The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist Page 7

  The dream left her.

  She relieved herself in the porcelain bucket, then returned it to its small closet. After raising a lamp wick to brighten the bedroom, she washed, brushed her hair, and twisted it into its bun. She opened the bedroom shutters to the cold morning and to bright stars winking out of a serene sky. A small mercy, and she thanked God.

  In the kitchen she brewed tea, then carried a tray with cups to his workshop. Still a wife no matter how aggrieved, still concerned with her husband’s care. She found him hunched at his worktable, his body shrunk into itself as an old apple, pencil scratching across a design of some new invention. He had not heard her footsteps, or if he did he pretended otherwise. She would not interrupt. He had asked her not to question him about his devices until he began to tinker, to put screw to bolt or clamp to flange. “When idea becomes object,” he had told her in the first days of their marriage, “and not before. I am nervous about my inventions until my hands start to work.”

  She watched him, this man, her husband, and studied the ferocity of his concentration, saw also how his reddish forelock fell in a loose curl across his immense brow, noted the fingerless gloves he wore against the room’s cold, the paleness of his fingertips. Her heart felt that pale and cold, like a windowpane in winter. She had not imagined marriage could lead to such a moment as this, to such a life. But there was much she had never dreamed possible in marriage. She had thought there would be more children, at least a daughter. She had thought there would be regular joy in their bed. But something changed after Charley’s birth, which had brought her so close to death that the midwife called for Reverend Hawes to say a last blessing. Not that prayer but some other—Horace’s, she liked to believe—returned Elizabeth to the living, though for months her blood ran so thin she shivered unless wrapped in blankets, and her eyelids weighed so much she twice fell asleep with Charley nursing at her breast. So weak, so intent on her son, she had needed months to notice how in bed Horace no longer pulled at her nightgown’s collar to kiss her bare collarbone, how instead he kept his hands fisted around edges of the quilt. When at last she felt herself recovered and Charley had been weaned, the long silence between their bodies had already become a habit, and though she had tried to provoke that now unfamiliar passion in coy, coded ways, Horace seemed not to understand, or had a quick errand to run, or a need to visit his workshop. The expressions of their affection became like those of siblings or best friends, each night a shared prayer and a hand squeezed in sincerity, the lamplight extinguished, the quilts kept orderly.

  Horace made notes now with his left hand and tugged with his right at the small curled whiskers growing in a muttonchop on that side of his face. Crossed his slippered feet. Cocked one at the ankle and tapped the toe against the rug. Then he looked up, looked right at her, blinked. He had such long eyelashes. Such tender lips.

  Out of which had spewed gutter words. Were there actually women in the world, she wondered, like that Clara of song?

  She placed the tray on the table near his desk, poured him a cup. A small stove in the corner remained unlit, and the room chilled her. “Your tea will freeze in here,” she said. “Have you slept?”

  “No, no, I’ve been here.” He scratched his nose with the dull end of his pencil, looked again at the papers on his worktable. He said, “I wanted to be here when you woke. I need to apologize to you. Please sit.”

  He cleared a crate from a chair, then watched her take the seat. He still watched her even as he returned to his place behind his desk, and the intensity of being his subject unnerved her. It always did, had even on that first day he came into the parlor of her aunt’s house and looked on her with such longing and terror as to force hydrangeas to bloom and wither all at once.

  “What you heard,” he began now, “was not my voice but the voice of the gas. It overtakes the mind. Much like a fever, the hallucinations that can accompany fever.” He pushed papers about his desk, and when he’d found a book he flipped the cover and paged through. “You remember how your cousin witnessed visions while feverish with the Asiatic Cholera? His was a common reaction. Angels, devils, long-dead companions, all appeared to the afflicted. Here,” he said, and he read, “among acute patients their visions included cities built of glass, winged cats, blue flames, and, most commonly, worms upon the skin and in the bed.”

  “Do not lie to yourself nor to me. The gas does not lounge about the Dutch Point docks and memorize vulgar songs.”

