The Speckled Monster (28 page)

 

Two days later, early on the morning of the twenty-sixth, Lizzy Mather, just a few months shy of her seventeenth birthday, slipped through the back door of her father's fast-dilapidating house in the North End, past the parlor where her stepmother sat rocking and muttering, and fled to the top of the stairs, to her father's sacrosanct library. She did not think twice; she yanked open the door and flung herself weeping into her father's arms.

It was some time before he could smooth sense from her, stroking her hair, letting her cry. When at last she managed to spill out a sentence or two, his skin prickled cold, and he found himself fighting the desire to catch the words like so many butterflies and cram them back in her mouth.

She had overheard her uncle returning late the night before; had not slept a wink. Overnight, as it seemed, there were eight more people sick, not just sick, but spotted, spotting, swelling into shapes undreamed of: not in one house or two, but in houses scattered from Bennett Street in the North End, through Dock Square and School Street at the center of town, to Battery March and Winter Street in the South End.

The reverend comforted his daughter as best he could, coaxed her onto her knees, and bent down to pray alongside her:
Our Father which art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, even in earth as it is in Heaven
.

The Lord, Mather thought as his daughter prayed on, had seen fit to bless him with many trials in the past few years. Had he not, for the sake of his Lydia—for the sake of
Doing Good
—agreed to administer the tangled estate of her son-in-law, his stepson-in-law? Whereupon Providence had spirited into the shadows all those in debt to the estate, leaving the creditors howling at Mather's door. From one day to the next, he teetered at the edge of bankruptcy, the gates of debtor's prison mocking him like gnashing teeth.

His small bit of wealth gone, his health deteriorated. Then his eldest son Increase, anointed since birth to replace his father and the grandfather for whom he was named in their famous ministry, humiliated the family name. Creasy had been running up debts for dancing teachers, rioting through the town at night with an infamous gang of rakes, descending at last to father a bastard on a whore.

Worse still, worst of all, thought Mather, his Lydia, once the best of American women, had begun to unravel. In odd moments while he was out, she sneaked through his journals, forcing him to write his many comments on her in a separate, hidden notebook, or in Greek. Passing in and out of fits he had christened “prodigious Paroxysms,” she reviled him with screams of fury that both startled and embarrassed him. The congregation, he feared, would surely hear her; she was probably audible over in Charlestown. Possibly as far away as Newport.

Once such a loving mother, her attacks on the girls grew so frequent and violent that he had at last sent them scuttling out of the house. First Hannah, his poor sweet Nancy, who could not hope to defend herself with her withered arm and sightless seared half a face, the permanent marks of a fall in the fire as an infant. But then even his strong, upright Lizzy, now living with her mother's brother, Dr. John Clark: only a few doors away, to be sure, but still, out of the house. For Mather feared that Lydia might be mad, perhaps even possessed.

All these trials, he could welcome with pleasure. But this plague of the smallpox, this was terror beyond bearing—though it did reconfirm his ability to sense the will of heaven: to commune with the angels. Almost twenty-eight years before, as the witch trials in Salem were sputtering out, he had been visited in the midst of prayer and fasting by his first angel, a winged man with a shining young face. Robed in spotless white, crowned and girdled with flashing jewels, the messenger of the Lord had sweetened the world with golden-voiced prophecy. He, Cotton Mather, would be as a tall cedar of Lebanon in the garden of God, sprouting books wreathed in laurels.

In the ensuing years, other angels had flocked to him with their messages, though most were more properly sensations than visions: on some troubling topic Mather would suddenly be filled with a pure ringing clarity. Everything had come to pass, just as they let him know it would, which had lulled him into a dangerous trust closely resembling pride. The Lord had been merciful, had allowed Mather to puff up with spiritual reassurance that his first wife Abigail would recover from her cancer. When she had not, Mather had taken the point, of course: it was a lesson that demons took pleasure in leading the godly astray with pleasant voices. He had been wary of such visitations ever since.

But this latest presence had not been pleasant, did not require such suspicion. A destroying angel was looming over Boston, talons ready to swipe, verminous, scaly wings poised for a thunderous downstroke, hot breath ready to engulf them all in a poisonous wind. In recent months, had Mather not lectured, had his father not preached doom like the prophets of old? Had they not called the wicked to repentance, warning that the smallpox would soon descend upon them like one of the seven plagues of Egypt?

