his scent, both in reality and in Zabdiel’s head. All that was left was clean: the sky and the sea and, far out in the marshes, a million birds wheeling and dancing through a rain-washed dawn.

  Back at home, he wrote to Jerusha. Just two words, but they gleamed beckoning and beautiful on the paper: Come home.

  At the bottom of the page, he had added one more: Please.

  When he visited young Samuel Valentine on September 5, the boy’s uncle, Judge Benjamin Lynde, was there. “Miraculous,” he said, rising from a chair next to the boy’s as Zabdiel entered. “I would bare my own arm this instant in support, sir, would it do you any good.”

  He did the next best thing. He had Zabdiel inoculate his seventeen-year-old black slave. “Fine fellow,” said the judge. “Spent the last two years training him as footman, you know. Don’t wish to lose him now.”

  Things were definitely looking up, thought Zabdiel.

  On Wednesday, September 6, there was a break in the clouds, one brief shiny day streaming with the slanted light of autumn. That afternoon, a carriage rolled up and deposited Jerusha and the girls on the front step. She went straight into Zabdiel’s arms and stayed there. The girls ran through the hall, fluttered through the kitchen, and burst into the garden to show Tommy and John and Jackey their treasures from Roxbury.

  Presently, Zabdiel led Jerusha up the stairs to the parlor and opened the door, as if ushering her into a king’s treasure house. Zabdiel junior was lying in state on the sofa with a book—a sight that made her fairly gasp. She inspected his thirty or so pocks, which were already scabbing nicely, and felt his cool forehead. And then she smothered him with mother’s kisses that made them both laugh, and made Jerusha cry too.

  Not half an hour later, the three girls in turn sat bravely on Zabby’s lap while they had the operation. He had promised them each a ginger candy if they could watch the whole thing and yet not squeal, and all three of them worked hard to earn their prizes. Jerusha said they must not actually eat the amber sweets until after dinner, though, so they made a centerpiece of them. For the girls’ sake and Zabby’s the meal had to be meatless, but Moll had made it festive as possible: fried eels with parsley and lemon—eel season, already!—a salad of purslane, spinach, capers, and raisins in an oil-and-vinegar dressing, and apple pie.

  If there was any jolt of unhappiness in the day, it had been Tommy’s that morning as he dismantled the pirate ship. Tomorrow, it would be back to the Indian game.

  “Those girls won’t be playing Indians in this rain, with them pocks raised on ’em, I can tell you that,” said Moll, one eye on the sky, the other on Tommy’s moping face. “I bet those girls’d love to play pirates. You ever asked ’em?”

  “It won’t be the same,” grumped Tommy.

  “No, but it won’t be the same old Indian game either. You just sail that ol’ ship right on upstairs, and see what happens.” She demanded the sacrifice of his mother’s best sheets, though, as the price for Captain Roberts’s liberty. “That’s a pirates’ world,” she said, handing him an old gray blanket instead. “Win some, lose some. ’Sides, you need a set of dark sails.”

  On Friday, Moses Pierce stepped up from his glass workshop next door to Tom Boylston’s shop and warehouse on the Town Dock and begged Zabdiel’s attendance on his little family; all three children were ill. His wife, Elizabeth, would not leave them, though, so they had decided that she should undergo inoculation. “I can’t try it myself,” he said anxiously, twisting big hands scarred with fire and glass, as if he were confessing a crime. “I had it back in ’02.”

  “Me too,” said Zabdiel, and the man broke into a relieved smile.

  That evening, Zabdiel rode home with Mr. Pierce to North S
quare, into the very shadow of Selectman William Clark’s grand mansion, with its three brick stories and twenty-six rooms—and a king’s ransom in windows, said Mr. Pierce. “Not as what I’ll be called upon to replace them in the future, when he finds what I’ve inoculated Elizabeth right under his nose.”

  Across the street, the Clark house brooded silently, but Zabdiel felt the prickle of watching eyes.

  On the way home, he stopped in to see Mrs. Dixwell in Union Street. She was a little jittery, but he showed her her own forearm, peppered with a light scattering of red flecks, and coaxed her back into calm. On the uppermost floor, three of her children were doing well, but ten-month-old Mary, her newest darling and her namesake, was in grave danger. In low, urgent tones in the stairwell, Zabdiel urged Mr. Dixwell to keep the news from her.

  “Thou shalt not lie, I am commanded,” said Mr. Dixwell gruffly, his face gaunt with sleeplessness, “and I shall not. Nor will I tolerate lying in the servants.”

  “Do not lie, then,” said Zabdiel, very close to exasperation, “but try to keep the truth from her. It is paramount that she remain calm and cheerful. We do not want her blood or her spirits troubled any more than they are.”

  On Saturday, he inoculated his brother. Jerusha shamed Tom into it, telling him that out in Roxbury, Sarah was fretting over his safety, to the point of harming the unborn child. “A boy,” she added, “by the way she’s carrying him. And a feisty one too. He kicks from noon to night.”