I admit that I felt sorry for Poe. His need for approval, for validation in the eyes of others, was sometimes pathetic. And so I asked, “What’s a biographer do?”
Poe leapt on my question like a sparrow on a cricket. “You would write down the details of my life,” he said. “You would chronicle, past, present, and future, all the incidents of my life. In short, you would recreate my life for all to read.”
It was the smugness of his tone that amazed me most, that imperious tilt of his chin that drove all trace of my sympathy away. Still, had I not been so exhausted by the trip, had I not even at that moment smelled the rum on his breath, were I, in short, not resentful of the changes displayed in him from the Poe I remembered and loved, his unpredictable fluctuations, I might have held my tongue.
“Sounds to me,” I said, “like a lot of sitting and listening and writing down what I’m told.”
He blinked. His head tilted back as if bumped.
And then I went too far. “I’m not about to be anybody’s secretary.”
His eyes narrowed. “All for the best. Since you are obviously not up to the task.”
“What I’m not up to is wasting my life by writing about somebody else’s. I’ve got my own life to live.”
“You cannot count on elephants to drown every day,” he said.
I turned to Captain Shook. “I’m on my way to Mexico to fight with General Scott. I suspect I’ll find plenty to write about down there, don’t you think?”
With that I shoved back my chair and stood, knocking against the table so hard that the plates and cutlery rattled. By the time I reached the door I had made up my mind to be done with Poe. I stormed outside and in the gray before dawn marched down the foggy path to the packet boat. The others arrived within a quarter hour. By then I had managed to unclench my fists, though my heart felt as hard as an iron ball.
ONE FINAL incident before Pittsburgh. And, as it were, a harbinger of all to come.
In Freeport, north of Pittsburgh, where the Kiskiminitas River meets the Allegheny flowing south, our captain pulled ashore along a line of docks to tend to some matter of his own. We passengers took advantage of the stopover to disembark and stretch our legs, to wash our faces in sunlight and fresh air. All along the docks were small barges and other boats, packets and rafts and dinghies. By June any craft with a draft deeper than a canoe’s would have a difficult time finding enough water to float the Allegheny, but March was not yet over and, because the spring melt had the Allegheny running high, river traffic was heavy.
Poe surveyed the fleet at hand, then looked into the sky—the sky was clear, with only a few high and wispy clouds, no threat of rain—then strode straightaway toward an odd-looking craft that to my eyes seemed the result of a collision between a barge and a steamboat. It had a wide deck and drew a shallow draft, with an awkwardly constructed cabin aft, its wheelhouse perched atop the engine house. At the stern was the paddlewheel, perhaps three-quarters the size of the wheel on a passenger steamboat. From rail to rail and bow to stern the boat was patched and tarred and splattered with contrasting hues of pitch and paint.
I watched Poe advance to the slip nearest this boat’s wheelhouse and speak to the captain inside. I suspected that Poe was negotiating passage on the little steamer, and I experienced a sickening flutter of panic that I was the cause of his action. But midway in the brief conversation Poe pointed back toward me, and the captain leaned out of his wheelhouse to have a quick look. When he nodded, Poe reached for his wallet and emptied it out into the captain’s hand.
Poe came briskly back toward the packet boat but did not even look at me as he passed. He went aboard, disappeared inside the cabin, and reemerged a few minutes later with both his bag and mine in hand. By now I had stood and come to the edge of the dock. He tossed my bag into my arms. “Let’s go,” he said. “We’re transferring to the Sweet Jeanine.”
“She doesn’t look all that sweet to me,” I said as I fell in behind him.
“Sweet enough. I can’t abide another hour inside that oblong box.”
“How much is my share?”
“It’s been taken care of.”
“I want to pay my share.” I had seen the way Poe handled his wallet when dealing with the Sweet Jeanine’s captain, and I knew how little that wallet contained.
But Poe said, “A few hours from now we will arrive at Dr. Brunrichter’s house, where I will have no need for money. And tomorrow night, after my reading, I will have been amply paid.”
