The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  “Charles made a liniment,” he said. “I’m to leave it over your eyes.”

  He had folded the cloth in a neat rectangle, she noticed. When he stepped to the bedside, leaned over where she lay, the concern on his face gave her sympathy for him.

  “I can see the strain,” he said. “Close those eyes, Elizabeth. Rest, is what the doctor says.”

  “It is what every doctor says. Rest is a luxury priced higher than we can pay.”

  But she let her lids slip shut, and in the darkness felt the cloth fall across her eyes. She heard the scrape of a chair pulled nearby. “Is it the rocker?” she asked.

  The quilt shifted, and then his hands found her feet. His fingertips, warm and gentle and confident, kneaded along the arch, each toe in turn. His touch started a magic breeze that traveled up her legs, around her hips, even into her scalp.

  She must ask. Though the question scared her.

  “Will I go blind, Horace?” she said. “What does your brother say?”

  “No word about blindness.” He lifted the quilt away from her legs, touched cool lips to the skin over her shin. “He said I must take better care of you.”

  Hay dust swirled in the wind, and Elizabeth sneezed. This was the next day, in the North Meadows, a lowland that flooded most springs and proved generally useless except for this autumn gathering of cows and cow-buyers and cow-sellers, each beast and man loud with revelry or fractiousness. All around, farmers struck cows with switches or moved them with a shoulder shoved into a haunch. In a roped-off square, shirtless men wrestled while others gambled on the outcome and shared jugs and laughed too much—drunken, Elizabeth supposed. At her second sneeze, Charles and Horace each offered a bless you, then gave their attentions back to the pen and a trio of white-and-mahogany-colored cows wearing dramatic horns.

  “I hear,” said Charles, pointing, “that these Ayrshires will find grass where another cow might starve.”

  “A good beast to graze your New Hampshire rocks.”

  Charley stood on the fence rail between his uncle and his father, his hair still greased dark and matted from the lard, an arm stretched toward the cows and hand grasping, as if by invisible string he could draw one to him.

  “What do you think, Charley?” Horace asked. “Shall we buy a cow, too?”

  Elizabeth glanced from husband to son. But with the wind it seemed Charley hadn’t heard his father’s question.

  “Charley?” said Horace, a bit louder.

  “Look at the boy,” Charles said. “The mirror of his grandfather. Those ears, that chin—handsome skips a generation, eh?”

  He yanked his namesake off the rail and swung him in a circle by the arms—once, twice, three times. When Charley’s giggling subsided, Charles said, “Let me take him ’round. I need a closer look if I plan to bring a few home.”

  Above, great clouds roiled, making space now and then for sun. Elizabeth blinked and shook her head. Despite Charles’s liniment and Horace’s ministering hands, her eyes still felt scraped with sand, worsened by this blowing dust. She squinted to mark Charles and Charley across the pen, and their motions suggested that uncle was showing nephew how best to approach a cow. She asked Horace.

  “From the side,” he said. “So it can see you. There’s enough space at Lord’s Hill for a cow. Maybe two.”

  “We can’t afford that,” she said.

  “Dairy, not beef,” he said, and she wondered whether he thought that made a difference. But no, he was just deep in his dreaming. Perhaps he hadn’t even heard her. Then he laughed. “As a child, I shied away from slaughter days. Charles used to tease me. Can you imagine? These days I’d want to give the animal the gas.”

  “Charles teased?” The idea surprised her, her kind brother-in-law acting the bully.

  “Mercilessly. The younger brother taking advantages where he could.”

  When he stepped from the rail, she followed, and they walked among stalls and pens. Elizabeth noticed a cow tonguing the side of her calf’s head. Her family had not been farmers. She’d seen cattle near Hartford’s slaughterhouses, and the neighbor Mr. Larkin kept a small herd, but her life had been as a woman in the city, among city women. The wives she saw here had knuckles red as clay, and nails cracked or black or missing altogether. She noticed one woman without fingers on a hand.

  “It seems hard,” she said, “to be a farmer’s wife.”

  Horace searched the clouds. “They might think it hard to be a dentist’s wife.”

