The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  “Is it a town?” asked Horace, “this New Covenant? Might they have a storekeeper?”

  “Berry-pickers,” the cooper said, his mouth full of biscuit, words even more garbled. “Sloth-mongers. No weeds ever grow in their gardens.”

  The cooper laughed for no reason Horace understood, then wiped his lips on his sleeve and spit into the fire. He began to hum what sounded like church music.

  “Would they have an interest in hygiene? I have an invention.”

  The cooper looked at Horace quizzically. “Ah, Lord,” he said, “I do love eating, but I weary of the time spent wiping my arse.” The old man poked his way into the brush, and left Horace and the boy to stare at each other across the fire. Though he was about Charley’s size in inches and girth, the boy’s coordination and the bloodless cast to his eyes suggested he was nonetheless older. He wore a bird tattooed on the left side of his neck just below his ear. A raven or a crow—in all ways common—but with three legs. Horace offered a biscuit from the cooper’s paper sack, but the boy ignored the gesture, now looking to the woods where the cooper had concealed himself.

  “He frippery,” the boy said.

  By ferry they crossed the Delaware River, then arrived at New Covenant near dusk. The cooper set the wagon brake at the edge of what looked to be less a settlement than a camp. A bell rang, and suddenly smiling people surrounded the wagon as if welcoming loved ones. The cooper rose and in his graveyard voice bawled, “Fornicators!”—then babbled Bible verses so quickly Horace could not make them out. The people reached to shake hands and to hug. “Do you intend to join?” asked a grinning young fellow in a purple hat of some fashion Horace didn’t recognize. “Have you heard the great voice sing?” queried another. Horace felt jostled by their good will, out of sorts, giddy despite himself. A ruddy complexion and spirit emanated, as if each person knew constant and happy exertion. Such infectious joy!

  “What is this place?” Horace asked as he stepped to the ground.

  “Look around,” commanded a young woman, freckle-cheeked and in pants, her dairyman’s high boots unlaced. Her arms swept the panorama—wall tents pitched amid moss and pine needles, a dusty bunch of Norfolk black turkeys (molting, Horace noted, outside their season), and countless dogs. “Look around,” she said, her smile an invitation. “Our New Covenant is as close to Eden as mankind has achieved.”

  Eden? With rips and patches in the tent roofs and such unruly gardens? With people clothed as farmers or hunters, but with little sign of farming or hunting? Two fellows even dressed themselves as Indians, sporting feathers in their hair and necklaces of skulls such as from mice or voles, but there were no real Indians nor any Negroes.

  People spoke to Horace of love and transcendence and planetary grace, and he could make no sense of it all. Eden, you say? He supposed it might be possible. Wouldn’t Eden seem a weird refuge to the undeserving sinner? To himself?

  Now the freckled woman in dairyman’s boots had grasped the cooper’s hands and, walking backward, she led him from his wagon. The apprentice followed.

  “Tomorrow for broken casks,” she said. “Come. Eat with us.”

  Horace fetched his notebook and chased after. Because dirt smudged every cheek and hand, he mentioned the shower-bath. “Interesting,” said the man in the purple hat. His pronunciation suggested an expensive education.

  “Is there a store?” Horace asked. “Where is the town?”

  “Without government, there can be no town,” said the man. “Without commerce, no store.”

  They came to a long framed house with walls made from tree bark, where inside people crowded around a communal table amid loud conversation. The cooper and his apprentice landed at the table’s other end, beside the man in the purple hat. Horace found himself on a bench beside the freckle-faced woman. Her name, she told him, was Delia.

  “This is how the Iroquois sheltered themselves,” Delia said. “And it’s how early Christians ate.” She shared a bowl of boiled potatoes.

  The potatoes needed salt, but he was glad for them, and for the turkey and squash. Bees hovered about the table, and a sweet rot of fermenting apple hung in the air.

  Between bites, Horace wrote in his notebook the clumsy proper name of his hosts: The Association of the Lord’s New Covenant for Edenic Return. Each day, Delia told him, they worked to liberate themselves from false doctrines and restore the freedoms of the first garden. They called each other Liberites.

  “I once stole a silk dress,” she said, “because I loved a slave man, and he had never touched silk. That’s when everything changed.” From a jar, she filled his cup with hard cider. “Have you read Theory of the Four Movements and the General Destinies?”

