The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist Read online

  And Elizabeth, who had been trying to remember her first doll, reminded herself to be grateful for Charley, to trust the Almighty’s plan for her family whatever it may be. If time to come brought a daughter, so be it. Trust God, she told herself. Trust.

  Now Colton asked the hired young men in the front row to prepare themselves, to unbutton their shirt cuffs and roll up their sleeves, because there was no telling how men might behave after they breathed the gas. “Do not hesitate,” he commanded his stalwarts, “to subdue any subject of the gas by whatever means required to preserve the security, modesty, and honor of the good people here present.”

  Then he turned to a small table beside him, a drape covering some object set on its top. He yanked at the drape (con brio, thought Elizabeth, as every traveling charlatan performs), and revealed a rubber bag the size of a man’s head, and attached to one end was a device like those used to tap cider barrels. Colton lifted the device for all to see.

  “Herein,” he said, “the gas. Of every benefit possible to mankind. An entertainment, a joy for those who breathe it. Even ones whose merrymaking is grotesque report a panoply of pleasures. Now, observe as I turn the faucet’s key and inhale. Each time I breathe the gas, I will hold the mixture in my lungs for a ten count before exhaling. And when next you hear my voice it will be deeper, more sonorous than what you have heard before. I cannot predict what I will say. Each time, my reaction is different. Once, I promised refunds to my audience!”

  Chuckles.

  “Tonight, who knows what might occur? I may climb into the rafters and chatter as does a monkey from inky-black Africa. I may beg you as a vagrant to feed me hardtack and rye whiskey. Do not be surprised if I remove my shoes and stockings, roll up my pant legs, and stroll through the dew of a meadow no one else sees.”

  He inhaled, a deep pull on the bag’s faucet, then turned the key and stepped near the front of the stage. Then, as if his own weight were too great to bear, his legs gave way and he landed on his buttocks, his fall punctuated by a great belch.

  A moment passed, and he crept back to his feet, staring darkly at his audience. He began to mumble, his voice deep and scratchy, but what he mumbled none could understand. Then he leapt forward, cried at them, his voice pitched low, a howl or ululation, and he crouched as if menacing all with a spear.

  “I am a Cherokee chief!” he yelled.

  Elizabeth barked a laugh. So did Peg.

  Colton stepped about the stage, his footsteps exaggerated and long as if with each he cleared some brush or fallen log. Never did he take his eyes off the people in his audience. “Chief T____,” he yelled, but the word that followed chief was a jumble of vowels and consonants none could make out or even repeat, something unintelligible and suitably wild, Elizabeth thought. She tried to see him as an Indian, but his suit was too dapper, the tails of his coat too long.

  “Horace plays games like this with Charley,” she whispered to Peg. “Given the boy’s church-mouse ways, we encourage him toward noble savagery.”

  Colton rushed now from one edge of the stage to the other, brandishing his imaginary spear, growling and baring his teeth, until finally, near center stage, he lifted his weapon with two hands over his head, the imaginary tip pointed earthward, and plunged it into the floorboards. “White maggots,” he said. “You crawl about the land, pale, an infestation, eating out the substance of my people’s being. If you were warriors, I would kill you all.”

  The women laughed. Now the men laughed, too. They clapped politely. Colton snarled. He staggered, ran his tongue over his teeth, breathed deeply two or three times, closed his eyes, raised a hand as if to quiet his audience, then said, “The effect now is nearly gone.” He asked a young man in front for a cup of water. After he drank, he said, “After a turn at the gas it is often the case that one wants a swallow. Who would like to be next, to find himself and his very world transformed?”

  Mr. Cooper the widower breathed first from the volunteers, then danced a round with an imaginary partner he called Hester (his wife had been Winifred), whom he praised for the skillful way she touched her tongue to the tip of her nose. Mr. Palmer followed, and with a lungful of gas tried to dive headlong into the audience, and he might have, too, but after he’d shed his clothes to the point just before immodesty, the thickset stalwarts covered him in a blanket and brought him off stage. When he came back, returned to sobriety and fully dressed, he allowed, loudly, how “the pond had looked so tempting and the day seemed so hot.” After Mr. Palmer came several who merely giggled, and then Mr. Wingfield, who sashayed as would a lady of the French court, batting the air with an invisible hand fan as he repeated the phrase “Je suis mouillé.”

