The Speckled Monster (31 page)

Rage, frustration, and something he had never seen on his father's face before.

Fear.

 

The whole of the next day and well into the night, Jerusha packed. She found jobs for the girls all over the house; Tommy she somehow needed nearby, almost underfoot. It was times like this that he envied John his shiny new apprenticeship, a present for his thirteenth birthday; he would not be thirteen for seven long years, thought Tommy darkly. Meanwhile, John was learning to be a merchant—or a merchant prince, as he put it. Usually, Tommy rolled his eyes just thinking about it. His brother stuffed his head with numbers from morning to night; he would eagerly trace not just sums but full-blooded trigonometry problems on the wall with a finger in his sleep. Tommy wanted to be a doctor, or maybe a ship's captain, not a merchant. This morning, though, he had to admit it would have been useful to have John's irreproachable reason to be somewhere else.

All day, Tommy helped his mother pack clothing, bedding, and food for what seemed like a year. Warming pans, pots, utensils. Pickles, preserves, cheeses, dried fruit, and meat. A precious chest full of books and writing paper. Another, even more dear, of medicinal supplies—all that their father would spare and some he was hard pressed to give up. “You must leave some for me and the boys, Jer,” he heard him chide, though gently. His mother nodded and ruffled his hair so fiercely that he had to swallow a yelp.

The next day, Uncle Tom arrived, riding alongside his coach. The men stowed the baggage up top, while the women nearly suffocated everybody else with farewells. Finally, his mother and the girls stepped into the carriage to join Aunt Sarah, looking faintly green, and his cousins Sarah and Annie who stuck out tiny pink tongues. Tommy crossed his eyes and waggled his own tongue back, until they squealed with laughter. Moll, Jack's wife and Jerusha's godsend, as his father said, gave Jackey one kiss and a pat on the rear, and climbed up to sit ramrod straight next to the driver.

And then with a groaning heave, they were gone, swallowed by the shout and chaos of the streets.

John bustled off in Uncle Tom's wake. Tommy's father and Jack, too, rode away soon after that, his father on a fine gelding, and Jack on the long-eared, strong-hearted mule he loved—because it was his, and because they had a sort of running tussle over which of them was boss. They would be gone all day, his father had said; it would take that long to visit all the sick people.

There was sure a lot of leaving going on, thought Tommy as he stood with Jackey and waved at everyone else. No doubt, he would miss his mother. On the brighter side, he had just been freed from the girls' endless demands to play the Indian game, reenacting over and over the attack on their mother's girlhood home, such ages and ages ago that his mother hadn't been born yet. The three girls traded off the roles of the heroic maid and the two babies whom she had saved by popping them under overturned kettles. Tommy always played the lone Indian warrior, which would have been brilliant if it hadn't meant that he not only always had to lose, but to crawl off and invent some new spectacular way to die as well. True, he got to take a few pretend pot-shots (he was very proud of the pun) through a window at the kettles. But then whoever was playing the maid got to bean him with yet another pot. And if that weren't bad enough, she then tossed coals in his face. Mary tended to get carried away with the beaning, even though they used a pillow; his sister Jerusha had a wicked arm with the leaves they used for coals. Sometimes he thought the taste of leaves was the last thing he remembered at night, and the first thing he thought of in the morning.

But he would not have to play the Indian game for a while. For a whole glorious week or maybe even two, he was a man in a man's world. Tommy decided to celebrate. Jackey might be only two and a half, but he already knew how to roar like a lion. Also, he worshiped Tommy, which Tommy reckoned was an excellent character trait. “Pirates,” decreed Tommy. “We'll play pirates.”

At crucial moments, though, just as the Dread Pirate Roberts (Tommy) threatened with magnificent rage to send the scurvy, thieving lubbers among his crew down the plank, directly into a frenzy of sharks, Jackey (the crew, good, bad, and middling) would wander off after a squirrel, or a bee, or the place where he remembered he had left some raisins two days ago. Or he would ask,
What do sharks sound like?
And keep asking, until Tommy came up with a good answer.

Tommy decided that being the man of the house, as his father put it, from dawn until dusk was not going to be easy.

 

Dr. Cotton Mather had the privilege of being attended in medical matters by his brother-in-law, Dr. John Clark. Nonetheless, on the twenty-first of June, one of the goods he devised was to encourage others in the neighborhood—those who could not, perhaps, be expected to bear the expense of Dr. Clark's services—to rely upon Dr. John Perkins in the matter of the smallpox. His skill and piety made the doctor eminently worthy, Mather judged; his need was self-evident. Newly released from debtor's prison, Dr. Perkins quivered at the threat of return. It was a fate for which Mather had developed a certain sympathy.

While canvassing the neighborhood, urging the services of Dr. Perkins upon his flock, however, Dr. Mather became aware of a certain reticence.

“If you please, sir,” one maid squeaked at last, “My father says to say he don't want none of your advice in matters medical or physical, sir, though he would be pleased to retain your services in a more ministerial line. Prayers and sermons and whatnot.”

It did not take him long to plumb the source of both her terrified embarrassment—she was bobbing through curtsies like a jack-in-the-box—and her father's obstinate reluctance. Though she was the bearer of bad news quite against her will, she was voicing an alarmingly general murmuration against him. The Lord, it seemed, was blessing him with a new set of trials. For it appeared that Dr. Douglass had not only squelched his plea for a physicians' meeting, but had proceeded to spread lies of a most abominable sort.

In return for evil, his inner voice bristled,
Do Good
.

