Disquiet Heart Page 4

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “Because molten lead, when dropped from such a height, will form itself into perfectly round balls as it falls and cools. The size of the mesh determines the size of the balls.”

  “Lead shot! That’s how lead shot is made?”

  “Precisely. Some of which, made here in this city, is being used by our men in Mexico.”

  “Put it on the schedule,” I told him. I mopped up a last small puddle of molasses with a last forkful of buckwheat cake. Poe by then had taken a small purse from his pocket and was counting the coins.

  “I’m paying for breakfast,” I told him, and patted my own pocket. “I have plenty of money.” I leaned toward him and whispered, “Nearly eighty-five dollars.”

  “On your person?” he asked.

  “Where else would I put it?”

  “You must be very careful, Augie. That’s a great deal of money to be carrying around in your pocket.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” I said, foolishly. “I worked too hard to get it.”

  Poe only looked at me askance, wanting to say more, no doubt, but holding himself back. It was not the first meal he had accepted from me, but the first I actually paid for, and in laying my coins in the thick hand of the barkeep I felt the stir of something gratifying, almost noble, a subtle whisper that the act of becoming an upright and honorable man might not be so onerous after all. If only I could discover a way to get my money by honest means.

  4

  WE WERE on our way toward Sparks Shot Tower on the waterfront, still five minutes from the Delaware River but in no hurry to get there, enjoying the clarity of a springlike morning, pausing now and then to look into a shop window or, in Poe’s case, to remark on the cherry blossoms straining to burst forth, the lilies poking pale green heads up through the dirt of someone’s yard, and, in my case, to enjoy Poe’s renewed appreciation of those sights, when I first became aware of how the street traffic seemed to be increasing its pace all around us, men alone or in pairs hurrying past at a brisk walk, laughing, carriages moving by at a speedier than normal pace, drivers applying the whip.

  Within minutes we became aware that much of Philadelphia was rushing toward the river, men in business suits and women in long, whooshing frocks, customers and store owners alike. Even what must have been an entire classroom full of young children, squealing, pushing, pulling at each other as they trotted past us.

  Trailing this group and moving with none of the children’s grace but just as much eagerness was a stocky boy of fifteen or so, apparently a butcher’s apprentice judging by the bloody white apron he wore, a red-faced and heavy-footed boy chugging like a steam engine.

  I stepped into the middle of the sidewalk as he neared. “What’s going on?” I shouted. “A fire?”

  He was two full steps beyond me before he found the breath to speak, and then only the one word shouted over a shoulder, “Elephants!”

  I looked at Poe, and Poe looked at me, his raised eyebrows a mirror of my own. Elephants? In Philadelphia? The moment was deliciously absurd. We turned and chased after the blood-splattered boy.

  Parasols dotted the waterfront. Slouch hats, beaver hats, plus fours, and linen suits. But also raggedy children, dock workers, beggar men and burghers. Schoolmarms and ministers, hausfraus and prostitutes. A Seurat riverside added to by Lautrec, a scene sun-filled and gay. All soon to be drenched in the tar of catastrophe.

  THE DAY THE PACHYDERMS CAME TO PHILADELPHIA

  The entire menagerie came prancing down Ferry Street, some twenty animals in all, led by the Circus Ringmaster and a small brown monkey that rode on his shoulder. The Ringmaster was a tall man with a pointed goatee, as elegant as a seraph in his white trousers and long-tailed red frock coat. Behind him came a pair of high-stepping Arabian horses, feathered and festooned with bright ribbons, their backs straddled by a young man costumed like Ali Baba in billowing blue pantaloons and a flowing white shirt. Next came, pulled in a small wagon, a bird a bit like a peacock but smaller and more grandiose in its long trailing plumage, identified, not inappropriately, as a RARE BIRD OF PARADISE. Then a one-horned goat billed as THE LAST SURVIVING UNICORN. A pair of lanky camels looking for all the world like long-faced imbibers wrapped in dusty rags. Midway in the parade, prowling back and forth in his rolling cage, came a Bengal tiger; atop his cage was a placard that read, to everyone’s delight and terror, MAN-EATER.

