Disquiet Heart

by Randall Silvis

  I rolled over and sat up, then crossed as quietly as I could to stand close to him, and whispered, “Where’s the guard?”

  He drew back for a look. “Setting down the hall. Ten, twelve feet.”

  I continued to speak softly. “Have you searched the house?”

  “For what?” he asked.

  “For anything. Anything that doesn’t belong. Anything that might tell us who was there after I left that night.”

  He put both hands on the panel’s ledge. His face was haggard, eyes red. He had not shaved since last I saw him. “What happened that night?” he asked. “She said not to expect her home before midnight, but I come back around half-past ten and … she was …” He choked down the rest, swallowed it, bitter as bile.

  “I brought her home around nine.”

  “You didn’t go to the party?”

  “We went. But only for a few minutes. It wasn’t the kind of party you would have wanted her to attend.”

  “And then you took her home?”

  “And said good night at the door.”

  “If only I had come home sooner,” he said. Then, “I shouldn’t have gone out at all.”

  But I would not allow him any of the blame. I wanted it all for myself. “I’m the one who left her alone, Buck. I should have sat with her until you returned.”

  His face, which I had never before seen without a smile, seemed less broad and full somehow, pulled in upon itself, shrunken, his brow creased, eyebrows knitted, lips puckered. It made me think of Poe’s theory of the universe, the way all matter would be drawn back to its center, where it would swallow itself. Poe had called that center the Particle Divine. I called it Grief.

  “You had better not stay here long,” I told Buck.

  “The guards won’t stop me from coming. One of them told me that if it was up to him, he’d give me fifteen minutes alone with you to do whatever I liked.”

  “Don’t let them think you’ve changed your mind about me.”

  He nodded, but I could tell that his mind was clouded, thick with the fog of sorrow.

  “I’m not even sure where I am, Buck. It’s not the penitentiary, is it?”

  “The jail,” he said, “alongside the courthouse. They won’t take you to the penitentiary till after the trial.”

  “And how secure is this jail? If I could somehow get out of this cell, I mean.”

  He looked up and down the corridor. “There’s one guard at the entrance to the cellblock, two more in a room outside his door.”

  “Just as I remembered it. So then—there’s no way out?”

  “None I can see.”

  “You will have to do the work then.”

  He looked at me with plaintive eyes. “I don’t got the brain you do,” he said. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “I need to know what makes them so sure I’m the one they want. What’s the evidence against me?”

  “You were the last one with her.” And now his expression turned doleful, full of shame. “I’m the one told them that.”

  “It can hardly be enough to hang me on.”

  “They’ll do what they want. Evidence or not.”

  “Find out for me, can you? Talk to the guards. Act like you want to be sure I’ll get the noose for this.”

  “I’m not an actor neither.”

  “You can do it, believe me. You have to. If we’re ever to find out who’s really responsible for this.”

  He set his mouth in a grim frown and nodded stiffly. Then, “There was something else you asked me to do. I forgot it already.”

  “Search the house,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Thrust a lamp into every corner. A man cannot come into your home and do what he did there and leave without a trace.”

  “All right,” he said. But I had to wonder if he would remember any of this by the time he reached the street. Instead he would probably wander aimlessly for the next several hours, maybe go to the docks and beg for work, for anything to keep him from having to return home, back to those cold rooms where the fire had now gone out, back to where Susan’s presence and her final chilling moments were so keenly felt.

  “The funeral is today,” he said.

  It struck me like a blow to the stomach, filled me with new sickness.

  “I need to go buy a shirt,” he said.

  I pressed my hands atop his as he clutched the panel’s ledge.

  “The church on High Street,” he said, “that’s where she’ll be. Beside her mother there.”

  I could think of nothing to say, no words, no words.

  “I need to see about getting her a little marker of some kind. See if they’ll let me pay for it on time.”

  I reached for my wallet then, was about to tell him to buy the finest block of marble he could find, to hire the finest artist to engrave her name—but my pockets were empty. Somebody had taken my wallet and everything in it. Probably the constable who arrested me. He certainly would have picked up my valise as well, carried it away from the boardinghouse so as to rifle its contents in search of anything valuable. So my life’s savings were gone. Everything gone.

  And then I remembered the underdress. That silky, weightless thing, a moment’s impetuosity. And now I would be hanged by it.

  Exhaustion washed over me, exhaustion and nausea. “Come back tomorrow if you can,” I said to Buck.

  He nodded. “I’m going to tell them to let you wash yourself. Let you clean off that blood.”

  “No, you mustn’t. Not a kind word about me—remember?”

  He blinked, too depleted to even nod. “Looks like they beat you pretty good,” he said.

  I touched my scabbing forehead. “Some of it I did myself.”

  He did not respond to this, but something changed in his eyes then, a shifting of light, a subtle darkening, which gave me to know that he understood too well the desire to harm one’s self. He had been thinking about it for a good while now, no doubt, had been thinking about how to end this agony, how to silence all cursed thought.

