Imp: Being the Lost Notebooks of Rufus Wilmot Griswold in the Matter of the Death of Edgar Allan Poe

by Douglas Vincent Wesselmann

  “The Lord of Life saved me.”

  Again I thought the remark strange. Poe was not a religious man. But I responded as I thought appropriate, even in my drunkenness. “Jesus saves us all.”

  “So he might if he lived in Richmond.” Poe and Jupiter both laughed with the first real merriment of the night.

  “Ha!” Jupiter’s fist slammed on the table.

  “He had slipped us.” Poe returned to the tale. “But we knew Fox’s travel plans. And Jupiter and I decided to intercept him on his return to Richmond and follow him to Baltimore.”

  “But why write me?”

  “One night before my cholera spell, I had been following Fox and saw her.”

  “Who?”

  “She accompanied him from his rooms. A slim woman with black hair, a proud neck, and a ruby ring.”

  “Caroline!”

  “Yes, I recognized her and realized that Mrs. Whitman had helped you make the same bargain as I, Griswold. Her tongue was black. I saw it.”

  “God forgive you, Poe.”

  “God forgive you, Griswold.”

  “You are both fucking fools,” said Jupiter.

  “My good master here.” Poe nodded towards the Negro. The reference seemed strange. “My good master here and I boarded the boat in Richmond – the boat we knew Fox had booked passage on. I even brought along my cane.” Poe waved the silver-headed Malacca stick over his head. “Actually, it belongs to my friend young Doctor Carter. I had bid my newly intended farewell, the remains of my fever still upon me. On the way to the docks, I stopped at the young doctor’s office to secure some medicine. Seeing the cane and its features, I thought it wise to avail myself of its charms.” Poe stroked the sculpted angels.

  “But you were stabbed on the boat, they said.” I was having greater difficulty forming thought or word. The watered brandy tasted less watered.

  “Stabbed?” Poe’s face was blank. “I know I was beaten from behind. Stabbed? Jupiter warned me.”

  “I did.”

  “The voyage was slow. We left Richmond some two hours late, delayed by a boiler problem. Again, at Newport, we stopped due to a squall running across the Chesapeake Passage. And again, the boiler failed for an hour off Windmill Point on our way north. I tried to remain hidden, but I could not contain myself.”

  “I warned you.”

  “I had thought that we would follow Fox in Baltimore. Having discovered it was his base, I thought to find her there.”

  “Your Virginia,” I mumbled.

  “She was on the boat!” Poe shouted. “I saw her with the dark haired woman and a maid.”

  “A maid, indeed,” grumbled Jupiter.

  “I approached her.”

  “You rushed into the cabin. Such a fool.” Jupiter wiped his mouth. “That’s the truth of it, Griswold. If Poe has told you anything true, it’s that he is a fucking fool.”

  Poe raised a finger to his lips. “Quiet, Jupiter. You will destroy my narrative.”

  “Oh, so that’s what it is, a narrative?” He laughed. “Like Pym’s and half as real.”

  “Quiet, please.” Poe composed himself and continued. “Her tongue was black as I reached for her. I grabbed at them both and came away with only a ruby ring in my hand.” Poe’s breathing was labored. His jaws began chewing on the leaf furiously. “I… I….”

  “You grabbed the ring from Caroline’s hand? What happened?”

  “I do not remember any events after that, save that on the boat, Jupiter took me and…”

  “They carried you off the boat.”

  “Thank God for the mercy.” Poe seemed lost in a dream again.

  “So, we have lost them.” I was in despair. “Fox is now somewhere in Baltimore – lost in the mobs of the second largest city in the Union. And Caroline…” I wanted more to drink, but my glass was empty.

  “More brandy for the lost!” shouted Poe.

  “God, I should have taken her then.” Jupiter’s face, if I may say however awkwardly, darkened.

  “Too many of them – too many. And no escape.” Poe’s eyes closed as if he was recalling some old wound.

  “So now, Poe?” Jupiter held his spoon like it was a dagger and pointed it at the poet.

  “What more do you want of me?” Poe’s shoulders slumped.

  “This.” Jupiter reached in his vest pocket and pulled out a small, folded scrap of paper. He tossed it past me, and the foolscap slid to a stop in front of Poe.

