The Blackest Bird Read online

  The boat had yet to sail, so the wooden crate was dug out from the hold, and sure enough, opening it, the captain and his mate found the printer, stinking, dead, stiff with rigor mortis, and in the most uncomfortable-appearing position.

  12

  Death of the Corkcutter

  Daniel Payne

  The killing of Samuel Adams by John Colt succeeded, finally, in driving the murder of Mary Rogers off the front page.

  BODY FOUND IN BOX

  There was no question of Colt’s guilt. Here was his confession in full, printed word for word in the Herald.

  The rest of the penny papers were left to scramble, taking up mere points of law, exemplified by cogitation in that weekend’s Tattler:

  PREMEDITATED MURDER OR SELF DEFENSE?

  The answer presumably to this curious legal conundrum would dictate whether “Homicide Colt,” as the headline writers had come to call him, would live or die.

  And so with this debate ongoing, public opinion found itself thusly consumed, until three weeks later, the sixth day of October, when all reverted once more to Mary Rogers.

  On that afternoon Mary’s betrothed, the forlorn corkcutter Daniel Payne, haggard and worn, appeared at Mrs. Loss’s roadside inn, the Nick Moore House.

  As reported by Bennett on the front page of the New York Herald:

  Mr. Payne stood in the establishment and inquired of Mrs. Loss the exact location of the spot where Miss Rogers had met her death.

  The unhappy man then sat down and commenced to drink a number of brandies before stumbling out.

  Two days later Payne was discovered, an apparent suicide, on what was believed to be the exact spot of Mary Rogers’ murder, in the same small clearing where Mrs. Loss’s two sons, Oscar and Ossian, had found the scattered articles of her person, leading many to speculate, even conclude, that the corkcutter was guilty of his intended’s murder.

  Others besides Mrs. Loss had seen Mr. Payne drinking and wandering about the general area.

  Mr. Samuel Whitney, a patron of the Phoenix Hotel, told how Mr. Payne had appeared at the hotel bar late the night following Mrs. Loss’s encounter with him at the Nick Moore House.

  “He looked red and a little intoxicated,” Mr. Whitney said. “And he seemed weak and could hardly stand up.”

  During the course of the evening, Mr. Whitney further reported, Mr. Payne spoke to him in the following manner:

  “Suppose you know me? Well, I’m the man who was to have been mar ried to Mary Rogers.”

  Mr. Whitney said Mr. Payne then mumbled, “I’m a man of a good deal of trouble.”

  An empty and shattered bottle of laudanum from the Deluc Chemist on Nassau Street, only steps from the Rogerses’ home, was found near the body. The Hoboken police were quickly notified of the death and forwarded immediate word to High Constable Hays in New York City.

  A storm rose up early that evening. Hays, with Acting Mayor Purdy, who again insisted on inviting himself to accompany the high constable and Sergeant McArdel of the Night Watch, rode over in a small boat through the squall to investigate.

  Upon their arrival, wet and chilled, the high constable was handed a note found by Dr. Cook in the dead man’s pocket. It was addressed:

  TO THE WORLD

  “Here I am on the spot,” Payne had written in a clear if not strong hand. “God forgive me for my misfortune in my misspent time.”

  “He has died as the result of congestion of the brain, brought about by irregular living, exposure, and aberration of the mind,” Dr. Cook responded to questions posed to him by High Constable Hays pertaining to the exact cause of death.

  Hearing this, the acting mayor let out an unsettling, self-satisfied yelp, proclaiming to one and all, with the death by his own hand of the corkcutter Daniel Payne, the mystery of the murder of Mary Rogers was solved, the murderer unmasked, the puzzle complete.

  “Obviously, the young man had been rebuffed by the segar girl,” Purdy lorded. “My friends, it is the only explanation that need be drawn,” he continued with his pontification. “Mr. Payne, in what can singularly be called a fury of rejection, commenced then to throttle her, and abuse her in a violent, intimate manner. He then proceeded to murder her on the spot of the very clearing where he himself has now died by his own hand. Warranted by every observation, here lies our culprit.”