  “Elizabeth, I will make this right, whether with neighbors or with God. You needn’t—”

  She rose from her chair to light the cold stove. A good wife even now, she would warm him if he would not warm himself. Why must he pretend he had no need for food, nor heat, nor drink, nor any human want? When she turned to chastise him with her glance, she saw an anguish in his face she could not explain, watched how with both hands he scratched at his whiskers as if he wanted to rake them from his skin.

  Elizabeth set a long, lit match to the kindling she’d stacked in the stove. Then she shook out the match, placed it in a tin box, and, with no warning, saw again the prior night’s dream. It was there, clear as the tongues of flame that filled the stove. Horace’s sweet breath on her lips. The strength she felt in his body, her one hand on his shoulder, the other squeezing the small of his naked back. The furious ease with which their bodies joined, how she lifted herself toward him, the bedclothes a disheveled consolation.

  When she turned to her husband, knowing that shame and joy and longing must be plain on her face, he only gathered a pen and a knife, some coins and a kerchief from the tabletop, and stuffed them into his coat pocket. Off again, she thought. Not to tarry in the warmth she made and wanted.

  As if he sensed her mind, he fingered his jaw.

  “Riggs,” he said, “and this foul tooth.”

  Late on the Wednesday morning of December 11 in 1844, Gardner Quincy Colton splashed cold water over his face and toweled his skin dry, smoked a cigar, then tongued a pinch of dried mint around his mouth. On the street, because he liked crisp air in the morning, he walked wearing neither hat nor gloves. He relished how the chill reddened his knuckles, and how those same knuckles stung when he knocked for attention at the counter of a bakery. “Two johnnycakes with apple butter,” he said. The baker asked, “What’s corked in that bladder?” and Colton replied, “My fortune.” The baker said, “I take coin and paper only.”

  Colton paid out of his purse, then set the bladder on a shelf near the window while he ate. The baker’s clock showed nearly ten, but Colton thought it prudent to dawdle. Possibly the gutter-bird surgeon dentist would reconsider his course. Ten dollars was ten dollars, and Colton would be glad for it, but the business unnerved him. In morning’s light and sober now, he realized that should the dentist die from this experiment and word spread, the market for laughing gas entertainments would die with him. What right-thinking person would pay to inhale the stuff that had killed a clever young medical man? For a moment, Colton thought to miss the appointment, head for New Haven and a performance scheduled there.

  “Another cake?” asked the baker, waving to Colton, who noticed for the first time that the man had only half a pinkie on his right hand. The baker smiled at the attention paid to his nub. “Calm yourself,” he said. “That piece never made it into the dough.” He presented the hand as would a rich man showing off an emerald ring. “My father took it when I was a boy. Gave him good reason, too. He fed the bit to my dog, Mips. Then we prayed together, yea, even Mips sitting right and proper by our side. ‘Fear the Almighty,’ my father bade me, and that was love, I felt it, and to this very moment I cherish his lesson and the Almighty both.” He gestured with a bread loaf toward the back shop. “Should my own boy profane the Lord, I’ll flatten his palm against one of them ovens. He’ll have his taste of Hell and know to want the better place.” The baker smiled. “So. Another cake for you?”

  Colton gathered his bladder to his breast, shook his head like a horse shaking off f
lies. “Grind more cinnamon into the apple butter,” he said as he opened the door to face the wind-thrown snow. “You’ll sell more cakes.”

  Arriving at the south corner of Main and Asylum Streets a few minutes past the hour, Colton tramped to the dentist’s second-floor office. At the threshold he smelled a wet sweetness, the slaughterhouse odor he remembered from surgical chambers in medical school. When he knocked, the door swung open and a young man waved him inside, the same grinning rascal who’d scraped his calf at the previous evening’s entertainment. Cooley, wasn’t he?

  “How’s the leg?” asked Colton.

  “It’s no war wound.” Cooley rolled his pants cuff and peeled back a dressing to expose the skin—green and yellow with brown streaks where the blood had dried. “But this morning it inspired the kindness of my neighbor’s daughters, and between their prayers and gentle touches, all discomfort washes away.”

