Disquiet Heart

by Randall Silvis

  He would not find the light on this train. He watched as his listeners all turned away. He held his pose for just a moment longer, blinked twice (I could feel for myself the sting of humiliation in his eyes), and finally faced his window once again.

  I bent over my paper and resumed my work. Two hours later, sensing some change in the air, I looked up to see that the train had stopped, we had arrived in Columbia, and that half our companions in the railcar had already disembarked. I felt vaguely disoriented, still half submerged in a fever dream.

  Poe stood in the aisle, satchel in hand. “Shall I insist that the boat be held while you complete your masterpiece?”

  I snatched up the paper in one hand, my bag in the other. “I’m coming.”

  The remainder of the journey would be completed by slow-moving packet boat, a small enclosed ark of a boat drifting down first the Juniata and Schuylkill Rivers, then through the Union Canal Tunnel over seven hundred feet long, and into the Susquehanna River. From there, as far west as Johnstown, a canal boat on wheels would be dragged along the Portage Railroad, hauled up mountain slopes by stationary steam engines, and pulled over level ground by a team of horses. In Johnstown we would again take to the water, canalling along the Conemaugh and Kiskiminitas Rivers until finally, gliding along an aqueduct, we would cross the Allegheny and enter into Pittsburgh.

  All in all, four days of watching the trees go by. (Except for those fifteen minutes when, just west of Carlisle, our drift paralleled the Pennsylvania Turnpike and we glided past the dusty, fly-clouded, tail-swishing, low-mooing train of a cattle drive on its way to the slaughter yards of Harrisburg, it was not a trip remarkable for its exotica.) By the time we had been on the water for a half day, most passengers had tired of pointing out bald eagles and red-tailed hawks perched on high branches, of river otters and muskrats poking their heads up out of the water. We also witnessed more than our share of white-tailed deer, and could be roused to a window only when the word “Bear!” was shouted. Besides, not every passenger was blessed with a window. The interior of the canal boat was stuffy and hot, free of all decoration and adornment, the benches less hospitable than Episcopalian church pews.

  “This canal boat is not unlike a communal coffin, is it?” Poe remarked. Several of us laughed, if sourly, at this observation. Only in hindsight do I see how prescient it was.

  In Columbia, at the inn where we availed ourselves of refreshments before first taking to the water, I had slipped away from Poe long enough to purchase a pencil of my own at a stationer’s kiosk, along with a half-dozen sheets of good parchment. Later, on the boat, while Poe and the others dozed or read in the dim light or stared blankly at nothing in particular, I busied myself with making a clean copy of my composition.

  This done, a good three hours after we had taken to the boat (the last hour was spent in nervous trepidation, the finished copy in hand), I returned to sit beside Poe. He had been drowsing, chin on his chest, but now opened his eyes, then turned his head toward me.

  “Are we stopping for the night?” he asked.

  “Not yet. We’ve got a bit of daylight left.”

  Now he noticed the paper trembling in my hand. “Is that for me?”

  I could not quite bring myself to hand it over. “You told me once that I had the instincts of a writer. Do you remember?”

  He nodded. “It was the day we first met.”

  “I assumed you were telling the truth.”

  “I have always told you the truth, Augie.”

  Finally, I held out the paper to him. “Tell me the truth about this.”

  He took it. Held it to the light. Read the first few lines. Lowered the paper and looked at me. “An account of the elephants?”

  “It is.”

  He nodded. “It would help me to know, in assessing this chronicle, the purpose for which it is intended.”

  “I was hoping to get it published somewhere. In a newspaper maybe.”

  A smile twitched at his mouth, but he held it in check. “You intend to make your way through this world as a writer?”

  “I guess that depends.”

  “On this.”

  “On that.”

  He looked at the paper again, now flat on his lap, but he was not reading. “It takes more than a writer’s instincts to make a writer, I’m afraid.”

  “I know that.”

  “It requires years of hard work. Discipline and perseverance.”

