Disquiet Heart Page 22

I AWOKE to the blank and unblinking eye of God.

  The eye is sometimes blue, as it was that morning, but a cold and distant blue, a bit curious, perhaps, about the creature lying so low beneath it. But hardly concerned.

  Imagine yourself as you peer through a microscope’s lens at a dung mite stuck to a glass slide. Now imagine yourself as the dung mite. If you can imagine that, you can imagine the sensation to which I awoke in my cell at Mount Airy, the jail atop Grant’s Hill, flat on my back on a narrow plank bed in an otherwise bare six-by-eight-foot room, awakening at first to no recognition but pain, an aching in every joint and a thunderous throbbing of my head, then opening my eyes to behold bare gray walls rising up close on all sides, rising high to a vaulted ceiling that culminated in a narrow, oblong window that gave the room its only light, a window filled now with the pale blue eye of God as it peered down in divine dispassion at the vermin blinking and moaning below.

  Some time passed before my senses returned. I smelled the mustiness of damp stone, the staleness of enclosed space. The air, though hardly fresh, was cool, warmed only by the shaft of dusty light slanting in from high above.

  I did not sit up or otherwise move until the realization formed that I was in a jail of some kind. For a moment I almost laughed, remembering how, during the earliest portion of my life, before I met Poe, I had always expected to end up in just such a place. But there was no humor to the soreness of my body, the pulsating burn in my head, the tenderness of ribs that ached with every shallow breath. I could not account for the latter except with a dull and dreamlike remembrance of being kicked at and dragged, but the incident of the former was my most recent conscious thought.

  I had been seated at the kitchen table of the Second Street Temperance House, having used the front of my hand to wipe ham grease off my lips so as to better speak, my head turning in resistance to the constable’s grip, that grip then falling away, jerked suddenly away, giving me but a half moment of relief before I sensed the man’s other hand whipping up into the air, the sibilant sound of some object suddenly unsheathed, a quick hissing as he pulled his truncheon through a belt loop and swung it at the side of my head.

  So, I had been arrested. For eating the woman’s ham? But I had paid for my breakfast—why hadn’t she told the constable this? Did she mean to deny it now that she had my three dollars in her fist?

  More time passed before I was able to sit up and brace my feet against the floor. How much time, I have no idea. Every tiny movement constituted an hour’s worth of pain. Every thought preceding movement was contemplated a dozen times before thought became act.

  A thick ridge of welt ran along the right side of my skull from ear to forehead. My hair was matted with blood, a sticky clot that had run down my back and pasted my shirt to my spine.

  From where I lay I managed to turn sufficiently to find the door, a heavy affair of dark, blank wood, with a sliding panel, closed, for communication with whatever waited outside that door.

  I stood, meaning to go to the door and hammer upon it until a satisfactory resolution was obtained. But upon standing, I quickly sat down again. Then did the same thing a second time. The floor slipped and undulated beneath me. I do not recall eventually completing the journey to the door but I must have done so, for at one point I opened my eyes to find myself leaning hard against the wood, forehead to the panel.

  The sliding panel was locked, of course, and would not succumb to my weak pummeling. Nor would the door itself.

  My next conscious thought was of lying again on the plank bed, staring at the exit and trying to remember if I had yet indeed made my way to the door, or whether I had only considered doing so. In either case, no further movement was in the offing. I ached deep inside, low in the back, and when I tried to probe the place with my fingers, a bubbling of nausea rose in my stomach, so that I lay motionless in that awkward position, hand trapped beneath my spine.

  The most I could accomplish was to turn my head so that my eyes roamed upward, every inch of movement a grating in my neck, a scrape of skullbone over wood. To that oblong gaze of blue high above, I asked, “What for?”

  As is usually the case, there was no answer.

  WHEN I slept, I dreamed of pain. Never had my entire being so ached and throbbed. Few external noises reached me through the thick walls of my cell, but the few thumps and shouts that did also found their way into my dreams. One dream in particular has stayed with me all these years, perhaps because what happened upon my awakening was as much a nightmare as what had preceded it.

