“Contract!” Cooley snarled. “Pistols at fifteen paces!” The men in their rows laughed particularly hard. The women yelped. Eaton, gray-haired and bovine, somehow stayed ahead of Cooley, whose legs worked but not as designed. He stumbled as he chased, sometimes bounced off a wall or tumbled into a chair. And when he scrambled over a sofa, it teetered and he fell and upholstery ripped. Protected now by the stalwarts, Eaton crossed the stage and made his case: “I buy my tallow from Mr. Glassen. Cooley doesn’t even sell tallow!”
Strain showed in the dampness of Cooley’s shirt. Hands clawing at the air, he groped toward Eaton, but a stalwart had him wrapped up. Then, as if a magician had snapped a finger, the effect of the gas wore off. Colton corralled groggy Cooley and flummoxed Eaton to shake hands and to raise clasped fists as if they’d been crowned king and crown prince of Hartford. Colton’s men helped Cooley to a seat next to Horace.
“How did I get past the ropes to chase Eaton?” Cooley asked. He panted, his eyes glassy. Horace felt similarly out of sorts, though his tooth and jaw had begun to ache again.
“I was in no condition to notice.”
“Did I make as much the fool of myself as you?”
“There will be talk, won’t there?” Horace said.
“Sermons.” Cooley glanced at the crowd. “The faces of our peers aren’t kind.”
“I’d do it again.”
“Immediately.”
Cooley’s pant leg, Horace noticed. Torn. He leaned near. Blood there, oily and dark, on the leather of Cooley’s shoe.
“My heavens, Sam.”
“What? Oh.”
Cooley rolled his torn trouser leg to show that a stocking had been ripped, skin under it shredded. Shiny white flesh and shiny red blood.
“That’s an awful mess,” he said, sounding weak.
“We’ve got to get you fixed up. How did this happen?”
“I’ve no idea. It’s the first I knew of it.”
“Can you walk?”
“Maybe. It’s starting to smart some.”
The men stood, Cooley tenderly, his foot cocked so he could better see his leg. They staggered together up the aisle, each pretending not to hear the opprobriums spoken in their wake.
“You didn’t feel it before?” said Horace.
“Not at all,” said Cooley. “Just now a prick.”
In the lobby, with Cooley sitting on a bench near the men’s washroom, Horace ripped back the trouser cloth. He felt a quick elation, spurred by the violence of the wound and Cooley’s testimony that he’d felt nothing. A small group had gathered to watch and murmur, Riggs among them. Elizabeth arrived and squatted near to Horace. He sensed her at his side, said, “Cooley didn’t feel this at all.”
“Horace, a word, please.”
“But, you see, he felt nothing. And when I was under the spell of the nitrous—”
“You covered our good name in shame, is what you did.”
He had not noticed her face until that moment. Had he met her on the street, he’d have thought she was not his wife, but some blacksmith’s creation hammered to look like his wife. He saw no softness in her, nothing vulnerable. Had he done this with his antics? He reached for her hand, but Cooley interrupted. “Now the leg hurts a piece,” he said, and Horace turned. Cooley gritted his teeth. “Will it need sutures?”
“Not likely. The wounds run vertically. You’d have bled dead by now had you caught an artery. A tight binding should do it. Let’s raise the leg. Lie back.”
“Horace.”
His predicament came clear. Worse, he knew that what ailed Elizabeth could wait. In fact, her concerns should wait, given the time and attention and privacy they would require. Cooley needed care here, now. And his situation carried the tantalizing possibility of an insight. Horace said to his wife, “I wish it were otherwise, but I must have water for Cooley’s leg. Would you?” He meant for his voice to sound even-tempered, but when he heard his tone he feared it sounded cold, uncaring.
“A fine night’s entertainment, Elizabeth, don’t you think?” said Cooley, his wide smile returned. “We’re all clowns through and through.”
“I’m no tavern wench you send to fetch a pint.”
Her pique, Cooley’s leg. Two sorts of bleeding needed to be stanched. Horace shifted his position so she could see Cooley’s wound. She gasped—her anger, he hoped, tempered by the sight.