  “What is this?” Poe unfolded the paper.

  “When you were on your back – flat on that deck – the captain sent me in to remove your offensive presence. ‘A job for the nigger,’ he said. I fetched you out of there, and that note was on your chest.”

  Poe was hardly listening, his head was bent in close to the small note, trying to make it out in the shadows of our place beneath the stairs. His lips moved as he read the markings. Then with a sudden move, his left hand, with the scrap pinched between two fingers, dropped to the tabletop, and his head snapped to the side. “Yes. Yes.”

  I took the note from Poe, and he scarcely noticed. He was still half turned away with his lips moving as if he were still reading some words that were no longer on paper but fully written in his mind.

  My eyes struggled to focus, and in the cellar’s dim light it was difficult, but I was able, after some squinting and strain, to make it out.

  Annabel Lee sends her regards.

  5 3, 1 9 5 8, 1 0

  8, 2 1, 3 4 3 7 5

  7, 1 8 8, 1 6, 1 7

  3, 1 2, 1 3, 0 0 0,

  2 4 3 5, 1 8, 2 3

  6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

  4, 1 7 4, 1 8 6, 1

  0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0

  4 5 2, 1 6 1 3 4,

  1 5 0 0 0 0 0 0

  - M.

  “But what does it mean?” My vision blurred as I struggled to read the numbers.

  “It’s the path to salvation,” mumbled Poe. He jumped to his feet and began pacing back and forth in front of our table.

  “Poe? Tell me. What does it mean?”

  “A moment. A moment.” He waved his hand at me as if I were a bothersome servant. And he paced.

  I turned to Jupiter. “What does the note mean?”

  “I have no skill in such ciphers,” he said. “Nor did I expect such to be part of this business. But, by fortune, I brought Poe here. Now he will serve my purpose.” Jupiter’s dark eyes followed Poe as he traced and retraced his steps.

  “You brought Poe? Serve you? Such arrogance.”

  “Arrogance, is it?” Jupiter leaned towards me. His breath was warm on my face. “You think I wouldn’t do whatever I needed to do?”

  I didn’t understand his words, but his anger was clear. I leaned back away from him.

  “Well, what does it mean?’ Jupiter growled at Poe.

  Poe stopped, put both his hands on the table and leaned in close to us. “An enigma, my friends. An enigma.” He grinned at us like a lunatic who believes he has seen the face of God. “An enigma!”

  “Enough, Poe. Tell me.” Jupiter started to reach out to grab his collar, but as the Negro’s hand reached for him, Poe jerked backwards and spun into the crude stone cellar wall. Another man’s hands had beaten Jupiter’s to the mark.

  He was wearing a sailor’s oiled-skin coat, and he stood hunched over Poe where he lay crumpled and stunned on the cellar floor.

  “I saw you on the Pocahontas. What are you?” His words were mangled with the accent of drinking, and he wavered as he loomed over Poe. “Listen, you fucking thing!” The sailor, if that’s what he was, could barely keep his feet. He swayed drunkenly from side to side as he yelled down at my companion. “What are you?”

  In a single motion, Jupiter took hold of our table with one hand and hurled it end over end away into the stairway pillar. The African moved in a blur to Poe’s defense and, with a heavy shove, deposited the attacker into the side of a stone buttress.

  Poe, sitting with his back to the wall, paid the situation no h
eed. As if he were giving a recitation in a large hall he proclaimed, “Seldom we find half an idea in the profoundest sonnet!”

  In the same instant, the room erupted.

  “The nigger shoved Barty Boy!”

  “What the fuck!”

  Chairs clattered to the floor as men leapt to their feet. Table legs protested as they were shoved across the rough flagstones to clear paths.

  “Barty Boy!” Shouted two or three throats at once.

  “I’ll have him!” A burly man, dressed as was Poe’s attacker, rushed forward with a Lamb Foot knife in his hand.

  Jupiter knocked his charge aside without strain, using a sweep of his arm. He picked Poe up by the collar while keeping his eyes on the cellar in front of him. He turned to me.

  “Move!”

  I stood up from the bench. I had been commended, but I did not know where to go. A mass of men began forming in front of us.

