Disquiet Heart

by Randall Silvis

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  Epilogue

  Also by Randall Silvis

  Copyright Page

  This book is for Rita and Bret and Nathan, my respite and nepenthe, evermore.

  Prologue

  THERE EXISTS a sketch of Poe that few have ever seen. It resides in a drawer in my library, and there it will remain until I hear the Grim One come scratching at my door, at which time I will consign that sketch, along with a few other more personal items, to the purity of the flames. I will do so not because the sketch would be, to the casual eye, repugnant or, for that matter, even provocative. It would no doubt be viewed as Poe intended it, a joke at his own expense, a lighthearted self-ridicule. But often men are not the best judges of themselves, not as keen-eyed or astute when gazing into the mirror as someone apart from them might be, especially someone who has already observed the man at his best and his worst, and who, for better or worse, has lived, if only briefly, inside that man’s soul.

  How do I view the sketch? you might ask. And also, if it is to be incinerated eventually, why not now?

  Not now because it was rendered by Poe’s own hand, and by retaining that yellowing piece of parchment I remain somehow connected to him even yet, more than half a century after the date of its composition. And even now I have a need for that connection. As to how I view the sketch: As the truest encapsulation of the journey we took together, that hoary fortnight spent between the confluence of two rivers, when each of us was looking for violence and found too much of it, and when each of us was challenging death to take us on, little realizing that we were already locked in its embrace.

  It is a simple pencil sketch, drawn in the space of half an hour. Filling the foreground and both sides of the paper, stacked to a height representing a full ten feet and terraced like a wide staircase leading to empty sky, are four tiers of long wooden boxes made of pale, unpainted boards. Positioned in the center of this display, stretched out on the next to highest tier, is Poe. In a black linen suit he lies on his side, facing the viewer, right elbow on a wooden lid, head resting atop his hand, left knee bent and raised—as insouciant a position as if he were taking the sun on the Bowling Green, watching a Sunday parade of sails across the Hudson.

  But he is on his way to Pittsburgh, and the boxes are coffins, all and more soon to be filled. At the bottom of the sketch, he titled it The Conqueror Worm.

  He laughed when he handed the sketch over to me, when he gave it away so blithely, a half-hour’s diversion, with the words, prophetic, “A little something to remember me by.” I folded the paper in half and slipped it into a coat pocket, and then, fortuitously, forgot about it until many days later.

  How that sketch came to be made, and how the two of us, Poe and I, each came to a clearer understanding of what it might be like to lie not atop but inside one of those boxes, that is the story I am about to relate. Before my voice, too, is drowned out by the gnawing of the worms.

  1

  27 February 1847

  My Dear Mr. Poe,

  I write to you as no mere admirer of your work, but as one who has discerned in your essays and criticisms a singular honesty of intellect; and in your tales a willingness to plumb to the very depths, however rank, of human nature; and in your poetry a rare and penetrating acumen conjoined with an altogether unearthly music. I write to you, sir, as your devoted disciple. As such it is my hope and desire that you will consider an invitation to visit me here in Pittsburgh and thence to remain as a guest in my house for as long as you might choose to do so.

  As incentive I offer you a speaking engagement before an enthusiastic audience, to be presented by the Quintillian Society, on whose board I am privileged to serve as president. As remuneration we will gladly provide your usual stipend and a more than usual attention to your every word. You may address us on the subject of your choice. We have in the past hosted to great success other writers whose names you will recognize, as for example Messrs. Dickens and Longfellow and Bulwer-Lytton, all of whom we lavished upon but a modicum of the enthusiasm with which you will be greeted.

  Moreover, while a guest in my home you will want for nothing. I am a man of ample means, all of which I shall endeavor to employ in the furtherance of your comfort. You will not want for edifying company, sir, of either gender, for your admirers here are many. However, if solitude is what you crave, that, too, shall be yours.

  I pray you will not consider it indelicate if I extend to you my condolences on the loss of your young wife in the early days of this year. I do so only to ensure you that I am well aware of a man’s special needs in the wake of such misfortune, and to make it known to you that each and every one of those needs will be provided for here in Pittsburgh.

  In closing, Mr. Poe, allow me to confess that though we have yet to meet vis-à-vis, I consider you my brother in spirit. Many among my acquaintances have remarked upon the striking similarity of countenance we share, while others have gone so far as to suspect your writings as my own, composed under the nom de plume of E. A. Poe. In my estimation these conjectures scarcely scratch the surface of the bond we share, for it is my belief, sir, that you and I are reflections of the same spirit. We are closer than brothers. More alike than twins. We are the same man in two bodies. We drink the same air of devastation.

  You will not, I pray, be put off by this assumption of familiarity on my part. Only know that the kinship I feel for you, derived through the study of and esteem for your work, is both real and profound.

  In my own line of work I have occasion to witness numerous variations of unnatural behavior. These, too, we might discuss and analyze during our time together, should you agree to accept my humble invitation. Such discussions will be to my edification, I am sure. Though perhaps it is not overly presumptive to suggest that one or two of my scientific investigations into the grayer realms of the disquiet heart might provide inspiration to your own endeavors. For I suspect that our labors, like our temperaments, are of a kind, sir, though conducted by different means. You employ the pen whereas I the scalpel. But we are nonetheless embarked upon the same journey, you and I. We can perhaps provide for one another not only pleasant company but some assistance along the way.

