The Blackest Bird (10 page)

S
omewhere deep in the distance, far away, yet perhaps surprisingly near, as the train slowly chugs forward out of Central Station, Philadelphia, picks up speed, and rumbles out of the city, bound for points north-northeast and New York, six hours away, the poet hears bells. His eyes widen with their knell.

He had miscalculated. As he stood in the vast lobby, inexorably alone, at the ticket booth, a sodden man in round steel-rimmed glasses staring out at him from behind the cage, he realized he had not sufficient funds for fare to Hoboken and still enough coin to cross the Hudson on the ferry.

He begged the clerk for consideration, received none, had been forced to settle for a ticket to the penultimate station along the line instead, as far as his money would carry him, holding in abeyance his last few pennies, just enough for ferry fare. He would make his way somehow from railroad junction to boat quay, even if he had to walk. He was a good walker. He had walked before.

The train, steaming over the flatlands, past Camden, past Trenton, is dark in the afternoon with the day’s ill weather. Night is descending. As it grows darker still, the cast of oil lamps behind sconces festooned on hardwood paneling causes eerie shadows to play.

His notebook is open. All around in the dim light his fellow passengers pore over the penny papers, the popular magazines. Women knit, crochet. He waits for the music of the muse to seize his hand, his ear, his heart, to drive him down, down into his seat, with his pen, the paper, the pot of blood-colored ink laid out in front of him, and to lead him, rescue him from those death bells clanging. What tale of terror their turbulence tells!

The brain, that organic jelly that resides inside the skull at its core, this is his difficult organ. His head is oversized. Outsized. It is literally a great thing. A massive entity unto itself. It resides on a slender stalk, a slender neck upon a slender body. The head a great weight. If only the stem and root were stronger. He falls into a deep slumber.

Sometime later, confused and disoriented, he is awakened by the booming voice of the conductor, a bewhiskered man in pressed blue serge, announcing the station stop, “Paterson!” and without thinking he scrambles to his feet and abruptly gets off from the coach.

He stands on the platform and peers into the darkness as the train steams away, leaving him with dense unrest and the clattering din of iron wheels.

Standing in the cold and damp, breaking away from the long empty tracks, he surveys the road. He looks for what? A dray operator or teamster who will be good enough to carry him to the Colt gun factory.

This, he suddenly realizes, is the reason he has come awake in this desolate town. Here lies Colt’s Paterson factory, the manufacturing plant of the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company, holder of Colt’s patent, maker of the Colt Paterson revolver. If Samuel Colt is on premises, if he will listen to reason, perhaps, just perhaps, he might increase Poe’s rate of remuneration for the word portrait of his brother.

As if in a sign that all is right, a wagon turns onto the street some one hundred yards away.

Poe starts. Signals.

The driver, a gaunt man in black, head like a skull, stares at him as
he nears, reins in, says nothing at first, just staring, and finally says, “Going up the Old Gun Mill,” his voice a deep resonance. “If you’re getting in, get in. Don’t have all day,” showing teeth like tombstones.

Poe throws up his satchel. Dust rises and falls. He climbs up, takes his place next to the man. He says, “Thank you, thank you. You are very kind,” in his soft Virginia accent, looks back over his shoulder at the empty flatbed, save now his cracked leather bag, the patina of dust settled back down.

The wagon lurches forward.

For a good long while the two ride in silence, their eyes fixed in front of them on the four roan horses’ undulating haunches, the steam rising from the old animals’ faded strawberry flanks.

“Picking up a load a them there revolving guns,” the driver eventually says. “Bring ’em down Bayonne. Then back up the block cutter to Weehawken. Pick up a load of cobblestone.”

Poe brightens. “Weehawken? Would you object, sir, if I were to ride with you as far?”

“Don’t mind if you don’t.”

Colt’s gun works occupied a group of buildings, an old silk mill, on the bank of the Passaic River at the intersection of Van Houten and Mill streets.

To Poe the factory seems surprisingly quiet, but then again it was late in the day, after 7 p.m. Poe enters the general reception area, where he is met by a clerk. He requests Colonel Colt and is asked his name. Poe gives it. A few moments later the clerk returns and leads him upstairs to a large office overlooking the river. Several pistols and muskets adorn the wall.

Colt is on his feet. “Mr. Poe? My pleasure. Have we met, sir?” He is a big man with abundant facial hair and shaggy muttonchops, holding a big segar, although it is not burning. His eyes, deep-set, are somewhat crooked in their twin sockets. Poe has the curious if uneasy sense that Colt is making use of these gleaming twin orbs in some undescribed, aggressive pursuit. To peer inside him?

“No,” Poe says, “we have not met. But you know who I am?”

“But of course. My brother holds you in such high regard. Anything I can do for you, Poe. Anything. You are on your way to see John right now, is that it? I know he has been expecting you.”

“Yes, I am. Sir, this is embarrassing, forgive me,” he says. “I understand we have made an agreement, and I am very grateful for it, and, I assure you, it is not my habit not to abide by the agreements that I make, but in this case, is there any way you can see in your heart, Mr. Colt, to improve my contract? Monetarily, I mean. You see my wife is ill, and right now I am to be paid fifty dollars for my work, which I emphasize is a fair price, but fifty more would make life that much more easy for me at present given my circumstances. I am sure you see.”