  Inside the office, a wooden curtain separated the surgery space from a waiting area and its three cushioned chairs. The décor was spartan, with two live songbirds in a cage, though Colton didn’t know what sort. He followed Cooley around the curtain, where he found Wells in a dentist’s chair, swinging his arms and jabbering as if in debate with the fellow who crouched at the hearth and worked a bellows to draw a healthier flame. Wells’s jacket lay open, and his shirt was unbuttoned to below his sternum. That crab-apple lump still swelled between cheek and gum. Beside him stood a taboret, on which rested a polished silver pitcher and a silver cup sitting atop a book. Behind him, burning wood cracked in the hearth.

  “Colton!” said Wells, pointing across the room. “We have the Holy Book for my oath, and here: your ten dollars.”

  The man who worked the fire wore an apron. His eyes were deep-set and heavy with what might have been concern or religion or both, and he wore something on his face that wanted to be called a beard but wasn’t quite. Trimmed and shaved in a strange way. All chin and no chops. Some new fashion. Colton wouldn’t dare it.

  “You’ve made no record of this?” he said. “Nothing in a journal or a daybook?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Hands on the Bible, then, all of you. Swear that my name not be connected with you tomfools.”

  So they did. Then Wells introduced the man in the apron, Dr. John Mankey Riggs, Wells’s one-time student, who now owned his own practice.

  “Riggs’s progress in periodontitis is excellent,” Wells said. “And he is a finer general dentist than he knows. I trust him in all things. He will remove my afflicted molar while I lie here entranced through the properties of your gas.”

  Colton sparked a match and lit his cigar. “Do you have oxygen on hand?”

  Wells’s look showed his confusion.

  Colton said, “Haven’t you read Davy’s notes? On nitrous oxide?”

  “I’m not a chemist, Dr. Colton.”

  Colton spit a tobacco leaf. Provincial men. “Oxygen speeds recovery from the effects of the gas,” he said. “Should you breathe too much and your life become endangered, oxygen could save you.”

  Wells looked from companion to companion, agitation evident in the way he squirmed in the chair. He lifted a hand as if to scratch at his cheek, then lowered it. “We don’t have time for that,” he said.

  “Let me repeat my warnings. You could become violent,” said Colton. “Your intellectual capacity could be permanently limited.”

  Wells nodded.

  “And you,” Colton said to Riggs. “Davy’s studies weren’t exhaustive. We can’t fathom all that might happen when a man fills his lungs with so much nitrous oxide. Perhaps his gums will bleed until his mouth is a cup of blood and his windpipe a siphon to his lungs. Perhaps he falls into a catalepsy, muttering and delirious, to all appearances awake but his eyes unseeing. You don’t know.” He laughed. “Maybe he’ll piss blue.”

  Cooley chuckled. Riggs straightened his apron, untied and retied the knot in the back to a tighter crease. He said to Wells, “It needn’t be you. There is the charity hospital. Negroes. We could begin with the incurables at the Hartford Retreat.”

  “My gum swells, Riggs, and the tooth aches. It must come out anyway. If there are dangers associated with my theories, no one should bear them but myself. Would you measure my pulse?”

  Riggs hesitated as if waiting for words, but none came, and he touched fingers to his patient’s opposite wrist. “Strong,” he said. “A little fast. Write that down, Cooley.”

  “No record,” said Colton. “If he survives you can take notes.”

  Wells motioned with the fingers of his upturned hand as a scholar demands a theme from a student. “What lines from the poet did you quote in your advertisement?” he asked. “The atmosphere of the highest heaven? Right and good. Make me a temporary angel, Mr. Colton.”

  Colton handed him the bladder. He explained again how to use the faucet, but even as he did, Wells seemed to forget him, smiling instead at Cooley. “Open the office door, Sam,” he said, his face transforming itself into a mien of mock terror. “Should the gas unhinge me and I sing bawdy songs, you must all be ready to flee.”

  Riggs frowned. Wells saw the expression and looked to his lap. “I know, Riggs. I misbehaved. But please agree with me that my actions are not so bad as my wife fears.”

  “Never take a man’s side in an argument with his wife,” said Riggs. “My father told me that.”

  “Wise men, our fathers,” said Wells. He winced and jerked his head, as if trying to move it away from the pain in the jaw.

