Soon, the boy ceased his struggles and appeared to sleep. “Doctor,” Cuthbert called to Horace, “begin your research.”
So many head-feathers now, but Horace concentrated and with fingers to the boy’s wrist tried to count a pulse. He could find a beat, but not the space in his brain with which to count. “Weak pulse,” he said.
“Maybe it needs to be weak,” said Cuthbert. “Perhaps a weak pulse hasn’t strength to carry pain ’round the body, much as a weak man can’t carry a coal bin up stairs.”
Cuthbert pressed his thumb against the boy’s Adam’s apple and held it until a gurgling noise crossed the boy’s lips. Cuthbert asked, “Do you mark this, Dr. Wells?”
“Yes.” He wanted to laugh at that gurgle, but his throat felt corkscrewed. He tried to swallow it clear. “The weakened pulse,” he reminded. “Go easy.”
Now Cuthbert grabbed the boy’s wrist, and in the manner of a puppeteer motioned with the arm as if the boy were conducting a choir. In answer, the accordion player began to finger a tune. With hands under the boy’s arms, Cuthbert bounced him about so his legs danced and his head flopped side to side.
Delia stepped in as the boy’s partner. She clasped the small hands, and the trio stumbled through an appalling waltz. Now and then she let go one hand so as to lift her long skirt and kick. When the tune ended, Cuthbert dropped ass-first to the ground, puffing, and he cradled the cooper’s apprentice in his lap, draping the ether rag once again over the boy’s nose and mouth. “Too much,” said Horace. “His lungs are young.”
Delia leaned and kissed the foreheads of puppet dancer and puppeteer as a mother kisses her children. “Nothing wakes this one,” she said, and she lifted her blouse to show Cuthbert and his puppet her naked breasts. Liberites whooped and cheered her revelation, but the cooper’s apprentice showed no reaction.
“Mark this.” Cuthbert stood, and Horace cried, “No!” even as Cuthbert stomped a booted heel hard on one of the boy’s ankles. The boy’s body jerked, but his eyes stayed closed, and afterward he lay as an overfed babe napping in its crib. Liberites hoo-hawed.
“A new day for science!” someone said.
“Maybe it’s not the ether. Maybe Chinese don’t feel pain.”
“Make note of that hypothesis, Wells.”
“What’s that mark on the boy’s neck?” someone asked. “Something a witch left?”
“Test his hand in the fire,” said another.
Horace opened his mouth to object. But feathers inside his skull muffled his voice, and feathers felt good—a solace, those feathers. Vision blurred, he quick-breathed from the balloon in hand, and the skull-feathers became liquid, a syrup sloshing side to side. “Please,” he said, or perhaps whispered. “Don’t.” But his body lowered itself to the warm ground near the bonfire, and the ether-syrup ran to his toes and comforted him. He heard the accordion’s flirtatious groans, the Liberites’ gay laughter, and he wondered where pain had fled in the midst of all this contentment? Where did it hide? Because it never disappeared, did it? He imagined pain as gargoyles flying dark-winged high above, or like black oil spilling to fill empty veins of earth, or dark hedges bunched at the far limits of New Covenant, waiting to spread limb and thorn …
“Let’s try a knife,” said Delia, now leaning over Cuthbert’s shoulder. She pulled a wide, shiny blade from her boot. He reached; she yanked it back.
“No one touches my knife,” she said.
Cuthbert made room, and she squatted, squinting and biting her upper lip. With faltering hand, she lowered the blade until its edge rested on the boy’s pimpled brow.
… because all Edens fade, and then pain will wing or drip or grow back into waiting bodies, into hearts, into the souls of those who had breathed whatever vapor. Because pain never disappears.
Somewhere in the midst of these thoughts, which Horace did not write down and thus would forget, he fell asleep.
The cooper’s voice strangled when he asked Horace, “Are you certain?”
