The Speckled Monster

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  Dr. Douglass tried to display polite indifference to such brazen effrontery. The man was not only refusing to apologize or to recognize Dr. Douglass’s proprietary rights to the information in the books he possessed, but was waving his F.R.S. about as if it gave him some prior claim to it. Having almost succeeded in swallowing his own sneer, Dr. Douglass bowed once again and departed.

  Back at the Green Dragon, Dr. Douglass marched upstairs and flung his stocky frame into a chair. He skimmed the two articles in question, and then clapped the books closed, stood up, and crossed the room. Drawing his watch chain from his waistcoat pocket, he disentangled a key and unlocked the lowest drawer of his desk. Withdrawing the letter that Williams had forwarded earlier that morning, he thrust the books inside, shoved the drawer closed, and locked it once more.

  He could honestly say that he had convened the blasted physicians’ meeting that Mather had asked for. Every last medical doctor in Boston—namely himself—had attended, had read the articles in question. He let out a single snort of laughter. The consensus, by God, was unanimous: inoculation was a dangerous bit of quackery. An old wives’ tale—and an Oriental old wives’ tale at that. A conversational curiosity, not medicine. Furthermore, that vain, credulous preacher named Mather should not—would not—be allowed to spoil Dr. Douglass’s imminent glory.

  Despite the fact that it was bright afternoon in the middle of June, he lit a candle. Holding Mather’s open letter above the flame, he watched the pages brown and blacken around the cramped writing, until in a whoosh of orange, the letter disappeared into nothingness and gray ash.

  Late on the twelfth of June, right through the thirteenth and fourteenth, and into the early hours of the fifteenth, demonic wings swept down across the town in a silent arc of terror, sowing the fecund red seeds of the rash through upwards of fifty houses. Within days, the seeds were blossoming foul yellow and white.

  This time, no attempt was made to put guards on the newly infected houses; there were too many. Those posted at the first eight houses melted away or were swept away by a fast-rising tide of panic. People began to flee, first in furtive trickles, then in a steady stream. By week’s end, wagons, coaches, light two-wheeled chariots, even wheelbarrows clogged the streets in an endless jostling flood heaving its way out of the city.

  “Eighteen days,” said Dr. Douglass with satisfaction to his brethren among the Scots Charitable Society, assembled as his guests at the Green Dragon. “Did I not predict eighteen days?”

  They had to agree, he had said eighteen days. Often. They raised their glasses to toast the scientific, the orderly, the neat and predictable number of eighteen.

  Not that he wanted the smallpox to come, Dr. Douglass reassured himself. Only, that if it were to come, as it indeed had, he wanted to understand it.

  What shall I do? Cotton Mather wrung his hands as he walked, as he talked, as he prayed, as he scribbled in his diary. G.D. What shall I do? Oh, What shall I do, that my Family may be prepared, for the Visitation that is now every day to be expected! His silent wails harmonized with the quavery terror of his two youngest children. Just as smallpox began to spread, Sammy came home from college in Cambridge and refused to go back again. It was spreading there too; he felt safer—or at least more comfortable—at home.

  Caught between the Charybdis of Dr. Clark—quite possibly trailing poison from one house to another, she cried to her brother—and the Scylla of her stepmother—barking mad—Lizzy was even more terrified. For her, nowhere seemed either safe or comfortable.

  Dr. Mather looked to heaven for direction, but heaven was strangely silent. Meanwhile, he determined to improve, with all the contrivance he could, his children’s interests in Piety. To impress upon them the need for subservience to the will of the Lord. To prepare for whatever sacrifices He might demand.

  On the night of the thirteenth of June, with the second wave of rashes blooming around them in the warm, moonless dark, Jerusha Boylston waited up late for her husband. He found her standing barefoot in her shift by the window in their bedroom, the casement open wide to the garden in hopes that a breeze might ruffle the close, damp heat of June. She was forty-two; she had borne eight children and buried two, one within the year. She was tired, not as slender as she once had been. Not yet matronly, but she knew with a sigh of amusement that her thickening waist and hips were headed that direction. She still held herself straight and strong, though, like a dare. He thought her more beautiful than ever.

