The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  Closer now, on the couch, he noticed that her eyebrows had gone gray. With a fist, she bunched her sweater’s collar tightly at her neck. Her hands seemed smaller and less capable than he recalled; he wished it were otherwise.

  “Aren’t you chilled?” she asked. “Your father likes to keep the windows open. He’ll want to smoke with you after dinner. Have you taken up a pipe?”

  “I might miss him. I need to make Bennington by nightfall.”

  “Oh, no. He’ll be home soon. And you’ll stay overnight.”

  He leaned near, bumped his shoulder against hers in a conspiratorial way. “I’d fall asleep in one room,” he said, teasing, “and in the morning find that you’d rearranged my bed out into the side alley.”

  Her laugh was sincere. He liked that he still could make her laugh. She glanced over her shoulder to the window as if considering the alley’s suitability for a bed. “One mustn’t rely too much on things as they are,” she said. “It’s not good for the elasticity of the mind.”

  “There must be a best way to arrange things, and once found left alone.”

  “Not to my view. The Son, I’m certain, would sometimes like to sit at the left hand of the Father. Don’t look that way.” She gazed upward. “It’s a joke.”

  Tea followed, with honey and chitchat about garden blooms, a road washed out near Brattleboro, his brother the physician (for whom Charley was named) still unmarried. He spoke of his shower-bath and the financial security it could provide. “Elizabeth wants another child,” he said. His mother chirped and clapped at the idea of a granddaughter. When pressed, she agreed that the Shaws would enjoy a shower-bath. “Though Mr. Shaw will know best,” she said.

  In the parlor, as Horace fixed in place the shower’s pedals for demonstration, Mr. Shaw limped through the front door, arthritic leg thumping the floorboards with each step. His gray eyes leaked when he blinked, and his voice still sounded as if it passed through gravel to his tongue. Something like a smile crippled his face. The odor on his breath suggested loose gums. This was an age Horace’s father had never been.

  “What contraption is this?” his stepfather said. “I thought you practiced dental surgery.”

  Horace stiffened. “I do have my kit if you need treatment.”

  Abiather Shaw waved away the suggestion and circled the shower-bath, his afflicted leg stiff and thumping. “I can’t track your enterprises,” he said. “Didn’t you have a business in Boston? Something to do with ornithology? Your stepbrother lives in Boston, you know. An architect. Worked with Bulfinch. Top o’ the mountain. What happens to the water?”

  “It drains to this chamber.” Horace squatted and pointed. “Then it recirculates via this pipe to the spout, pushed by the force of the feet working the pump.”

  “Twice-used bathwater? Why do I want dirty water splashing in my eyes?”

  Horace stiffened. He noticed his mother across the room, cradling a bowl of potpourri at her waist, looking here and there. She placed the bowl on the pianoforte, seeming as far away from Horace as if he were yet in Hartford.

  “Abiather,” she said, her voice thin as a breeze, “invite our son to stay the night.”

  Horace took up a wrench, loosened a nut on the shower-bath wall. He’d practiced disassembling it and could pack it into its crate in seven minutes.

  “Make your mother happy,” his stepfather said.

  “I need to reach Bennington by nightfall. Early appointments with merchants interested in my invention. Perhaps we’ll see you someday in Hartford. You might like visiting us there.”

  But Abiather Shaw was already limping out of the parlor. “Business first,” he said. “A sound decision.”

  Horace did not reach Bennington that night, nor had he meant to. Crossing the Connecticut River, he steered Newton along a road still lumpy with frost heaves, and in the village of Bellows Falls, he parked near a grain mill hard beside a saltbox house in rough repair. “A series of tenants since we moved out,” his mother had warned. “They’ve been unkind to the property. I don’t like to see it.” Now, on his wagon’s bench, Horace leaned to pat Newton’s rump by way of thanking the mare for bringing him here, for proving reliable, solid. The house looked meaner than in Horace’s memory: the yard all weeds and packed earth, clapboards repaired with scrap, a peeling painted fence behind which a few hens kept company in the moonlight with a scabrous, yipping terrier. Horace expected someone to step from the house, to demand his business or suggest he move on, but none did. Tonguing the space where his tooth had been, he lifted his face and saw flecks of starlight glint in a second-floor window, darkness from the room behind. There his dying father had lain, young Horace—age fourteen—attending. He thought to pray, but that terrible power was not right for him, not now. The bat jerked again through memory, and Horace realized how fiercely he now gripped the wagon’s brake handle. Newton scraped a hoof over dirt, and Horace saw a shooting star rend the heavens.

