“Has your father returned from surgery with Dr. Ellsworth?”
“Eighty-five. Eighty-six.”
“Has he?”
“He’s in his workshop.”
“Then we’ll not disturb him.”
She lifted away the umbrella, sat beside her boy, and pulled him into her lap. “I’d like you to sit here and pray with me,” she said, her tone meant to comfort him—and her, too. “A girl died today. Let’s ask God and Heaven to welcome her.”
He cozied into her, so she felt filled by a warm liquid weakness. “What girl?”
“A girl at the retreat.”
“Can it be a silent prayer?”
“It’s better so.”
Charley swung his legs, kicking at nothing, until she touched his knee. He breathed hard out his nose as if that would help him to pray for a girl he didn’t know, and Elizabeth felt hopeful about her son’s place in Heaven, about the goodness of his soul.
“She was sad,” said Elizabeth. “Now, pray that she’s happy.”
They sat that way a moment, and then Elizabeth heard a door unlatch, and as if he had sensed her disquiet and come to console, Horace stepped into the room. “What goes on?” he said. “I heard only silence. It concerned me.”
“A girl died,” said Charley, with perhaps too much thrill in his voice.
“One we know?” Horace kneeled beside them, his fingertips smoothing her hair.
“A lunatic girl from the retreat,” Elizabeth said. “A difficult child. You pulled her tooth a long time ago. Her name was Maggie.”
“I remember Maggie,” he said quickly, the name coming off his tongue as though he were accustomed to it, and this surprised her. He noticed, too, and when their eyes met, he felt a bee’s sting of chagrin, and he wondered how to deny the familiarity. But before either could speak, Charley fidgeted out of his mother’s lap and asked whether Father would take him to feed apples to neighbor Larkin’s horse.
Even on a bone-chilling winter’s morning, Dutch Point smelled of a sweet sawdust reek Horace associated with loud flies and broken windows. A cow ambled along Ellery Street, pausing for a long steaming piss before heading toward the river. Horace, teeth chattering despite his heaviest coat and mittens, circled a spilled garbage bin and curled his lip at the sound of a man retching from a room above. He would rather not see or be seen in Dutch Point ever again, which is why he’d come at dawn when the rats—human and rodent—still slept in their holes.
Turn and go home, he told himself. You owe Nan nothing. But since Elizabeth had told him about Maggie, he had three times thrown drafts of a note into the stove. Now he carried the last in his pocket, a few simple words. What compelled him he couldn’t name, but its weight and momentum were familiar. Turn and go home, he told himself, right up to the moment he punched the note over a rusted nail fixed in the door of Levi Knowles’s tavern. There. Done.
Tell Nan her Maggie is dead—HW.
He hurried away, nearly at a jog, choosing a speedier though perhaps less safe route. He must have a story for Elizabeth, a place he’d gone. For years he’d kept the secret of his father’s death, mere silence enough to cover the old scar, long faded into flesh. This younger secret—Nan, Maggie—could show itself as a fresh wound, visible. Concealing it required invention.
Rounding a hard corner, Horace’s boot sole caught ice, and he nearly crashed into a man asleep in a chair beside a handcart. By the dawn’s bluing light, Horace read words painted on the cart: Teeth pulled—no pain.
The fellow needed a shave; his stubbled jowls hung in loose layers to his collarbones. His nightcap had been fancy once, and he wore it snug. A blanket, sewn to repair a dozen tears, wrapped him like a winding-sheet and smelled like wet sheep. In his lap, a clay bowl, empty except for a greasy spoon and translucent bits of cooked onion stuck to its sides. Horace pulled off the man’s hat and let it fall into the bowl.
“What’s this about?” he said, shoving the fellow’s shoulder.
The man startled. He coughed once, pinched the end of his nose, and took a deep mouth-breath. “Christ, it’s cold,” he said.
“What’s this? Painless tooth-pulling?”
“Do you need one out?” The man kept his eyes shut. “If you aren’t sure, better to do it. Easier to live without the tooth than to live with the pain.”
Horace could see the man’s cheeks stretch as his tongue explored inside his mouth, then over his incisors to pooch his lips.
“How much?”
“A quarter dollar.”
“What’s your training?”