  And who succeeded Mr. Wingfield?

  Elizabeth’s own Horace.

  He looked small to her there, vulnerable. Colton stood a foot taller, and with his granite face and hair of a lycanthrope he seemed every bit the predator; her Horace, the tender prey. His eyes were eager, his manner shy. Had he planned this? She remembered their conversation about how college students forgot themselves by inhaling the gas, and she realized he had been looking for an opportunity such as this. This had been his plan all day. But he’d not said a word. The secrets he kept!

  Horace looked deeply at Colton as Colton asked questions about Horace’s lung capacity, about the universes he dreamed of at night, about the readiness of his soul to escape into a land of mist and mystery. Horace blinked a bit, seemed to smile, though the expression might also have been a wince at a tight collar. Colton asked Horace’s profession. When Horace answered “Surgeon dentist,” Colton thundered, “A man of science! You, then, must appreciate all the natural wonder we’ve seen this evening.”

  “I have noted it carefully,” Horace said.

  “And will take the gas of your own volition, in the interest of science?”

  “There is no other reason.”

  With a handkerchief, Colton wiped the mouth of the faucet. Horace took it between his lips, and when Colton turned the key, Horace inhaled.

  Elizabeth found that she was worrying one hand with the fingers of the other, pushing and kneading with a nail, picking at rough flecks of knuckle skin. She fumbled her opera glasses twice before getting them to her face. Now she could see his lips, pursed, holding the gas until Colton waved a finger under his own chin, a signal coaxing the breath from her husband’s chest. Horace exhaled, then stumbled back, Colton catching him. He closed his eyes, squeezed the lids so lines appeared on the sides of his face, then smiled, but with lips sealed and no teeth showing. She’d never seen that smile from him before, and something about it made her set her opera glasses in her purse with great care.

  “I-I would like an ale,” Horace said. “Yes. Thank you.” He cocked his head and grinned, and he asked Colton if he often visited the Dutch Point Tavern. When Colton hesitated to answer, Horace waved his hand to encourage play acting. Colton allowed as how it was his first time at the Dutch Point Tavern.

  “This is a fine … place,” Horace said. “Good people. A sort you won’t meet in church, if you get my meaning.” He winked in a slow, exaggerated way, and gentlemen in the audience laughed. Harmless, this entertainment, their snickering seemed to say, but there was unease, too, a disquiet that kept these restrained and sober men of church and property from fully embracing the scene. Elizabeth sensed Peg Trumbull lean away from her.

  “Take Evelyn there,” Horace said, pointing into the audience at Mrs. Morgan, whose given name was not Evelyn, “and that fellow beside her. The Earl of Bilgewater, they call him. They say his father was a pirate and his mother a slave. Thus his dusky skin. They’re fiercely loyal to each other, Evelyn and the Earl, though never married.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes! And he doesn’t mind all the men she takes to her bed so long as she pays for his rum.”

  Her eyes burning, Elizabeth turned to Peg. Could Horace be stopped? He committed no crime against God or man, not murder nor adultery nor robbery. But he was
laughing his way toward public disgrace, a downfall of reputation that could exclude him and his family from Hartford’s social circles, perhaps even ruin his dental practice. Peg looked back at Elizabeth with a face full of apology, then turned away. So Elizabeth knew it was too late. In this Union Hall she sat alone. Those around her were united in communal revulsion. At the very least, they now had an opportunity to extend a pious, condescending pity to her and her husband.

  “Let’s sing along with the river men!” Horace said to Colton, and he reached an arm over the big man’s shoulders, so that Colton needed to hunch to keep the pretense alive. “Follow me on this, man. You’ll get the hang after a verse or two.”

  When Horace sang, his voice was surprisingly clear and loud, a choir soloist’s. A tenor one expects to hear singing hosannas.

  Clara Bliss is my true love, Oh! Clara’s so dear,

  And together we travel to ports far and near;

  Of all the young beauties, she has the best luck,

  All days we’re in taverns, all nights we do fuck!

