The Speckled Monster (34 page)

“Make way,” shouted Dr. Douglass. “Make way for a doctor!”

The teamsters, both the size of trolls, paid him as much mind as they might have given a gnat.

“Are you men or mutton?” shouted Dr. Douglass, waving his walking stick about in a fury. “Make way for a doctor!”

Zabdiel sighed. He did not care for the man, but he pitied his patients. No doubt someone had sent for him in a panic and was now anxiously awaiting his arrival. At this rate, though, they would not catch a glimpse of the doctor before dinner. Reluctantly, Zabdiel turned Exeter about and picked his way to the carriage. “I would be happy, sir,” he said with a nod of greeting, “to give you a lift to your destination, if it would be of help.”

A look of horror rippled across Dr. Douglass's face as he registered Boylston astride a tall horse. “Thank you,” he said, bristling with all the hauteur he could muster. “But I must refuse. I do not mind telling you, sir, that my patient is a lady of some consequence.” He returned Zabdiel's nod. “I make no doubt that she expects me to arrive in a style befitting her station. I cannot think that arriving pillion, like some flibbertigibbet maid out for a country ride with her beau, will quite answer.”

A smile twitched at the corners of Zabdiel's mouth. “If she's as ill as you suggest,” he said, “she'll surely find the speed of your arrival more to the point than the style of it.”

Withdrawing into the coach and motioning Dr. Boylston to lean in, Dr. Douglass lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I wouldna have yon oafs know it, sir, but her condition is not yet so acute as to justify dispensing with form. Nevertheless, she may present an intricate case,” he added with pride, pulling out a handkerchief and mopping sweat from his face. “I make no doubt of being recommended most warmly to her acquaintance if I should satisfy: so you see, I must endeavor to satisfy in all particulars. Including appearance, which, as you know, is of great importance to the ladies.” He shot out of the window to shout once again at the men ahead, and then he turned back to Zabdiel. “Have you had the good fortune to be called to a case of smallpox yet?”

“No—” began Zabdiel, intending to add that he had been called to something closer to twenty, but Dr. Douglass cut him off.

“Not a one, sir?” he cried with something like triumph. “I wish you may have better luck in upcoming days. A most fascinating distemper, sir. Most fascinating. And one must make hay while the sun shines, no?”

Down in the harbor, the last of the shots—fifteen, all told—faded away. “I have never thought to equate smallpox with sunshine,” said Zabdiel quietly.

Far from registering his companion's distaste, Dr. Douglass positively gloated.
“Carpe diem,”
he cried, waving his walking stick about with excitement once again.
“Seize the day,
you know. It's no different for men with fortunes to make than for young maids with beauty to bargain,
n'est-ce pas
?” He cast a quick, sharp glance up at his companion. Craning forward conspiratorially, he said, “As long as we are thrown together in this morass, sir, may I take the opportunity to ask whether Dr. Mather has sent you one of his letters?”

“Yes—” began Zabdiel.

“Ah! Then may I count on you, sir, to join me and the other practitioners in this town in—shall we just say
quarantining?
—this bit of foolery to the oblivion it deserves?” His rumble of mirth at his clever choice of words faded as he registered the gravity on Boylston's face.

“No,” said Zabdiel, shaking his head. “No, I am afraid you may not.”

“Surely, sir,” said Dr. Douglass, quite aghast, “you cannot be considering undertaking the practice?”

“No,” answered Zabdiel. “I have already performed it.”

An odd noise escaped Dr. Douglass's throat as mirth, triumph, and relief were all knocked to the ground in a hard little rain of surprise. “
Already
—” he croaked.
“When—?”

“This morning,” said Zabdiel. “On my youngest son and two slaves.”

Dr. Douglass swept the pieces of his dignity into a glowering mass of disapproval. “You are aware, sir,” he said darkly, “that as a medical doctor I cannot recommend or support this practice?”

“I am now,” said Zabdiel. “Luckily, I was not counting on either.” He did not want to hear doubt, not now, not even from such a predictably sourpuss source as Dr. Douglass.

