The Blackest Bird

by Joel Rose

  “Olga, I beg of you, come with me to pay a condolence call at the cottage of Mrs. Clemm. I cannot find it in myself to go alone.”

  Olga glanced to her father, who nodded his slow concord. “All right,” she said to Annie.

  Within minutes Olga was kissing and hugging her father goodbye. She inquired one last time if he was sure he would not like to accompany them to Fordham Village.

  He replied he was sure, and they were gone.

  Left alone, the high constable retired to the parlor. As he lowered himself back into the recliner, his thoughts returned to Poe, departed this firmament.

  “Not altogether a fool,” he conjured this man’s prescience from “The Purloined Letter,” “but then he’s a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool.”

  The high constable’s mind deferred. He dozed off into a fitful sleep, waking abruptly to a hard knock at the door.

  A package messenger, a small man with a large red nose, stood shivering on Hays’ stoop, awaiting the door to be answered. He turned over a parcel, damp from the drizzle that must have recently started, and departed.

  What is this?

  Back in the comfort of his parlor, Hays pulled away the soggy paper, finding inside John Colt’s bound manuscript. A note beneath, signed “Poe,” also included:

  Richmond, Virginia

  27 September 1849

  My Dearest Sir:

  I can only hope this note finds you well as I am well. Better. Best. I enclose herein the curiosity we both had occasion to scrutinize in the cottage by the river at Turtle Bay. To say these poems have caused me consternation is to understate my frame of mind. Perhaps there is something unseen hidden herein. Do you think? Even as I write this brief word of warning while waiting for the steam ferry to Baltimore and ultimately your (not mine) beloved Gotham, I feel the hard black eyes of carrion crow, the blackest bird, on my back. I ask you, what has led me here, sir? What—do I dare ask—might lead me away?

  The manuscript book is as it was: fourteen poems, all in the pained and studied hand of the calligrapher.

  The first:

  Ligeia, there a body lies.

  Go, the miserable deed done, but one ugly fear

  Storms over me now, to touch this thing.

  Look, nothing remains to struggle against me here,

  Not in this lifeless heap.

  How much more could I only wish it would spring

  Full and grasp me, and strike at me, as I did it

  But only a moment or two before?

  I tried to lift the head, but it dropped, and slid

  Fast from my grasp to its bed of gore.

  What have you to do with this horrible thing?

  Down—o’er grub a grave in the ground!

  Grub dark with your nails! If you choose you may sing

  That song so often sung. Don’t start and look around!

  Should I dig? How terribly slow you are!

  Go and dig! The dawn in the East begins to grow!

  Shan’t you dig? The birds are all chirping. Bury there

  So deep that body at once, and for God’s sake just go!

  O, all the world will be up in less than an hour,

  Ram and rattle and ring along the clear road.

  Strumpet, your fault. Dig for your life!

  Deeper still, Dig for your deed!

  Dig full speed, for what more can you do?

  Cast it out upon the water? There

  So close to shore. Where the tides rush and the shad tarry.

  All there! Cast it out! Cast it out! Cast it out!

  Zante, fairest of all flowers. Cast it out. Nevermore.

  O Nevermore!

  Hays is fast to see this poem, the poem once of John Colt and his victim Samuel Adams, has changed, undergone transmogrification. Whereas when twice before he had had opportunity to scrutinize the peculiar verse, both at the Tombs and later at Turtle Bay, the poem had seemed to him to have taken itself with the Samuel Adams atrocity.

  Here he found it no longer about the printer per se. No, if he was not mistaken, the subject as presently perused had been intersticed with a recognizable, if not strictly factual, rather (he no critic) shabbily executed, self-involved ode to Mary Rogers.

  Why? After study, nothing else in the manuscript appeared to have changed as far as he could tell, save this one verse.

  The high constable pondered the whys and wherefores for a period of time, but unable to sit still longer, he gathered up the manuscript and left his home with definite destination in mind.

  Traveling first east on Lispenard, he moved at his own pace two long blocks to Centre Street and then directly south to the Tombs.

