The Port-Wine Stain

by Norman Lock

  “Good,” said Poe, having effected our truce. “When you tell the time, you will think of me, and, in time, I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  This is the very watch and chain, Moran. Inside the lid, you can still make out the inscription:

  To David From His “Eliza” September 1807

  “Thank you, Edgar. I’ll treasure it.”

  I didn’t mean it, but I’ve kept it with me all these years. Why, I’m not exactly sure. Not for love of Edgar Poe. I respected him; I admired him; I pitied him—perhaps that most of all. But I didn’t love him and may not have even liked him. Dr. Mütter was right, however; Poe would fascinate me my entire life, and I do think it was important to have known him.

  “It’s the only thing I have of my father’s,” said Poe.

  Looking back on it, I realize the full meaning of the gift: The watch and its heavy gold chain, in effect, bound him to his past, his paternity. To have given them to me was like cutting himself off from his original self. He was so very much a man adrift, cast off, and pushed to the margins of life, so that all that remained to him was an empty sheet of paper to fill up with words.

  The pigeons scratched at the grit on the floor, making the sound of a pen on paper.

  “I might have pawned it,” said Poe about his gift to me, but I thought I owed you something for last night. Consider it a pledge of our friendship.” He looked at the watch resting grandly on my palm with regret, as though he’d have liked to take it back.

  “Thank you,” I repeated while I scratched an itch on my cheek.

  One night, while we were walking past a line of ships docked at the naval yard, Poe returned to my initiation into the afterlife—a rough sketch of what’s to come.

  “It’s the fault of an unquenchable curiosity, which has been a burden and a curse since I was a boy. Without it, I couldn’t write; because of it, I must write.” He shrugged, unwilling to say which of the two punishments he preferred. Maybe he didn’t know. He shrugged again and went on. “I couldn’t help myself, Edward, although I was sufficiently distressed to hide in an ether-induced sleep.” He paused and then admitted, “I find it hard to sleep in the ordinary way.”

  What a marvelous thing is sleep! Much more useful than Macbeth supposed when he praised its power to “knit up the ravell’d sleeve of care.” It’s a darkness in which to forget, to hide, and, for a time, to let the world go its way without you.

  “I sleep like a log,” I said to hurt him.

  He looked at me with yearning, as though I were Morpheus, god of sleep, instead of the custodian of a charnel house. That’s what I was, Moran. A caretaker of the dead. I hadn’t the sense to know that I was no more exalted than the rat catcher or the negro grave digger, for all my fancy clothes.

  “Tell me, Edward: What was it like to wake up in a coffin? I have to know, but the dread of confined spaces has prevented me from attempting the experiment. My fellow Eschatologists, I’m afraid, are too unimaginative to come back from death’s threshold with anything like a story to tell. You can imagine what such dark knowledge would mean to a writer of horror tales.”

  “Didn’t you dream it?” I asked mordantly. “Or were you too fuddled by ether to receive my mesmeric transmission from inside the coffin?” Never mind my screams, I thought, but did not say.

  I could see the contest being waged within him: whether to grab the manure shovel hanging on the wall of the coop and cudgel my brains out or else to offer me some other bribe.

  In the end, I told him what he wanted to know. Why should I have denied him access to my deepest emotions, my most private experience, to the secrets that I should have been allowed to take with me to the grave? Was he not the illustrious Edgar Allan Poe? Should his writer’s curiosity have been left unsatisfied? Who was I to frustrate the desire of an eminent man of letters—or of medicine? I was a nobody, a protégé—not even that. I was Mr. Bones. I told Poe what he wanted to hear, just as I had told Dr. Mütter.

  “The master of this ship is an acquaintance of mine,” said Poe.

  We’d halted on the naval yard dock before a two-masted brig, the USS Grampus. Poe hailed the second officer, who was on deck, lounging against a rail. The man recognized him and bid us come on board. We climbed the gangway and were escorted below to the captain’s cabin.

  “Whenever he’s in port, he sends me word, and we drink a glass or two of rum in his cabin,” said Poe as we descended the companionway. “He’s been everywhere and knows a great many stories.”

