The Speckled Monster (52 page)

 

On Thursday the fourteenth of September, Zabdiel's brother edged into the fever even as his own girls left theirs behind, and headed into the rash. Up in Salutation Alley, Fanny Webb gave her husband one last look of longing and regret, and let go of life.

Grieving for her, and even more for poor John, who looked pithed for all that he was a minister and must urge proper Christian fortitude in the face of sorrow and death, Jerusha gripped Zabdiel's hand and held her breath as she watched the rash sow its way over her girls. Before she had even dared to hope, it slowed and ran out of seed. Young Jerusha had no more than forty or fifty quickly ripening flecks; Mary and Lizzy had more than she did on their faces, but they skated lightly on the surface of the skin: they would leave no scars.

 

On Saturday afternoon, high thin clouds scudded overhead as the New North Church filled with every Webb and Adams in town for John's sake, and every Bromfield for Fanny's. Behind them came the ruling elders and deacons of the New North, out of respect for her husband, their pastor, and all the province's councilors and judges as well as the governor and the lieutenant governor, out of respect for her father, Councilor Edward Bromfield. Behind that streamed the regular congregation and the Webbs' friends and neighbors. Every house in Salutation Alley emptied into the church, which soon began spilling people back into the streets. The minister's young wife had held many a pock-ridden hand in the neighborhood when no one else could or would, without a thought for herself. Her husband and father were respected; she had been loved.

Like a long-legged bird of doom, the Reverend Dr. Cotton Mather stalked into the pulpit to deliver her funeral sermon. But even as he intoned,
This brave and beloved servant of God,
Zabdiel's mind wandered. Fanny was beyond help, but he said his own silent prayers for John, who would be lost without her. And for John's sister Bethiah Nichols, who might yet be saved, Lord willing. But no longer, he thought, in the absence of the Lord's concerted help. Zabdiel had visited her on his way to the church; she was full of small, depressed pocks that were already confluent, and still they were spreading. Her throat was dry and sore, and she was racked with a dry cough. Her progress did not look good. In fact, it looked damned poor—He caught himself and glanced about, as if someone might have heard the rough urgency of his thought. Still, she might yet be saved. Where better to hope for that than in a house of God?

Afterward, as the bearers carried the coffin from the church at a slow march and set it on the hearse, the funeral bell found its bronze voice. It tolled, once and then a second time, fulfilling the legal limit of mourning. But the shipwright and anchorsmith pulling the bell rope with arms thick as oaks cared nothing for the selectmen and their decrees of how many times a bell might be tolled, and when; they grieved for the young woman who had cradled their dying children at the stinking worst of the distemper, when no one else would come near, least of all the selectmen. The bell boomed out again. A murmur of surprise and satisfaction rose and died away, and still the bell tolled.

“It is expressly flouting the law,” muttered Mr. Cook in a tone he knew would carry to Chief Justice Samuel Sewall, three feet ahead. “Twice only, and once for Negroes.”

“It is the first public funeral I have seen without the ostentation of scarves and rings,” remarked the judge to his son in clarion tones. “It has a very good character.”

Mr. Cook scowled, but fell silent. The bell tolled twenty-eight times, once for each year of her too-short life, as Frances Bromfield Webb's funeral procession wound west up Snow Hill to the burial ground and laid her in ground so sodden that the earth itself seemed to be weeping.

 

Later that evening, a carriage drew up at the Boylstons' door, and a small party of Reverend Webbs's Adams cousins descended. Mr. Jones had been inoculated two weeks before and had done well; only a few scabs still clung to his skin. Now he and his wife—one of the Adams clan—wanted their five-year-old daughter Mary inoculated. With them was Mrs. Jones's eldest brother, Samuel, along with his wife and four-year-old daughter, both also named Mary.

The Adamses had already lost two children to other childhood disasters. “I cannot bear even to think of losing my last little lamb too,” said Mrs. Adams, holding the child tight, as if some dark wind might snatch her away. “But it was hard not to fear it this morning.” She had decided in the midst of the funeral, she said, that she and little Mary should be inoculated without delay. Samuel had agreed so heartily with her scheme that he had driven straight here on the way home, without so much as looking left or right.