  On and on they came, an assortment of the earth’s most exotic creatures. Each of the hundreds of spectators who lined the sidewalks to watch the passing menagerie then fell into line at its end, there to follow the most spectacular and improbable beasts of all, the two African elephants that brought up the rear of the parade.

  The elephants were accompanied by their trainer, a small wiry man who shouted out interesting bits of information about his beasts, that they were a mother and daughter named Betsy and Baby. The mother was reputed to weigh nearly six thousand pounds—three tons!—and the daughter not yet four thousand. The mother sported short blunt tusks, the daughter no tusks at all. But in every other particular they were identical: in the stout legs, those thick limbs that for all their rigidity moved in a stately gait, slow and deliberate, the child holding by its trunk to the mother’s tail, much as a mother and child of the human variety might stroll down the street hand-in-hand. Both wore loose gray skin with a greenish cast, so wrinkled and tessellated as to give it the quality of a cracked mud wall. Both had ears that flapped out periodically, almost rhythmically, like heavy sails of canvas. And in those ears, where the elephants’ skin was least thick, veins stood out so clearly that the closest of spectators could discern the movement of the beast’s blood in the network of arteries.

  Then, of course, there was the miraculous trunk, so odd yet so practical an appendage, as nimble as a jeweler’s hand, able with equal ease to roll a log or to pick a pebble off the street. The trunk of the mother was always moving (the baby’s being employed as a tether), either swinging in a lighthearted dangle just above the ground or rising into the air like a thick-bodied serpent, not to strike but to sniff the air or, on two occasions, to startle the crowd with a trumpeting blast, a brassy blare soon answered with a shriller blast from the child, as if the mother were asking, “Are you all right back there?” and the child responded brightly, “I’m just dandy!”

  A female rider sat atop Betty on a brightly beaded blanket and small cushioned seat of red, holding to a strap lashed around the pachyderm’s girth. And from each beast there arose a steam of vapor into the early morning air, which gave these animals a look even more fantastical.

  In time the entire parade made its way to the water’s edge, there to be conveyed by ferry across the Delaware River and onto the New Jersey shore. While the first ferry was loaded and began its slow transport, the remaining animals lined up one after another, each accompanied by a trainer to keep curious boys from approaching too closely. A local urchin ran hither and thither passing out broadsides inviting all citizens of Philadelphia to attend the first night’s show, a gala of “amazing feats and incredible spectacles” to be performed in a tent that would soon be erected not far from the opposite shore.

  Upon return of the ferry for its second crossing, the ferryman expressed to the Ringmaster some concern that the pachyderms’ weight would sink his flat-bottomed craft. The Ringmaster answered this with a loud proclamation that his wondrous beasts would swim to New Jersey.

  The ferryman scratched his chin for a while, then wondered aloud if, owing to the speed of the current midriver, perhaps a better choice would be the sturdy new bridge a quarter mile north.

  “Nonsense!” cried the Ringmaster. And in true Ringmaster fashion he then delivered an oratory on the miraculous nature of pachyderm anatomy, and described in such glowing terms the sponginess of elephant tissue, the natural buoyancy thereof, that the assembled crowd, reluctant to have the last of the morning’s spectacles removed without a final flourish of drama, all began to cry out and cheer
in favor of an elephant swim, a miracle of flotation!

  With a nod then from the Ringmaster and the sweep of his arm toward the east, the rider atop Betty urged her forward, down the grassy bank and into the mud. First the mother and then the child at her tail waded into the river, each stepping as delicately as a bather into a chilly tub.

  Forward they went. The rider periodically patted Betty’s huge shoulder or pulled at an ear and shouted words of encouragement. And indeed it was a glorious sight to behold those great hulking beasts so gracefully plying the swift green water. Higher and higher the water rose on the gray flanks, until first the child’s feet left the riverbed, and its great bulk was buoyed up. Soon the mother was afloat as well. And now Baby, in an effort to keep her trunk from submersion, released her mother’s tail. The child issued a short blast, not of terror but, perhaps, of a rising concern. Betty answered with a trumpet’s blare of reassurance, swiveling her huge head as far to the rear as possible.

