Mosquitoes hovered thick in the afternoon air, while gulls swooped low and splashed in black pools along the railroad tracks. Lightning played over the western hills, a storm moving closer. On the Hartford station’s platform, John Mankey Riggs shifted foot to foot as if uncertain where he stood. Now and then, a buzz against his ear triggered a twitch and slap, interrupted the persistent and awkward heartache of having seen Horace Wells, his teacher and friend, so troubled. Such concern had preyed on Riggs for several days and become a brooding that kept him awake as many nights. He was tired, the air was dank, mosquitoes hungry, and he felt soul-sick about a man he admired who was broken, whom he couldn’t fix. He rocked foot to foot on the platform as he awaited help in the person of that other fellow who had studied dentistry with Wells, a man Riggs disliked and did not trust and despite himself had summoned. No wonder he felt tetchy.
A train lurched into the station, steam whistles complaining and steel screeching against steel. Men on the platform shouted halloos at passengers waving from behind windows, and a small black dog in a girl’s arms started to yap. Riggs felt an itchy welt swelling on his chin, aggravated by his scratchy beard. He wished he’d not written so dramatic a letter. He only wanted to get Morton’s attention, to make clear that an urgent reply was needed. He’d not intended for Morton to descend on Hartford as if he were some knight errant drawn by distress, bent on rescue. He knew Morton well enough to know that wasn’t true; the man never suffered a noble impulse. Something sordid lurked in his motives, of this Riggs was certain. And that meant the letter, intimate as it was about Wells’s indignities, had divulged too much. A worry that he’d been a disloyal gossip puddled cold and oily in Riggs’s belly.
Passengers began to disembark, and he saw a toddler stumble down a train car’s steps to smack against the platform. Behind the child came Morton, scowling, lifting his suitcase high and taking an exaggerated step so that for a moment his storkish legs straddled the wailing boy. Then he marched on, straight to Riggs, even as the boy’s mother lifted her child to his feet and chastised him with harsh words and open-handed slaps to his trousered caboose.
Morton turned back to watch. “Brat,” he said, spitting something dark. “He raised Cain all the trip, cut past me in the aisle as we waited to disembark, and nearly tripped me just now.”
“How did he come to tumble?”
“I didn’t push him, Riggs, if that’s your implication.”
Riggs clasped his hands behind his back to avoid a handshake and rose on his toes so that for a moment he stood taller than his visitor.
“Not at all. It’s too bad you endured an unpleasant journey. A letter detailing Wells’s Boston trip would have spared you the trouble.”
“I owe him money,” Morton said.
“January was not so long ago. You could have paid him then.”
“My lawyer says now. Why so much argument, Riggs? Perhaps I’ve other business here that doesn’t involve you or Wells.”
Other business? Riggs hadn’t considered the possibility. So single-minded had been his concern, he’d not allowed for any purpose but Wells to explain Morton’s visit. It was a small slip, yet it dumbfounded him. Morton turned and marched toward the lodging district, but Riggs lingered as if just shaken awake. Since he’d been faced with his mentor’s suffering, his wits had scattered. His brain—despite years of training in scientific inquiry—had reverted in its thinking to that of a schoolboy.
“Riggs?”
He felt Morton pinch his jacket sleeve. Exasperation seemed to be turning the man’s shaved upper lip cherry-colored. “What’s the delay?” he said.
Riggs looked at Morton now as if through a glass wiped clean of soot. Science required disinterest, and here was a man without love for Horace Wells. He’d not be distracted by pity, as Riggs had been. Morton, Riggs realized, might well be their mentor’s best hope. So he offered his hand, which Morton looked at, cockeyed, then took. “I only wanted to tell you,” Riggs said, “before we left on our mission, that I’m glad you are here.”
Morton let go Riggs’s hand to slap his own neck and grunt. He showed Riggs the bloodied wings and legs before wiping mosquito remains on his jacket. Morton’s sleeve cuffs, Riggs noted, were frayed.
While Morton settled into his lodging on Allyn Street, Riggs—in the lobby—recalled that wintry morning not so long ago when he’d pulled Wells’s tooth and Wells had felt, as he said then, not a prick. But what occupied Riggs was the moment before: We can’t fathom all that might happen, Mr. Colton had warned, his face grim, humorless. The phrasing suggested endless possibility, effects in the short term and effects over time. Because Wells’s breakdown manifested after he returned from Boston, Riggs had assumed Boston was the source of the trouble. But what if Boston were not? Could his friend’s affliction be traced to that snowy morning’s inhalation of nitrous oxide? Could Riggs himself, a participant in the experiment, have been an unwitting factor in Wells’s later collapse?