  Hays paid silent attention to this smugly delivered conclusion, fixing first the invidious acting mayor, then Coroner Cook, with his famous steady, cold gaze before declaring:

  “Not so, gentlemen. I have made life study of the police science of physiognomy. Daniel Payne was not one to escape my scrutiny. He is not our man.”

  One Year Later

  OCTOBER 1842

  13

  His Is the Rampant Temerity

  It is a cold and rainy day on the streets of Philadelphia. Overhead, the slate gray of the sky is uniform, one somber shade. He has made plans with hope, as if hope might make a difference. His is the sudden uplift, the abrupt downward spiral. He blames magnetic fields gone haywire, celestial powers askew, the powers that be looking down on him askance, as he is convinced they have always done.

  Sissy is dying. His wife is dying. She ruptured a blood vessel while singing. Since then his life has been one of constant despair. God help him, in his mind he has taken leave of her forever, and has undergone all of the agonies of her death.

  He shoves his hands deep in the pockets of his greatcoat, the same greatcoat he wore as a cadet during his stint at West Point, but now, twelve years later, the garment so much worse for wear, a miserable reminder, one of so many, of his failure.

  Muddie has done yeoman’s work. She has patched the heavy garment a dozen times: where the wool has worn thin, where the moths have lain in wait, where the insects have laid their eggs and watched them hatch. It is these hatchlings, the moths’ loathsome larval offspring, that have had their fill, leaving behind a dozen holes.

  No matter, he reassures himself, moth holes are inevitable, even in the best of broadlooms.

  But to be truthful, all those patches and darns are telling. Everything is telling on this man. He does not disguise well.

  Yet he deems himself genius.

  But if he is a genius, why is he not recognized? Why is he so poor, so destitute, he must beg to eat? Why does society reject him?

  A man of his vast talents?

  His name is Edgar Allan Poe, although he loathes the Allan part, and eschews it. He prefers to be known simply as Edgar Poe. Or Edgar A. Poe. Or E.A. Poe. Or Eddie Poe. Or even E.A.P., as in his first published work.

  His darling little wife, his Sissy, his Virginia, calls him “Brother,” or “Buddy.” Sissy’s mother, Muddie, his aunt Maria Clemm (he and Sissy are first cousins), calls him Eddie or “dearest Eddie.” His stepfather, the despised John Allan, the Allan of Edgar Allan Poe, called him Ned.

  He has no recollection of what his real father, the disappeared actor David Poe (Muddie’s brother), called him.

  To his dead mother, Eliza Poe, née Arnold, “the Little Actress,” “America’s Sweetheart,” famous for her stage role as Little Pickle in The Spoiled Child, he seems to remember he was “darling.”

  He tells himself it is his lack of tenacity. His rampant temerity. His passion. His emotion. The unrest in his bosom. The burrowing fear.

  Stop!

  He disgusts himself. His indulgence with self-pity is reprehensible.

  What has he done to deserve this fate? He must stop this. He must. After all, everything could change. A letter has arrived. He has an offer. Some much-needed funds.

  He has been invited by the family of John C. Colt, a vague acquaintance, to travel to New York City to write a final portrait of their young penitent, sitting in his jail cell, awaiting death. The letter signed by family patriarch Colonel Samuel Colt himself.

  John Colt, “Handsome John,” “Homicide Colt,” “Colt the Homicide,” christened in the public prints “failed poet,” “doomed poet,” “po�
�te maudit,” held in the Tombs, the New York House of Detention, for the murder of his publisher, Samuel Adams.

  Poe could not help but smile to himself. He would have liked to do the same: Murder his publishers! Kill Billy Burton. Eviscerate James Harper.

  Mr. Poe lives with his family, his women, in Quakerdom, in the City of Brotherly Love, in a small, neat, but only partially completed house on the rural edge of the city sprawl, on a quiet ordinary street named for a tree and a scourge: Locust.

  His aunt Muddie, his cousin Sissy, the only ones left who love him.

  Sissy, married to him when she had just turned thirteen; he twenty-six, twice her age.