  I pried his fingertips up off the wood, gripped them in my own. “We have a lot of work to do now, Buck. Remember that. We have a lot of work to do for Susan. We’re the only ones who can.” Even as I said these words I heard the hollowness of my voice, the lack of belief.

  But the light hardened in Buck Kemmer’s eyes, flared and strengthened.

  “Come back tomorrow,” I said.

  He slipped one hand free, patted mine. Then gripped it fiercely for a few seconds. Then released me and stepped away from the door.

  “Goddamn you to Hell!” he shouted, and the corner of his mouth twitched in a mournful smile suppressed, and he turned toward the exit and with a halting gait, mechanical, he marched away.

  OF WHAT use is the sun if it does not illuminate her smile? What purpose the moon if it cannot light my path to her?

  Of my own tongue I have no need if it will never speak to her again, never touch a kiss upon her lips, her neck, her breast.

  I want only what I cannot have, can never have because there is no God so great or wise or merciful enough to grant it to me: To trade my death for hers.

  How can she be gone?

  How can life, all life, not be gone with her?

  A DAY in every waking minute. My jailers came and went, brought morning and evening a tray of tasteless food. A man dressed like a constable but with no insignia on his stiff blue coat came to speak with me briefly, asked me to tell him what had happened that night, then stood outside my door stone-eyed and stoical while I recounted the incident at Brunrichter’s mansion. I left out the reason for our sudden departure from the mansion, said only that the doctor, in my opinion, had had too much to drink and behaved in a forward manner toward my companion, and that I, admittedly, had overreacted by intervening physically, only to be slugged from behind by Mr. Tevis. Next thing I knew I was saying good night to Susan at her door and promising to call on her the next day.

  “Is that all?�
� the man asked.

  “That’s all there was to it.”

  He slid shut the panel and did not return. I was an animal being held for slaughter.

  I lay on my bed and stared at the high window, gazed into a sky that changed unpredictably Pale blue, gray, cloud white, midnight black. Its color did not matter. The sky was empty.

  As my head gradually cleared, a few thoughts arose. Only one man might have raised an uproar for my release, but he believed me guilty too. So I could not count on Poe. He had been so unlike himself these past several days, so subdued. He seemed, almost, as if at all times a part of his mind and most of his energies slumbered. Nor did his lethargy seem the stillness of melancholia, which is a dark and heavy stillness, suffocating. His seemed more a colorless calm of insentience.

  What was it Brunrichter had said, that he was treating Poe’s illness? Treating him how? With some analgesic that, even as it dulled Poe’s pain, loosened his every connection with the world?

  I had no doubts that on the occasion of Poe’s one brief visit to me in my cell, when he looked in on me with his hopeless gaze, even then Brunrichter had probably been at his elbow, subtly pulling him away. The doctor saw Poe as a kind of twin, the completion of his own incomplete self, and he meant to keep Poe in Pittsburgh indefinitely. This attention had done Poe a lot of good, yes, had surrounded him with admirers he sorely needed, eased his troubles in myriad ways. I could find no fault with that.

  What rankled, I suppose, was that Poe had found a better friend than me. All the way from Philadelphia the distance between us had widened, and into this gulf Brunrichter had stepped, filling it up entirely, shoving me aside. I resented Brunrichter for wanting to be so like Poe, or wanting Poe like him, and the irony of this resentment was the fact that I, in striving to become a writer, had been aching to be more like Poe myself. This effort, the writing, had become the final wedge that had driven us apart.

  But what did any of this matter now? The writing did not matter, nor did Brunrichter’s friendship with Poe. What mattered was that the city that had so eagerly embraced my mentor and lifted him up and away from me had just as eagerly thrust me down into a gray-walled isolation, labeled me as murderer, beast, while the true beast of Pittsburgh still blithely strolled its streets.

  ANOTHER DAY. My whiskers had me clawing at my face, causing flecks of dried blood and scabrous flesh to be raked off by my fingernails. A macabre kind of entertainment it was to sit on the edge of my bunk and watch the black flakes fall between my knees, to see how much of myself I could scrape onto the floor.

  My forehead, beaten raw two days previous when I had repeatedly banged it against the floor, was slow to heal. Each time a layer of blood coagulated over the abrasions I picked it off and bled anew. There was no small amount of masochism to this practice. The physical discomfort was like a nearer music that, though superficial, muted the darker and deeper music within.

  That afternoon Buck Kemmer came again. I stood close to the open panel so that we could whisper without being overheard. He was wearing a new white shirt, its collar buttoned tight around the neck, the fabric still stiff but soiled and wrinkled now. I suspected that he had been wearing that shirt since donning it for Susan’s funeral, had slept in it, or maybe only lain awake in it all night.

  I knew nothing about funerals at the time, had never attended one, and could only imagine how Buck had passed the night afterward, doing what I would have done if not confined: an aimless walk all up and down the riverbank, for no reason but to separate myself from anyone who wished to comfort me, an exhausting walk until my legs gave out, then staggering back to the churchyard in the stillness of deep night, back to that mound of fresh earth, to remain there through the darkness so as to watch, with first light, as the earth gave up its warmth to the morning air, a fine white vapor rising into the eggshell dawn.

