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

  Then Wells stopped holding his breath or turning the key. He breathed back into the bladder, inhaled from it, breathed again into it, his mouth tight over the faucet. Colton counted breaths, and at six jumped from his chair.

  “That’s enough,” he said. “That’s enough! We agreed to six.” He seized the bladder, cranked the key to shut the faucet. With a hand to Wells’s brow, Riggs lifted the heavy head away from the spigot and set it to rest against the padded pillow of the chair. Colton noticed Cooley at work and seized the sketchbook. “No record, I said!” He tore at the pages, taking half of one and almost all of the other. Then he gave the crumpled mess to the fire. Cooley recovered his book and made an obscene gesture at Colton’s back.

  Wells’s skin had blanched like the scales of a fish belly, so his red hair seemed even more like flame. He blinked, his blue eyes shifted, lids half closed but the eyes still seeming to see. But see what? The pupils lazed about, sometimes settling on an object, then moving in the direction of another: from open drawer in the tool chest to a green-glass bottle of chemical to a fleur-de-lis pattern in the wallpaper. Riggs placed a fingertip against Wells’s neck.

  “His pulse is tranquil,” he said. He counted. “The beats spread widely but with regularity.”

  Colton pushed his knuckles into his own brow with such force he left his skin mottled pink. “Is he awake? Is he asleep?”

  Though Wells’s eyes remained open, he appeared unaware, helpless. His vulnerability troubled Riggs with a sense of responsibility he’d not experienced in all his days as a dentist. He glanced out a window and saw that snow still fell, layering the shingles of the tobacconist across the corner. “Neither asleep nor awake, I think.”

  Colton waved his hands in front of Wells’s placid face. “Open your mouth!” he shouted.

  Wells opened his mouth.

  “He’s not deaf,” said Riggs, less reproach to Colton than a note to himself. He reached for the tooth key, crouched near Wells’s face. “Open wider,” he said. Wells did.

  In the next moment, Riggs found the tooth, secured the key. He felt his own pulse jump. “Shouldn’t someone hold his arms?” he asked.

  “Just pull,” said Colton. “Now.”

  Riggs tightened his fist on the handle, gasped as he yanked.

  Nothing else happened. Wells lay in his chair, his expression unchanged.

  “Not even a flinch,” said Cooley.

  The men stood a moment, watching for some other reaction. As if by reflex, Riggs wiped Wells’s blood and saliva from his fingers onto his apron. Then he presented the bloody molar to Colton, showed Cooley. Riggs’s whole arm trembled, and the molar shook in the air like some strange moth in a light.

  Riggs whispered near Wells’s ear. “What do you feel?”

  Wells’s lips moved like an infant’s in its sleep.

  It had begun, Horace would later remember, with a tingling. He had made a mental note.

  Tingling.

  Tips of fingers.

  Tips of toes.

  Then numbness overtook his limbs. He thought to tap his foot, to lift it at the ankle and tap his shoe sole against the floor. Strange, this part, because he sensed no subsequent movement. Given that his mind was a scientific mind, he did not assume that an absence of a sense of movement proved failure to move. Perhaps his foot had tapped but he hadn’t felt the sensations of tapping. Perhaps absence of pain required absence of all feeling. Perhaps. Perhaps Charley could learn to tap dance. He should ask Riggs. He thought to say, “Might Charley make a good tap dancer?” but again, he sensed no movement in his mouth. But he felt something. Or his head did. Whichever it was, he approved. His body became waves—waves instead of legs, waves instead of arms, waves instead of lungs, the weightless pleasure of waves. He experienced something like a laugh, but it was the laugh of soul rather than body. So the two—soul and body—are separate after all! What a thing to discover! What else? He could hear. A pulsing beat, a sound the color of gold. A beat that sounded as if it rang from inside the bell of the world. Ah, the church bell of Creation. The heartbeat of God. He looked around. Cooley tap dancing! A delight. Riggs a delight, too, and Colton, and teeth, and gums—all a delight! The room expanded. Or rather, Horace shrank. Or rather, the room expanded. Somewhere he heard a sharpening wheel, and he saw its sparks spray into the air. What ecstasy to be a spark in this universe, one of an infinity of sparks, all brilliant, all in flight. A spark streaked by his face, and it spoke to him in a voice like God’s. “Open your mouth!” said the spark, and Horace imagined his mouth opening, and perhaps it did or did not but did it matter? Brilliant and humble and in flight! Rapture!

