Brunrichter, in his dressing gown and slippers, was sipping coffee in the library, his chair turned to face the threshold past which I was attempting to steal. He smiled when he saw me, and gestured toward the silver coffeepot beside him on its serving cart.
I wanted no conversation at that moment, no encumbrances of any kind. On Roebling’s suspension bridge a revelation had occurred to me. I was not equipped for a routine of daily interaction, I understood that now. I was not equipped for any profession that might place me in routine proximity to others. I needed to be apart from mankind, an observer on the fringe.
The night before, in The Blind Dog and after, I first felt my apartness begin to assert itself, felt the observer in me take precedence over the participant. And in that detachment, I found a serenity.
I was now in no hurry to give up that serenity. But I was a guest in this man’s house, in this man’s clothes, if only for a short while longer.
“I’ve had some coffee already,” I told him, and came as far as the threshold.
“One more?” he said.
When I did not answer immediately, he turned to the serving cart, poured another cup, then held it out to me. I came forward and took it, reminding myself that when he questioned me about my whereabouts all night, when he upbraided me for upsetting Poe before his reading, I must keep my anger in check, it would avail nothing, it would only delay my departure, hence my freedom.
“Help yourself to the cream and sugar,” he said.
I did so.
“Edgar’s reading was a great success, don’t you think?”
“It seemed so to me.” I stood beside an empty chair and sipped my coffee.
“But the activities afterward, the adulation, it went on too long.”
“Oh?” I said.
“Not that he didn’t revel in it. But it did exhaust him. The young women, in particular, were overly attentive.”
“I’m sure he took no part in that at all.”
Brunrichter smiled. “He does bask in the flirtation, does he not?”
“And is a master of it himself.”
Brunrichter must have detected something in my voice, a tone I had not wished to convey. “You don’t approve?”
I blame the weariness for loosening my tongue. “I only wish that he could be more …”
“Discreet?”
“No, no I was thinking … more complete unto himself.”
“You have no need for other’s approval?” he asked.
I raised the cup to my lips, and sipped, and wondered.
“In any case,” the doctor said, “he will be sleeping for a while. Throughout the morning, I expect. I prepared a mild inducement to that end.”
“But took none yourself?”
He shrugged. “I have a restless mind, always have. A few hours of sleep is all I require.”
I nodded, and then, involuntarily, glanced into the empty foyer, the staircase, my gaze slowly mounting toward the top.
“Ah, you’re tired too,” Brunrichter said. “And I am keeping you from your bed.”
“Yes, well,” I began, thinking then that I should inform him of my plans, that I would be departing by noon. But I pondered it too long.
“I only wanted you to know,” he said, “as you no doubt know already, that Edgar is not as strong just now as we might wish him to be. In my opinion, he is rather ill.”
I responded with a quizzical look.
“The grief, you know. As well as the recent excesses in an attempt to assuage that grief.”
“He needs to get some strength back, I agree. But otherwise—”
“Otherwise he is depleted. There is a lassitude to his movements, as I’m sure you have observed. However, despite the exhaustion he now feels, I am of the opinion that he requires more evenings like the last, by which I mean an atmosphere in which he is surrounded by admiration and respect—not ridiculed as he would be in New York, nor chided and coerced by penurious editors as he was in Philadelphia.”
I wondered just how much of his life Poe had revealed to Brunrichter, just how naked were his confessions.
“An ambiance of heartfelt esteem,” he said, “that is what Edgar needs most at this difficult time in his life.”
He seemed to be asking for my permission, my approval of his thesis. And so I gave it. “I cannot disagree.”
He smiled again. “And you, Augie. You are an important, no, an essential part of that ambiance.”
To this I made no reply. Apparently he knew nothing of what had passed between Poe and myself the night before.
“You are his family now,” Brunrichter said. “His sole connection to all he has lost.”
If I was weary before this, the weariness now doubled. I felt a great heaviness press down on me, a pinching at the top of my spine.
