Speakers of the Dead

by J. Aaron Sanders

  “And that’s why the story offers no solution?”

  “I couldn’t pretend,” Poe says. “The story is my greatest failure. I promised the reader something I could not deliver. That’s why I’ve followed the Lena Stowe story so carefully. That’s why I had to be there tonight. You’re clearly encountering the same obstacles.”

  “Isaiah Rynders told me the committee will not work. He said Miss Blackwell will hang despite her innocence, and he said I will die too if I don’t leave this alone.”

  Mr. Poe pulls a small notebook and pencil from his coat pocket, scribbles a few notes. “And why won’t the committee work?”

  Walt runs his finger along the sofa fabric.

  Mr. Poe senses his hesitation. “I only want to know who it is we are up against, Mr. Whitman. If I’m going to risk my reputation, such as it is, I need to know.”

  “Rynders told me that the committee was just for show, that it has already been shut down.”

  “Ah.” Mr. Poe nods. “So he told you this after the meeting?”

  Whitman nods.

  “Well, then—tell me everything you know.”

  Walt relates how he witnessed the sheriff’s murder, how James Warren is being tried in Samuel Clement’s place. He talks about Kenneth Barclay and Eli Quigley. He includes Henry Saunders’s disappearance and murder, Frankie Clement’s visit, and Walt’s own encounter with Samuel Clement. Whitman spares nothing, hoping that Mr. Poe will indeed help him. He concludes with his meeting with James Bennett and the committee of safety. “And now I’m here with you. That’s everything.”

  “You poor dear.” Mr. Poe emerges from the chair, paces back and forth in front of the fire. He does this for what seems like several minutes before he turns to face Walt. “So you believe Mrs. Stowe did not kill her husband?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Of course I agree with you,” he says. “But let me play devil’s advocate. They found the same arsenic on her person that killed Mr. Stowe, did they not?”

  Whitman nods.

  “Even if Mr. Stowe did not kill Mary Rogers, which I am most certain he did not, he had a history of being unfaithful to his wife, did he not?”

  “So it seems, but—”

  “Why, pray tell, do you think she is innocent?”

  Walt considers his words carefully. “As I said at the meeting, his body was gutted like a deer and not dissected as suggested in the many accounts.”

  “Including the coroner’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was this reported by anyone but you? Because your voice, I hate to say it, has been discredited. But Mr. Saunders’s dissection—that is interesting. As you know, I am no doctor, but I have been in dissection labs, and to gut a corpse like a deer, as you’ve put it, is not proper nor is it typical procedure. While that fact alone does not stand up in court as evidence for Miss Blackwell’s innocence, it certainly casts reasonable doubt.” He pauses. “Your friend Dr. Stowe, was his body found in a similar way?”

  Walt nods.

  “Suggesting—”

  Whitman stands. “That the same person committed both murders, I know. It’s obvious—but how do we prove it when it seems every important city official prefers to look the other way? What good is the truth if no one will act on it?” Walt is shaking now. He goes to the desk, points to the whiskey. “May I?”

  Mr. Poe nods.

  Walt pours himself a half a whiskey and drinks it down. “I feel I’ve proved innocence—starting with Abraham, then with Lena—over and over, but no one listens. I saw Samuel Clement murder Jack Harris.”

  “We have to force the mayor, the sheriff, and even Isaiah Rynders to act on the truth,” Mr. Poe says. “If we demonstrate that the bodies were cut in the same manner, that the first autopsy was fraudulent, and then make those results public, city officials will have to do something. The citizens will demand it.”

  “It’s the only play we have left,” Whitman says.

  Mr. Poe’s posture is wobbly and unsure, a stark contrast to his words, which are resolute and clear: “I wrote a story about a man who disinters his—”

  “You mean ‘Berenice.’”

  “Oh?” Mr. Poe raises his eyebrow. “You’ve read it? Well, then you know what I’m about to suggest.”

  “I’m afraid I do,” Walt says, “because I came here tonight to suggest the same thing.”