But Dr. Douglass was beyond voicing doubt, or anything else. His mouth was opening and closing in silence.
Curious,
thought Zabdiel,
how periwigs make some men's faces expand toward greatness, while others seem to
shrivel until they resemble nothing so much as a South Sea Islander's shrunken fetish
. Beneath his borrowed mane, Dr. Douglass began to shake with what was presumably rage. If he were an Islander, wondered Zabdiel, would he feel obliged to dance about in some kind of savage idolatry, to appease him?

Zabdiel pulled himself out of his reverie. He must get away, he realized, before either of them said something they would both regret. “You are sure, sir, I may not give you a lift?”

Douglass was still too shocked to provide any answer beyond a vigorously negative shake of the head.

“Then I must bid you good day and good luck, sir, and head off to my own patients.” Zabdiel set his horse into motion, threading through the tangle of carriages and carts. The dray, he saw, had not moved an inch. As they reached the ditch, Exeter took it in stride, leaping it with ease. After winding through the equally dense thicket of vehicles on the opposite side, they were soon trotting away through streets that were clear, save for a thick shimmer of heat.

 

By nightfall, the entire town knew that Dr. Boylston had given smallpox to his own flesh and blood—
on purpose
—and as if that weren't enough, to two black slaves as well. The boy whose pock Zabdiel had pressed talked to his mother; she talked to everyone she could find. Dr. Douglass also let the news slip once or twice, in well chosen houses.
No better than murder,
sniffed one of his more excitable old gossips; she had ample opportunity that day to practice her tone of outrage and offended motherliness, tweaking it to perfection.

The next day, Zabdiel began to sense whispers, silences, averted eyes, but he told himself he was imagining things. He managed to believe it, too, until the first door shut in his face. At the next house, though, he got a hearty slap on the back, and a request to try it on a child or two there. If it should succeed on Tommy, that is.

The word went on sputtering, flickering, flaring through town, sometimes burrowing to hushed bass depths, sometimes accompanied by gale-force gasps and shrieks that would do banshees proud. Nervous giggles. Blanched horror. For four days, the glares thickened around him as he rode about his business; Jack, who felt entirely well, still rode out with Zabdiel, but he began drawing his mule as close as possible behind. At home, Zabdiel changed all their dressings, two each, morning and evening: they had flamed red by the end of the first day; after that they looked as if they might go on holding that same angry shape until the Day of Judgment.

On the fifth day, another wave of eruptions began to appear around town; this time the sick numbered in the hundreds. Castle William, too, was infected. Men had been deserting in hordes, it seemed, for a week. In the streets, the glares following Zabdiel thickened to hatred. The whispers hardened to muttering, exploding here and there into jeers, as if he might be to blame for the spread of the disease.

G.D.,
wrote Cotton Mather in his diary,
the Affair of preventing the Small-Pox, in the way of Inoculation, is begun, and has raised an horrid Clamour, which Occasions new Cares upon me
.

On the sixth day from inoculation, the first of July, Tommy, Jack, and Jackey all grew feverish, their skin a little warm to the touch. Zabdiel insisted that Jack stay home with the boys. That evening, a jeer broke loose from a huddle of men, and then another, and then a stone skimmed across the street, not quite at him, but too close for comfort. Zabdiel's horse shied. He said nothing, however, just rode on as if nothing more untoward than the sudden flap of a bird had startled his mount.

All three of his patients at home were a little restive and feverish that night, on into the next morning. That day, more doors shut in his face. Early on, one or two women begged him, quietly, to return later, after their husbands were out. In broad daylight, one or two more whispered for him to come back after dark, when the neighbors would not see. As he rode home that evening, someone spat, hitting him square on the cheek. Zabdiel shook out a handkerchief and wiped the spittle away, looking straight ahead.

At home, he found that Jack's fever had dissolved, and the sores on his neck and arm were drying up. “Are you sure you haven't had the small-pox?” asked Zabdiel.

“Don't remember,” said Jack.

“You've had it,” said Zabdiel.

Jackey and Tommy, though, remained feverish; their incisions had blossomed, so that each showed a red halo burning around a single large pock.