  “What you said to Charley about a cow? I’m glad he didn’t hear. He might have thought it possible.”

  “Sometimes my fancies run away with me. Can’t seem to help it.”

  “Horace. That letter from Colonel Roberts—”

  Another sneeze interrupted her. At the same moment, two sloppy-drunk farmers and a woman passed near, spewing vulgarities. The woman looked familiar to Elizabeth and put her in mind of birds. Geese? Turkeys? She glanced to Horace to see whether he recognized her, too, but he gave his attention to some spot on his jacket pocket. That didn’t last, because one farmer shoved the other, who stumbled into Elizabeth. Horace caught her, kept her from tumbling.

  “Watch yourself!” he called to the man.

  “Watch your own damned self!” the drunkard said.

  “I’ll make a fist,” Elizabeth shouted, and she meant it. “I’ll bloody your nose.”

  The men laughed and tottered on—and Elizabeth remembered. Not turkeys. Chickens. She did not want to mention the bird panorama and raise cruel memories, but she wondered. Did her husband recall that this had been the same strange woman who’d attended his exhibition’s first night, sitting in the front row? Even then Elizabeth had recognized her; Horace once pulled her lunatic daughter’s tooth.

  “A fist?” Horace said. “That’s not so Christian.”

  “I’m not feeling as Christian as I ought.”

  He took her hand and led her along a path through willow brush to the river’s edge, where they sat on a boulder. Water lapped against the rock; gulls cried overhead. Wind carried cattle calls, muffled at such a distance. “I have made life difficult,” he said. “Though I hate the idea, I’ll ask Charles for a loan. Perhaps enough to forestall Roberts and leave a bit for candlesticks.” He laughed a short, joyless laugh.

  A plop off the riverbank drew her attention, brown-blue ripples suggesting a frog. She folded her hands in her lap so he would not reach for them. Her hands, she noted, were fisted. She wondered about the exhilaration and regret that came with an honest bloodying of someone’s nose.

  “I don’t want candlesticks,” she said. “I’m not sure I want anything.”

  For a moment he seemed to be calculating. “Not even a daughter?”

  She beat those fists against her lap. “It’s all a numbness inside,” she whispered. “None of it pleasing.”

  Wind gusts had messed his hair into a confusion. She felt an urge to comb, to bring order to his head. His lips moved a moment or two until he found words. “You call it loathsome, but something good will yet come of my work with the gas.” He laughed. “Something must! I met a man from Manhattan. If I took my dentistry practice there he’d arrange for me to serve the wealthiest patients.”

  “Do not confuse what I’m saying with money.”

  “Since my return, I have worked to be a good Christian, to be an honest husband. Last night, you were happy that I fixed the sash cords. You complained of cold in the parlor, and I brought you a quilt.”

  He was right, of course. It had been years since he’d been as attentive as in these past weeks.

  “And I remain your wife,” she said, “for good or ill, in life and death, before the Almighty. That will never change. What I mean is that because of our circumstances, something vital in me has become like lead. I am all heavy inside, pressed by something dense. I can’t explain more than that. But I wanted you to know.”

  She found herself squinting, unable to focus on him. She remembered that day in the shower-bat
h, how with water splashing in her eyes she asked God to let her see Horace clearly. She felt the pressure of tears, but none came.

  “I admire your new candor,” she said, “but of this matter, pray, speak only to me.”

  “I should never have gone away. Isn’t that the problem?”

  She shook her head that she had no answer for him.

  They sat a while longer. He watched gulls circle over the water; she turned her face from the sun. Now and then, he clenched his jaw as if fighting some discomfort. When he reached into her lap, she let him, and he took her hands, peeled open the fists. Then he lifted her off the stone and into his arms, his hold firm, his lips near her ears. He whispered something she couldn’t hear, but she nodded so he wouldn’t speak again.

  The family rode home in an open livery wagon, Charley napping across his uncle’s lap. Horace used his hat to shoo flies off the boy, studied his son’s face.

  “Do you really think there’s a resemblance to our father?” he asked. Though he meant the question for his brother, he glanced at Elizabeth, who sat beside the driver.