“The finest.” The man bent slowly over his handcart, rummaged about, and came up with a green-glass bottle and a rag. “You breathe, I pull.”
“Chloroform?” Horace asked. “Ether?”
The man shrugged, struggled up out of his chair. His breath smelled fetid, and when he smiled he showed two black incisors.
“Where did you learn dentistry?”
“Around here.”
Horace laughed, a sharp, bitter syllable. “What does that mean?”
“It means, ‘around here,’ ” the man said. “Which tooth?”
Horace’s head rattled. He wanted to laugh more; it seemed the only answer, one Morton would give. But his chuckle got stuck somewhere in his throat. He coughed, but couldn’t shake it loose.
“Which tooth?” The man’s voice rose with annoyance.
“Not a one,” said Horace, palms outturned while he backed away, as if to ward off this farce. The other made an obscene gesture as a send-off.
In the windowless cell that had been Maggie’s, Mrs. Cornish’s husband laid the girl’s earthly remains into a pine-box coffin he’d built. Mrs. Cornish then placed a small pillow she had embroidered with Revelation 21:4 to cushion Maggie’s head, and tucked a shroud around her body as she would a quilt over a sleeping child. When her husband fit the lid, she winced, and did so again each time he hammered a nail into the splintery wood. As the man lifted the coffin at the head, Horace obliged at the feet, and together they carried the box outside to a cart with a gray-white mare in harness. The retreat’s chaplain awaited, his arms enfolding a Bible against his chest, wet snow collecting on his black-robed shoulders, as it fell also upon Elizabeth’s hat and coat.
The chaplain set a slow pace onto Hartford’s streets. The cart followed, axles and springs creaking, Mr. Cornish with the reins, his wife sitting at his left. Horace and Elizabeth walked on either side. The company brought Maggie east, toward the river, funeral bells of the Episcopal church already tolling her home. Low clouds choked light, ingraining the day with a hard, shadowless gray. With no wind, chimney ash spilled from the air to stain the snow. Such a day enervates the soul, and few men doffed their hats as the small cortège passed. Only a driver or two noticed the chaplain and out of respect reined a horse to walk or to stop altogether. No one wondered about the departed. The pine box, its smallness, and so few mourners—all these told enough.
So as not to outpace the cart, Elizabeth swayed with a to-and-fro creep that stitched up the low muscles of her back and made every step a Christian mortification. She prayed as she walked, asking grace and mercy for the souls of motherless daughters and then, in a way she hoped was not selfish, the same benefaction for daughterless women. She rested a gloved hand against the cart’s sideboard, a way to guide her feet as her eyes shut tight and head fell forward. There is sufficient love on this earth, she told the girl, Maggie. Had you lived, love would have found you. I believe that. I’m sorry about your mother. Sometimes God mismatches us. He has His reasons.
Opposite her, Horace gripped the cart’s rail with such strength his forearm trembled. He would not be weak, not as on that long-ago day when he met Maggie. He should then have fixed her tooth, not pulled it. Out of cowardice, he had chosen the easy way, the least painful for them both. Later, with the gas, he’d have made a different choice, though he would not have been braver. The gas, after all, was not courage. Sometimes, it seemed the oppos
ite. He glanced at his wife, her head bowed, eyes closed, and he thought, She’s praying, and loved her for her selfless example, decided he should pray, too. For courage and strength. Amen.
A horse’s gallop sounded from behind, and he turned to make sure the animal wasn’t loose, wasn’t a danger, and yes, a rider spurred it on and around them. But then another movement caught his eye—a sight more chilling than the air.
Nan followed.
Except in memory and imagination, he hadn’t seen her since his brother’s visit and the cattle fair—that brief glimpse he acknowledged to no one, hardly to himself. She had changed since then, of course, though at such a remove Horace could not see the scar that now creased her upper lip, or how her skin had mottled from the dyes in the textile factory where she sometimes worked. What he did notice was an unfamiliar weariness rounding her shoulders, her dark hair crowding her face. She didn’t conceal herself as she came after them, only lagged behind as if unsure of her station. One certainty was her grief. Faint though it was, Horace could hear her keening.
He thought to ask Mr. Cornish, please, stop the cart. But he kept quiet. If Nan wanted to remain distant, only to watch, that was between her and God and had nothing to do with him.