  I await your response and the consummation of a brotherhood.

  Yours most sincerely,

  Alfred K. Brunrichter, M.D.

  THE SUNLIGHT of a late afternoon fell across my hand and across the single sheet of ivory parchment as I read this letter, fell upon the handwriting composed in a tight but elegant script, the lettering so precise as to seem almost feminine. Yet the soft yellow light did little to warm or brighten the dark chill in me.

  “It isn’t more bad news, I hope,” said Mr. Longreve. “Edgar has had enough of that to last him a lifetime.”

  I did not answer for a while but stood there in Longreve’s office, my shoulder near the window, as I stared at the letter and tried to fathom the sudden lassitude I felt. After a half minute or so I told myself that I was merely weary, a simple fatigue from the long journey that, I realized, was
not yet over.

  “No, no, in fact it is good news. An invitation for Poe to read. In Pittsburgh.” Yet even as I refolded the letter, some backwater tug of gravity pulled at me, weakening my legs.

  “But it tells you nothing of his whereabouts?”

  I shook my head. “It does not.”

  Mr. Longreve, an editor for Godey’s Lady’s Book, stood with his back to the window, a hand to his cheek, rubbing up and down. The letter had been sent in care of his office, and he seemed more than a little relieved now to entrust it into my care. He told me that he had not spoken with Poe for the past several weeks. Poe’s young wife, Virginia, had passed on January 30th. A few days later he had escorted the girl’s mother back to the comfort of family and home in Richmond, Virginia, promising to return to Manhattan at the earliest possibility. It was now the third week of March, and Longreve’s only word from him had been a telegram dated February 19th, in which Poe stated that he would be interrupting his return to New York City with a brief stopover in Philadelphia, for reasons he did not provide.

  “May I take the letter with me?” I asked.

  “Will you go to Philadelphia?”

  “I don’t know where else to look for him. It seems the logical choice.”

  “You might try the Dollar Newspaper,” he said. “He’s published there. They may have an address for him.”

  I nodded and slipped the letter into my coat pocket.

  “I can only pray that no further misfortune has befallen him.”

  My knowledge of Poe, though now some seven years old, suggested that if misfortune had waylaid him in Philadelphia, it was the misfortune of his own proclivities.

  In the summer of 1840 I had lived with Poe awhile, for a few frantic but fecund days that had changed my life. I was then a ten-year-old street arab, a sticky-fingered liar and thief upon whom Serendipity shined one day by making me the only witness to a young woman’s desperate leap into the Hudson. The attempted suicide brought numerous curious onlookers to the site, one of them a threadbare journalist in search of a story. Poe took a liking to me, and I to him, and the peculiar bond of kinship we felt for one another was strengthened further upon our mutual discovery of the pale and bloated body of a second young woman, Miss Mary Rogers, that had become lodged beneath the pier.

  In any case, Poe had plucked me out of the gutter and invited me to his home on Bloomingdale Road, there to live temporarily with him and his lovely sweet Virginia and their bastion of steadfastness, Virginia’s mother, Mrs. Clemm. Later he arranged for my placement on a farm in western Ohio. Over the next seven years, all three members of the Poe household had written to me regularly, Poe’s letters more philosophical than intimate, subtly affectionate admonitions that I remain on the straight and narrow, that I keep my nose to the grindstone, that I do not fritter away life’s opportunities for success. More often than not the letter was accompanied by a book he could ill afford, sent, he always wrote, “in the furtherance of your education.” The more strident the admonitions contained in his letters, the more desperate, I somehow knew, was his own situation.

  Virginia’s letters, on the other hand, those sweet epistles from Sissie, were invariably bright if empty chronicles of the day’s weather, which flowers or fruit trees were in bloom, or, in winter, the ones she most looked forward to seeing in bloom once again. There was little else for her to talk about; she seldom left the house; she seldom could.

  It was Muddy, Mrs. Clemm, who kept me apprised of the family’s true condition. She sent copies of the few stories and poems Poe managed to get published (this was how I learned that he had honored me by transforming the humble name of Augie Dubbins into C. Auguste Dupin, literature’s first investigator of crime!). Muddy also kept me apprised of Sissie’s slow decline, of how the tuberculosis in her lungs grew steadily stronger and she weaker, of Poe’s occasional retreat into drink, the disorienting highs and lows of his manic optimism and his bottomless despair.

  Muddy’s letters were always long and intimate but never mournful. She seldom referred to herself or to her regimen of daily chores, the ceaseless ordeal of caring for the two individuals she loved most in all the world. I was, I’m sure, her only confidante. Yet not a word of complaint did she send my way. Every letter opened with the address, “My good and lovely boy,” and closed with, “Until we meet again, dear Augie.” Small wonder that my heart broke anew with every letter she wrote.

  It did not cross my mind, not once in those hard seven years, nor in the years to follow, until too late, that I would never again behold this woman who had mothered me more truly in a few short days than any other woman ever had or would.

