On Night's Shore

by Randall Silvis

  His body writhed beneath me; his hands fluttered. My own hands, their grip finally broken, lay against his hard chest, felt the throbbing engine therein, felt the dark hot slippery flow of his blood.

  I don’t know how long I lay atop him, staring into his face. Long enough to watch his eyes, so darkly bright, begin to cloud. Long enough to see the bubbles of blood come out of his nostrils with every snorting breath. For a few moments his scent filled and narcotized me.

  By slow degrees, my other senses returned. I tasted the slick salt of blood in my mouth, either my own from biting my lip, or Careys’s, splashed upon my face. I saw what seemed a dark cloud gathering outside the French doors, hovering against the ceiling but growing thicker by the minute, and I smelled its choking scent.

  All the rest is like a dream to me. I pulled away, I found my feet. I went out through the French doors and into the hallway and past the searing staircase of flames. I recall standing at the front door, working the heavy key, and feeling the fire singeing my back. I recall how the lock finally clicked, how very difficult it was to drag the door open, how weak my knees suddenly felt, how distant my feet, how cool and fresh the night as I then walked down off the porch and through the yard and around to the side.

  Mrs. Clemm was standing as last I had seen her, gazing fervently up at the pantry roof, but this time with both hands pressed to the side of her head as she swayed anxiously from one heel to the other. She heard my boots scraping across the grass, and she turned and saw me and cried out, “He’s here! He’s here! Come down quickly. Oh please, Eddie, please hurry!”

  Poe had been climbing back up the porch roof, on his way back in through the window, no doubt. Now he scrambled down to the edge and, lying on his belly, eased himself over, then dropped onto the ground.

  He came to me and seized me by both shoulders, gave me one long searching look, then said, “Let’s go!”

  Dragging me by a sleeve, he hauled me away from the house, around to the rear. Halfway to the carriage house he released my arm, and immediately I turned to face the mansion; I had to look back. The house by now was a huge granite box from whose windows poured an obscene and florid light. I had started to shiver.

  A window exploded, yet I did not move. “Augie!” Poe said.

  I turned away from the mansion to look at him, but instead I saw the carriage house illuminated by the mansion’s flames, and suddenly I cared again. I cared about living, about life itself. I sprinted toward the carriage house.

  “Augie, please!” Mrs. Clemm cried out.

  “There are horses in there! Two of them!”

  Poe came running up behind and seized me by the arm. “I’ll turn the horses out. Take Mrs. Clemm and go.”

  “The side door is unlocked,” I told him.

  “Go!” he said.

  Mrs. Clemm grasped my hand and dragged me into the darkness. We were not forty yards from the house before a whinnying was heard, and soon the harried clop of hooves on earth, a kind of countermelody to the snap and flutter of flames that had begun to tumble and roll in an echo down the street, the mansion’s windows blowing out one by one, each dull explosion thumping in the soreness of my heart.

  Mrs. Clemm and I were within sight of the Croton Aqueduct’s reservoir on Forty-Second Street when Poe caught up with us. In silence then and three abreast we hurried past that massive Egyptian edifice, that monument to a banished pharaoh, and at nearly a trot we headed north and toward that small, clean house in which Virginia lay sleeping.

  49

  We were not far past the reservoir when Poe asked us to stop for a moment. “You go on ahead with Muddy,” he told me. “I have one last bit of business for the evening.”

  Mrs. Clemm sighed and tapped her chest. “My goodness, Eddie. Is it never enough?”

  “To the South Point docks, no farther.”

  “No. You come home now and rest. What good will it do to walk yourself to death?”

  “I have never felt more fully charged with energy than I do this night.”

  “You need to attend to yourself. Look at the both of you—you’re bloody, and burned, and all blackened up with soot… I don’t even want to know what went on inside that house.”

  “Do I look the ghoul?” he asked.

  “You and the boy both.”

  “All the better.” He gave me a wink.