  This way, that way, which way you will,

  I’m sure I sing nothing that you can take ill.

  “Pray God, stop,” Elizabeth said, meaning her husband, meaning time, meaning whatever divine decree played out this night. Because what had started as a crass breach of decorum had become vile, perverse. Men hurried to their wives’ sides to hold their trembling hands or to rush them, bloodless, from the hall. Colton himself seemed torn between laughter and some pretense of horror. What to stop? What to allow? Horace kept on, filling the theater with his voice, louder than the protests from the audience. He laughed and sang and swung his arms to and fro like some mad metronome of obscenity.

  Clara’s born of a good priest and his saintly wife,

  Clara fled home to vouchsafe them days wi’out strife,

  Had they known how she lives she’d weep in the stocks

  ’Stead of drinking down ale and swallowing cocks!

  This way, and that way, and which way you can,

  For the fairest of women who lies with a man.

  “Enough, enough!” Elizabeth whispered. But everywhere the same faces, the same sour, pleased looks, until she saw Sam Cooley. No longer smiling, but on stage beside Horace, young Cooley pushing Colton away and clamping a hand over Horace’s mouth. Cooley shook Horace some, as if wrestling him, and let him go only long enough to yank at Horace’s muttonchops to get his attention. When Horace began another verse—“Clara’s church is a …”—Cooley slapped him, but Horace only giggled, then kissed Cooley on both cheeks and said, “Try the gas, Cooley. Prithee. For science’s sake.”

  Cooley signaled two of the hired stalwarts, who led Horace back to his seat. Colton then made some stumble toward an apology, but Cooley was waving him to get on with it, that he wanted to take the gas, to keep the entertainment a-moving and shift attention from the dentist in the third row with the whaler’s salty mouth.

  Elizabeth hardly noticed. She could only look down at the brooch that had fallen from her breast somehow and landed in her lap. She wanted to take its pin and prick her hands. She wanted to be sitting at home as Horace read to her from the advertisement in the morning’s paper, and to say, “Horace, let’s stay home. We’ve no money for this nitrous oxide show.” She wanted not to hear the gasps from all around her, the murmurs and footfalls of people leaving the Union Hall. At the sound of each, she imagined the weeks to come: the sideways glances, the scolding chatter from people who would not suffer a moment in the chair of a dentist so odious.

  And worst of all: this was, after all was said, her husband. The man she sat beside in church, who so devotedly praised God and His creation, industrious man who labored long hours in his workshop, who so despised the pain he caused his patients that he would foreswear his livelihood, this man also held, deep inside him, a vein of depravity that she did not recognize, that made him a stranger.

  When at last she raised her eyes, hopeful that he would have found her in the now thinning crowd, would have come to sit by her, come with apology, or with support, or to escort her away from this gross humiliation; instead, he sat where the stalwarts had placed him, in a third row seat, one in from the aisle, watching—what word could describe him, fervent!—as he studied how Cooley took the gas. And when Cooley lost his mind and ran about the hall chasing poor Mr. Eaton, Elizabeth watched the man who was her husband and a stranger, who seemed to have forgotten she was in the room, forgotten that he had mortified her with his vulgar song. She had never felt less important, less necessary. Now, with her mouth opening and closing, her fists clenched as if they could never let go of the shame he caused her, she wondered at the cruelty of becoming, to someone you love, no more than an accessory in some grand scientific investigation. “We should go to this exhibition,” he had said earlier that day, without revealing his plan. How awful, she had thought then, to forget who you are, not at all foreseeing this darker veil.

  In his seat in the Union Hall, Horace Wells scrunched his nose and sneezed out the stink of Monkey-Face Pete’s clam breath. The Union Hall—“You are in the Union Hall,” he told himself—tilted left, then right. When he tried to shift his legs they felt porridgy, which made him giggle. He fingered his pockets for a pencil (Pencil for a pockets are the words he thought) because he wanted to write down what he remembered while he remembered: knock-kneed on stage, studying the serious faces of Hartford’s better sort, then blinking as those good people became others: Levi Knowles, Monkey-Face Pete, Evelyn, and the Earl of Bilgewater, all rum-happy and back-slapping. Levi started them singing a full-throated drinking song with words that were, well, Caribbean is the most polite way to say it. Horace had never sung when the company in the tavern launched into vulgar ditties, but now he gave full voice to the tune (something he’d not even done when singing Hallelujah! in church). What a lark! He felt himself a new man, and he saw no reason why the old Horace had with such care avoided the fun of the taverns. It was as if a hooded cloak had been lifted from his shoulders, taking with it the burden of discerning sin from virtue, moderation from intemperance. Those qualities no longer existed: all life was a song. So sing, Dr. Wells! Sing!