The boy’s body lay between them in the tent, the forehead sliced in a thin, precise line. Skin curled back from the cut and had stiffened, and flies hovered around the brow. Blood had spread thick and sticky across the boy’s face and dried in the creases of his eyes. Delia crouched over him, a bucket at her side and damp rag in hand, and with careful, gentle motions, she washed him. She made no sound, though her mouth twisted in grotesque shapes.
The cooper would not look at the body. Instead, he looked at Horace. Horace held his own arms tight about him, a hand rubbing an elbow. He studied the boy, whose hair strayed like twigs and twine in strange, comic ways; whose face appeared blasted with the force of new knowledge.
The cooper asked, “That vapor, maybe it only chased his soul away. When it wears off, he could come back.”
The cooper said, “He’s dead now. I know.”
He said, “Maybe another potion might open his eyes.”
In the afternoon heat, the cooper walked about New Covenant speaking loud and beseeching prayers, his steps slow and loping. His arms reached high and wide as if to catch whatever mercy God might let fall from heaven. He recited Gospel verses, but grief mixed them in ways that might have been funny had one not known how his heart was broken.
“I’ll not yet put dirt on his head,” he told Delia, when she offered her own robe as a winding sheet. “Imagine if he wakes underground. It’s best I keep him near.”
That night, Horace sat on the packed dirt inside the shared tent and watched by candlelight as the cooper straightened the boy’s limbs, covered him with blankets, tucked a pillow beneath his head. “If he stays dead,” the cooper said, “I will cut my beard.”
Horace rose then, and without a word carried his mat and blanket outside to a spot in the woods where exposed roots tangled and the moss was damp, a place utterly lacking in comfort. There he lay his mat and himself, so that roots poked his kidneys and the wet chilled through his shirt, and thus afflicted, he trembled before an inexplicable Heaven. A boy had died—and hadn’t he died because of the gas? Horace begged to know why. And this, too: Since the revelation of the nitrous-oxide miracle, why had he, Horace, become an instrument of so much and such ruinous pain? He smeared wet, gritty dirt across his cheeks and asked and asked until language failed and asking became desolation and endless night, need and exhaustion.
When fat rain drops woke him, he sat and let himself be soaked through his blanket and clothes. At a distance stood the ragged tents of New Covenant, this contrary Eden, illumined by gray dawn. He clasped his hands as if to pray but instead covered his face. What must he do? He’d wanted during this exile to reclaim his better self, but he’d only come here, to this bitterness. Why? He recalled that morning when Riggs had pulled his tooth: all its potential, its promise. But then came Warren and humbug and failure, and Horace living as if his obligation to proclaim the miracle were ended. He thought of birds buried in a riverbank’s muck, and of silly shower-baths, and of the chipped button on a woman’s blouse—ways he’d turned from the gas or turned it to his own purposes. Perhaps that was his mistake. There could be no turning. Every miracle demanded its prophet. No matter how ill-suited that soul, no matter how unexpected the choice, it was Heaven’s election and thus undeniable. With the gas, then, who else but Horace Wells? As with his broken-legged mare, his finger alone touched the trigger.
He wondered: could he make a new covenant?
It seemed that he must.
“Elizabeth,” he said, her name coming from deep inside him like a cough, and again, “Elizabeth,” to draw her near, to narrow the distance, with her to again begin.
V
HARTFORD
AND BOSTON
An early autumn wind bullied the cottage at Lord’s Hill. Elizabeth sat on a braided rug in the bedroom she and Horace shared, her forehead pressed against the cool wood of his wardrobe, praying for relief from the awful strain in her chest. It felt as if she were on a rack, or—Lord forgive her presumption—crucified.
She gulped air. Was this hysteria? Save me from a mad fascination with birds!
She laughed. Felt worse. When she blinked, her eyes watered, the recent grittiness in them somehow worse today.
Stand up, she thought, the curtains need beating. Stand up: tighten the bed ropes, and stir the potpourri in the guest room.
Charley complained from downstairs, his head itching with lice. Those filthy Wilcox boys. Her hands stank of the lard and sulfur she’d lathered into his scalp.
“Don’t scratch!” she shouted to him. “I’ll be there in a moment!”
