Because of the unpleasantness of this spectacle, and the longevity of anguish suffered not only by the condemned but by those who must witness his suffering, it was recently suggested to the penitentiary officials that the method of hanging known as “the long drop” be adopted here, as it has been throughout much of Europe. According to Dr. Brunrichter, this method requires a drop of between eight and ten feet, the exact distance to be calculated according to the condemned man’s weight. The force produced by the fall is expected to cause immediate unconsciousness owing to a fracture of the neck and the spinal cord. The victim’s heart may continue to beat for another quarter hour or longer before asphyxiation results in death, but it is presumed that the accused experiences no physical pain whatsoever.
Unfortunately, a miscalculation in the appropriate length of drop can result in an absence of instantaneous unconsciousness, as in the short drop method, or, as befell Leonidas Dixon, when the drop is too long, an even less desirable outcome.
The snap of the noose when Dixon fell was brutal and sharp. Dixon’s body, from the neck down, broke free of the noose to crumple in a heap on the hard-beaten ground. His head, still mercifully enshrouded in its black hood, leapt upward with the coiled rope as it was suddenly released of all tension. A moment later gravity reclaimed its victory, and the black hooded head tumbled sideways out of the noose, and fell onto the body beneath it, and from there rolled onto the ground.
For a moment the courtyard remained preternaturally still. No man so much as breathed. Then there came a heaving sound from among the witnesses, and Maximus Dixon was seen to fall from his chair, having fainted at the sight of his brother’s decapitation. This broke the spell of horror that had transfixed us all, and Maximus Dixon was quickly attended to, and in time revived and led away.
Dr. Brunrichter later invited those witnesses who cared to do so to examine the severed head. Mr. Poe and one other witness accepted this invitation, though out of scientific curiosity alone, in examination of the intricacy of musculature and nerves that renders human life so fragile and so precious.
Upon completion of Dr. Brunrichter’s examination, the victim’s head was reattached. The corpse was then placed inside an iron gibbet constructed to the exact specifications of Dixon’s anatomy. The gibbet, with Dixon inside, has been placed at the head of Maynard’s Island in the center of the Monongahela River, facing upstream, where it shall remain for the next several weeks as a deterrent to all individuals who might be contemplating a criminal life.
12
I SLEPT poorly that night, as might be expected, despite a cup of the special tea Brunrichter had prepared for Poe to help him relax, a mix of chamomile and what the doctor called “Indian herbs,” plus a hearty measure of an Oolong and Darjeeling blend to give it body. In the library he’d poured out a cup for Poe, then, handing one to me as well, had said, “You’ve been upset by what you saw tonight. Your eyes are clouded.”
“Not upset,” I told him, but took the cup anyway, if only to wash from the back of my throat the sticky taste of blood. “But I can’t stop thinking about it. I can see and hear every detail of that courtyard even yet.”
“He is a writer now,” Poe said from his chair, teacup close to his lips. “He has caught the writer’s disease.”
“Insomnia?” asked Brunrichter.
Poe nodded. “The imagination never sleeps.”
“If I erred in inviting either of you to accompany me tonight, I apologize. I only thought …”
Both Poe and I waved the suggestion of error away. We were glad to have witnessed what we did, grateful for the sickening scene; that was the gruesome irony of it.
And as a result my dreams that night were harsh and convoluted. Each ended in sudden violence. Strange noises wafted out of the corners of my mind, chilling breezes from dark woods and filthy alleyways. Thoughts whispered like voices overheard through the wallboard, fragmented but threatening. At times I thought myself awakened by a shrill cry and lay there with an ear cocked to hear it again, and upon hearing it a second time arose to investigate, only to look back from the door and see myself still in bed. “Come back where it’s warm,” my supine self then said to the one naked and trembling by the door. “You’re dreaming.”
It was that kind of night. Laughable, terrorizing, exhausting. To this day I do not know if my most vivid dream of all was a fantasy or not.