  And then, he felt himself breathing. His lungs, no longer waves, had become lungs again. He blinked and saw blinding brightness. He felt the blink. He held his eyes shut a moment. The pulse that had been God’s heartbeat seemed now to be a throbbing, as if it were a visitor knocking on his forehead with two knuckles. His mouth tasted of iron. His tongue felt leaden. Still, it moved at his bidding, sort of, so he explored his mouth and found a hole along his gum line where he remembered no hole. He opened his eyes with care, and in the brightness he saw Riggs in his apron. Riggs held a tooth key, and lodged in the key was a tooth. It looked to him white as could be, as if polished, as if it were the tooth of an angel.

  “Did you feel it, Wells? Did you feel the tooth pull?”

  He had not. He had not, and even as he felt tired, wanting to sleep, the awareness that the angel tooth Riggs held was his own sparked through him like some celestial fire. He tasted blood and tongued the spot where his sore tooth had been, felt its emptiness, and even the pressure of his tongue in the hollow space felt as no more than a caress.

  He clapped his hands once, then let them fall, benumbed birds alighting in his lap.

  Thus does the map of the known world widen and its mysteries multiply. Giddy with discovery, a dentist staggers to and fro, laughing as he upends a tool tray, caught by a companion as he tumbles into a bird cage, spilling seed and litter. “Oxygen!” one fellow yells. “Open the window!” But no one does. A more momentous thing has opened, and in this second-floor office above a frozen-dirt main street in a provincial capital, men gape at a new panorama, knowing they are first to see. Being men, they want to speak of what makes them whoop and cheer, but words have yet to be invented for the unknown that demands to be explored. “Pray, keep this secret,” mumbles the dentist (his mouth packed with cotton) as his fellows leave to return to their commonplaces—a bill to pay, a floor to sweep, a bench seat on a train beside a boy crying over his stubbed toe—all that humdrum which will buoy them as it never has before, its monotony lightened by their new hope for humanity. “Hold your tongues,” says the dentist. “Not a word. Not yet.”

  From butchers on Market Street, Horace Wells bought a half dozen hog bladders and a few of sheep. The sheep organs held the gas just as well but crackled like parchment as he filled them. “You see, Elizabeth?” he told her that Friday she and Charley visited his office. “Who imagined there could be a qualitative difference between the bladders of hogs and sheep?” She stared into the wooden tub full of inflated animal parts, each corked shut, and allowed that she had not. Charley nodded as if it had always been plain to him, then leaned against a wall to draw on a fogged window pane with his finger.

  Horace made a spot for her to sit on a crate, which smelled strongly of cedar. “To forestall moths,” he explained. “That’s where I’ve stored my business records.”

  Then he told how in recent days he’d learned to measure lung capacity—“Mine’s not so good,” he said—and showed her the table where he blended chemicals and heated gases, the tubes fashioned from the arteries of livestock and sewn with sinew. The ventilation system he had made from a bellows, a board, and a length of stovepipe leading to the window. “You broke a pane?” she asked.

  “With a tiny hammer.”

  At the window, Charley had finger-drawn birds on the wing, which with a few lines he tur
ned into angels. Then he gave each a sword to wield. Elizabeth, watching him, noticed small nests of dust drifting under his shoes and realized furniture was missing. She smiled and reached for Horace’s hands so that he might stop scampering about the room like a hound in a field of rabbit holes. The week since Mr. Colton’s exhibition had been too much, too fast.

  “Where did you put the settee?” she asked.

  “Not to worry,” he said. “When I’m ready again for patients, I’ll buy it back.”

  He pulled away his hands and began whistling the song of a meadowlark—chee-chee-yoo chee-yoo, chee-chee-yoo chee-yoo—so that Charley turned from the window and tried to whistle, too. They met at the middle of the room, and Horace lifted the boy and swooped him about, Charley’s arms beating the air as if wings.

