“I ain’t no coward, but I ain’t no fool either.”
He leaned away from me then and blinked. I had a strange feeling that I had insulted him somehow. He said, as if to himself, “I thought you better than this.”
Now I was the one insulted. “Goddamn you. Gimme a boost.”
He seized my shirt at the back of the neck, my trousers at the waistband, and before I had time to gasp, I was halfway through the opening. Headfirst I crawled in farther while he, holding to my ankles, lowered me to the floor.
On my feet again, I waved a hand past the window to let him know that I was safely inside.
He whispered, “Go to it, lad.”
It was a large room with bales of tobacco stacked against the side walls, leaving an alley perhaps ten feet wide down the middle. A dark and redolent place, it smelled of burlap and cigar leaf. The air was dry, dusty, it scratched at my throat. My eyes itched, my skin felt prickly.
I kept close to the bales on my right, my hand sliding across them as I crept forward inch by inch. A pigeon purled in the darkness above. I wanted more than anything to cry out to Poe, wanted his voice and presence to save me from the terror I was feeling. The dry heat of the warehouse scaled my skin, but below that I was chilled, shivering in my bones. I had to piss, I wanted to whimper, I wanted to run back to the window and dive upward through the opening.
But there was a dim light glowing up ahead, the flickering light of a candle. Five more yards and I could see that the light came from a kind of side alley in the bales of tobacco. Another few yards and I could look down that alley; I saw it empty, saw the way it opened again to its right, to where a kind of cave had been formed between the warehouse wall and the stacked bales. The candle was inside that cave. As was, I told myself, Poe. And no doubt the constable.
But the door—the front door could be no more than a dozen truncated steps ahead. I tiptoed toward it, but always with my head turned to the left, my eyes on the candlelit alleyway.
I was sneaking forward with my head turned to the rear nearly as far as it would go when I smelled the stink of garlic and fried meat. With that breath, my stomach heaved, I wanted to vomit. I knew I was doomed. He chuckled then, a sound like wet gravel. I turned my head toward the door. The constable struck a sulphur match and held it up to his grinning face.
“Come to join the party, did you?”
Something about the flame from that burning match hypnotized me, something about that hideous grin. I could not run, could not call out. He came toward me with the match held before him, and like a timorous child, all I could do was to squeeze shut my eyes.
He grabbed me by an arm and flung me so hard against a bale of tobacco that all the breath went out of me in a whoosh. All I could see as I crumpled to the floor was the match lying there at his feet, a red ember. And I remember thinking, as if they were the last thoughts I would ever have, What made Glendinning imagine I could do this? And answered with the thought, He never did.
I was, of course, correct. Glendinning knew I would fail. But even in my failure I would provide him with the distraction he required. For suddenly there was a crack as loud as thunder, a flare of light which though softer than lightning was no less startling, and here came Glendinning through the kicked-in door, Glendinning striding forward and dragging a tide of soft light in behind him.
The constable turned and squared himself and pulled out his nightstick, but that was the last deliberate movement he was to make. I had never before nor since seen fists so quick as Glendinning’s, so graceful and relentless as they hammered at the constable’s broad face, as they followed with their shattering music as the constable staggered backward, already too dazed from the first blows to defend himself, as they hammered him up against the wall of tobacco and did not stop hammering, not even when the nightstick clattered to the floor and the constable’s arms hung limp at his sides, fat hands fluttering with every blow, the blood pouring from the constable’s nose and mouth in thin streams of shadow, the black ooze of his soul.
On my hands and knees I crawled away from this carnage, crawled into the alleyway of candlelight. I stood then and made ready to turn toward the cave to look for Mr. Poe.
But I could not resist a last glance at Glendinning. I saw him standing sideways to the constable now, standing with his chin lifted, mouth slightly open, catching his breath. The constable, though still on his feet, was beginning to slide toward the floor, knees slowly folding.
Glendinning stuck his left hand against the constable’s chest, fingers splayed, and pinned him in place against the bales of tobacco. Then, reaching behind himself with his right hand, Glendinning twisted at the waist and bent low as if to pick something off the floor.