  Since the water’s edge, he’d looked to her often, measuring her mood. All a numbness inside, she had said. He—perhaps better than anyone—understood the consequences of an unfeeling state.

  “You don’t recall?” Charles brought his hands to the sides of his head, repositioned his ears so they pressed more tightly against his skull. “Like this? And father’s chin? You could plow a furrow with it.”

  “I’ve a hard time remembering how he looked before he grew ill.”

  “That,” said Charles, “is what I don’t recall.”

  “You were younger. Mother thought it best that you not watch the nights.”

  “Still, I’d like to know, even now.”

  Horace turned toward the sun now tucking itself to sleep behind Talcott Mountain’s long ridge. He saw veins burst in the skin gathered beneath his father’s eyes. Lips flaked. Whiskers sharp, mean. Not like Charley’s face, no.

  “It was a death,” he said. “Awful as any other, I suppose.”

  “All those hours together. He must have told you things.” Charles’s voice had changed; Horace heard a hint of entreaty.

  But the wagon arrived now on Main Street, where lamplighters had started their work, and Horace asked to be let off at his office. “My apologies,” he whispered to his brother. “My mood’s turned sour. Work always heals.”

  When later he arrived home, that mood had changed. Charles and Charley were in the parlor building a stick house with glue, and Horace found Elizabeth in the kitchen ladling stew into bowls. He grinned and waved a sheet of paper at her.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have been experimenting with the gas. My head rings a bit, that’s true. But also I have just received a letter. An offer of work.”

  He laughed, and she studied the smears of grease, clear and shiny, that she stirred across the broth’s surface. He pinched a piece of floating meat, popped it into his mouth.

  “It’s from Morton,” he said while chewing. “About a discovery. He stands to make a fortune, and he’d like to share.”

  Standing, he jerked a boot off one foot, then the other.

  “Morton offered me a job,” he said, then laughed again. “I’d sooner chew nails.”

  October 18, 1846

  Boston

  Friend Wells:

  I write to inform you that I have discovered a preparation by inhaling which a person is thrown into a sound sleep. The time required to produce sleep is only a few moments, and the time in which the persons remain asleep can be regulated at pleasure. While in this state the severest surgical or dental operations may be performed, the patient not experiencing the slightest pain. I have patented it, and am now about sending out agents to dispose of the right to use it. I will dispose of a right to an individual to use in his own practice alone, or for a town, county, or state. My object in writing you is to know if you would not like to visit cities as my representative to dispose of rights upon shares. I have used the compound in more than one hundred and sixty cases in extracting teeth, and I have been invited to administer it to patients in the Massachusetts General Hospital, and have succeeded in every case. I have administered it in the hospital in the presence of the students and physicians—the room for operations being full as possible.

  Professor Warren has given me certificates to this effect. For further particulars, I will refer you to extracts from the daily journals of this city, which I forward to you.

  Respectfully yours,

  Wm. T. G. Morton

  October 20, 1846

  Dr. Morton—Dear Will:

  Your letter is just received, and I hasten to answer it, for fear you will adopt a method in disposing of your rights which will defeat your object. Before you make any arrangements whatever, I wish to see you. I think I will be in Boston the first of next week, probably Monday night. If the operation of administering the gas is not attended with too much trouble, and will produce the effect you state, it will undoubtedly be a fortune to you, provided it is rightly managed.

  Yours in haste,

  H. Wells

  At a small basin in a room with no mirror, Horace cupped icy water over his face, dried his hands on his robe, then sat on the only chair and waited. Nearby, in the room’s best light (dim, through a smudged window), Elizabeth rummaged their traveling kit for his soap and razor. Horace shifted his weight this way, then that, and each time the chair’s uneven legs nearly tipped him. He detested a cold-water shave, but Elizabeth had decided not to pay for a barber. Given Col. Roberts’s threat, she had insisted on full control of their accounts, purses and wallets. Horace agreed.

  “It’s a poor blade,” she said, testing the razor’s edge with her thumb. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Six breaths of the gas, and I wouldn’t feel a nick,” he said. She didn’t laugh, so he said, “The razor belonged to my father. Barber Coles says I should buy another.”

