Poe shadow (6 page)

“You knew him, Mr. Spence?”

“When he lived in Baltimore, in Maria Clemm’s little house,” the sexton replied musingly. “It was years ago. You would have been hardly older than a boy. Baltimore was a quieter city then; one could keep track of names. I used to see Edgar Poe wander about the burial ground now and again.”

He said Poe would stand before the graves of his grandfather and his older brother, William Henry Poe, both of whom he’d been separated from in childhood. Sometimes, said the sexton, Edgar A. Poe would examine names and dates on the tombs and quietly ask how this one was related to that one. When Spence would meet Poe out on the streets, the poet would sometimes say “good morning” or “good evening,” and sometimes he would not.

“To think such a fine gentleman should look
as he did
at the end.” Spence shook his head as he spoke.

“How do you mean, Mr. Spence?” I asked.

“I recall he always had a fastidiousness about his dress. But that suit he was wearing when he was found!” he said as though I should know perfectly well. I motioned for him to continue, so he did. “It was thin and ragged and did not fit him at all. It could not have been his. It was for a body perhaps two sizes larger! And a cheap palm-leaf hat one would not bother to pick up from the ground. A man from the hospital offered a better black suit to bury him in.”

“But how did Poe come to be wearing ill-fitting clothes?”

“I cannot say.”

“Do you not think it utterly strange?”

“I suppose I have not thought of it much since then, Mr. Clark.”

Those clothes were not meant to be worn by Poe.
Poe’s death had not been meant for him,
I thought, an irrational and abrupt notion. I thanked the sexton for his time and began rapidly to ascend the long stairs that rose from the vaults, as though once I’d secured the top there would be some immediate action to take. Suddenly seized by a momentary foreboding, I stopped in the middle of the stairs, tightening my grip on the handrail. The wind had grown worse outside, and as I reached the top I could barely direct myself to cross back into the upper world.

When I emerged, my eyes drifted to the spot of Poe’s unmarked grave for one last look. I nearly jumped at what I saw. I blinked to make certain it was real.

It was a flower, a fragrant, blossoming flower lying incongruously atop the grass and dirt of Edgar Poe’s plot. A flower that had not been there just a few minutes before.

I gasped for Mr. Spence, as though there was something to be done, or as though he could have seen something I hadn’t while we were both sitting together below the earth in that tomb. Down in the vault the sexton could not hear me calling. Dropping to my knees, I inspected the flower, thinking perhaps it had blown from another grave. But no. Not only did the flower sit there,
there,
but also its stem broke firmly through the dirt on top.

Suddenly there was the noise of horses stepping and wheels clicking slowly to life. I peered around and could see a medium-sized carriage cloaked by the mist. I ran toward the gates to try and see who was there, but I was instantly blocked. A dog bounded into view. The dog barked voraciously at my ankles. I tried to steer around her, but the canine pounced to the side, growling and snarling from behind the gravestones.

The dog had clearly been trained to prevent Baltimore’s “resurrection men” from attempted thefts of our corpses, and perceiving me run had identified me as one of those miscreants. Finding some ginger-nuts in my coat, I offered them up, and the mongrel soon befriended me. But by the time I could safely reach the street, the carriage had vanished into the distance.

I WAS STIRRED
awake the next morning only by the muffled sounds from the servants below. I washed and dressed rapidly. But at this hour, no carriages were found for hire near my house. Luckily, I found a public omnibus that happened to be boarding.

Having not traveled by public conveyance as of late, I was struck by how many strangers to Baltimore were aboard. This I thought from their dress and speech, and their watchfulness of the people around them. It led me to wonder…. I happened to be carrying among my papers a portrait of Poe from a biographical article published a few years before. At the next stopping-place I turned to the rear of the bus. When the conductor finished collecting tickets from the newcomers, I asked him whether the man pictured in the magazine had been his passenger in the last weeks of September. That was the time—I had estimated from the more reliable newspaper accounts—that Poe would have arrived to Baltimore. The conductor murmured “Don’t recall ’m,” or something in the same fashion.

A slight comment, I know! Hardly worth any excitement? Yet I felt the flash of accomplishment. In a single moment, though rebuffed, I had acquired knowledge that Poe had not been in this particular omnibus during this conductor’s watch! I had solicited a small share of the truth behind Poe’s final passage through Baltimore, and that contented me.

Since I had to move about the city anyway, it could not hurt to ride the omnibus more frequently and, when I did, ask such questions.

You have no doubt noted that Poe’s time in Baltimore had not seemed to be premeditated. After becoming engaged to Elmira Shelton in Richmond, he had announced his intentions of going to New York to complete his future plans. But what had been the poet’s whereabouts and purposes here in Baltimore? Baltimore should not be so indifferent as simply to lose a man, even in its dingiest shipping quarters—it was not Philadelphia. Why had he not traveled straight to New York after sailing here from Richmond? What had happened over the course of five days between leaving Richmond and being discovered in Baltimore and what had brought him into such a state that he would be wearing someone else’s clothes?

After my visit to the burial ground, I’d been bent on directing to these questions my own faculties of intelligence, which I would humbly measure against those of any man—at least any man I had yet known (for this was about to change).

