On Night's Shore Page 7

  “Well, well,” Poe said, “the General has returned, home from his wanderings.”

  He stroked the cat’s head a few times. “Augie,” he said, “this old soldier on my lap is General Tom. An infrequent boarder in our home. Recently returned, if these nicks on his ear are any indication, from the conflict in Cuba.

  “And where are your comrades in arms tonight?” he asked the cat. General Tom arched his neck and pushed his head against Poe’s hand.

  Then, to me, “Now that Tom is here, his two scouts will no doubt wander in as well. Aristotle is a blue Parisian; he will typically announce his presence by singing from beneath the big lilac bush out there. But Asmodaios—” He paused to flash me a look of dark foreboding.

  Virginia raised the handkerchief to her mouth and giggled softly.

  “You will not see our black Asmodaios,” Poe said, “until he has wrapped himself around your face. By then his mouth will be pressed to yours, and you will feel your life force being sucked away…”

  Even in the faltering light I could see how wide were Poe’s eyes, how riveting. I sat paralyzed. Then Mrs. Clemm broke the spell with a loud pshaw.

  “Now, Eddie,” she scolded, “you will give the boy night tremors.”

  I turned to her. “Is he talking about another cat or something worse?”

  “He’s just a stringy old tomcat, don’t you worry. But he does like to sneak up on a person sleeping and curl up underneath your chin. Which wouldn’t be so bad if he wasn’t so black and invisible in the night, and if his breath didn’t reek of bird eggs and fetor.”

  Virginia said with a devilish smile, “You had better sleep with a blanket over your head tonight, Augie.”

  It was how I always slept in any case, with just a tiny opening for my mouth to take in air. That night, however, I resolved to try sleeping without access to fresh oxygen.

  Soon dusk relented to full twilight, and it was then a raucous and wild sound came shooting like arrows from the woods behind the house.

  “Our local murder has returned,” Poe announced.

  Mrs. Clemm tsk-tsked him again. “A murder is the term for a flock of crows,” she told me. “They come in this time every evening to take roost in the high branches. You will hear them again at sunrise.”

  “I dreamed of crows,” Virginia said. “This afternoon when I was napping. I just now remembered it.”

  “Did you, beloved?” Poe said. He kept one hand atop the cat’s head, the other covering his wife’s small hand.

  “They were sitting at my window,” she told him. “That’s all there was to the dream. A half dozen of them all lined up on the casement, their beaks pressed hard against the glass.”

  “It’s because of the bread and seed you lay on the windowsill,” he said.

  “I feed the finches and chickadees. I have no desire to attract the lank one to my window. He will come soon enough without invitation.”

  Poe made a sound at this, a kind of shhshhshhshhshh with his teeth tightly clenched.

  “What’s the line from Macbeth?” Virginia asked. “‘The raven himself is hoarse that croaks the fatal entrance.’”

  “Of Duncan,” Poe said. “Of Duncan. ‘Of Duncan under my battlements.’”

  Even I, too illiterate to know who were the Macbeth and Duncan of whom they spoke, could not miss the trembling shadows in Virginia’s voice. Nor could I miss the pall that descended on the porch in the aftermath, all three of them silent, all motionless but for Poe who with eyes closed tightly now shook his head back and forth as if negating the image of something cruel that had raced before his eyes.

  And I felt something more tangible as well, a shudder through my company as real as a Canadian gust. As was his way, Poe attempted to sweep the chill aside with his wide broom of erudition.

  “In fact Corvus is a most admirable bird,” he said. “It inhabits arctic ice floes and the kiln of the deserts and everywhere in between. Its plumage shines like ink,” he said, “and helps it to fly with liquid strokes. It writes an ancient mystery across the sky. The variety of its language finds equal only with our own.

  “William the Conqueror carried a standard emblazoned with the Corvus corax,” he said. He leaned slightly forward in his seat now and gazed into the distance down the hallway of deep night. “Lord Odian learned the secrets of the world from a pair of birds—Thought and Memory—that rode upon his shoulders. The prophet Elijah was fed by ravens sent by God.”

