The Speckled Monster (32 page)

Zabdiel frowned. He had heard the skirling gossip that Mather was championing some new bird-brained notion of a cure for smallpox. He had also heard that it was the dour Scots plumage of Dr. Douglass that was most ruffled. But Mather was a meddler, and Douglass a complete snarler. Zabdiel had had no time for their nattering.

He glanced at the first page of the enclosed treatise:

 

If only Dr. Mather could obey his own calls for brevity. Zabdiel riffled through the treatise, ream thick. Here and there, a phrase or two leapt off a page: “a
New Distemper . . . the Ancients
unacquainted with it.” The reverend began, it seemed, with history. Next, theology, or the “Sentiments of PIETY to be raised in and from this
Grievous Disease
.” No surprise there. Smallpox, like every other ill, cried Mather, was the hot lash of a wrathful God.
“Ah, Sinful Generation, a People Laden with Iniquity, a Seed of Evil-doers, Children that are Corrupters.”
Zabdiel could hear Mather's voice ringing from the pulpit, deep and doom laden with the cadences of Jeremiah, of Isaiah, of Ezekiel—surely this had been delivered in a sermon?

He shivered. The reverend had the poetry, the bright burning visions of a prophet too. “
Behold an Angel with a flaming Sword
over thee giving of it;
Prepare to meet thy God,
O thou Traveller thro' a Land where
Fiery Flying Serpents
are hovering Everywhere about thee!”

Zabdiel sensed no shadow of God in the merciful person of Jesus anywhere in the treatise; Dr. Mather seemed concerned solely with God in the wrathful person of Jehovah. To those fallen ill, he recommended self-abhorrence and self-abasement, directing them to cry out,
“Unclean! Unclean!”
and confess,
“Lord, I am a Filthy Creature!”
On and on he fulminated. “All the nasty
Pustules
which now fill thy
Skin,
” he thundered, bringing down his arm to point with terrible sure directness, “are but Little Emblems of the
Errors
which thy
Life
has been filled Withal. Make thy Lamentation:
Lord, from the Sole of the Foot, even to the Head, there is no Soundness in me; nothing but putrifying Sores
.”

Zabdiel did not know whether to laugh or cry. Such self-loathing was hard to avoid at certain stages of the distemper, but in his experience, breast beating and panic contributed little to nothing toward curing the body; he had his doubts about their usefulness for the soul. Did he not spend all day from dawn to full night urging his patients and their families that the best restorative for those fallen ill—the best preventative for those still healthy—was cheerful calm?

He was tossing the papers aside when another phrase caught his eye: “Yet let us be of
Good Courage
; yea, be
Very courageous
.” For there is, wrote Mather, a way to manage the beast. Zabdiel's arm stopped of its own accord and drew the treatise back under his eyes.

It was a false alarm: Mather launched into detail on Sydenham's cold treatment. Useful, well done, but not news. Zabdiel had learned a modified—moderated—version of Sydenham's regimen long ago, from his master and mentor, Dr. Cutler. He skimmed on. The minister had certainly done a fair amount of medical reading: everything in print concerning the smallpox, it seemed, had been digested and discussed here. Quite impressive, really. A fair amount of sound advice. Authorities like Archibald Pitcairne and John Woodward, in addition to Thomas Sydenham. But, as yet, nothing new.

Zabdiel rubbed his eyes, let the papers fall to his lap. Again, an image of the boys sick rose into his mind. He sighed and picked up the dissertation once more. There was supposed to be something new here; he would find it no matter how deeply Dr. Mather had buried it.

Ah. An appendix.

“There has been a
Wonderful Practice
lately used in several Parts of the World, which indeed is not yet become common in our Nation.”

Yes, this was it.

“I was first instructed in it,” wrote Dr. Mather, “by a
Guramantee
Servant of my own, long before I knew that any
Europeans
or
Asiaticks
had the least Acquaintance with it; and some years before I was Enriched with the Communications of the Learned Foreigners, whose Accounts I found agreeing with what I received of my Servant, when he showed me the Scar of the Wound made for the Operation; and said, That no Person ever died of the
Small-Pox,
in their Country, that had the Courage to use it.