I began this dream as a boy, a child of ten or so, asleep on my pile of rags in my room in the Old Brewery, deep in the anus of Gotham, a building damp and reeking and rank. My mother’s snores rattled the chinking in the opposite corner. And then I was awakened by my mother’s cry. But my consciousness, even as I sat bolt upright, told me no, that was not your mother, the voice too high and shrill. That was a girlish cry. It’s Sissie! I thought. Oh god, she’s dying again!
Dreams, as I’m sure you know, have no respect for the constraints of time or space.
In my dream, I then leapt up off the floor, meaning to save her, though from what or whom or how I did not know. I hurried in the darkness to the door. Reached for the latch. And grabbing it, looked down at my hand and saw that it was not little Augie’s hand at all but a hand fully grown, a strong hand callused and browned from seven years of farm work. I looked back toward my pile of rags and saw instead a luxurious fourposter, now empty.
This was not the Old Brewery but a room in Brunrichter’s house. Was I awake now? Was this the actual corporeal me standing barefoot and in a nightshirt, my hand on the cold glass knob?
And then the cry again, plaintive and shrill, though weaker this time. Was it real, or merely the echoing residue of a dream?
I convinced myself that it was real. I did this by reminding myself that Virginia was gone, Sissie could not be saved. But the urge to save her, the ache, this remained, logic be damned. I opened the door and crept out into the hallway.
If my room was dark, the hallway was even darker, a tunnel of pitch without dimension. I felt my way along, hand to the wall. Every time I touched a doorknob I gave the knob a silent twist, pulled open the door if it yielded, and peered inside. Every room was a black box, a tomb of absolute darkness. I continued on.
At times I seemed to be pushing my way uphill. At other times, in danger of sliding down. I walked for an impossibly long time, though it might have been only seconds elongated by my disorientation. I might, all this time, have been asleep in my bed.
But whether awake, half awake, or fitfully asleep, I soon found myself standing in an unfamiliar room, illuminated poorly by clouded moonlight through a tall narrow window. It seemed a sitting room of some kind, but small, perhaps eight by ten. I could make out a writing desk and chair, a mahogany secretary, a bookcase lined with leatherbound volumes.
During my stay in Brunrichter’s mansion I had heretofore made no attempt to investigate the house, had slept in my chambers, taken supper in the dining room, breakfast in the kitchen, tea in the library. There must have been at least a dozen other rooms I had not yet viewed. So I was not surprised by the presence of this one, but surprised by what I can only describe as the density of its air, the great dark heaviness of every breath. I became aware of my own heart beating, slow and heavy. It felt in my chest like a large slow clock muffled in cotton.
I had come in as far as the center of the room when the windows went dark, and with them the room itself. A black cloud had obscured the meager moonlight. I waited for the cloud to pass, but the light did not return. My heart’s pounding grew louder and more anxious. I began to feel claustrophobic and could not remember my way to the door. Suddenly my thoughts were as clouded as the moon.
Like a blind man I lurched to the side, hands feeling for a wall with which to steady myself. Without visual reference I felt in danger of falling over. In time I found the wall, and crept along it slowly, like a bug scuttling fearfully over the boards, maneuvering past any furniture in my way. I remained at this activity for a time much longer than should have been required to return me to the
doorway, feeling more dizzied all the while, more constrained by the darkness, more convinced that I was in fact dreaming, and therefore entrapped in some nightmarish maze without termination.
But then, beneath my hands, a door swung open with a dull clack. Eagerly I stepped into the opening, though it too was just as black as the room, and though my outstretched hands told me just how narrow this doorway was.
By putting out both hands only a foot or so beyond my shoulders I could touch the sidewalls of a narrow corridor, the boards rough, support beams bare. When the narrow door eased shut behind me, the darkness was absolute. On bare feet I advanced an inch at a time, fingertips picking my way along, toes sliding over smoothly worn wood.
