On Night's Shore Read online

  From Fifty-First, I angled my way left through an area I beheld as my other possible fate. If I failed to hustle as cleverly as Madame Restell, I would end up here, I told myself, here in the mud and garbage heaps of these shantytowns, here with the ragpickers and their half-feral pigs. The swampy pestilence of the area was an assault on the senses, and I mucked along as briskly as I could, imagining not for a second that this festering terrain could ever be the site of summer concerts and promenades and the fashionable turnouts of Central Park today.

  Then all the way to 174th Street, a very long walk for a boy but a pleasant one, unhurried, and made even more enjoyable when I clambered atop the massive stone arches of High Bridge to cross the East River. Here the huge pipe was being laid that would eventually convey water a distance of some thirty-two miles, from the Croton River into Gotham, an undertaking so huge as to dizzy me more than did the height of the bridge above the river.

  Then on to Fordham and the sweetness of true bucolia. After inquiring of a man weeding his garden—he was so thin and bent and slow that I first mistook him for a scarecrow—I found Poe’s farmhouse. It was surrounded on three sides by an apple orchard, and I remember how surprised I was to discover that the newspaperman was also an apple farmer.

  As I approached, a woman came out the front door, banging it open with a small washtub she carried. She was a stout woman of middle age, her hair dull black and chopped off squarely just below her ears. She did not look my way but went straight to a pump at the side of the house and worked the handle up and down until water sloshed over the brim of the tub.

  By now I was less than five yards from her. I stood and waited until she had picked up the washtub to return to the house and there saw me standing. She was startled to see a boy where none was expected, but quickly recovered and greeted me with a scowl.

  “There’s nothing in the house,” she told me. “If you’re hungry, go pick a couple apples. They’re green yet, but it’s the best I can do.”

  She thought I was a beggar-child looking for a handout. “Are you Mrs. Poe?” I asked.

  She hunched forward and gave me a stare. “You know him, do you?”

  “I help him with his newspaper work.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I come to give him some information.”

  “Then you come for nothing,” she said.

  And now it was my turn to stare.

  “They’re gone,” she said. “Packed up and cleared out two days back. Supposed to take the house till October at least; that’s what he promised me. But no.”

  She sniffed once, then shook her head. Her tone was softer now. “He was walking that trip every day, can you imagine? There and back every day without a single complaint for hisself. They was good company, I’ll tell you that.”

  She might as well have been talking Greek. “He moved?”

  “Isn’t that what I just now said?”

  I could only stare at her and blink.

  “I can’t even blame him, that’s the thing. What with all he’s got weighing down on him. Worries like that build up on a man. Knocks the starch right out of him.”

  I could not help myself; I turned and looked back toward the city some thirteen miles away. She must have read the weariness of my posture, for her tone softened even more.

  “If you need a drink of water, you can get it,” she said.

  I lacked the strength to thank her. “Did he say where he was moving to?”

  “Back across the river and south a ways. Just off Bloomingdale Road is what he told me. Quarter mile or so below the reservoir.”

  I nodded and pushed one foot in front of the other to start myself moving, then thought better of it and turned toward the pump. The woman picked up her washtub again and headed for the house. I waited until she was inside, then put my hand to the pump and worked the handle up and down until a gush of water gurgled forth. I ducked my head under it and doused myself and then turned to gulp it down until the slender torrent died away. Then I pushed the hair out of my eyes and thought, The hell with Poe, and walked away from there.

  I was too hungry and tired to care if Poe got his story right or not. What did any of it matter to me? Who was this Poe fellow anyway? Just another hustler, a rung or two above my own position perhaps, but at least I did not go moving about the countryside at the drop of a hat. I was done with him. He wasn’t worth the trouble.

  The flaw in my logic was that I would have to retrace my steps to return to the city, and in doing so I would pass within a few hundred yards of Bloomingdale Road (which is what Broadway, at least the upper portion of it, was then called). And when after another two hours of sluggish marching I came to the northern shore of the reservoir, I again thought, The hell with it, and swiveled to my right and followed the western shore rather than the eastern. If I spotted a likely-looking house off Bloomingdale Road, maybe I would stop. Maybe I would give Poe a piece of my mind.

  It was an area of fields and woods and a scarcity of houses. There was only one building visible in the area Poe had described to his former landlady. It was a small white cottage set in a clearing at the end of a long grassy lane. A ribbon of white smoke curled out of the stovepipe protruding from the roof. On a day as warm as this, the smoke could mean only one thing: somebody was cooking supper.

  I trudged down the lane and came to a halt at the side of an oak tree not fifteen feet from the front steps. A narrow covered porch ran along the front of the cottage, and on the porch was a deacon’s bench and a wicker chair. The front door stood open by half. Through the doorway came the scent of something delicious and stupefying, frying meat, a simmering pot. I lifted my nose to it and closed my eyes and did nothing to keep my body from dissolving into pure hunger.