In this case, there was a particularly satisfactory good within his reach. The next morning, Dr. Mather shut himself up in his library and drew from a cupboard a sheaf of papers carefully wrapped up in ribbon and labeled. These he carried to his desk and settled down to write a Treatise on the Small Pox, in three parts: first, a section awakening the sentiments of Piety necessary in order to face death in a godly manner. Second, a section delineating the best medicines and methods the world had yet seen for managing the disease. And third, the new discovery of Inoculation.

For he had, of course, copied out both Timonius and Pylarinus word for word—as close as would signify, at any rate—upon first reading them. Long before the miserly Dr. Douglass had locked them away in some secret treasure hoard of knowledge.

Day brightened, and then faded again, and still his pen scrabbled on. Dusk had crept through most of its long summer-blue hour when he at last laid down his quill and wrung the cramps from his hands. He stood up and considered what to do with his treatise, a fine piece of work if he said so himself. In the right hands, he flattered himself—hands that would not burn it—these few humble pages might save many lives.

Shall I give it to the Booksellers?
he asked his diary.
I am waiting for Direction
.

Direction came in the night. He would not spread it abroad indiscriminately, pearls before swine. He would see, however, that everyone fit to comprehend it, to judge its worth, should receive a copy. The next day, he noted in his diary,
I write a Letter unto the Physicians, entreating them, to take into consideration the important Affair of preventing the Small Pox
.

Actually, he had written the brief letter out once. It was Sammy and Lizzy who were copying it, along with the treatise, many times over, one of each for every doctor in town. It was a task that had the double good of easing his worries about Sammy's hours of idleness.

The last letter he wrote out himself, signing and addressing it with a grand flourish. Cotton Mather, D.D., F.R.S.

To William Douglass, M.D.

6

FATHERS AND SONS

ON the twenty-fourth of June, Zabdiel Boylston arrived home exhausted, long after dark. He had sent Jack home earlier, to get dinner for the boys, so Zabdiel unsaddled, watered, and fed his horse himself. He stopped, too, at the stall of his bay stallion, Prince, who snorted and stamped softly. As he did every evening, Zabdiel fed him some raisins. “Tomorrow,” he promised, stroking the horse's nose. “We'll ride tomorrow.”

Then he stepped into the far stall, empty save for a bucket of water, soap, and towel. Kicking off his shoes, he stripped, working upward to the day cap that covered his close-shaven head. He had given up wearing a wig at the first cry of smallpox. In his estimation, the thing trapped contagion like a net; in Jerusha's estimation, it would be impossible to comb out the smell. For a few days, he had felt naked and light headed, but now he liked riding out with nothing but a velvet cap between his skull and the sky. The cap, too, soon went flying across the stall, and then he washed himself from head to toe. It felt good to bare his skin to the summer night. To pretend, at least, that water faintly astringent with rue and rosemary could rinse the day's filth from his memory, as well as from his skin. Still mother naked, he walked the length of the barn and ducked into the stall at the opposite end, also near empty, in this case save for a clean set of clothes.

He had decreed this measure for both himself and Jack, to safeguard the boys. Extreme, to be sure, and quite possibly absurd, especially if the contagion turned out to be climactic, settling on the whole region like some foul mist. He could not tell about that yet, though, while he knew for certain that garments could carry the infection. Bedding, too. That infernal practice of auctioning off a dead sailor's clothing at the mainmast within an hour of the unfortunate's expiry might well be what had spread it with such deadly and particular deliberation around the
Seahorse,
for instance. He had heard about that from Dr. Clark: how the worst cases on that ship had seemed to follow one another in single-file procession.

The boys were ready for bed. He said prayers with them, and then told a story about the Dread Pirate Roberts and a Pearl of Great Price. Tommy let himself be swept away quickly on the tides of sleep. From the look on John's face, though, Zabdiel guessed he had sadly fallen off his best story-telling, though John was not going to say so.
Papa needs rest,
said the worried expression on his face.

He was right.

He descended from the boys' eyrie on the third floor to the parlor that stretched the full length of the house on the floor below. It was his favorite room, with his and Jerusha's armchairs drawn close to the cozy fireplace in winter, turned to face the windows and the open sky in the summer. Jerusha had left—on purpose, he guessed—a bit of half-finished cross-stitch on hers, so that he might pretend that she was just across the hall, upstairs with the children, down in the kitchen with Moll. Somewhere, anywhere nearby, rather than five miles off, where she might be fighting fever in one of the girls without him knowing, much less helping. Where she would sit ignorant herself when Tommy and John fell ill.

For they would fall ill. Unless Zabdiel could spirit them out of town soon, they would fall ill. And it would be Zabdiel who infected them, no matter what precautions he thought up. Something would slip by, and he would carry the infection home from some sickroom and feed it straight to the boys. Might as well get over it now, said the crisp voice of reason. But the father in him balked, choked at the thought of his sons swollen and covered in an ash-gray crust of scabs, or scattered with flat black sores seeping into one another. Already, the flat pox was sowing its seed among Boston's children with deadly abandon.

Zabdiel shook the vision off. A letter lay on the table between the chairs; a big, bulky letter. He picked it up. From Cotton Mather, fire-breather. He opened it.

 

At the very bottom was his name, Dr. Boylstone, as Mather spelled it, with that old-fashioned curl of an
e
at the end, the only personal word on the page. Otherwise, the missive had the distinct distance of a form letter. As if ten, fifteen, identical letters had been written, then each marked out for a different doctor, ticked off some list.