Harry Turtledove (Editor) - The Enchanter Completed

Like I said, friends, I have had teeth transplanted before. Not a one of them stayed in place long. I had said as much to the tooth-drawer. I started to say so again. But then I shut my mouth, and not on account of I was still bleeding some. He knew what he was talking about with the chloroform. Maybe he knew what he was talking about here, too.

"Can you walk?" he asks me. "Are you all right to go?"

I got to my feet. The room swayed some, but it was not too bad. I have felt drunker than I did just then. "I am fine, thank you," says I. "And I do thank you-believe me, I do." I think this was the first time I ever thanked a tooth-drawer after escaping his clutches. I confess, though, I may be mistaken. Now and then, I have been suffering sufficient so as to thank one of those brigands no matter what he did to me.

"Walk around my room here a bit. I want to make certain you are steady on your pins," Vankirk says. So I did that. It was not too bad. On my third or fourth circuit, I caught the dentist's eye. He nodded, for I had satisfied him. Says he, "Come back in a fortnight. I will take the wire off that new tooth I put in there. It should do fine on its own. With any luck at all, it will last you the rest of your life."

"I will do just as you say. Let us make the appointment now," I answer him. So we did. He wrote it in a book he had, and he wrote it for me on a scrap of paper. I put that in my waistcoat pocket. "And after that," says I, and I planted my beaver hat on my head, "you will see me nevermore."

Looking back, I do believe that to be the very commencement of my troubles, the beginning of a descent into the maelstr-m from which I was fortunate in the extreme to escape unscathed, or nearly so. But at this time I knew nothing of what lay ahead, nothing of the ordeal to which I was to be subjected.

My head still whirled a bit from the chloroform and from the laudanum. I could walk, however, and knew where I was going. And I was leaving the dentist's, and it did not hurt. It did not hurt . Since the Passion and Resurrection of our Lord, I do not think God has wrought a greater miracle.

When I returned to my house, Helen flew into my arms. "Oh, Bill! Poor Bill!" she cried. "How are you, you sorry, abused creature?"

"I am-well enough," I answered, and regaled her with the tale of my experience. As she hearkened to the story, her eyes, the outward expression of her soul, grew ever wider in astonishment. Kissing her tenderly yet carefully, I continued, "And so you see, my dear, I am in a state to be envied rather than pitied."

"No one who loses a tooth is to be envied," she said, which is true enough, "but I am gladder than I can express that it was not the torment you have known too many times."

"So am I, by all that is holy," I replied. "He told me the chloroform was no humbug, and he told me the truth. Who would have expected such a thing from a dentist?"

My three sons, my daughter, and her husband, knowing I was to be subjected to this latest bout of toothly torment, came to call upon me in turn to learn how I was, and were pleasantly amazed to discover me so well. I am, as I have previously observed, fortunate in my family.

They all exclaimed to no small degree on observing me to be free of the agonies I had hitherto endured during and subsequent to the forced removal of that which Nature purposed to endure for ever. And Benjamin, my eldest, on learning in full what had transpired, said, "So you have another man's tooth in your jaw in place of your own?"

"I do indeed," I replied.

"And from what unlucky soul came the mortal fragment?" he inquired.

"Why, from a fallen hero of the late war against Mexico," I informed him. "So, at any rate, said Mr. Vankirk. He seeming otherwise veracious, I have no cause to doubt his word- But why do you laugh? What have I said or done to inspire such mirth?"

"You will know, dear and loving Father," said Benjamin, "that my particular friend is Dr. Ernest Valdemar, with whom I studied at Harvard College. Owing to your dental miseries, we have found occasions too numerous to mention on which to discuss such matters. He has, generally speaking, a low opinion of transplanted teeth."

"As has Mr. Vankirk, generally speaking," I replied. " Exceptio probat regulam , however, and he believed I would do well with this new tooth inserted into my jaw. Since he spoke the truth-indeed, if anything, less than the truth-regarding the analgesic and anaesthetic properties of chloroform, I see no reason not to hope, at least, he likewise had cause to be sanguine about my long-continuing use of a tooth now valueless to the soldier who once bore it."

He held up a hand to forestall my further speech, and then declared, "Dr. Valdemar has also a low opinion of those who gather these bits of ivory for the tooth-drawers' trade-harvesters, he styles them. He says, and he should be in a position to know, that the bulk of the teeth employed in dentures and in transplantation come not from battlefields but from graveyards and even from the potter's field, stolen at night in the dark of the moon by those whose deeds must not see the light of day. Whose tooth, then, Father, dwells now in that socket once your own?"

I will not-I cannot-deny the frisson of horror and dread shooting through me at this question. If the donor of the dental appendage was not the stalwart soldier to whom Vankirk had animadverted, who was he? Who, indeed? Some fiend in human shape? Some nameless, useless, worthless scribbler, his brief, strutting time on earth all squandered, his soul gone to fearful judgement, and his fleshly envelope flung now into a pauper's grave?

My laugh holding more heartiness than I truly felt, I essayed to make light of my beloved Benjamin's apprehensions. "In a fortnight's time, I shall see Vankirk again; it is then he will remove the wire affixing the new tooth to its neighbor, that neighbor being one of the handful of sound instruments of mastication remaining in my upper mandible," I said. "That will be time enough to discuss the matter with him, and, I pledge to you, I shall not omit doing so."

Setting a kindly hand upon my shoulder, my eldest said, "Let it be as you wish, then, Father. My concern is only for you; I would not have you-contaminated by some unclean bit of matter rightfully residing on the far side of the tomb."

My own chief concern after receipt of the new tooth was not contamination but suppuration, the almost inevitable bout of pus and fever attendant upon such rude intrusions upon the oral cavity as the tooth-drawer is compelled to make. Having suffered several such bouts-having, indeed, lost a cousin at an untimely age as a result of one-I knew the signs, and awaited them with the apprehension to be expected from a man of such knowledge. Yet all remained well, and, in fact, I healed with a rapidity hardly less astonishing to me than the anodyne of chloroform itself. By the third day after the extraction, I was up and about and very largely my usual self once more.

Fourteen days having passed, I repaired to the illustrious Vankirk's so that he might examine the results of his ministrations upon me. "Good morning, Mr. Legrand," he said. "How fare you today?"

"Exceeding well; monstrous well, you might even say," I replied. "Undo your wire, sir, and I shall be on my way."

"If the socket be healed sufficiently, I shall do just as you say. In the meantime"-here gesturing towards the chair whence I had been fortunate enough to make my escape half a month before-"take a seat, if you would be so kind."

"I am entirely at your service," I said, reflecting as I sat upon how great a prodigy it was that one such as I, with my fear both morbid and well-earned of those practicing the dentist's art, should allow such a pronouncement to pass his lips as any thing save the most macabre jest.