  She held out her arms, and he went to her, enfolding her; the top of her head fit right up under his chin. When she drew back a little and looked up, he could see the wisps of crow’s feet that edged her eyes and the laugh lines lacing her mouth. She was not laughing tonight. He ran a finger delicately about her face. For a long time, they stood there breathing in each other’s musky scent, curled about with the rich sweetness of roses.

  They had never discussed what they would do if and when it came to this, for it had been clear to them both: She would leave with the children, and he would stay with the sick.

  The question that circled unspoken around them was not what to do, but how to do it, as quickly as possible.

  “How long?” she asked after a while.

  “A few days yet,” he answered. “Tom rides south beyond the Neck tomorrow, to find a suitable house. We must also hire a coach: Sarah is too far gone with child for a rough ride. It will be better, too, for you and the girls. Pack the—”

  “No.” She bit her lip and turned her head to the side, pressing into his shoulder and looking determinedly into the starlight until she trusted her voice not to waver. Then she drew back and looked up into his face. “How long before I will see you again?”

  He ran a finger down her cheek and gave her a smile, but his eyes were dark seas of sadness and trouble. “I don’t know, sweetheart. If we’re lucky, the distemper could burn itself out in a few weeks. But it may be many months.”

  “Many months,” she whispered, burying her face once again in the cambric that covered his chest.

  He stroked her fine hair, once so blond, now the pale brown of late autumn leaves, of young fawns or panthers. “The children are in more danger from me every day I walk back into this house.”

  She shook her head. “Not from you. From the smallpox.”

  “It will amount to the same thing soon enough,” he said. “I will be no better than poison to my own children.”

  “Never say that,” she whispered.

  “Would you have me lie?”

  “No,” she said, flinging her head back to answer the glitter in his eyes. For a moment it was hard to say whether they were clinging to each other or pushing each other away. Then a wild, wicked smile no one but Zabdiel had ever seen broke across her face. “I would have you lie with me, though.”

  He swept her up and carried her to the bed, where they curved and arched over each other, swimming fiercely toward union and the troubled sleep that lay beyond.

  The following day, Zabdiel’s brother Tom stopped by the house briefly at dawn and then rode away south toward Roxbury. He did not return until late into the night.

  Thirteen-year-old John was supposed to be sleeping: his brother Tommy had dropped off hours ago, breathing slow and even beside him. But John could not sleep. He was too aware of the humming tension on the floor below. He knew, without seeing, that his father was pacing in circles around the parlor, while his mother sat rigidly still at its heart, gripping her needle with such ferocity that the square of linen she was skewering might as well be the devil himself. So he heard his uncle ride up, coming straight around to the kitchen door and handing the reins to Jack. He heard their voices, low and indistinct, three stories below. Heard Jack stomp off to the barn, and then silence, as his uncle paused on the doorstep. After a long while, he heard his uncle sniff, and then the door creak open.

  He crept out to the landing, to the place where the shadows always lay thick enough to hide in, and peered downstairs. Uncle Tom took the
stairs up to the second floor three at a time, as usual, but not with his usual bound: each step was a leaden, deliberate threat. In the parlor, his mother laid her needlework neatly aside and stood up, reaching out for his father, who took her hand in a hard grip.

  Tom stopped just inside the doorway, partially blocking John’s view.

  “Good or bad?” he asked quietly. “Which first?”

  “The bad,” said his mother.

  Tom shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing we can afford.” The words peppered out like angry shot. “Hovels with no drains and a two-mile walk to water are going for rates that would give Mr. Cooke pause.”

  “And the good?” asked his father.

  Uncle Tom set his shoulders. “Rebecca and William have agreed to take Sarah, my girls, Jerusha and your girls as well as Mary and young Mary.”