The corridor seemed to turn, an angle here, another there, though in such darkness and with no clues other than those of touch, I could not be sure. Then came a set of stairs, but short. Strangely, I counted only four steps, scraping each with my heel. My hands and feet were my eyes, and with my hands I felt depressions in the walls, tiny alcoves whose purposes I could not discern, buttonlike protuberances that did not yield to pressure. In essence I was worse than blind, for I lacked the blind man’s heightened acuity of hearing and touch and balance. My head was thick, all senses murky, and my fingertips half numb. Yet I could think of no option but to continue on.
Then more stairs. Or were they the same ones I had encountered earlier? Was I going up now instead of down?
Dead-end. The corridor stopped. My hands ran up and down the wall but felt nothing. A panic began to rise in me, a fear of being trapped here, buried, and I thought of the stack of coffins aboard the Sweet Jeanine—was that where I was? Had I fallen asleep in one of those boxes?
I rapped the wall with my knuckles, and indeed there was a hollow resonance to the sound, some emptiness on the opposite side of the wood. My hands ran all along the dead-end wall once more, tapping and tracing its surface, feeling for a latch of some kind. But nothing.
And then, unexpectedly, the wall came toward me, pushed against my hands. I stepped back so as not, I assumed, to be crushed by the wall’s collapse. But immediately there was light streaming in at me, a brilliant light thrust so close to my face that I could smell the smoky oil, feel the heat radiating off the glass. I would have retreated but that a hand seized me by the wrist.
With the lamp now blinding me with light, I could not see the face of the man who held me, but I recognized his voice. “What are you doing in there?” Mr. Tevis demanded. He gave my wrist a twist as he spoke, and I contorted my body in compliance with the pressure.
“I’m not sure,” I told him. “I thought I heard a sound … a woman’s voice. I’m not sure if I did or not.”
He blew out the lamp. And now I was blinded again, differently but just as completely. He pulled me into a larger room. Said not another word as he dragged me quickly out of that room—a room I did not wish to leave, for it was pleasantly warm and smelled of fruit. I seem to remember a small table over which my hand trailed—I recognized the feel of oilcloth. And then out of that room and through another and soon we were mounting the servants’ stairs to the second floor.
He led me straightaway to my bedroom, pulled me inside and up close to my bed. “Go back to sleep,” were his only words. A moment later the bedroom door softly closed behind him.
But instead of lying down I went to the window to stand, that rectangle of gray light, the glass frosted on the outside, cold to the touch on the inside. I stood there looking out. In time I was able to see a few dim stars, diffuse pinpricks of white in the black-clouded sky. My heart still hammered like a cottoned clock. I shivered, my skin atingle with gooseflesh.
After a time I convinced myself that the stars were real. The glass I laid my hand upon was real. The cold was real. “You must surely be awake,” I said.
Not without some trepidations, I looked back at my bed. It was empty.
I looked to the bedroom door. Closed.
All a dream? I wondered. All but the past few minutes, this slow dawning of awareness? Had I been out of this room at all that night, or walked no farther than from the bed to the window?
I climbed back into bed and pulled the covers to my neck, shivered and rubbed my feet together, in a hurry to get warm.
The stars were real, that was all I knew for certain. The bed was real and I was in it now.
It’s all because of that hanging, I thought.
I wished for once that I knew a prayer, some repetitious rhythm to quiet a racing heart. In lieu of prayer I resorted to an old strategy, practiced often in my bunk in Ottawa County, and muttered the multiplication tables—colorless, odorless, unimaginative numbers—until I drifted off. Six times four is twenty-four, six times five is thirty, six times six is thirty-six …
JUST BEFORE dawn I stood on Brunrichter’s veranda, unable to sleep any longer. Truth is, though weary I was grateful to be awake, to be standing upright again in a well-lit and comprehensible world. My gratitude and relief were translated into an appreciation of the aesthetics of the new day. The river far below, for example, appeared never lovelier than at that moment, swollen and white, a river of fog overflowing its banks. Far to the east the horizon glowed orange and bright as a forge, and above the orange the palest of blues ascending seamlessly into sapphire. The beauty of that morning made me ache to be a watercolorist, a skill I could never acquire, and was rendered doubly poignant by my memories of the day before.
