The Blackest Bird (35 page)

I
f Mrs. Clemm had given her nephew Old Hays’ message, delivered to her by the high constable himself for the author at their Greenwich Street boardinghouse, no matter, Poe never saw fit to appear at the Tombs as requested.

Hays returned to the rooming house after waiting patiently three days. When he did, the landlady informed him the Poe family had moved out. She claimed she did not know where they had gone, only that they had hired a carman to carry their belongings. She suspected, she whispered, not for the first time, behind her hand of bent fat fingers, from something she admitted she had (not entirely) inadvertently heard, that the family had left the city.

It took Hays three days more to locate the carman. He made yet another request of Olga, this time to make the rounds, to place an advertisement in each of the penny prints and sporting papers seeking that individual who had moved a family from 130 Greenwich Street to some location outside the city, giving his address at the Tombs for respondents.

A gaunt man came forward to claim the reward, although no reward had been offered. A Scandinavian with long, stringy yellow
hair, wearing much-battered canvas pants, he said he had taken several bags, a trunk, and some wooden boxes containing books for a family of three: a gentleman, suited in black, his young invalid wife, and her mother, a mannish woman, her plain dress, as he remembered, fronted by a white bib, to a farm on the Bloomingdale Road at Eighty-fourth Street. He said he had been paid a pittance for his trouble. At the last, the black-clad gentleman claimed to be short of funds. The carman said he accepted what trifling was offered. The pecuniary indignity of thirty-seven cents, he spat, better than nothing.

I
n his time as high constable, Jacob Hays had given considerable thought to the manner in which a suspect was to be approached. If Old Hays had settled on Edgar Poe as a true murderer, a simple abetter, or just some tormented sam-rip, he had vacillated enough. All he felt of himself was his frustration, his concentrated desire to come to resolve what had befallen Mary Rogers. The crime had eaten at him enough. So it was on a late Sunday afternoon that he appeared at the rear door of the Brennan family farmhouse, some feet off the Bloomingdale Road, without benefit of strong-arm, but leaning on his large ash staff, knocking politely. When a child answered, he asked in his most even tone, “Good day, young lady. I am seeking a family by the name of Poe. Do they reside here?”

He waited patiently at the door, facing west, staring out at the river, recalling his first time here with his suspect, Poe, the night of the Morningside Heights debacle, while the little girl, gay pink and white ribbons in her caramel-colored hair, went off in search of her mother.

Between the house and the Hudson spread the proliferation of outbuildings. A number of hearty men worked the busy produce depot. Behind the curtained window Hays saw the rear door led into a mud-room
through which one entered the kitchen of the downstairs apartment. Hays could smell pie baking, apple with cinnamon, if he was any judge, and for a moment it made him mourn his deceased wife, and he found himself imagining, and even longing, to live with his daughter Olga in a setting safe and outside the city proper where an apple cinnamon pie so baked and placed to cool on such a windowsill would not be purloined, and a young woman, innocent and hardworking, would not be subject to the sordid and criminal. His thoughts then went to his daughter specifically, and he felt an uncomfortable hollow and longing to deliver her from him, her own overloving and protective father, to whom she was inordinately loyal. He felt compromised by age. He tormented himself why Olga had never married. He worried why she had chosen her father over a life with husband and children of her own. He wanted, once and for all, to solve the mystery of the murder of Mary Rogers, and then he would stop, quit the city force gladly; he and Olga would go away, move to the Hudson Valley, far from the nature of evil and the consequence of sin.

Patiently he waited with his thoughts so engaged. The lady of the house, Mrs. Brennan, eventually came to the door, and to Hays’ inquiry made her explanation.

“Mr. Poe is in the parlor reading to the family,” she said, her little daughter in her ribbons, matching pink dress and crinoline, hiding behind but peeking past her mother’s apron.

Hays asked Mrs. Brennan would she not say to Mr. Poe that Jacob Hays, high constable of the city of New York, was here to speak with him.

She fixed him with a curious eye before saying that she would indeed, at first opportunity, although making it clear she could not interrupt Mr. Poe unduly.

He told her he would be grateful.

She left, returning a few moments later.

“There is no way to disturb him in mid-breath,” she apologized. Would High Constable Hays like to come into the parlor and listen to the recitation until Mr. Poe is through? “It is from a poem he has only
lately written and works on still in his upstairs study,” she gushed. “Also there will be tea and cakes afterwards.”

She led him inside. Through the kitchen (he left his boots in the mudroom), through the dining room, a big plank yellow pine table, a cherrywood breakfront displaying the Sunday family dishes, yellow-glazed with painted blue enamel flowers, very sunny, the floor scratched, and in some spots even splintered where chair legs had marred the soft yellow pine as the farm men must have pulled away from the table or leaned back in their bentwood chairs, patting their full bellies after finishing up their Sunday supper.

