The Pox Party Read online

  I stepped closer to the table. “Sir,” I demanded softly, “with the respect due to me as your student, tell me why Mr. Sharpe wishes me to fail.”

  Wearily, Mr. Gitney said, “Mr. Sharpe does not wish you to fail.” He picked up strands of hair from before him and rolled them between his fingers. He wrapped the hairs around a thumb and tugged. At last, he admitted, “The nature . . . of the experiment . . . has changed.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “We receive our funds now from a consortium of men of affairs who have some interest in proving the inequality of African capacities.”

  I had known the answer, and yet, to hear it stated so baldly was terrifying.

  “Our investors took particular interest in your progress, but felt that the experiment was skewed by a certain favoritism towards the African subject. They requested that we institute new practices to ensure that the experiment was conducted with more complete impartiality.”

  “Who are they?” I whispered.

  “They are drawn from several of the Colonies. They are, for the most part, merchants, the owners of some few plantations . . . rice, tobacco. . . . They have been most generous in their funding.”

  I stepped backwards. “Sir,” I said, “how can this be supported?”

  He looked careful in the candlelight. “I would be racked with guilt,” he admitted, “were I not devoted to the belief that the results you will produce will more than outweigh their claim.”

  This was the comfort I received.

  I left the book on the table.

  Empedocles claims that in utero, our backbone is one long solid; and that through the constriction of the womb and the punishments of birth it must be snapped again and again to form our vertebræ; that for the child to have a spine, his back must first be broken.

  Following this interview, I walked to the chamber I shared with Bono, and I recalled all the lessons in language Dr. Trefusis had set me in the last weeks I’d been permitted to study with him:

  (A) In the reign of the Tarquins (so Livy tells us), a slave-boy was found sleeping in the palace with his head afire; it burned with a mystical flame as he slumbered, and yet was not consumed. When this boy, son of the captive Princess of Corniculum, awoke, the flames evaporated, leaving him unscarred; some years later, as this prodigious conflagration foretold, he was crowned King of Rome.

  (B) I read of the slave revolt of the wizard called King Antiochus.

  (C) I read of the Greek slaves who, endued with countless graces, taught their Roman masters’ children philosophy, declamation, poetry, and all the arts.

  (D) I read love-poems to bonded girls.

  (E) I read in Plutarch of the rise of the gladiatorial slave Spartacus.

  (F) I read of Diogenes the Cynic, who traveled the length and breadth of Greece in a bathtub, and who was captured by pirates and sold into slavery in Crete. When the slave-auctioneer inquired what skills Diogenes might offer, the philosopher replied, “Ruling men.”

  Some few months later, a mob assembled in Old South Meeting House; and, after a rousing word by Mr. Adams, some habited themselves as Mohawk Indians and repaired to the wharves, where they dumped tea.

  I did not hear of this charade until the next day, and did not understand its purport; rather thinking it a pleasant interlude from the more brutal games of the Sons of Liberty. There was something almost gentlemanly about it, a hint of sport. Dr. Trefusis and I walked along the wharves and spake of disguise, color, substance, and the solidity of matter.

  Far out in the harbor, tea clotted the brilliancy of sun upon the water. Men thin as insects rowed scows between the clumps, shepherding them with paddles, pressing down upon them, dousing them, drowning them, so that light might play unimpeded upon the winter sea.

  The months went by; I read my fragments and powdered Mr. Sharpe’s hair. I played dance-tunes at the convocations and entertainments of wealth. My mother sewed in the kitchen with the other slaves.

  We heard the countryside was full of insurrection. In every town, Loyalists and rebels rose against each other. Men were beaten; some were shot at in jest. The spirit of Anarchy spread everywhere his light and agitated wings.

  Merchants began to stock-pile for war, for siege. The Harbor was plied with barges and packets from all up and down the coast, delivering fuel and grain. There was, in all of the denizens of the town, an expectation of riot, famine, and sickness. In the countryside, rumors of smallpox spread like sedition. There was word that the pestilence crawled towards the city from the north shore, and that soon, in the alleys, we should be dying of it.