There was that one momentous afternoon when the answers seemed to come improbably into view. Peter had been delayed at court, and our desks were empty of new work. I was walking away from the Hanover Market and was stepping to the Camden Street curb with an armful of packages.

“Poe the poet?”

At first I ignored this. Then I stopped and turned around slowly, wondering if my ears had been fooled by the wind. Truly, though, if this voice had not pronounced on its own power “Poe the poet” it had said something
just
like that.

It was the fish dealer, Mr. Wilson, with whom I had just done business at the market. Our law office had recently arranged some mortgages for him. Though a few times he had come to our offices, I preferred finding him here, as I could then also select the finest fish to be prepared for supper at Glen Eliza. And Wilson’s crab-and-oyster gumbo was the best this side of New Orleans.

The fishmonger motioned me to follow him back to the large market. I had left my memorandum book at his table. He wiped his hands on his streaked apron and handed it to me. It was now wrapped in the distinct odors of his store, as though it had been lost at sea and then pulled out.

“You don’t want to forget your work. I opened it to see who it belonged to. I see you’ve written the name Edgar Poe.” The fishmonger pointed to the open page.

I returned the book to my bag. “Thank you, Mr. Wilson.”

“Ah, Squire Clark, here’s something.” He excitedly unwrapped a package of fish from its paper. Inside was a hideously ugly fish, piled upon its identical brothers. “This was ordered especially from out west for a dinner party. It is called a
dog-fish
by some. But it’s also called a ‘lake lawyer,’ for its ferocious looks and voracious habits!” He chuckled uproariously. He quickly worried he had insulted me. “Not like you, of course, Squire Clark.”

“Perhaps that is the problem, my friend.”

“Yes.” He hesitated and cleared his throat. He was now hacking at fish without looking down at his hands or at the heads shooting off them. “Any event—poor soul, must have been, that Poe. Died over at that creaky ol’ Washington College Hospital some weeks back, I heard. My sister’s husband knows a nurse there, who says, according to another nurse who spoke to a doctor—
demonish
busybodies, these women—who said Poe wasn’t right in his upper story, that as he lay there he called out a name over and over before he…well, that is,” he shifted to a whisper of great sensitivity, “before he
croaked.
God have mercy on the weak.”

“You said he called a name, Mr. Wilson?”

The fishmonger sloshed around his words to remember. He sat at his stool and began picking out unsold oysters from a barrel, carefully prying each one open and checking them for pearls before discarding them with philosophical regret. The oyster was the consummate Baltimore native, not only because it was enterprising and could be traded but because it possessed the always-present possibility of an even more valuable treasure inside. Suddenly the fish dealer clucked exultantly.

“‘Reynolds,’ it was! Right, that’s it, ‘Reynolds’! I know because she kept saying it when she told me over supper, and on our plates were the last good soft-shell crabs of the season.”

I asked him to think hard
and be certain.

“‘Reynolds, Reynolds,
Reynolds!
’” he said with some offense at my doubt. “That’s how he was calling it out, all through the night. She said she couldn’t pluck it out of her brain after she heard of it. Creaky ol’ hospital—should be burnt down, I say. I knew a Reynolds in my youth who threw stones at infantrymen—he was a demonish character, no mistake, Squire Clark.”

“But did Poe ever mention a Reynolds before?” I asked myself out loud. “A family member, or…”

The fish dealer’s enjoyment of the scene lessened, and he stared at me. “This Mr. Poe was a friend of yours?”

“A friend,” I said, “and a friend of all who read him.”

I bid my client a hasty good evening with much gratitude for the remarkable service he had provided me. I had been permitted to hear Poe’s very last utterance to this earth (or nearly the last, anyhow), and in it some retort, some revelation, some remedy to the slashing and the cutting of the press might be recovered. That single word meant there was something to be found, some life left of Poe’s for me to discover.

Reynolds!

I spent countless hours searching through Poe’s letters to me and through all of his tales and verse to detect any sign of Reynolds. Tickets to exhibitions and concerts went unused; if Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” were singing in town, I would have been among my books all the same. I could almost hear my father direct me to put all this away and return to my law books. He would say (so I imagined), “Young men like yourself should observe that Industry and Enterprise can slowly do anything Genius does with impatience—and many things Genius cannot. Genius needs Industry as much as Industry needs Genius.” I felt suddenly, each time I opened another Poe document, as though I was in an argument with Father, that he was trying to tear the very books out of my hands. It was not a wholly unwelcome feeling to encounter: in fact, I think it actually pushed me forward. Besides, in my capacity as a man of business I had promised Poe, a prospective client, that I would defend him. Perhaps Father would have commended me.

Hattie Blum, meanwhile, called at Glen Eliza with her aunt frequently. Whatever disapproval on their part had developed from my recent transgression had passed, or at least been suspended. Hattie was as thoughtful and generous in our conversations as ever. Her aunt, perhaps, was more watchful than usual, and seemed to have developed the dark eyes of a secret agent. Of course, my intense preoccupations, along with my general tendency to grow quiet when others talked, meant the women in my drawing room addressed each other more than me.

“I do not know how you bear it,” said Hattie, looking up at the high domed ceiling. “I could not suffer a house as enormous as Glen Eliza alone, Quentin. It takes bravery to have too much space for yourself. Don’t you think, Auntie?”