  I dreamed I was in the barn in Ohio, Deidendorf’s barn. My job was to fork hay down the square hole in the floor, down into the stall from which the cattle would be fed. But in my dream the stall below was not a feed bin but a bedroom, Virginia Poe’s bedroom, and on her bed she lay dying of consumption. Even as I forked the hay down atop her she lay there looking up at me, eyes full of forgiveness. I did my best to pitch the hay away from her, but the hole in the floor was not large and allowed little freedom of movement. Some of the hay always landed on her face and body. She was too weak to push it away. Bit by bit I was burying her. Deidendorf stood at my side, rifle in hand, and barked at me to work faster. I did so, crying, still just a boy in my dream, eleven or twelve years old. Every time I slowed or hesitated he jabbed the tip of the rifle barrel into my ribs.

  The barn itself was a peculiar affair. (Years after this dream I would first encounter the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and think to myself, Here’s a man who’s seen my dreams.) The rafters were lined with pigeons softly squabbling, their perches white with excrement. The hayloft was stacked with unpainted coffins like the ones Poe and I had seen on the steamboat. And all throughout the barn, on various improbable levels from floor to high ceiling, like a cross section of the Old Brewery in Five Points where I had lived as a boy, were individuals I remembered from those days, the diseased and dying on their beds of rags, the drunken and drugged, the imbeciles and crippled. A young whore yellow-eyed and feverish but working hard to earn her ten cents for the day. An old man squatting over a chamber pot, his face shiny with sweat, hands trembling.

  In my dream I was aware of what lay outside of the barn, the Mexican desert, a flat, sere landscape sun-bleached and clean. But here inside the barn all was filth and stink, a rank greasiness of shadow. Everywhere I looked my eyes fell on something squalid and ugly. I had no choice but to gaze down into the hole, to watch the hay mounding up around Virginia, as high as her shoulders now, her ears, nearly covering her innocent face.

  My shoulders ached as I pitched down the hay, my ribs ached, my head throbbed with the squabble of a hundred pigeons. “Faster!” Deidendorf barked. “Get your work done!”

  I stabbed the pitchfork into the mound of hay but too hard, the tines sank into the plank floor, stuck there. The pitchfork quivered in my hands, stinging. I could not pull it free. And now Deidendorf pulled a harness off its nail on the wall and began to beat me with it, leather and buckles biting into my flesh, over my shoulders, lashing across my back. I recognized the smell of that leather, recognized the way it cracked against my skin, just as my mother’s strop had done.

  And now I wanted to wrench the pitchfork free only to turn and plunge it into Deidendorf’s belly. But my hands were slick and the pitchfork remained stuck fast.

  With every lash of the harness the barn rumbled all around me. The entire structure creaked and wobbled. Faster and faster Deidendorf beat me, screaming in my ear, turning my name into a profanity. Dust and feathers and pigeon shit rained down over me. Walls and floors creaked and split, tumbling Old Brewery residents out of their chairs and beds, sending them crashing to the barn floor, broken and moaning while they too cursed my name. The caskets in the hayloft rumbled against one another, slid this way and that, lids popping open, boards splitting open, spilling out skeletons and dust. I struggled to free the pitchfork, wept like a child because I could not. The harness flayed my back and shoulders. The barn, board by board, tumbled down all aro
und me.

  I let go of the pitchfork finally and covered my head with my arms. Felt every blow as the entire structure collapsed. But somehow I remained standing. The dust swirled in a storm around me, blasting my skin, filling my wounds. Every breath burned like fire. Finally, when I thought I could stand the torment no longer, I uncovered my head, looked up, and there beheld the pale blue eye of God, the oblong window of my cell. I was sitting up on the side of my bed.

  Was the dream over? Not quite yet. For there in the corner of my cell, seated at a small table, the one from his kitchen in the cottage on Bloomingdale Road, was Mr. Poe bent over a piece of parchment, vigorously scribbling.

  “Are you writing me?” I asked. “Are you writing this dream?”

  He said nothing. Did not even look my way.

  But the rattling of my dream continued, the banging and shouting. It was now at the door of my cell, wanting in. The panel slid open with a bang and I heard my name, a curse that filled the room. Poe at his table was smiling.