“Even so,” I began, until he flashed me a look over his shoulder, and I decided to accept his generosity.
And so ended our first conversation since our joust at breakfast. Both of us, I think, regretted those impetuous words, yet an awkwardness remained between us. All morning long I had been searching my mind for some way to mend the rift without actually apologizing, which my pride would not allow, but again and again his condescending descriptions of my composition would return to me, and I would burn with resentment anew.
We placed our bags inside the wheelhouse and introduced ourselves to the captain, who did not reciprocate. He was a sallow man, wide in the gut, just like his boat, and equally attentive to his personal maintenance as to the Sweet Jeanine’s. I remember looking at the dirt that lined the creases of his neck and thinking that Jeanine must be very sweet indeed to tolerate the rank proximity of this gentleman in her life.
“Got my load coming anytime now,” was all he said to us by way of introduction. “Don’t wander too far off.”
With that both Poe and I returned to shore. There he gave me a sidelong glance and said, “I believe I’ll stretch my legs a bit.”
He did not invite me to join him, so I merely nodded and stood my ground as he ambled down the shore. I watched him for a few moments, feeling somehow bereft, as sorrowful as an abandoned child. Then, suddenly recognizing this emotion, I grew resentful again, and resolved to rid myself of all unpleasant emotions, and turned and strode across the dirt lane that ran alongside the river, and hiked adamantly into the woods.
SOME TWENTY or so minutes later, having spent most of that time chucking acorns at a fat red squirrel who sat on a branch ten feet above my head while shrilly scolding me for invading his territory I headed back to the docks. There I found three wagons lined up along the road, their identical loads being carried one by one onto the Sweet Jeanine’s foredeck, and there being stacked in four tiers of descending number, four tiers of brand-new, empty coffins made of yellow pine, unpainted and unadorned but for the loop of heavy cord at the foot and head of each box.
Poe was leaning against the wheelhouse, watching this somber sculpture take shape. He stood with arms crossed, a half smile on his lips. It was then a strange presentiment began to overtake me. I cannot call it chilling because I felt no chill, nor can I call it heavy because it did not weigh me down with dread. What I felt as I watched those coffins going aboard, the clean, smooth boards as yellow as sunlight, their cleanliness in stark contrast to the rest of the Sweet Jeannie, what I felt was more of a nervousness, an itch of apprehension, exacerbated as much by Poe’s cryptic smile as by the nature of the freight itself.
When the loading was done and the emptied wagons on their way down the road, I joined Poe aboard the steamer. Our captain, the only other individual aboard, uncleated the mooring lines, shoved his craft a few inches from the slip, then returned to the wheelhouse and set the paddlewheel in a slow, thumping churn. He backed us clear of the dock, gradually swung us around, and set us off down the Allegheny.
I waited silently beside Poe for a while, giving him an opportunity to be the first to speak. He did not avail himself of the opening. And so I asked, with a nod of my chin toward the coffins, “Where are all those going?”
“Same place we are,” he said. He then turned away and went into the wheelhouse for a moment, only to return with his notebook and pencil. He leaned against the wheelhouse wall and immediately set to work on a rendering of the coffin sculpture.
>
I asked, “Any idea why Pittsburgh needs so many of them?”
He sketched for another thirty seconds without answering. Then said, “Climb up on top of those for me, will you, Augie? I am in need of a model.”
His tone was as warm and familiar as ever, all trace of coldness gone. Still, I wondered if I had heard him correctly. “On top of those things?” I asked.
“Certainly a man on his way to war won’t be afraid of empty boxes,” he said.
It was all the challenge I required. I climbed, albeit gingerly, to the very top tier, and there stood, legs spread wide to steady myself against the steamboat’s rock, hands jammed onto my hips.
The captain leaned out of his wheelhouse and shouted, “You topple them boxes and you’re gonna haul them out of the river by hand!”
Poe told me, “Come down one tier.”
I was more than happy to accommodate him.
“Now sit,” he said.
I sat.
“Hmm, not right. Try lying down.”
I did so.