  Later, at an inn, he fastened the door latch of his room and made certain the window was shut, turned a faucet and breathed the gas. He hoped for a vision of his father, healthy as when he tapped maples, but instead came a woman strange to him, young, who pressed near, her breath unnerving at his ear. Her whisper: “I hurt.”

  On he drove, west through mountains and across the Hudson River into New York. A Hoosick Falls storekeeper agreed to sell the shower-bath, as did one in Albany. Too expensive, the rest kept saying, and for this Horace blamed the manufacturer, Col. Roberts, who had calculated costs and set the price. Yet he, the inventor, would by contract owe Roberts money if the bath didn’t sell! This knowledge troubled his sleep.

  Deep into the Catskills he lost track of the calendar and did not know it was a Wednesday when he and Newton drove a narrow trace into a fen. Branches lashed his cheeks, and the evening air brought cobwebs and mosquitoes and despondency. He coughed—he’d been coughing for days—and a sharp pain surged at the back of his skull. Self-diagnosis: cephalgia, occipital. Headache. Stemming from a chronic cough brought on by morning dampness, prolonged by lack of sleep. He coughed again, so violently that he gagged and spit and sweat broke across his brow, something in his chest hardening as if to petrification. Distant, he heard a panther’s scream, and then—closer—an owl’s plaint.

  Elizabeth and Charley. The worse he felt the more he wished for them. Her with forehead flushed from garden work; the boy in his favorite paper hat. Their voices seemed just at the edge of his hearing—until it seemed not only possible but likely that in the next moment Elizabeth would materialize on the bench to his right, Charley tucked between his parents.

  He reined Newton to a stop. Enough sleeplessness, he told himself.

  Crawling into the wagon’s bed, he unlocked a crate, removed a bladder, bunched his coat as a pillow. With a few quick breaths, he found his way into slumber and dream. Where he found them.

  Elizabeth and Charley crouched around a plot of overturned earth, the dingy sky casting a metallic glow—menacing and static. Wet dirt smudged Elizabeth’s chin. She held a trowel. Her hair hung loose as she dug, her skirt muddy at the knees. In the dream’s unnatural quiet her breath echoed, the trowel rasped with each cut into soil. At the garden’s edge, Charley chewed his lip. Redness rimmed his eyes. Elizabeth dug as if she hadn’t noticed her son, as if exhaustion allowed her one focal point, which was her chore. Horace watched from sleep, helpless no matter how hard his heart beat.

  “My arm still won’t move,” Charley said, his voice breaking.

  Elizabeth drove the trowel with such force her grip slipped. Horace wondered what she meant to unearth. When she spoke, the cold strength of her voice frightened him.

  “Dr. Taft said nothing is wrong.”

  “I can’t lift it.”

  In the dirt, Horace saw root, worms. A spider crawled up the trowel handle toward Elizabeth’s bare hand. Charley wiped his eyes with his left. “Papa could fix my arm,” he said.

  Elizabeth stopped digging, leaving the tool�
��s blade buried. She stared then, not so much at Charley as toward the dreaming Horace. He saw it, straight on, a reproach and a challenge. She yanked the trowel free, stabbed once more into dirt. Why? What to unearth or to bury? He peered hard into the hole. “Why are you digging?” he asked, but it was with Charley’s voice. Elizabeth did not answer except to tap the trowel against her left elbow. “My arm, also, is useless,” she said. “You must help me dig.”

  She drove the trowel, waited. With his good arm, Charley made a scoop of his hand and pulled loose dirt from the hole. “Why are we digging?” he asked.

  Sweat smarted her eyes, which in the strange magic of dreams had become Horace’s eyes. Blinking away the salt-sting, he and she noticed shards of a pot, broken eggshells, a centipede, larvae, bits of paper on which something was written but could not be read.

  “Why are we digging?” Charley pleaded, his voice rising.

  One eye opened to light. Overhead, a canopy of leaves. Sunlight bright through them. Horace lifted himself from where he lay across the wagon’s bed. Coughed. A mosquito whined at his ear. Farther away, bird calls. Goldfinch? Yellow-rumped warbler? He did love the Sylvia coronata.