Creasy, Nibby, and Nancy, at least, were safe: had suffered through the distemper the last time, when his library had become the family hospital—so many small bodies lying all in a row, burning up. But Lizzy and Sammy had not yet been born.

He squeezed Lizzy's hand.

The one scrap of glory in this welter of fear was knowing once again that the Lord favored him, had chosen him as a vessel fit to sense the presence of angels. Instantly, he regretted this brief flash of triumph: he would have to humble himself exceedingly and lie in the dust, lest his vanity provoke the Holy One into doing some grievous harm to him or his family, by way of just retribution. In his mind, he saw his two youngest children cowering in the shadow of terrible dark wings, and he gasped aloud.

He prayed for a long time with Lizzy, crying to heaven for direction, for the strength to submit to the sacrifices no doubt fast approaching. When their prayers had ebbed into calm, he rose and escorted his daughter down to the front door. Lydia flew shrieking out of the parlor like a harpy, but he shut Lizzy safely out in the street, and then turned and marched silently past his screaming wife. She followed him up the stairs, but he locked her out of his library, still screeching in the passage. Then he sat down, flipped his coattails on either side of the chair, smoothed open his diary, and dipped pen into ink.

The grievous calamity of the smallpox has now entered the town,
he scrawled. He looked up, his eyes scanning the shelves until they came to rest on not one but two volumes of the Royal Society's
Philosophical Transactions
. For there had been a second report on inoculation since the first by Timonius, this one by a certain Pylarinus; it, too, he had borrowed from that surly Dr. Douglass. He nodded to himself, and began again.
The Practice of conveying and suffering the Small-Pox by Inoculation, has never been used in America, nor
indeed in our Nation
—here he paused with a sigh—
but how many Lives might be saved by it, if it were practiced,
he added longingly. How to urge it into practice? When the Royal Society itself balked? Surely, now if ever, was the time to try. He bit his lower lip and wrote on:
I will procure a Consult of our Physicians and lay the matter before them
.

 

The news that Lizzy had delivered to her father hit newsprint three days later, on the twenty-ninth—though by then it was doubtful whether there was a soul north of the Neck who could still call it news. As before, guards were placed at the doors of the infected houses and red flags run up to flutter over their gables with perverse gaiety.

The papers also reported that at six o'clock the morning before, Thomas Newton, Esq., aged sixty-one, had passed from this long travail his life. As controller of customs, he had been the man in charge of the bureaucracy that inspected all incoming shipping.
What had killed him? Was it the smallpox?
One could fairly hear the question skittering up and down the streets.
From the Paxtons, from the pirates, from the multiple ships in from Barbados? Was it?
The Newton family remained staunchly silent: there were many things that could spirit away a sixty-one-year-old at dawn's turning of the tide.

Still—barely—the selectmen managed to keep order. Only eight houses, they said. Only eight ill. And all these might have been infected before they had learned of the first incursion; this was as far as it might spread, now they knew to take precautions.

Might,
others moaned darkly, hollow and filling fast with doubt.

Still, they waited. Only a month would tell. A whole month, free of pocks.

 

On one of these tense days, Cotton Mather saw four black men go by with shovels, brooms, and a cartload of dirt, singing as they cleaned the street. Musing upon free black men put him in mind of Onesimus, who had long since purchased his freedom, or most of it—Mather had carefully retained rights to his occasional help in such heavy work as carrying corn to the mill and fetching water on washing days. The sum he had required Onesimus to pay was the purchase price of his younger, less immorigerous replacement: once again, a prime, healthy, intelligent black lad, this one quickly christened Obadiah. This musing upon Onesimus, in turn, led Mather to another memory.

Obadiah in tow, he stepped out to speak with the men sweeping the street. Onesimus was not among them, but Mather was not looking for Onesimus, in any case. Not yet. The four men stopped singing; two of them chattered away in some language Mather could not follow. They laughed, and one of them rolled up his sleeve to show a round scar, grayish-pink and puckered in skin otherwise smooth as polished ebony. Very like the one Mather had seen on Onesimus, so many years ago.