  To Mrs. Clemm he said, “There will be no more brawling, I vow.”

  “I know too well what you are up to,” she told him. “And I know the kind of trouble it will produce.”

  “The trouble sets sail within the hour, Muddy. I merely hope to wish it bon voyage.”

  “Why can you not let matters be? Come home and be with your wife and family.”

  Poe flinched and was silent for a moment. Then, but gently, he told her, “There remains yet time enough for that, dear Muddy. But at the stroke of midnight, the Josephine will depart, and my opportunity shall have been missed.”

  “It is not an opportunity I would have you meet.”

  He gave her that crooked smile of his, the one that somehow suggested both merriment and pain. “I shan’t be long.”

  He turned and headed south, striding briskly. We watched him for a minute, and then Muddy said in a very tired voice, “Go with him, son.”

  “But he told me—”

  “He’ll be needing an attendant more than I will.”

  “What if he sends me away?”

  “Then go. But never so far that you lose sight of him.”

  I was eager to join him and did not argue any further. Three minutes later, I sprinted up to his side. He had heard me coming and was not surprised.

  “She made me,” I told him.

  “I thought as much.”

  “Is she going to be safe walking home alone?”

  “Safer than we,” he said.

  We headed southeast together then, with me taking two strides to every one of Poe’s. He would not, for another several days, ask what had happened to me inside Hobbs’s mansion, and I did not that night volunteer any information. A strange kind of calm had descended on me, a feeling difficult to describe. Call it confidence and humility mixed, with a small, thin streak of bittersweet regret.

  In any case, we walked for several minutes before I asked, “Are you going to knock his block off when we get there?”

  “I am,” Poe said. “But I shall do so without laying a finger on him.”

  “How do you intend to do that?”

  “The gentleman’s way,” was as much as he would tell me.

  To do so we did not have to walk as far as the docks after all. Just south of Union Square we spotted an entourage advancing on foot, marching in our direction up the center of Broadway. Behind us Hobbs’s mansion was lighting up the night sky with whirling plumes of glowing smoke, a million swirling embers.

  Poe slowed just a bit, squinting ahead; he put out a hand to hold me back. Beneath the sputtering gaslights, it soon became apparent that Hobbs himself was leading the approaching group, hurrying along as briskly as he could without sacrificing his aristocratic bearing, accompanied by eight or nine other men, all in tuxedos, many still holding the champagne flutes from which they had been sipping when news reached the ship’s salon of the conflagration on Fifth Avenue.

  Thirty yards or so behind this group came the females, their gowns and petticoats rustling like a dry, hot wind.

  Poe positioned himself in the middle of the street and crossed his arms over his chest. I stood at his side. My first instinct was to reach for his hand, but I squashed the urge and doubled up my fists instead.

  Hobbs started shouting as soon as he recognized us. “By God, Poe! By God, man!”

  He was quivering by the time he came face-to-face with Poe; he was trembling with so much rage that he could find no words to express it.

  �
�Allow me to speak quickly before the ladies arrive,” Poe told him. His voice was not loud or dramatic, but neither was it uncertain, and so was, therefore, all the more compelling. The men in Hobbs’s entourage made not a sound.

  “I come only to wish you Godspeed, sir. And to pass along the same from your young mistress. I refer not to the one who died on the abortionist’s table, not Mary Rogers but the second girl, the one you knew as Amanda. She sends to you her regards, as well as her hopes that in Europe you might discover a cure.” And here he paused for just a second, just long enough for the final word to prick the men’s curiosity.

  “A cure,” Poe said, “for the French pox from which she will surely die. But you? Perhaps in Europe there exists a remedy for syphilis we have not heard of here. If so, you might yet spare yourself her fate.”

  He now reached out a hand to clap Hobbs’s shoulder. Hobbs recoiled at the touch as if Poe’s hand itself were transferring to him the horror of the disease. “A lie,” was all he could mutter.

  “You know me too well for that.”

