The Speckled Monster (37 page)

On the twelfth, Zabdiel and Jack came home to dinner to find both boys shedding their scabs like pennies tossed at a wedding. Zabdiel thought he had never seen such a beautiful sight in his life. The fever still had not showed; now it likely never would. One more time, they sank to their knees, but this time Zabdiel had no trouble with his prayers. He would not declare victory, he told himself, for another two or three days: the incisions were still bubbling with fresh pocks.

Hope was becoming harder to hold down, though. So hard that right after the last amen, he let out a mighty yell. Instead of a bedtime story that night, a full-blown game of pirates raged through the house, with Zabdiel leading the way as a wily captain sailing through seas boiling with leviathans and giant squid that hoarded treasure like deep-sea dragons. Armed with a pot and tongs, Jack was brewing up a magnificent storm just reaching gale force when they became aware of a thunderous noise not of their own making. Someone was pounding on the front door.

The game dissolved into silence.

Zabdiel slipped downstairs into the front hall, where he picked up a cudgel, hefting it twice, and stepped toward the trembling door.

“Who is it?” he called, but whoever it was had no chance to hear over his own rhythmic pounding. Dogs were barking all over the neighborhood, and a rooster or two had begun to crow.

Zabdiel raised his cudgel overhead and slowly unhitched the latch.

Torchlight flickered on the stoop just outside, but he could see only one figure in its angry glow, so methodically hammering away that he did not realize the door had opened until the next thump sent it crashing into the wall.

It was Joshua Cheever. “It's Sarah,” he said hoarsely.

Zabdiel took the torch from his hand and doused it, seizing his friend by one sleeve and dragging him inside, pulling the door shut behind him. “What's wrong?” he asked quietly.

Cheever slumped into a chair. “Fever. Vomiting. Jabbing headache and backache. . . .”

The smallpox,
shrilled a mean little voice in both their minds.

“I should've taken her away,” said Cheever dully.

“Let me get my things.”

“Things,” repeated Cheever, as if it was a new word he had to think about. He nodded, but as Zabdiel turned away, he leaned forward and snatched at his coat. “For the love of God, make it quick.”

 

They rode hard up to Cheever's home off Salutation Alley, the narrow lane trailing west from the inn, where many of their friends had built snug homes set in neat gardens. After a brief examination, Zabdiel stepped out of the sickroom. Cheever leapt to his feet. “How is she?”

Zabdiel shook his head. “I won't feed you false hope, Joshua. The fever is a bad one: not the purples, but I can't guarantee it won't go that way. I don't like her flush.”

Cheever turned abruptly to look out the window at a tall row of hollyhocks edged with Queen Anne's lace. Not easy to grow so close to the salt winds off the sea, but Sarah could coax anything into bloom. “When will you know?”

“Not for a day or two. Even then,” Zabdiel went on as gently as possible, “we won't really know what we're dealing with until the rash comes out.” He cleared his throat and said the hardest thing of all. “You should leave, Joshua. Tonight. Jack and I'll move her to my house and care for her.”

Cheever stared out the window in silence. “What are my chances, if I stay with her?”

Zabdiel just shook his head.

Cheever caught his reflection in the glass. “Inoculate me,” he said quietly.

Zabdiel frowned. He must be hearing things.

Cheever turned. “Inoculate me,” he said again, more forcefully.

“No.”

Cheever crossed his arms. “You said yourself that it could save hundreds or even thousands of lives.”

“It could kill that many too,” retorted Zabdiel. He took a step back. “It came a lot closer to killing Tommy than I like to think about. I'm not trying it again until I'm sure it works. Or at least, until I'm damned sure it isn't going to kill.”

“When will that be?”

Zabdiel had no idea, but he did know that at the moment Cheever could not stomach such hazy truth. “Three more days,” he said.

“I don't have three days.” Cheever slid off his coat and began rolling up a sleeve. “I'm not leaving her, Zabdiel. Not even to you. So either you inoculate me, or I'll inoculate myself.”

“You won't.”

