We parted, agreeing to meet at some later time. I confess my motives were selfish. I never became a true acolyte of Timson’s; I did not believe that the addition of Honduras to our Union, or any amount of new slave states, could head off the reckoning that yet awaits our nation, and to this day every time I hear of a negro lashed or beaten I find myself drawn one inch closer to the abolitionist camp. But Timson could prove the biscuit, I felt, and this I wanted more than anything.
Returning to the Strand, I was accosted by two ruddy-nosed drunks, their mouths curled into devilish grins as they grabbed at my handbills and bellowed, “A sample, Dr. Toad, a sample!” The nickname grew from a rumor about my ingredients, and such treatment was in the normal course of things. But it was not always so. Three years ago the biscuit was birthed into the world with great hope and fanfare. As with all my inventions, my motivation was the alleviation of suffering. To make the biscuit I boiled beef, reducing it from eleven pounds to one, and combined the resulting extract with flour, which I then baked, creating an incorruptible and easily transportable nugget of nourishment. With it, ships at sea would have no worry for starvation, and missionaries and soldiers cut off from supplies would have all the benefit of a full meal in a single bite. Dr. Asa Smith was my partner. He had lodged in my back room for two months when he first arrived in the city, and I had held him in friendship ever since, allowing him to treat cholera patients in my parlor during the occasional epidemic. Though it was his habit to oppose my contrivances, he saw the biscuit’s merit and gave over half his small fortune for its support, and together we showed the biscuit at the Great Exhibition in London and sent canisters of it to Arctic explorers and British troops in the Crimea. Everywhere it was met with enthusiastic praise, and on our return to Galveston we manufactured thousands of pounds more.
And then all orders dropped. A committee of army officers in Washington complained of the flavor. Flavor! I made no claims of flavor, only sustenance. Indeed, it is my true belief that a cabal of meat purveyors bribed the committee, for they stood to lose everything to my biscuit. Whatever the cause, it was only the last failure in a long list, ranging from the terraqueous machine to the potato pill and bone bread.
After the committee’s report, Dr. Smith and I were left with a warehouse full of meat biscuit, twenty thousand pounds packed in barrels, canisters, and bottles. Often we made our nightly meals upon it — I prepared the biscuit in diverse ways, sometimes in puddings, sometimes in broths, sometimes in pies, sometimes simply toasted. Even so, this was more than Dr. Smith and I could eat on our own were we given until Armageddon.
It was only in the last season that the fever took my Penelope. I shut myself in the study and turned away from all projects, including the meat biscuit. Overcome by a bleakness of the soul, I spent days tracing the grains of my desk with my fingertips, searching my mind for methods of revivification. I refused food and drink, and after the first night I abandoned hope. I was emptied. She had suffered too many days, and when they took her coffin from the house I could not bear to watch. The sight of her laid out on the bed haunted me so, as did the memory of her constant calling, first for water, then for release. Dr. Smith, who had done his best to ease her pain, managed the affairs of the burial, and I only left the study to follow the black-draped wagon down Avenue P, its horses tired from the many loads forced on them by the fever-ridden island.
Distraught, when I returned from the cemetery I went once more into isolation, plagued by visions of Penelope’s deathbed agonies. Yet turning my mind to the rescue of others soon became a salve, and thinking of the fever’s coincidence with summer’s heat — a fact well known by all but little acted upon — I drew up plans for a sealed box in which men could pass frozen through the pestilential season, untouched by infection. Driven by those deathbed visions, my labors were unceasing, and when I emerged from the study two days later I erected the box in the side yard, near the fig and the oleander we had planted on our wedding day. The box was three feet tall, ten feet long, and six feet wide, piped with ether and built of wooden double walls that I reinforced with iron and lined with a mixture of cotton and corncobs. Completed, it stood like a long dwarf house between the two twiggy nuptial scrubs. For patent purposes, I named it the Cooling Safe. It would be my monument to Penelope’s memory. If only I had built the box while she yet lived!
Pleased with the Cooling Safe’s construction, I invited Dr. Smith to come inspect it. I waited as he opened the box’s door and crawled about inside, tapping the ether pipes and checking my calculations. When he finished, he said nothing, but clasped my hand and looked hard into my eyes before riding back to his office.
The next day I went about the city soliciting volunteers to test the box. The men at the Tremont and on the wharf only shook their heads. They said I had taken “a bad turn.” They could not understand. “You shall not freeze me to death, Dr. Toad!” Captain Briggs shouted, twisting his arm from my grip in the Liberty saloon. “Not death!” I countered. “I shall freeze you to life!” But he only chuckled and took his whiskey, as the others had done. I returned home, sullen at their refusal, and as I considered the box our slave boy John tugged at my sleeve and asked about repairing the chicken coop. My mind seized on the opportunity. I gave John some ham and a blanket and put him in the box, showing him the gutta-percha breathing tube and instructing him to knock soundly on the door if he should feel any deleterious effect. At first he was not obliging, but I swore I’d cuff him (an empty threat) and he crawled inside. I shut the door behind him and waited, sitting on the steps of our porch, my chin in my palm, my other hand holding the mourning ring made of Penelope’s fine golden hair.
I watched the box for nearly an hour before John banged on the door. I opened it and found him shivering, nearly passed out.
“John, are you all right?” I asked, my arms around his torso as I pulled him free, and he said, teeth chattering, “Yes, master, just a mite cold.”
Once I had John clear of the box, I took him into the study, sat him in a chair, and administered a series of tests to his person. His skin was cold to the touch, and I draped a second blanket over his shoulders to stop him shivering.
“Did you feel any spells come upon you?”
“I don’t know. It was all dark, and too cold to tell spell from no spell.”
I felt his head, his chest, his back, his feet. He had been cooling evenly, moving steadily toward the stasis I had predicted.
“Master,” he said to me then. “Please tell me what it is I done to get punished in that shack.” He gathered the blankets closer about him and looked up to me. “I promise I won’t do it no more.”
His mouth was open in pleading, his eyes teary. I held his hand, feeling the tips of his fingers. They had warmed faster than I expected.
The day after I met Timson in the Strand, I found him waiting for me outside the warehouse. He was sitting at the door, his head leaned against it, his wide hat low over his eyes. His clothes were dusty and rumpled, and I believe he may have slept in the street. I nudged him awake, and he asked if he might now sample the meat biscuit. He told me he had heard intriguing stories of my career. This I ignored — I knew what others said of me. I toasted him a small portion of the biscuit, and when he bit it, he declared its taste satisfactory. “This manna will feed my army,” he said, chewing still as he straightened his coat, “and strengthen its conquering hand.” He made a fist and brought it down on an imaginary Honduran’s head.