  At this Hobbs pulled away with a jerk, staggered backward. The men in his entourage did not grasp and brace him up as they would have just half a minute earlier; they drew apart from him, his tight circle of friends expanding outward as on the ripple of something repugnant tossed down from high above.

  Poe too took a step away. He bowed slightly from the waist, then straightened, turned, and with his hand resting firmly atop my soot-blackened shoulder, his weight leaning into me, he set us in motion once more, northward to home and away from the lights.

  50

  In the wake of a triumph there is often a dead calm, the emptiness of an end that has come and passed and left nothing in its place. Such was the ambiance we in Poe’s cottage awoke to next day.

  If the morning following Poe’s rescue was gray, the afternoon was pitched in black. Shortly after noon, a wagon came rolling down the lane. I was at that moment on the porch steps, playing with Aristotle and a piece of dirty string. I saw the wagon and the two robust men and the shiny black piano rising from the wagon’s bed to stand high above their shoulders, and I did not know whether to announce the delivery or to wave it away as if from a plague house.

  By the time the wagon rolled to a stop out front, Virginia stood in the doorway. I watched the transition of emotions in her expression. Her eyes lit up so brightly at the sight of the piano, a child’s eyes, gleeful, but soon her sense of thrill collapsed, as did her smile, and she said to me, “Is it paid for, Augie?”

  I had no time to answer, for here came Poe pushing past her, dressed only in his banyan and slippers. He had in one hand his pocket watch and chain and in the other three volumes of his published poems. He stopped beside me long enough to whisper, “Your money. Have you any left?”

  “Not a fip,” I answered. “Where’s yours?”

  “Stolen from me in Hobbs’s house.”

  “That bastard.”

  He hurried out to the wagon’s driver then and attempted to strike a bargain. The pocket watch and chain, the three published volumes. The driver produced an invoice and pointed to the figure at the bottom of the paper, the balance due upon receipt, as per Poe’s agreement with the piano broker. Poe insisted that they take the watch and chain and the slender books of poetry not in barter but as a small initial payment in good faith, the rest to be submitted regularly, one dollar per week. And here, wait, there were valuables inside the house as well, sketches, more writings…

  They argued for a full five minutes. The voices of the deliverymen grew progressively harsher, Poe’s weaker and more desperate. It was Virginia finally who came to the wagon and asked in a voice so sweet as to turn all anger aside if they would please extend her sincerest apologies to the piano’s owner; she begged forgiveness for this inconvenience but they simply could not pay; there was no money to pay. If the good gentlemen would please be so kind as to return the piano with her profoundest regrets, if they would please be so kind, if they would please, please, please be so kind.

  And we watched the wagon turn and the deliverymen go off scowling and the piano like polished darkness throwing the dirty sunlight back into our eyes.

  For the next hour or so Poe remained deaf to his wife’s pleas that he come inside. Instead he paced up and down the lane in his banyan and slippers, scuffing away at the tracks in the dirt left by the wagon.

  Only when the tracks had been obliterated did Poe abandon this exercise in self-negation and return inside. There he stood at the window for another half hour, looking out at we knew not what. Finally he retreated to his rocking chair, and there he remained for another hour, not rocking. He either stared at his hands folded in his lap or, if he looked up, at the blank face of the door.

  Mrs. Clemm stood by the window for a while herself. When she turned away, it was to announce that a nor’easter was coming. There was no suggestion from any of them that I return to the Newsboys’ Lodging-House just yet. Mrs. Clemm asked if I would cut some wood for the stove.

  I went out back to the woodpile to chop a bucketful of kindling. I could smell and taste the rising storm now. The sky looked as hard as gunmetal, as gray as a bruise, a long dark cloud like a puckered welt approaching from the horizon.

