The Speckled Monster (33 page)

“Jack,” he called, just as his servant reached the back stoop. “What do you think?”

He heard a catch of breath, a sigh; saw a gleam of eyes looking about for an answer. It was not common for a white man to ask a black man his opinion. Not unheard of, but uncommon. On such a dangerous subject as this, Zabdiel realized, Jack'd have to pick his way into speech with extreme care.

“Same as I thought last night.”

“Right,” said Zabdiel wearily.

“Wait there a minute,” said Jack. Zabdiel heard the faint whoosh of the door opening, a creak of floorboards, a footstep or two. Then Jack said, “Catch.” A tiny stone of darkness arced toward Zabdiel through the night; without thinking, he put up his hand and caught it.

“Good night, Doctor,” said Jack. “I got to go see to those rascals upstairs.” Then he was gone.

Zabdiel opened his hand. In his palm, silver in the moonlight, lay the old-man wrinkles and folds, the doubled ship's-hull curve of a walnut.

 

A few minutes later, he was astride Prince, trotting west up Queen Street, the stallion's hooves ringing over paving stones. A few more minutes, and that clatter melted into a muffled thud as the ground relaxed into deep turf. Both horse and man breathed deep sighs upon outrunning the town's plucking panic, escaping into the windswept freedom of the fields that sloped away up the Tremount. Zabdiel had no particular destination in mind; he gave the horse his head, and soon they were cantering along a bridle path, a narrow ribbon of silver that seemed to lead straight into the stars.

Near the top of the tallest of the mountain's three peaks, the Beacon Hill that rose three hundred feet above Boston, Prince slowed to a satisfied walk, the lights of the sleeping town now twinkling far below. Beyond lay the infinite darkness of the sea murmuring to itself in sleep. With a satisfied whinny and a thorough shake of his mane, Prince stopped to graze in the summer-sweet grass.

Zabdiel leaned across his back. The horse smelled of fresh brown earth, newly turned and clean; all around them, June had draped the earth in green growth, the scents of wild roses, hawthorn, and budding apples. The air was warm and moist, rippling with mischievous winds from the sea.

He closed his eyes. There were only two paths off this mountain. One led to a familiar hell. He saw a small girl with Jerusha's eyes, digging a grave. He felt the heat and stretch of his own skin on fire. The other was a road that stretched into an unknown distance. Flickering through his mind he saw an august body of learned men in London, sensed the undulating beauty of Turkish harems. Heard the lilt of African voices, high and low, telling, again and again, the same story.

Heard again the suspicions that had wafted across his path in low whispers all day long:
It may be a plot. Why not? They are not so numerous as to be able to rise against us, as they do in Barbados, in Jamaica, aboard slave ships. But they are cunning. They will tempt us into killing ourselves. Our own children
.

He did not think there was a conspiracy. Too many upright, God-fearing people had told stories that were similar, yet not the same, not spread out regularly, easily, like bait. But brought out hodgepodge, jumbled. Some were the worn flotsam and jetsam of men and women stretching back to long-ago memories of a far-distant land. Some were newly broken shards, scooped up and waved with fierce pride, images of a home still clear in mind and desire, described in voices not yet accustomed to English or refusing ever to become accustomed to English.

In the west, the moon was setting, swollen and white like some vast celestial pock. Far in the east, a thin spear of gold lanced between sea and sky. Prince had been grazing steadily downward; Zabdiel now gathered the reins, spurring him on faster, down and south across the Common, skirting the town to their left, taking a hedge or two for the sheer pleasure of flight. The stallion was more than willing, his black mane and tail streaming behind the rich reddish brown of his body as he roused the winged creatures from their roosts, earth against air. Southward they sped, in among the sparse houses at the bottom of the South End. Then the houses drew apart again, and fields ran up to the road, their heels nipped by water on either side as the solid land funneled itself into the Neck. At its narrowest point, just forty yards wide, a high wall guarded all entry and exit to Boston. One gate for pedestrians, one tall enough for riders and wide enough for carriages. The porter had seen Dr. Boylston coming and had already opened the big gate, waving him through with a call for good luck. Assuming, no doubt, that he was off to some emergency.

