Reincarnations

Harry Turtledove Reincarnations

THE HAUNTED BICUSPID

This one first appeared in The Enchanter Completed, the tribute anthology to L. Sprague de Camp that I had the privilege of editing. Being a tavern tale, it's a sort of hommage to de Camp and Pratt's classic Tales from Gavagan's Bar. That's why the bartender here is called "George M." You're supposed to think "Cohan," the name of de Camp and Pratt's barkeep. As for the rest, well, I had the chance to be a Poe-t, and I took it.

Here’s two dollars and fifty cents-in gold, by God, George M. A quarter eagle’s plenty to buy drinks for everybody in the place. Tell me when you need more. I’ll do it again.

What’s that you say, my friend? You see more gold now than you did just a few years ago? Well, I should hope you do, by thunder. It’s all coming from California, way out West. I don’t suppose any one would have thought the world held so much gold until they stumbled across it on that Sutter fellow’s land.

But I don’t feel like talking about gold right this here minute-except that that’s my gold on the bar. If I’m buying, part of what I’m buying is the chance to talk about any blamed thing I please. Anybody feel like quarreling about that?

No? Good.

All right, then. Here goes. Friends, my name is William Legrand. Most of you know me, and most of you call me Bill. I’m a plainspoken man, I am. Nothing fancy about me. Yes, I’m partial to canvasback duck and soft-shell crabs when I can get ‘em, but what Baltimorean isn’t? That’s not fancy-they’re right good eating, and who’ll tell me they aren’t?

I was born in the year of our Lord 1800. Last year of the eighteenth century, that was, and don’t you believe any silly fool who tries to tell you it was the first year of the nineteenth. As of the twenty-seventh ultimo, that makes me a right round fifty-one years of age. I am not ashamed to say I have done pretty well for myself in that half century and a little bit. If there’s a single soul who sells more furniture or finer furniture in Baltimore, I’d like to know who he is. Helen and I have been married for twenty-eight years now, and we still get on better than tolerably well. I have three sons and a daughter, and Helen was lucky enough never to lose a baby, for which I thank God. One of my sons went to Harvard, another to Yale. I wasn’t able to do that kind of thing myself, but a man’s children should have more chances than he did. That’s the American way, don’t you think? And I have two little granddaughters now, and I wouldn’t trade ‘em for anything. Not for the moon, do you hear me?

If it weren’t for my teeth, everything would be perfect.

I see some of you wince. I see some of you flinch. I see I am not the only man in this splendid establishment to find himself a martyr to the toothache. I am not surprised to make that discovery. People laugh about the toothache-people who haven’t got it laugh at it, I should say. And Old Scratch is welcome to every single one of those laughing hyenas.

I was still a young man the first time I faced the gum lancet, the punch, the pincers, the lever, and the pelican. They sound like tools for an old-time torturer, don’t they? By God, gentlemen, they are tools for an old-time torturer. Any of you who ever had dealings with a dentist more than a few years ago will know what I am talking about. Oh, yes, I see some heads going up and down. I knew I would.

Here’s another quarter eagle, George M. You keep that river flowing for these gentlemen, if you would be so kind.

People would say, You try this, Bill, or, You do that, Bill, and it will not hurt so bad. I would drink myself blind before I went to have a tooth yanked. Or I would take so much opium, I could not even recollect my own name. Or I would do both those things at once, so that my friends would have to steer me to the latest butcher because I could not navigate on my own.

And when the damned quack got to work, whoever he was that time, it would hurt worse than anything you can think of. If he grabs a tooth with the pincers, and instead of pulling it he breaks it, and he has to jerk out all the fragments one at a time, what else is it going to do? I ask you, my friends, what else can it possibly do?

I tell you frankly, I was more relieved than sorry when I lost the last tooth down below-ten years ago it was now. My bottom false teeth fit tolerably well, and I don’t mind ‘em a bit. But I wanted to hang on to the ones I have up top. I still do want that, as a matter of fact. If you have a full plate up there, they hold in your uppers with springs, and that is another infernal invention. There are plenty of ways I would like to be like George Washington, but that is not one of them.

But God does what He wants, not what you want. Not what I want, either. About six months ago, it was, when one of my top left bicuspids went off like it had a fire lit inside it.

What’s a bicuspid? On each side, top and bottom, you have got two teeth betwixt your eyeteeth and your grinders. Ask a dentist, and he will tell you they’re bicuspids. I have done a powerful lot of palavering with dentists over the years. I know how they talk. I am a man who likes to learn things. I want to find out just precisely what they are going to inflict on me before they go and inflict it.

And a whole fat lot of good that has done me, too.

I kept hoping the toothache would go away. Might as well hope the bill collector or your mother-in-law will go away. You stand a better chance. Before long, I knew it was time to get me to a dentist-that or go plumb out of my mind, one. I had not had to lose a chopper for five or six years before that. The last quack I had gone to was out of business. Maybe the folks he tormented strung him up. I can hope so, anyhow.

So I found me another fellow, a Dutchman named Vankirk. He grinned when he saw my poor sorry mouth. His teeth, damn him, were as white as if he soaked ‘em in cat piss every night. For all I know, maybe he did.

He poked at my poor sorry chopper with one of those iron hooks his miserable tribe uses. You know the type I mean-like out of the Spanish Inquisition, only smaller. He had to pry me off the ceiling afterwards, too. You bet he did. Then he gave me another shiny smile. "Oh, yes, Mr. Legrand," he says, "I can have that out in jig time, and a replacement in the socket, and you will not feel a thing."

I laughed in his face. "Go peddle your papers," I says. "I am not a blushing bride at this business. I have been with your kind of man before. I have heard promises like that before. I have stupefied myself with every remedy known to nature. And it has hurt like blazes every single time."

"Every remedy known to nature, perhaps," says Vankirk. "But what about remedies known to man? Have you ever visited a dentist who uses chloroform?"

Now, I had heard of his stuff. It was written up in the Baltimore Sun not so long before. But, "Just another humbug," says I.

Vankirk shook his head. "Mr. Legrand, chloroform is no humbug," he says, solemn as a preacher at a millionaire’s funeral. "They can take off a man’s leg with it-never mind his tooth, his leg-and he will not feel a thing until he wakes up. I have been using it for six months, and it is a sockdolager."

In my day, I have been lied to by a good many dentists. I am familiar with the breed. If this Vankirk was lying, he was better at it than any other tooth-drawer I have had the displeasure to know. I felt something I had not felt since my very first acquaintance with the pincers. Friends, I felt hope.

"You can pop a replacement tooth in when you yank mine, you say?" I ask him. "I have had that done before, more than once, and never known it to hold above a year."

"Plainly, you have been visiting men who do not know their business," says Vankirk. "From examining your mouth, I believe I have the very tooth that will make a perfect fit in your jaw."

He opened a drawer and rummaged in a box of teeth and finally found the one he wanted. It looked like a tooth to me. That is all I can tell you. It did not have blood and pus all over it, I will say that, the way mine do when one butcher or another hauls them out of my jaw. I ask him, "Where did it come from?"