Rolling a hoop with a stick, Tommy went sprinting by the bay window facing the street, and John ran yelling after him. Wild laughter could be heard around the side of the house.

“Whenever you're ready,” said Zabdiel, picking up his lancet.

 

On the seventeenth, Zabdiel's brother's pocks came out; Mrs. Nichols's rash went on thickening.

On Monday, September 18, Mrs. Dixwell's pocks at last began to scab, though her face, more truthfully, could no longer be described as having pocks. It was one vast swollen boil. Her throat was raw and her breathing ragged.

In her big house in Marlborough Street, surrounded by servants, Mrs. Salter detected a fever. She detected a headache. She demanded laudanum.

Zabdiel detected impatience, but did his best to quell it.

In a move of unforgivable pride, Governor Shute proclaimed a Day of Thanksgiving in October, provoking dark muttering all over town. Not that anyone was opposed to giving thanks, when it was merited. But just then, with the epidemic's furor still rising around them, it seemed dangerously imperious, as if setting a date by which the Almighty must behave. Almost as dangerous a temptation of the wrath of God, muttered some, as inoculation.

The next morning, the advocate general of the province responded by having his daughter, Elizabeth Valentine, inoculated.

By Wednesday evening, Mrs. Dixwell's face had scabbed over completely; bloody pus seeped through cracks in the thick crust. The next day, the scabs on her body began to slough off, and her incisions opened wide, disgorging rivers of poison. Both John Dixwell and Zabdiel clung to hope. She was feeling more comfortable; her breathing had eased, and her fever was still moderate. Maybe the scabs and the incisions would eject the poison from her body.

That afternoon, Zabdiel allowed Mr. Dixwell to bring their two eldest children—ten-year-old Basil and six-year-old Elizabeth—in for a visit, which gave her great joy and, as they were recovering nicely from their own bouts with smallpox, put them at no danger. John, only three, they kept in the nursery, fearing that he would scream in terror at the figure on the bed, who was not, could not, be the big, warm, cinnamon-scented mother he missed. Surely, such a scene would only upset them both.

Basil and Elizabeth were charged not to mention their little sister Mary at all; Zabdiel still thought it too dangerous for Mrs. Dixwell to know that her littlest now lay in the earth.

In the midst of this visit, Zabdiel was called away to see Mrs. Margaret Salter, who had taken a sharp turn for the worse.

When he saw her, she pointed to three flecks—two on her face, and one on her arm—and wailed. He was inexcusably short with her, he thought glumly afterward. After explaining for the tenth time that the appearance of
some
rash was to be expected, he abruptly took his leave and returned to Mrs. Dixwell.

As he rode back to Union Street, the funeral bells began to toll all across the city; it was the mourning hour. Five o'clock.

Mrs. Dixwell's windows were all wide open and the air in the room was crisp and cold, cut with the scent of burning leaves outside and cinnamon oil within, though neither masked the thick miasma of her pocks. The children had gone, and she was shaking with hysteria. “My baby,” she wailed, as he walked in. “My Mary, my baby, my Mary.” She could hear her baby's sweet voice, she said, calling her to heaven. She would die in the night and be eaten by worms.

“She asked,” said John stonily to Zabdiel's silent question. “Point-blank.”

Zabdiel sighed. He dosed Mrs. Dixwell with laudanum and sat with her until the crying and shivering went off, and she drifted into heavy purple dreams.

The next day, he visited early in the morning. She was groggy, but seemed refreshed and calmer.

That afternoon he slipped away to see other patients. Mrs. Nichols, thankfully, had held steady for about a week: she hadn't improved appreciably, but she hadn't worsened, either, and that, at this point, seemed a gift of grace.

Mrs. Salter was lying back on her pillows, a looking glass lying hopelessly in her hand. She had several pink bumps already filling with clear liquid; about two dozen, he estimated. “Twenty-five,” she snapped. He assured her this was a fine sparse number, but she would have none of it: she had a splitting headache, vapors, and she was dying, she announced.

He returned to Mrs. Dixwell. She had done well all day, but as the bells boomed out again at five o'clock, she began to shake and wail afresh. Ominously, her fever rose with her hysteria. Zabdiel bled and blistered her, but to no avail; the fever soared higher and higher.