  He paused for a moment, and when he continued, his voice dropped in pitch, as if he were reluctant to acknowledge the rest, to utter it, yet could not but yield to the compulsion to view both sides. “But it’s true,” he said, “that the dark-coated one is also an outlaw. It repeatedly ignored the ban on lovemaking levied against all inhabitants of the Ark. And when Noah sent a raven forth to search for land, the bird did not return.”

  “Because the world was filled with bodies,” Mrs. Clemm observed. “A feast for the raven. Only Noah and his eight were saved.”

  “Only those nine were chosen to be saved,” Poe corrected her. “A few of the Nephilim survived as well. The godforsaken giants.”

  She sniffed at this, and shook her head once. I could not tell if she agreed with him or not. As for me, I believed every word he uttered. With every remark he stretched my universe and made it larger, more wondrous and mysterious.

  “In any case,” Poe said, “the Corvus has been revered the world over. The Chinese, the Greeks, the Vikings, even our own mysterious Indians—all revered the Corvus as both a god and a rogue, as keeper and disseminator of otherworldly wisdom.”

  “So perhaps my dream was more than merely that,” Virginia said with a small but satisfied smile.

  Poe caressed her hand. “It is the waking dreams from which true edification comes. Only then do one’s physical senses cease to impinge, which allows for a truer if fleeting glimpse of a world superior to the corporeal. A glimpse of the outer world of Eternity.”

  And here suddenly was another world I had never paused to imagine, the world of Poe’s small porch whereon all things were alien to me, the words and phrases never before heard and so poorly understood by me that they acted on my brain as an intoxicant. But not giddy-making or vertiginous. All their talk of crows and dreams and invisible Eternity; the cat purring in Poe’s lap and the glutinous purr from the back of Virginia’s throat; Poe’s stillness juxtaposed upon his all but throbbing discontent; Mrs. Clemm’s huge and mighty gentleness; and not least of all my own place in this tableau, invited guest, half-informed outsider drawn close in the wake of a floating corpse—it all conspired now, all elements combined, the deepening night and the amorous fireflies and the last harsh cawing cries, it all synthesized into a bleak intimation, a whispered but unwavering voice disclosing that I had blundered into something beautiful but awful here, something beguiling, a bog of tragedy that would inevitably entomb us all.

  7

  I slept deeply for the first half of the night, as if drugged by the company of three sober and unarmed individuals. But as always I awoke with a start in the darkest hour and sat up quickly, arms wrapped about my head to ward off the blow that this time did not come. Gradually I became aware of the glow through the metal plates of the kitchen stove, the red moon rings and scimitars of ember light, and I recollected then just where I was—on a pallet not far from the stove, though far enough that I would not roll over and against it, Mrs. Clemm’s usual space, I think—and by degrees the hoary fear sifted out of me. I could hear Mrs. Clemm’s heavy snores, a rumble as calming to me as a lullaby.

  Before giving myself over to sleep again, I rolled toward the bedroom door, saw it closed tight, and imagined, erroneously, Poe and Virginia lying side by side on the soft mattress, in a posture both affectionate and decorous, not in the kind of vulgar tangle my mother and her visitors seemed to prefer, a knot of naked flesh and stink and clotted cl
othing. This too I found soothing, this idealized image of connubial repose, and so I was able to close my eyes a while longer, awaking just before dawn to see Poe wrapped in a dun-colored damask banyan, a faded old overcoat with flared skirts, seated at the table and bent over a manuscript. A candle illuminated the right side of his face as he scribbled down his thoughts.

  When I awoke the final time, it was to the vibration of Mrs. Clemm’s movements as she built up the fire in the stove. The room was pink with morning, redolent with the tannic perfume of a pot of boiling tea, and as humid as a Turkish bath. Besides the tea there were two large kettles of water bubbling and hissing on the stove.

  Mrs. Clemm spotted me wiggling deeper into the pocket of blankets. She was on me in a flash, stripping the blanket away and spilling me out of my cocoon.