He hurt to think so.
When Morton returned, the men hailed an open buggy, taking seats on the bench behind the driver, who wheezed and kept his horse at a trot and who, as they approached cavities in the road, called out, “Mind the hole!” but always too late.
“In Boston, Wells seemed more nervous than usual,” Morton began, “stuttering and doing that funny thing where he scratches at his cheeks. You know—” Morton scrunched his eyes as he clawed his beard. “Afterward, he proved inconsolable. We spent the night chugalugging cheap rum. Wells drank like a friar, and it was all I could do to get him to the train station. The man’s nerves break like straw. You’ll concede to his erratic nature. Made for a poor business partner. One can’t count on him.”
“That’s a slander.”
“Not if it’s true.” Morton pointed to the sullen clouds now overhead. “That Wells, like the weather, is inconstant is a fact, and no more an insult to him than to the weather.”
The driver reined his horse at the Hog River bridge, taking its rise at half speed, and at the bridge’s apex, Riggs caught sight of clouds flashing; thunder rumbled soon thereafter. All over the city, shopkeepers shuttered their windows, and near the south pasture, Riggs marked a farmer with a switch flicking his pigs toward shelter.
Morton elbowed Riggs. “Help me understand Wells’s experiments. Yours, too.”
Because he knew such facts might aid his teacher, Riggs answered precisely as he could Morton’s questions about the nature of the gas, the time between applications during longer surgeries, whether Riggs or Wells had tried any other vapors—alone or mixed with nitrous oxide—how often Wells himself had experimented, whether either dentist had attempted methods of application other than the bladders with faucets, whether they’d given the gas only to people of sound mind, whether they’d tried it on people whose dispositions proved delicate.
“A chemist friend,” Morton said, “theorizes that laughing gas is an unreliable agent.”
“Do you suppose it is at fault here?” asked Riggs, his voice softening. “Might the gas prey on a certain mind? A certain disposition?” He felt the question like a cramp near his heart and wished suddenly that he’d not asked. He recalled as a student watching Wells work with patients, the hardness that overcame his teacher that seemed also like a fragility.
“Mind the hole!” bawled the driver just before a jolt shivered their spines. After the buggy regained its rhythm, Morton shouted over the rising wind and thunder claps: “How goes the battle against spongy gums?”
Had Morton not heard the question about the gas being to blame? Riggs sighed, relaxing against the side of the wagon with gratitude for having escaped a knowledge he’d rather not face.
Inside Sedgewick House, Morton scowled at Charley as if here were another boy to tangle underfoot. Elizabeth in turn gave Morton the full power of her eyes, but Morton did not wither under her gaze, saying that whatever Elizabeth’s misgivings he had indeed come to help, that after Boston he owed Wells his presence. “Also,
” he admitted, “he’s a curiosity to me, how his admirable qualities so often conflict with his interesting ones.”
“Likely we’d disagree over your definitions of admirable and interesting,” Elizabeth said.
Morton shrugged. “A discussion for a more quiet time,” he said. “May I visit him now?”
Elizabeth looked to Riggs for an answer, and he nodded. So the widow Mrs. Sedgewick, Elizabeth’s aunt, led the two men up the dark stairway to the attic, waiting with them as Riggs knocked and spoke into the door, announcing them.
They heard footsteps, and Riggs straightened, preparing for both Wells and a flurry of birds. But instead a door’s bolt crashed into place, and fast as a finger snap went a second, and then the rasp of a chain. Mrs. Sedgewick yelped and remarked that the door had never locked from the inside, that this was new, and moreover, inhospitable! Riggs pummeled the door with the fleshy side of his fist. Morton shouted, “All the way from Boston, Wells, and I’m not leaving!”
“An axe!” called Mrs. Sedgewick, who turned and jounced down the stairs.
“Isn’t that extreme?” said Morton.
“You have not lived with my nephew these two months!” she yelled back.