For another two seconds he maintained this posture, tensing, increasing the torque. As quick as a rifle shot, then, he unwound. His fist came up in a sweeping arc, so vicious a blow upon the constable’s jaw that had the baled tobacco not acted as a restraint, I swear the constable’s head would have swung the whole way around.
The sickening crack alone was enough to make me flinch and jerk away. I staggered forward to find Mr. Poe.
He was bound hand and foot and mouth, wedged into a tiny opening behind a bale of tobacco that had been pulled away from the wall. It took me a quarter of an hour to free the knots. The first thing he said when I took the gag from his mouth was, “Muddy and Sissie? Have you seen them?”
“They’re fine,” I said. “Just fine.”
He wanted to know how I had located him, how I had overpowered the constable. “I had some help. Glendinning.”
“The same gentleman we encountered on the street?”
“The same. He’s out there now. Finishing up.”
But when I led him out of the cave and into the center of the warehouse, there was no one else in sight. A wide smear of blood led to the doorway, and from there to the end of the pier. Poe and I stood on the edge of the pier in a dusky light and watched the constable’s nightstick floating off toward Brooklyn.
37
He would listen to no reason but, concerned for the welfare of his wife and Mrs. Clemm, insisted upon returning to his home at once. No hackneys were about at that hour, and so again I trotted at his side. (The miles I piled up in Poe’s company!) I attempted once or twice to shorten the journey with conversation, but he was strung too tightly for talk, his only speech in the form of grunts and quick mumbles. All of his energy was invested in his stride, in whittling away the miles to those he loved. And so I followed his example—I strode on, hoarding my darkest thoughts to myself.
Under a sky charcoal gray we arrived at the mouth of his lane. And there it seemed our darkest thoughts were made tangible. The cottage sat as silent as a shadow, as unlit. No movement inside or out.
He trembled, tightened, and would have bolted forward but that I caught him by the sleeve. “It might be a trap of some kind. There might be somebody in there waiting for you.”
He drew his arm out of my grasp, but not brusquely, with measured deliberation. “Wait here,” he said.
“No, sir, I won’t.”
“Then walk directly behind me. We’ll approach from the side, shielded by the trees.”
In this manner, moving from one tree to the next, from the trees to the lilac bush, we made our way to the side of the house. Poe peered in the nearest window. Then along the house to its rear, where he did the same. And on around to the front of the house again. “It’s completely empty,” he said.
“Unless there’s somebody hiding inside.”
“Then damn their cowardly souls,” he announced, and with that he marched onto the porch and threw open the door.
The cottage was empty, as gray inside as the night. While he went from room to room, calling for his wife and mother-in-law, I found the oil lamp and matches and gave us some light. Only after he had returned from the basement would he admit to
himself that they were gone.
“I need to know where they are,” he said. “I cannot rest until I find them.”
“Just because they’re gone don’t necessarily mean that somebody took them. In fact, last I seen Mrs. Clemm, she was trying to think of someplace safe to go.”
“She was? She told you that?”
“Yes, she did. And there ain’t no signs of fighting here, are there? Ain’t nobody could of got Mrs. Clemm out of here without a fight.”
He nodded and allowed himself a tentative smile. “She would’ve left me a sign of some kind. We’ll just have to find it, that’s all.”
But the sign was not immediately found, and his apprehension returned twofold. “Even the cats are gone,” he cried. His voice was broken and shrill.
“But that’s a good thing, ain’t it? It means they took them along too. It means they left in their own good time.”
An inventory of the house did little to settle his emotions. Mrs. Clemm’s broom was missing, as was her favorite skillet, her keepsake box made of curly ash. But very few articles of their clothing—perhaps no more than what they had had on. Poe’s shawl was gone, and Virginia’s songbook, and one whale-oil lamp.
“I cannot think straight,” he said. “I cannot tell what’s gone and what remains.”
“Seems to me they grabbed a couple things and set off. They didn’t stop to plan it, just did it. Took whatever meant the most to them, that’s all.”
“But where have they gone?” he moaned. “Where are my beloveds?”
Finally, then, in his trunkful of manuscripts, he found Mrs. Clemm’s semaphore. “Augie, look, look!” he cried, calling me out of the kitchen. “Here is where they have gone!”
