The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  A few more breaths for the horse, and the small man lifted the lit burner near the horse’s muzzle, all the while leaning away as if the animal itself were a threat.

  Then it exhaled across the burner’s flame.

  Blue fire flickered from its nose.

  “Congratulate us,” said Brewster. “We’ve invented dragons.”

  The carriage wheels found so many ruts and bumps on the road to the painter’s farm that Horace suspected the driver deliberately steered toward them. At each jolt and jostle, bottles of French chloroform in Horace’s satchel rolled, clinked. “For experimentation,” Brewster had said. “Tell us what you learn. This time, arrange for witnesses.”

  The painter’s farm looked nothing like the government’s. Unkempt hedges lined the drive. The farmhouse and barn had weathered gray, some roof shingles blown away. Chickens roamed, whispering to each other, and a goat eyed the dentists with mistrust as they stepped from the carriage. Leafless silver maples sheltered the walk, and the men ducked as they passed under so as not to bump the myriad thingamabobs strung with catgut line from the bare limbs. These bird houses Horace might have expected, but not their rainbow colors, and not artificial birds fashioned from twigs and rag scraps, snow dusting their wings. Bits of shattered mirror glass dangled, too, dancing in the day’s last light. Overseeing it all stood a headless scarecrow wearing an expensive brocade dress.

  “Marie Antoinette,” said Brewster.

  From somewhere a dog’s thunderous bark. Through a squeaky-hinged door, they entered a kitchen where an odor of oil paints—strong, noxious—almost turned Horace around. But he followed Brewster, deeper into the odor and then to a barn of a room with tall windows and several oil lamps burning in sconces. The walls had been white, but now were speckled with colors; the floor stones the same. Lilac and flax and blue sky and tan the color of a fawn’s coat. Here the air was most pungent, and the caustic smells mixed with such vivid colors made Horace’s head go floating. If not for a growing nausea, he might have thought he’d been breathing nitrous oxide.

  On the room’s far side, a woman in a farmwife’s gown stood on the seat of a wicker chair, dabbing with a brush at a high, wide canvas. Her straw hat’s brim ran nearly as wide as her shoulders, and her white hair struck out in all directions. Her bare feet were spattered with violent hues.

  “Madame DeNoie,” called Brewster, his tone deferential.

  She replied in French, her attitude nonchalant, her attention on her dabbing.

  Brewster kept his peace. She dabbed more. Then, cat-quick, she pounced from the chair to snatch a rag—they seemed to breed on the floor—and with it smeared paint around the canvas. Somehow (magic to Horace), those oils became a river. Then, her grunt suggesting she was done if not satisfied, she plunged her hands into a water bucket, and as she scrubbed spoke to Brewster, who turned to ask Horace how he liked his coffee.

  “Cream and a spoonful,” Horace said.

  Still studying the canvas, she ambled out of the room. Brewster waved at a stool and a barrel to indicate they should sit.

  “You didn’t translate,” he said. “She speaks English?”

  Brewster nodded. “And Italian. Very educated. These landscapes? Premier coup. You’ll want to buy.”

  Though Horace’s understanding of art was limited, to him some quality seemed new in the freshly made canvas. Dark trees menaced the left, and how she’d applied the oils suggested leaves ruffling, branches asway. In the distance, clouds churned thin and gray to threaten not only the forest but the towers of an old abbey, itself only a suggestion of sandy brown oils. The paint itself made a commotion. Elizabeth would say, “Buy it.”

  “I had expected a man.”

  “We all do. She signs her paintings P. H. DeNoie. That way misogynists will buy, and the Salon at least consider them.”

  They heard her voice down the hall, louder as she drew near, until she burst into the room, her words hurrying past Horace. Brewster shouted, “Eh, eh! Speak only English to him.”

  She smiled and held a bottle forward. “Absinthe?”

  “What does absinthe mean?” His words sounded more clipped than he’d intended. An irritation nicked at him. Was she playing a game, still speaking French?

  Brewster and Madame DeNoie began another loud exchange, this one longer than the first, and she laughed, and Brewster sipped his coffee, and for nearly half an hour Horace tried to understand from their faces what was being communicated, until the effort and the fumes left him drowsy. Put me to bed, he thought. At last the painter turned to him.