“Isn’t that an awful lot of blood?” said Cooley, sounding proud and scared.
Elizabeth left then to fetch water, and Horace, relieved, closed his eyes, the reckoning postponed. To Cooley, he said, “You really felt nothing? All that time we sat together. No pain in your leg. Not even when you cut it?”
“On the Holy Gospels, Horace. I felt nothing.”
When Elizabeth returned, her hands trembled as she set the bucket beside her crouching husband. He dunked a rag into the water, surprised at its iciness, a quick ache stiffening his fingers.
The sleigh runners rasped over ice patches, and the mare, Newton, coughed in air become even colder. Elizabeth crowded the far edge of the sleigh’s bench, leaning so far from her husband a bump might have tumbled her into a snowbank. He made no comment as he drove, did not ask her forgiveness. At Lord’s Hill, he kept his coat buttoned. His boots left snow on the floor. Elizabeth hung her coat on a peg, slipped into her house shoes. She noticed that he stayed dressed for the outdoors and took it as a sign of his chagrin and sincerity, that his desire to be forgiven and the conversation awaiting them was of such importance that nothing else—especially not what he wore—mattered.
“You have ruined us,” she said. Ruined. It was the word that had echoed through her head since they left the Union Hall.
“No, no. Not at all.”
“We shall need to start again in another city. Who will seek your services now, so foul a man?”
“The gas erases pain. I’m certain of it. Cooley felt nothing. The exhilaration—”
“We are not talking about the gas!” A large snow clump from his boot had begun to melt into a pool, she noticed. She did not want to be angry. Her anger was a pain to her. She calmed her voice. “We are talking about how you have brought us low.”
“People will forget,” he said. “If my theories are correct, patients will stand in lines from my office door all the way to Boston. All the way to London! What happened tonight won’t matter.”
She bent near him, and he startled backward, and she rose with the snow from his boot, now a small ball of slush in her palm. She let it fall atop the heating stove, and it sizzled, steamed. She had asked for his contrition; he gave her science.
“You keep secrets,” she said. “You never spoke of your intentions. I lie beside you, and we are strangers. The words you used.”
“People will forget.”
“I will not.”
Such a hard crystal phrase, brittle in the cold air. She sensed a hardness thickening in him to match her own.
“Are we done?” he asked, standing. “Colton may leave on the first morning train, so I must speak with him tonight.”
Astonished, she gave no answer. Then the door clunked shut behind him, and all her hardness softened. At first, that change felt a relief, but she stayed still for many minutes, and soon that softening became a rawness and then a vulnerability. The cottage walls fell away, and the cold crowded her, and Elizabeth could see far into the night-black city and beyond, the world so large and hostile, and herself small, much too small.
Not a bad evening’s entertainment, Colton thought. Upsetting about the young fellow’s leg. But the surgeon dentist’s singing! His gutter-bird warbling! A highlight.
He dimmed the lamp, and with a dull knife cut a ham slice from the room’s sideboard, though it was hardly that, more a shelf with a bit of dried-out meat, moldering cheese in a crate underneath. He sipped hard cider from a mug and imagined the visit from a town sermonizer that would surely come tomorrow. “You’re right, Reverend. Endangering morals of the flock. Very
concerned, yes. Oh, Reverend, my gas isn’t what devils breathe in hell. A little air from the shit fields? Ha ha. My gas—and this is what the poet claims, Reverend, not myself—is the atmosphere of heaven. Would you like to explore those Elysian skies? No charge. As the Psalmist sings, ‘Let everything that has breath, praise ye the Lord.’ ”
Now, Colton breathed pipe smoke, and sipped cider, and let the knotty muscles near his tailbone relax into the back of an uncushioned chair. Clara who sucks cocks. Wonderful. He’d like to meet this Clara.
He rested his pipe in a bowl and pulled the tank near, leaned over the faucet, intending to take some gas. Three quick raps on the door stopped him.
The surgeon dentist gutter-bird stood there, flushed as if he’d sprinted up the stairs. “A moment of your time,” said he between gasps. Some gurgle in his pronunciation, as if his tongue were working to avoid that nob on his jaw, more inflamed now than it had been at the exhibition.