The hanging had been with me through every waking hour of the night. I could not count the times I had watched it happening again, that sudden and awful drop, the startling severance. In any case too many times for any man, even a writer, and even for a young one who might claim, with mug of ale in hand, that he cannot get his fill of human drama. Too many.
13
OF THE next day, three incidents of importance.
Upon first waking, while the images were yet fresh in my head, and perhaps made more vivid from being replayed in incessant close-up in my mind’s re-creations, I wrote down the story of the hanging as I remembered it. My objective as a writer was to place the reader of that scene beside me in the courtyard. Unlike Poe, who with his short stories and poems attempted to create an effect, a single emotion to engulf the reader as a chill fog might, my goal was simply to re-create the scene as accurately as my recollection would allow, and thereby permit the reader to generate his or her own atmosphere according to temperament. In short, I saw myself not as a tale maker, not as a creator of worlds imagined, but, more humbly, as a chronicler of facts. This was what I felt suited for. I was not long on imagination, and grateful for that shortage, considering how Poe had been and was tormented by his imagination.
If anything other than my own psychology could be blamed for causing me to forswear the imagination and for trying to live only in the world of the senses, it was Poe’s enduring anguish. He lived as if tethered by the limbs to four wild horses named Grief, Loss, Fear, and Failure. In daylight hours these horses remained fairly quiet, sometimes even tractable. But only because they were nocturnal beasts, whipped by darkness into the most unpredictable gyrations of movement. Every night they tore Poe apart.
In the soil of imagination are planted, by whom or what or why we do not know, the seeds of all madness.
In any case, I awoke early and lit a lamp, and with a fine misting rain blurring the window I wrote the hanging and rewrote and reworked and re-created it until my spine ached as if stretched by the noose. The next day, a Monday, I would deliver it to the editor who had purchased my elephant story and, with luck, prove that initial success not a fluke.
This, I learned, is the alchemy of the writing act. To take an incident, in this case a man’s execution, to take an incident that wounds the witness so deeply as to render him mute, stunned, frozen in horror, to take this incident that might damage him forever and then to transform it, through the magic of incantation, of words precisely chosen, into a prideful thing, a piece of work well done, a healing satisfaction. (I
s writing an act of self-preservation? It is, it is. Tomorrow I will kill myself. Today I must write.)
But for now, at nearly 9:00 A.M., with the rest of the household excepting Poe off to morning services, the thing I now required, having written, was to refill the well that writing had depleted. Sustenance and stimuli. The world outside my own head.
I washed and dressed quickly. Then, feeling still a bit of a traitor toward Poe for having written again, and therefore not wishing to encounter him just yet, I tiptoed downstairs and, alert for evidence that he too was awake—of which I heard none—I eased out the front door.
In the market square four blocks off Water Street I bought a meat pie and a sweet bun and enjoyed an ambulatory breakfast. I was discovering that nothing can whet the appetite more than a morning spent crawling on one’s knees through the literary fields, planting row after row of words. It was then, as I ambled along the wharf just south of Roebling’s Bridge, brushing crumbs from my lips, that the second auspicious incident of the day took place.
I recognized a man down on the docks as the one Poe and I had first encountered upon our arrival in Pittsburgh, the strong and cheerful stevedore of the blue shirt and brown felt hat. I watched him for a while as he went back and forth from the dock to a dray, each time carrying a small wooden barrel from the latter to the former.
“Last time I saw you,” I finally said, having come to stand at the side of the wagon, “you were over on the Allegheny, and unloading caskets.”
“And this time kegs of beer!” he said. “You’ll avoid them both if you know what’s good for you!”
Disquiet Heart Page 12