  “Brewster says you know nothing about paintings.”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “But you invented an important something that takes away pain, and so you are a genius.” She winked at Horace. “Also, you have money.”

  “He did discover something important. I did say that.”

  “Why would you make such a thing to take away all pain?”

  Why take away pain? Wasn’t the answer obvious? Taken off-guard by the question, Horace set his cup on the floor, as though he couldn’t answer and balance a cup at the same time.

  “I don’t want people to suffer.”

  She frowned. She had been dripping water over sugar and into her absinthe drink, and now she sipped. “It is good to hurt,” she said. “My husband died, and his farmwife, me, he deserved that I hurt for him. He is a great loss. So I left for Paris to study great art and to be sad. Because I am lost. Now. Look.” She spread her arms and turned a circle, stately, as if the room were an achievement. She waved an invitation or maybe a challenge for him to answer. “Your gases?”

  “Yes.”

  “Someday everyone will breathe them?” She hummed, then, not a tune, but a noise to fill space until she found the English word. Brewster helped. He was holding the bottle of absinthe, sniffing its mouth. “Manufacture,” he said.

  “Yes! Manufacture! Everyone will breathe gas and be happy, and art dies.”

  “That’s an overreaction,” Horace said.

  “Monsieur Genius,” she said, “does it hurt you that people suffer?” Her eyes widened; she expected an answer. But what to say? A bat flew across the ceiling of Horace’s mind, lit on his father’s gray brow. Horace cradled his son in the cold dirt of a fresh grave. Hurt? Madame DeNoie spoke the word as if it had no power.

  “Look!” she said, stabbing a finger his way. “Pain plus genius, and you, le dentiste, make an important thing. A great thing. That is the life secret. Everything is made from pain! But the thing you make?” She shook her head as if dismissing it. “Too much. No one makes anything ever again.”

  “I’m here to buy paintings.”

  “There are no paintings without pain.” She straightened her back, seemed proud of her wordplay in a foreign tongue. Then she clasped her hands over her heart and grinned in a pantomime of agony. “No progress,” she croaked, “without pain.”

  Brewster laughed, but in Horace a cold thing rose from his belly to his throat, choking him. He, of all people, needed no lecture on pain. His lips worked for a moment before he spoke. “Respectfully, Madame DeNoie, that is a stupid thing to say. And cruel.”

  She stopped smiling. After a moment, she spoke furious bubble-words at Brewster; they burst like fireworks. She kicked at the air. Brewster shouted, and then Madame DeNoie spun and splashed her coffee across Horace’s face.

  She said in a loud voice, “I am with the workers. We make things from pain. The bourgeoisie want comfort. They will perish in their feather beds. The workers will live.”

  She stomped from the room, leaving Horace to wipe coffee from his cheeks with a paint rag, and Brewster coughing so as not to laugh. “You provoke an argument like a true Parisian,” he said. “But give her the last word, or we’ll sleep with the goats.”

  They ate supper at a farmhouse table, gouged and stained as if she had used the surface to slaughter chickens. She served cheese soup with radishes, along with a hard-crusted bread, and the food se
ttled Horace’s stomach. “Do not apologize,” Brewster had warned. “Pretend as if the argument never happened.” So Horace kept quiet, let Brewster and Madame DeNoie talk, and now and then she opened her mouth to point at a tooth high toward the back on her left side. After dinner she showed Horace several paintings, all in the same tumultuous style. Brewster translated prices, which Horace recorded with pencil in a notepad, though he did not agree to any purchases. He sensed how this annoyed her. But later, after she showed the dentists where to find fresh water and where to empty their chamber pots and then to their separate rooms, she kissed Horace’s cheek good-night in a way that made him feel like a son.

