On Night's Shore Read online

  I finally shrugged. “I’ll try it out awhile, I guess.”

  “A mature and responsible decision.”

  “What about your story though? Don’t we need to keep at it?”

  “The work is all but finished. You saw as well as I the furtiveness in Mr. Andrews’s eyes, the manner in which he gave himself away. All that remains is for me to expose the culprit in the Mirror. This afternoon and evening, I shall organize and compose the findings of our investigation. By tomorrow’s late edition, you shall be famous.”

  “Not me,” I said. “I don’t want to be mentioned in none of this.”

  “No?” said Poe.

  The truth is that I feared my mother yet, feared that she or one of her stinking companions might be spurred by the prospect of coinage to come looking for me, leather strop in hand.

  “I ain’t the writer,” I told him. “I’m just the fido akees something or other.”

  “Fidus Achates,” he said. He clamped a hand on my shoulder. “And yes, my young friend. You are that indeed.”

  21

  It was an awkward day and uneasy night that followed. Though the residents of the Newsboys’ Lodging-House were ostensibly learning a degree of civilized behavior, their circumspection of strangers remained untamed. At every opportunity I was bullied and threatened and otherwise made to know my place at the bottom of the pecking order.

  Somehow we were all more wary of one another for being boxed together within those brownstone walls, less willing than we might have been in the open to view each other as brothers in misfortune. The longer the tenure at the boardinghouse, the more one accumulated: an extra shirt or pair of boots, the advancement to next in line for a coveted job or a coveted bunk space. In most of the boys, a subtle meanness grew. As scavenging rats we had shared what little we had with all other rats and had found a certain comfort among the community of rodents, but one by one through the civilizing generosity of Messrs. Graham and Van Rensselaer, many of us were learning greed and ambition.

  Presiding as schoolmaster of these qualities in the room I shared with eleven other boys was a bulbous-headed whelp named Moonie Weaver. He was not only the largest boy in the room but the loudest and rudest. The others swirled around him like soiled water down a drain.

  I knew him as a former resident of the Old Brewery. He had moved out six months earlier, much to my and every other child’s relief. We imagined him (not without some glee) dead and buried in the building’s basement, having cursed at one adult too many. Yet here he was again, a full three inches taller than I remembered him and with an even more ogreish grin.

  He and a half-dozen others came to my bed that first night and formed a wall across the edge of it. One of the boys lit a candle and held it close to my face. “Come to show you somethin’,” Moonie said. He had grinned at me all through dinner; I had been expecting a welcoming ceremony. Still, I clutched at my thin blanket and tried not to draw my knees up to my chest.

  “Brought you a picture of your mother,” he said. He then drew from behind his back a painted playing card and held the illustrated face of it close to the sputtering candle, which itself was near enough to warm the tip of my nose.

  At my first reaction to the picture on the card—I whimpered a little, I think, and jerked my head back—the entire pack of whelps broke into guffaws. The picture showed an obese and naked woman sitting with legs spread, one hand cupped beneath each mountainous breast.

  I looked up at Moonie but said nothing.

  “Tell me that ain’t your mother,” he said. There was no mistaking the challenge of his words. Rebuke him and I would soon suffer more than humiliation.

  I held my tongue.

  “It’s his mother all right,” he announced to the room. “And this here’s your sister, ain’t it?” He produced another card and held it to the candle. “Don’t know who the dog belongs to, though—do you?”

  “I don’t have no sister,” I said.

  He whacked a fist against the side of my head. “You ain’t callin’ me a liar, are ya?”

  I turned my eyes to the candle. I found that by staring at the base of the flame, at the small pool of melted wax accumulated on the candle’s caldera, I could blank out the remainder of the room but for a wall of looming shadows.

  “Here’s another one of your mother,” he said. “It shows how she keeps the leatherheads happy—two at a time!”

  He baited me for ten more minutes, even rubbing one of the cards in my face. “Kiss your mommy’s quim,” he ordered. “Kiss it good night.”

  I could smell his body on the card, the stink of his pocket.

  It seemed an eternity before he finally tired of me. With a parting thump to the crown of my head, he left me to my share of darkness. He and his disciples retreated to a far corner to slaver over the playing cards a while longer.

  In time a smallish boy whose name I do not recall crept up to my bed and tapped me on the shoulder. “You awake?” he whispered.

  I chose not to answer.

  “I just wanted to tell ya that he does that to all of us,” the boy said.

  I finally mumbled a response. “I figured.”

  “We all know it ain’t your mother. We figure it must be his own.”

  “He never had no mother,” I said. “He was shit out by a crow.”

  The boy giggled, but softly. “Anyway he’ll get his before too long.”

  “From who? Ain’t nobody in the house big as him but MacGregor. And MacGregor can’t hardly even wipe his own nose.”

  “You heared about Death, ain’t ya?”

  “I know what death is, I ain’t stupid.”

  “I’m talking about Death hisself. People down in the Bowery say they see him walking around there most every night now. Looks just like you’d think Death would. They say he walks all around like he’s down there looking for somebody special.”

  “That ain’t Death. There’s no such person. Death don’t have to go looking.”

  “You don’t know,” the boy said.