“He enjoyed last evening so very much,” the doctor said. “All that was missing in the festivities afterward was your company. He asked of you several times.”
The weariness welled up in my chest then. It stuck in my throat and stung my eyes. “I thought he was angry with me. We had talked about something earlier and … I think I upset him greatly.”
Brunrichter waved a hand through the air, as if my worry were a fly he could carelessly shoo away.
“I spent the night down on the wharf. Trying to forget, I suppose, how angry he had been.”
“On Water Street?” he asked.
“Water, First, Second, all up and down the area.”
“You weren’t”—and he paused briefly, considered his words. “You weren’t uncomfortable in such a milieu?”
“I grew up on the streets. Lower than the streets. Five Points in Manhattan. Pittsburgh’s version is like a church picnic to me.”
“Young women do not disappear from church picnics,” he said.
“Sir?”
“You didn’t hear the news while you were there?”
“News of what?”
“How strange that you, in the very midst of it, shouldn’t hear. Edgar and I arrived home before midnight and already knew.”
“Knew what, sir?”
“Another young lady. A child, actually. Barely fifteen years old. Last seen, we were told, just after nine. Returning home from a visit with a friend. On Diamond Alley, I believe.”
“I walked down that street last night. This morning, I mean. Just a few hours ago.”
He shook his head. “The women of this city have been cautioned, again and again and again, to refrain from walking about at night unescorted. They know the danger, and yet … What is it about youth that creates this sense of invulnerability?”
“Don’t you remember?” I asked.
He smiled wanly. “I suppose I do.”
Several seconds passed before he spoke again, and this time more vehemently. “Gaslights. We must have gaslights on every corner of every street in Pittsburgh. And I intend to see that we do. I will not let the council rest until it is accomplished.”
I asked then how he had come to hear of the most recent disappearance.
“The operations of many of the watchmen are privately financed,” he told me. “My fellow councilmen and I have arranged for these watchmen to keep us informed of the progress of their investigation. Or, in this case, the total lack of progress.”
He turned away from me then, apparently lost in thought, his body twisted at the waist, chin resting on his hand, elbow on the armrest as he stared hard at the red embers in the fireplace. After a few seconds I set my cup on the tray and slipped out of the room. Before mounting the stairs I glanced back at him. He had now turned toward me but sat leaning forward, head lowered, gaze on the foyer floor, two fingers of a hand laid over his mouth. A tiny bead of moisture glimmered like glass in the corner of his eye.
NEEDLESS TO say, I forgot my plans for an immediate relocation. No, not forgot. But I did forego them for a while, if a bit grudgingly, in the interest of Poe’s health.
11
HE SLEPT past midday, though not
quite as long as I. After dressing for the day I ventured downstairs but found Mrs. Dalrymple’s kitchen empty, no sight or sound of her about. I helped myself to a pair of fat rolls from the pie locker and slathered them with apple butter. With the grumblings of my stomach eased, I went looking for Poe and found him on the front veranda, seated in a posture that was not typical for him, by which I mean empty-handed, with no manuscript to fuss over, nothing but the scenery to occupy his eye. His acknowledgment of my presence there on the porch was slow, as was the turn of his head and his smile when I took a chair next to his.
I had determined that the best course of action was to clear the air between us, to talk about our argument of the previous evening and then to explain myself. I waited for him to broach the subject, any subject, but again, atypically, he seemed in no hurry to converse.
The day was clear and warm and the few wisps of cloud in the sky showed no signs of moving. The air, too, was still, though I felt a trembling in my gut.
“By all appearances you have a great many admirers in Pittsburgh,” I told him. “And rightfully so.”
His response did not come quickly, nor was his speech rushed. His Virginia drawl seemed accentuated by the drowsy afternoon. “In many ways this noisy little city strikes me as even more civilized than New York.”
“It’s not noisy up here though.”
“It is very pleasant up here.”