“Not on your back, that pose does not work. Try lying on your side facing me. There, good, that’s much better. Now then, elevate your left knee. Good. Now prop your head up on an elbow. Excellent. Remain just like that, if you will.”
I spent the next ten minutes in that ridiculous pose, in constant danger of rolling forward off my narrow ledge. Finally Poe announced that I could come down if I wished, and I wished precisely that. I hurried to his side, legs peculiarly shaky, to see how he had rendered my likeness.
But the sketch displayed not me at all. He had, as he said, needed only a model. He had drawn himself in my place, himself in black suit and boiled shirt and stiff collar, the black tail of a frock coat draping over the edge of the coffin on which he lay so casually reposed.
Finished, he titled the sketch The Conqueror Worm. He then held it at arm’s length for a moment, considering what he had done. Then he laughed derisively and ripped the sheet from the notebook and tossed it at my chest, where I trapped it between both hands.
“Something to remember me by,” he said. And then he went to stand alone at the bow, his dark eyes glaring hard upriver, as if in defiance of all calamity ahead.
6
THE DAY grew hazy the nearer we came to Pittsburgh. The air sat heavier in my lungs, smoke-gray air from the blast furnaces in the distant forests where charcoal was made for the iron works built closer to the river. This cloud of smoke, renewed daily, lay like a perpetual gloom over the basin of the city, and the deeper into it we penetrated, the heavier grew the foreboding in my chest.
I would not say that I had begun to fear Pittsburgh, but rather that an apprehension of it, just short of premonition, had arisen in me. Disconcerting too was the new relationship that had developed between myself and Poe. It troubled me that my emotions toward him were now so frequently at crosscurrents with one another, a deep affection now and then subdued by resentment, pity, and even disgust. Through all my seven years as a farm slave, through all the abuses and routine miseries, what had kept me strong was the desire, the determination, not to let Poe down. Had I at ten, and thereafter in his absence, viewed him so differently than I now at seventeen saw him? Or had he in those seven years become more cynical, more arrogant, more bitter and distrustful? Had seven years of hardship and ridicule, the loss of his wife and the dissolution of his family, had all this fueled his desperation to the point that he had become less the Poe I remembered and more like one of his own tormented characters?
To each of these questions: Yes. Yes. And yes.
And now before us, Pittsburgh on the left, Allegheny City on the right, both muted in color beneath, or rather inside, the adumbrated sky that lay atop them. The first landmarks to catch my eye were the courthouse atop Grant’s Hill, its dome and spire not tall enough to pierce the charcoal clouds, and, farther back on the opposite shore, the Western Penitentiary, as low and stolid and uninviting as the courthouse was noble and grand.
Then came the aqueduct, the very same one on which Charles Dickens had entered the city in 1842, crossing from Allegheny into Pittsburgh on the Pennsylvania Canal Line, there to behold before him an “ugly confusion of the backs of buildings and crazy galleries and stairs.” The Sweet Jeanine made a slow swing out of midriver and aimed itself left, bringing me to face head-on all the confusion and baroque randomness described by Dickens but doubled, perhaps even tripled by now, a mere five years after his visit.
At river level Pittsburgh appeared a crazy quilt of docks, some stable and complete, many not, a few of them still layered atop one another by the previous winter’s ice jam and left there to rot. Moored to these docks was every kind of shallow-draft barge and raft and canoe and small boat imaginable, plus a few that remained unimaginable even as I gawked at them.
Old logs, broken barrels, flotsam of every type littered the shore and docks. It was an area so busy, so focused on upward growth, that all clean-up was left to the river itself. And the river was, to say the least, an indifferent housekeeper.
Rising up from the docks on both sides of the aqueduct was another crazy-quilt construction, but this one of wooden stairways and landings and loading ramps, each ascending to a congestion of wooden buildings, each building shouting for attention with a brightly lettered sign high on its wall: THE RAILROAD HOTEL, THE FOWLER EXCHANGE, DEVLIN’S TOBACCO AND CIGARS.