A week before she herself had written to a friend: Horace’s brother to visit. We are not in a very inviting plight for visitors, but they must take what they can get. Such a singsong tone. About now, she knew, Horace and his brother, Charles, a physician from New Hampshire, would start the walk from the train station up Lord’s Hill. Would Charles ask: why not a wagon? She feared Horace would tell the truth, that he would talk of the dead mare, Newton, then admit that they hadn’t the money to purchase a replacement for the wagon he’d abandoned. His tone would be serious, full of confession and virtue. “And the shower-bath?” Charles might ask. And Horace would say, “Thus far, a failure. I’m done with that foolishness.” Such candor had been Horace’s passion since he had arrived home, slumped on the sagging back of a near-dead nag, sorrow plain in his eyes. It seemed the road had stripped him of that second self we each and all present to our fellows, and what remained was the barest, truest Horace. “Keep my soul safe,” he kept saying as he held her close, mumbling about a dead boy.
Their bank accounts remained thin; he practiced dentistry only on occasion and in limited ways. Instead he spent hours in his workshop experimenting with gases and making notes. But whereas once he had been furtive in this work, now he told her plainly of his day’s plans. When friends and acquaintances asked, “How goes it with the Wells family?” he spoke frankly and in measured tones about their privations and his research.
One overcast morning as they walked to church, Charley ahead kicking stones in the road, she told Horace, “Not all Hartford must know how we struggle. Perhaps you could speak less openly of our lives.”
He touched her shoulder and turned her to him. The way his eyes searched her face suggested that her words betrayed his new convictions, perhaps even jeopardized her own soul. “But I’m speaking truth,” he said.
“Silence,” she said, “can also be truth.”
“Silence can also be a lie.”
She returned a sad smile. She had come to understand more about deception than she thought possible, how a lie comes easily as truth when you are poor. When people asked her about the family, she’d say, “We have every confidence in Horace’s shower-bath.” When Aunt Dorothy asked why candlesticks she’d given as a wedding gift were no longer on the mantel, Elizabeth had said something about polish. She did not mention the shopkeeper off a South Green alley who told her, “I’ll ship them to a buyer in Baltimore. Anything else? Knife sets are always in demand.”
Now, in the bedroom, she pulled herself upright, her breath shallow, and waited until the spell in her chest had passed. She blinked, though that failed to clear her sight, then gathered items for the guest room—scissors, pillow cases, thread—and as she did, a gust rattled the panes. A draft cut in, and she thought ahead to the first snow. Would there be money for coal or wood?
She recalled the courier that morning at the front door, how he studied the ground, pawed it like a horse. Charley was crying then from the kitchen, and though her hands were greasy with lard and sulfur, she took the envelope. Twice she pressed the back of a wrist against her eyelids, snapped the paper open as if that might bring the words into focus. She called back the courier and asked that he read it to her.
“Not my place, Mrs. Wells.”
“Read it to me, please.”
Face reddening, he took the paper. Thus she learned from Col. Roberts’s lawyer that Horace must immediately return the colonel’s investment in the shower-bath. The lawyer assumed court would not be necessary.
The brothers arrived pink-eared and smiling from their long cold walk, pushing and prodding each other as if boys. Elizabeth kissed Charles’s cheek, asked him please to sit. He rested on a bench near the door, boots muddy, legs spraddled, belly swelling with deep breaths, and told an ordinary story about his ordinary trip. Horace, meanwhile, had found Colonel Roberts’s letter on the shelf where Elizabeth had known he would, in that same spot where he set his pocket purse each time he arrived home. He read, turning his attention now and then back to Charles’s tale and laughing at the right moments. Then he folded and slipped the letter under the base of a table trivet. His eyes met hers, and she shook her head in a barely perceptible way meant only for him. When he scratched at his cheeks, she understood that he would keep silent—for her.
Horace asked, “Where is Charley? He must greet his namesake.”
“Let him alone,” said his brother, generally waving toward wherever in the house Charley might be. “He’ll see me soon enough.”