The scene he encountered in the sitting room took Old Hays up short. What exactly he was expecting, he probably could not have said. He was a quick-witted man, prideful, cagey, he thought somewhat cultured. But an author reading his work on a Sunday afternoon in such an idyllic setting as this sunny living room presented, what was that? He had not seen Poe since the night of the grave robbery at St. Mark’s churchyard. Consequently, what remained in Hays’ head in regard to the man after the verbal character attack on him by James Harper, not to mention the workings of his own insinuated imagination, might have been just that, mere conjury.

In the Brennan parlor the listeners sat enraptured in front of the fire, immersed in the spell of the literary work. The black-clad poet, a pearl gray stock at the neck, stood with his back to the blaze. The room was not the least chilly. Poe’s young wife had been given a seat of honor, closest to the warmth. The assembled surrounded the reader. They were fully attentive. In circles of society and even in law enforcement conversation there was of late much talk of the Viennese medical physician Franz Anton Mesmer. (Olga was certainly fond of mentioning this radical medical practitioner, regaling her father, telling him even Poe was said to be a fanatic.) The expressions on the faces in this room qualified to Hays as nothing less than “mesmerized.” The attendants in the parlor were that well entranced. Even the children.

In his hands, Poe held a long, partially unfurled roll of blue foolscap on which was penned in neat and exact script his text. On the floor at
his feet, temporarily discarded, was a snippet length of red ribbon used to hold the manuscript in a tight cylinder before it was unrolled.

Hays stood quietly motionless in the arch leading from dining room to parlor until Mrs. Brennan, touching his elbow, ushered him to be seated.

Mrs. Clemm, alone, occupied a rose-hued velvet love seat. Now, from across the room, as she registered the high constable, the color drained from her face. She shot him a look that bespoke a certain panic, but as Mrs. Brennan ushered him into the room, she moved over uncomfortably to make space.

Hays silently half bowed and mouthed apology. He sat carefully, his intelligent eyes quickly taking in the other adult listeners, all female, all enraptured.

At the same time, Poe looked up from his recitation and saw him, Hays, perhaps without recognition.

Six children, including the one who had answered the door, were present, the youngest fidgeting, but not the most mature, an open-faced teenaged girl, who sat as utterly transfixed as her elders by the fascinating, if macabre, poesy of Mr. Poe, a gentleman she must have thought quite romantic from the starry look in her eyes.

Poe’s wife sat quietly, her delicate hands folded in her lap. Upon seeing her in this light, Hays was again struck: she was indeed so much younger than her husband, a mere child, not much older than the Brennan girl who sat with such excitement permeating her countenance.

The wife coughed.

Hays shifted slightly as she pulled from her sleeve and used a delicate lace handkerchief to dab her mouth. Her eyes momentarily lifted and met his, then lowered. Hays switched his gaze, following her adoring eyes back to drinking in her husband as he recited. A young bride, the high constable observed, absolutely loving and devoted.

I
n the Brennan parlor, the high constable waited until the wan poet finished reciting; his final word, charged yet familiar to Hays from that night on the Heights, hanging in the air: “Nevermore.” After that Poe’s wife Virginia rose unsteadily from her chair, came to her husband, and fell to her knees, scrambling to take up the unfurled foolscap scroll and reroll it. The good Mrs. Brennan came up to the writer then and whispered to him, and he looked toward the detective, and then he nodded ever so slightly that he understood, and Hays took this as a signal and rose himself.

Having regained his boots, Hays stood at the kitchen door waiting to be joined by Poe. While he waited he surveyed the backyard in the late afternoon sunlight. In front of him stood a cluster of three small sheds, excluding the privy, and a larger barn to the right. Holding pens for livestock, some with a few stray beasts, stood behind the barn. The orchards extended down to the railroad tracks. A line of trees, a windbreak, stood at a right angle at the far side near the river’s edge. In the crisp light Hays could see clear to the water, and in that entire expanse on this Sunday afternoon at this hour no one was to be seen, although earlier the place had been teeming with busy men.

The high constable’s mind wandered. He mulled over how, at another time, he might have found it pleasant to sit, as he just had experienced, in a sunny and cozy farmhouse parlor, listening to a forlorn poet read his curious poem about a talking black bird in high dramatic voice intoned, to sip strong East Indian tea and munch hot scones, fresh from the oven, slathered with jams boiled from fresh fruit culled off the backyard orchard trees. For a moment he was taken off guard by the resounding loneliness and emptiness that had suddenly come over him in such setting, the debilitating sense of loss and uneasy despair he felt all at once for his departed wife.