  At the gates he was admitted to seek audience with that individual who had replaced him, the superintendent of police, Mr. George Matsell, whereupon he was ushered inside, past the all-too-familiar Bummers’ Cell and through the main corridor.

  The day was dark and the cages, each holding one, two, or three prisoners, were in shadow. Dim lights shine, bodies slink, faces remained obscured beneath greasy caps and dented, dirty hats.

  Through an open grate affording him glimpse into a cell at the end of the corridor, Old Hays observes two familiar boys slumped side by side on a cot.

  He hears his name whispered, “Old Hays,” before being ushered into the presence of he whom he sought.

  “Superintendent,” Hays spoke.

  “Mr. Hays.”

  “Mr. Matsell, I am here in regard to the tragedy of Edgar Poe. I wonder are you in receipt of any notice arrived from Baltimore which might shed light on the circumstances of his death?”

  Police superintendent Matsell shook his head with a genuine sadness, said he was much disturbed by the news of such a man passing. He was a former bookseller and held Poe in a high light. He inquired of his predecessor if this inquiry was business or idle curiosity, the response being, “Business.”

  Matsell said he had indeed received a number of detailed cards from that city, all of which he had full opportunity to inspect with a deep and intent interest.

  The steamer on which Mr. Poe had been a passenger, he said, docked on schedule at the Baltimore wharves a few minutes before noon on September 29. Mr. Poe’s trunk was evidently removed from the hold at the time of docking, and he was observed leaving via the gangplank with several young men. Opinion seems to vary among observers who these young men may have been: sports, soaplocks, swig coves, jarkmen. If they were old acquaintances or new friends also was variously speculated. Poe was said to be wearing a white suit, and seemed somewhat unsteady on his feet. The shipboard barman, when questioned by officers, said Poe had been drinking, and seemed familiar with those with whom he drank.

  Reliable supporting details were as such: on the day of Mr. Poe’s descent from the gangplank, Baltimore City was in the throes of an election campaign for local members of Congress and representatives to the state legislature. Because there is, as of yet, no official registration of voters in that city, if a man can hold up his hand, he can take the oath and vote. Lawless street gangs are known to round up, sandbag, and mobilize scores of potential ballot casters, keeping these coves docile with drugs and whiskey at certain dives, saloons, and two-cent coffeehouses. Sites of operation of this kind are known in the Crab Cake City as coops. Having secured their quota of these wayward individuals, the rapscallions then repeatedly deliver their charges from these crypts with the intention to vote the inebriates time and time again on the behest of whichever political party willing to pay out the highest dole.

  In all probability, Poe fell prey to such agenda.

  “Perhaps the Bloody Eights, perhaps the Peelers, the Rip-Raps, the Pluckers, the Gumballs. All are named. The pick is yours, sir.”

  To keep him taciturn, Matsell surmised, blackguards such as these curs more than likely provided Poe with a paralyzing brew consisting of nothing less than a mixture of laudanum, lager, and brandy.

  “For some hours after Mr. Poe left the coastli
ne steamer, any verifiable trace of him ceased,” continued Matsell, “before he seemed to reappear on High Street, spotted by a German washerwoman behind an old engine house, thereafter stumbling into a notorious coop called the Fourth Ward Club.”

  During the course of that day’s vote, Matsell further stated, 140 voters were counted to be held captive there, Mr. Poe assumed among them.

  Later in the afternoon a seriously disabled man who may have been Poe was seen at Cooth and Sergeant’s Tavern on Lombard Street, two blocks from High. He was no longer in his white suit, but dressed in ill-fitting ragged pants with a rope belt and an ale-soaked cotton shirt and gray cloth jacket.

  Not long after, an old friend and supporter of Mr. Poe’s, Dr. James Snodgrass, received a note while at his dinner table in his home at number 103 High Street, signed by a print-setter who had recognized Poe.

  In its entirety, the communication read:

  Dear Sir, There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s Fourth Ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, and he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you he is in need of immediate assistance.