And the people, the citizens and visitors of Pittsburgh: At the dock level, burly bearded men in shirtsleeves, each one heaving this or that, carrying crates and kegs and barrels and bales either up the stairs or down, or easing them down the loading ramps with pulleys and ropes, or likewise dragging them up. From the deck of the Sweet Jeanine I could witness more of the same going on at street level at the top of the stairs, not only the rough and eager laborers of varied stock but also all manner of more dandified entrepreneurs, merchants and professional men of every ilk, gentlemen in frock coats and top hats, their faces clean-shaven or muttonchopped or goateed, and often as not arm-in-arm with bonneted women, their long frilly dresses and four layers of undergarments swishing with every step, rustling like the water itself as these women strolled down Washington Street or promenaded across the canal’s footbridge.
Now that we were nudging close to a dock, I observed that Pittsburgh was not as uniformly enshrouded in smoke as it had seemed from upriver. Certainly it was not a sunny place, not even on the brightest of days, but here in the city proper the smoke did not hang so thickly nor so low upon our heads, and the local smoke arose from only a few high chimneys in the immediate area, from restaurant cookstoves and hotel fireplaces, with the blacker smoke of blacksmith shops or iron and glass works scattered farther up and down the river.
With all this clamorous activity, then, all this bustle and busy noise, how to account for the feeling Pittsburgh induced in me? A heaviness in my chest and limbs, a shortness of breath. A vague sense of oppression, as if the air itself were weighted and had begun to tighten around me. I knew nothing of premonitions at the time, of the way our bodies sometimes react at a cellular level to a looming darkness, the approach of disaster. But that is surely what it was.
The moment our bowline was seized by a boy stationed on the dock, a huge man standing next to him leaned forward to seize the rail not four feet from where I stood, and with the alacrity of a Macedonian lemur swung himself up and over the rail and landed with a smack of both soles firmly on our deck. He was the broadest-shouldered man I had ever encountered, thick enough across the chest to have been a prize attraction in one of Barnum’s shows in New York City: The Pittsburgh Strong Man! Stronger than a team of horses! Watch him snap a telegraph pole in half with his bare hands!
An exaggeration, of course. But this was how he struck me. His arms at the bicep were as broad as my thigh, his fingers one-inch pipes. He wore dungarees and black boots and a chambray shirt with sleeves rolled nearly to the shoulder. And a battered brown hat, creased and double-peaked, looking something like a cross
between a cowboy’s Stetson and a crushed bowler. Slung from a loop in his waistband was a stout baling hook, the only tool of his trade other than animal strength.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen!” he boomed at Poe and me. He had a voice like a blunderbuss. “It’s a fine day for casket work, isn’t it now?”
With this he stepped atop the first tier of coffins and seized the braided cord from a box on the uppermost row, then turned both that coffin and the one next to it perpendicular to the row. He then faced us and, still grinning, backed up close to the two coffins he had positioned, reached backward with both hands, each hand seizing a braided handle, slid the boxes forward, and finally stepped down onto the deck with one long box balanced on the broad beam of each shoulder.
By now a gangplank had been set in place, and down it he went with his long thundering stride. Then up a wobbling staircase, two steps at a time, to a waiting wagon, where the empty coffins were deposited and moved into place. Then down the stairs he came again and onto the Sweet Jeanine.
Neither Poe nor I had yet moved. I wanted to see the same show again and would gladly have paid my two bits for the privilege.
The strong man gave me a wink as he seized two more boxes. It was all the invitation I needed. “Why so many?” I asked. “Is somebody building a house with them?”
His answer was delivered as lightly as my question had been. “Cholera!” he said. “That and murder—helps to keep the population down!” Then off he went with his two-shouldered load.
When he was out of earshot I turned to Poe. “Was he joking, do you think?”
“Not about the cholera, in any case.”
I shuddered. “And the murders?”
Poe merely shrugged. By all appearances the heavy Pittsburgh air was not affecting him as it affected me.
It was then our captain offered his version of good-bye. Halfway down the gangplank himself, he shouted at us, “You can get off my boat anytime now.”
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