Hays trudged down the rickety boardwalk from the kitchen door, listening to the resonance of his own heavy feet on the tread in the still air, the faint bleating of a sheep from the pens—or was it a kid goat?—despondency and utter fatigue having taken the animal over.

He stood still for a moment and it was in this brief interim, with the unseen beast keening, that he sensed Poe approaching. He turned. Yes, here he was, dressed in black, traipsing heavily through the barnyard muck toward him.

When they faced each other, Hays apologized. He said, “Mr. Poe, it was not my intention to interrupt your Sunday.” Adding, “Mr. Poe, so good to see you again. You remember me, I’m sure.”

“Most assuredly, High Constable.”

They stood together in the yard, a number of chickens pecking at the dirt between their feet, Poe’s gaze fixed in the distance on some indiscernible object or site (the sun-dappled cliffs of Weehawken?) whilst Old Hays’ gaze remained fixed on him.

“Why, sir,” Hays asked finally, “did you choose to avoid me in the city?”

Poe seemed to have no idea of what Hays was talking. “I did not realize I was avoiding you,” he said.

“I came to call at your rooming house.”

“No one told me,” Poe said.

“I spoke with your mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm. I told her I needed to see you.”

“It must have slipped her mind. She said not a word to me. My sincere apologies for any inconvenience. My wife is in delicate state, you see, and is much fatigued. My family has only just arrived from Philadelphia. They find the city noisy and dirty. We are all unsettled…” He made vague motion to take in all around. “Here the air is cleaner. For all our sake, we decided to move to this farm. Remember, Mr. Hays, it was with you I first came upon this site.”

“I remember,” Hays said, “as if it were yesterday.”

“So there is nothing more insidious,” Poe answered, his voice tinged with melancholy. “Avoidance was the last thing on my mind. Why, sir, should I avoid you?”

“Exactly my question to you, Mr. Poe. Can you explain to me, sir, why your name comes up repeatedly in my ever-ongoing investigation into the murder of Mary Rogers?”

Poe did not answer immediately. He stared at Hays almost blankly. Behind Poe, at the kitchen window, the high constable could make out Mrs. Clemm, pressed to the glass, staring at her put-upon son-in-law, and him, the villain, Old Hays, her Eddie’s poor shadow nemesis.

“I am fully aware my name is denounced by James Harper. For what transgression, I am confident you will soon tell me, High Constable.”

“Why, sir, would a man such as he entertain a vendetta against you?”

“Revenge,” Poe said without hesitation.

“Revenge? Revenge for what?”

“Revenge for my infringement on his bailiwick! Revenge for standing up! If I were to tell you, High Constable, the most popular writer in America is the Englishman Charles Dickens, and he makes not a shilling from his work here, I promise to you, my good Mr. Hays,
I
am your good citizen telling
you
the God’s truth. Same for the likes of Thackeray, Walter Scott, Bulwer-Lytton. Not a sixpence. And I, just for your enlightenment, make not a sou in Britain, and barely a sou here. It is why I write short stories, sir, and not novels. At least the magazines pay. American book publishing houses find neither need
nor desire to fork over royalties, or any fee whatsoever for that matter, to we writers. Especially we natives.”

“No? And why is that?”

“Because, as I have said, there is no recourse. There is no international copyright compelling them to do so. Mr. Harper has gallantly, most vociferously, most conveniently, adopted the credo, bellowing loud and long over this wide and vast young country: Why should we as an American people pay for a literature of our own when we can have it for nothing?”

“And this is why you contend he denounces you, implicates you in crime and the avoidance of punishment?”

“Exactly. To be sure. He seeks his revenge for my support of an international copyright law, sir. Because I myself am after him, sir. This gentleman accuses me of what? Infringing on his God-given right to make money? Let me tell you something, Mr. Hays, even though Mr. Harper mints flying eagles hand over foot, Mr. Harper finds within himself no need or want to defend a national literature, sustain our men of letters, uphold our dignity. You know what his standard practice is, Mr. Hays? His Honor our mayor, this dignitary, stations a man in London and pays him a substantial wage, certainly more than he pays any wordsmith. This secret agent is usually an employee of a prestigious English house. As soon as the latest literary volume hits the streets, or better still returns in galley form from the printer, this scoundrel will pirate the manuscript and rush it to the docks. There the book is jettisoned across the Atlantic on the swiftest sailing vessel available. While still miles off the Montauk Point of Long Island, a ready schooner is dispatched. The schooner will meet the English ship mid-swell, the English literary work transferred, and the schooner races back to New York City and our publishing megalopolis. Here the volume is torn into a hundred sections, each consisting of four or five pages, no more. Then each of these is distributed to a printer, who will labor through the night to have his bit typeset, proofread, and complete by morning. At which time all the printers come together each of their contributions assembled to comprise the
whole. The volume, now complete in folio form, sans cover, will be on the street by noon ready for purchase, not a cent destined for the embattled author of the work.”