  Upon receiving this alarm, Dr. Snodgrass immediately rushed to the polling location mentioned, only to be referred to another location, that of Gunner’s Hall. Snodgrass gave testimony that he had not seen his old friend and associate for some time, had apparently read much in the newsprints of his deteriorating condition, and was therefore much concerned. Now, he said, he found the subject of his anxiety sitting on the floor, dressed in filthy clothes, with a decidedly stupid expression on his face.

  Dr. Snodgrass related that Mr. Poe looked up at him without recognition. He said that he reminded Mr. Poe who he was, that he was a friend of long standing, to which Poe responded in a dull, somber voice, “If you are a true friend, the best thing you can do for me is put a pistol to my head and blow out my poor brains.”

  The dying man was transported forthwith to the facilities of the Washington Medical College. For four days he struggled in his hospital bed. At some point, as the shadow of death fell across him, he became restless and called out something unintelligible that might have been a name. The room reportedly rang with his call, and this same cry was said to echo down the hospital corridors hour after hour all that Saturday night. Whatever he was trying to say, however, remained unintelligible.

  Then, before the dawn, on the morning of Sunday, October 7, 1849, at five o’clock a. m., Edgar Allan Poe rose one final time in his bed and cried out, this time distinctly, “God help my poor soul!” and that was the end of him.

  Additionally, Matsell handed over to his predecessor a letter for his perusal:

  To Any and All Interested Parties, Authorities, and To Whom Else It May Concern:

  I am the medical doctor upon whose hands it fell to administer to Mr. Edgar Poe at the last. It was I who was with him in his dying hours. I proclaim for all to know that a slander is being committed upon this man. In many circles it is construed that Mr. Poe suffered and died under the influence of liquor, but nothing could be further from the fact. Upon his arrival at the hospital it is true Mr. Poe appeared in great physical and mental distress. I did momentarily consider that he might be suffering from mania a potu, delirium tremens, but upon examining the patient I discounted this diagnosis as quickly as it had come upon me. Although he had been drinking, now I could see plainly that what plagued this man was a brain fever of the most malignant and aggressive kind. Still, as a precaution I took time to inquire of the hackman who had brought the ailing Mr. Poe to our facility if he had by any chance knowledge of the patient’s state. The hackman replied that his passenger had not been drunk, although there was the slight smell of liquor about Mr. Poe when he lifted him into his vehicle.

  As the patient’s last hour approached, I bent over him and asked if he had any word he wished communicated to his friends. The dying man raised his fading eyes, turned uneasily, and moaned, “Oh God, is there no ransom for the deathless spirit?” then turned silent. After a few moments, in a croaking voice, he continued. “He who rode the heavens and upholds the universe has His decrees written on the frontlet of every human being,” he said.

  Then followed guttural murmuring, growing fainter and fainter, then a tremor of the limbs, a final faint, sigh, and the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe had passed the boundary line that divides time from eternity.

  Signed respectfully,

  Dr. J. J. Moran

  “J. J. Moran?” Hays repeated the name.

  “Do you know him?” asked Matsell. The superintendent was fingering his eight-pointed copper star, his head cocked, his stern face accentuated by a growth of beard beneath the chin. He wore his police cap oddly askew. His uniform was poorly tailored, the leather belt cinched beneath his rib cage tight enough to impede what Hays saw as the comfortable inhalation and exhalation of breath.

  “I do if it is the doctor J. J. Moran I have severally encountered. In the spring of 1834 the necessity came upon me to arrest a young medical student associated with the New York Hospital. In the years ensuing, this individual found his way into my custody on more than one occasion, each time for the same crime for which he was arrested the first: that of body snatching. The last occurrence he was found to have robbed the grave of a young woman, digging up her body for dissection and making a most indecent exposure of her corpse.”

  “And this is the same doctor who has conveniently had fortune to administer to the dying Poe and attest to it?” said Matsell.

  “So it seems. Curious.”

