The Pox Party

by M. T. Anderson

  “I am young,” I said.

  “I did not mean you.”

  “I would — could I do it — I would wish to dance with them.”

  He winced.

  My mother fell.

  Dr. Trefusis rose instantly to his feet. I could not rise with such swiftness.

  Others were gathered around her. I stumbled to my feet; my leg dragged, deficient in its circulation.

  Already, she sat up. Her eyes were wide. She whispered to herself. Inquiries were made as to her strength; she responded that she had a turtle’s shell upon her, would not let her vault as she wished. She attempted to swat at something — the shell — upon her back, crying with the frustration.

  “She is distempered,” said Dr. Trefusis. He went to her side. “Will a gentleman assist me?”

  I went and took her other arm, and we raised her up. Dr. Trefusis stumbled beneath her weight, before Mr. Gitney stepped in.

  Together, we drew her out of the dance.

  As the door shut behind us, the music struck up again, and the dancing carried on.

  My mother being laid upon her mattress, I bowed and made to retire from the chamber.

  “Octavian,” said Mr. Gitney, “you sat.”

  I inclined my head and awaited reproach.

  “You require no instruction in this matter . . . to sit before guests . . . it disrespects them and the house.”

  “I plead my fever, sir.”

  “You are a rational being. Your fever is but a state. . . . The sole mitigation I can summon is that you did not sit in a chair which might have been occupied by a guest, but settled upon the floor.”

  My mother moaned from her pallet.

  “There is no time for the wanted objurgation,” said Mr. Gitney, frowning. I knew not his word, and hesitated; he, perceiving my fault, explained its meaning and derivation while my mother begged for water. He bade me return to the dance and take up my fiddle again, and so I stepped out of the chamber, he kneeling beside my mother to minister to her.

  My spirits flagged with the exhaustion of illness; their mute disorder rendered more uncomfortable by awareness of hostile suspicion all around me, fear at my mother’s state, and, finally, by a confused sense that Bono had been exiled groundlessly. Circumstanced thus, my thoughts were not of the most acute, but moved with a bewildered sluggishness; and for some moments I stood outside in the dark of the yard, engaged in attempts to collect my wits before returning to my task.

  The voices of the younger of the Young Men burst into the night; and the laughter of damsels; a youth yelling, “There is the Negro boy.”

  They approached, pulling each other by sleeve and hand. “Search up and down the house,” said the youth to me. “Find us blindfolds.”

  I did not move, but regarded him with astonishment.

  “Now,” said he.

  “Six,” said a girl.

  “We will have hiding.”

  “And forfeits.”

  “And blunders.”

  “I like a game to grant favors.”

  “And kisses.”

  I nodded. My spirits were all in a ferment. I thought on Bono; I thought on his final scene with me.

  I walked away from them into the night.

  “Boy?” one of them called.

  “Mr. Gitney has requested . . . I should . . . ” I said to them, and bowed, too weak to complete the excuse; and so I continued my retreat.

  I fled to the garden; I fled to the stone Bono had marked out for me to worship.

  The night was filled with wind, the orchard with motion. Dimly I heard calling behind me.

  I fell upon my knees and scrabbled at the dirt around the stone. He had bade me pray to it, and in hasty wise, I did: hollers for my mother’s safety, for Bono’s own, pled silently within.

  He had told me to lift the stone, and so recalling, I drew it forth from its socket. The dirt beneath was rich and marbled with the white roots of those plants which grow in darkness.

  There lay on the dirt a ring of keys.

  I blinked and reached forth to touch them.

  Bono had, I ascertained, connived to secrete them when we had removed to this house from the town; having no use for them upon his exile, he had left them for me.

  I drew them forth.

  Once the surge of excitation had passed from my frame — his gesture in leaving them as sure as a hand upon my shoulder from that most solicitous of mentors — I revolved plans in my head of some future escape. Now that I had in my possession these keys, I might slip from the house with my mother, when she was well, and together we might run for —

  My fancy convolved places of flight.