  Newton stared up the road. Or was that down? Both views were unfamiliar. Had Newton wandered? Horace considered whether he’d forgotten to set the wagon’s brake.

  He lifted the bladder at his side. Empty.

  A mosquito lit on his wrist, near a prominent vein. He slapped it dead, then returned the empty bladder to the crate, marked that only one full bladder remained. Had he breathed so much gas? He couldn’t remember. What remained from the night before seemed fogged, indistinct. He could not discern where memory ended and gaseous visions began. Never before this trip had the vapor brought on a nightmare. He would make a note, figure that out. He needed not to breathe nightmares.

  Newton whinnied, and that was neither memory nor dream. Horace verified the proper direction by the sun’s place and shook the reins, but the mare refused instruction. He touched her rump with the crop, then swatted, but she only twitched. When he, still light-headed, stood at her head and took the bridle to lead by foot, he noticed swelling below her right rear hip where there ought not be any. When did that happen?

  Newton lifted the leg, set it down, a grotesque dance. She turned to him, ears aquiver. He searched her big face, leaned into the shiny fur of her neck, and breathed her horse smell. With her lips she nuzzled his coat sleeves as if they might hide a carrot.

  Horace slipped his hands along the length of the swollen leg, over the bone-break. Jaw trembling, he climbed back into the wagon.

  Nothing for it, then, but to wait for a man to come by in possession of a musket.

  First came the hymn—an Isaac Watts tune, Horace guessed from the lyrics, something cheerful and platitudinous about hope wiping a tear from sorrow’s eye and faith pointing toward the sky, and so forth. Then up rolled a wagon carrying the man who sang, if the sound could be called singing. That voice clambered from a larynx dry as cork, the tune sounding less warbled than exhumed.

  The wagon stopped so near that Newton touched wet nose to wet nose with the other’s horse, a raw-boned beast that had more sores than fur along its legs. Horace waved a two-fingered greeting. The other driver set his brake and grimaced, evaluating each detail of Horace’s own wagon as if meaning to buy, then muttered, “Frippery.” It was true Horace’s running boards and cushioned bench seat made the man’s own wagon look ascetic with its gray, peeling sideboards, the wheel bands flaked with rust, and the seat upholstered with what looked to be an old potato sack. Still, how odd that the man hadn’t first said hello. Horace stepped toward the other wagon and saw in its bed a web of rope and a jumble of broken barrels—“Casks,” the man corrected, “firkins and kilderkins”—because he was a cooper, and he was driving the casks to his shop for repair. He wore a wide-brimmed black oilcloth hat; twigs and bits of leaf tangled in his gray beard, long and thick as a prophet’s. Then the man called out, a deenk-deenk sound like some piano key struck twice, and at his side appeared a Chinese boy dressed in faded yellow and gray rags, head shaved as if by a broken razor, forehead broad and pimpled, narrow chin and eyebrows placed by God as to suggest constant bewilderment, his face a living question mark.

  “Today’s language lesson,” the cooper said, and he pointed in Horace’s direction. “Tell me what we’re seeing.”

  “City man,” said the boy, in a voice mild as moss, “with a hurt horse.”

  “An injured horse. From the Latin injuria.”

  “Leg is big.”

  “It is distended.”

  “Small wagon, with bells.”

  “Frippery!” the old man said. “Frippery is sinful.”

  The boy nodded, and the old man palm-rubbed the boy’s shaved scalp.

  Horace turned to his wagon. Perhaps the bells were a bit much. Perhaps he had even indulged Newton, fed her too well, groomed her too often. He envied now how she stood at peace, somehow balanced despite the broken leg. She seemed to him the picture of patience, waiting without aspirations to any particular hope, without even an expectation. What she knew he needed to learn. Newton nickered toward the cooper’s nag, who answered with bared teeth. Yes, the cooper said, he had a musket. He lowered himself from the bench to rummage, and flies moved from smear to smear of whatever the broken casks once carried. The sweet reek offended, and Horace pinched his nose. As the cooper pulled the rifle from a blanket roll, Horace noticed Bibles stacked in a corner of the wagon bed.

