Actually, he had written the brief letter out once. It was Sammy and Lizzy who were copying it, along with the treatise, many times over, one of each for every doctor in town. It was a task that had the double good of easing his worries about Sammy’s hours of idleness.
The last letter he wrote out himself, signing and addressing it with a grand flourish. Cotton Mather, D.D., F.R.S.
To William Douglass, M.D.
6
FATHERS AND SONS
ON the twenty-fourth of June, Zabdiel Boylston arrived home exhausted, long after dark. He had sent Jack home earlier, to get dinner for the boys, so Zabdiel unsaddled, watered, and fed his horse himself. He stopped, too, at the stall of his bay stallion, Prince, who snorted and stamped softly. As he did every evening, Zabdiel fed him some raisins. “Tomorrow,” he promised, stroking the horse’s nose. “We’ll ride tomorrow.”
Then he stepped into the far stall, empty save for a bucket of water, soap, and towel. Kicking off his shoes, he stripped, working upward to the day cap that covered his close-shaven head. He had given up wearing a wig at the first cry of smallpox. In his estimation, the thing trapped contagion like a net; in Jerusha’s estimation, it would be impossible to comb out the smell. For a few days, he had felt naked and light headed, but now he liked riding out with nothing but a velvet cap between his skull and the sky. The cap, too, soon went flying across the stall, and then he washed himself from head to toe. It felt good to bare his skin to the summer night. To pretend, at least, that water faintly astringent with rue and rosemary could rinse the day’s filth from his memory, as well as from his skin. Still mother naked, he walked the length of the barn and ducked into the stall at the opposite end, also near empty, in this case save for a clean set of clothes.
He had decreed this measure for both himself and Jack, to safeguard the boys. Extreme, to be sure, and quite possibly absurd, especially if the contagion turned out to be climactic, settling on the whole region like some foul mist. He could not tell about that yet, though, while he knew for certain that garments could carry the infection. Bedding, too. That infernal practice of auctioning off a dead sailor’s clothing at the mainmast within an hour of the unfortunate’s expiry might well be what had spread it with such deadly and particular deliberation around the Seahorse, for instance. He had heard about that from Dr. Clark: how the worst cases on that ship had seemed to follow one another in single-file procession.
The boys were ready for bed. He said prayers with them, and then told a story about the Dread Pirate Roberts and a Pearl of Great Price. Tommy let himself be swept away quickly on the tides of sleep. From the look on John’s face, though, Zabdiel guessed he had sadly fallen off his best story-telling, though John was not going to say so. Papa needs rest, said the worried expression on his face.
He was right.
He descended from the boys’ eyrie on the third floor to the parlor that stretched the full length of the house on the floor below. It was his favorite room, with his and Jerusha’s armchairs drawn close to the cozy fireplace in winter, turned to face the windows and the open sky in the summer. Jerusha had left—on purpose, he guessed—a bit of half-finished cross-stitch on hers, so that he might pretend that she was just across the hall, upstairs with the children, down in the kitchen with Moll. Somewhere, anywhere nearby, rather than five miles off, where she might be fighting fever in one of the girls without him knowing, much less helping. Where she would sit ignorant herself when Tommy and John fell ill.
For they would fall ill. Unless Zabdiel could spirit them out of town soon, they would fall ill. And it would be Zabdiel who infected them, no matter what precautions he thought up. Something would slip by, and he would carry the infection home from some sickroom and feed it straight to the boys. Might as well get over it now, said the crisp voice of reason. But the father in him balked, choked at the thought of his sons swollen and covered in an ash-gray crust of scabs, or scattered with flat black sores seeping into one another. Already, the flat pox was sowing its seed among Boston’s children with deadly abandon.
Zabdiel shook the vision off. A letter lay on the table between the chairs; a big, bulky letter. He picked it up. From Cotton Mather, fire-breather. He opened it.
June 24, 1721
Sir,
You are many ways endeared unto me, but by nothing more than the very much good which a gracious God employs you and honors you to do to a miserable world.
I design it as a testimony of my respect and esteem that I now lay before you the most that I know (and all that was ever published in the world) concerning a matter which I have been an occasion of its being pretty much talked about. If upon mature deliberation, you should think it advisable to be proceeded in, it may save many lives that we set a great value on. But, if it be not approved of, still you have the pleasure of knowing exactly what is done in other places.
The gentlemen, my two authors, are not yet informed, that among the Guramantees ’tis no rare thing for a whole company, of a dozen together, to go to a person sick of the small pox, and prick his pustules, and inoculate the humour, even no more than the back of one hand, and go home, and be a little ill, and have a few, and be safe all the rest of their days. Of this I have in my neighbourhood a competent number of living witnesses.
But see, think, judge; do as the Lord our healer shall direct you, and pardon this freedom of, Sir,
Your hearty friend and servant,
Cotton Mather
At the very bottom was his name, Dr. Boylstone, as Mather spelled it, with that old-fashioned curl of an e at the end, the only personal word on the page. Otherwise, the missive had the distinct distance of a form letter. As if ten, fifteen, identical letters had been written, then each marked out for a different doctor, ticked off some list.
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:
There is a Great Plague which we call the SMALL POX, wherein the Misery of man is great upon him: A Distemper so well known and so much Felt that there needs no Description to be given of it.
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 se
lf-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 ri
de 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.