  But there, my plan suffered, and I recognized that this was why Bono had not himself fled, all regions being hostile, freedom being found nowhere. In a house such as this, in all events, no key was necessary for exit. The doors were not often locked, and we frequently were sent out by night to the shed or the yard, and might at such times slip away, and our absence remain unnoticed until the next morning.

  He had, I supposed, used them to assure himself of the freedom of the house; even more, for the defiance of knowing he had the liberty of motion, unknown to his masters.

  Still, it was a gift from he whom I worshipped most in this world; and I determined that my mother and I should benefit from it.

  And so I slipped the keys within my waistcoat pocket and returned to the house to find blindfolds for the guests.

  And then the poxy days began in earnest: men groaning on their beds for water; women groping their way along the corridors; a girl singing by the rented harpsichord until blood came from her nose and mouth; the linens I dragged down the steps, befouled with sickness; a child uncovering his back to display a mass of cheesy suppuration.

  Much of the company was miserable, but not otherwise too incommoded; some a few pocks, but not many; and of course, those upon whom it had been visited before were immune, and could aid in the care for their loved ones, who now lay panting on their mattresses.

  My case was benign. The worst of it was the expectation that I still fulfill my duties in ministering to the others who were laid low; so I was employed running ewers of water up the steps; bathing the foreheads of the little ones; and aiding the cook and maids with the management of the dirty crockery. I felt every minute like I should tumble into sleep precipitously. In some quiet moments, I folded myself in a corner and did sleep, and the cook did not wake me.

  A few men, slow-witted and pale, played faro at the gaming-tables. Wives doddered through, clutching at chair-backs. There were dramatic readings of poetry in the parlor.

  The sickness was heaviest upon three: the boy to first achieve a pock; and one of the love-triangle — the triumphant rival, who now tossed and turned in his fever, his face swiftly stippled with sores; and, last, my mother, whose head was exceeding hot, and whose palms were gathering into virulence. Her cheeks were ruddy and chapped in a way that presaged irruption.

  She regained her senses after her collapse. A night’s sleep recalled her to herself. She requested a gourd filled with wine be placed by her side. She lay on her flat pallet in the servants’ quarters, exiled from her bedchamber, where several of the women of quality were sleeping. The maids moved softly around her, padding to and fro from their ticking.

  “Octavian,” she said, “must you work?”

  “They will let me sleep soon.”

  She raised her arm and dabbled her fingers in the wine. Her hand was limp and covered in sores. They were on her elbows now, too. “I was foolish, to dance,” she said. “They must be laughing about me now.”

  “They are laughing about nothing,” I said. “The most healthy among them are lying abed, reading out fairy tales to one another.”

  “Will you read me fairy tales?”

  “I do not have any books,” I said.

  She frowned and turned to the wall. “Thank you, Octavian.”

  “I will — I will tell you stories. Fairy stories f
rom Ovid. As I remember them. When I am released from my duties.”

  I would not have been released from my duties at all — nor would have the other less-fevered servants — and we would have received few of the comforts of the sick, had Mr. Gitney not been conducting an experiment to determine the relative susceptibility of Homo afri and Homo europæi to the pox; which survey, as I demonstrated to him, should be invalidated, did we not receive the same treatment as our masters.

  Then he agreed, and sent me to go sleep; which is a good thing; for my balance was growing poor, and my head hurt so prodigiously that I could but picture one of the torture devices I had seen in Bono’s book, a helmet of metal over my skull, constricting, my eyes peering out, like an animal about to be struck.

  The fevers for some were passing. Children now played in the yard. Women went on long, constitutional walks with their husbands and beaux through the fields of the house. Slaves went before them, carrying red banners to warn off field hands and poachers.