  When the heavy boots hit the porch floor, I must have been dozing on my feet, for I jerked upright at the sound and scraped my spine against the tree trunk. The individual peering out at me from the edge of the porch was sufficiently frightening to make me consider immediate retreat. My first guess would have been of a circus strong man in a long, loose dress. Of a man with thick forearms and broad shoulders and a wide round face and with a chest as broad as a beer keg, with hands as large as any stevedore’s and a solid splayfooted stance to match. For some reason I envisioned this person hoisting me up like a barrel and sailing me high above the trees.

  But no, she smiled. A womanly smile, with a gaze as soft as her hands were strong. “Are you looking for something to eat?” she said. I saw then that she had a dipper and tin pail in her hand and, since I saw no sign of a pump, was apparently on her way to the springhouse.

  “I’m looking for Poe,” I said.

  “You’re here to see Eddie?”

  “Poe,” I said again. “That’s what he told me his name is.”

  She cocked her head and gave me a look of amused curiosity. Then she stepped back inside the cottage, and I heard her muted voice. A moment later she returned to the door and came outside and down off the porch, and with a lumbering gait in perfect counterpoise to her smile, she went off to fetch the water.

  And soon, there was Poe at the door, looking just as he had on the day previous save that his collar now hung open at the side of his neck. And instead of clutching a small pad of paper in his right hand, he now held a thick book, one finger closed inside it.

  “Master Dubbins,” he said. “You’re a long way from home.”

  “I’ve been farther out than this already.”

  He misunderstood my insinuation, which was delivered too wearily to convey the indignation I intended. “No doubt you have. And no doubt you’ve come to collect your share of the byline, am I right?”

  It was my feeling then, as now, that when the drift of a conversation has missed your ken, the wisest response is silence and a sneer.

  He turned sideways and waved his hand through the doorway. “Come in, come
in and take a seat. Let us conduct our business as the gentlemen we are or at least pretend to be.”

  He winked at me then, and when I came forward he stepped aside and held the door for me, and with his little pat on my back I once again felt reconstituted. Light-handed as it was and as leg weary as I was, it engendered in me some brotherly affection, some strangely emollient suffusion of sufferance for even the ragpickers and their pigs and for myself and all the world.

  The interior of the cottage seemed as foreign to me as some distant star, though it was a place only slightly more lavish than the one I returned to each night, the scant furniture of a Boston rocker and straight-backed chairs and table and cast-iron potbellied stove, all the necessary accoutrements of domesticity but no more than the necessary ones, no gilded mirrors or marble vases or carpets from the mysterious East, nothing I had not seen before in a score of other impecunious homes. With the exception of the books. Books were everywhere. Books were stacked or lined on nearly every flat surface, even shelved standing on the floor. It was as much a library as a cottage, a clapboard athenaeum.

  Yet the element most disconcerting about those three small rooms—the kitchen area flowed wall-less into a sitting room, at the rear of which stood a closed doorway, a bedroom I presumed—the element most disconcerting because it was something I had never encountered in the residences near my own, not in the tenement row houses or the slapdash shacks, was the cleanliness. In fact to refer to the condition as mere cleanliness is to soil it with understatement. Spotlessness does not do the job either. Nor even meticulousness. Let me just say that had I been aware in those days of the existence of bacteria, I might too have discerned the sudden expiration by fright of each of the myriad germs and mites and microbia to whom my body, until that moment, had been home sweet home.

  There was not a single scuff of dirt upon the dull plank floor. Not a sniff of dust on any surface. No discarded bottles or tins oozing mold, no gobs of spat tobacco or hawked-up phlegm, no rags wadded into cracks or tossed about willy-nilly, no overflowing slop pots or blobs of hardened food or rat droppings or insect hulls or the stink and stain of urine from a corn-shuck mattress or coal bucket or the crackery stench of unwashed bodies. No reek upon reek. No stink of squalor, not even a hint of it. Every surface had been scrubbed and scrubbed again. The place was so clean that it took my breath away. It was so startling that upon my first contact with it, it stung my eyes. I have no other words to describe it.

  Poe led me to the small square table and pulled out a chair and motioned that I should sit. Then, after marking his book with a slip of parchment, he laid the book aside and sat opposite me and placed both hands flat on the table.

  “You saw the story, then,” he said.

  And I, still reeling from the blast of unfouled air, could only nod cross-eyed.

  “And you believe that you are entitled to a larger share of the remuneration.”

  I understood most of the words, at least the gist of them. But it was his implication that confounded me, that I had come there to demand further payment for a transaction already completed.

  He dug into one of his pockets and brought out a small leather purse and opened it. “I was paid four dollars for the story,” he told me as he picked through the coins. “A paltry sum, I agree. Especially considering the hours spent gathering the requisite facts and fashioning them into a coherent tale. Even so…”

  By now he had laid three dimes upon the table. He paused for a moment to stare into the small mouth of the purse. Finally he extracted a fourth moon of silver and laid it with the others. He pushed all four across the table.

  “Ten percent,” he said. “Would you consider this a fair commission?”

  It looked like a small fortune beneath my very nose. All I had to do was to put out my hand and claim it. But something kept my hands clasped together between my knees.

  “You already paid me the half dime,” I told him.