  “Even if he was, what makes you think he’s looking for Moonie?”

  “’Cause of what we been feeding him. We been putting cat piss in his mush.”

  “Who has?”

  “Some of us.”

  I tried not to laugh out loud. “What good you think that’ll do?”

  “It’s better than nothin’, ain’t it?”

  “I don’t see why. How do you get the cat piss in the first place?”

  “There’s this place a coupla blocks from here where a bunch of cats hang out. We put down some rag and leave it and the cats piss all over it, and the next day we let the rag soak in Moonie’s mush for a while. He don’t even notice the difference!”

  Sometimes I wondered how people my own age could be so childish. (I still do.) “You think this Death fella likes the smell of cat piss, do ya?”

  “Don’t see how he can help hisself, being who he is and all.”

  “Well…good luck to you. That’s all I can say.”

  “We’ll get the rag to you when it’s your turn to serve the mush.”

  “Sure thing,” I said.

  Surreal as the evening had been thus far, it was not this conversation or even Moonie’s bullying that most unsettled me my first night there. Not the tiresome prayer before and after supper. Not even the mandated wash of hands and face before turning into our bunks. It was instead the sense of apartness, of being turned out through my own efforts from my real family and then turned out from my surrogate family. Here I was housed with no fewer than five dozen of my peers, and never had I felt more alone.

  I kept thinking of Poe at home, composing at his kitchen table. He did not value journalistic writing as he did poetry and criticism but neither would he give it less than full attention. I lay abed in the quiet hours of that first night and in my own mi
nd composed along with him, laid out the facts of Miss Rogers’s bogus illnesses, her confederation with Lieutenant Andrews, a confederation concealed even from her own mother. I then constructed the scenario of how the seaman, in a fit of rage no doubt, perhaps told by the lady that she would not break off her engagement with Mr. Payne, a duller but more reliable exemplar of what she looked for in a mate, had lashed out at her, struck her down, and then, moved by tenderness, remorse, his sudden anger spent, had replaced her bonnet upon her head and secured it with the knot that came most naturally to him.

  Many days later, her body discovered, he had found it necessary to bribe the medical examiner, to create a scenario that, though besmirching the young lady’s character, would draw attention away from the way she had actually died.

  It seemed all of a piece, with but one exception. Again and again I stumbled over the single, small bump in my logic. If Miss Rogers was sufficiently enamored of Lieutenant Andrews to continue a two-year liaison with him, why perpetrate the charade of romance with Mr. Payne? The latter was employed as a bank’s clerk, a respected but hardly lofty position. The former, it could be assumed, hailed from a family of some affluence and note, as did all the naval officers in those days.

  Was Miss Rogers’s relationship with the lieutenant one of mere carnal convenience? I knew enough of fornication to know the kind of beasts it turns both male and female into, beasts who growl and flail for a few minutes only to shiver and yelp and then show their backs to each other, so this was the only conclusion I could achieve, and then with but the vague understanding of a nonparticipant and theorist.

  The next morning found me awake and ready for the door before breakfast was laid on the table. The moment it was set before us and we had muttered our amens, I attacked my bread and mush and baked apple (all the while with a twitching smile as Moonie did the same) and flushed it all down with a mug of tepid water.

  It was the job of us mid-age boys to carry the dishes into the kitchen afterward, where half a dozen older lads, those few not turned out early to hawk the morning editions, scrubbed and dried and put the dishes away. The dining room chairs then had to be lined up like soldiers, the floor swept clean of every crumb, the tables set with bowls and spoons and glasses for the first supper shift to arrive some ten hours later.

  By the time I hit the street, the city was already abuzz. The day’s edition of the Mirror had sold out. Copies of the broadsheet were passed from hand to hand. I was able eventually to get my own copy only when it rose, in a bizarre defiance of gravity, up and out of the pocket of a gentleman’s waistcoat and into my palm, which just happened to be in a proximity to catch it.

  Apparently Poe had composed his piece with alacrity, for there it was on the left half of the front page. Poe’s scenario read exactly like my own, if more voluminously and with larger words. As did Poe’s conclusion that Miss Rogers and Lieutenant Andrews had been engaged in a relationship “of mere carnal convenience” (it was from him I took the phrase).

  You cannot imagine the atmosphere of scandal that was generated by this article, the shock to the sensibilities of Park Row, the nods and winks from lower Broadway to the Battery. Poe did not explicitly accuse the lieutenant of the young lady’s murder, but his delineation of the facts afforded no other assumption.

  I wondered for a time if Mr. Andrews had had the time to put to sea or otherwise absquatulate, but by 10:00 a.m. the word was out: he had been arrested. Only then did the city’s agitation transform itself, bifurcated, if you will, into a scornful certainty by one half the populace that Mr. Andrews would never be brought to justice, and indignation by the other half that one of their own should be treated so roughly over the demise of a wanton shopgirl.

  I wondered too what Poe was making of this hullabaloo. Up and down the streets I trudged, imagining how he and his family must be celebrating up there in the country. Somehow, by late morning, I found myself standing behind an elm near the end of their lane, staring at Poe’s cottage.