  Sissy so sick now, he has very nearly abandoned all hope. Yet with each accession of the disorder that plagues her, he loves her more dearly. He feels all the agonies of her death even as he watches her cling to her life with ever more desperation.

  He admits to being constitutionally sensitive, nervous to a very unusual degree.

  He rids himself of this thought. Here is opportunity to redeem himself, opportunity afforded by Colonel Colt and his family on behalf of the unfortunate John.

  He kisses Muddie and Sissy goodbye. They kiss him back, say, “God’s speed, dearest Eddie.” He leaves the meager house in the middle of the day, a dark and brooding figure beneath a dark and brooding sky. He fingers the few coins remaining in his pants pocket, hopes there are enough for the rail ticket, the ferry across the river Styx.

  The good Colonel Colt has forwarded him ten dollars as an advance against the completion of the word portrait of his brother John. He has given the lion’s share of the funds to Muddie for food and medicine for Sissy.

  He has discovered an elixir he calls “Jew beer.” A strange Hebrew fellow down the road makes it in his barn. It is the only medicament Poe has found that causes Sissy improvement.

  Darling Virginia, what she does for him! So infirm, her health so fragile, although she remained plump and round-faced, her voice so sweet still when she rises to sing his favorite song, “Come, Rest in This Bosom.”

  For all the world he looks beaten, even before he starts on his journey. He fingers his one joy. With him in their canvas case, now stuffed in his greatcoat pocket, he carries his augments, his talismans: his steel pen, the nib worn perfectly through use to the slant of his hand, his pocket notebook, his precious ink in its heavy corked ceramic pot.

  With his instruction Sissy concocted the brew. She is so proud to help him with his work. The tint, a careful mixture of red and black, heavy to the red, a single drop of black added, two, three, so the black dye drifts in the red, transforms the crimson into the color of blood.

  The pocket notebook, buff pages cut meticulously by her, perfectly folded, bound with leather thong, the smooth paper protected by a buttery-soft black-dyed goatskin-leather cover.

  He buoys himself. He tells himself once more the idea to go to New York is a good one. After all, Gotham is the literary capital of America, and E.A.P. no small American literary figure.

  Adding t to Poe, he reminds himself, makes poet.

  Truth be told, in Philadelphia nothing has met his expectation. Nothing has been satisfactory. How many tales has he published? Sixty? How many poems? Reviews? Yet he has nothing. For how many weeks must his family be forced to eat bread and molasses and nothing more? How many times can he expect his dearest Muddie to show staunch face at the Christian mission seeking charity?

  For a year he was employed as editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, but some of those stints with drinking had poisoned the minds of detractors and ended his job, although he assured friends that temperance was not an issue, that intemperance was as far removed from his habits as day from night.

  The true issue, if you want to know, was the feral stupidity of the publisher Billy Burton.

  Bilious Billy, he called him.

  Bilious Billy of the title page.

  Bilious Billy the buffoon!

  Once the man had been a successful comic actor. He had come from England with great success and fanfare. That was before he had incredibly taken on the mistaken mantle of publisher and—even more laughable—writer!

  What made the fool think himself capable of such pretense?

  Haggard!

  Billy Burton—this man—had the audacity to warn him, to warn Poe—Poe the Poet—that he must tone down his reviews, to rid himself of his ill feelings toward his brother authors.

  No matter. Monetary need rewards its own humiliation.

  “The troubles of the world have given a morbid tone to your feelings,” Burton had lectured Poe upon his firing. “It is your duty to discourage such outpour. Take some exercise, man! Rouse your energies. Care!”

  The ignorance of him! The arrogance!

  Upon reviewing his recently published “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the Philadelphia Inquirer had proclaimed: “This tale proves Mr. Poe a man of genius.”

  Mere puffery, you might say. But his peers, the people who know, his fellow literati, respect him. Fear him.

  Fear his mind. Fear his tongue. Fear his wit. Fear his pen.