  In his room: a feather bed, which surprised him given her earlier speech. If he spoke French, he would have explained that his gas might never rid the world of pain. No one had breathed more nitrous oxide than he, and still he suffered, still heard humbug and the Chinese boy’s flute, and when he thought of Elizabeth and Charley so far away, an animal trap snapped shut on his heart. The gas destroyed some pains, true, but he had begun to hypothesize that it exaggerated others. Before the gas, a scraped knuckle or tweaked knee had never been anything to him but a short-lived distraction. After? The slightest affliction pressed to the forefront of every moment. Stubbed toe. Mosquito bite. Even a disappointment. The distraction of small hurts grew beyond the hurts themselves, unbalanced his hours, gave him reason to consider the gas and then test it. Oftimes he’d inhale as a relief from routine, as if routine itself were a sort of upset.

  You do not learn such things, Brewster, when only horses breathe the gas.

  A breeze had come up, and he heard the mirror shards in the trees tinkling against each other. The sound first put him in mind of Charley and his toys, and he wished he could show the boy how horses breathe fire, and those thoughts led him to Elizabeth. But then the breeze grew to a wind, the mirror shards clashed, and he recalled the chloroform bottles in his satchel in the carriage.

  Out of bed and in his boots, he stepped into the hallway, from which vantage he could see the length of a long hall and into Madame DeNoie’s studio. Lantern light shined out that open door, and she in silhouette sat on her wicker chair, a giant white dog lying beside her. She’d pulled her knees up against her chest, and one arm hung low. The fingers of that hand played in the dog’s deep fur, though she seemed not to know the animal was there, her attention on something Horace couldn’t see, perhaps a hope or a memory. Nowhere in the house had he seen a painting that might portray her husband, and he wondered why not. He wondered what consolation he might require were Elizabeth to die.

  As if sensing his thoughts, the dog turned its massive head toward him, its soulful eyes dark and unconcerned, and the sight pricked in Horace a recollection of that other white dog, of mangled leg and blood-stained snow, of barking at the edge of blackness.

  Were he fluent in French, he might dare say more over the next morning’s eggs and jam, about pain and about respect and honesty, about giving shape to what hurts. But he was not that fluent, not even in English. Shivering, he retreated from the long hall, deciding—in a determined way—to leave the chloroform in the carriage, that for tonight at least the comfort of a feather bed ought to be enough.

  As the carriage turned, Horace leaned a shoulder into the door, glimpsed Paris’s spires over a distant hill, and with his tongue worked a bit of smoked fish out of his teeth. He tucked the satchel holding chloroform bottles more securely under his arm.

  “Last night,” he said, “you told Madame DeNoie that I’d made a great discovery. You said it without qualification, as if you believe my claim.”

  Brewster nodded, and with a ribbon bookmarked the novel he’d been reading, then set it on a cushion on his lap. “I’ve read your accounts now, listened to you talk. Yes. I’m convinced.”

  He offered his hand to shake, and Horace felt a deep welling cry wanting to escape his chest, but he gripped it as tightly as he did Brewster’s hand.

  The road rose, the sun flashed into the carriage, and Brewster drew a curtain. “On Saturday,” he said, “we present before the Medical Society of Paris.”

  “What?” Horace raised his open hand as if signaling Brewster to halt. “That’s three days.”

  “And after that, the French Academy of Sciences, then the Society for Medical Observation. Don’t look so frantic.”

  The city gates opened, and the driver lashed the horses forward. A few blocks in, the carriage slowed on a turn, and then, just as Horace began to ask whether any dentists sat on the Medical Society, the window behind his head shattered. Cold bits of glass stung his cheek, and Brewster shoved him by the shoulders hard to the carriage floor. For a strange moment Horace thought he’d been hit by a snowball. But against his leg lay a brick, what had smashed the glass. Outside: angry shouts and a whip’s snap. The carriage jerked forward in a rush. Someone shrieked, and horse hooves clattered over boulevard stones. Pistol fire echoed.

  “Stay down!” Brewster yelled.

  A gallop—several blocks? a mile?—and they arrived at Horace’s apartment. Brewster, hair damp with sweat, lifted Horace off the carriage floor. “My god, my god,” Horace repeated, and when the door opened his feet couldn’t find the steps. The attendant, off his perch beside the driver and now awaiting Horace’s descent, offered a white-gloved hand, helped him down.

  “Politics here have been violent for too long,” said Brewster, disembarking just after. “They called it a revolution, but it was more a civil war. And civil wars, it seems, never ever end. Perhaps there’s a vapor to fix that.” He smiled sadly.