“So you plan to stay on awhile then? To present another reading?”
“The invitation has been extended, yes. And I am not averse to accepting it.”
“No reason not to,” I said. I listened for a while to a muted clanging of metal that rose to us from far below. The paleness of that distant sound seemed to accentuate how high above the clamor of commerce we sat, there on the porch of that lofty palace.
Then I asked, “What about this affair tonight? Have you any aversion to it?”
“Are you asking if I am eager for it?”
“I suppose that is what I’m asking.”
“No, Augie. I am not eager to watch a man be asphyxiated and hanged.” He pursed his lips for a moment and gazed into the naked treetops. “Howsoever,” he said. “As a writer who has made the macabre his métier, whether by accident or not, I suppose that I do feel an obligation of sorts. Nor can I deny a fair measure of curiosity.”
“Nor can I,” I said.
This brought his first abrupt movement, a cocking of his head. “I have wondered of your interest.”
“How could I not be intrigued—even though, in a morbid kind of way.”
“Morbid indeed,” he said. A brief pause, and then, “I vacillate between wanting you there and not. At times I think it might be good for you somehow. Edifying. At other times I feel certain that you must not attend.”
I bristled at his use of the word “must.” But rather than speak out, I spent the next several seconds entertaining every notion I could conceive of as to why he did not want me at the hanging. None of them satisfied. And so I asked, as evenly as possible, “Why must I not?”
“You are too young,” he said. “It would not be appropriate for you, a lesson so harsh.”
“Are you forgetting the many other harsh lessons I have witnessed? Harsher, I’m sure, than to watch a stranger hang.”
I was referring to the time he and I had spent together in New York in the summer of 1840, the four murders perpetrated in a fortnight, one my own mother, one other by my own hand.
“Those you did not attend by choice,” he said.
“Which makes tonight all the more acceptable. Because it is my choice. A choice I am fully old enough to make.”
I had had no intention upon sitting down of antagonizing him further; I wanted only to placate, to reconcile. Yet there I sat balking at the first suggestion of a set of reins, though I knew in my heart that he had no desire to break or tame me, only to dissuade me, if he could, from the same descent into darkness that he too had begun as a very young man.
He smiled at me then, but I, unfortunately, already with my hackles up, viewed that smile as sardonic, a challenge. (Only now, so many years after the event, now with two sons of my own, one of them with his mother in whatever plane of existence, if any, this low and lonely one leads to, I now can see Poe’s smile in a far different light. I see it as the same sad smile I offered up so frequently to my own children as they grew, the smile that says, It is so hard for me to stand by and allow you to make your own mistakes, it is so painful. But I love you more than life and breath itself, so I must. You may do what you will.
As young men we think we know all there is to know, that we can handle the worst life throws at us. Only with age does our store of certainties dwindle, our confidence diminish and our ignorance grow, until finally we realize how impotent and uninformed we truly are, and, accepting this, can count ourselves wise.)
At seventeen I was far from wise, and I viewed Poe’s smile as a challenge to my courage, my ability to face without flinching another man’s death. And so I stiffened at the gesture, shoved myself up and out of my chair, muttered something about needing to stretch my legs, and marched away toward the river, always toward the river, as if I expected mere water to wash my humanness away.
I returned to the mansion a few hours later, sufficiently mellowed by my ambulation that I was able to join Brunrichter and Poe for a simple but pleasant dinner of bread, cold meat, cheeses, and fruit (Saturday being Mrs. Dalrymple’s day off), then afterward fine cigars and desultory conversation. And then we climbed into the doctor’s carriage and, sharing whatever jovialities sprang to mind, including Brunrichter’s comical rendition of a plantation minstrel song, we rode leisurely down the hill and across the river and onto the grounds of the Western State Penitentiary, and then we went though the massive gates, full of blithe and camaraderie, to watch a man we did not know be strung up by the neck to die.