The next morning, Saturday, September 23, the fever stopped rising, but it clamped around her like a vise, inside which she shivered uncontrollably. Zabdiel drew John aside, and began to prepare him for the worst.

Later, among the stately houses of the South End, he inoculated the only son and heir of Councilor Thomas Fitch; the powers that be, it seemed, were slowly coming around to inoculation, even as his own faith began to waver.

In the Town House, the selectmen met to discuss the problem of firewood: supplies were already dangerously low, and there hadn't even been a cold snap yet, not a real one. But the sloopmen who sailed it down from the forests of the north had no wish to touch at Boston. Dr. Mather had sent them a suggestion, and this time, they admitted it was a good one. The selectmen let it be known that if the sloopmen would moor their sloops at the Castle, the town would bear the cost of hiring crews to run the boats over from the Castle to the Long Wharf, unload them, and return them empty and aired.

They could not face a smallpox winter without fuel for cooking and for heat.

On Sunday morning, September 24, Jerusha shepherded Zabdiel and the children to church: it was to be a familial day of Thanksgiving, for the girls had shed the last of their scabs. Everyone in their little family was safe.

The children, she knew, had decided in hushed conference among themselves that they would pray hard for the souls of their papa's sick people. Jerusha smiled, anticipating their little faces screwed up tight as they pressed their prayers toward heaven. Perhaps those prayers would help; she certainly hoped they might, though she silently asked pardon for her entirely selfish reasons. If Mrs. Dixwell were to die, the simmering mob that trailed her husband night and day might explode. But the mob was not half as harsh as Zabdiel would be on himself.

She shook off her gloom. Misery might always come tomorrow; it was her duty to the Lord to celebrate His glories as they came. And what glories they were: six fine children, hard pressed to keep from skipping to church, safe once and for all from the smallpox. The angel of death had passed over their door.

She knew she must look grave, she knew she must join the congregation in begging for mercy for all of Boston. But exaltation and praise bloomed bright in her heart. She was looking forward to the singing.

For his part, Zabdiel had promised Jerusha that he would focus this morning on thanksgiving, so he had thrust Mrs. Dixwell to the back of his mind. As they crossed the street, he clung to the successes for which he could give thanks: his family's safe passage through inoculation, Jerusha's return. Cheever. Helyer. Dr. Mather's support, however strange and sly it might be. Across town, Mr. Adams and his little girl Mary had begun to erupt and looked to do well. Mrs. Adams was a bit of a concern—she had not yet felt so much as a single flash of fever. But too little sickness was a much nicer problem than too much. Young Mary Jones, too, inoculated the same day as her Adams cousins, had a fine sparse rash of pocks creeping across her.

And then there was Mrs. Salter. Her pocks had ripened to pustules; though she refused to believe it, she would soon be fine. The sooner, the better.

Just before they entered the church, someone plucked at his sleeve. He turned, and a black man he did not recognize leaned forward and whispered in his ear the words he had been half dreading all morning. “It's the missus. I am to beg you to come at once.”

He turned to Jerusha, but she had heard. Her pale eyes wide, she gave him a quick smile of encouragement and said, “Go. We will pray for you.”

Zabdiel sighed, though whether it was more relief at being released from false thanksgiving or regret for the summons he had known must come, even he could not say. Jack materialized, behind him, and they headed back for the barn, the other black man in tow. Five minutes later, they were trotting north.

At Mr. Dixwell's shop, where Union Street ran into Hanover, Zabdiel was dismounting, when the servant ran up behind and puffed, “Pardon, sir, but may I ask why we are stopping here? I was to beg you, sir, to come straightaway.”

“Isn't your mistress Mrs. Dixwell?”

“No, sir. Mrs. Nichols. She's begun to bleed. Before her time, if you get my drift.”

“Mrs. Nichols.”
Zabdiel blinked twice, and then tossed himself back in the saddle and leapt into a canter north up Hanover Street, toward Wake-field Alley.

Bethiah Nichols was weepy, but Zabdiel had no time to coax her out of it. “You told me you were not with child,” he said, a little sharply. “Are you sure?”