Hays was about to make comment but Poe, so self-dramatically engaged, waved him off.

“Because the profits are enormous, sir, the risks negligible, because all concentration is turned toward such business, our American publishers have no need, nor inclination, to print writers from our own shore, and if they do have said inclination, they pay miserably for the favor. The most popular native writers of our day—who would you say?—Irving and Cooper, both talentless curs, mind you, are lucky to receive even one thousand sovereigns for their latest output. And a writer such as myself is left begging to eat.”

From his countless professional encounters, Hays knew suspects to have a certain way of comporting themselves when they felt the onslaught of threat. Their faces light with an unnatural distorted smile or turn dour with self-absorption. Their eyes may have a certain cast, a certain intensity. Their backs are straight or stooped, their hips sway with the shifting of an uncomfortable weight. Emotions may well. You look into their eyes. You see something chilling—what is it?

Hays had no doubt Olga was right: Poe considered himself above any man in intellect. In power of deductive reasoning, he must have thought himself unsurpassed. Even now, in confrontation with him, high constable of the city of New York, a grin Poe seemed not able to suppress played under his mustaches. But was it a villain Hays saw, or something else?

“And now, sir, Mr. Hays,” Poe said, “now that you understand the motives of Mayor James Harper directed toward me, such as they are, here
we
are. What exactly is it that you would like, sir? How may I help you?”

Hays took it a given, as he had heard, that women would take to this man without respite, and that men would not. The high constable’s frank, steady eyes fixed on Poe’s penetrating eyes, pupils and irises concentric circles, dull black disks.

The realization came to Hays the man had not a clue why he was here. He pulled out his tobacco, tapped his pipe against his shoe, and filled the bowl. He proffered his leaf to Poe, saying, “Won’t you join me? This is from a sock, first rate, purchased from Anderson’s.”

Poe refused, saying he carried no ready bowl.

But then he reconsidered. He removed from his inner breast pocket the foolscap cylinder of manuscript from which he had read earlier, retied with its red ribbon length. Without a word of comment, he tore off a corner and held out the small rectangle. Hays, seeing Poe’s intention, filled the slip with a healthy pinch of blond cut and watched him roll his smoke.

“Ingenious,” Hays said as Poe licked the neat cylindrical package tight.

“It is nothing more than a tiny segar. Quite appealing really,” Poe said. “What is being called a segarette.”

“Just that indeed.”

Hays made himself comfortable by the side of the barn, sitting on a nail keg, the smell of manure in his nose, not unpleasant. “I sympathize with you, Mr. Poe, for what you did,” he elicited, firing a locofoco with a thumbnail. “Sometimes in a court of law a man does not always get justice. Sometimes a man is sorry for what he has done, contrite, but the court is unable to see his remorse. If the young woman was pregnant, if she died accidentally during the procedure, I tell you, vouchsafe, I can help. I am here to beg your cooperation, and if we are successful, sir, I shall be of both moral and mortal assistance to you to the best of my ability. Would you like that?”

Poe stared straight ahead. On the nail keg Hays puffed his briar until it glowed red. “Forgive me, High Constable, but what have I done again?” Poe asked.

“You have acted nobly to save your wife embarrassment. What have you to do with the death of Mary Rogers, sir?” Hays sternly inquired.

“Mary Rogers? Nothing, I tell you. Is this the game in which Mayor Harper implicates me? I thought you were talking palming off.
The man’s audacity is boundless. Mary Rogers! I … My God, I wasn’t even in the city at the time of the crime against her … I would never … and I was living in Philadelphia at the time besides.”

“Living there, yes. But it is my understanding you frequently traveled to New York to visit publishers and editors and the like. And the occasion of Miss Rogers’ death coordinates with such a time.”

Poe coughed but could not deny it.

“Mr. Poe, I expect nothing less than the truth from you!” Hays persisted.

“I knew her. I did. You know that.”

“You admired her?”

“I admired her, yes. She was a young woman of extraordinary beauty and bright spirit.”

“And this is why you held her in such esteem?”

“Please, Mr. Hays, disingenuousness is not your strong suit. I am a poet, sir. Beauty attracts me. But as to anything else…” He hesitated. “I am a married man, sir,” Poe managed.