  “I do, in fact, preach against the devil’s works in the tradition of Mr. Edwards, late of Massachusetts colony,” the cooper said. “There’s a Hell, and it’s by God’s grace we’re not swimming through its fires.”

  Horace had released Newton from the harness the night before, and now the cooper and the boy put their backs into moving Horace’s wagon so the mare would have room to fall.

  “I once thought to pursue ministry myself,” Horace said. “My father had died. I saw his soul leave through his mouth. It scared me into studying God’s ways.”

  The cooper said, “I’ve heard that about the soul at death.”

  Horace pet Newton’s neck and wondered whether she could benefit from a breath of gas—how much for those immense lungs? Too late, though, wasn’t it? If the mare had suffered, it was when she broke the leg and thereafter through this day. Soon the ball would cure any pain. Merciful. That’s what the old farmers said. But how could they know? How could anyone know whether in that last moment pain fled the soul or joined it in eternity?

  Horace’s father—he knew.

  Newton turned, nibbled at Horace’s belt. The brown liquid of her eye, how she looked at him—so agreeable.

  The cooper handed over the musket, and Horace took it, heavy but balanced, a pleasant weight. Alongside Newton’s shoulder, he angled the barrel toward the fleshy part of her head behind the jaw. He thumbed the hammer so it clicked.

  “Animals have no souls,” said the cooper, as if to reassure. Then his thought carried him into theology. “Nor do Indians. I don’t know about Negroes or Chinamen.”

  Newton, at the end of the barrel’s length, tongued her own lips. Thirsty, Horace thought. I should let her drink. He felt too warm in his clothes, so he unbuttoned his shirt, rolled his cuffs. Once more he raised the musket. A sour taste surged from his throat, and he spit. To shoot Newton, he realized, he must want to shoot Newton. Such a simple truth. But how to want such a thing? He had not wanted to think Elizabeth would die from childbirth; not-Horace dug her grave. Nor had he wanted to work violence in mouths that already suffered. With his father—no, unimaginable wanting that. In none of those moments had the deepest, truest part of himself acted. He had no practice in such wanting. Not-Horace had spared him.

  But now? Somehow, work with the gas had interrupted that mysterious transformation. In Warren’s Boston hospital, in Horace’s own dental office, no longer did not-Horace release him from intimacy with pain. Even now: his finger, none
other, warmed the trigger.

  The moment belonged to him and him alone.

  When the musket roared, the cooper hopped back, and Newton’s massive head lurched forward and down, her whole body following the spurt of blood, her knees buckling. But she caught and then righted herself. For a moment the mare stood long enough to convince Horace he would have to shoot her again. Then Newton shook her head as if to move flies, and she coughed a reddish spray. She staggered backward, but the broken leg couldn’t support the weight, and Horace heard something in it rip and crunch. Her haunches sank, and she sat on her tail. Her head turned left and then right as if she searched for some answer, and Horace saw wild fear and confusion in her eyes. Then, because she could not balance that way forever, she folded sideways into a poison ivy patch beside the road.

  “Catholics baptize Indians,” Horace whispered, “so someone believes in their souls.”

  “Those fish-eaters will baptize anything! Even a peevish bear.” The cooper’s laugh sounded bitter.

  Because the cooper’s nag could not pull two wagons, and because the cooper refused to hitch his horse to frippery, Horace moved his few belongings (dentistry kit, shower-bath, a last bladder of gas) into the other, and the party drove south. Later, the cooper offered to share lunch, and Horace thanked him, but only took the biscuit in his fist, and sometimes forgot that he held it. The cooper gave language lessons to the boy, whom he called his apprentice, and ate so crumbs nestled in his beard. Wobbly-spined, Horace lurched with each bump and dip, recalling the resistance of the trigger under his finger, how it gave way, and he felt new, and he felt old.

  Where they stopped that night the mosquitoes flew thick, so the cooper built a fire for the smoke. The Chinese boy sat on the crate that held the shower-bath, his legs splayed for balance, and he played melancholy tunes on a wooden flute. Now and then, Horace asked about wood-bending or scraping, but the cooper could not speak long about anything without finding his way back to wickedness and the devil, though his homilies sounded rote, a memory game or a stubborn tic more than a sincere effort to win Horace’s salvation. Horace’s fingers played around the faucet of the bladder in his lap.