  “I have to start somewhere, don’t I? Well then, that’s my start. Right there underneath your hand.”

  This time he lifted the paper to the light again. Fifteen seconds later he asked, “And will you be staring at me all the while as I read?”

  I slid off the bench and stood. “I’m going to try to go up on top for a while. I need some fresh air. I’m suffocating down here.”

  A half hour later I returned to his seat, sneaking in like a thief. He kept his face averted, though I thought I could detect the insinuation of a smile on his lips. Whether it was a smile of pleasure or ridicule, I had no idea.

  He asked, “Have you more paper?”

  “I do.”

  He handed me the story. “Then start again.”

  I spent the remainder of that first day studying the marks he had made on my story, the circles he had drawn around certain phrases and redirected elsewhere on the page with long arrows, the lines drawn through other sentences, words changed, misspellings corrected. In the margins were comments to accompany the hieroglyphs. “A poorly chosen word.” “Unclear.”

  “Maudlin.” “You’ve remembered this incorrectly.” “If you must steal, steal from a better writer.”

  I labored over every new word, every revised sentence. By the time the canal boat pulled to a dock at dusk that night and the weary passengers went tramping ashore, my second copy was ready. I handed it to Poe as we disembarked.

  “Might this wait until after supper?” he asked.

  “Of course, there’s no hurry. Take as long as you like.”

  “Then let us fall into line. Surely somebody must be leading this parade.”

  Like sheep we followed the rest of the passengers along a footpath through the woods. A hundred yards or so back from shore set a roadhouse; there we were fed and given a room for the night, shared with four other men. All through supper I vacillated between exhaustion and euphoria, as drained by my intellectual toil as I was exhilarated by it.

  In our room, a plain room furnished with one chair and three beds, I immediately went to the only bed not already occupied by two bodies and sat on the edge of it and pulled off my boots. Poe stood by the window, looking out at the darkness. I told him, “I don’t mind sleeping on the floor tonight.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “Lie down there. You’ll be up again soon enough.”

  “Aren’t you coming to bed?”

  “As soon as I’ve had another look at your masterpiece,” he said. He searched the room for a candle but found none. “Well then. I suppose I shall do my reading downstairs.”

  In the past few moments I had become aware of an ache building in my chest, some low throb as I lay there watching him scour the room for a candle, my manuscript in his hand. Just as he pulled open the door to leave the room, I spoke. “Sir?” I said.

  He turned back to me.

  “I just wanted to thank you. For everything you’ve done for me. Everything you’re doing. I’ve already learned a lot from you.”

  He nodded but said nothing, and soon disappeared out the door. I heard perhaps four receding footsteps, then silence, and then his tread returning. He looked around the threshold at me. “If we are to be professional colleagues as well as traveling companions, perhaps you had best stop calling me ‘Sir.’”

  I fell asleep that night with my eyes filled with warm tears.

  IT COULD not have been more than 4:00 A.M. when a thunderous knock on the door startled me and my roommates awake. “Breakfast in thirty!” bellowed the canal boat captain outside our door. “
Departure in sixty!”

  I sat up. The room was still dark but sufficiently moonlit for me to discern that the other half of the bed was empty. I put my hand to the mattress. Cold. And no indentation of Poe’s head marked the pillow.

  I arose quickly, having slept fully clothed but for my shoes and coat, made fully alert by a growing alarm that I would find Poe downstairs as I had found him in Philadelphia, reeking and helpless. Even at seventeen I understood the appeal of alcohol, the seduction of having to look no further than the bottom of a tall mug for one’s strength, one’s forgetfulness, one’s surcease of misery. How many nights had I driven Wiley and Pike home from the Indian camp and dragged them to their bunks, with Wiley promising all the while to flatten Deidendorf at the next opportunity, just for the principle of it (a principle that invariably vanished with the mist of morning), and Pike weeping about a redhaired girl from Indiana who had gone to the creek for a bucket of water one afternoon and never returned? (More than once I had attempted, while hoisting Pike’s stinking feet onto his bed, to ascertain his relationship to the girl, and how he was able to describe so vividly the way her hair, “as pretty as a sunset,” fell forward over her shoulders as she dipped her bucket in the river. But there are some secrets that even a quart of potato whiskey will not wrench free.)