The next morning—the eighth day, July 3—Jackey's fever limped on as before. Tommy, however, began twitching and tossing in his sleep, his skin papery and burning to the touch, the fever creeping ever higher. With a heavy heart, Zabdiel left the house on his rounds. The air, too, was feverish, hot and moist, pressing like a headache against his temples.

Jack rode out with him again; this time, Zabdiel did not complain. When Jack drew up alongside on his mule, unbidden, neither man remarked upon it, but they both felt safer that way. That afternoon, crowds began to jostle around their mounts; Prince reared and flailed out with his hooves, scattering the crowd. Zabdiel stared the crowd down, and then said one word under his breath to Jack:
“Home.”

It was just as well. No, it was a godsend. For Tommy lay in a wet heap on the kitchen floor, his fever so high Zabdiel thought he could fairly see steam rise from his son's skin. Jackey was sitting next to him, petting him and singing a wandering little lullaby.

“What happened?” Jack asked his son.

“He was hot,” whispered Jackey. “He went out and stood under the pump. Then he came back in and went to sleep.”

Jack built up the fire, while Zabdiel stripped his son and toweled him dry. Tommy muttered and twitched, but did not wake, even when Zabdiel lifted him in his arms and carried him upstairs. He was already soaked with sweat by the time Zabdiel could lay him on the big bed. His and Jerusha's bed. He tried not to think of Jerusha. Of the face she would turn to him if she were to walk in this instant. Jack brought up a bucket of cool water and some cloths.

Zabdiel sat up late into the night, laying cool cloths on Tommy's head and feet, while the boy shivered and mumbled, struggling against the darkness. On his arm, the large pock in the middle of the incision had exploded into an open sore two and a half inches across. Green and yellow rottenness dripped at its heart, while the red ring had stretched huge, its perimeter thick with tiny pocks.

Faint and far away, he thought he heard a commotion. “Doctor,” said Jack from the passage, “I think you had better come into the parlor.”

He had made up a cot there for Jackey, within calling distance from Zabdiel. Jackey was fitful and hot, too, but not dangerously so. His arm looked just like Tommy's.

It was not Jackey or his arm that Jack had called him to see, however. The light in the parlor was a strange glowering orange, and the noise seemed louder here. Was louder—was a roar of voices shouting. A bang rattled the window glass, and Zabdiel instinctively stepped back. A splatter of filth dripped down the glass. Then came another and another, until the front walls and windows reverberated as if under siege.

In the back room, Tommy moaned; just behind them, Jackey cried out.

Zabdiel strode across the room in three steps and threw open the window. A shriek rose, hung before him, and died away. Zabdiel stood gazing at the mob below. A crowd of men unsteady on their feet. Others still solid in their rage, but flickering like ghouls beneath their torches. A few women; one of them screamed,
“Murderer.” “House of filth,”
shouted a lower voice. And in the front, in the middle, stood a large man he did not recognize, silent, square on bowed sailor's legs, swinging a rope.
“Negro lover,”
he said in a voice that needed no shout to carry.

Zabdiel let his eyes roam the entire crowd, till he held every last ounce of attention. “There are sick children up here,” he said in the voice that could seize women out of hysterics, pull men back from the brink of panic, send children and animals hurtling safely out of harm's way.

“Murderer!”
the woman screamed again.

He found her face, her jaw still hanging open from the cry, and pinned her beneath his gaze until she closed her mouth. “Sleeping,” he said firmly. “Not dead.”
If they die,
he thought,
you can have me. But not until then
. “They need quiet.”

The mob shifted sullenly, muttering. Under his stare, they went silent, though they did not go away, standing like sentries of wrath in the street. “Thank you,” he said. “And good night to you all.” He shut the window and turned back into the room.

To be two and a half
thought Zabdiel glancing at Jackey,
and sleep through a riot
.

Jack, for his part, was watching the doctor. “Come on,” he said, heading back into the bedroom and stepping up to the bed, taking Zabdiel's place wetting cloths and laying them across Tommy. The boy was sweating, shivering, and muttering on the bed, stripped save for the bottom sheet.