  After, Horace arranged illustrations and beakers just so, then recounted to son and wife how he’d felt nothing when Riggs yanked his tooth. He showed his notes and explained that very soon he would introduce his discovery to the medical establishment, and physicians and surgeons could see for themselves how it would change the lives of every man, woman, and child.

  “All this from a pulled tooth?” Elizabeth asked.

  “It’s possible,” he said. “We could live in a world with no pain. None. Not after a scrape or tumble, not with a broken bone or the worst disease.”

  “Not even in childbirth?”

  Her words—carefully chosen to open him to a new subject, to a new possibility—took away his smile and buoyancy. He looked over to Charley.

  “Perhaps not even,” he said, as if he understood her secret desire for a daughter. “Life will change in ways we can’t divine.”

  Charley applauded. Then Horace waited, relying on his wife’s love to confirm the reality of his hopes. She laughed once, and her face glimmered with what he took to be assent. “You are becoming a wizard,” she said.

  “It’s no dark art,” he said. “I am becoming happy.”

  “That answers my prayers.” She kissed his cheek, then left with Charley to visit the bank and confirm her worries about their debts and balances.

  Of course, childbirth is pain. But for Horace, his son’s arrival had been a nightmare of silences and screams, an unpredictable and awful pairing, hour after hour. Pain seized Elizabeth’s body with its own whims, and the helpless body did pain’s bidding. Excrement on her bedsheets. Her face purpled. She beat her arms against the headboard until her hands bruised and swelled. A film clouded her eyes. Thursday. Friday. Saturday … “Pray,” said the midwife and the neighbor women, repeating the word. Pray. Pray. Elizabeth’s screams wormed their way into his head, his heart. At the church, on his knees, he beseeched God as Reverend Hawes recited the sixteenth verse from the third chapter of Genesis: Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.

  Throughout the long plod home, snow-white worms worked at Horace’s heart, left a cold cavity, until he who arrived at the house was not Horace Wells at all, but a ghost, a shade; the worms had eaten him empty. He sat outside Elizabeth’s room, a hollow man. Had you asked his wife’s name, he would have answered “Elizabeth Wells.” Yet he felt nothing of the husband he had been those months before, who had shed tears and kissed his wife’s belly at the happy news.

  This man, this not-Horace, executed his duties, stationed just outside the door, fetching what the women asked, and they praised his courage, marveled at his stoicism. Then the hour came when they told him he had a son and with the same breath that his wife would soon die. He offered no reaction, made no remark—only nodded and took a shovel to the yard, and the women no longer thought him praiseworthy. They whispered to each other about his monstrous indifference.

  Driving the shovel into the earth, his body was not his own, but some other weighted thing that he could sense but not feel. August’s muggy air slicked his skin with sweat so dirt clung to his hands and forearms. His eyes burned. But of these irritants, he had no concern. He worked as if in the world and out of it. The pile of soil and stone grew to his knees, then higher. The grave deepened. When the hour came that his work was done, he returned to where his wife slept, each breath coming from her mouth as if torn. “I want my son,” he said and took the boy from the arms of a neighbor woman.

  Outside, he set the infant on his back at the grave’s edge, then climbed down. When he again took his son, it was to cradle him against his chest, then to sit with him at the pit’s bottom. He studied the mottled forehead, the half-open eyes, and only then did his heart grow back. “Little murderer,” he whispered, that new heart ripping, one part grief and the other joy. “Son of mine.”

  But Elizabeth did not die, and Horace refilled the hole. When she slept in bed with Charley on her bosom, Horace kneeled beside them, unshaven, his vision blurred, his soul bursting. He had suspected that her affliction was his fault, Heaven’s judgment against a sin from his past (he knew which one), but he had prayed, and God had given back his wife. Thereafter in Horace grew an apprehension that such mercy must not be taken for granted. So, to his sleeping wife and to his ever-living God he swore an oath: never again would she suffer childbirth. Not ever.

  A difficult promise to keep, because he was young and yet a man. In years since he’d sometimes revisited his response to Elizabeth’s trial and thought it extreme or unreasonable. But when he had offered that sacred oath, it was fitting and right, born of gratitude and love, and once made how could a promise to God be unmade?