I carried my candle to him and saw that he was holding a piece of parchment, and on the parchment the pencil sketch of a farmhouse that looked vaguely familiar.
“It is Mrs. Curran’s farm,” he said. “In Fordham. Where we lived previous to this place.”
“I thought I’d seen that house before.”
“I made this sketch for Muddy when we had to leave. She kept it in her keepsake box.” He looked at the sketch for a moment with wet eyes. Then, almost violently, buried it beneath his manuscripts. “We must go to them at once.”
“And lead Hobbs right to them?” I said.
He turned and looked at me, glared, his eyes black with rage, as if I were Hobbs himself.
I spoke more softly. “What we need to do now is to stay away from them. That’s how to keep them safe. We need to keep at this thing until we get the goods on Hobbs and that lieutenant. Only when you put the nails to them are you gonna be safe.”
He spun toward the door as if he had heard a noise. But there was only the open rectangle of night. “Even here we are not secure,” he muttered.
“Least of all here.”
And now the last of his strength seemed to go out of him. He sagged like a half-empty sack. I asked, “You got any friends hereabouts? Even back in town maybe?”
“Any who would be quick to take in an alleged murderer?” He shook his head. “And you?”
“Here’s what I know,” I told him. “I can trust you and you can trust me. Beyond that, I ain’t willing to speculate.”
He nodded. He looked about the small room, his face uneven in the candlelight. “Make yourself a bedroll,” he finally said. Then he went into the bedroom and rolled up two blankets for himself and then we closed up the cottage and went out to the woods and lay shivering and tense through a warm summer’s night.
• • •
Without a campfire, with the canopy of trees blocking the moon and most of the stars from view, we had only each other’s voices to give us comfort as the hours ticked toward midnight. We talked until I, at least, was weary enough for sleep, our voices little louder than a murmuring of streams.
He told me of how he had come to be in the warehouse on the waterfront, the sequence of deception to which he had succumbed. How Hobbs’s manservant Careys had seduced him away from the cottage, then escorted him to a table at the Sportsman’s Hall, where they shared a pot of tea while awaiting the appearance of Horace J. Greeley. Soon Poe became drowsy; Hobbs’s man suggested a short walk in fresher air. Next thing Poe knew he was trussed up and gagged in a cave that reeked of tobacco leaf. He had no idea until Hobbs’s constable told him, gloatingly, that Poe had been marked for the river.
In turn I filled him in on how Hobbs’s manservant had followed me to the Old Brewery, where I had overheard him questioning my mother. I left out the part about my mother’s gruesome murder, for Poe would have blamed himself, and that burden was my own, I would not share it. He worried vociferously about his wife and mother-in-law, about the mountain of anxiety his actions must be causing them.
“Yours is the only life my efforts have actually improved,” he told me, and I could not disabuse him of the notion, not because his joy in that illusion was too great but because my guilt over his misery was.
I felt his misery as palpably as a winter fog. I knew that I had brought all this misfortune down on him. The way I had run off at the mouth in Hobbs’s kitchen, my tongue lubricated with tea and gooseberry jam. The intimacies I had revealed now raced through the blood of Poe’s family like gangrene. If anyone was responsible for his family’s upheaval, it was not E. A. Poe, but Augie Dubbins.
“And this Glendinning, or Nostrand,” Poe said, “whatever his name might be—he works for Van Rensselaer?”
“He does his bidding, seems to me. He’s the one Van Rensselaer sent for, leastways.”
“The convolutions,” Poe mused. “This snake pit of power. It is not easy to keep the serpents straight.”
“Van Rensselaer ain’t no serpent, is he? Else why would he be helping us out? Twice now Glendinning saved your skin.”
“I credit you, not him.”
“Both times he led me to you.”
“Very curious indeed,” Poe said.
The phrase kept echoing in my head, a kind of metronome that eventually lulled me to sleep.