  Less than a minute after the captain’s call to awaken I was on my way out of the room, then down the dark and narrow stairway and into the tavern. The canal boat captain was seated at a table near the door, his platter of fried meat and bread lit by an oil lamp in the center of the table. He looked up at me and nodded, chewing vigorously, and spoke with his mouth half full. “Go on into the kitchen and fix yourself a plate.”

  I nodded in answer, though my gaze had already traveled to the other end of the room, to the table and chair closest the fireplace, where a stack of logs was just then beginning to take fire. There, slumped back in a straightback chair, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle, arms folded over his chest, was Poe. I approached tentatively, searching for evidence of his condition. On the table sat a pewter mug. I picked it up, sniffed for the scent of rum, smelled only tea. Nothing else lay on the table but for my sheaf of papers, the elephant story, weighted down by Poe’s meerschaum pipe and his well-used pencil.

  As noiselessly as possible I freed the papers and picked them up and slid closer to the fire. I knelt into the light. And squinted at the hieroglyphs with which he had once again adorned my composition, but this time not so prolifically He had left at least half of my words intact.

  “One more pass-through should do it,” he told me, his voice hoarse with sleep, eyes still closed. And at that moment the heat of the fire washed through me and so warmed my chest and face that it was all I could do to keep from flinging myself upon him, seizing him in a hard embrace and kissing his unshaven cheek in gratitude. Little did either of us realize that had I done so, that kiss, in the not too distant future, would have come to be regarded as a Judas kiss.

  THAT DAY’S travel brought us to the mountains, our slow inching up one side, our cautious creep down the other. I cannot recall much of the actual experience, whether it was pleasant or monotonous, how the scenery was received by my fellow passengers, so immersed was I in my revision. But I do recall looking up from my work at midday, stretching my back, blinking, a bit surprised to find myself in a dim packet boat and not, as I had been all morning, standing on the banks of the Delaware in harsh sunlight. Poe was looking my way.

  “You’ve done well,” he said. “You’ve produced a serviceable little piece.”

  I do not know if it was his intention to lift me up with praise only to dash me down again, but that was the result of his remark. A serviceable little piece. Could a compliment have been any crueler?

  Not only could, but was. Throughout the rest of that afternoon, he approached me from time to time and gave the thumbscrew another twist.

  “It is really quite competent writing for one your age.”

  “It is hardly overdone at all.”

  “An engaging little sketch.”

  By early evening I felt as if a hundred barbed porcupine quills had been fired into my flesh. “Why do you call it a sketch?” I finally asked, able to tolerate his praise no longer. “A little sketch, a little piece, a little anecdote. Are you saying that it isn’t finished or complete?”

  At the time of this exchange he was seated by a window, sucking on his meerschaum, watching the smoke drift through the opening. “Oh, it’s complete enough, certainly. For what it is, it is quite complete.”

  He was baiting me now, I felt sure of it. Still, the quills dangling from my skin had made me cranky. “For what it is? And what, exactly, is it?”

  “What do you think it is?” he asked.

  “I think it is a story. A true story.”

  “One might call it that, certainly.”

  “But you wouldn’t?”

  “What it lacks,” he said, “is a foundation. An underlying purpose. One does not simply tell a story so as to hear oneself speak. There must be a reason for the story. A raison d’être.”

  “What about art for art’s sake? Isn’t that what you’re always preaching?”

  “This is your first effort at composition, Augie. We are not talking here about art. What you have composed is journalism. Reportage. Art is conspicuously absent.”

  “Well maybe that’s what I was aiming for. An honest depiction of what I saw. Simple and true.”

  “If you were aiming for the simple,” he said, “you have hit a bull’s-eye.”