  The child who had first contracted the pox died in the night. The pestilence had grown so thick within his throat in colonies and clusters that he could not even sip water without the most excruciating pain. Late one night, as his brothers lay beside him, something within him ruptured, and with spasms of asphyxiation, he choked, and, hanging off the bed, he quivered and ceased; taken to that place where, I trust, the waters are cool on the tongue and the sunlight eternal.

  His body was carried out to the shed, where it corrupted.

  I ministered to the Young Man who had caught the pox worst. His disfiguration was complete, his whole skin clotted with pustules. They bled upon the linens, and every position was agony. We could not rearrange his limbs so that his nerves might quiet their shrill attack; he desperately sought, but could not find, sleep’s oblivion.

  Waking was a torment to him.

  My mother’s hands and face had burst forth in sores. I sat by her side when I could.

  The darkness in the slaves’ quarters was cut only by rushlights. In that ruddy light, I could not see the full bloody blush of the pustules. They ran across the ridges of her cheeks.

  She reached up with her hand, already encrusted, and touched the excrudescencies gingerly.

  “I won’t scratch them,” she said. “They will not scar if they don’t burst.”

  Mr. Gitney had given me a lotion to spread over her sores. I put some upon my fingers and rubbed her face gently.

  She wept. Her mouth was an horrible shape; a lamentatory shape.

  At other times, she did not weep, but stared at the rafters and repeated, “I will not scratch, Octavian. Although I itch. I have never known an itch like this one. It fills the room.”

  I fetched her some water from the ewer.

  “Can you feel it?” she asked. “You must. It is like a god. All-knowing.”

  At other times, blessedly, she slept.

  The calamity which cast the world into flame occurred early on an April morning, when all was still black night. We awakened to the ringing of the Meeting House bell, the firing of warning muskets. We heard shouting in the main house.

  My mother moaned and rustled her sheets. I told her I would ascertain the situation.

  I dressed quickly and crossed the yard. Two of the Young Men stood by the back door of the house, watching me approach. They each held a fowling gun at ready.

  Inside, the ladies were in high panic. They all sought seats away from the windows. The men called up and down the stairs. A Young Man dashed down two flights, a musket clamped in each hand.

  Dr. Trefusis sat amidst the tumult, sketching a snakeskin.

  I stood against the wall, awaiting instructions.

  “The King’s Army have marched out of Boston,” said Dr. Trefusis, without concern. “It appears they plan on seizing munitions from our militia.”

  “By God!” said Mr. Gitney, who was walking by. “We shall not be moved by this!”

  “When Syracuse fell,” Dr. Trefusis offered, “Archimedes the engineer did not flee, but even as he was run through with a sword, sat in his own house, working out geometric equations with a stick in the sand. His last words were, ‘You may attack my head, but stay away from my circles.’”

  “Precisely!” said Mr. Gitney. “We shall not be chased from our own house!”

  “We have been already,” Dr. Trefusis noted. “We live in Boston.”

  Mr. Gitney, however, was moved on to another room, shouting out commands and flapping the arms of his banyan-robe.

  We heard the whistle of fifes on the green and the rattle of cheap drums.

  Mr. Sharpe descended upon me and sent me to the kitchen. Two Young Men with guns were posted there to watch the slaves. We began cooking their breakfast, somewhat constrained for space, with so many in so small a chamber, and the fire burning large within the hearth.

  During the day, people ran by upon the road that passed the house. Many were men with guns.

  The Young Men shouted to them from the windows, but few stopped. We could get but confused accounts of the engagement. A few men from Acton, the next town over, had been slain; the British were marching in the thousands. At one moment, the British were in retreat; an hour later, the word was that they were triumphant, that they were upon us.

  There is no need to animadvert to the deeds of that day, which shall resound, for weal or woe, as long as this terrestrial globe has habitation.