“Like hell I won't.”

Cheever turned dark eyes on him. “My wife is fighting for her life, Zabdiel. I can't afford to be any sicker than I have to be. Not now. And from everything you've said, inoculation is the easiest way out of this mess. If you won't do it for me, do it for her.”

The old vision of a little girl with Jerusha's eyes, digging a grave, swam before Zabdiel's eyes. He swallowed hard and felt for the vial that had hung on a thong around his neck since he'd first inoculated Tommy. He'd cleaned it out and replaced the old matter with new only that morning, in the course of a regular examination. As he had been doing—
for no reason,
he told himself—whenever he came across a fine distinct case at just the right stage.

 

Much later that night, Zabdiel finally sat down to write Jerusha. He wanted her to hear the news from him:
Tommy is safe. So are Jack and Jackey
.

But Joshua Cheever was not. Not any longer. Zabdiel ran both his hands up along his head. He could not bear to write that part: that just a few hours before, he had stirred two drops of smallpox into his best friend's blood.

 

That afternoon over in Cambridge, the House of Representatives adjourned itself without so much as a by-your-leave from the governor. It was the representatives who had first urged Governor Shute to allow the assembly to retreat from the Town House in the center of Boston across the wide expanse of the River Charles, so as to escape the threat of the smallpox. At their urging, the governor had also reluctantly followed Puritan precedent in the face of calamity and proclaimed the following day to be a public Day of Humiliation. He proved recalcitrant, though, in giving the men leave to go home and pray with their families—reasoning that it was their own fault they were huddled too close for comfort in the little town of Cambridge. They had work to do; they could bloody well pray over there.

At the glowering behest of their speaker, Dr. John Clark, the House responded by plucking adjournment from the governor's short list of prerogatives and granting themselves the leave they sought.

The following day, Thursday, July 13, shops and warehouses stayed shut and fishing boats stayed in, as people throughout the province trooped into church to tremble before the wrath of the Lord.

 

That evening, Dr. Clark directed his carriage to Dr. Boylston's shop. He did not descend, but begged a word with the doctor out in the street.

When Boylston emerged from the purpling dusk, it was not from the house, but from the drive that wound around its side, back toward the garden and orchard; Clark could hear the excited shouts of children in that direction.

“Fine night, Doctor,” said Zabdiel with a smile. “How can I help you?” His greeting went no farther than a nod; he appeared to be holding something in his tightly cupped hands.

Dr. Clark came straight to the point. “It has been brought to my attention, sir, that you are considering spreading the practice of inoculation for the smallpox well beyond the bounds of your family.”

Dr. Boylston cocked his head, regarding his visitor with polite but detached curiosity, as if listening to strange, shimmering news from far-off lands.

“I must warn you, sir, against any such step,” continued Dr. Clark.

A little crease appeared between Dr. Boylston's eyes. “Do you speak in an official capacity?”

“Let us say that I am delivering a private request, with the sincere hopes of several men of position in this town that it can remain so.” Still sitting in his carriage, Dr. Clark leaned forward and rested his chin on the knob of the walking stick he gripped with both hands. “May I have your word, sir?”

Slowly, Zabdiel unfolded his hands; a firefly flickered pale green in his palm. He tossed it into the air. “No,” he said with a little shake of his head, his eyes following the drunken, spiraling path of the firefly. “No, I'm afraid not.”

“May I inquire why not?” asked Dr. Clark stiffly.

Zabdiel's eyes riveted his guest. “Because I've already broken the promise you're asking me to make.”

Dr. Clark felt his face harden. “That, sir, was most unwise.”

Dr. Boylston's eyes gleamed with irritating amusement. “I understand you might have concerns,” he said, “but I think I can set them to rest, if you'll just step back into the garden, and see my son.”

“No.”
Dr. Clark bristled. “No sir, I will not. I have already discovered more than I wished.” He gave a curt command to his driver. “Good evening,” he said coldly, as the carriage rolled away.