“I have since met with a Considerable Number of these
Africans,
who all agree in one Story . . .”

 

Zabdiel stood up, hardly knowing he did so. He took a step forward in his excitement, and another. Soon he was striding around the room as he tore through the remaining pages, devouring every word through to the end. Africans along the Gold Coast, old women among the Greeks, the Turks in Constantinople, all of these people knew this practice of inoculation. Said it was not just workable, but damned near infallible. Into this appendix, Mather had transcribed reports made to the Royal Society several years earlier by two Italian doctors in the Levant, Timonius and Pylarinus. According to them, all one needed for delivery from Mather's destroying angel was a needle, a clean glass vial, a lancet, a bandage, and a small curved bit of shell from a walnut.

That, and the poisonous white paste from the ripe pock of a healthy young person—as healthy, at any rate, as it was possible to be while stricken with the smallpox.

Zabdiel made one more circuit around the room, thinking furiously. Then he yelled for Jack, who appeared in the doorway a moment later. “Listen,” he said hoarsely, without interrupting his stride. He read the appendix all the way through again, this time aloud, gripping the pages so tightly the paper came near to ripping.

“Have you heard of this?” he cried, wild eyed, waving the papers before him.

Jack gripped both sides of the doorway, on the theory that somebody needed to keep the house still, or it would fair begin to spin from the force of the doctor's crazed circling. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Never seen it—born in Barbados, not the Gold Coast. But I heard of it. Everyone's heard of it—everyone of us, Doctor, begging your pardon.”

The last sentence brought Zabdiel up short; he had never given much thought to that black, recently African
us
. But of course, there was one, with its own remedies, traditions, knowledge. A great deal of it discreetly shielded from English view, no doubt, if that
us
was anything like the Indian
us
. He licked his lips, which suddenly felt dry. “What do you think?” he asked, his sudden stillness even more urgent than his circling had been.

Jack watched him unblinking for a moment, then cocked his head, and said, “Takes a brave man to try it, Doctor. So they say.”

Zabdiel nodded. “Thank you,” he said, and Jack withdrew. He ran his hand across his head, rubbed his eyes. He paced across the passage and dropped to a seat on the edge of the bed. He was tired. So tired already, and it had just begun. He knew what was coming, though: in the worst cases, purple spots and convulsions, bloody urine or no urine, or involuntary, unstoppable urine; sweats and salivations, grossly inflamed eyes, throats, and groins. Scarred faces. Many people would lose one eye; some would lose both. Women big, but not big enough, with child would abort before their time, swimming through their own blood to follow their too-young babies into death. Parents left childless, and children left orphans; parents and children carried off in one fell, family-shattering swoop. And everywhere, the thick, choking smell. Blisters and pustules. Pus, pus, and more pus.

Death was terrible in all its shapes, but this was one of its worst. Mather's newfangled notion was no cure. It was deliberate infection, its only merit an unfounded claim to offer future protection. Surely it was a demonic joke, a bit of laughter fallen from the destroying angel's throat.

Takes a brave man to try it,
Jack had said.

What kind of a man did it take to try it on his sons?

 

The following morning, Tommy was up and into the shop early, helping his father fill the cordial bottles and powder papers he would take with him that day; it was a new job, one that made Tommy stand as tall as he could. Still not tall enough to reach the higher shelves, though. He was on the footstool, reaching for the black cherry water, when the front door banged open, though it was not yet time for breakfast. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a woman slump to the floor; a funny sound came from her throat.

“Tommy,” said his father, “step down, please, and fetch some salt from the kitchen.”