  Suffice it to say the British expedition met with resistance at Lexington, and fired upon the local militia. I have heard that a woman watching from her house saw her husband hit; that he crawled, dying, across the grass while Patriots stepped over him and fired at the regiment; that he made it to the door of his house, to the arms of his wife, where, liberty quickened, he expired.

  Suffice it also to say that brave men faced each other across the bridge at Concord; that more blood was spillt; and that the British retreated then towards Boston, hounded all the way from behind stone wall and smokehouse, from the garret windows of great houses and the dooryards of small ones. The atrocities were countless: At Concord Bridge, a Patriot boy swollen with ire saw that a Redcoat had not died with sufficient haste, and as the man screamed, scalped him with an axe. Fearful of all windows, of any door, of walls and banks and gullies and wells, the grenadiers and light infantry shot indiscriminately as they ran for hours along the road, starving, parched, covered in mud from the waist down from having waded through swamp to reach the mainland. Muzzles were leveled at them from every side. A soldier paused to bind an old man’s wound, and the old man, revived, shot him. Soldiers ran a bayonet through a woman in labor. The final casualty of this sanguine retreat was a little boy who paused by a window to see the brave coats and flashing gorgets of the army-men; glimpsing a head there by the glass, they shot him in the face.

  Outside, the British Colonies of America detached themselves with infinite lumbering care, while within our enclave I thought on nothing that day but my mother. I did not mark the sobbing in the street, though I saw, when I passed by a window, that a hay-wagon laid with three corpses rolled past.

  Her cries were a fine trickle. They leaked from her without cease, as the pox mobbed her face and ravaged her gullet. Her agony was continual.

  I looked on the appalling irruptions that bubbled across her forehead now, her cheeks, her chin, her eyelids, and I knew that I should never see her again as once she was. She knew it, too, and in the silence when only her breath rasped, we regarded this fact, both of us, as if together admiring a portrait painted of her on the wall.

  I could not hold her hand without causing her irritation so great that she writhed. I wished to comfort her, but there was no comfortable action I could take; I desired to console her, but there was no word that could be a consolation.

  Her fever grew worse in the evening, as it did every evening. No one marked much my absence from the house. There was too much rushing about from window to window, too much stacking of arms in the bedrooms, too much muttering of
strategic niceties as men smoked in the attic, for the presence or absence of one boy to be noted.

  A silence and immobility came upon her in the evening-tide.

  “A death-bed’s a detector of the heart,” the poet Young has written. “Here tired dissimulation drops her mask.”

  I sat by her side.

  “I was born,” she whispered, “half a world away.”

  I could not imagine what skies she saw, what men and women gathered about her, what childish scenes crowded in upon her. I could not imagine the face of my grandfather, my grandmother, whom I have never seen. Perhaps an image of my father, blank to me, beckoned in her fancy in a house where I might have grown. I drew my chair close upon the edge of the bed.

  “Tell me,” I said, “of your country.”

  “I have told you before.”

  “I do not wish to . . . I will not question you, but . . .” I stopped, unwilling to make my first foray into filial disobedience with one who faced her Maker — but could not refrain from saying, “I ask you not to tell me children’s tales of panthers pulling chariots.”

  “I never spake of panthers.”

  “And there was no orchid throne. Tell me what you sat on.”

  “Octavian . . .”

  “I beg of you,” said I, “tell me of the Empire of Oyo.”

  “That would gain you nothing,” she whispered. “It is all gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Not gone. Lost.”

  “When you sat, what did you sit upon?”

  She sighed, and in a cracked voice, said, “This is no time . . . for telling stories. . . .”

  “Tell me one true thing. I will know one true thing. Tell me what you sat on.”

  She did not speak to me.

  “The ground?” I demanded. “Did you sit sometime upon the ground? A stool?” I pushed aside my chair and squatted, placing my palms upon the floorboards. “I want to touch something. Tell me of an object! Tell me something I could have touched!”

  She did not respond. Her breath was heavy. There was a stench in the air. Her hands lay before her.