  As I split and chopped the logs, I tried to think of what I could do for those people inside. I made up my mind that I would get into another mansion in a day or so, not Hobbs’s unfortunately but in another just like his, because to me these men were all the same, thugs in silk and diamonds. I would steal all the fine silver and anything else I could carry, and maybe in the bargain I would leave a message for Hobbs and his ilk—I would piss on his carpets, I would torch that place too. I would embark on a methodical kind of rampage, destroying one mansion after another. I would reduce Fifth Avenue to ashes.

  It was all fantasy, of course, a boy’s angry dreaming. But my mood fit perfectly with the mood of the sky. I watched the local murder of crows making hard against the wind for the cover of trees, and their flight gave rise to an idea. I knew then that the thing to do, the only sensible thing for all of us to do, was precisely what Poe and Virginia longed to do, to clear out of New York City once and for all. But not to Saratoga or Richmond; we should head for the territories. Poe could do well there, a man with his gift for words; he could start his own newspaper, his own magazine, and I would personally peddle the copies to every farmhouse and sod hut west of the Mississippi.

  By the time I carried the wood back inside, I was so charged up by my plan that I couldn’t keep quiet; I stacked the wood beside the stove and rattled on for several minutes about the inevitable prosperity that awaited all of us beyond St. Louis.

  Mrs. Clemm and Virginia both smiled as they went about their evening business, preparing the evening’s bread, setting the table, holding fast to routine and the illusion that if nothing had been gained through the events of the past few days, at least nothing had been lost. Before long Virginia needed to rest, and she went to the sofa and lay back and covered herself with a shawl.

  Just as she had made herself comfortable, she was racked by a spell of coughing. She pressed one hand to her mouth, the other to her bosom, until the bruising episode passed. And I saw clearly now for the first time, saw in the grief of her mother’s eyes and the misery in Poe’s, how every breath she took was another small blow to her strength, another soreness, so that just the act of living, the deliberate effort of breathing in and breathing out, reminded her, reminded all of us, of the tenuousness of existence, the evanescent moments that remained.

  It was then Mrs. Clemm answered my earlier soliloquy with a look, a look at her daughter and then a look at me, and suddenly all the wind went out of my sails because I understood as clearly as she did that Virginia could never make the trip out west. Even the constant talk of moving to Saratoga was but a fancy. A journey as brief as her walk to the piano wagon had all but ruined her for the rest of t
he day.

  At one point Poe rose and went to Virginia and asked if she was warm enough. She said yes and asked him to read to her awhile. But all he did was to smooth the hair from her brow and smile down at her as if he hadn’t heard, and then he returned to his chair and his ruminations.

  After a while Mrs. Clemm spooned the soup into bowls and took a loaf of bread from the oven. She asked us all to sit and eat now, but I was the only one who came to the table. Her blessing that evening was especially protracted, especially hoarse. Then she and I ate our soup without conversation.

  After a while Poe asked if he might have a glass of brandy, and to this nobody moved or replied. Mrs. Clemm looked down at her soup bowl, and Virginia turned her eyes to the wall. And finally Poe nodded to himself and said nothing more.

  The rain began about eight that evening. We could hear it pocking on the roof and plinking hard against the glass. The wind howled like a pack of distant dogs, and the hemlocks at the side of the cottage swept their branches back and forth across the wood, shushing us again and again, a repetitious reprimand all the more harsh for our silence.

  Unexpectedly, Poe came alive. He stood sharply, straightened his jacket, and asked Mrs. Clemm if he might have use of the table. “Of course,” she said. She cleared away her knitting and went to sit in the vacated rocker.

  Poe went quickly to his trunk and pulled out all of his manuscripts stored there, the poems and the essays and the stories, and he spread them across the table and then laid a clean sheet of vellum over each manuscript. He took out his ink and pen and then sat at the table and pulled the first manuscript to him.

  For the next hour I watched as Poe considered each piece of writing in turn and noted one by one where each manuscript had been sent or delivered and then rejected, or in a few cases where the piece had been accepted and how much he was to be paid for it. For each of those not yet sold, he listed the remaining markets untried.