  Before speaking into the panel, Buck jerked his head down the hallway, jabbing his chin in the direction of a guard. “That one asked me why I keep coming back,” he whispered.

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “I said I just like to look at you. So that I can picture you dangling from a rope.”

  An icy tremor ran through me as I envisioned a somewhat different picture, my body dropping too fast and too far, hooded head suddenly separating to snap upward with the unencumbered rope … . But to Buck I said, “That’s good. You said the right thing.”

  “He told me I won’t have to picture it for long. Said they’ve got you dead to rights.”

  “They don’t have a damn thing,” I said, though I knew otherwise. “How could they?”

  “I only know what I’ve been told.”

  “Which is?”

  “First off, that lady at the boardinghouse. Said you showed up there all bloody and strange-looking. Scared the life out of her, she said.”

  “There wasn’t much life in her to be scared out, if you ask me.”

  “Then the livery master, Ben Findley, who I happen to know.”

  “You talked to him?”

  Buck nodded. “Said you didn’t bring the horse and carriage back till close to midnight. Though you claim to have left Susan off at the house at half past nine.”

  “What is that supposed to prove? I rode around town for a while, thinking about things. I paid him damn well for the use of that carriage!”

  “Says he thinks you spent the night in his barn. Uninvited.”

  “Where else was I supposed to go?”

  “Says he found blood all over the hay. Not to mention on the carriage itself.”

  “That’s my blood! Brunrichter’s man coldcocked me. I bled like a stuck pig.”

  “I reckon that’s not the worst of it.”

  “What is?”

  “What the doctor told the police.”

  Finally, something that made sense. I had expected Brunrichter to lie. He could not report that he had stopped me from removing Poe from the party because he might then be asked why I would attempt to do so. Well, because we were having a right old debauch, my good man. Rum, opium, ether—randy old goats and frisky young ewes—many of the most respected citizens of our fair city, all in utter abandon of normal restraints. I fail to see why Mr. Dubbins took such umbrage.

  Hardly. No, Brunrichter would certainly lie. But what would he say?

  “Said you came there feeling your oats,” Buck told me. “Left Susan waiting in the carriage while you went waltzing in and started carrying on, loudmouthing Mr. Poe about something or other. Said you tried to pick a fight with him. When the doctor asked you to quiet down, you took a swing at him, he says. That’s when his man stepped in and put an end to it.”

  Buck watched my face closely as he related all this, studied me for my reaction.

  “You believe any of that?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t sound like the Gus Dubbins I know.”

  I thanked him with a mirthless smile.

  He added, “Course, I don’t know you all that well.”

  At that small joke, my heart leapt. I was not, after all, alone.

  “According to the doctor,” he continued, “you was also in the neighborhood of where the last of them missing girls disappeared. Says you told him that yourself, that you were right near there at the time they figure it happened. He says you seemed to be bragging about it.”

  “I was there …” Suddenly my head grew thick again, so clouded that I could not recall much of the conversation in question. “I was in a tavern nearby, I think. On Diamond Alley, wasn’t it?”

  “People see you there?” he asked.

  “Dozens of people.”

  “You can name them?”

  Name them? They had all been strangers to me then and were strangers still. Could I count on a single one of them to vouch for me, to state unequivocally that I, who meant not a whit to any of them, had been present in the tavern at the very moments, known to no one, when the girl had been assailed?

  “Thank goodness for English,” I said. “He
’s already confessed to having done it.”

  “There’s talk of letting him go.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “They say he’s not in his right mind.”

  “He’s a raving lunatic! Which is what a man would have to be to murder seven girls.”

  Buck answered with a twitch of his mouth, a grimace.

  “So now they suspect me of all of them, don’t they?”

  “Your friend Mr. Poe has sworn you were with him.”

  “For the first five at least.”

  It was the way he looked at me then, the way he held his head, a question in his eyes, that told me there was more to come, the coup de grace. I waited for the fatal stroke.

  “Then there’s that thing they found in your bag.”

  My pulse beat hotly against the scabs on my scalp. I smelled the rankness of my skin. “They show it to you?”

  He nodded. “To ask was it Susan’s.”

  “Which it wasn’t. So they probably showed it to the other families as well.”

  “They did.”

  “And?”

  “Nobody recognized it.”

  “Then they can’t use it against me.”

  “What they figure is, somebody just don’t remember it. Or one of the girls had it without telling anybody.”

  I could make no reply but to shake my head, incredulous even yet that I could have been so profoundly stupid as to take the underdress in the first place.

  Buck said, “Me, I figured you had it because you planned on giving it to Susan one night.”

  There was a tremulousness in his voice when he said this, a quiver that gripped my heart. Though it was an effort to do so, I lifted my head and looked him square in the eyes.