  That was when the current seized Baby and swung her off the course. She was spun to face downstream, and, without the comforting view of her mother’s broad backside to guide her, the child panicked. Her movements, previously altogether graceful and smooth, became agitated. She jerked this way and that, legs lurching, trumpet shrieking, her huge dark eyes aglimmer with fear. She heaved herself toward the near shore and then the far, where, upon spotting her mother again, she appeared more terrorized by the distance between them than when she had not seen Betty at all.

  The mother had turned now too and struggled to return to her child. The rider hammered a palm against the gray skin, hoping to turn the beast around. To no avail. Now both rider and Ringmaster shouted at the elephants and to each other. The Ringmaster, three-quarters across the river at the rear of the ferry, cupped his hands to his mouth and demanded, a bit absurdly, that the elephants follow him.

  By now Baby was beginning to fail. Weakened by the powerful current, no doubt chilled by the water, her head dropped momentarily, submerging even the great knob of forehead until only the tip of her trunk was visible. From the evidence of the trunk, canted at a diagonal to the water’s surface, Baby appeared to have capsized underwater. This observation was confirmed when the foot of one leg broke the surface. Betty lurched so vigorously toward her child that the rider was catapulted off and went down with a splash, down and completely under for a few moments, then to emerge several yards downstream, being carried swiftly away. She tried for a few strokes to fight her way back to the elephants but soon realized the futility of it and returned to the Philadelphia shore.

  No amount of screaming from the Ringmaster could now turn Betty toward New Jersey. She plunged her trunk underwater, probing with it for her still-submerged child. Eventually she located Baby and the trunks emerged entwined, the mother holding the child’s high. The crowd cheered and applauded.

  But the celebration was premature, for the smaller elephant was no longer trying to swim, and the weight of its body moving in the current made it impossible for the mother to make for shore. She pulled and struggled a few moments longer, both beasts moving steadily downstream, all spectators running parallel to them down the bank and shore, the crowd now mute and helpless. In every mind was the knowledge of what had to be done, that Betty must release her doomed infant in order to save herself. Perhaps Betty knew this as well. But whether guided by instinct or intelligence, she would not concede, and held tightly to her daughter.

  And then the mother’s head dipped down as well, the eyes went under, leaving nothing but the powerful forehead above water, looking like a green-gray boulder being driven by the current. Within a minute’s time, Betty, too, slowly tipped onto her side. And then came a deep and terrible silence, and the crowd stopped moving, and nobody spoke.

  Both Betty and Baby were washed ashore just a hundred yards or so downstream from the bridge they might have strolled across to New Jersey. There was no brightness in their eyes as they lay there in the mud, no pulse of blood visible in their ears. Their hides were a duller gray now, even as the vapor steamed off their bodies, the trunks of mother and daughter yet entwined.

  It strikes me as more than a little fitting that the final spectacle to assault our eyes before departing Philadelphia, that most civilized of cities, should have been the drowning of those two great beasts. Here was tragedy at its most absurd. And in what better incident to discern the hand of God? All tragedy is God’s work, for only God, if He were inclined to do so, might prevent it.

  On the other hand, is it fair to blame God for the damage done by that brief explication, composed in my own hand, of the elephants’ demise? Some things, I suppose, must be ascribed to man himself—such things as jealousy, envy, and pride. If I plant a tree, for example, and on that tree a fungus grows, a blight, can it be argued that I, by planting the tree, created the disease that destroyed the orchard?

  That is a debate best left to the philosophers. As for me, I must let the narrative suffice.

  AFTER THE elephants’ misfortune, neither Poe nor I had any appetite for entertainment. We passed the weekend in desultory conversation and lethargic activity, by cleaning up his room, packing his few essentials, sending a wire to Longreve in New York, and placing Poe’s manuscripts with Mr. Godey, who grudgingly offered five dollars in the dim hope that he would find something publishable within the stack. Even more grudgingly, Poe accepted.