  Colton stepped to the side as would an actor who has finished his role. For the first time, he considered the possibility that the dentist’s theory might be right. Wouldn’t that be something? He found, to his surprise, some admiration for the man’s gumption. He seated himself near the caged birds. Leaning close enough to see light reflecting in their dark eyes, he softly sang, “Clara Bliss is my true love …”

  The door would not stay put, so Sam Cooley—age twenty-two, an extra hand whenever his friends Wells or Riggs needed one—swung a tall, loop-handled brass doorstop to rest against it. Then he rummaged through his satchel for his charcoal pencils and sketchbook. Admittedly not much of an artist, he nevertheless understood how to shape a scene, to frame a vision. The visual relationship of objects, the juxtaposition of contrasts, these he saw with the clarity of a European master. He could not draw, no, not as the masters drew, but he was sought as a companion for those rare gallery showings in Hartford, because he could explain why an artist’s work looked right. He valued imbalance in a composition, and he recognized tensions made by shapes, color, and light. As he blocked in the scene before him, he wished he could rearrange the lot, turn Wells and his chair to an angle against the hearth, and push Colton and his cigar farther toward an imaginary edge. He almost spoke his suggestion, but instead turned to a fresh page and started a second, more appealing version of the scene. He paged between two sketches, creating one picture that was true to physical reality and another that would best flatter the heroism of the moment. No wonder, he thought, that Reverend Hawes warned against art as the devil’s tool. How many lies exist in historic canvas? Franklin in the field with his kite. Newton reposing beneath an apple tree. Horace Wells and his afflicted molar. Sam smiled. Well, perhaps not so grand as those others.

  He knew he should be serious about the stakes, given Colton’s warning about bloody suffocation and blue urine, but he couldn’t bring himself to the proper state of reverence. On stage he’d inhaled the gas more than twice—how could a few more puffs kill a man? His father dispensed potent medicines in the apothecary where Sam clerked, and people often took them in greater doses than prescribed, and none had died. Reasoning by analogy, then, it seemed unlikely that the gas would kill Wells. Whether it would work as Wells predicted? In Abial Cooley’s shop, customers could buy cocaine and laudanum, clove poultices, creosote sticks, lotions and rubs, opium—all proven to alleviate gout or intestinal cramp or a burning gullet. None destroyed pain as if pain
had never been. Sam doubted such an analgesic existed. But Wells pursued the idea as if he were de Leon chasing the waters of youth or Magnus wanting gold from lead. Sam himself had been subject to Wells’s exploration: an experiment intended to quash the pain of a sore molar via magnetism as championed by that European quack, Dr. Mesmer. “There might be something to his theories,” Wells had said as he tied dangling magnets about Sam’s body, squeezed his fists around Sam’s erect thumbs for a ten count, then waved his fingers over Sam’s brow, near his temples, close enough to touch but never touching, the motions slow and precise as a man might caress a woman. All the while, Wells spoke in a singsong whisper, words too soft to hear. Maybe he had said “flow”; perhaps “vitality” and “relief.” The whole effort seemed silly and desperate, but Sam allowed it for friendship’s sake and for a tooth pull without charge. But when Horace’s tooth key gripped Cooley’s molar and ripped, yes, Sam screamed. Flew right up out of the chair, body jerking as if gravity mattered not at all, an animal’s instinctive leap, his conscious mind made irrelevant. Magnets bumping against his jaw, the animal that had been Cooley grabbed a poker from near the fire and smashed six times against the hearth bricks, chips cascading about the office. Some guttural sound barked from Cooley’s mouth, and it was all he could do not to shout profanities. Pain charged through him like lightning, and like the lightning its spark proved furious, unsparing, irrepressible.

  Quickly as it rose, the temper passed. “Rinse with this,” Wells had said, offering Cooley a cup. His open hand on Cooley’s back comforted.

  Riggs cradled the Bible against his chest, closed his eyes, moved his lips in prayerful silence. Wells closed his eyes, too, dropped his head, and folded his hands, whispered, “Amen.”

  Then he adjusted the bladder in his lap as if wanting the gas itself to feel at ease. He placed his mouth over the faucet, turned the key, and inhaled.

  “Count ten,” said Colton.

  Wells did, then exhaled. He inhaled again. Another ten count.