  Chapter 33

  The idea is crazy, but no crazier than the circumstances. At least that’s what Walt Whitman tells himself as he steers the freight wagon north on Broadway, Mr. Poe leaning on his shoulder, clutching a bottle of whiskey. The farther north they travel, the quieter the streets and the nicer the buildings are. The trees are well groomed and part of an overall landscape design that Five Points residents have neither the time nor the resources to consider.

  They had taken the freight wagon from a dairy farm a few blocks away from Mr. Poe’s residence. They’d waited behind the two-story white house until the farmer disappeared inside the barn, before they hopped into the driver’s seat and drove away, the farmer’s voice ringing out behind them.

  Outside the burial ground gates now, Walt stops the horses and listens. The only sound is the wind that brushes through him like a whisper. He lights the lantern.

  From the seat of the wagon, he scans the headstones until he locates a grave, the name A. STOWE carved into stone above the years 1807–1843. His sight wavers, he is suddenly dizzy, and a sickness comes over him at what they are about to do. Edgar Poe sits up straight beside him, a great sweat upon his forehead, his cheeks bloodless as chalk.

  “We’ve arrived, have we?”

  Whitman lifts himself down from the driver’s seat and stretches. His legs and arms are stiff already, and they haven’t yet begun the real work. From the wagon bed, he gathers the pickax and shovel.

  Walt turns to Mr. Poe. “Are you coming?”

  Mr. Poe takes a drink from the whiskey bottle. “I will keep a lookout while you dig.” Then he offers a drink to Walt.

  Whitman shakes his head and sets the lantern on the gravestone.

  Mr. Poe smiles and waves from the wagon seat. “Let me know if I can spell you in a while.”

  Walt begins by loosening the dirt with the pickax, and at first, the pointed end barely penetrates the frozen ground at all. With every swing, however, he moves more dirt, and he thinks he has made real progress, until he realizes it has taken over an hour just to break up the dirt enough to dig.

  Mr. Poe, meanwhile, has crawled into the wagon bed, stretched out in the hay, and fallen asleep.

  Whitman switches to the shovel. The deeper he goes, the easier the digging becomes, and while he works, he has a strange sensation that he is somehow outside himself, watching himself dig. He enjoys the monotony of physical labor, and he is able to settle his mind.

  He reflects on the materiality of death, how his beliefs have altered because of it, and how naïve he had been before he experienced death firsthand. Indeed, not long ago, in his story “The Tomb Blossoms,” he boasted how he does not dread the grave. There is many a time when I could lay down, and pass my immortal part through the valley of the shadow, as composedly as I quaff water after a tiresome walk.

  As he moves the dirt with his shovel, awe spreads over him for the ubiquitous power of death. Not a moment passes without a body, and its flesh becomes one with the earth’s flesh, a reminder of nature’s fecundity, the boundless and endless growth and decay that encompasses them all.

  The digging takes so long that Whitman wonders if Samuel Clement has already removed the body. When he hears the sound of metal on wood, he is both surprised and relieved. He stops and wipes his brow with his sleeve. His hands are torn apart, and his whole body aches. Despite the cold, he is sweating, a heat from the inside out, that almost burns in the wind. He glances around him. The horses stand s
till, Mr. Poe still sleeps, and beyond the lantern, all he can see is blackness.

  Still, he can’t shake the feeling that they are not alone.

  In the grave, Whitman clears away the dirt around the casket. To get to the body, he has to remove the top half of the casket lid. With the pickax, he chisels around the edge and pries up the nails, just as he had seen Clement do. It takes all his strength to get the lid off. The force of it flings Walt against the wall of the grave, and from where he lands, he can’t see into the casket, so he rotates forward and peers inside.