  Finally, Monday morning arrived. Still in darkness we took our turns at the privy and the washbasin, then stumbled into the tavern for some tea and bread with blackstrap. Then to the railroad station to begin our journey. The train departed at eight, and since our car was not full, both Poe and I claimed window seats, his facing south, mine north, the locomotive west. On occasion he would point things out to me, or I to him, and we would hurry to the other’s side to have a look. Poe’s thoughts, far more than mine, were surely on the destination. Or perhaps his eyes shone only because of hope renewed, a purpose restored.

  I, too, felt a low fire burning inside me, but not, like Poe’s, an old fire, so frequently stoked. Instead it was something completely new to me, this ambition to preserve and understand an event by writing it, to take an image that was scalded into my brain, the last fervid glance from Betty’s huge eyes before they sank beneath the water, to render that image in words that might somehow ameliorate the burn. We were not yet halfway to Cumberland, clanking along at a slow rattle, when I asked Poe if I might borrow some paper from his satchel, and maybe a stub of pencil if he could spare it.

  He did not question my request until he had produced the items. “A letter to a girl in Ohio?” he asked.

  “The only girl I know who might want a letter from me wouldn’t be able to read it,” I told him. “No, I just thought I might put down a few of my observations.”

  He smiled, but said nothing more, and soon turned back to his window.

  An hour later, while I was still laboring over my words, he said, “All of the interesting scenery must be passing on your side of the train. What can you possibly see out that window worth writing about? There is little over here but trees.”

  I almost told him what I was up to, but held back, stopped myself, for I was not eager to share any of this just yet, by which I mean not merely the writing but the compulsion to engage in it, this growing ambition, this blossoming sense of myself that had not yet crystalized. A small part of me was trembling as I wrote, subtly quivering like a man on the verge of a momentous discovery, an explorer who knows that just around the next bend will lie the most momentous and startling discovery of his life.

  I said only, “I would like for you to read this when I’m finished with it.”

  “Not poetry,” he begged. “Not another Longfellow with his odes to woods and field.”

  “It’s not poetry.”

  “Heaven help us!” he exclaimed in mock horror. “You’ve become a Transcendentalist! The flowers, the grass, the beauteous sky! All witnessed from behind the sooty glass of a noisy railcar. You
will make the Frogpondians proud indeed, Augie.”

  The dozen or so other passengers, all of whom had turned to catch his declamation (as was his intent), now awaited my response. I muttered, “I’m no more fond of Emerson than you are.”

  “Praise be to the Great Oneness!” he cried. “The boy is not yet lost!”

  I doubt that any of the passengers fully grasped Poe’s sarcasm, but they enjoyed his histrionics all the same, the flamboyance that I countered by speaking as calmly and softly as the rattling of our transport allowed. “If you will let me finish, I will show it to you soon.”

  He leaned across his seat so as to glance at the paper on my lap. “Are there any words left you have not yet crossed out?”

  “I’m trying to get it right,” I said.

  He sat up straighter and leaned back in his seat, the side of his face fully lit by the sun. “When I composed ‘The Raven,’” he said, his voice pitched louder and deeper now, as if to fill a lecture hall, “as well as my many many tales, every word flowed complete and perfect without a single revision, a gift direct from the Muse.”

  I might have contradicted him in this, might have remarked on the nights I had watched him toiling at his craft, trying out this phrase and that as a stonemason working to fill a hole with just the right stone will chip away at the edges, a flake here and a flake there, working patiently toward the precise fit. But then I took note of how the other passengers were reacting to him, those small derisive smiles, how to a man they had turned their backs to him in hopes of silencing him, an obvious crank.

  What he hoped, I’m sure, was that one of them—all of them!—would cry out in a paroxysm of delight, “Edgar Allan Poe? Are you he, sir? Are you the famous author?”

  That was the light he hoped to bask in, the light he always sought. He seemed to require it more desperately now than ever before, now that he was alone and bereft of the family that had shored him up. That light and the promise of it was the true reason he was traveling to Pittsburgh.