  Jupiter grabbed at me and shoved me towards the stairs. Likewise, he pushed Poe in the same direction. I was up two steps, with Poe right behind me as the shouting grew even louder.

  “Let’s plug ‘em ugly, boys.”

  Jupiter was behind us, backing his way up the flight as we two frail souls ran as we could on our own intoxicated legs.

  I’d almost reached the doorway at the top of the steps, when something hit me in the back of the head. My head started to spin, and the room began tilting. I wanted to do something, but I could not remember what it was.

  There was a roaring behind me, and I felt myself slipping into the chaos.

  The numbers from the note – I tried to remember the numbers on the note. But I could not recall them. The digits began to float off the scrap of foolscap I had shoved into my pocket. I saw them float and then churn in a current of unconscious air. The numbers spiraled into a maelstrom of darkness before my wavering eyes.

  Poe grabbed at me as I fell.

  His hands were like ice.

  Chapter 12

  September 29, 1849 1:00 a.m. - No One Will Deny the Propensity in Question -

  I have heard tell of the Burmese Necromancers who hold that a perfect ruby will protect the one who inserts the jewel under his flesh from all perils to person or property. The Maharajas of the Punjab give credence to the power of the blood-gem to shield the wearer in battle against missile or blade. On the shelves of my library there is a volume, the lapidary treatise produced by Sir John Mandeville, which maintains that the possessor of such a “Lord of Stones” shall be preserved from all calamity in body and soul, should the ruby be worn on the left side.

  I recall the shock of seeing my dear wife’s ruby ring spinning on the table in front of my disbelieving eyes. My head spun to match its spiral path across the planks. The watered brandy in my stomach stirred. The virtues of the deep red jewel took on a vampiric hue before me, and the gem that had graced her finger became a mottled crimson eye that mocked and accused me. All sense escaped me. Breathing was beyond my strength. Scarlet sparks became darkness, and I was dropped into unconsciousness with an airless sigh.

  Only looking back now and recreating that night from scraps and tattered memories can I make some sense of it all. My fragmented impressions are illuminated by the lamp of passing time and my Lord God who answers my prayers for understanding.

  How exactly we fought our way clear of the stagnant air of the oyster cellar I cannot say. I vaguely remember being limply tossed across Jupiter’s shoulder once we made the chill air of the street. I had replaced Poe as the burden. Like a mule, Jupiter accepted the load, and we ran, turning this way and that into the maze of Baltimore. There were no angry voices to be heard in pursuit. I struggled to make my battered head make sense of the riot behind us. Had Jupiter managed to barricade the door as we fled? I could not say, I only know we were not molested again, and soon our pace slowed.

  A cold mist swirled in a gust, then clung in the eddy of the wind as it died. My bones were aching, and my nose was full of the musty perfume of the Negro’s coat.

  “We don’t need him.” Jupiter’s voice slipped into my ears as my head bounced against his back.

  “You needed him at the dock.” Poe was walking beside us. I could not see him, but he was there.

  “Only as a cat’s paw.”

  “My, my, Jupiter. Such an uppity one you are.” Poe’s laugh was as dark as the alleyway we traveled.

  Jupiter’s pace slowed. “I’m not in the mood to absorb your petty jabs, Mr. Poe. And I’m in no mood to continue this vain search for a whorehouse of which you have some vague memory.”

  I had missed some part of their conversation and was unsure of what house Poe searched for, or the import of my companions words. But I listened.

  “Not in the mood? It’s not in the mood? Such a sensitive thing.”

  Jupiter stopped – my head ceased its infernal jostle. “It? Thing? Poe, I tell you this again and for the final time. You will deal with me as a man.” There was a growl in the black man’s throat. “Save when required by this necessary charade we play, you will treat me as I am.”

  “A blessed son of the Heavenly Father.”

  “Spare me your quaint philosophy, Poe.”

  “A blessed lump of coal from the Divine furnace.”

  “You forget so soon, Poe?”

  “I do not forget.”

  “Oh, but you do.” Jupiter shrugged, and my limp body was weightless as he shifted me off his shoulder into the crook of a mighty arm and then set me down on the mud of the path, my back hard against Poe’s trunk.