  Her letters became a model for my own infrequent responses to the Poes. Because Poe had set me up in this position to divert me from a life of squalor and crime, I never wrote to complain about the grueling, endless work, the meager victuals, the friction, like grit rubbing grit, between me and Deidendorf, the brutish farmer to whom I was apprenticed. “Just because you come from New York City don’t mean you know your ass from a hole in the ground” was one of his favorite endearments for me.

  All this I kept to myself. If I wrote, “We put in three hundred bales of rye today,” I hoped that Poe would somehow intuit my blisters and itch, the dead ache between my shoulderblades. If I wrote, “Deidendorf thinks I’m lazy, but I’m working as hard as I can,” I prayed that Poe would close his eyes and envision the new bruises laid on my chest by Deidendorf’s fist, or the blood dried on my scalp from when my employer had dragged me halfway across a field by my hair.

  A part of me believed that by not giving voice to misery I was sparing Poe an extra concern, of which he had too many already. But another part of me filled every dispassionate letter with tears and silent pleas.

  Then came Muddy’s final letter to me, dated 4 February 1847:

  My good and lovely boy,

  Our beautiful songbird is gone at last. What a sweetness of voice she will add to the choir in Heaven. But it is hard on our Eddie, I’m afraid. He is at a loss to know what to do with himself. He could use a true companion now. As could we all.

  Until me meet again, dear Augie,

  My love is with you Always.

  Your Muddy

  The farm where I had been working, where I had been all but enslaved the past seven years, lay, like most northern farms in February, in a relative ease. There was as always livestock to be fed and tended, repairs on buildings to be made, equipment to be readied for spring, but the eight hundred acres of wheat and corn and potato fields slept under fifteen inches of hard-crusted snow. Still, Henry Deidendorf refused to grant me leave.

  But I was seventeen that winter, or close to it. I was more than willing to grant myself leave. My old skills as grifter and pickpocket had not been abandoned completely when I became a farmer, and over the years I had managed to squirrel away a nice bit of traveling money. In truth, even before Muddy’s letter arrived, I was itching to find a new home. All I had needed was some news of a wagoner heading south, for I had my heart set on Mexico and the conflict there. In May of the previous year President Polk had convinced Congress to declare war on Mexico, and with that declaration my own manifest destiny had been assigned a destination.

  I was not a farmer, never had been, never would be, no matter how long and hard Deidendorf worked me. I had no love for neat rows of freshly turned soil. My spirit did not soar at the stench of fresh cow manure. I longed for dry ground beneath my feet, dry air in my lungs. After seven years I had had seven years too much of pig shit, horse shit, cow shit, and chicken shit, of defecation of any species, which I then had to shovel from stall to wheelbarrow to field, acre after unending acre of steaming manure shoveled and spread, scraped off my boots, picked from under my fingernails. I longed for the clean clash of steel, the sharp aridity of gunpowder.

  Yes, I admit to a bloodthirst that year. My favorite days were those Sundays when Deidendorf sent me out with his small-bore shotgun to bring home a brace of pheasants,
rabbits, or squirrels. I even enjoyed the act of gutting and skinning, of handling the still-warm corpses of bare meat. A lifetime of anger, I suppose, was boiling away inside me, seeking a vent.

  Then came Muddy’s final letter. It arrived weeks after its date of composition and had probably spent a good portion of that time crammed into a pigeonhole in Deidendorf’s desk before he deigned to give it to me. I read the letter at the end of a workday promptly requested leave from my employer, was refused with a laugh and a snort, and, at shortly after midnight that same night, cleaned out my trunk and began the long trek east.

  For spite I stole Deidendorf’s favorite saddle from the tack room, a black leather affair with red-and-tan inlays. But after a mile or so the stink of him imbedded in the leather was too nauseating to bear, so I tossed the saddle into an icy creek and strode away feeling very nearly weightless.

  An hour after dawn, some fifteen miles or so east of my jailer, I flagged down a coach heading for Columbus and paid my fare. In this manner, walking when necessary, hailing a wagon or coach when I could, I covered the distance in thirteen days. Had I known that a new rail line ran from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia I might have veered south and shortened my trip considerably (only to learn, after landing in Gotham, that Poe was in fact somewhere back in the city of brotherly love!). As it was I kept to the north, across the uppermost forests of Pennsylvania, the midreaches of New Jersey, and finally into the state of New York. When I finally hit Manhattan in midday I went directly to Poe’s last address there. I did my best to ignore the way the city sang to me, the welcome I felt in its clamor and chaos. I tried to ignore the way my mouth watered each time I caught a whiff from a corn brazier or a pastry shop. I felt like a soldier home from war, and I even began to wonder if maybe the fighting in Mexico could do without me.

  But then I found another family living where I expected to find Poe and Mrs. Clemm. And my sense of homecoming turned cold.

  That was when I turned to the downtown offices of Godey‘s Lady’s Book, where Poe had published several pieces. The first editor I spoke to, the man named Longreve, recognized my name, said that Poe had spoken of me often. All this I found warming. Until the news that Poe had gone incommunicado somewhere between Philadelphia and New York.