“No refunds,” said Colton, “but I can sell you another tug on the pipe for ten pence.” It wouldn’t be the first time a man returned wanting more. “You can join me. I was about to partake.”
“My concern is not your entertainment. My concern is science.”
“More money in entertainment, but come in.”
The dentist stayed outside the door. “I need you to administer the gas for me in a larger dose than you did tonight. Tomorrow would be ideal. At my office. My name is Horace Wells.”
“Come inside, Dr. Wells. Sit down, please. Allow me to sit. The evening lasted too long for my back, and its argument with my legs is more than I can bear. How’s the lad who raked his calf?”
The dentist quick-stepped into the room, not so much sitting in a chair as landing birdlike at its edge. He seemed unwilling to commit to sitting, leaning forward, elbows on knees, with just enough of his backside on the chair to keep both from sprawling.
“At home. Sleeping, if the pain won’t keep him awake. I prescribed a whiskey.”
“What a spectacle, his chasing the other fellow about the room! But you, my friend, you were the highlight of my evening. Whatever place you visited in your gaseous dream, I’d like you to take me.”
The dentist’s half-smile suggested ruefulness. Without asking, he carved a wedge of ham the size of a piglet’s hoof and bit into it, chewed only on the side of his mouth opposite the bump.
“Would you like a slice of ham?” Colton said, but the dentist seemed too engrossed by his thoughts to notice the gibe.
“My theory,” the dentist said, and Colton heard something unyielding in the man’s voice, “is that exhilaration of all sorts alters sensibility and interferes with the mind’s perception of pain. Think of the wounded soldier fighting through his agony. The mind that is bored or at rest, I think, experiences pain more acutely, having nothing else to occupy it. Young Cooley said he felt nothing of his wound until the effects of the gas wore off. His sprint around the theater could also have annulled his pain—as with that soldier in battle—but, having breathed the gas myself, I believe something in its exhilarating quality separates mind from body. Could that quality be potent enough to separate the mind from the most severe pain? Say an amputation? Might we control that exhilaration through careful application of the gas? Perhaps you already know.”
“I’m not in the habit of hurting myself while undergoing the gas’s effects, nor subjecting anyone else to pain. Why interfere with the good life?”
“You think my preoccupation to be morbid. Perhaps. I go where my profession leads me. Thus, I study pain.”
“That’s a life’s work. Three lives, even. The poet’s, the priest’s, and the scientist’s.”
“I have approached the problem as the scientist. Now I need your help. Will you come to my office in the morning at ten o’clock? I ask that you administer an excess of the gas. I’ll arrange for my colleague Dr. Riggs to extract a tooth that has been causing me discomfort. We shall see how I react. Please understand the implications of proving my theory. Surgery without pain. And then after that? Painless childbirth? Battlefields where soldiers are spared the agony of their wounds? An end to cephalalgia, cardialgia. Another generation might even eliminate every species of suffering.”
The dentist had stopped looking at Colton as he spoke, staring instead at the bladder holding nitrous oxide and its faucet. His aspect had grown fervent but his voice strangely calm, as if he were reciting docking schedules at a harbor or detailing the mating habits of a thrush. The sincerity of the man’s grandiosity troubled Colton, who preferred his dramas false and harmless.
“What I know of pain,” he said, “is that it is best avoided, and when it can’t be avoided, it is either endured or it kills. Were I to allow you a hearty inhalation of nitrous oxide and some harmful thing resulted, I, too, would suffer. Say the gas leaves you mad or makes your wife a widow. What would happen to me? Have mercy, Dr. Wells. I’m an entertainer. A clown.”
“But, you must be a scientist, too?”
“No, sir. I am not. I ended medical studies after I observed my first surgery.”
“Look, Colton, I’ll sign any contract that holds you harmless. Write one up. My signature is good. I am in my right mind.”
“You have a wife.”
“And a child. A son.”
“Who will take responsibility for your family? These are not small questions. As you say, the gas is an exhilarant—”
“Pain, also, is an exhilarant.”
“Say your heart ruptures. Say your eyes open but your mind never wakes. What happens to your wife and child then?”