Though two years and six months separated Horace and Charles, a new acquaintance might have thought them to be twins. They shared long, thick-lobed ears, and their chins were creased with short, shallow clefts. Both stood roughly the same height, tended toward plumpness, and had lost hair at a young age, as if their medically inspired minds burned the follicles to ash. But their faces conveyed different—and deceptive—attitudes. Horace, older, always worrying some problem, nonetheless appeared light-hearted, the pinched corners of his mouth suggesting a never-ending smile. Charles—a calm, grateful optimist—showed the world a heavy brow and a frown. Voices revealed more accurately their personalities. Horace’s was intense and beautiful. Love me, his voice had said to Elizabeth in their courting days, and what glows in our hearts will light the dark, a brighter star.
Which is why she had married him.
But when she imagined Charles courting (imagined him with other women, mostly, but with herself in surprising, compelling moments she would never admit) his voice would say, Love me, and I will eat every biscuit you bake, and afterward smoke a pipe on the porch, and with warm hands rub your feet at night.
Which is why now, distressed by couriers and lice and candlesticks sent to Baltimore, her skin tingled in Charles’s presence, his flushed face quickening her breath. Worried, she began to rearrange the candles on their clay plates and worked not to look at him. Then, so as not to draw attention to how she ignored him, she did look.
“Charley is exiled,” she said, explaining the lice. “I boiled the pillow cases,” she added, hoping to ease Charles’s concerns if he had any.
“Mother shaved our heads to the skin,” Charles said. He had removed his muddy boots and pulled slippers from his traveling case. “Mary cried and cried.”
“I don’t recall that,” said Horace.
“You were off studying at Hopkinton. The school closed, you know.”
“Not a surprise,” said Horace. “The headmaster knew his Plato but always hired someone else to teach bookkeeping.”
Elizabeth clapped once to punctuate that sentence and suggested they move to the parlor for tea. Charles thanked her as he rose from the bench, his face having recovered its color. “Would coffee be possible?” he asked. “Tea fiddles with my stomach.”
She did not want to say that there was no coffee. No lie came to mind, either, so she smiled close-lipped, blinked, and raised her hands to adjust her hair pins.
And somehow, Charles understood. His eyes searched her face, and the pity in them bruised her. She returned to him what she hoped was her proudest look. He said, “Tea, though, is better for the teeth. I’ve heard that somewhere. Coffee stains the enamel, doesn’t it, Horace?”
“Everything stains the enamel. But stain has little to do with a tooth’s health. That is more an aesthetic concern.”
“Tea it is,” said Charles, a kindness, and Elizabeth once again felt troubled by a satisfying momentar
y affection for her brother-in-law.
In the kitchen, she measured the loose leaves into a strainer, then filled a ceramic pot with steaming water. She could hear the men talk but couldn’t make out the words. Something about a woman? For a moment she imagined Charles and a pretty wife, with a daughter who would never carry parasites in her scalp. Why a daughter? She knew why.
Elizabeth set the tea tray on a half-moon table in the parlor and apologized that there were no cakes. “Out of sugar,” she said. “With the boy’s troubles I hadn’t time to fetch any.” Rubbing her eyes as she poured, she missed a cup, and tea streamed to the rug. She yelped, and Horace turned in his seat nearby. “Are you all right?” He grasped a fold in her skirt.
“Tired. A few restless nights, and my hands get twitchy.”
Charles waved Elizabeth to come near. She protested that the puddle needed sopping, but he insisted, and Horace fetched a mop, his mindfulness a balm. Charles lifted her arm at the wrist, felt for her pulse. No doubt her physician brother-in-law smelled the sulfur and lard stink, but he gave no sign. Then he stood, laid a thumb on either side of her eyes to spread them, and asked her to look up, look down. He touched cool fingertips to either side of her temples, palpated places about her neck. His breath smelled of nutty, sweet tobacco. She feared she might weep.
Damp cloth in hand and halting in step, Horace closed their bedroom door that night.
The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist Page 19
