The Blackest Bird (46 page)

The bartender eventually inquired did the gentlemen have intention of taking a drink or not?

Poe responded with a smile. “Even a failing heart demands a stimulant,”
looking upon Tommy pleasurably while calling for a mint rhum.

“White suits you,” Tommy Coleman flattered while they awaited the spirits, surveying Poe’s elegant new clothes with undisguised admiration; and Poe, for his part, Edgar Poe, staring again into the mirror, seeing his reflected image, joined with Tommy Coleman and his brethren, transfixed, mesmerized by himself, and by them who stood surrounding him, before responding:

“Yes. Yes, it does.” 

Correspondence of the
Baltimore Sun
.

 
DEATH OF EDGAR A. POE
 

The obituary notice occupied first page in Bennett’s
Herald
, first page of every paper in the city.

The high constable remained immobile on his recliner without speaking. Olga stood over him, clasping the newspaper to her bosom.
Her cheeks were stained. She had already been weeping when she entered the parlor.

She apologized. “I am so frustrated and begrieved, Papa,” she said.

“As am I,” taking her hand, finding it warm, dry, and firm.

Later, while drinking strong black tea and speaking of Poe dead, what must have befallen him, they are disturbed by the heavy clap of the brass door knocker at the parlor floor landing. It was Annie Lynch come calling, her eyes red, her cheeks, too, streaked by tears. She and Olga hugged in commiseration.

“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:

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

The first:

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 coastline 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:

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.