  Elizabeth felt uneasy, a leaden weight in her chest. The candles she had lit gave no comfort. Partly it was the unsettledness one feels in an unfamiliar city. Mostly it was having to rely on Horace to guide her through Boston, trusting herself to his care. Once, she would have done so without reservation. Once, she had confidence in him—and also in love, in God, and herself. Now she felt squeamish, vulnerable, her certainties shaken.

  Mulling this, she fumbled the cake of shaving soap. Horace offered to fetch it from under the bed where it had tumbled, but she told him no. On her knees, she peered into that dark, concealing space, and saw amid the dust and dead insects a jumble of pink-and-white tissue—used candy wrappers. The soap sat, a clean and smooth white stone in a garden of cast-off blossoms. She reached, then hesitated. The discarded wrappers frightened her. She imagined grimy fingers, a mouth stuffed, breath choked. Candy sucked and chewed and swallowed until teeth felt coated with a residue of sin, of gluttony. Her stomach turned.

  Elizabeth prayed a few words, then reached for the soap. When she stood with the prize, some wrappers clung to her sleeve, and she shook them loose. “No housemaid cleans under there,” she said.

  Her husband’s jaw lathered, she scraped the razor along his chin, leaned near to see better. Scratched over and dry, her eyes still troubled her. She’d begun to wonder if what ailed them might be a great well of unwept tears. Of late she had not been one to cry at anything. Horace’s brother had told her that women need to shed tears as naturally as they need to nurse after giving birth. Did it follow then that she had become unnatural? So she felt. The day before, on the train to Boston, she had noticed a shadow billowing across the sky outside her window. Carrier pigeons, a cloud of thousands, and they put her in mind of that bird-mad spring at Aunt Dorothy’s house. Eyes burning, she had waited for memories to undam her sorrow. Nothing. The pigeons flew on; the sky cleared.

  Horace fingered lather away from his lips. “Whatever Morton is up to, it could be dangerous if he doesn’t take care. And he has n
ever been a careful man. He must consider all reasonable precautions. I speak from experience.”

  “So this is why we’ve come to Boston? To save Will from his worst impulses?”

  Horace smiled, and Elizabeth held her next stroke so as not to cut him.

  “If I am honest,” he said, “I must admit to other motives. He writes of painless surgery as though I’d not achieved it first. It fell to me to make this miracle widely known. That burden has proven costly—I don’t need to tell you that—yet Morton hopes to earn a fortune from my—our—sacrifices.” He grasped her skirt. “Your behavior at the cattle fair inspires me. If Morton has stolen my knowledge, maybe I’ll bloody his nose.”

  “Be better than my poor example,” she replied. “It ought not be difficult.”

  “What do you suppose is his preparation? Nitrous oxide with an added odor? Ether?”

  With the fingers of one hand, she stretched his cheek; with the other she dragged the razor. But the chair tipped, his face followed, one of her fingers slipped, and the blade bit her fingertip. She watched the razor slip through skin and then come free. A moment passed as if nothing had happened, then blood welled.

  Her yelp had to do with surprise. Of pain, she felt none.

  In the same instant Horace had her by the hand, dipping her finger in the basin of icy water. When he lifted the hand and peered at the fingertip, blood pooled again. Once more, a dunk into the water. Then a clean rag over the cut. When next he examined the wound, he kissed it.

  “These small cuts sometimes hurt the most,” he said.

  “You still have soap lather on your face.”

  He grinned, and something in his expression chipped at the lead she carried in her chest. He bandaged her finger, then let her guide him back to the treacherous chair, and she finished shaving his whiskers. With her apron, she wiped his cheeks clean.

  Pretty, she thought, the soap’s lavender smell.

  Morton’s new office. Spotless windowpanes. Light reflecting from beveled mirrors wide as angel wings. Polished brass trim on three chairs. Three chairs! Painted on the ceiling for patients to see as they leaned back: Orpheus playing his lyre in a meadow among sleepy lions and smiling bears. So many shiny tools, and on the shelves a dozen jars of gold foil for packing cavities. The air smelled of clove oil.