At the graveyard, Mr. Cornish halted the mare near where Maggie would be buried when the ground thawed, and from there, coffin still in the cart, the chaplain began the necessary prayers. Horace stood beside Elizabeth, her arms hooked through his as if they might stroll afterward. When the mare nickered, Horace lifted his head toward the sound, then looked about the church grounds to see whether Nan remained nearby. Yes. There, outside the tall iron bars of the graveyard fence. None of the party seemed to have noticed her, all attention on the chaplain, who had fumbled his Bible into the snow and was now brushing it clean. Horace looked back to Nan, who maintained her separate place but had come close enough that he could see her hands fisted at her mouth, how she bit her own knuckles. She no longer keened, but in her silence Horace heard her pain, louder than before. It was a hymn, a tolling bell, a wind’s low whistle. It clarified, abided, a song from God’s caged bird. He concentrated, listened with such fervor that the whole of him dissolved into the sound. Nan pressed against the fence, and Horace stared and tried not to stare. When he noticed Elizabeth’s glance go Nan’s way, he worried that he’d drawn attention. But then Elizabeth turned back to the coffin, whispered, “Amen,” and the moment passed.
Prayers finished, Mr. Cornish and Horace slid the coffin from the back of the cart, its bottom rasping over the planks, and carried it to a nearby shed, where it would remain until the thaw. Then, men who had never known Maggie would dig her grave and with squeaking ropes lower the box into the ground. They’d cover it with straw, then shovel the hole full.
When Mr. Cornish and Horace returned from the shed, their wives and the chaplain sat in the back of the cart, wrapped in wool blankets and talking in quiet voices about quiet things. Mr. Cornish took the driver’s spot, but Horace turned once more to the fence, hoping to glimpse Nan, but also hoping she’d be gone.
She was not. She pushed herself against the bars, arms stretching through, hands clasped as though beseeching the company to leave. Her knees buckled, and her mouth opened and closed, shaping strange, noiseless words, but what Horace heard—her resounding pain—deafened him. Elizabeth’s voice, scarcely audible, called his name from an impossible distance. Out of a darker sky the snow came heavier now, settling on limbs of the graveyard trees so a branch cracked under the wet weight, but didn’t fall.
Horace felt leaden, beaten toward earth. Strength, he prayed. Courage. He faced Elizabeth, who waved him toward the cart. But Nan’s pain insisted—that hymn, that tolling bell. It astonished him how no one else seemed to hear. Perhaps God meant the sound for his ears alone, divine instruction for one practiced at answering the need. Please, he said, no, but Heaven gave no reply; God’s will was plain. Horace stepped away from the cart, between headstones, toward the fence. When he neared, Nan’s body began to convulse. Her shoulders rose and fell and fell. She grasped at the air, cried, “My girl.” When he took her hands, she pulled him into the bars. Her arms encircled him, his coat bunched in her fists, and he squeezed himself against her as best he could, touched her back, her head. His fingers worked deep in her hair. “I know,” he said. “Her name was Maggie. I know.” Nan’s animal moans broke the brittle air. “I know,” he said.
Then she was running from the graveyard, scrambling past a vendor selling half cabbages, under an awning sign for a candle maker, turning into an alley and away. His arms, he realized, remained through the bars. His gloved hands clutched cold iron.
On the cart bench, he sat next to Mr. Cornish, careful as he did not to look into anyone’s face. Mr. Cornish released the brake, snapped the reins. The horse lifted its tail, and the cart jolted forward. It was Elizabeth’s voice that came first, just as they were about to leave the graveyard ground and enter the street. In all their years, he had never heard her so clearly.
“Horace. Will you tell us who was that woman you seemed to know so well?”
He did.
That hand, his son’s. Those fingers tapping against his leg, too. “You turned two pages at once,” Charley complained. “You missed the part about the canoe.”
That woman at the table writing a letter—his wife, now unfamiliar. Quill scratching against paper. Snow, gray as ash, falling past the window. These weak sofa cushions, insufficiently stuffed. Charley seated beside, turning pages back and back and pointing: an accusation. “Here. When he looks through the bullet hole in the side.”