  On June 1st of that year, the fatal blow fell: the Port of Boston was closed; the Assembly dismissed; the Governor rescinded to England; General Gage, newly come from London and an audience with the King, appointed in the Governor’s place; the courts were in ruin; and it seemed all civil government was at an end.

  Many families began to flee the town; while others fled into that last hive of the government for protection: being rural justices who cleaved to the Tory cause, and met with hard words and had their horses maimed or painted; journeymen who had spake too loudly of their loyalty to the King at taverns; men who had been belabored about the head with the butts of muskets; farmers who had been hoisted up Liberty poles and forced to recant; shopkeepers who had persisted in selling their English wares, despite the injunctions of the rebel Committees. Such made their way into the city, where transport ships seemed daily to arrive, disgorging regiments of soldiers who paraded through the streets and encamped upon the Common.

  Fasts were declared, and public prayer. We knelt in the Negro aisles of the Meeting House asking for deliverance from what was to come. Other cities, too, called for fasts to offer up their corporate orisons; and, sensible of our distress, they sent flour and rice. Carts came all day across Boston Neck.

  We were among those who fled into the countryside.

  At the Gitney house, we packed our things in trunks. We closed up the windows with shutters and laid sheets upon the furniture, the house being prepared for dormancy. We rushed through the uncarpeted chambers, candlesticks clutched to our breasts. On the streets, we heard the marching of soldiers.

  Mr. Gitney hired wagons, and we were all employed in carrying out experimental apparati and stacking them behind the horses. Caged animals squabbled with us through the bars. We sent out wagon-load after wagon-load into the countryside.

  We were retreating to the house of one of Mr. Gitney’s brothers, one of the Young Men.

  The house was a spacious one, new built, in the town of Canaan, Massachusetts. We set up experimental chambers there, and fed the raccoons and serpents. We constructed our curious machines.

  We heard news — which word could not but quicken the blood — of common men rising in the thousands to empty the rural law courts of corruption and expel the un-elected favorites of government. We heard of troop movements in the countryside to seize powder and shot. We heard of free elections cancelled for fear of who would win.

  And in the midst of it, Bono was given away as a Christmas gift to a trustee of the College.

  Mr. Sharpe and Mr. Gitney both felt considerable trepidation at the onset of what promised to be the most mischievous of calamities. With the closure of the port, most of the College’s income was stopped up and its investments nullified; and so to anxiety was added penury.

  As a result, Mr. Sharpe and Mr. Gitney’s remonstrances with the committee of investors were grown particularly groveling and obsequious. To this date, I know not what terms they discussed, what blasphemous deal they tried to strike, abhorrent to their humanity. I know only that, in the course of negotiations, they elected to deliver Pro Bono as a garnish to a gentleman donor in the Virginia Colony.

  Bono and I sat in the country house’s garden. A thin snow had fallen the night before and grimed the weeds.

  “A new light of liberty appears in the land,” I said, without hope.

  “Aye,” said Bono.

  “
It may be that we shall not long be slaves.”

  He nodded without reply.

  We both surveyed the bedraggled stalks of dead things. The wind blew across us, over the brick walls. The sky was gray that day, and mobile.

  I asked him, “What do you think of?”

  “Coffles,” he said.

  “You will be a gentleman’s valet.”

  “I’ll be one skip closer to the West Indies,” he said. “Where they don’t bother to feed a man because they don’t bother to keep him alive.”

  I could not think on it. I wished to embrace him.

  O Lord of heaven — place Your hand upon him now, Your palm incised with age and suffering. The deeps of heat there in the Indies — he shall not go there — the ranks of chained men led out to the sugar-fields — the sun, buzzing in the heavens. O Lord — say that he shall not go there — decree it — the mud where men lie whitening as they die.