  “And what, High Constable, do you make of the disparity in accounts? That one version states Poe’s last words as ‘God help my poor soul,’ while the other claims, ‘Is there no ransom for the deathless spirit?’”

  “I cannot say,” said Hays.

  “And the fact that Dr. Moran claims that it was not alcohol poisoning as causation of death, but brain fever?”

  “Some time ago, through undue experience,” Hays said to Matsell, “I have learned to distrust the testimony of individuals, even medical practitioners, already proven to me to be compromised. Experience and common sense dictates in no way can I take to heart anything stated by Dr. Moran.”

  Hays gestured his head in the direction of the first-tier cells. “Those two apaches you detain back there. I require a word with them.”

  Matsell craned his thin neck, ensconced in tight collar, in the direction indicated by Hays. “Of whom do you speak, sir?”

  “The two boyos in the last holding tank. Do you know who they are, Superintendent?”

  “I do. Two worthless and profligate characters up on the steamer from Baltimore. Run with a gang of pap-nap-nickies known in that city as the Bloody Tubs, they. My officers spotted a whole passel of them at the time the cards came to the South Street dock. My men gave chase, but these are the only two caught. What, might I ask, do you want with them?”

  “If I am not mistaken, they are Oscar and Ossian Kallenbarack, sons of Frederika Loss from Nick Moore’s roadhouse in Hoboken. I am intrigued they have found their way here. I haven’t seen them since they were boys, the night of their mother’s death. It was Ossian who shot her. I find it curious that they should find their way here, running with a Baltimore gang of billywidgeons.”

  Mr. Trencher, the insipid keeper, still on the job over the span of these years, keyed the lock, happy to be of assistance once more to his old protector, the high constable.

  When Hays stepped into the cell, his constable’s staff held with two strong hands, he said nothing, merely staring, giving the two Kallenbarack youths the once-over, waiting.

  “Do you boys know who I am?” he finally asked.

  They knew. Old Hays.

  Fidgeting, they eyed the high constable’s ash peddler’s pony.

  “Do you know why I might be here?”

  They denied that they did.

  “Good citizens tell the truth, Oscar and Ossian Kallenbarack,” he warned
, slamming his staff on the stone slab floor for good effect. “I knew your mother. But I have not seen you boyos for several years. Now which of you is which?”

  OLGA DID NOT RETURN home from Fordham Village until late in the afternoon of the following day. By that time the weather, profligate on the island of Manhattan, was in the process of abrupt change. Any trace of the warmth of Indian summer had fled the streets of the lower island as a cold, dismembering gale tore down the long avenues from the north.

  Hays heard the familiar sound of the kitchen door opening and closing. His daughter, drained of color, stormed into the parlor in a rush, chilled and much disturbed.

  “The coward!” she cried. “The poltroon!”

  She stood in front of the fire, her back to the blaze, her body trembling, not necessarily from cold.

  “Of whom do you speak, Olga?”

  “Whosoever signs his name ‘Ludwig,’” she snarled. “Have you seen this, Papa?”

  She tore the New York Herald from her travel bag and waved it angrily in the air. “I picked it up before I boarded the railroad, and have had to live with the lies and hocum ever since.”

  On the front page was a defamatory obituary, signed with an obvious pseudonym. “Edgar Allan Poe is dead,” this nom de plumed individual began. “He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday.”

  The announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it. He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinctcurses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers for the happiness of those who at that moment were objects of his idolatry, but never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned. He seemed, except when some fitful pursuit subjected his will and engrossed his faculties, always to bear the memory of some controlling sorrow.

  “Do you know who I think this Ludwig-skycer is?” Olga continued to spew with acid vehemence. “I’ll tell you exactly who it is, Papa. The reek of it, the smell. It is none other than Mr. James Gordon Bennett, that is who it is. He has put the Reverend Rufus Wilmot Griswold up to the task. I would bet my life on it. Papa, Muddie told Annie and me Bennett had already been to Fordham before we arrived, seeking from Muddie exclusive exercise over Edgar’s literary estate.”