  Whatever was wrong, thought John, it must have something to do with girls. For his uncle had just named most of the girls in the family. Aunt Rebecca, one of his father’s sisters, lived down in Roxbury with his uncle William and all his Abbot cousins; that was who Uncle Tom must have been visiting. Aunt Sarah, Uncle Tom’s wife, and their two baby girls. His own mother and sisters, and his father’s other sister in town, Aunt Mary and her daughter, cousin Mary Lane. To find any more girls, you’d have to get on the ferry for Charlestown, or ride all the way out to Brookline.

  “The boys,” whispered his mother in a strange harsh voice.

  Tom shook his head. “William was quite firm. The women and the girls are all they can manage. More than they can manage in comfort.”

  His mother did not weep or wail, or even gasp; she made no sound at all. But a dark wind of despair seemed to pour from her eyes, blowing out all light and warmth, wrenching open a pit at the bottom of John’s belly. He had never seen her like this, except once, when they had nailed the lid on his baby brother’s coffin. She had not known he was looking then either. As had happened then, her whole body disappeared, wrapped in the strong arms of his father.

  Then, the way that his father had held her had reassured John: encased in that grip, the seams of the world would not come apart. This time, the hole in his stomach split wider. For he saw the look that shot from his father to his uncle, over her head.

  Rage, frustration, and something he had never seen on his father’s face before.

  Fear.

  The whole of the next day and well into the night, Jerusha packed. She found jobs for the girls all over the house; Tommy she somehow needed nearby, almost underfoot. It was times like this that he envied John his shiny new apprenticeship, a present for his thirteenth birthday; he would not be thirteen for seven long years, thought Tommy darkly. Meanwhile, John was learning to be a merchant—or a merchant prince, as he put it. Usually, Tommy rolled his eyes just thinking about it. His brother stuffed his head with numbers from morning to night; he would eagerly trace not just sums but full-blooded trigonometry problems on the wall with a finger in his sleep. Tommy wanted to be a doctor, or maybe a ship’s captain, not a merchant. This morning, though, he had to admit it would have been useful to have John’s irreproachable reason to be somewhere else.

  All day, Tommy helped his mother pack clothing, bedding, and food for what seemed like a year. Warming pans, pots, utensils. Pickles, preserves, cheeses, dried fruit, and meat. A precious chest full of books and writing paper. Another, even more dear, of medicinal supplies—all that their father would spare and some he was hard pressed to give up. “You must leave some for me and the boys, Jer,” he heard him chide, though gently. His mother nodded and ruffled his hair so fiercely that he had to swallow a yelp.

  The next day, Uncle Tom arrived, riding alongside his coach. The men stowed the baggage up top, while the women nearly suffocated everybody else with farewells. Finally, his mother and the girls stepped into the carriage to join Aunt Sarah, looking faintly green, and his cousins Sarah and Annie who stuck out tiny pink tongues. Tommy crossed his eyes and waggled his own tongue back, until they squealed with laughter. Moll, Jack’s wife and Jerusha’s godsend, as his father said, gave Jackey one kiss and a pat on the rear, and climbed up to sit ramrod straight next to the driver.

  And then with a groaning heave, they were gone, swallowed by the shout and chaos of the streets.

  John bustled off in Uncle Tom’s wake. Tommy’s father and Jack, too, rode away soon after that, his father on a fine gelding, and Jack on the long-eared, strong-hearted mule he loved—because it was his, and because they had a sort of running tussle over which of them was boss. They would be gone all day, his father had said; it would take that long to visit all the sick people.

  There was sure a lot of leaving going on, thought Tommy as he stood with Jackey and waved at everyone else. No doubt, he would miss his mother. On the brighter side, he had just been freed from the girls’ endless demands to play the Indian game, reenacting over and over the attack on their mother’s girlhood home, such ages and ages ago that his mother hadn’t been born yet. The three girls traded off the roles of the heroic maid and the two babies whom she had saved by popping them under overturned kettles. Tommy always played the lone Indian warrior, which would have been brilliant if it hadn’t meant that he not only always had to lose, but to crawl off and invent some new spectacular way to die as well. True, he got to take a few pretend pot-shots (he was very proud of the pun) through a window at the kettles. But then whoever was playing the maid got to bean him with yet another pot. And if that weren’t bad enough, she then tossed coals in his face. Mary tended to get carried away with the beaning, even though they used a pillow; his sister Jerusha had a wicked arm with the leaves they used for coals. Sometimes he thought the taste of leaves was the last thing he remembered at night, and the first thing he thought of in the morning.