  “Bono,” I said, choking on my own panic — thinking thus then, as I pray devoutly now —“Bono, you have been like my —,” and I held forth my hand to touch him, not knowing what word could supply his curious role — a brother? A father?

  “Do not speak,” he said, rising. He took my hand and pulled me to my feet. He yanked my arm, and dragged me through the desolate orchard. He said, “I ain’t going anywhere I don’t wish. You be sure.” He led me through an arbor; we stood in a small grove of dead vines trailing purple across furniture of marble. There was a door there which led out into the pastures of Canaan. There were, as well, several terms, stone satyrs in the brambles.

  Bono pushed my head down towards a flat rock, on which the snow lay.

  “You see that?” he said. “Commit it to memory. It’s a magic rock.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You pray to that rock sometime, and it give you what you wish for. You see it now?”

  “Is this some frenzied retreat into your native animism?” I asked.

  “God damn, I’ll retreat my boot up your arse. Do you see it?” He thrust my skull towards the stone.

  “I see it.”

  I could hear him close to tears. “There’s going to be some day when you need it, and you come out here, and you pray to it. And you hold it close to your belly. And it will give you everything you ask. Does His Highness understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Does His Highness remember?”

  “His Highness does.”

  “Does His Highness, King of Nowhere, Monarch of Nothing, Lord of the Shit-hill Isles —”

  “Bono,” I said. “His Highness wishes to entertain a more decorous final image of you than being held over a rock and berated by some parcel of insanity.”

  He let loose his grip on me. I stood to my full height. I was of a height with him, though he was broader.

  He looked out over the wall into the orchard, squinting. “First week I was at the College,” he said, “they lit some kind of gas on fire. You recall that? Out in the orchard. You were little. A minikin.”

  “I recall it,” I said.

  “I thought they was gods. I thought, Now I’m walking in heaven, and it won’t ever matter what happens on Earth.”

  Together, we looked at the apple-trees against the winter sky.

  “Fine, then,” he said. “I’m going to go in now to put a bow in my hair. As befits a gift.”

  The next day, they took him to Salem to dispatch him in a coaster bound for Virginia. Through Dr. Trefusis’s kind intercession, I was permitted to ride with them, though atop the carriage, rather than within.

  We reached the Salem wharves late in the day; I climbed down to open the carriage door and set in place the steps. As Mr. Gitney and Bono descended, I could see in the lineaments of their faces that the ride of hours had not been passed in idleness, but rather marked by contest of will.

  Mr. Gitney having alerted the captain of the vessel to our arrival and arranged for two soldiers to conduct Bono to the ship, he returned to his charge.

  He said to Bono, “You refuse still to tell me what you heard?”

  Bono replied, “I don’t know what you think I know, sir.”

  Mr. Gitney nodded and scowled. “Then I wish you enjoyment of the Southern Colonies,” said he, and with that, turned and climbed back into the carriage.

  Bono and I faced each other. We embraced — or I should say, I embraced him, as his hands were shackled behind him until such time as the ship made open water.

  He looked at me; I looked at him.

  “Next time we meet,” he promised, “I’ll have a different name.”

  They rowed him out to the ship. I stood upon the shore and waved.

  He looked back once at us while they bundled him aboard; then he turned his face toward the sun.

  Without Bono, my days were a brown drudgery. My mother seemed defeated too by his absence, as he had long supplied her with companionship; and she and I went about our tasks without pleasure, slept without release in dreams, and ate without satiety.

  Canaan, where now we lodged, was full of Whigs and rebels. We watched at night by moonlight as they lugged cannon past our door on the way to Concord and Acton. They covered kegs of gunpowder with hay.

  We heard reports from Boston. The body politic was so disordered that all government seemed suspended. Soldiers patrolled through the streets, apprehending Negroes out at unseasonable hours on suspect errands. Groups of rebels, communicating by eerie whistles, carried out a nighttime justice, descending on informants silently. There was continual outcry against the troops by some — soldiers scuffling with boys, their heel-marks in the slush; girls surrounded by lanky privates.