  “Good evening, Edgar!” cried the captain, whose name was Simon Phillips. “I’m happy to see you. I hope you and Virginia are well.”

  “Well enough, Simon. I’d like you to be acquainted with my young friend here, Mr. Edward Fenzil, of this city.”

  The captain bowed with military courtesy, which made me ashamed not to be in uniform. America was at peace, momentarily. We would go to war with Mexico in two years’ time, and I would put on an army captain’s uniform in ‘63. In this country, one will always have his chance to play soldier and to die in earnest. By your one remaining eye, Moran, you yourself are nearly proof of that observation.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Fenzil,” said the captain affably.

  “No need to stand on ceremony,” said Poe. “We’re all friends here.”

  “So we are, Edgar. Edward, Edgar—a glass of the good Jamaican?”

  “If you please,” said Poe, rubbing his hands together briskly.

  “Thank you, Simon,” I said, blushing to my very roots to hear myself speak casually to the master of a United States ship of the line.

  The captain was untroubled by my familiarity, but Poe smiled at me—sardonically, I thought.

  We sipped the rum in silence. I felt its pleasant fire invade me, belly and limbs. I favor rye whiskey and like a glass of gin for the smell of juniper. But in my experience as a drinking man, there’s nothing quite so gently warming as rum taken hot or as it comes from the bottle.

  “I was telling Edward that you are a master storyteller,” said Poe, leaching a trace of liquor from his mustache with his tongue.

  The captain gave a self-deprecating laugh. “High praise indeed from one of the greatest of our living authors!”

  Poe made a tch, tch sound meant to deflect the captain’s compliment. I thought his show of modesty was less than sincere. I noted his always pale face had not colored in modesty.

  “You may not know this, young man, but, last year, when I discovered that Edgar Allan Poe lived in Philadelphia, I sought him out when the Grampus was in dry-dock for repairs. He wrote my favorite sea story, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Strange, isn’t it, that the brig in that tale should have been named the Grampus, too?”

  We drank to the strangeness of it.

  “Tell us a story, Simon. It’s a cold night worthy of a weird tale and a warming glass of rum.”

  Captain Phillips eased back in his chair and stretched his long legs toward the brazier. He searched his memory awhile, staring out the aft window toward the black river, where a steamer sowed bright sparks into the starless, moonless night. I admired the captain’s gold-fringed epaulets and, on the desk, his naval hat, whose form suggested to me the very ship he commanded. The cabin smelled of Oriental tobacco, tar, cordage, lignite, and wet wool. The captain’s cabin was a manly space, where great outcomes were bravely decided with aplomb.

  I wondered what it would be like if I were to enlist in the navy. Then the ship creaked and lurched, and I recalled my fear of confinement and of climbing trees and ladders. However much I could picture myself strolling the quarterdeck, wearing a boat-shaped hat, I could not—for all the tea in China, as is said—imagine scampering barefoot up the ratlines or lying down, exhausted in every muscle and bone, in a berth no roomier than a coffin. There was more of the coward about me than the hero. In those days, I was often afraid. I knew my place: to submit to better men, to envy them the footlights and to lurk in the shadows of their eminence.
Since then, I’ve distinguished myself in the field and have performed surgeries that required the steadiest of hands and nerves, but I’m still afraid.

  You may wonder why I choose to make so unmanly an admission to you, a stranger. I’m usually reserved and circumspect. I’ve told only a few others this long and rambling story of my winter with Poe and never before have I betrayed my fears and weaknesses. But I like your face, Moran, and I sense in you someone who has not been altogether brave, in spite of your ferocious eye patch! I never got the chance to spoon out an eye during the war.

  Aboard the Grampus, Phillips charged his briar pipe with tobacco imported, he said, from Anatolia. He’d first smoked it while on duty with the Africa Squadron, and he kept a supply in his cabin for special occasions.

  “I’m pleased,” said Poe, “that you count this rendezvous a special occasion. And now—Captain, if you please—a story to commemorate it.”

  Phillips glanced at his friend cordially while he drew on his pipe. I heard the tobacco crackle in the bowl, and we were soon engulfed in a heady cloud of smoke. His preparations completed, the captain leaned back in his chair again, tugged at his ear, and began his story.