  Dizziness began to overcome me, and I tasted bile in my mouth. I wavered, but held on to such sense as the shock and the excess brandy of the evening allowed. I could not focus my eyes fully, but I listened. I listened as well as I could.

  “So will you strike me?’ Poe did not sound afraid of the prospect, though having witnessed Jupiter’s prowess, he must have known that the Negro could crush him without a thought.

  “Strike you?’

  “Will you smash me with that ham of a fist, you black pig?”

  “Pig?”

  “Pig nigger.”

  Jupiter sighed. It was not a gentle or reflective sigh. The sound escaped his mouth through clenched teeth.

  “Fucking pig nigger. Will you strike me?”

  A wave of nausea swept over me. The sound in my ears was a buzz, as if there was some spark in my head trying to escape. Faintly, through the buzzing of my brain, I heard shoes scrape against dirt and stone. I heard an explosion of air escaping a man’s lungs as he was pushed against a wall.

  Poe’s voice was constricted – labored. “Hit me, you fucking pig nigger.”

  “No.”

  “Hit me.”

  “No.” Anger faded from Jupiter’s words. “You have not forgotten, have you?”

  The back of Poe’s coat snagged on rough brick as he slid down towards the ground – released by his assailant. “Kick me then, you black bastard. Kick me.”

  “I can’t kill you. You know that.”

  “Bash in my head with your boots.”

  “I won’t release you.” Jupiter’s words seemed to echo for a moment in the darkness. “…Release you.” Silence shrouded the scene for a brief moment.

  Finally a whimper – was it Poe?

  “You will do what we need to do.” Jupiter voiced it as a command.

  Even in my disoriented state, the import of the words was clear. There was an unnatural, even a perverse sense of wrongness in the situation.

  Jupiter commanded, “You will.”

  “Crush the bones in my head. Splinter my skull, you fucking devil. Stab me with my own sharpened ribs and let the last of my blood flow out into these gutters. Cut me into strips of flesh and eat me and all the maggots that breed in my entrails, you damnable piece of ebony shit!” Poe screamed in the shadows.

  The shadow stood above him and answered, “I will not make your madness mine, Mr. Poe.” Jupiter paused, and for a short moment there was only the rasp of P
oe’s breathing. “Your madness is not mine.”

  Poe almost sobbed. After a moment he replied, “It’s a world of demons, Dr. G – a world of demons.”

  Jupiter gave a little laugh. “It’s a world of men, Mr. Poe.”

  “Demons. Demons…” Poe’s mutterings faded away.

  “Here. Drink this.”

  “More of your potion?”

  “Take a swig or two. It’s just the laudanum. No more of the rest until tomorrow. Trust me.” Jupiter spoke as if to a child.

  “Laudanum.”

  “Take it. That’s it. Take a real pull on that, Mr. Poe.”

  Poe swallowed noisily. “You are my savior, aren’t you, Jupiter?” There was another loud gulp. Poe exhaled. “Praise to my savior. All the highest praise.”

  “Get up.”

  “I obey, Lord.” Shoes and hands scuffled on the cold mud and rock of the broken pavement.

  “Brush yourself off.”

  “Of course. Of course.” Poe’s tongue was thick.

  “We’ll leave him here.” Jupiter was not asking a question.

  “But we may need him.”

  “You’re a white man. One white face should do.”

  “Then why did you want me to tell that little story about his wife? And the ruby ring? You gave him back that ruby ring. What a cruel little gesture. Why call him down to Baltimore?” Poe had a talent for the twist that turned situations around.

  “His money. I need his money. I could give less than a fuck about what tales you tell him.” Jupiter defended himself.

  “Jupiter – Mighty Jupiter, you sound unsure.”

  “I will do what I must do.” Jupiter took a deep breath. “I know what I must do.”

  “But you had him on the wharf.”

  “Fox?”

  “Yes, you had Fox on the wharf. But you let him go. You stayed to help me. And now you have carried Griswold…”

  “Only this far.”

  “You are not the vengeful god you pretend to be, Jupiter.” Poe swiped dust off of his knees. “Fox was there for you. And he was there within your reach in Richmond when you first so kindly made my acquaintance. Why have you shown Fox such mercy?” Poe was mocking the Negro.