Just beyond, as he passed the gibbet, Zabdiel wrinkled his nose at what was left of Joseph Hanno, the black man hanged a month earlier for murdering his wife. A few more minutes of cantering, though, and salt marshes stretched away on either side. Out here at dawn, the world was made mostly of lavender sky and towering castles of pink, orange, and gold. Out here, it did not seem possible that the world could hold such filth as smallpox.

The marshes were crisscrossed with a web of trails more or less solid at ebb tide. Zabdiel set Prince on a course for a sliver of beach beyond; as they raced still southward, hundreds upon thousands of ducks, geese, herons, and cranes filled the sky with wings, wheeling white, blue, dun, tan, emerald-green.

These birds migrated every spring, thousands of miles, from the steaming wetlands of the south toward the blue glowing icebergs of the north, and back in the fall. No one knew how. But human ignorance had never stopped it from happening.

At the sea's edge Zabdiel reined Prince in and faced east as the world caught fire.
Take knowledge where you find it,
he heard his father's voice say, though perhaps it was his own murmur. He tried to shake the thought off, but it grew wider and warmer, along with the day.

He could not try it on both of his boys. He would have to choose. John, highly intelligent and just as highly strung, already agitated to sleeplessness by tales of sick friends. Or Tommy, who certainly knew about the epidemic—he had seen a dying woman just yesterday—but who seemed not to know fear. Tommy, who wanted to be a doctor and would therefore have to get through the distemper someday, just as he once had. Tommy, who was, a very small voice whispered, his favorite, the one he would least like to risk.

The sun rose burning from the sea. He watched it for what might have been seconds, or might have been centuries. Then he turned Prince's head for home. They ran all the way, galloping through dawn, not bothering to slow up even for the clutter of town, scattering pigs from their wallows, irritating the roosters, unsettling the hens.

 

When Zabdiel walked into the kitchen, Jack was stirring porridge; he turned and stood there, just holding up a ladle like a steaming question mark.

“I can't try it on myself,” said Zabdiel.

“No, sir,” said Jack, understanding the apology offered in the doctor's voice.

“I'm going to try it on Tommy.”

Jack nodded. “I hope you'll try it on me, too, then. And Jackey.”

Zabdiel said nothing, but he felt a surge of relief, maybe even triumph: he had been right. There was no conspiracy.

Jack turned back to the pot hung over the fire. “Guess I can be as brave as you, Doctor.” He began spooning breakfast into wooden bowls. “Just hope you'll be quick about it, before my mind has much of a chance to change.” He set the bowls on the table, and wiped his hands on his apron. “Shop was locked up from the inside last night. I went around and opened it from the front while you was out. Now excuse me, while I go rouse those three slug-a-beds.”

Zabdiel ducked down the passage and into the shop. The counter was spread with a clean white cloth; neatly lined up across it lay a small glass vial and stopper, a quill newly sharpened into a toothpick, and a lancet. Off to the right, by itself, lay a nutcracker.

There was a walnut in Zabdiel's right hand, a walnut that he had rolled this way and that all night like a Mohammedan worry bead.

John, Tommy, and Jackey pelted down the stairs to find Zabdiel already gone, which was disappointing. On the other hand, for no apparent reason their porridge was not only sweetened with sugar and thickened with new milk, but also studded with raisins and freshly cracked walnuts.

“Is it someone's birthday?” asked Tommy, plowing into it as soon as grace had been said.

“Always,” said Jack. To John, he added, “You finish up, now, and head on back upstairs and pack a few things. Your uncle Tom'll be needing you to stay at his place for a few days.”

 

Zabdiel rode off at a trot to a certain house that held everything he wanted: a young man progressing nicely through smallpox of the most distinct kind, the pocks having scattered themselves sparsely across him nine days since. This morning, they were plump and white.

The boy's mother was surprised at seeing Dr. Boylston so early: her boy was doing well, and she knew for a fact that others nearby needed him to ward off dying. However, no doubt the poor man wished to start the day with something easy and cheerful; her boy was just the thing. That thought made her cheerful herself, though she was a bit pressed for time, it being baking day and the oven not heating quite as evenly or quickly as one would wish. She sent the doctor up alone.