  Inside a canvas tent reserved for New Covenant’s guests, Delia had placed three mats woven of dried grasses over the hard-packed dirt. Now she and the purple-hatted man hauled a clay pot heavy with water through the tent’s entry flap. Each crouched to bear the weight, water sloshing over the pot’s rim. Once they eased their burden down aside a tent wall, Delia blew hair out of her eyes and slipped a ladle from her belt. “For drinking or washing,” she said to the three guests, “or whatever use you see fit.”

  It was only now that the man introduced himself. Cuthbert, with a Dutch last name, a sound like a man blowing his nose. Bronk, perhaps. “From Manhattan,” Delia said. “Descended from patroons.” Cuthbert grinned, teeth white and right-sized, in perfect alignment. She snuggled closer. “And he’s good with a rifle.”

  Cuthbert laughed and gathered her hair in a fist, tugged back her head to lift her chin. She received his kiss so Horace could see their tongues banging the insides of each other’s cheeks. Their brazenness shocked him and gave him to ache for Elizabeth.

  “Fornicators,” muttered the cooper.

  Delia answered that all pleasures are innocent. Then she and Cuthbert bade their guests sleep well.

  Given the warm night, Horace bunched his blanket as another pillow. But he could not find a comfortable way to lie, and he could not shake that dream of nights past, of Elizabeth and Charley digging. It remained present and vivid as no nightmare ever had. Was nitrous oxide at fault? He had brought to the hut his last bladder, and now he cradled it, wanting to breathe but afraid to. When the cooper began to snore, Horace lifted the faucet to his lips as if it were open; his eager blood jumped. Lighting a candle, he wrote his concerns in his notebook. Had long absence from Elizabeth changed how nitrous oxide worked in that place deeper than his consciousness? Perhaps the gas somehow sensed their separation. Perhaps, he thought, it works in the same deep, unknowable place as does love. Or sin.

  Across the hut, the cooper’s arm enfolded the sleeping apprentice as if for warmth. Horace arranged himself upright, leaning against the heavy water pot. He made a note about his father and a last thought about Elizabeth, then put aside the unopened bladder and his bedding and stepped into the night.

  When he found Delia’s tent, he whispered her name until she answered, “A moment, please,” then limped out as if one of her legs still slept, her whole body tilted to compensate. In nightcap and a long cotton gown, she refused his hand, but followed when he beckoned her to the woods’ edge. The night exploded upward into a spray of stars, and the damp woods smelled of moss and sap.

  Delia rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “I’m no easy fuck, Dr. Wells,” she said, “if that’s your hope.”

  He could not deny that her presence comforted him as no man’s could. But he raised his open hands as does a man to show his innocence. “I woke you because I had a dream. It terrified me. It won’t wash from my mind.”

  Delia scrunched her brow. “In Eden,” she said, “no one dreamed. Such perfect waking peace. There was no need. But now, angels speak to us in sleep.”

  She sat, tucking her legs underneath her, and he settled against the foot of an oak. Then she told him about the common passions, and about poverty and justice. Horace listened to her wide-ranging musings, and though he could not
follow why the goodness called God favored laughter over obedience, or how a particular spiritual plane mimicked the design of a spider web, he heard a sturdy promise in her words. He heard kindness. The moon peeked above the tree tops and very soon showed its partial self, curved, a celestial hammock. Tree frogs sang, and Delia explained the roundness of the soul.

  Yes, yes, exactly this, the truest reason for his exile: such a night, such words. He did not feel healed or absolved, no, but Delia’s certainty about Creation and its openness, its possibilities, gave him hope for his own salvation and forgiveness. He shut his eyes against tears.

  “The soul can break,” she said, “like a cask. Also, it can be mended. The cooper understands this. He’s silly, but …” She yawned. “Do you think you might sleep now?”

  He did. So he walked her to her tent, and before she entered she turned and kissed the tip of his nose. “Stay in New Covenant as long as you like,” she said. “But if you must go, go knowing that God is all of your potential, all of your promise.”

  Back in the guest tent, Horace found the cooper and apprentice as he had left them, the cooper’s arms holding the apprentice tight. He settled under his own bedding, but later, when in search of a more comfortable pose Horace turned, he saw that the apprentice’s eyes were open, that the boy was staring at the bladder. Then the boy’s eyes moved and met Horace’s, and it seemed to Horace that some understanding passed between them.