  But there at the door, his face filling the panel opening, was a flesh and blood man, no dream at all, his face scarlet with rage, eyes hideous with hate.

  Buck Kemmer.

  WHETHER SOMETHING in his indecipherable shouting conveyed to me what had happened to cause his anguish and outrage, or whether I merely deduced as much, somehow knew it in the heart’s deep wisdom, felt it in the shudder of my bones, I cannot say. My thoughts were not yet wholly rational, nor would they be until the following day. Suffice it to say that somehow, by word or murmur or by the ineffable intuition that accompanies love, I understood.

  I covered my face with my hands, and I wept, I wailed, I collapsed into a bottomless pit of grief.

  With every breath, I prayed that the pain of that grief would erase me.

  WE HOLD love so dear, I suppose, because the anguish of losing it is so terrible. There is no other hole so deep or black, no maw of hell so engulfing.

  My tears evoked no sympathy from Buck Kemmer. If his voice softened, it was only because of a shortness of breath. His sentiments underwent no change. He cursed me with every epithet he knew, while I, having fallen forward onto my knees on the rough cold floor, pounded forehead and fist against the stone.

  When finally I settled into motionlessness, and Buck too had exhausted himself into silence, I asked, though it hardly mattered, “How, Buck? How did it happen?”

  This unleashed another flood of venom from his tongue. He ended by promising, “If you ever get out of there, I will kill you myself.”

  I must have been a terrible sight by then, forehead skinned and bloodied, cheek bruised, nose and lip swollen, shirt stained black with blood front and back. But he felt not an ounce of pity for me, nothing but a murderous contempt. Still, I raised my eyes to him. If anything mattered to me at that moment—and, in truth, nothing much did—it was that he be made to understand. I needed someone to share my misery with, or else I could not bear it. And I knew that no soul in the world could feel as incinerated as mine, with the single exception of Buck Kemmer’s.

  “I didn’t do it,” I told him.

  He grunted at me, too furious for words.

  “Whatever happened, Buck, it wasn’t me.”

  He slammed one fist and then the other into the door. The thunder shook the stones beneath me.

  I put out a hand to the side of the bed, seized the scarred plank, dragged myself up onto my feet. I doubted I could walk as far as the door. My center was gone, the core of me blown away as if by cannonball.

  Yet I staggered forward.

  When he thought me close enough, he stuck an arm through the opening, lunged at me, hand straining for my throat. Nothing more than instinct made me jerk away.

  A guard outside the door shouted at Buck to pull back. He did not. Then came the sharp crack of a truncheon slammed across his shoulders. Buck winced but he did not reclaim his arm.

  “Let him be!” I shouted. “Let him kill me if he wants to!”

  The guard laughed. “You volunteering for it, are you?”

  “If that’s what he wants,” I said, “let him do it.”

  “It’s nothing to me,” the guard said, invisible to me behind the door. Then, to Buck, “If he’s stupid enough to get that close, have at it.”

  “You think I won’t?” Buck asked.

  The guard said, “I would if I was you.”

  I let a moment pass, did not yet move within Buck’s reach. Felt the guard stepping away from the door, absolving himself of all responsibility. Buck’s arm withdrew until only a hand was visible, and then, above it, his face appeared in the opening now.

  I told him, “I’m coming forward, Buck. But first you should know this. I didn’t do it. Whatever happened to Susan, I had no part in it. I would sooner be cut to pieces, an inch at a time, than to ever do anything to hurt her.”

  His face became a mask, I could not read it. No matter: He would either strangle me or embrace me. I think I longed more for the first than the second. In any case, I moved closer to the door.

  His fingers, gripping the panel’s frame, now flexed, went stiff and splayed. He was thinking about reaching for me, about crushing my throat in his powerful grip. He lifted his hand away from the frame, knotted it into a fist. Then suddenly he drew back and again slammed that fist into the wood.

  “Here now!” the guard shrieked. “Take it easy on that door!”

  Buck looked in on me a final time. His mask of torment nearly finished me off. Then he turned and stalked away.

