The Blackest Bird (25 page)

F
rom the building shadows across the street on Second Avenue, Old Hays watched the nervous team hitched to the truck stamp their splayed hooves in the dark and obscured cemetery copse. The coffin had now been loaded in the back, the huddling mass of urchins in the bed, clutching and cackling in the night at each other to keep off the spirits of the dead.

It was then Hays saw a phantom ghost reveal himself, emerging almost directly in front of Tommy Coleman and his land crabs, a hundred strides away from where Hays stood, the shadow across the street from the cemetery plots.

In response to the phantasm’s presence, Tommy cracked the traces down on the nags, demanding speed lest the devil himself get them, and the wagon began to roll out the iron gate from whence it came onto Tenth Street, loping at first, faster than a canter now, steering sharply onto Second Avenue on two wheels before the wagon righted itself with a clatter, left again, on Eleventh, cross town, again two wheels, and then righting itself once more, continuing on Eleventh to turn again up the Fourth Avenue at a full gallop.

The spirit stood stock-still momentarily, ephemeral, before making
labored attempt to follow horses and wagon. A bandy-legged man, he was dressed in black, of poor build.

Hays immediately saw there was no hope for such person to keep up. He was struck by the man’s physiognomy. He had impossibly large head to the point of misshapenness. As Hays continued to watch, he stumbled along on Eleventh Street, bent over grotesquely, his cranium seemingly an undue weight, a veritable burden. This individual’s eyes were trained down at the sidewalk and the muddied manure-slickened road. The man remained unmindful at worst, unaware at best, of the high constable behind him, a shade to his own shadow.

Hays recognized him now, knew the phantasm for who he was. Yes, it was he. None other. Edgar Poe, the poet.

He signaled for his police barouche. Balboa rolled up immediately from across the road, reins in hand, waiting as he was by the kerb at Second Avenue and Ninth Street.

With an arm up from this colored gentleman, the high constable climbed heavily aboard the carriage, taking his well-worn place in the rear.

“Hurry!” he shouted aloft to his aide-de-camp, who had resumed his place in the raised driver’s seat. “Our suspects have left at something other than a funereal clip.”

Balboa snapped the reins, and the fine pair of geldings leaned into their traces.

In his accustomed seat, although the carriage had its detachable top in place for the oncoming winter, Hays arranged a coarse woolen blanket over his legs against the biting midnight cold as Balboa made his attempt to keep up with the casket wagon by now racing blocks ahead along the deserted night streets.

At Fourth Avenue and Twelfth Street a crush of drunken pedestrians stumbled into the intersection on their way north from the beer gardens of the Bowery. Balboa made vain attempt to cut sharply in front of them, nearly running the lot down before coming to a forced stop.

The group squealed, first in terror, then in rage.

Hays, about to lean out the carriage window and shake his fist at the whole besotted bunch of them, there glimpsed the writer Poe. He had straggled up and was now standing directly behind the drunken group, under an awning, in front of the plate-glass window of a dark shop, shifting his weight uneasily from one foot to the other. He was wearing the military-style greatcoat Hays had seen him in before. The huge garment flapped about him in the stiff north wind shooting violently down the wide avenue. Hays silently studied him as Poe pulled the heavy garment tight, his thin body wracked by an audible, ratcheting cough before he gagged and expectorated on the ground, sighing dismally when it was over. Hays thought once more of Mary Rogers, of this man’s involvement, and wondered what was he doing here. Was it mere ghoulism or something more? Hays watched as Poe looked around him and ran his fingers through his disheveled black hair. He frantically patted himself all over as if he were searching for a misplaced pocket wallet or his keys. He peered ahead, up Fourth Avenue where the Forty Little Thieves and their hearse had all but disappeared, and then stepped closer toward the shopwindow, and here Hays observed the establishment was, of all things, a bookseller.

Poe peered through the glass behind where were displayed any number of volumes Hays could not possibly discern as to title or author from this distance.

After a few seconds, Poe broke off his entrancement and moved away, muttering to himself, took a step in one direction, then a step in the other direction. He acted bewildered, unable to decide where he was going. A pang of vague sympathy struck High Constable Hays then. He saw him, the broken man, perhaps drunk, perhaps intoxicated on opium. (Hays had taken note the night his daughter read him “Ligeia,” reasoning rightly Poe the conqueror worm.)

Whatever Poe’s queer mandate that evening (the inexplicable attraction of the grave?), it now seemed lost on the gentleman himself, and on Hays.

For God’s sake, man, get a grip
, Hays nearly bellowed at him.
Stop
wasting time. If you are going to follow, follow!

Tommy Coleman and his boyos were lost in the distance, three blocks north at the least, and more than likely lengthening that gap.

Hays found himself calling out to him. “Mr. Poe!”

Poe turned and peered about him, confused as to who might call his name.

From the carriage window, Hays signaled him, and Poe stepped closer.

“Mr. Poe, do you know me?” Hays asked.

Poe’s eyes blinked once, twice, then seemed to snap into focus through a self-made mist. “Indeed, sir,” he said. “You are Jacob Hays, high constable of the metropolis.”

Hays was once more struck by the man’s lyric lilt, the charm of his southern accent.

“Get in!” Hays ordered.

Poe cocked his head ever so slightly. “Why are you here, High Constable?” he said. “And where might you be going?”

“There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, my dear Mr. Poe, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural,” Hays replied, pushing the door to the barouche open from the inside. “I, sir, am but a weak and weary wanderer in pursuit of whatever ghosts and ghouls that might abound this ebon night.”