Then came muffled shouting from within, and that started a cacophony of bird cries. Riggs threw his shoulder against the door, and Morton told him to stop, that they should think this through, but before either could utter another word Mrs. Sedgewick panted up the stairs, handed over a maul, and Riggs swung in the tight quarters until he’d broken the door around the knob and locks. “Kick with me now, Morton,” he said, and on a three-count they did, and the door opened. That awful smell again! And birds! Those beating wings shattered the air, filling every small space around them, down the stairwell into the house, ever more fluttering, careening, and it seemed there could never be an end to birds. The men and Mrs. Sedgewick raised forearms to ward away beaks and claws, then stumbled through the attic searching until convinced that Wells had vanished. An open window suggested his escape, and when Riggs looked out he glanced first to the sky, envisioning a winged dentist flying gargoyle-like into the stormy horizon. Then his eye caught a spasm of movement on the street. Wells! Stumbling, caroming off the corner of a brick building, sidestepping a pig in his way. The men, without a word, hurried to the stairs and to the chase.
Even as they ran, Riggs didn’t know why they ran after, what might be accomplished. It only seemed to matter that they catch Wells, that to let him go would not do. Morton proved fleetest, but Riggs knew the city better. They moved pell-mell, as dogs after a squirrel, heads jerking into this alley and that bystreet. A glimpse! Wells’s fiery hair? Yes, him! Scrambling north—and the chase renewed. Now thunderclaps filled the air, and drops pelted Riggs’s scalp. Through a gate they pursued, into a pen where heavy-headed cattle awaited slaughter, past a kitchen woman who tossed supper scraps into the street. A rag-clothed girl selling paper flowers told them she’d seen a man with orange hair, yes, and pointed toward the Hog River. They searched until Morton doubled over panting, yellow in the face. Riggs lay a hand on the man’s back in sympathy until Morton recovered his breath and complexion.
When they reached the river, the two scrambled among the factories and tenements and sewage pipes that populated its bank. The air reeked, and Riggs noticed Morton stuff his nose with snuff.
In the muggy dusk, Riggs’s shirt stuck to his nape, and a blister smarted on his left foot. He pulled his hat tight against the gusts, unable to tell what spray came from the heavens and what came from the millwheels and spillways along the Hog. He watched for rats and nails, and shut his mouth so as not to inhale any of the bugs that swarmed. Legs wobbly, he seated himself on a pile of broken bricks. That was when he spotted a figure sheltered under the brownstone arch that bridged the river at Main Street. At its foundations the bridge and riverbank vanished into shadow, but the figure’s white shirt—he wore no coat—bloomed as an orchid from the shade.
Closer and yes: Wells.
He sat, mud and water soaked into his trousers. With a length of branch he swatted at an encroaching rat, keeping the rodent wary and at arm’s length. A shovel leaned against the bridge foundation, its handle and blade caked with green-black river muck. Wells coughed into his fist. Around him, the bank was cleared in an uneven circle, freed of the detritus that lined much of the waterway, and inside that circle stood tiny stones, markers of some kind, as a child’s pretend graveyard.
Riggs sat himself a few paces from his friend, hoping distance would prevent Wells from fleeing anew. Then, “The clouds promise a fierce evening.”
“The weather,” said Wells, his voice hoarse. “When there is nothing to say people speak of the weather. Did you bring a bladder of gas as I asked?”
Again, Riggs felt that cramp near his heart, the joy he associated with pulling Wells’s tooth (“Not a prick!”) never again so pure. “No,” he answered.
“Next time, bring the gas. I must sleep.”
Wells looked around him at the markers, then lashed at the rat.
“He wants my birds,” he said.
“What say?”
Coughing. Then: “The rat wants to dig up my birds. To eat them.”
Now Morton appeared, mud or worse spattered across his face, and a great rip in his coat from shoulder to waist.
“Shit, Horace,” he said. “You make nothing easy, do you?” He wiped his sleeve across his cheek and lowered his gaze as if he searched for something lost.
Wells picked up a fallen stone, then jammed it into the mud. “In this spot,” he said, hardly breathing, his words smashing together, “I’ve buried the birds, but the rats dig them up. Each time I return, a gravestone—sometimes two—is disturbed and a little hole in the place where I lay a sparrow to rest, or a flycatcher. I never want to kill the birds, but I need to understand them, and how else to make them keep still but a twist of the neck? My father taught me that when I was a boy, to kill chickens. All farm boys must learn to kill. I have notes I have written.” He patted at his chest as if searching for a pocket. “I find I understand these birds too well, and I think I am in a position to say they do not deserve to become rat food.” His pitch rose, voice lifting toward shriek.