  The attendant, older, with gray in his neatly trimmed eyebrows, brushed glass shards off Horace’s coat with his hand, then peered to pick at smaller flecks. The man’s cheeks had gone white, too, and sweat beaded above his lip.

  “Are you all right?” Horace asked.

  The attendant pursed his lips. Nodded. But his eyes sparkled with too much life.

  “Brewster!” Horace said, stepping out of the attendant’s reach. “Your man!”

  The attendant stared at his fingertip and thumb, as if still trying to find a fleck of glass. A dark wet stain had spread across his coat, midwaist. Now Brewster was at his side, French words like bubbles at a boil. Queasy, Horace swallowed to keep the fish down. Brewster was helping the man out of his coat, the fellow complying in an awkward, hesitant way as if meaning no disrespect by undressing.

  “Let him breathe this,” Horace said, groping for a bottle in his satchel.

  “He needs a surgeon,” Brewster said.

  “For the surgery. That’s what I mean. Look at his pain!”

  The attendant lurched as if some sharpness shifted inside his midsection, and he bumped Horace, who fumbled the bottle into the man’s chest. “Take it,” Horace said, and with his good arm the attendant did. “Breathe its fumes before the surgery.”

  “Wells, we don’t know enough.”

  “It’s only breathing,” Horace told the attendant. With his hand, he pantomimed air sweeping up into his nostrils.

  “You’re not being helpful.”

  Brewster was leading his attendant into the carriage compartment, shouting to the driver. The wounded man clutched the bottle, turned from Brewster to Horace. He mouthed Merci, then stepped into the carriage.

  Later that night, Horace instructed a valet to draw a bath and to leave a bottle of chloroform on the edge. “Make the water steam,” he said. He himself felt on an edge. At Madame DeNoie’s he’d gone without chloroform or any such gas, despite the urge to partake, and in doing so felt virtuous. The same eagerness tugged now, consorting with the need for chloroform experiments. But he did not like to think of scientific inquiry as a temptation, akin to the glutton’s next bite or the gambler’s dice throw. He did not want to think that at all.

  In the bath chamber, he noted the date in his record book, and also the time, his mood (on edge), his pulse rate, what he’d eaten and drunk. Then he eased himself into the steam, imagined Madame DeNoi
e’s voice accusing him: “Bourgeois.” Submerged to his shoulders, his flesh pinkened, he watched the hairs on his belly float toward the surface, and he reached for the chloroform bottle on its silver tray. He scratched behind his scrotum, where air bubbles itched, then dunked a towel until it was soaked through. This he put over his head as a hood, hiding his face and the bottle at his nose.

  Pungent, this chloroform, sweet smelling, like sugared mint. He breathed, nose membranes tingling, then stopped the bottle. Counted ten. Rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. Exhaled. In his ears a rushing sound echoed. He uncorked the bottle, breathed, and his heart sped. The room narrowed and expanded so he could count each fiber of the towel draped before his eyes, see strands loop back on themselves as if describing an orbit. Through the nose, into the lungs, belly swelling, and he imagined himself to be the sun, and a planet in his orbit flew past, leaving in its wake a long, tremulous note as if from a violin, and there was no want for anything, and he, Horace Wells, destroyer of pain, generated a radiance greater than brilliant.

  Perhaps he would have drowned, but his valet returned with hot water and discovered Horace hard asleep and slipped low, wet towel draped over his face, the waterline just below his nose, the chloroform liquid swirling, the empty bottle afloat.

  The wretched began to gather the next morning outside Horace’s apartment building long before he woke. First came a syphilitic, the oldest son of a wealthy exporter of soaps, who could not bear to be touched for the burning sensation that erupted over his skin. Soon, a young woman arrived who felt her skull cleave whenever she ventured into bright sun, like this day’s. Next, a mother brought her child, whose skin around his eyes had gone purple, and she pushed him in a potato cart because the grinding in his hips kept him from walking or sleeping. Discomfort, twinge, torment—more joined the miserable company, and last came a scrawny, bent man whose arms crisscrossed his abdomen because without warning his viscera cramped as though cinched by the tightest belt.