THE HANGING
by James Dobson
The gallows of the Western State Penitentiary stand in the eastern corner of the prison’s interior courtyard. These gallows are not new, though here and there a clean white board stands out among the older, grayer ones. Witnesses in attendance for the hanging are seated some twenty feet from the gallows, and during the early minutes of this event we stare at those white boards as if the wood’s newness might suggest something hopeful. We are not sure what form this hope should take, but not in any case a reprieve, because we do not wish to go home disappointed. And in truth there is little hope or possibility of it evident inside these walls, and none of it at all in this courtyard on the evening when Leonidas Dixon is to die.
Convicted of the murder of a steamboat captain and three passengers aboard the paddlewheeler Excelsior, a crime committed in the autumn of 1846 and well-known to readers of this newspaper, Dixon is not the type of man to inspire sympathy. By all accounts having conducted himself in a low manner, being a brawler and liar and thief for as long as any Pittsburgher can remember, he is nevertheless considered by those who know him best little more than a third-class swindler, reliable in nothing but his devotion to John Barleycorn. His brother Maximus Dixon, employed as a blower in the Bakewell and Pears Glass Works, and also in attendance as a witness to the execution, informed this correspondent that Leonidas had never been known to hold a regular position before being taken on as a stoker for the Excelsior.
That employment, however, proved short-lived. It lasted a mere thirteen days before Leonidas Dixon, his face blackened with soot, strode into the pilothouse with pistola in hand, there to shoot down the captain in cold blood, one Percival Sidling, father of eight. Dixon then proceeded onto the deck where he divested the startled passengers of their personal belongings. Having done so, yet not satisfied with the amount of carnage thus wreaked, he then seized a fire ax and ran amuck about the deck for several minutes, swinging wildly at every person in his path even as the first mate ably guided the Excelsior toward shore.
Leonidas Dixon was successful in slaying three more men in
their attempts to bring him down, and afflicted grievous wounds to twice as many others before he was finally knocked off his feet and subdued.
And now, at a few minutes before sunset on a warm spring evening, with the air so still that, beyond the prison walls, the song of a wren can be heard, and with a dozen witnesses waiting somberly for the appointed deed to be carried out, Leonidas Dixon, hands tied behind his back and ankles shackled, is led across the courtyard and up the gallows steps. Among those witnesses, in addition to the condemned man’s brother and this correspondent, is local surgeon Dr. Alfred Brunrichter, and his guest, the illustrious author and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe.
Four members of the prison’s personnel stand at attention to the side of the gallows, two men on each side. Another stands below the drop, though well to the side of it. A single guard accompanies Dixon up the stairs. The condemned man pauses only once as he mounts to the platform, gives his head and shoulders a shake, and continues on.
Dixon is now placed facing west, toward the setting sun and his small audience of witnesses. The charges against him are read aloud. Upon the recitation of each of his victim’s names, Dixon is seen to grimace. When asked if he has any final words, he calls out loud and clearly through the stillness of the evening.
“You done it right, Maxie,” he is heard to say. “I always thought you was the stupid one. But right now I’m thinking different.”
Hearing this, his brother Maximus, who theretofore has sat stoically, now doubles forward in his seat and covers his face with a hand.
And then it is time. A black hood is pulled over the head of Leonidas Dixon. The noose is slipped around his neck and cinched snug. The guard steps away, leaving Dixon alone atop the platform.
When the nod is given, a lever is thrown and the trap door sprung. Dixon drops suddenly down. All of this is expected. What happens next is not.
Previous to the execution of Leonidas Dixon, the method of hanging in this state was known as “the short drop.” By this method the victim falls only a matter of inches. Death is produced by a slow strangulation that can take several minutes to reach culmination. During this process it is not uncommon for the victim’s face to become engorged with blood and to turn blue as a result of being deprived of oxygen. The eyes and tongue of the victim will protrude (hence the black hood) and the victim may be seen to struggle for quite some time before a total loss of consciousness ensues.
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