  “Smelled it coming, didn’t you?” she said with a grin.

  “I figured it was just a matter of time.”

  She held out a hand to me. “Cleanliness is next to godliness.”

  “Neither of which I ever claimed to be.”

  “Dirt is the devil’s playground.”

  “What’s wrong with a little fun now and then?”

  She laughed at this but hauled me to my feet all the same. “You’ll find it waiting for you out on the porch,” she said. “You better hurry if you don’t want the rest of New York waking up to see you naked as a baby. And do it right, young man, or I will do it right myself.”

  I could easily have kept on going when I walked out her door, could have raced down the lane and avoided that steaming washtub altogether, but that I had spotted a block of salt pork waiting near the stove, poised beside the bag of cornmeal and the crock of apple butter already fetched from the springhouse, and at that moment I would have leapt into an icy stream were that the ultimatum.

  “There’s some clean clothes out there too,” she told me. “Leave your old ones on the porch. They’ll be good for keeping the weevils out of the cabbage.”

  The moment I was outside, she probably flew to my blankets to pick through them for fleas and lice, but I could never resent her fastidiousness; she was as generous with goodness as she was stingy with dirt. Besides, my brains were in my stomach, and this, coupled with the crust of dirt I wore everywhere except on my hands, rendered her zealotry nothing short of practical.

  Never before had I faced water so early in the day, but face it I did, squeamishly at first, then gluttonously, chortling and splashing until the porch boards were as slick as my carcass. Mrs. Clemm came out midway to pour another blistering kettle of water over my head—a warning to the lice, I imagine, before she applied the bar of lye soap. I squirmed and complained, of course, but I loved every abrasive thrust and pull of her fingers through my hair.

  “Breakfast in ten minutes,” she finally said. “And don’t you come waltzing in buck naked either.”

  The trousers she left for me had once been Poe’s, mended and patched so many times that less than half the material was original cloth. She must have risen early to cut and hem the cuffs and take in the waistline. The blouse was of white poplin and carried the vague scent of lilacs. I was both thrilled and chagrined to imagine this same blouse once distended by Virginia’s bosom. The undergarments too—I preferred not to think about who else might have worn them previous to my pulling them on.

  Virginia slept late and did not join us for breakfast. Poe came to the table in his banyan and saw me freshly scrubbed and said, “Who’s this?”

  “That’s Master Dubbins,” said Mrs. Clemm.

  “I believe you are mistaken, Muddy. Master Dubbins is a colored boy and at least two inches taller than this pink fellow.”

  “Then I don’t know who this one is,” she said. “Except that he smells a whole lot sweeter than the last one that was here.”

  Later, when Poe returned to his bedroom to dress for the day, she pushed a broom into my hands. “Watch you don’t miss the corners,” she said. “And do both rooms, please.”

  I went to work happily, almost moronically content. If half my little soul, as Tennyson said, was dirt, that half had long evaporated off the floorboards on the porch. What remained had been swollen to twice its normal size by cracklin’ bread, salt pork, oatmeal with apple butter, and a beneficence I had never dared to imagine for myself.

  Meanwhile I swept to the noises that soon issued from the bedroom, Virginia’s fit of coughing upon awakening, Poe’s gentle inquiry in response to it. I did not then know that she would cough like this every morning, as well as once or twice during the day, and just as vociferously again at night, and so my thoughts were on Poe instead and on the alchemy he practiced, this prestidigitation called writing.

  “He always get up in the middle of the night to write?” I asked.

  “It’s not unusual,” said Mrs. Clemm.

  “He’s working on the newspaper story, you think?”

  She shook her head. “Mr. Poe is a very great writer. A critic of literature. A poet as well.”

  “Is that for true?”

  “His work has been published in numerous periodicals. Before moving here he was the editor of a highly esteemed journal in Richmond, the Southern Literary Messenger.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  She cast a cocked eye in my direction. “I hope and expect that you will subdue your colorful language while in my presence, Augie.”

  “I thought I did.”

  “You must try a little harder, please.”