Riggs noted a red stain in Wells’s right eye, and then a chain around his neck—the molar Riggs had pulled. Grotesque now.
“Humbug!” cried Wells, stumbling near to Morton. “Humbug-a-roo!”
“For God’s sake,” Morton said, “shut up.”
Riggs expected an explosion, a wail of some sort, or for Wells again to flee. Instead, Wells rubbed his cheeks—did not scratch—but rubbed. “Will?” he said.
“Christ, yes,” Morton grumbled. “Will who never doubts himself. Will, a man of conviction. That’s what you said when last we spent time together, Wells, so you’d best listen to me now.” Morton began to kick over bird gravestones, grunting as if he were the mad one. “That you understand birds does not mean you speak for them,” he said. “They are not your birds. They belong to God, or to the rats. Or the ants. Or the beetles. Or the maggots. Let the river rise and carry them to the sea for fish to eat. Don’t be a silly man, Wells. You are better than a silly man.”
A wind gust tossed Wells’s thin hair. It pushed water from an eddy higher along the shoreline, around Morton’s boots. Morton looked to the sky. “And now we’ll get drenched,” he said.
Wells spoke then, a question for Morton, and Riggs heard surprise in his friend’s voice, but only surprise—none of the frenzy from earlier. “Will,” Wells said, “what brings you to Hartford?”
“I am here to square my debt to you. Also, to ask you a question.”
“That’s good. I’ve worried about the money for too long, and it will be good not to worry. Or, to worry about other things.” Wells squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. “To worry about the right things. So, thank you. Now, what is the question?”
“What other gases have you tested? Nitrous oxide and what else?”
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“None other.”
“None?”
Wells shook his head. “None.”
During the buggy ride, Riggs recalled, Morton had asked him the same. Curious. The old mistrust returned, a fine soot that attached to Morton so well.
Morton fingered the rip at his shoulder. “I’ll stop by Sedgewick House tomorrow with a banker’s check,” he told Wells, “less the cost of a new coat.” Then he turned and climbed the riverbank, and Riggs watched until Hartford’s lights made Morton a silhouette huddling against what was now a hard-driving rain. He looked back to his old teacher, his friend, who examined his own clothes, said, “I am a mess, aren’t I?” Wells used both hands to smooth his hair, then smiled. “I do not want to be a silly man. They are not my birds, as Will says. Their songs are not my songs. How presumptuous to believe that what God gives His whole dominion might belong to me alone. Not true for the birds, nor for laughter nor pain. Not the gas, no. None of it mine.”
Riggs swallowed, a softening in his throat. Some flicker in his friend’s eyes, some sureness of his footing, hinted at a former clarity. Morton had done it—Riggs could not explain how—but with a few true words Morton had reached deep past the brokenness and awakened Wells. Riggs could not call his friend restored, no. But he appeared to be rescued, a man reacquainted with reality. Pray God that it be enough.
“John.”
Wells’s voice, calling softly. He reached his hand beyond the shelter of the bridge to catch rain in a shaky palm. “My Elizabeth,” he said, an ache in his voice. “How much sorrow have I brought her? How much grief?”
For nearly three weeks, Charley sat atop the attic stairs, watching his father kneel with bristle brush and sudsy water to scrub bird dung from floorboards. Trousers soaked at the knees and shirt untucked, Horace swept feathers and seed into a barrel that he lugged to the yard and emptied into a fire pit beyond the shed. He spit-cleaned windows and oiled shutter hinges. The work exhausted him, but he insisted on proceeding without help. “My amends to Aunt Dorothy,” he told Elizabeth, just returned from her Monday charity work at the insane asylum. He wanted to see in his wife’s expressions a little of the confidence she once placed in him—perhaps even a hint of pride. He told her he would replace the door Riggs had destroyed, but she said Aunt Dorothy wanted the attic to air, which was a true answer if not forthright. We must watch over you, Elizabeth thought. “Here’s a penny,” she more than once told Charley. “Go be your father’s tiny shadow.”
The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist Page 14
