The Blackest Bird

by Joel Rose

When they faced each other, Hays apologized. He said, “Mr. Poe, it was not my intention to interrupt your Sunday.” Adding, “Mr. Poe, so good to see you again. You remember me, I’m sure.”

  “Most assuredly, High Constable.”

  They stood together in the yard, a number of chickens pecking at the dirt between their feet, Poe’s gaze fixed in the distance on some indiscernible object or site (the sun-dappled cliffs of Weehawken?) whilst Old Hays’ gaze remained fixed on him.

  “Why, sir,” Hays asked finally, “did you choose to avoid me in the city?”

  Poe seemed to have no idea of what Hays was talking. “I did not realize I was avoiding you,” he said.

  “I came to call at your rooming house.”

  “No one told me,” Poe said.

  “I spoke with your mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm. I told her I needed to see you.”

  “It must have slipped her mind. She said not a word to me. My sincere apologies for any inconvenience. My wife is in delicate state, you see, and is much fatigued. My family has only just arrived from Philadelphia. They find the city noisy and dirty. We are all unsettled…” He made vague motion to take in all around. “Here the air is cleaner. For all our sake, we decided to move to this farm. Remember, Mr. Hays, it was with you I first came upon this site.”

  “I remember,” Hays said, “as if it were yesterday.”

  “So there is nothing more insidious,” Poe answered, his voice tinged with melancholy. “Avoidance was the last thing on my mind. Why, sir, should I avoid you?”

  “Exactly my question to you, Mr. Poe. Can you explain to me, sir, why your name comes up repeatedly in my ever-ongoing investigation into the murder of Mary Rogers?”

  Poe did not answer immediately. He stared at Hays almost blankly. Behind Poe, at the kitchen window, the high constable could make out Mrs. Clemm, pressed to the glass, staring at her put-upon son-in-law, and him, the villain, Old Hays, her Eddie’s poor shadow nemesis.

  “I am fully aware my name is denounced by James Harper. For what transgression, I am confident you will soon tell me, High Constable.”

  “Why, sir, would a man such as he entertain a vendetta against you?”

  “Revenge,” Poe said without hesitation.

  “Revenge? Revenge for what?”

  “Revenge for my infringement on his bailiwick! Revenge for standing up! If I were to tell you, High Constable, the most popular writer in America is the Englishman Charles Dickens, and he makes not a shilling from his work here, I promise to you, my good Mr. Hays, I am your good citizen telling you the God’s truth. Same for the likes of Thackeray, Walter Scott, Bulwer-Lytton. Not a sixpence. And I, just for your enlightenment, make not a sou in Britain, and barely a sou here. It is why I write short stories, sir, and not novels. At least the magazines pay. American book publishing houses find neither need nor desire to fork over royalties, or any fee whatsoever for that matter, to we writers. Especially we natives.”

  “No? And why is that?”

  “Because, as I have said, there is no recourse. There is no international copyright compelling them to do so. Mr. Harper has gallantly, most vociferously, most conveniently, adopted the credo, bellowing loud and long over this wide and vast young country: Why should we as an American people pay for a literature of our own when we can have it for nothing?”

  “And this is why you contend he denounces you, implicates you in crime and the avoidance of punishment?”

  “Exactly. To be sure. He seeks his revenge for my support of an international copyright law, sir. Because I myself am after him, sir. This gentleman accuses me of what? Infringing on his God-given right to make money? Let me tell you something, Mr. Hays, even though Mr. Harper mints flying eagles hand over foot, Mr. Harper finds within himself no need or want to defend a national literature, sustain our men of letters, uphold our dignity. You know what his standard practice is, Mr. Hays? His Honor our mayor, this dignitary, stations a man in London and pays him a substantial wage, certainly more than he pays any wordsmith. This secret agent is usually an employee of a prestigious English house. As soon as the latest literary volume hits the streets, or better still returns in galley form from the printer, this scoundrel will pirate the manuscript and rush it to the docks. There the book is jettisoned across the Atlantic on the swiftest sailing vessel available. While still miles off the Montauk Point of Long Island, a ready schooner is dispatched. The schooner will meet the English ship mid-swell, the English literary work transferred, and the schooner races back to New York City and our publishing megalopolis. Here the volume is torn into a hundred sections, each consisting of four or five pages, no more. Then each of these is distributed to a printer, who will labor through the night to have his bit typeset, proofread, and complete by morning. At which time all the printers come together each of their contributions assembled to comprise the whole. The volume, now complete in folio form, sans cover, will be on the street by noon ready for purchase, not a cent destined for the embattled author of the work.”