  We went about our business in the countryside, in a town of slow undulating fields and great clouds.

  On the Canaan town green, the militia practiced loading and firing their muskets. We sate inside, and jumped with the reports of guns in the distance. Their officers claimed, with supercilious air, that they practiced speed and marksmanship in case the French should invade; but we all of us knew for what eventuality they prepared.

  And late in March, as we all awaited some imminent fatality, Mr. Gitney sent out invitations for a pox party.

  Canaan

  March the 20th, 1775

  Sir — Madam —

  I would be most gratified by your attendance at a Pox Party, to be given beginning the 1st of April at my brother Lemuel Gitney’s Lodgings — on which Day my Guests and their servants shall receive as it were the Kiss of Life upon the Arm — which shall prove your Immunity from the Plague of the Small Pox, according to the most current Methods. No one shall leave the Premises once the Inoculation is complete. The Party shall continue unabated, in full festival Mode, for some few weeks thereafter, or until the belittled Pestilence has run its course through the Assembled. Any inconvenience due to our sequestration will be outweighed by the Protection afforded both against the Pox itself and against other Tumults of this Colony, of which we all must be sensible.

  Commodious Quarters shall be erected for your Serving-People; the gayest and most gracious of Entertainments shall grace the Gathering throughout; and excellent Cuisine the Like of which you shall not have again while these oppressive Measures last. Contagion may well stalk these Fields, “his Eye-Sockets glaring Beams of frigid Light; his withered Weeds draped about the slats of his Emaciation”; but can we not bask in those Rays? And can we not dress him instead in Raiment of Silk, and teach him to dance the Minuet — and, the dance over, bid him bow and be GONE?

  In short — if you must take the sickness — I beg that you share it with

  Your most humble & affectionate,

  Mr. Josiah Gitney

  I have not been able to divine entirely why Mr. Gitney called for a pox party when he did. Certainly, the first and clearest motivation was that most obvious to view: that the smallpox circulated throughout the north shore at that time, and, in anticipation of its spread throughout the countryside — which, in a time of tumult, would be
rapid and rapacious — he proposed that all who had not previously suffered from the disease should be exposed to it through a prescribed process which rendered it, in most cases, inoffensive. By submitting guests to a mild form of the distemper, which should last for some few weeks, he might greatly curtail the mortality of his acquaintance and their households.

  And yet — at the time he announced the party, Boston was hearing only its first rumors of plague in the countryside. There was, as yet, no cause for alarm.

  Mr. Gitney had other reasons for announcing this convocation; these darker purposes, I only happened upon as the party progressed. Suffice to say, it was not medical foresight which prompted him to arrange this gruesome fête.

  Not foresight indeed — nor prognostication — for not except in nightmare could he have predicted what destruction this gathering would occasion; that even as my mother and I copied out the invitations at his command, the fates had bent their heads above our household, muttering, and were about to blast his College of Lucidity forever.

  My mother and I, as I have said, wrote the invitations; and runners were hired to take them throughout the city and the countryside. It was not far advanced into the spring, and the narrow streets were thick with mud, puddles bright in ruts near heaves. Men on errands had to step dainty to avoid being spattered.

  The guests, primarily, were the extended relations of Mr. Gitney, that sizeable clan of merchants known only as the Young Men, cheerful in demeanor, indeterminate in number. Some had fled the city; others, remaining, were sunk in an uncharacteristic despair, their trade irreparably harmed first by their investment in interdicted Indian lands, second by their participation in non-importation agreements, and thirdly, by the punitive closing of the Harbor by Parliamentary decree.

  Warships drifted there now; none could slip past.

  Taking good advantage of the bounty sent to the city’s relief, Mr. Gitney and Mr. Sharpe ordered wines and spirits, fruits procured by special appointment, beeves and hams, flour and honey, game-birds and squash, and, from a pest-house in Salem, a glass jar full of contaminate matter from the pox-sores of the dead.