These words had been purloined by Hays directly from “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” Unlikely as it was in this cold night air to have them regurgitated back at him, the afflicted author’s dark eyes softened with recognition. Hesitating only for an instant, Poe struggled aboard, taking the proffered seat opposite the high constable.

Old Hays turned his attention, barking the straggling Bowery drunkards out of the carriage’s way. Already, as far as Hays could see, the truck of the Forty Little Thieves with their casket load was long across Fourteenth Street and past the Union Park. Hays called to Balboa to lay leather to horseflesh. As they rolled past the inebriates at a lope, the stragglers did not even look up.

With Balboa bent at the reins, the barouche rushed up Fourth
Avenue. The Negro driver cut around the park, as had presumably those of whom he was in pursuit. They followed the tracks of the Haarlem Railroad before veering off at Thirtieth Street onto Middle Road, reaching Fifth Avenue and swinging north on this steeped piece of roadway, as the pursued hopefully had, eventually to come to the Forty-second Street, where lay in a most pleasant copse of wood and hill, illuminated by icy moonlight, the new municipal distributing reservoir, tippling with water funneled from Croton.

Here again there was no sign of the grave robbers. Balboa pulled the reins and shouted at the matched horses, “Whoa!” and he and Hays, talking rapidly, weighed their options (High Bridge or Kings Bridge?) before deciding to continue northeast with plan of eventually cutting due east in the nether reaches toward the Haarlem River, to cross above Hell’s Gate, where they hoped they might intercept Tommy Coleman and his gang, surmising their flight up Broadway and the Bloomingdale Road anticipated a dash east to the Bronks (even Connecticut), presumably to rendezvous.

As the barouche continued its way through the night, past the Irish pig farms and German vegetable gardens, through the irregular terrain of swamps, bluffs, and rocky outcroppings that studded mid-island, Hays first launched his questioning what was Poe doing at the graveside of John Colt.

Poe, sitting facing the high constable, stared at him peculiarly. He shook his head slowly as if it were indeed a painful weight. “I was holding vigil at the final resting place of a friend,” he said.

“And when you saw those rough lads digging up his grave only to abscond with the coffin?”

“I felt outrage. I had every intention to follow and redeem the remains of my associate.”

Hays gauged him. “Admirable notion on your part, Mr. Poe, if improbable,” he said.

“It is true my best intentions proved implausible,” Poe responded. “It did not take long to come to the realization the cause I had undertaken was hopeless.”

“So you allowed yourself to become distracted at that bookshop?”

“We all have our weaknesses, High Constable.”

“And might I ask what exactly was displayed there in the window of the bookman that caught you strongly enough to distract you from your initial intention?”

Poe’s eyes watered. “Dickens,” he muttered. “Dickens, Dickens, and more Dickens. Ah, the omnipresence of that blessed individual. His
Barnaby Rudge
, that cursed crow Grip.”

In Poe’s voice Hays heard the tinge of sad lamentation, if not envy. “Your volumes were not visible?” Hays asked. “Not even the
Ladies’
Companion
with your ‘Marie Rogêt’ story?”

Poe blinked several times. He laughed mirthlessly. “See, High Constable, already you know me too well.” 

A
T
E
IGHTY-FOURTH
S
TREET
, near the colored enclave of Seneca Village, the steeples of its three churches ghostly in the night, Balboa swung the barouche onto a muddy lane, following northeast for more than half an hour, the deserted, well-worn cow path on its meandering way to the water’s edge. Here he reined the carriage. Standing still, the snuffling of the horses subsiding, surrounded otherwise by quietude, they listened to the lapping, stared at the choppy current of the East River, and then Balboa again whipped the horses, now due northward, this time all the distance to High Bridge, where they started to make their way over the rock outcroppings and across the tidal strait into the villages of the eastern shore.

Already it was nearing four in the morning. Hard pressed to the Manhattan shore rather than the Bronks, a flatboat passed near against the current. The waters shimmered from the whale-oil lanterns of the barge, towed along the towpath hugging river’s edge by a team of sorry-looking mules.

The only sound Hays heard at this point was the fast flow of the river itself rushing by the broad barge flank, mixed with the soft slap of waves as they smacked the vessel head-on.

Hays sat stolidly, watching the swirl of water below. Poe remained opposite him, perhaps a little more hunkered into himself than before, muttering under his breath as he stared down at the water, the current’s gyre.

“Nevermore,” Poe spoke, Hays knowing not why. “Evermore.” Then again, “Nevermore.”

In this manner he continued until Hays interjected. “Mr. Poe,” having to repeat his name not once but three times before finally gaining the troubled man’s attention. “Mr. Poe? Mr. Poe, please remember. Some short time ago, during his incarceration, John Colt paid me the service of extending a copy of the first installment of your story ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.’ My daughter later went out and procured the second. I must say I read both with fascination, and await the final chapter and your solution to the crime; a crime and solution that vex me to this moment. Mr. Poe, please, sir, you knew the maiden Mary Rogers?”

Hays awaits reply, considering this man, his puzzlement, his apparent trouble. Finally, when no answer comes, he says, “Mr. Poe, I am warning you, when I find myself in need to ascertain how wise or how unwise, how good or how wicked is a suspect, or what might the thoughts of this nemesis be, in accordance with that expression of his, I fashion that individual’s expression on my own face, as close to the real as possible, and then I exercise the patience to wait to see what thoughts or sentiments might arise in my mind, or better still, my heart, as if to match, and sometimes even to correspond with he whom I wish to know.”