  Several times I saw Mrs. Clemm move to or fro past a window. Once, Virginia came to the doorway and gazed out. But Poe never showed himself. Still sleeping, I told myself, exhausted from his long hours of ratiocination. And so I waited, standing for as long as I could, then sitting against the elm, and finally dozing off in its shade.

  It was in this latter position that he discovered me. His hand on my knee woke me. I opened my eyes and saw him kneeling there, and I waited to hear how he would upbraid me.

  He held out a bright moon of silver. “Your payment, sir.”

  When I did not reach for it, he pressed it into my hand.

  “I went looking for you at the lodging house,” he said.

  “They turn us out not long after breakfast.”

  “In any case, I have found you. And none too soon. A celebration is in the offing, and you, of course, must attend.”

  “I knew you’d be all chirky about this. The whole city’s read what you wrote.”

  “It is the beginning of a great change for us all. Mr. Neely has proposed a less tenuous position for me with the Mirror.”

  Though the word tenuous was not one I yet claimed to understand, despite its application to my own existence, I answered, “Ain’t that something?”

  “It is indeed.” A moment later, he pushed himself erect. “I have informed Mr. MacGregor that you will be lodging with us this evening. Provided you are amenable.”

  “I’m staying here tonight?”

  “We cannot have you strolling the streets after dark with your belly full of pandowdy and sweet potato pie, can we?”

  “Mrs. Clemm’s making pies?”

  “That and more,” Poe said. Moments later, I was at his side as before and striding down the lane and feeling very nearly weightless just to step foot in his dooryard once again.

  22

  We spent a pleasant enough lunch together, except that it was hurried a bit by Poe’s gleeful restlessness. One moment he was reciting to us a new poem, the next he was whisking away the sausage to drag me outside to the woodpile. He split maybe four logs for the cookstove, with me fetching and stacking, before deciding that it was more important to clear the weeds from around the springhouse. In short, he was too happy to sit still, and his happiness was exhausting me.

  It must have been around two in the afternoon when Mrs. Clemm called for him to return to the house. We were both standing knee-deep in the springhouse at the time, barefoot, with our trousers rolled to the knees; Poe had, a few minutes earlier, been inspired by the dank and earthy coolness to imagine the springhouse as the scene of a fictional murder, a place where bodies could be kept fresh until diabolically reanimated by a school of electric eels. It was some such scenario, in any case, and he had insisted that we experience the chill firsthand, all the better to describe it, he said.

  And so we were standing knee-deep in sweet coolness, trying to imagine our legs and ankles being stung by a thousand slithering eels, when Mrs. Clemm’s voice reached our ears. Poe stepped outside and, a moment later, mumbled something and hurried toward the house. I meant to peek out only long enough to see what he was up to and then retreat to the springhouse again, but when I saw the hackney at the gate and the frock-coated man standing beside it looking our way, with a very anxious Mrs. Clemm wringing her hands on the porch, I changed my mind and trotted barefoot after Poe.

  On the breast of the man’s blue frock coat, cloth letters had been sewn: BNYP. The Bank of New York Police was but one of many small police forces in the city, each privately endowed and with its own patrol area (frequently disputed), its own claim to absolute authority. Most were little more than hired thugs who enforced their claim with nightsticks. All but Hays’s troop of leatherheads were privately financed.

  Poe had not yet bothered to roll down his trousers and so cut a rather comic figure standing next to the officer. The man had a face chiseled from rock—though from a cragg
ed and porous block of limestone. His eyes seemed deep hollows, his mouth a scratch. He had come, he said, to talk to Poe’s witness, the unnamed individual who, according to Poe’s article in the Mirror, had fingered lieutenant Andrews as Miss Rogers’s escort on the day of her disappearance.

  “I have no idea where the man resides,” Poe said.

  “You found him once before, didn’t you?”

  “In point of fact, no. He found me.”

  “We need to talk to him,” the officer said.

  “In regards to…?”

  “In regards to whether he’s telling the truth or not.”

  “Do you have reason to believe that he lied?”

  “We’ll go find him, you and me. It won’t take long.”

  “How would you know that, not knowing where the place might be?”

  “Come along now.”

  Poe stood completely motionless for the next ten seconds, eyes fixed on the officer’s as if he hoped to see through to the workings of the man’s brain. Water trickled down my legs and made me want to scratch, but I dared not move.

  “Augie,” Mrs. Clemm finally said and softly broke the silence. “Run and get Mr. Poe’s shoes for him.”

  Poe looked at her and smiled. It was all the acquiescence I needed; I raced to the springhouse and gathered up our shoes and stockings. Poe and I then sat on the front porch and reshod ourselves.

  “The boy don’t need to go,” the officer said.

  “Master Dubbins is my assistant.”

  “You won’t need no assistant for this.”

  “Again I wonder,” Poe said with a strange smile, “how you would know that in advance?”

  In answer the officer went to the hackney and climbed into the driver’s seat and took up the reins. The moment Poe and I had settled in ourselves, the officer snapped the reins and set us moving.

  I noticed as we neared the end of the lane that he showed no sign of slowing down, and I leaned very close to Poe and whispered in his ear. “How does he know where to take us?”