  Now, on those nights when he woke because Elizabeth moaned from a dream, and her leg brushed the soft spot behind his knee or she snatched a deeper breath, his awareness of her parted lips, of her fingers curled at her collar, grew so sharp that the only way he could not place fingertips against her neck, not lay his lips to the edge of her ear, was to steal from their bed and to think about some problem of nitrous oxide. Whether a person’s size might alter the efficacy of the gas, whether the young would prove more or less susceptible to its exhilaration than the aged, whether Horace would experiment on himself before a meal or after, what might serve as counter-agents, and also such mundane matters as how to organize notes. Through work, he kept his oath.

  At the office in daylight, he filled notebooks with his observations and a precise record of his actions. He tested the potency of gas freshly manufactured against that which had sat a day, then against that which had sat two. He counted the breaths of nitrous oxide required before he began to feel the waves of pleasure that signaled its effects. Sitting in his dentist chair, a bladder and a notebook in his lap, he marked a single line for each inhalation. Generally, five breaths brought the pleasure-waves. They moved from his toes, pulsed along his tendons, and then nestled as a kindness against his skull, just below the epidermal layer. He heard waves as he had when on their honeymoon he breathed in the summer tang of Elizabeth’s skin, and she held a seashell to his ear, and a quiet, personal ocean echoed. The nitrous oxide waves from his toes and the waves just below his scalp moved through his body toward each other—as soul mates find each other in the dark, he remembered thinking—and how miraculous that the waves moved in a dance, oceans meeting in perfect rhythm! His vision sharpened. Looking into his lap, thinking, “I must look into my lap,” he turned the spigot and breathed again. What was he breathing? What was he? What was? Waves waltzed inside him. He could waltz, too, though he never had, had never really danced, but now he perceived his own grace and rhythm. God meant for him to waltz. He had only to stand up out of his chair.

  He could not stand up.

  Fine and good. Seated in his chair he waltzed, and seated in his chair he dreamed the interior of a great ballroom such as he knew existed only in Paris, and then Elizabeth waltzed with him, in the chair, his arm about her slender waist, her eyes wet with admiration, and his with happiness.

  What had been a fresh dusting of snow the week before had become dirty, crusted, crushed by footfalls and yellowed with the urine of livestock and,
Horace supposed, a few crude men and boys. He craved warmth and rain, a cleansing. Or a blizzard. Then bright blue sky and icicles glistening from every eave.

  “We need more color, don’t you think?” he said to Elizabeth one evening as she prepared supper. “Silk flowers. Gold curtains. I’d like you to wear blue, something like July in your scarf.”

  Elizabeth looked at him through eyes red and damp from the onion she’d chopped for a stew. She said, “Bring me that water heating on the stove, would you?”

  He did, then wondered whether a chemical property in the gas could be distilled into drops that might dull the onion’s sting. He rubbed the bump on the side of his noggin. That day, while under the influence of the gas, he had fallen out of the chair and knocked his head against a footstool. He hadn’t felt it then. His body remained on the floor, that was true, but his five senses traveled, left him. Or perhaps the gas peeled apart whatever thin membrane separates this dull earth from heaven. Heaven is not above, he thought. It is around us, angels in every room, hidden to our sinner’s eyes. Onions cloud our vision. The gas reveals brighter colors.

  Elizabeth tilted her face to the ceiling and squeezed a rag to sprinkle her eyes with warm water, and she blinked so wide her brow wrinkled. He turned the bacon sizzling at the bottom of the otherwise empty soup pot. “Should I add the onions?” he asked.

  She nodded, then reminded him to make time for their son, that Charley wanted to go sledding. “The boy needs outdoors activity,” she said. She snapped the towel and hung it again. “My aunt Dorothy tells me that a physician from Boston conducted a study regarding frail boys. Contrary to expectation, their frailty did not make them vulnerable to the elements. In fact, activities held out of doors—play or work—strengthened them. A good sledding trip could inoculate Charley against fever or the mumps.”

  Horace put his face into the pot to breathe in the smoky bacon. His voice echoed back on him out of the sizzle. “You say Boston as if it is the Athens of the medical world. A residence in Boston does not make one privy to every secret of science and human physiology.”