“Perhaps you should read to me.”
“It takes me too long.” And Charley pointed again. “Here,” he commanded.
So Horace read, the words tongued to life but empty of meaning. What he wanted was to seize Charley, clasp his son to his chest, turn flesh-of-his-flesh into a bulwark against whatever might come. He glanced across the room to Elizabeth. who wrote words she would not share, to whom he didn’t know. If he had brought shame to her years ago on Mr. Colton’s stage, then this fresh transgression—a public embrace of a woman not his wife—would be far worse. All that day he had shadowed her, shoveling the walk while Elizabeth beat the hearth rug, fixing a shelf in the pantry as she organized spice jars, reading now with Charley in the parlor as she penned that letter. His conscience plagued him with visions of Nan in his dentist chair, his fingers slipping loose the buttons on her blouse. That those memories might not show on his face, he imagined Elizabeth, angry and asking questions—How did you recognize her? Why such an intimacy?—and he rehearsed some lies, some shadings of truth. Though he wanted her to raise the business, to show by her expression what their future held, her eyes avoided his, and throughout the day she remained inscrutable. Around dusk, in the kitchen, she wiped sticky dough off her fingers with a towel, touched his shoulder and said, “We’ll talk later. Help me roll out this crust.” And Horace dared hope that his actions at the graveyard had, after all, made less trouble than that business with Colton.
But aside from a remark about firewood or water to be fetched, Elizabeth said little for days. Though he lived by her side, joined her in bed at night, hour by hour he felt himself becoming like a vapor—unseen, unheard, less substantial than dust stirred in an attic’s drafts. Sleeplessness drove him to his workshop, where he fidgeted with bladders and bottles. Breathing ether and chloroform, he felt confused and angry, because while the vapors granted relief, they never gave him hope. He’d expected otherwise though could not say why. Hand shaking from fury, he marked in his notebook. “Hope & relief: NOT the same—”
One night, when he came to their bedroom, Elizabeth had crawled under the quilts ahead of him and left a candle burning. He smelled a potpourri, something piney and warm, and when she propped herself up on the pillows, he saw that her neck and shoulders were bare, her face intent.
“Latch the door,” she said, her tone cold.
Perplexed, he shed his c
lothes, and beside her warm body he lay facing the ceiling.
She pressed one leg over his, grazed her lips over his chin. “Kiss me,” she said.
Because he did not dare anything else, he pecked her cheek. Tasting wetness and salt, he opened his eyes to see whether she cried. “Are you unwell?” he asked. But she turned her face from the light.
She reached low, gently, then lifted herself above him, the candlelight glistening along the edges of her skin, her face shadowed. He closed his eyes as she guided him. He did not mean for it to happen, but it did: even as Elizabeth moaned and shifted, Nan’s face appeared to him. Panic seized his heart, and he bit hard on the soft flesh inside his cheek. Elizabeth rocked against him, encouraging, inviting, and though his heart thumped with apprehension, he followed her. His whole self became taut, and at the moment of his greatest pleasure he groaned with the sense that some bygone sin was expelled out of himself and into her, a clemency—but a horror, too, because it was now an evil she carried.
They lay together a while, neither speaking, and maybe he dozed. When at last he opened his eyes, she had moved the candle. In the light, she brought her face near to his, except it was not her same face. Now it was unnatural. Lips contorted, jaw slack as if unhinged, her eyes swollen and pink. Her righteous glare. Studying him. Seeing every truth. Her fingertips flitted over his cheek, unable to touch, or strike, or withdraw.
He could not stop staring at what she’d become, at what he’d made.
She said, “Have you betrayed me?”
The pain in her eyes. Pain deciding, as always, how things end. The inevitable corruptions.
“Yes,” he said.
The night’s impure blackness, stars sprayed across a moonless eternity, the cattle lowing, pasture stubble breaking under hoof falls, a melody on the cold air—that hymn played on the pianoforte, there, inside the farmhouse. Two men: one swinging on a hanging bench in the garden, his belly full of goose meat and buttered potatoes, the tip of his cigar aglow like a January firefly; the other on a folding cane chair, scratching at his cheeks, too casual with the loaded derringer he keeps switching hand to hand.
The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist Page 28