“In my country, grandy-many die of the smallpox,” said the man with the scar, his Creole lilt dipping into exaggerated gravity. He tapped his arm. “But now they learn this way: people take juice of smallpox; and cutty skin, and put in a drop; then by'nd by a little sicky-sicky.” He flicked his skin lightly in several places, and broke into a wide smile. “Then very few little things like smallpox; and no body die of it; and no body have small-pox any more.”

Entranced, Mather listened with a strange mix of envy and greedy delight. He, too, half sang when he talked, but he could never have managed the easy freedom with which these men bandied words about, mixing West African tongues with English, French, and the Spanish of the Caribbean. What he could do was trap every word, just so, in the vise of his memory, holding them firm until he could pin them onto paper with a quill.

It would be a while, yet, for he loped off toward the house of Onesimus, and soon, with his old servant's guidance, he was making his way, street by street, through the homes of other men and women born in Africa and now free. Neat homes, he saw to his surprise. Pious and scrupulously clean, many quite prosperous, more than a few of them nearer neighbors than he had supposed.

One after another, the people who lived in them told virtually the same story.

For a week and a half, Mather dithered, dancing forward, dancing back. He sat down at his desk, meaning to write, but got distracted by reading the
Philosophical Transactions
again. He caught up Obadiah—again—and went out to yet another house: as if out there, somewhere, down the next street, through the next door, would be lurking the information that would make him certain. A rock, an anchor, a smiling Fellow of the Royal Society staying for the length of an experiment in the home of one of their free blacks:
Why, Dr. Woodward, Dr. Newton, Dr. Halley, so honored to meet you,
he would say,
so unexpected yet so timely. Do tell me what you have discovered, if you please: does it work?

He hinted, rather broadly, to his medical friends and acquaintances, but they returned his inquiries, the most delicate of hints as to a useful experiment, with blank stares. He fretted about his own safety, that of his children, his neighbors, all hunched down beneath the angry angelic shadow spreading over the town.

He was not alone. On June 1, still squabbling with Governor Shute, the House of Representatives demanded to be adjourned from Boston to Cambridge: the men staring at one another, wondering who might be breathing death upon the company. While they waited, the moon rounded through full and began to wane. Squally rains, haze, and lightning fluttered nervously through the air. At last, summer muscled spring aside, clearing the skies to a brilliant blue. The land below began to smolder. Still, all around town, people peered at each other, brooding.

On the fifth of June, the selectmen ordered the grammar school moved from the schoolhouse to the representatives' room upstairs in the Town House. Three different people were sick of the smallpox in three different houses in School Street, far too close to the school itself for the comfort of parents.

On the sixth of June, Mather's servant Obadiah finally and absolutely refused to go out of the house and into the cloud of contagion he was certain lay just outside the door.

Mather sighed and retreated upstairs to his library. He would write that letter to the physicians, at last. The Royal Society, he wrote, had not so long ago described a sure preventative for the smallpox. It was untried, untested by the Society: but they had among them an army of Africans who had tried it in their own country, and who could swear to its efficacy. Carefully, with unusual brevity, he outlined the general notion of inoculation, and urged the doctors to meet, read the reports, and discuss their merits:

I will only say,
he summed up in his pinched handwriting, further cramped with underlines, capitals, and exclamation points,
that inasmuch as the Practice of suffering and preventing the
Small-Pox,
in the way of
Inoculation
has never yet, (as far as I have heard) been introduced into our
Nation;
where there are so many that would give
great Sums,
to have their Lives insured from the
dangers
of this dreadful
Distemper,
nor has ever any one in all
America
ever yet, made the trial of it (though we have several
Africans
among us as I now find who tried it in their own
Country)
I cannot but move it be WARILY proceeded in. I durst not yet engage, that the Success of the trial here will be the same, as has hitherto been in the other
Hemisphere.
But I am very confident no person would miscarry in it but what must most certainly have miscarried upon taking it the
Common way.
And I would humbly
advise
that it be never made but under the management of a
Skilful Physician
who will wisely prepare the Body for it before he performs the Operation
. Gentlemen,
My
request
is that you would
meet for a Consultation
upon this Occasion and to
deliberate
upon it that whoever first begins this practice
(if you approve that it should be begun at all)
may have the concurrence of his
worthy Brethren
to fortify him in it
.