The Blackest Bird (47 page)
Authors: Joel Rose
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?”
O
LGA 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 indistinct
curses, 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.”
“To what end?” Hays asked. He was paying attention.
“He wants revenge. He blames Edgar. He thinks he has forever defamed and destroyed the good name of Fanny Osgood.”
“And the Reverend Griswold? Why would he partake?”
“Jealousy, pure and simple. He means to destroy Edgar’s literary reputation. He is jealous, jealous, jealous! It is nothing new. He has always been. Muddie informed me Bennett possesses papers alleging Griswold Edgar’s literary executor with power of attorney. She is distraught from his visit because that unconscionable, unctuous being had the audacity to make strong, scathing attempt to bully her, and now I see her right. The two are set to destroy the lifework and literary reputation of he whom she loved so deeply and they detested equally deeply.”
“Olga, I fear I have more disturbing news than literary slight and besmirchment. I have been to the Tombs yesterday, and early this morning I have had a most interesting journey by skiff to the hospital at the southern end of Blackwell’s Island.”
She was confused. “To what effect, Papa?” she asked.
“After you left with Annie the other day to go to Fordham, I received a package sent to me by Edgar. In the package was a manuscript of poetry and a curious note.”
“What kind of note?”
“Before his death, Mr. Poe professed to being followed.”
Olga veritably leaped at her father. “Followed?” she cried. “Mrs. Clemm received similar note. She thought it Eddie’s paranoia. What of the manuscript?”
“That of John Colt. Poe’s note to me made reference to some message hidden therein.”
“Where is the manuscript?” Olga clamored, coming closer. “Is anything in evidence?”
He indicated where said manuscript occupied a place on a table by the arm of his chair.
“I have been through it any number of times. I noted something inordinate almost immediately. After his escape, if you remember, I visited Colt’s cell, and there, beneath a black silk handkerchief, found a poem written in regard to the murder of Samuel Adams. The same poem I again observed in the manuscript Poe received while living at Turtle Bay. In this manuscript sent to me, however, the poem included has undergone some kind of transformation. It has been altered.”
“Altered? How so?”
“It is a bastardization. The initial effort concerned itself ostensibly with the death of Samuel Adams, yet here, in this doctored manuscript, this very similar poem is embellished with curious reference to the death of a woman who might be taken for Mary Rogers. My eye is not trained to the art of the scratcher, but I thought my observation keen enough to detect alteration by a hand not the hand of the original writer.”
“But why, Papa? And by whom?”
“It is why I found myself at the Blackwell’s Island hospital. James Holdgate, the forger, is held there in poor state, not likely to endure, suffering from a debilitative ailment of the alimentary canal. I asked him amidst his suffering if he might not have a look at the Colt manuscript. Between yelps and howls, he said that he would not object, and although giving continuous sign of pronounced discomfort, proceeded
to examine the poems and paper they were written on. He said without doubt the poem in question has not been written by the same person, nor is it on the same paper as the rest.”
“Meaning you are kerrect, Papa, in assuming it has been altered by Edgar.”
“This is my assumption, and it has been concurred by Holdgate when I showed him samples of Poe’s handwriting which I had seen to bring with me.”
“But we must assess for what reason would Edgar Poe change these rhymes?”
“In his note to me he alluded to some kind of cryptic. When I visited the Poes at Turtle Bay, Edgar was not in the cottage at first. Instead I encountered Virginia. She showed me a verse she had concocted for her husband on the occasion of Valentine’s Day. Within its lines, as a kind of tribute, she disguised his name in the first letters of each phrase reading down the page. I checked the one poem in question, however, and then each and every other poem of Mr. Colt’s, yet could make no sense of such system.”
Olga now had the manuscript in her clutches, having grabbed it literally out of the hands of her father.
“Three years ago at Annie Lynch’s salon,” she said excitedly, already bent over, scrutinizing the verses, “I am sure it was on Valentine’s Day as well, Edgar read a poem he called ‘To Her Whose Name Is Written Below.’ At first glance no name was decipherable, but I later learned the secret. If one were to designate the first letter of the first line, the second letter of the second, and so on, down the twenty lines of the poem, one was able to spell out the camouflaged name, ‘Frances Sargent Osgood.’ Virginia must have taken a model not unlike that as her inspiration. I have no doubt Eddie Poe is sending us a message from the beyond. It is only up to us to discern it.”
“Take notice of the verse that begins, ‘Ligeia, there a body lies.’”
It took no more than a few seconds before she blurted, “See here, Papa! Right here, this coded acronym! The first four lines spell out the
word ‘LOOK’!” Her excitement, however, immediately cooled. Her expression turned glum. “But after that, as far as I can make out, nothing,” she said.
Hays moved closer to his daughter, adjusting his irksome spectacles on his face so that he might see and study as well.
“It does not follow,” she lamented. “After the initial ‘LOOK’ it is all gibberish and gobbledygook nonsense.”