  But he would not have to play the Indian game for a while. For a whole glorious week or maybe even two, he was a man in a man’s world. Tommy decided to celebrate. Jackey might be only two and a half, but he already knew how to roar like a lion. Also, he worshiped Tommy, which Tommy reckoned was an excellent character trait. “Pirates,” decreed Tommy. “We’ll play pirates.”

  At crucial moments, though, just as the Dread Pirate Roberts (Tommy) threatened with magnificent rage to send the scurvy, thieving lubbers among his crew down the plank, directly into a frenzy of sharks, Jackey (the crew, good, bad, and middling) would wander off after a squirrel, or a bee, or the place where he remembered he had left some raisins two days ago. Or he would ask, What do sharks sound like? And keep asking, until Tommy came up with a good answer.

  Tommy decided that being the man of the house, as his father put it, from dawn until dusk was not going to be easy.

  Dr. Cotton Mather had the privilege of being attended in medical matters by his brother-in-law, Dr. John Clark. Nonetheless, on the twenty-first of June, one of the goods he devised was to encourage others in the neighborhood—those who could not, perhaps, be expected to bear the expense of Dr. Clark’s services—to rely upon Dr. John Perkins in the matter of the smallpox. His skill and piety made the doctor eminently worthy, Mather judged; his need was self-evident. Newly released from debtor’s prison, Dr. Perkins quivered at the threat of return. It was a fate for which Mather had developed a certain sympathy.

  While canvassing the neighborhood, urging the services of Dr. Perkins upon his flock, however, Dr. Mather became aware of a certain reticence.

  “If you please, sir,” one maid squeaked at last, “My father says to say he don’t want none of your advice in matters medical or physical, sir, though he would be pleased to retain your services in a more ministerial line. Prayers and sermons and whatnot.”

  It did not take him long to plumb the source of both her terrified embarrassment—she was bobbing through curtsies like a jack-in-the-box—and her father’s obstinate reluctance. Though she was the bearer of bad news quite against her will, she was voicing an alarmingly general murmuration against him. The Lord, it seemed, was blessing him with a new set
of trials. For it appeared that Dr. Douglass had not only squelched his plea for a physicians’ meeting, but had proceeded to spread lies of a most abominable sort.

  In return for evil, his inner voice bristled, Do Good.

  In this case, there was a particularly satisfactory good within his reach. The next morning, Dr. Mather shut himself up in his library and drew from a cupboard a sheaf of papers carefully wrapped up in ribbon and labeled. These he carried to his desk and settled down to write a Treatise on the Small Pox, in three parts: first, a section awakening the sentiments of Piety necessary in order to face death in a godly manner. Second, a section delineating the best medicines and methods the world had yet seen for managing the disease. And third, the new discovery of Inoculation.

  For he had, of course, copied out both Timonius and Pylarinus word for word—as close as would signify, at any rate—upon first reading them. Long before the miserly Dr. Douglass had locked them away in some secret treasure hoard of knowledge.

  Day brightened, and then faded again, and still his pen scrabbled on. Dusk had crept through most of its long summer-blue hour when he at last laid down his quill and wrung the cramps from his hands. He stood up and considered what to do with his treatise, a fine piece of work if he said so himself. In the right hands, he flattered himself—hands that would not burn it—these few humble pages might save many lives.

  Shall I give it to the Booksellers? he asked his diary. I am waiting for Direction .

  Direction came in the night. He would not spread it abroad indiscriminately, pearls before swine. He would see, however, that everyone fit to comprehend it, to judge its worth, should receive a copy. The next day, he noted in his diary, I write a Letter unto the Physicians, entreating them, to take into consideration the important Affair of preventing the Small Pox.