  Hays was about to make comment but Poe, so self-dramatically engaged, waved him off.

  “Because the profits are enormous, sir, the risks negligible, because all concentration is turned toward such business, our American publishers have no need, nor inclination, to print writers from our own shore, and if they do have said inclination, they pay miserably for the favor. The most popular native writers of our day—who would you say?—Irving and Cooper, both talentless curs, mind you, are lucky to receive even one thousand sovereigns for their latest output. And a writer such as myself is left begging to eat.”

  From his countless professional encounters, Hays knew suspects to have a certain way of comporting themselves when they felt the onslaught of threat. Their faces light with an unnatural distorted smile or turn dour with self-absorption. Their eyes may have a certain cast, a certain intensity. Their backs are straight or stooped, their hips sway with the shifting of an uncomfortable weight. Emotions may well. You look into their eyes. You see something chilling—what is it?

  Hays had no doubt Olga was right: Poe considered himself above any man in intellect. In power of deductive reasoning, he must have thought himself unsurpassed. Even now, in confrontation with him, high constable of the city of New York, a grin Poe seemed not able to suppress played under his mustaches. But was it a villain Hays saw, or something else?

  “And now, sir, Mr. Hays,” Poe said, “now that you understand the motives of Mayor James Harper directed toward me, such as they are, here we are. What exactly is it that you would like, sir? How may I help you?”

  Hays took it a given, as he had heard, that women would take to this man without respite, and that men would not. The high constable’s frank, steady eyes fixed on Poe’s penetrating eyes, pupils and irises concentric circles, dull black disks.

  The realization came to Hays the man had not a clue why he was here. He pulled out his tobacco, tapped his pipe against his shoe, and filled the bowl. He proffered his leaf to Poe, saying, “Won’t you join me? This is from a sock, first rate, purchased from Anderson’s.”

  Poe refused, saying he carried no ready bowl.

  But then he reconsidered. He removed from his inner breast pocket the foolscap cylinder of manuscript from which he had read earlier, retied with its red ribbon length. Without a word of comment, he tore off a corner and held out the small rectangle. Hays, seeing Poe’s intention, filled the slip with a healthy pinch of blond cut and watched him roll his smoke.

  “Ingenious,” Hays said as Poe licked the neat cylindrical package tight.

  “It is nothing more than a tiny segar. Quite appealing really,” Poe said. “What is being called a segarette.”

  “Just that indeed.”

  Hays made himself comfortable by the side of the barn, sitting on a nail keg, the smell of manure in his nose, not unpleasant. “I sympathize with you, Mr. Poe, for what you did,” he elicited, firing a locofoco with a thumbnail. “Sometimes in a court of law a man does not always get justi
ce. Sometimes a man is sorry for what he has done, contrite, but the court is unable to see his remorse. If the young woman was pregnant, if she died accidentally during the procedure, I tell you, vouchsafe, I can help. I am here to beg your cooperation, and if we are successful, sir, I shall be of both moral and mortal assistance to you to the best of my ability. Would you like that?”

  Poe stared straight ahead. On the nail keg Hays puffed his briar until it glowed red. “Forgive me, High Constable, but what have I done again?” Poe asked.

  “You have acted nobly to save your wife embarrassment. What have you to do with the death of Mary Rogers, sir?” Hays sternly inquired.

  “Mary Rogers? Nothing, I tell you. Is this the game in which Mayor Harper implicates me? I thought you were talking palming off. The man’s audacity is boundless. Mary Rogers! I … My God, I wasn’t even in the city at the time of the crime against her … I would never … and I was living in Philadelphia at the time besides.”