Zabdiel examined the boy's legs and chose a fine large pock. Explaining what he wanted, he pricked it near the base and gently pressed the matter out into his vial. It was fetid, but not rancid. The boy watched the whole operation with keen fascination.

When he was finished, Zabdiel stoppered the bottle and shoved it into a leather pouch that hung on a thong around his neck, tucking the whole inside his shirt to keep it warm.

Back at home, he forced himself through the ritual of changing clothes in the barn; he could not tell whether he was hurrying or moving in slow motion. Inside, Jack had explained to the boys that they were to have a small operation, like big boys. It would not hurt so much as bloodletting, but blood would come. It was practice for being a man.

Zabdiel did Tommy first; Tommy insisted. A little scoring of the skin on the outer arm, just above the elbow, a glossy red bead of blood welling up. A tiny bit of white matter drawn from the vial on the point of a quill. Only a little shaking of his hands, almost imperceptible. The two drops, red and white, swirled around till they were one. A curved bit of walnut laid over the scratch, bound up with clean white linen: keeping anything else from touching it, wiping it off, spreading it. But letting air circulate.

Zabdiel had Tommy lie down on his stomach a bench, and he did the same to the inside of one leg, up near the buttocks.

Next he operated on Jack. As he finished his arm, Jack scratched his head and said, “I been thinking. How'm I supposed to sit that cantankerous old mule if I got a rear full of smallpox?”

Zabdiel looked up from the lancet he was wiping clean and shook his head. “Maybe that mule's out in the barn thinking,
How'm I supposed to walk pretty under a cantankerous old man with a rear full of smallpox?
”

Jack blew a sigh of relief. “Suppose any other part will work?”

After a short consultation, they agreed upon the muscle that swept from his neck, across the shoulder blade, and into the back.

At last, it was Jackey's turn. He had screamed at the first scratch of Tommy's skin. By the time his father was done, though, he was so eager to be one of the big boys that the hard part was to get him to stop squirming with excitement.

It was all so prodigiously, preposterously easy.

“Now what?” asked Tommy, as if a few words of hocus pocus would suddenly produce a painless crop of spots.

“Now we wait,” said Zabdiel.

 

Later that morning the light breeze off the water died away, leaving heat to settle heavily on the streets. Out in the harbor, the great guns of the
Seahorse
began to roar in slow, pompous succession.

Well into his rounds despite his late start, Zabdiel reined his horse, the big patient gelding called Exeter, to a stand and turned to face the sea. Everyone else in the street was doing the same. Earlier, the
Seahorse
had hauled herself up to the end of the Long Wharf to load her refurbished guns back on board; Captain Durell was wasting no time in testing them. No doubt he would justify the noise and the expense in powder by claiming to be celebrating some royal birthday or other. To Zabdiel and many of the Bostonians around him, though, it sounded like a preemptive funeral salute for a city, the reverberating footfalls of fast-approaching doom.

Behind Zabdiel, a ways up the hill, someone began shouting. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that the commotion centered on the gilt frippery of Dr. Douglass's carriage. It was an absurd vehicle that might have been at home in the boulevards of Paris or possibly the more palatial districts of London, but was sorely out of place in Boston, whose streets were as narrow and crooked as cow paths. The doctor had thrust half his body out the window and was griping at a couple of teamsters who had halted an ox-drawn dray in the road. Having pried open a trap door in the ground just outside a shop, they were stolidly proceeding to transfer their load of barrels and boxes from cart to cellar.

Unfortunately, the dray occupied half the street—at a squeeze—just at the point where someone had dug up the other half to lay a drain. Not knowing of the blockage ahead, traffic had gone on pouring into the street behind. The gunfire had then induced many to turn back halfway for a good look, so that in no time at all the road had become a thick jumble of carts and carriages facing every which way. For Dr. Douglass, there was now no going back, while there would be no going forward until the dray popped itself like a stopper from the bottleneck. For the foreseeable future, however, it appeared to be settled as firmly as a lump of solid cement.