The dentist had cut himself another lump of ham. He chewed with care. “Widows marry again,” he said softly. “My mother did.”
He stood from the chair and stepped nearer the pouch of gas. With the fingertips of his left hand, he touched it and kept his fingers there as if he could feel something—heaven’s faint pulse? He said, “But it’s not my aim to make my wife a widow. You allowed me how many breaths of the gas? Two? Three? How many more can a man survive? When you started this business you must have pushed the limits.”
“I have not. I allowed you three good breaths.”
“We’ll not go past six. Three big mugs of ale make me drunk. Six make me sick but won’t kill me. There. Now my risk is limited. Ten o’clock. I will pay you for the gas and for your time.”
Colton considered. Among these Puritans, the wall that divided seemly titillation from scandal was constructed of wet paper—easily broken. He’d not likely draw a crowd in Hartford for a very long time. This dentist whose singing cost him money might as well help square Colton’s balance sheet.
“No contract,” he said. “I’ll not have any evidence exist that I participated in your death. But I want an oath, sworn on the Gospel by both you and this colleague of yours, that you will never connect me to this foolishness if it turns out badly. And ten dollars. I require ten dollars and that oath. Then, we’ll pursue your science.”
An enthusiasm flashed across the dentist’s face, bright and keen. “Agreed,” he said. “But believe me, Colton, because of what we do tomorrow, you will someday see your name in every newspaper and magazine. Europe’s leading scientists will praise you. Children will sing hymns to you in their school rooms.”
Then he was gone. Colton bolted the door, swallowed a gulp of cider, a bite of meat. He could not sit comfortably in that hard-backed chair. He arched his spine, tried twisting a bit to the side, lifted a leg over the arm. The pain would not diminish. No, not pain. The word was too strong, tossed about too easily in this room this night. His back ached. He knew the difference between an ache and a pain. His father knew true pain, what he’d once called a hot curl of ash inside his ear. The man had endured. Attended his fire and his molten iron every day, hammering nails and shoes for horses. Swung his tools even as that worm of pain burrowed and squirmed. No doctor could explain it, nor any minister. Old women made tinctures of root and herb; doctors prescribed calomel. Nothing worked. And he
re came Papa into Colton’s head, a clear picture, half his face a grimace, probing his ear with a finger or with a swab of cotton on the end of a stick, digging around, trying to kill the pain. Always, every day. His night moans, his sudden whoops at the dinner table as if he’d been bit. How he, a pious man, gave in to the vilest oaths. The skin around his eyes grew sallow from sleeplessness, his nocturnal roaming. Then came the day young Colton found his father in the barn, sprawled in the hay, a red and brown halo where his head lay, his eyes open but his skin cold, a bloody hole where his ear had been, and still in his fist that knife he had used to kill the worm.
Colton’s back felt sore but that was not pain.
He pulled the bladder into his lap, cradled it as he would an infant. The dentist believed in its properties, and he’d pay the high price. So why not? The wick on the lamp had burned down to a blue glow. Colton’s mouth tasted bitter and velvety from the cider. He took the faucet between his teeth, pinched his nose shut.
If she had been dreaming, Elizabeth did not remember. She woke in morning’s dark, gauzy with sleep but only for a moment. Then the previous evening returned to her, muscle cramp, hard pulse, a fragility in her belly. She untangled her feet from the sheets, sipped water from a cup at her bedside to moisten her lips chapped by winter, moved so as not to wake Horace—but no need for that. She lay in their bed alone.
The bite of cold floorboards underfoot. She shivered as she hung her nightclothes in the wardrobe. Horace, if home, made no sound. Tinkering in his workshop, perhaps, or nibbling in the kitchen. She would not eat with him. The thought of a cheddar slice or a cake with jam weakened her legs, curled her lip. Disquiet filled her now, coming with the memories of her husband’s sickening performance, his disregard after. She hugged herself until her arms trembled, and then she stopped.
She had dreamed. What was it? The sense that lingered was of something better than this morning’s reality, so she reached for it. Horace had been with her, and she’d been furious, yes, but he somehow—
The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist Page 6