 

Zabdiel was still standing there, looking thoughtfully after the carriage, when a woman turned up the street, her broad hips swinging so comfortably through the soft, thickening darkness as to almost hide her hurry.

Moll had come home.

She handed Zabdiel a note, slightly damp and crumpled, and sidled past him, fairly running up the drive toward the kitchen door. By the time he wandered in after her, she already had Jackey curled up in a sleepy ball on her lap while she rocked him, stroking his skin and humming a lullaby in a slow, deep contralto.

Zabdiel paused for a moment to listen, and then he trailed upstairs to sit alone in the parlor with Jerusha's scent skating up from the paper Moll had set in his hands. He gazed for a while at his wife's handwriting spidering over the page, before he actually read it.

I know you will not be pleased,
she wrote.
You will protest that Moll has not had the distemper. But Jackey is her only child. At least I have the girls to worry over, here. If I did not, I could not bear it.

We are all well here
.

And then, off by itself at the bottom of the page, the sentence he had wanted to see most.

You have done the right thing
.

 

The days that had crept by so slowly for two long weeks began to reel by in a blur. He inoculated Moll first thing the next morning; he had been prepared for an argument, but when he came downstairs she planted herself in front of him with both feet and fairly demanded it.

That afternoon, John Helyer tracked him down as he was leaving Cheever's and demanded it as well. The smallpox was popping out among the children all up and down Salutation Alley, and Helyer could not bear to think of his own flock penniless and alone in the world, like the three new housefuls of orphans at the other end of the street alone, should he himself succumb.

At home, Zabdiel saw that the boys' scabs were nearly gone, their skin smooth as babies'.

Any impulse he might have had to exult, however, was tempered by the misery swelling around him. The next day, he had to give Cheever the news that his wife's smallpox was thickening ominously; Cheever himself had yet to fall ill. In the streets, the jeering and taunting sputtered back into life; a crowd now followed Zabdiel everywhere, though they maintained a wary distance, as if he himself might be contagious.
Most of the day,
thought Zabdiel,
I probably am
. They could hear the mob's cries from inside Cheever's house:
Poisoner. Pox spreader
.

“Go on the offensive,” said Cheever with vehemence, as Zabdiel dressed his incisions; he'd decided to drop the walnut shell, in favor of his tried-and-true dressing of choice: cabbage leaves. Cheever rattled on. “You've got a right to defend yourself. And if you ask me, reasonable people who happen not to have milk toast for livers have a right to hear the truth of the matter, from you.”

So that afternoon, a Saturday, Zabdiel sat down and composed a letter for his paper, the
Boston Gazette
. He was no Dr. Mead, he sighed upon finishing, no Cotton Mather whose words flowed on and on with the shake of a pen. But he had managed, he thought, to make his case in plain English, for plain men and women to read. He hoped they would read with their heads, rather than with frightened hearts.

Mr. Philip Musgrave, the provincial postmaster and proprietor of the
Gazette,
was gratifyingly pleased to have Zabdiel's little missive. He needed some draw to keep everyone from deserting to his competition, Campbell's dratted
News-Letter
and its sensational pestilences. The letter would appear, Musgrave promised, in the very next issue: Monday.

 

On Sunday, July 16, the catcalling thickened.
Raw Head and Bloody Bones!
the crowd screeched after Dr. Boylston. Parties broke off from him to heckle Mr. Cheever and the Reverend Dr. Mather as well.
Murderer,
they shouted at the startled minister on his way into the church.

G.D.,
Dr. Mather wrote in his diary when he returned home.
At this Time I enjoy an unspeakable Consolation
. It was hard not to puff with some modicum of pride. For the enemy raging against him with dark sulfurous fire was no lesser foe than Lucifer.
The Destroyer, being enraged at the Proposal of anything that may rescue the Lives of our poor People from him, has taken a strange Possession of the People on this Occasion. They rave, they rail, they blaspheme; they talk not only like Idiots but also like Frantics. Not only the Physician who began the Experiment, but I also am an Object of their Fury, their Obloquies, and Invectives
.