  Outside: wind, just now rising.

  The next morning, Horace assembled his shower-bath, mud from the night’s rain squishing around his boots. He worked in open air with a canopy against the sun, and he hung a dressing curtain alongside. When people tried the bath, he sat on a broken rocking chair he’d carried from a nearby strawberry patch. He gave up that seat for those needing a tooth scraping or a nerve deadened. To preserve his remaining bladder of gas, he’d left it behind in the tent, calculating that no pain brought to his chair would require of him more stomach than had Newton’s death. Some patients arrived already drunk, and to others he applied a swab of cocaine or clove oil and steeled himself. Raising his charges from Hartford prices, he hoped to earn enough to buy a horse, even one as poor as the cooper’s nag.

  Several patients had paid and left when Cuthbert arrived. “My teeth are fine,” he said, using his purple hat to wave off Horace’s question. He sat in the rocker and crossed his legs so one foot might bob. Expensive boots, Horace noted. Cuthbert lay the hat in his lap.

  “I know,” said Horace. “You have perfect teeth.”

  “You aren’t the first dentist to say so.” Cuthbert grinned as if sharing a secret. Then he blurted: “The Chinese boy told me about a magic sack.”

  Horace’s smile in reply was false, an effort to convey calm as if this were no news at all. With a finger he cleaned mud from his own poor boot. “Observant boy,” he said. Then he showed Cuthbert the tooth on the chain around his neck, and explained about painless surgery and nitrous oxide until Cuthbert’s expression suggested Horace had said more than was necessary.

  “Your nitrous oxide sounds like our ether,” Cuthbert said.

  “You have ether?” Horace’s pulse jumped. He recalled the banks of the Hog River and Morton’s question: “Nitrous oxide and what else?”

  “Yes, for our frolics. Parties once a month.” Cuthbert hopped from the chair and staggered as if he were a three-penny drunk clutching a whiskey jug. “We breathe ether out of balloons and act like fools. Or rather, we ‘transcend our corporeal burdens.’ One of our flock brought the practice home from England. Except there the men dress up like women and women like men, and … well, ours are different. We’ve planned one after dark. Come frolic with us. Bring your gas.”

  Then he slipped a calling card into Horace’s apron pocket. “Should you ever wish to practice in Manhattan, look me up. I can introduce you to patients who will appreciate your science. If your gas performs as you proclaim, you’ll have a fuller appointment calendar than President Polk’s.”

  “You won’t stay in New Covenant?”

  Cuthbert topped his head with the purple hat and snorted. “The cooper would be disillusioned,” he said, “to learn how rarely Liberites do fornicate.”

  At workday’s end, Horace hadn’t sold a single shower-bath. Though the day’s dentistry had earned him enough money to buy a horse, probably, he’d ride that mount home with little to show for his journey’s stated purpose: the sale of his invention. Keen and undeniable, his disappointment in that regard. He scrubbed his tools and hands in a bucket, rubbed blood from forceps, and used his fingernails to scrape what could not be rubbed. He tried to remember all he had read about ether. With a rag he dried tools, then wiped his hands on his trousers. Nearby, the cooper conversed with a Liberite. “He felt forsaken, yes,” the cooper was saying, “but still he gave himself over to God’s will.”

  Moments later, Horace arrived at the guest tent to find the apprentice huddled inside, giggling, knees against his chest, eyes lacking spark, Horace’s remaining bladder beside him. So quick, so unexpected but honest, the bitter fury that hurried Horace to the sack, to finger its open valve. He twisted fists around the emptiness and nearly cried out his anguish. The last of his gas: gone.

  Balloons wagged in clenched fists. An accordion player fingered a buoyant reel. Torch and bonfire flames stuttered and lit the glistening faces of Liberites swaying, whirling, their motions wild and impulsive. The night’s ether frolic was underway.

  Horace tried to count the balloons so he might record the number in his notebook, but they changed hands too quickly, Liberites lifting them as if to drink from inside but instead inhaling vapor, then pinching the ends and passing them on. Nor in the firelight could Horace tell the balloons’ color: gray, perhaps brown.