  Abraham Stowe’s skin is pasty gray. A shirt and tie constrict his bloated neck and body, and his dark suit is stretched tight from his arms to his legs. The body appears pumped full of air, as if a pin will make it explode. The body is Abraham, recognizable as the man Walt Whitman regarded as a surrogate father. But the form has changed. Walt remembers the night Abraham told him to mend things with his own father because none of us knows when our time will come, when we will vanish from this earth. Something has vanished from the man he knew, and it is crushing. This isn’t the man who said those words to him. This is not Abraham.

  Whitman wraps a handkerchief around his mouth and nose. Then, using his knife, he cuts off the buttons of Abraham’s shirt one by one. Maggots swarm the insides of the body and buzz like fingernails on a chalkboard. Walt clears as many of the maggots away with the shovel as he can so he can examine the chest area. The incision, sewn together with black thread, runs up the middle of the corpse, from its navel to the base of its throat—the same as Henry’s.

  The smell has gotten to him, and so he crawls out of the hole and lies down until the nausea passes. Above him, the night sky is now framed by morning light. A house behind the cemetery has since become visible, along with a small church next to it. Exhaustion hits him, and if not so cold, he might fall asleep.

  The horses don’t sound like horses at first—the rhythmic clomping dances along the wind like rustling leaves and shifting trees.

  “Did you hear that?” Walt whispers. “Mr. Poe!”

  Mr. Poe’s head pokes up, looks around: “’Tis the wind and nothing more.”

  But the horses only draw closer.

  Whitman hurries back to the body and holds his breath while he threads the rope around the left arm twice, then around the neck and right arm. He climbs out of the grave, takes one end of the rope in each hand and ties them together around his waist.

  In the distance, a lantern hovers.

  The weight of Dr. Stowe’s body surprises him. On his first try, the body doesn’t budge at all. He takes a deep breath and readjusts his grip. He tries again. This time, he moves the body a few feet until Abraham Stowe’s head pokes out of the ground, maggots pouring out of his chest.

  The noises grow louder. Metal on wood. Breathing.

  Walt pulls the rope again, and this time, he heaves the body out of the casket and onto the ground. He drags it to the wagon, where he hoists it in the back next to Mr. Poe. Walt covers the body with a tarp, then pulls himself up into the driver’s seat and holds the reins ready.

  Outside the burial ground, on the road, the voices have stopped.

  Then footsteps on the frozen earth.

  They have come for him.

  All Walt Whitman can do is watch as the carriage rolls closer. He recognizes the sheriff in the driver’s seat, his square jaw and broad shoulders highlighted by the hanging lamp. “I’m impressed,” the sheriff says. “You don’t give up easily.”

  “What makes you think I’m giving up now?”

  “I know about the committee of safety and your conspiracy theories, but you’re sniffing down a snake hole, son, and you’re going to get bit.” Petty spits on the ground. “Now, why don’t you come with me and I’ll go easy on you.”

  “If I go with you,” Walt says, “we will all be complicit in the death of an innocent woman.”

  “Stop the bullshit, Mr. Whitman. Your reporting has done more damage to law enforcement credibility than anything I’ve ever seen,” Petty snarls.

  Mr. Poe’s voice catches both men by surprise. It sings from the darkness, from an invisible space as if from the graves themselves: “We have put her living in the tomb,” he calls out. “I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I hear them even now.”

  The voice continues: “Have I not heard her footsteps on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart?”

  Mr. Poe springs furiously from the wagon and charges the sheriff, who fires a warning shot in the air. The carriage lunges forward just enough to clear the way for Whitman. He doesn’t hesitate, flipping the reins hard to make the horses go. The freight wagon races toward Petty, who has no choice but to scatter as it speeds past him and out into the street. Walt glances over his shoulder once, and he can’t believe it: Mr. Poe is dancing in front of Petty, blocking his way, waving his empty whiskey bottle in the air, screaming “Madman! Madman! Madman!”

  Walt needs to find Broadway, the most direct route south, so he takes a combination of streets southwest that will lead him there. The farther south he drives, the more people are out and about, and the more vehicles on the road. On one street, he gets stuck behind a milk wagon. He tries to go around it, but the traffic coming the other way is too heavy.