  We did not talk for the next three hours. Which is to say, I avoided all conversation. Again at dusk our packet pulled ashore and its passengers hiked stiff-legged and weary to the nearest roadhouse. Along the way Poe stepped to the side of the path so as to fall in beside me as I brought up the rear.

  “You mustn’t sulk,” he said. “If you wish to be treated as a colleague, you must be prepared to accept the bitter with the sweet.”

  “Where was the sweet? I must have missed it.”

  “If I was overly hard on you, I apologize.”

  I was still too angry, too stung, to wave his cruelty aside.

  “You have talent,” he told me. “I have always known this about you. Your perceptions are as keen as any man’s.”

  We walked in silence for a while, though I now began to feel a softening of my anger, a cooling of the heat that reddened my face.

  As we walked he put a hand on my arm. “Let us not make too much of this,” he said. “It was your first effort and it was a good effort. If my criticisms were too severe, it is only because of my deep affection for you. An affection so deep, Augie, that the least I ever want for you is perfection itself.”

  And now my chest ached with a different kind of heat.

  “Have you ever found it yourself?” I asked, not as a challenge but an inquiry sincere. “Have you ever composed the perfect story or poem?”

  He considered his answer. Then, after a sigh, “It is probably fair to say that what we crave most for those we love is precisely that which we ourselves have failed to attain.”

  And with that admission he healed the wound between us.

  Unfortunately, the wound did not stay closed for long.

  5

  ANOTHER ROADHOUSE breakfast at 4:30 A.M. The tavern, despite its smoky lanterns hanging from the ceiling beams, seemed as dark and dank as a cave. And once again, Poe spent not a minute of the previous night horizontal, but this time, with no manuscript with which to pass his night, had sought out the usual solace.

  At our table that morning he was more animated than anyone else in the room. Most of us were barely able to lift our heads, and so consumed our bowls of potatoes and eggs with eyes half-closed. In my presence, Poe took nothing but tea. But the vague scent that arose from him, and the restless nature of his gaze, at once furtive and fiery, were unmistakable. He could not keep his fingers from drumming nameless tunes on the tabletop.

  Three othe
r passengers shared our table that morning, all men. One was the canal boat captain himself, a Mr. Shook, a hard little bald-headed monkey of a man always in a hurry, his every movement brisk and sharp.

  “Eat up, gentlemen, eat up. The sun’s on its way and we must be as well.”

  “After Pittsburgh,” said Poe, “is it then back to Philadelphia for you, Captain?”

  “To Wheeling, sir. Down the Ohio to Wheeling.”

  “Some of us are traveling to Wheeling?” Poe asked the table in general.

  One man raised his hand a few inches above his breakfast, but he showed no inclination to prolong the conversation. Captain Shook said, “In Pittsburgh I’ll pick up several. Some for Wheeling, some for Cincinnati. Some for only God knows where.”

  After that the conversation lapsed. By this, our third morning, few had energy for idle talk.

  Poe, however, had energy to burn. In lieu of other distractions, he turned to me. “Seeing as how you have your mind set on pursuing the life of a scribbler,” he said, and here I looked up at him, not at all pleased to be singled out in this manner, not at all comfortable with having my ambition tossed onto the table like a slab of fatty ham, “I have devised a scheme for your advancement.”

  Here he paused to note how many ears had been piqued. Satisfied that all at the table were attentive, he continued. “Every great literary man needs a biographer,” he said. “You shall be mine.”

  I feel certain that what Poe hoped for at that moment was not in any way to demean or ridicule me but to achieve for himself some measure of recognition from the other men at the table, at the least a question or two that might allow him to introduce himself, humbly of course, as a different kind of man than the rest of them, as a man not bound for the iron or glass works but engaged in loftier pursuits, a laborer in the vineyards of intellect and art.

  A couple of our tablemates looked up at him briefly, but the only one to speak was Captain Shook. “Eat up, gentlemen. Let’s finish up quick.”