  “Living there, yes. But it is my understanding you frequently traveled to New York to visit publishers and editors and the like. And the occasion of Miss Rogers’ death coordinates with such a time.”

  Poe coughed but could not deny it.

  “Mr. Poe, I expect nothing less than the truth from you!” Hays persisted.

  “I knew her. I did. You know that.”

  “You admired her?”

  “I admired her, yes. She was a young woman of extraordinary beauty and bright spirit.”

  “And this is why you held her in such esteem?”

  “Please, Mr. Hays, disingenuousness is not your strong suit. I am a poet, sir. Beauty attracts me. But as to anything else…” He hesitated. “I am a married man, sir,” Poe managed.

  “Need I remind you such status has not stopped others before you, sir.”

  “This is true,” Poe conceded.

  “You loved Mary Rogers,” Hays said. It was not a question.

  “And what, sir, if I did? I have already admitted as much to you.”

  “And you traveled to Poughkeepsie with her at the time of her first disappearance.”

  This, too, not a question.

  “And what if I did that, sir?”

  “In your own clever tale and indictment of we police, entitled the ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,’ Mr. Poe, you have charged whosoever was with Mademoiselle Marie at the time of her first disappearance must have been the villain in her second disappearance. What can you tell me, Mr. Poe, that will convince me you are not the assassin of Mary Cecilia Rogers?”

  58

  Poe, Poe,

  a Thousand Times Poe

  Poe returned to the Brennan house in a state of extreme agitation. Trudging heavily up the outside stairs, he wrestled with the idea of alcohol as solution, momentarily considering a glass of sherry might do much to settle his nerves.

  Before the arrival of the high constable, Poe had been relaxed, content with his recitation. His new poem had been the singular thought on his mind, a work years in progress. He had persuaded himself it to be the bit of doggerel to change everything for him—the verse of the black bird—a crow or raven, he still hadn’t quite decided which.

  While he was reading to the Brennans, to Muddie and Sissy, the poem’s intrinsic power coursed through his blood and psyche, engendered his hopes. He knew what he had. Listening to himself recite, he felt privileged to witness the excitement reflected on the faces of his listeners, and with the unexpected appearance of the high constable, he actually relished the opportunity as well to watch the reaction of this man with no link to him, save as antagonist.

  Although perhaps at first confused by his presence, Poe certainly knew immediately who the police constable was when he entered the room, after his eminence had been shown to his seat by Mrs. Brennan, after he had excused himself to Muddie and settled beside her on the red love seat. Poe had looked up at a moment when he was most impressed with himself, as he pronounced a pilfered phrase he had heard uttered by a little boy while he, Poe, paced the paths of Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia some years before with the same poem occupying his mind, reciting to himself, repeating, trying the lines, the meter, the foot, and the boy, not more than eight or nine, minded by his guardian, preoccupied in the grass with a hoop, had overheard the poet’s mutterings and turned to him, saying in the most extraordinary childlike chirp something to the effect that he, the boy, “had never heard bird or beast with such a name as Nevermore,” and Poe, flabbergasted by the innocent, inadvertent poetry of the child, had immediately incorporated what the boy had said into the line, and here he was thinking now how beautifully his poem was playing out in all its song, as the scroll slowly unfurled to the floor, and there—out of where?—out of nowhere, was this police constable, this broad man of imposing figure, with large, powerful block torso set upon dwarfish legs, and a decidedly Semitic cast, being shown by the lady of the house, Mrs. Brennan, to the vacant spot next to Muddie.

  Poe looked up and Hays’ boring stare caught his own eyes, and held. For a moment Poe flustered. Their looks were locked, and Poe felt an unsettling, the words of Muddie reaching him out of the near past that Old Hays was after him, had paid a visit to 130 Greenwich Street looking for him, but then Hays sat heavily and Poe fell back into his reading, the long paper scroll continuing to unfurl from his hands, all things considered, the poet undisturbed in a course that must inevitably lead to his triumph, and Poe smiled to himself in his secret heart, eternity to come in this guise of carefully crafted words with black bird.