  “What if I say danged instead?”

  She shook her head.

  “How about blasted?”

  Another chiding look.

  “I guess I can’t think of no other way to say it then.”

  “You could say ‘My my, isn’t that interesting!’”

  I giggled so hard I had to steady myself with the broom.

  Mrs. Clemm pretended to be in a pucker, but I caught the corner of her mouth twitching.

  “So if he’s so all important,” I asked, “why ain’t he rich?”

  At this she flinched. Her smile evaporated.

  A moment later Poe surprised me from the bedroom doorway. “Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,” he said.

  “Which means something, I suppose, though I don’t know what.” I said this fairly quickly and without much interest in pursuing the conversation, for I was straining then for a fuller glimpse of Virginia still supine on her bed. I glimpsed too a Hitchcock chair on the window side of the bed, the chair pulled close to the bed, and slung over the chair a patchwork quilt and Poe’s banyan, and only one bolster on the bed and this under Virginia’s head, and somehow I knew with a glance that this marriage was in yet another way unlike those I had witnessed before.

  Poe must have asked me a question to which I failed to respond, for he then eased shut the bedroom door and told me, “No matter. Latin is a dead language anyway. Good for nothing but a bit of ostentation from time to time.”

  He winked at Mrs. Clemm then, and she crossed quickly to brush a speck of lint off his shoulder. “Fortune awaits,” she told him and kissed his cheek.

  He held her close and patted the small of her back. “On the wings of your faith, sweet Muddy.”

  I thought for a moment they might embrace and kiss, their posture was that intimate. But then he turned and, striding toward the door, announced, “To work, Master Dubbins?”

  “I’m ready.”

  “Might I suggest you leave the broom behind?”

  He retrieved a slender satchel of cracked brown cowhide from behind a chair and was soon out the door. I followed at a gallop.

  The morning smelled of dew and apples, and I swelled myself with the scent. The crows’ aubade, the sweep of the sky, the chit and buzz of insects—it all struck me as remarkable in its newness, the incunabula of an unexpected grace. One of Poe’s cats watched us from the t
all grass; its green eyes glinting from the shadows made my smile even wider.

  But we were barely down the lane before Poe’s stride faltered. A weariness came into his limbs and into his eyes—as if he had only been feigning jauntiness.

  We walked awhile longer before I spoke. “You got up too early, I think.”

  He offered me a sidelong smile.

  “What was it you were writing on?”

  “A poem,” he said. “A villanelle.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “There are but two fit subjects for poetry. Love and death.”

  “Must be a good one whatever it is. Mrs. Clemm says you’re a genius at poem writing.”

  Another wistful and broken smile. “Some days you wake with honey in your mouth. Some days bile.”

  Even to a boy it was clear he was not happy with himself, more inclined that morning to see the shadows than the sunlight. In time I would realize that this was his gift as much as it was the burden that would destroy him. He heard the groan of life in common things that other men scarcely noticed—a tree bent in the wind, a floorboard creaking, a trodden stair, a door eased shut, a bedspring, a house at night. He heard the sigh of life in leaf rustle, wing flutter, the flicker of gaslights, in pulling on his trousers, dragging a brush through his hair. There were times too when a trickle of stream spoke to him, the rain tumbling off roof shingles, a trill of laughter, steam from a teakettle, the way Virginia sipped her soup.

  In all this and more, he also found the pleasures of life, small pleasures, strophes, moments when the ubiquitous groans and sighs became almost comic to him, a cosmic joke. But this surcease never prevailed and scarcely lingered. He heard the darkness of approaching night, the rasp of Virginia’s breath, and soon he was attuned once more to life’s chorus of protest, its murmured song of misery.

  Not until the palaces of Broadway rose into view did he break our silence. He thrust his chin down the avenue. “There are men in this city doing masterful work,” he told me, apropos of nothing but his own hoarded thoughts. “Men who at this very minute are alone in their rooms and composing words that will ring through the ages. The poems and tales and philosophies that will lend sustenance and elucidation to the souls of humankind.”