  Whitman checks behind him and sees the sheriff’s phaeton barreling toward him on the narrow cobblestone street. When Walt spurs his team into a gallop, his own wagon skids on the cobblestone as he drives around the milk wagon. An oncoming carriage drives onto the sidewalk to avoid him, and the horses kick up their legs, toppling the carriage. Whitman regains his spot on the right side of the road without causing any more accidents, but his actions have cleared the way for Sheriff Petty too.

  Walt steers the freight wagon around the next corner and almost crashes into the stairway of the outermost row house.

  The sheriff takes the same corner easily and closes the gap. The two vehicles drive side by side, Walt trying desperately to outmaneuver Petty.

  “Pull over,” Petty yells.

  Swinging his phaeton almost into the wagon, Petty reaches for Whitman, narrowly missing him. He tries again, but this time, Walt kicks him in the side.

  Whitman tries to speed up, but Sheriff Petty matches his speed. The sheriff’s carriage swerves into the freight wagon again, and Petty stands up and makes ready to jump into the back of the freight wagon.

  Walt checks his grip on the reins. He waits until the last moment, right when Petty jumps, to throw the brake. When he does, the horses skid and the brakes screech. The sheriff flies past the wagon and hits the ground in a roll. The sheriff’s phaeton tips over and scrapes to a stop, showering sparks along the street. Walt regains control of the freight wagon and navigates it around the sheriff and his wrecked vehicle.

  He hopes the sheriff is not too seriously injured, but he knows he can’t dwell. It is almost nine in the morning, and the streets are full of people—a tricky scenario for someone with a corpse in the back of his wagon.

  Chapter 34

  Walt Whitman brings the wagon to a stop in front of the row house at 104 Washington Street. The coroner’s windows are dark, and there are no signs that anyone stirs at all.

  He hastens up the front steps, pats his pocket for the pistol, and pounds on the front door. No one answers, so he knocks again, with increasing speed and intensity. Finally, a light comes on in the front window. Footsteps scrape in the entryway, and the door opens.

  Kenneth Barclay comes to the door, wearing a robe and slippers. He frowns.

  “Come with me,” Walt says.

  “Why won’t you leave me alone, Mr. Whitman?”

  “Now. Please.”

  The coroner staggers down the stairs after Walt to the wagon. Whitman lowers the endgate to reveal the corpse of Abraham Stowe.

  “What have you done?
” Barclay says, his face turning white.

  “Help me carry him inside.”

  He reaches underneath the tarp for Abraham’s arms.

  Barclay says, “Why in God’s name would you do this?”

  “Grab his legs.”

  Barclay hesitates, so Whitman grasps the pistol. “The legs.”

  “You don’t need to point that at me.” Barclay bends down, grabbing hold of the corpse’s legs. “It’s insulting.”

  Walt returns the gun to his pocket and takes up Abraham’s arms again. The two men slide the bloated corpse out of the wagon, Barclay walking backward. He stumbles after a few steps, losing his grip on the body, which hits the sidewalk with a thud. Whitman waits for the coroner to gather himself, and the two men continue to transport the corpse up the stairs, through the front door, and into the morgue, laying it on an empty table.

  The room is dark and cold. Walt looks around nervously for Henry’s body and spots it, two tables over.

  Barclay lights a lamp, revealing Henry in full view. Whitman’s pulse quickens and a queasiness settles over him.

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” the coroner says. “I know you were close.”

  Walt takes deep breaths to calm himself. The body has been scrubbed from head to toe. Henry’s mouth is open, but unnaturally so, halfway between a yawn and a smile, and his head is tilted back. The skin is waxy and bleached. The area around and inside the bone saw’s incision down the middle of his chest has been pulled apart, exposing the yellowish-gray insides. A thought strikes him: Henry is a thing now, nothing more.

  “Mr. Whitman?”

  Walt looks up.

  “Why are you here?”

  He takes a few more deep breaths. “I need to see the autopsy reports for Henry Saunders and Abraham Stowe.”