  Laughing dancers met dancing laughers. Jack-o’-lanterns flitted from the black wood to prettify the meadow. Or were those bonfire sparks and embers caught on breezes? Flickering, they orbited freckle-cheeked Delia, now in a silk skirt and blouse dyed lavender, who to and fro’d across a raised platform dandied up with cloth ribbons and illuminated by paper lights. Twice she swept near the edge, and twice Horace tensed to catch her should she fall. When she offered him her balloon, eagerness fairly choked him. He tucked its mouth between his lips. Breathed once. Twice. His fingers tingled; he felt himself rise. Not quite the experience of nitrous oxide, but …

  With each inhalation, the night lengthened and its shape changed; his scribbled notes grew more haphazard.

  He would need a workshop. In which his lungs could balloon with ether. Ethereal. Etherealised. He tried to write in his notebook. The effect of ether on the person. He didn’t mind that the pencil fell from his fingers. To etherealise, he thought, means to infuse with heaven.

  Breathe.

  Then he clambered onto the platform and explained to Delia (winsome Delia, kindly Delia) how he had discovered painless surgery, the same tale he’d told Cuthbert—but his eloquence! Fine-spun. His etherealised tongue shaping words beaten to leafy gold. Every thought expressed in verse. Ovid’s envy.

  The bonfire’s light colored her cheeks orange. A flame herself, Delia threw heat like liquid. Her breath singed his jaw whiskers, so he staggered to where the night’s air cooled,

  and wandered,

  and wondered: had he left a sentence unfinished?

  He stepped over a man curled on the ground like a cooked crayfish and who giggled. Gave room to another who dropped his trousers and sashayed cross-eyed in his undergarments. Paused as a ruddy woman with white hair straight as falling water reached hands to the sky and chanted predictions: the world would produce more poets than grocers; all plants would become hermaphroditic; every woman would choose from fifteen lovers each night; and people would learn to shit porcelain teacups!

  A man’s whisper in Horace’s ear: “She read those somewhere. They aren’t original.”

  The ruddy-faced sibyl cried out, “We’ll breathe the air of a faithless heaven!”

  I
t was Cuthbert who had whispered. He wore neither shirt nor shoes, but a fancy-buckled belt held up his trousers.

  Horace observed, “Your second toe is longer than your big toe.” He inhaled from the balloon once more before offering it to Cuthbert, who ignored the gesture and turned Horace by the shoulders so he faced the wood. “Look there,” he said, pointing.

  It was the cooper’s apprentice. The boy watched from the edge of the meadow, making no effort to hide. In fact, he waved.

  “What, the cooper lets him wander?” someone said.

  “He’ll be lashed,” said another. “Probably missing tonight’s sermon.”

  “Call him over.” This was Cuthbert.

  The boy ran to them, grinning. He spoke words Horace couldn’t understand, though one sounded like “lullaby.” The boy pointed to the balloon.

  “This one breathed up all my nitrous oxide,” Horace told Cuthbert. He turned his head toward a sound like someone retching, but saw nothing.

  Cuthbert looked over the apprentice as if he were some sort of machine. “Do you suppose,” he said, “that ether acts as does your nitrous oxide to destroy pain?”

  “I am considering the possibility,” said Horace, looking for his pencil. He’d brought a pencil, hadn’t he?

  Cuthbert wrapped his fist around the boy’s upper arm and dragged him toward the bonfire, signaling to others for assistance. Horace gave his balloon to the sibyl, then chased after, ether joy making a goosedown cushion of his head. “Inquiry into the nature of things requires procedures,” he said. “Procedures are the foundation of sound research!”

  “Take notes, then,” said Cuthbert. A small group, half a dozen, had gathered around him and the boy, who laughed and panted like a dog, stretching his neck toward a balloon in a Liberite’s hand. A rag appeared bunched in Cuthbert’s fist, and even from a few steps’ distance Horace could smell the caustic scent of the ether in which it had been soaked. When Cuthbert smothered the boy’s nose and mouth a panic brightened the boy’s eyes, and he made a noise, muffled by the rag. Arms jerking, he pawed the dirt with his bare feet. Liberites grabbed his limbs, holding him upright, and Horace giggled at the resulting odd dance (science could be festive!), kicking his own legs in studied imitation, trying to create a memory of this behavior that would last until he found his pencil. Delia at his side watched, too, then offered Horace another balloon. “An angel’s lung,” he whispered before taking a long suck.