The Undressing of America: opening, draft 2

This is how the first chapter will begin, until either I or my editor decides that it has to change. I still haven't made up my mind about whether to start right here or lead with some kind of introduction.

Although the great forces of history are most likely immune to the acts of any individual will, and most of what we like to see as turning points are probably, really, the first manifestations of movements already bound to happen, still it’s interesting to speculate on how the cultural history of America may have turned on the shooting of that rabid dog in Winnipauk, Connecticut in the late summer of 1862. There were other events to the south that had a more obvious impact on the nation’s course and no doubt deserve the much greater attention historians have given them—the Battle of Antietam and President Lincoln’s first Emancipation Proclamation to name a couple—but even so, what happened inside the soul of one young man when he leveled his gun, not at a Confederate soldier but at a drooling mastiff, would echo through the next five decades and beyond.
          Tony Comstock was eighteen years old. Just six months before he had left New Canaan, one of those Congregationalist communities scratched by sheer puritan zeal out of the thin New England soil over a hundred years before, now withering slowly as the wealth of America moved to more temperate, more southerly, and more secular climes, to seek better fortunes in the mill town of Winnipauk, burgeoning with the recent arrival of a railroad link to the coast and the rest of the world. Tony was less interested in worldly fortune than in serving the austere God whose spirit had informed every joy and sorrow of his childhood, every lowering winter sky and hard row of sod and tender spring shoot of barley on his now lost family farm; but he had obligations. His mother had died when he was ten, his father had vanished while chasing another of his financial pipe dreams, and his older brother had gone to war to end the evil of slavery; his younger sisters were living with relatives, and Tony’s income provided their keep.
          In those six months, Tony had already impressed his Winnipauk neighbors with his energy, industry, and earnestness. Tony was, above all things, earnest. His round face, nascent jowls, full chest, and thick legs made him look several years older than he was. His air of complete devotion to every task he undertook, the gravity he brought to discussions of morals and politics, his obvious love of little children, and his unquestioning willingness to lend his energies to anyone who needed help made him seem older still. So it was that when rumors shot through the town of a mad dog on the loose, Tony was among the first men asked to hunt it down.
          This was not a request made lightly. Rabies was one of the great terrors of nineteenth century American life. There was no cure, or any treatment known other than washing the wound (which many people dismissed as superstitious nonsense anyway), and the contracting of it was a sentence to agonizing death, inevitable from the appearance of the first symptom. Reported cases had been rising since early in the century; although to what extent that reflected the genuine spread of an epidemic as opposed to the rise of a terror within the national imagination is hard to ascertain. America’s canine population surged exponentially along with its human population, and the ever-quicker flow from farms to towns and towns to cities brought dogs, like their owners, into closer contact. So epidemics are spread.
          But times of change stir their own special nightmares, too. In communities like those of New England, where once-homogeneous societies found themselves increasingly disrupted by rapid economic and population shifts, where the moral and philosophical control of the founding churches was being steadily eroded by spreading secularism and free thinking, the idea of the loyal family dog turning suddenly into an agent of death was a compelling one. Common belief held that the first symptom of rabies was a sudden mania, a feverish energy, a frantic and directionless roaming: canine echoes of the unbridled human ecstasies that earlier generations of New Englanders had read as products of witchcraft. Many a cry of “mad dog” went up before the creature in question had a chance to show the insatiable thirst and foaming chops that would have proved it to be rabid; and many a dog surely died for no more than a bout of uncharacteristic energy or anxious restlessness.