  “This excellent tobacco reminds me of a time three years ago when we sailed with the squadron. We’d departed New York for the Portuguese archipelago and had provisioned the ship in Madeira; thence we’d made for the west coast of Africa. We were charged with stopping any British or American vessel suspected of carrying slaves. We’d been out four months when we went aboard the United States merchant ship Patuxent, carrying sugarcane, according to her manifest. We found the cane and, down in the depths of the hold, a shipment of scared blacks. Her captain claimed they were ‘blackbirds.’”

  Do you know the term, Moran? It was used before the war by those who hoped to circumvent the prohibition on slave running by claiming that the Africans were ‘blackberries,’ meaning they were paid a wage and, therefore, were not slaves. It was a subterfuge employed by those who meant to steal, within the letter of the law, other human beings. Greedy, immoral men will always find a way to enrich themselves. I beg your pardon, Moran: High-mindedness is intolerable in anybody other than oneself.

  “We boarded the Patuxent and took the Africans—men, women, and children—onto the Grampus. We fed and clothed them and, later, put them ashore at Cape Colony to fend for themselves. We could do no more. They’d come—God only knows the anguish of their capture—from up and down the coast and, many of them, from the interior. We could not entirely undo the injustice—feeble word—done them. We did, however, put the Patuxent’s master in chains.

  “Sailing northerly toward Lisbon to resupply, the ship entered a fog bank like no other in my experience at sea. It seemed to have no end and was illumined by a peculiar glow such as that which torches make on mica at the bottom of a mine shaft or mashed fireflies leave on the palms of thoughtless children. After a time that might have been hours or days, so muddled were we all by—to call it ‘fog,’ gentlemen, is to give no true impression of its murk and obscurity.”

  Edgar’s eyes had closed to rest, no doubt, on an inner vision.

  “Finally, we came to the end of it, and the ship entered a zone unknown to me or to my officers. It reminded me—I’d made a study of arcane matters relating to my trade—of a Nubian geographer’s account of Mare Tenebrarum, the name given to the Atlantic south of Morocco by fifteenth-century mariners. The Europeans and the Arabs believed it to be the southern limit of the world, a ‘dark sea’ impossible to cross. The Portuguese called the point of land that marked it Cabo de Não. The explorer Alvise Cadamosto wrote of that dark, wild ocean, ‘Quern passar o Cabo de Não, ou tornará ou não’: ‘Those who cross it will return or not.’

  “But it was not Cape Não on our starboard beam, nor could the ocean have been Mare Tenebrarum, which the Arabs called Bahr al-Zulumat. We had been sailing in the nineteenth century, not the fifteenth. The world’s seas and oceans had been charted. I myself had sailed the western coast of Africa many times, and yet, gentlemen, I could not recognize this bedeviled sea, which the wind blew into precipitous crags to make even the most able seamen afraid to go aloft to reef the sails. We plunged into warring currents like a toy boat and were swept with demonic speed around the rims of gigantic whirlpools. The noise terrified us, and we could not make ourselves heard above the din. I believed the ship would shortly founder and go down to the bottom of one of those gnashing maelstroms.

  “Suddenly, a black man appeared to us on the water. In a moment, the wind had fallen, the ocean grown calm, and the shuddering Grampus, whose stern was buried by the sea, had righted and shaken off the foam from her sheets and rigging. He came striding across the slack water toward our ship, and, speaking through a grotesque mask in the language of the Yoruba, he demanded that we give up the Patuxent’s master. I don’t know how we understood him, unless we were dreaming actors in what the Yoruba call Odun Egungun, a ceremony in which the Egun is possessed by one of his dead ancestors. We understood that this black man, standing tall and erect beside our hull, was, in fact, the slave who’d been beaten to death aboard the Patuxent for some ‘insolence’ to her master.

  “I handed him over to the black. Why not? He was a brutal slave runner, deserving neither my protection nor my pity. Seamen are an unsentimental lot, Moran, and I was ship’s captain, responsible for the lives of all aboard. I pushed the man over the side and watched him sink like a stone under the weight of his chains and his sins. The black man danced, briefly and ecstatically, and then he, too, sank beneath the flat calm of that most unnatural ocean.”