• • •
The crows woke me. Or rather, their morning cries woke me by blending somehow with my dream, a dream in which I had been hunting on a fine bright day, hunting with bow and arrow in a clean western land of my imagination, stalking a magnificent bull elk, when a crow came to roost on a nearby boulder and started cawing at me. The elk, a hundred yards out, turned at the sound and looked back, twitched its tail, cocked an ear. The crow kept cawing. I shooed it away lest it make my position clear. The crow then began to fly in circles above my head, scolding me with its raucous cries. I notched an arrow and pulled back the string and took aim on the crow. It ascended in a tight helix above my head, rising higher and higher and growing smaller and smaller though its caws did not diminish in volume. When the crow was but a black pin dot, I let the arrow fly. I watched it up, up, until it disappeared from sight. And then the pin dot crow stopped flying as if stuck to the firmament. A moment later, it began to fall. All the while, it kept cawing at me. It fell spinning, growing ever larger, wings splayed out wide. At length I recognized it as Poe himself, black frock coat flapping as he fell, black eyes raging, arrow in his chest, his jagged caws diving down to engulf me.
I sat bolt upright, drenched in perspiration, and saw that it was morning; I was not out west but in the woods above New York. Poe sat wide awake against a nearby tree, watching me, softly smiling.
“You are a lively sleeper,” he said.
I brushed the dew from my face. Glanced furtively at his chest. No arrow there. I rubbed both eyes with the heels of my hands. “You been awake long?” I asked.
“Some time,” was all he said.
38
Having witnessed no evidence of a visitor to the cottage during the night, we returned to it briefly in the morning. After a hasty breakfast and a quick wash at the pu
mp, Poe announced that we had no choice but to return to town, there to gather as many facts as were needed to lay this matter to rest. He spoke with resolve if not confidence, a kind of resigned determination. The man was not without his flaws, but the absence of grit was not one of them.
Circuitously, then, keeping to the east side of the island and the narrower, less trafficked streets, we made our way into Gotham. Poe’s first order of business was to obtain a copy of the morning edition of the Mirror; I spied one unattended in a newsboy’s stack (he was a good two steps away and with his back to me) and gave it a home in Poe’s hands. We found a shaded doorway of an empty garage on lower Pearl and concealed ourselves there.
He did not appear surprised by what he read in the Mirror. I watched his finger moving down the lines of an article, watched his face for a sign of his mood but saw no change of expression, no tightening of features. He read the article, tapped it once with his finger as if placing a period at the end of the final sentence, then handed the paper to me and gazed east toward the river.
This is what I read:
A certain poet-critic, lately from Richmond but well known throughout Manhattan for his vitriolic attacks upon the works of more esteemed writers who are themselves beloved institutions of American belles lettres, was discovered on Wednesday to be in a state of insentient repose in an area not far from a Water Street doggery. The unmistakable air of John Barleycorn accompanying the poet’s breathing, the constabulary was left with no uncertainty as to the nature of his repose. Two watchmen attempted, in their compassion, to return the poet by hackney cab to his modest home north of the city, there to be consigned into the care of his mother-in-law, a strong and able woman, and to Mrs. Poe, who is yet but a child and by all descriptions unable to grasp the gravity of her husband’s recurrent condition. Before this could be accomplished, however, the poet’s somnambulance wore off, and by degrees he became more and more agitated. According to the single watchman who accompanied Mr. Poe on his journey home, this agitation manifested itself in a flailing of limbs and “wild talk” concerning the demise of one Mary Rogers, whose unfortunate story is already well known by readers of these pages. The watchman further noted that the poet’s tone and attitude in this regard intimated a degree of collusion in the young woman’s dilemma, the specifics of which the watchman was reluctant to reveal to the general public. Suffice it to say that the constable thought it wise to return Mr. Poe to the city for continued interrogation, but upon signaling to the driver to turn his hackney about, the constable was surprised by a sudden escalation of the poet’s erratic behavior, and was consequently unable to restrain him from vacating their conveyance and taking to the streets. A thorough search ensued, but Mr. Poe’s whereabouts have yet to be discovered. It is only hoped by those many who know Mr. Poe and admire his talents that he will return herewith to the able care of his mother-in-law, who, we are confident, will minister to him with the tenderness of a wife. Such attention, unusual though these connubial circumstances might be, will not only speed the poet’s recovery but cause him in the interim to at last forswear those profligacies that have laid him so low.
On Night's Shore Page 26