  Still no pencil in his pocket. No paper, neither. Either.

  He shook his head to clear the moss. Tried not to giggle.

  Colton’s gas works itself in wondrous ways, he thought, on mind and spirit. An inventory: first, the woodsy taste of the faucet, like bark; second, the gaseous mist that lingered in his mouth, cool as a waterfall’s spray. The ease with which he held his breath. The beginning effects: how he closed his eyes and the darkness behind them seemed deeper than any he’d known, how he probed that darkness, curious as to how far it led, whether places in it might reveal a thread of light he could follow. How soon thereafter, light or dark, he no longer cared. How he let go of all curiosity.

  (Horace paused here to mark the memory, because he could not recall any other time when he’d stopped being curious. His mind, that supple companion, that perpetual machine, had always wondered about the goings-on behind this door and that, contemplated the trivial and profound in equal measure: what chemistry led bricks to fire into the colors of bruises, how the human gum secured teeth in place, or what mechanisms of the nervous system allowed pain to travel its length. He mused over why God separated the heart and mind and spirit, if Descartes was correct, and whether in heaven all three became one. And was that unity the source of all bliss? He questioned why he questioned, why his mind could not keep still. Except, in the nitrous oxide dark, he had felt no need to think. Awake, his mind focused, and he sang.)

  Was that relief from curiosity third or fourth in his inventory?

  When he had inhaled Colton’s gas and the limits on his perceptions vanished, the Union Hall waxed in particular and vivid ways. He could count the threads of each rope between the stanchions without leaning near, notice dandruff spread on Peg Trumbull’s shoulder though he stood on stage and she sat so many rows back. The
lamplight pulsed as if alive. He’d never thought a brown hue could look bright, but Colton’s coffee-colored coat had then cast light. He heard Colton’s young men breathe, heard their heartbeats mingle in wet rhythms, and then that song, distantly: “This way, that way, which way you will, / I’m sure I sing nothing that you can take ill.” Colton encouraged him to breathe deeply, so he did, and now Colton sang along, as did Riggs, and Levi Knowles in the second row, who would not usually belong to this crowd but who did not seem out of place. Up farther, Elizabeth sang, too, as did her dandruffy friend, Peg. So did Monkey-Face Pete, with Horace’s long-dead father beside him, robust now, a purplish glimmer in his eyes. And Morton, of all people—clean-shaven Morton—laughing with a woman in his lap… the mad girl’s mother, Nan, who sold eggs, whose whole person seemed so of the world. They did not sing, Morton and Nan, and their not singing sounded perfect. But the rest did, and Horace, too, pitching his arms as would a Bedlam-bound orchestra conductor. “Ooooooh! Clara is a …” and so forth.

  Then Colton winked at Horace, and Horace’s tooth no longer ached, and well, what do you know? As there was no sin nor virtue in Colton’s gaseous realm, so, it seemed, there was no pain—all of those former things vaporized by the vapor.

  Monkey-Face Pete had come from the audience to grapple with him, breathing clam breath, and slapped him—the slap didn’t hurt—and the nitrous oxide party stopped. In the same way he could never remember the moment of falling asleep, he could not now remember that moment of waking. He was singing, then not. Monkey-Face Pete stood with him, and Pete became Cooley. Morton and Nan vanished, and Peg Trumbull stopped singing. He existed in a new paradise, then his head felt full of moss. The stalwarts led him by the arms off the stage, and Horace heard mutterings as he passed his neighbors.

  What was Cooley up to now? Shouting? Yes, at Mr. Eaton. And Eaton was on the run, galloping up the aisle, Cooley behind him spitting accusations.