  So now Poe was returned to the parlor following his disturbing outdoor tête-à-tête with the detective, visibly agitated, in spite of himself, as he watched his dear aunt bustle about, helping Mrs. Brennan clean and straighten after tea and cakes, dinner preparation to follow, his face ashen when he entered the room and paused in the threshold.

  Upon his reappearance, pleasant conversation ceased. Sissy from her seat, warmed by a crocheted coverlet against her ceaseless inner chill, fluttered her fingers in his direction, motioned to him, her Edgar.

  He came to her immediately, dutifully.

  “What is wrong, Eddie dearest?”

  A pure white handkerchief, certainly not silk, but pounded cotton, twice, or even thrice, darned, yet so neatly and carefully pressed giving the illusion of perfect newness, was clasped to her mouth.

  He took his spot next to her on the brocaded sofa. Mrs. Clemm joined them. His two women now having taken their familiar spots to either side of him, his protectorate, each with one of his hands in theirs. Muddie with the left, Sissy with the right. Sissy stroking the soft hairs on the back of Eddie’s hand, admiring his long, sensitive fingers. Muddie patting his other hand reassuringly, lovingly, loyally.

  “Everything will be all right, Eddie,” Muddie said. “All will be fine. There, Eddie, rest your humours. You are all a-boil. Everything will find its proper level. Is that horrible man gone?”

  Poe stared at her for some seconds before answering. “No, he is not gone,” he said finally. “I fear he will never be gone. And he is not horrible, Muddie.”

  Mrs. Clemm’s look bespoke her alarm. Then she collected herself. “Don’t worry, Eddie,” she tried another tack to soothe him. “This too will pass. Your magnetic fields are simply in a state. Now what in the world does he, this not-so-horrible man, want with you?”

  On the divan, Poe abruptly pulled away from his aunt, snatching his hand back from his wife. He clutched his head and murmured to himself, rocking back and forth, before requesting salts of Mrs. Brennan to relieve the terrible ache encapsulated in his skull.

  59

  Poe Makes Overtures

  to His Doomed Wife

  Mrs. Brennan prepared dinner of freshly killed lamb shank and boiled potatoes for her family and the Poes. High Constable Hays was graciously invited to this meal. He took his place at the near end of the table along with the cojoined families of landlord and boarders and three weathered farm depot workers, already seated.

/>   From his place the high constable ate moderately while occasionally, unobtrusively, observing Poe.

  When it came to attending to his ailing wife, as far as Hays could tell, Poe was beyond reproach. He made himself sensitive to her needs and, invested in her health, made overtures to all her comforts.

  She, in turn, seemed indeed a delicate creature, very pale with feverish consumptive eyes, eyes that in their infirmity appeared to Hays almost otherworldly.

  After supper, a substantial meal despite its simplicity, there came a time when the poet called on her, his wife, to sing. He clapped his hands once to gain the attention of the assembled, and announced it was in honor of his guest, High Constable Hays of the New York City Municipal Police, that Sissy would sing, and so she, somewhat abashed, rose unsteadily.

  Hays immediately protested, saying he felt no necessity to be entertained.

  “Sit, child. Sit,” he instructed her. In his mind he was verged on volunteering himself in her stead. He had only a half-bad voice, as Olga fondly at times reminded him.

  But before he could launch into his treasured rendition of “Tiddly Aye-Aye for the One-Eyed Reilly” or the absolutely riveting “Widow McGinnis’s Pig,” Martha Brennan, the eldest of the comely Brennan children, sprang to her feet and eagerly offered herself up instead.

  Sissy would not have it. Whatever her ailments, she made a few tentative steps to the sideboard, picking up the concertina with a sidelong look of smug satisfaction toward this rival for her husband’s affections, Martha Brennan, that fervent, robust, healthy farm girl, four years her junior.

  Hays had to admit Mrs. Poe made a striking figure, round-faced, pouting lips, arguably a forehead too high and broad for beauty (must this not have been a Poe family trait? he wondered), big, dark eyes, raven black hair, contrasting, almost startling, with her white, translucent, virtually colorless complexion.

  She was outfitted for the evening in a simple white dress when she stepped to the middle of the warm little room and announced proudly, “My husband’s favorite.”