  How many times had Poe explained to Burton that he worked from a mental necessity to satisfy his task and his love of art? Fame forms no motive for him. “What can I care for the judgment of a multitude, every individual of which I despise?” he insisted. “A man of large purse has usually a very little soul which he keeps in it.”

  On that note Poe bolted from the editorial offices of the Gentleman’s Magazine, leaving his ex-boss Bilious Billy staring after him, his beady little eyes swallowed by his fleshy face.

  Poe’s desire is to answer to no one but himself. To sit as his own arbiter. To his thinking, to coin one’s brain into silver, at the nod of a master, is the hardest task on earth. He loathes to work for another imbecile again. He will tell you the greatest number of those who hold high place in our poetical literature are absolute ninnies. Nincompoops. Name your names: Longfellow, Cooper, Irving, Halleck, Bryant. Bloated reputations, derivative aesthetics, undeserving practitioners.

  The laudation of the unworthy is to the worthy the most bitter of all wrongs, Poe would tell you. Yet no man living loved the praise of others better than he. So he trods the smoothly cobbled streets of Philadelphia on his way to Central Station, to some opportunity, to the unknown. Head down, keeping his eyes upon the ground, studying the herringbone of cobblestones, the stereotomy of the streets. Benjamin Franklin once said the Philadelphian could always be told from the New Yorker. New York was so crudely cobbled the poor Gothamite found himself listing merely from habit while walking fair Quakerdom’s smooth stones.

  Poe himself was fairly listing at that very moment, with each step the momentary shreds of optimism and resolve falling away from him, him fairly falling, falling into that strange beaten posture of his, as if fate has had her final say and there is nothing more to be done.

  During the remainder of a dull, dark, and soundless day, he goes on, his West Point greatcoat pulled close. Philadelphia so quiet that day, as every day, striking him as Sunday.

  The wind is shifting. Above him the cloud cover is shredding. As he walks the sky splits apart, revealing slivers of bright blue and streaks of glistening yellow sunshine. He straightens hopefully to his full height. The crack of blue sky and warming golden rays no more than a mere wink and nod for him, him rejecting any signs of any good in the cosmos, as transient as a glint of gold in the ether.

  He coughs.

  He removes a frayed clean handkerchief from his pocket and presses it to his lips. God save her. God, please, save his innocent little wifey.

  14

  Somewhere Deep

  in the Distance Stereotomy

  Somewhere deep in the distance, far away, yet perhaps surprisingly near, as the train slowly chugs forward out of Central Station, Philadelphia, picks up speed, and rumbles out of the city, bound for points north-northeast and New York, six hours away, the poet hears bells. His eyes widen with their knell.
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  He had miscalculated. As he stood in the vast lobby, inexorably alone, at the ticket booth, a sodden man in round steel-rimmed glasses staring out at him from behind the cage, he realized he had not sufficient funds for fare to Hoboken and still enough coin to cross the Hudson on the ferry.

  He begged the clerk for consideration, received none, had been forced to settle for a ticket to the penultimate station along the line instead, as far as his money would carry him, holding in abeyance his last few pennies, just enough for ferry fare. He would make his way somehow from railroad junction to boat quay, even if he had to walk. He was a good walker. He had walked before.

  The train, steaming over the flatlands, past Camden, past Trenton, is dark in the afternoon with the day’s ill weather. Night is descending. As it grows darker still, the cast of oil lamps behind sconces festooned on hardwood paneling causes eerie shadows to play.

  His notebook is open. All around in the dim light his fellow passengers pore over the penny papers, the popular magazines. Women knit, crochet. He waits for the music of the muse to seize his hand, his ear, his heart, to drive him down, down into his seat, with his pen, the paper, the pot of blood-colored ink laid out in front of him, and to lead him, rescue him from those death bells clanging. What tale of terror their turbulence tells!

  The brain, that organic jelly that resides inside the skull at its core, this is his difficult organ. His head is oversized. Outsized. It is literally a great thing. A massive entity unto itself. It resides on a slender stalk, a slender neck upon a slender body. The head a great weight. If only the stem and root were stronger. He falls into a deep slumber.