  “But apparently you feel slighted. And that I cannot abide.” He pushed the coins a bit closer to me.

  My mind spun as I considered the mountain of confections I could stuff into my cheeks as the owner of those dimes. But also, alas, my stomach churned.

  “I would gladly pay more if more remained,” he told me. “But it goes so quickly.”

  And then the sound of footfalls on the porch, a lumbering stride. He brushed his hand over the coins. “Take them, Augie, please. Hurry and put them away.”

  I raised my hand to cover them. But at the last moment, only one finger presented itself, and this I laid upon a single coin. “This one is plenty,” I told him.

  He cut a glance at the door, then back at me. “You’re certain?”

  “I didn’t come to squeeze more money out of you,” I said.

  A slight smile, a tiny nod. And then he scooped up the remaining dimes and quickly returned them to his purse and returned the purse to his pocket. I detected in this sleight of hand a conspiracy between us, and it warmed me to him even more.

  And then in strode the large woman with a full bucket of spring water. She smiled down at me as she waddled toward the pair of enameled basins on a raised plank adjacent to the stove. She set down the bucket and dipped out a glassful and set the glass before me and then turned away without uttering a word.

  Poe watched me and kept smiling. He knew, I think, how alien her gesture was to me, this simple generosity, and how filthy I suddenly felt in my dirty skin and rags.

  After a moment he nodded toward the glass. It was all I needed to reach for it with both hands. I drank it down and wiped my mouth.

  “What I come here for was to tell you something,” I finally said.

  He sat all but motionless, waiting, and it was then I first observed how birdlike was his countenance, how hawklike or owlish, by which I mean not menacing or predatory but keen-eyed, with a patient and acute intelligence.

  “I think you got it wrong about that girl,” I said.

  At this the woman—I had not yet determined if she was his mother or his wife, though had you pressed me at the moment I would have guessed the former—turned from her sink to regard first me and then Poe. She had been washing carrots and onions in one of the basins, but now she turned at the waist with both hands still immersed.

  “Eddie doesn’t get things wrong,” she told me. This, as with every word she said to me that day and thereafter, was delivered with a velvet firmness of intonation.

  And Poe said, smiling, “Sometimes, Muddy, I sometimes do. But we mustn’t let anybody else ever suspect as much.”

  She pursed her lips and shook her head as if she could not abide this confession.

  Poe said to me, “Mrs. Clemm is my most stalwart champion and my greatest source of strength. Isn’t that true, Muddy?”

  Her broad cheeks blossomed like roses in bright sunlight. I had never witnessed people behaving in this manner before, such kindliness of spirit and with such unveiled affection—not unless their speech was slurred and their eyes foggy with drink.

  Soon Poe regarded me once more. “In what particular was I incorrect?” he asked.

  “The gang of ruffians,” I answered. “I don’t know whose idea that was, but it don’t seem right to me, whoever thought it up.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because I would of heard by now. There would of been talking. Bragging. People would of been whispering all about it where I live.”

  “And there has been no such whispering?” he said.

  “And her little purse being still there hanging around her wrist the way you said. The people I know would of took it—you can count on that. Whether there was anything in it or not. And this one still had coins in it? That’s just about the unlikeliest thing I ever heard of.”

  He tilted his head slightly as he considered this.

  “And that sailor’s knot on the bonnet,” I said. “That�
�s another thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Anybody I know who could tie a sailor’s knot wouldn’t be anybody I know.”

  At this he laughed. “A sailor’s knot is too intricate for your fraternity of acquaintances—is this your implication?”

  “I’m saying why tie a bonnet back on in the first place? Why take the time to bother? If you care so little that you can strangle somebody, do you care enough that you’re going to put her bonnet back on her?”

  And now his eyes narrowed. “Your point is well made.”

  He sat very still and did not take his eyes from mine, though I suspected he was not really seeing me at that moment; he was gazing again upon the New Jersey shore, taking his bearings, readjusting his conclusions. Slowly, then, he closed his eyes and held them closed for half a minute.

  Mrs. Clemm stood motionless at the sink, her shoulders hunched.

  Finally he opened his eyes and said to me, “I need to rectify this immediately. Will you accompany me back into town?”

  At this Mrs. Clemm spoke. “You will do no such thing. It will be nightfall in an hour and you haven’t had your supper yet. And besides all that, there’s the scent of rain in the air.”

  “I think she’s right about the rain,” I said.

  Poe’s expression relaxed. “Mrs. Clemm has a wondrous tempering effect on my impetuosity.”

  I nodded and decided then and there that I must remember a few of his big words and try to uncover their meanings.

  “Your young friend is welcome to stay,” she said. “He looks as if he could use a bowl or two of my good soup.”

  “And good soup it truly is,” Poe said. Then, “Would you care to pass the evening with us, Master Dubbins?”

  Truth was, with an extra dime in my pocket I was in no hurry to sneak back home just to have the wealth shaken out of me. I was in no hurry, in fact, to take another unnecessary step.

  “I could sleep out on the porch,” I told him. “And we could head back to town first thing tomorrow.”