It was an odd request, but his father's tone of voice was the one that meant
Act now, ask later
. He stepped down at once, though in such a way as to get one good look at their visitor. The woman—was it a woman?—in the midst of that heap of widow-black skirts had sores over every visible inch of skin, flat round sores the size of coins, deep crimson and purple. Her swollen nose was bleeding, and blood seeped from her mouth. Just as he rounded the corner of the door that joined the shop to the rest of the house, he caught a queer impression that she was crying tears of blood.

His father patted him as he went by, then gave him a quick shove through the door, shutting it between them; Tommy heard the latch drop home from the other side. It was a sound that seemed to cancel the strange request for salt, and in any case, he had reached the outer limits of his capacity for obedience. He did not go on to the kitchen, but stood listening to his father's voice, kind and calm, on the other side of that door: the woman was to go home, he would send a nurse around, he would come himself directly, but she was not to stir out again, not to put others at risk, not to waste her precious store of energy that must be put to use fighting the distemper.

Tommy heard a scraping that must be his father pulling her back to her feet; heard the front door open, a whistle, muffled voices of men, a clatter of wagon and hooves. Heard the front door close again, and then stood to attention, waiting for his father to come back, unlatch the door, and explain everything. But his father did not come; no footsteps crossed the shop. After a moment's careful thought, Tommy scuttled through the passage to the kitchen, just in time to catch a glimpse of his father's back disappearing into the barn, forbidden territory since the smallpox had descended on the town.

Jack called him to the breakfast table, but Tommy shook his head impatiently. He stood lookout at the window until he saw his father emerge in his work clothes and ride away.

 

It was a consequence of dispensing with guards on the infected houses, thought Zabdiel angrily. Well-meaning friends and family visited the sick and then each other; the solitary sick wandered out into the streets, half delirious, to find help. It left one in the untenable position of ordering a dying woman from the house, for the sake of one's children.

He set his shoulders, put his head down, and went to work; to his visitor, first of all, though all that remained to do for her was to make her as comfortable as possible and send for the minister she trusted most.

Then all day long, in and out of bedrooms sumptuous or spare, of garrets, cellars, sheds, and ships, Zabdiel dutifully tended the sick and comforted the still healthy. It was not where either his mind or his heart lay, though. Some odd detached part of him watched from above as eagerly, even greedily, he asked in each household to speak to every person there, slave or free, who had been born in Africa.

Evening stretched into night, and this time Jack stayed with him. “Boys'll be all right,” he said when Zabdiel tried to dismiss him. “Left 'em some venison pie and salad.” Then he took the lead, guiding Zabdiel to several households of free blacks who had stories to tell. Scars to show. In one of those houses, they heard the very tale that Cotton Mather had transcribed word for Creole word.

To a man, to a woman, every person Zabdiel spoke to all day long upheld that story. Not exactly: not as if they had been discussing it among themselves. Some displayed scars on the fleshy parts of an upper arm or leg; some showed the back of the hand, or the thin web of skin between thumb and forefinger. Sometimes they spoke of an old woman who pricked people with a thorn. Others had put themselves in the hands of tribal elders, sometimes even priests, bearing ceremonial instruments. But the central part of every story was the same: they had been infected with a small bit of pock matter. They had sickened briefly. And they had survived to face down the speckled demon, unscathed and unafraid.

Zabdiel rode home deep in thought. Once again, he stripped, washed himself, and walked naked to the other end of the barn, to dress in clean clothes. Jack did the same, if rather less absently.

As they stepped out into the yard, Zabdiel stopped. “What do you think?” he asked Jack, once again.

Behind them, Prince snorted softly and stamped.

“I think you better ride that horse,” said Jack. “He's tired of standing in a stall day in and day out.”

Zabdiel nodded. In the moonlight, the shadows under his eyes looked like bottomless gulfs of exhaustion, but at the thought of a ride, his whole body perked up.

“I'll see the boys to bed,” said Jack.

Still, Zabdiel hesitated.

“I tell a fine bedtime story,” said Jack. “You go on.”

“Thank you,” said Zabdiel. He watched Jack walk off toward the house. He was thirty-six, only a few years younger than Zabdiel; he, too, had a son at risk.