  “Buck!” I cried, because I could not help myself, and thrust my head into the opening so as to call after him. “Tell me what happened to her!”

  The guard raked his stick across my face, driving me back. And slammed the panel shut.

  SOMETIME LATER, maybe midafternoon, the panel came open again, easing quietly this time, even cautiously. On my bed I continued to stare at the blank window high above, and waited for the visitor to speak. When he did not, I raised myself up enough to look his way, a hard expression on my face, a look of annoyance at being interrupted in my abject grief.

  Poe stood at the door. His eyes were wounded, dark, his mouth a crooked frown. He was gazing at me, I thought, as one might gaze upon a small animal, a rabbit or squirrel that has been crushed beneath the wheels of a wagon, barely but yet alive. A look of regret and revulsion.

  “I didn’t do it,” was all I said.

  He closed his eyes to this. Shook his head slightly. Then moved away.

  A guard looked in at me and grinned.

  NEXT DAY, the first gray light of morning. A clank and scrape in the corridor outside my door, coming gradually closer. Breakfast on its way. But I was more ravenous for information than for food, and stood waiting at the door.

  “What’s going to happen now?” I asked the moment the panel came open and the guard took his preliminary peek inside.

  He was a different guard than the one from last night, but of a similar temperament. He thrust in the bowl. “Court meets first Monday of the month.”

  “What is it I’m supposed to have done?”

  “You forget already?”

  I stared down at the bowl of food in my hands, nauseated. Oatmeal, a slice of bread spread with lard. Even the odors were sickening. “Is she dead?” I asked.

  “Dead?” He laughed. “You drove that gaff clean through her!”

  Again I staggered, put a hand to the door. The bowl tilted sideways. The bread slid to the floor.

  “What everybody’s wondering,” said the guard, “is did you do the other business before or after you put the hook in her.”

  I moaned, I think; went numb. The bowl fell from my hand and everything on it spilled to the floor, metal bowl and spoon clattering away even as I dropped to my knees gagging, the echoing ring a distant chiming in my head as I heaved and vomited against the door.

  26

  BECAUSE I cannot be specific about the passage of time during this hazy episode of my life, I apologize. Any
individual who has ever been pitched in grief will understand. Time becomes fragmented by delirious thoughts. Or perhaps, time loses relevance. Nothing matters, not hunger, not the stink and soreness of one’s own body. The misery is its own soporific, a narcotic that causes the sufferer to lapse in and out of sleep. At the moment of awakening there is a brief lightness, almost a giddiness as you think, “I was dreaming.” But then it all comes back at you, rushing like a bull with horns lowered, and one of the horns catches you straight through the heart and lifts you up, holds you there, suspended, impaled and impotent, as the bull shakes his head furiously and with this movement widens the hole, until again the pain is too much to bear and you lapse again into the temporary blessing of sleep.

  Is this what God is? The bliss of unconsciousness?

  From one of the guards I managed to wrench a bit of information. He found my ignorance humorous, and played along, I think, to see how far I would carry it.

  “The gaff that was used,” I asked. “What kind of gaff was it?”

  “I suppose you don’t remember taking it down from beside the door.”

  “Buck’s baling hook? Is that what was used?”

  “You could’ve at least pulled it out of her when you was done.”

  I nearly swooned, but could not let myself give in. “And where was she at the time?”

  “Where would she be? Considering what else you done.”

  “She was in her bed?”

  “Stuck there, I’d say. Until her father come in and found her like that.”

  At some point on the second or third day—the sky had turned overcast (though not as dark as my thoughts) and I was unable to guess the hour—Buck Kemmer returned. He looked in at me as I lay on my bed.

  The first thing he said to me was, “Haven’t they even let you wash yourself yet?”

  By this I knew that he had come to an understanding. He had sat alone in his small dark house, remembering his daughter’s scent, the way she moved and the delicacy of her smile, and he remembered the way she had looked on me, the things, perhaps, she had spoken to him in secret, and he recalled the look in my eyes each time she was near, and he came to realize somehow that I, in my own dark room, was doing the same, and that in all the world there was only one man who might understand his grief, because, though perhaps we loved her differently, we loved her the same.