  The captain paused. Entranced by memory, he rubbed a thumb across the corner of his gray mustache. It rasped in the silence of the cabin. Edgar’s eyes were still closed, and, for a moment, I wondered if he had gone to sleep. You could have heard the woodworms gnawing the bulkhead, so very quiet was it. The captain roused himself from his reverie and quickly finished his tale.

  “Shortly, the natural currents reasserted themselves; the wind freshened and filled the sails, which, miraculously, had not been rent by the ferocious winds; and we were once again on course for Lisbon. The Grampus spanked along under a high, clear sky that held not even a memory of the dense fog that had enshrouded her. Having arrived in port, I polished my boots, donned my braided hat and finery, and went to see the admiral’s man. I told him nothing about the weird sea or the black Jesus walking on the water. I reported that the Patuxent’s master had died en route of black water fever, common in the tropics. No one disputed my claim.”

  Was the captain’s story the truth or a tall tale?

  Moran, it doesn’t matter.

  Phillips drew on his pipe and sent another cloud of smoke into the roiling air. My mind a confusion of thoughts and fancies, I wondered if I had heard the story aright or if I’d imagined it, befuddled by rum and the strong Turkish tobacco. I glanced at Edgar, who seemed in a stupor. If not mine, was the tale his? Had it seeped into my mind from his unconsciousness through the pneuma of the smoky atmosphere? The tale was like one by Edgar Poe. In the years since then, I’ve read all of his stories to appear in print, but never have I come across one like that which I heard or dreamed aboard the Grampus.

  We kept silent awhile, as people do who experience something beyond their power to assess. I looked out the stern window, as if I expected an Egun to be walking on the night-blackened Delaware. There was only the water and, moving slowly past our starboard side, a wooden crate, whose contents might have been anything you care to imagine: silks from Japan, opium from China, or a woman’s head hacked off in a fit of jealous rage. By night, a river is a sluice for dark dreams . . . an artery feeding the bewildered hearts of men . . . a sewer. I left them to drink once more to the strangeness of life. I left the ship for the ice-cold air of a February night and walked, brooding over the captain’s tale, to a sailors’ taproom on Church Street, just beyond the naval yard.

  At the bar, I stood beside an ordinary seaman arrive
d early that morning in Philadelphia after a cruise around the Horn. He’d been to Wake Island and the Philippines aboard the USS Vincennes, a Boston-class sloop of war, which had put into the yard for overhaul. I don’t recall the man’s name, though I told him mine—no, not mine, I’m embarrassed to admit. I told him my name was Edgar Poe. I haven’t any excuse to make except that I was not myself at that late hour of the night. Like anyone who has drunk more than is good for him, I was eager to escape the confines of my narrow personality. Wishing to be somebody else, I took the first name that came to mind.

  We drank until the barroom, with its maritime decorations and an amateur painting of the naval Battle of Plattsburg, began to gyre and the voices of the other inebriates grew distant. I remember the slap of coins on the bar, the scrape of my stool against the sawdust-strewn floor, the bang of a door, the sting on my face of the cold night air, an icy snuffle, and, outside a tattoo parlor, the hoarse voice of my friend—he was, by now, my boon companion, for whose sake I was prepared to martyr myself to drink—calling loudly through the shuttered window to be allowed inside. The proprietor must have let us in, for I awoke next morning on a broken couch in a corner of his shop with a painful arm and, beneath a scab, the tattoo of a rope looped around the inked words EDGAR POE.

  I told you he had left an indelible stain on me. Here it is, Moran, the livid souvenir of that preposterous night. There is another, which you are kind to ignore. Have you ever in your life met a fool like me?

  Yes? Well, you’ve knocked around the country long enough to have met a boatload of fools and madmen.

  I got dressed and walked through the empty early-morning streets to the college, hoping to clean myself up before Mütter arrived. He was already there, however, and, creep as stealthily as I might, he found me out.

  “Edward, you look as though you haven’t been home to bed.”

  “Sorry, Dr. Mütter, I’ve been on the town,” I mumbled sheepishly.