Colt laughs. The mention of money has drawn his attention. “My dear Poe,” he booms. “Money is the bane of us all, is it not? Our scourge. Never enough. Never.” He laughs, good-naturedly, a bass crescendo. “You do know, sir, that I am in bankruptcy?”

Poe’s eyes widen, turn down. “No, I did not know.”

“If it was a gun you were after, a fine repeating revolver, nothing would be easier. I’m sorry to say money is another story. I thought I would have a fat contract with the army, but it has all gone to hell.”

He shakes his large head sadly.

“I’m on the verge of going under here, Poe. To be frank, your timing could not be worse. What with John at the hangman’s door, and my munitions business what it is. I’ve been blowing things up since I was a boy, Poe. You’ve probably been writing them down just as long. How does that strike you for irony? Look here, Poe, this is the complete outfit.”

On his desk he opens a cloth-lined wooden case. Inside, the blue-finished gun is held in place with small wire loops. He removes it. In script is marked on the barrel: “The Patent Arms M’g Co. Paterson, N. J. Colt’s Patent,” and on the cylinder “Colt.” The only adornment Poe can see is an engraving around the cylinder. “We offer two choices
of etching,” Colt explains. “The first is of a centaur with two revolvers in hand, killing two horsemen, as you see here. The other depicts the scene of a stagecoach holdup. When you buy the gun, you get a complete case outfit. Here a combined bullet and powder flask. It loads five measured charges of powder and five bullets simultaneously. In addition there is a magazine-capping device that holds fifty percussion caps that feed singularly, one at a time. Also included is a bullet mold, a brass cleaning rod, and this tool that combines several uses, including screwdriver, hammer, and rammer. All of that plus an extra cylinder to be carried ready-loaded, thus giving ten shots without reloading.”

“Ingenious.”

“I can’t give them away. You, sir, won’t even take one.”

“I have no one to shoot.”

“Come, come, come, there must be someone,” Colt booms.

“I would need to think about it.” Poe smiles weakly.

“The Texas Rangers in their quest against the Mexicans have been my best customer, but the United States Army in Florida have declined. A man can shoot fifty shots in ten minutes with this weapon, Poe. Fifty! But I cannot make money.”

As he left the offices Poe could still hear the reverberation of Colonel Colt’s big voice as if it were an echo, even though the only echo to be noted was in Poe’s head.
Fifty
, he could hear Samuel Colt saying.
Fifty. Fifty shots in ten minutes. But I cannot make money. Fifty
dollars? My brother, you say?

“I was only hoping for something more,” Poe had pleaded. “Given my straits. Perhaps not fifty. But even ten will do.”

“Ten?” Colt again shook his craggy head. “You can’t be serious.”

In the end he settles for three dollars.

Poe hurries back down to the loading platform. The drayman’s wagon is now fully loaded with oblong boxes, the words “Colt’s Repeating Carbines, Property of the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company, Paterson, New Jersey” stenciled across the slats.

Poe climbs aboard and they are on their way.

Again, for a time, nothing is said. As they clatter over the cobbled city streets of Paterson, a one-sided but animated discussion of inner-ity travel and paving bricks develops. Poe speaks of stones made smooth for stereotomy, his personal aversion to round cobbles.

The drayman’s response is to Poe surprisingly negligible, and there follows another period of silence where both men refrain from talk, only the renewed clop, clop, clop of horses’ hooves and the rattle of metal-treaded wheels.

“I am a poet,” Poe tells him after some distance, aware of the gauntness of the man. “My name is Poe. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

The driver grunts, shakes his head. “Never.”

“I am well known in some circles.”

The driver, who Poe decides may or may not be a revenant, spits a stream of black tobacco juice. “Not mine.” He snaps the reins. His horses break into a trot for a few steps, then resume their lugubrious pace.

“I only mention it because you said Weehawken and my latest story is inspired by an event that took place there, in Weehawken.”

The driver casts eyes upon him but says nothing.

“Have you never heard of Mary Rogers?” Poe continues. “The beautiful segar store girl found floating in the Hudson River shallows a year ago last summer. I have written about her, a story set in Paris, but the parallels to the crime in New York are prescient. The authorities think it is a gang, but I point my finger at an acquaintance. The same man—”

“If you don’t mind me asking,” the drayman interrupts, “what have you to do with it?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all,” Poe retreats. “I knew her. I knew Mary. Something is telling me to stand on the spot where she died.”

The gaunt man turns his black eyes again on Poe. Poe holds the gaze, intrigued, as if looking into another world through the glistening orbs. Their beady coal beam seems to bore into the poet, save there
is not a pittance of expression on his cadaver-like face. The driver turns back now to the motion of the horses’ huge hindquarters.

To Poe’s imagination he is indeed Death’s drayman.

The teamster flicks the reins again, and the long leather traces crack across the equines’ broad backs with negligible result.

Again nothing is said for some half mile, the driver unreadable, ruminating. Finally he spits out another black stream, the bile of hell.

“If I were you, Mr. Poo,” he says, once more through those tombstone teeth, the devil’s leer, “I’d be letting the dead rest.”

H
igh Constable Jacob Hays sits beside his daughter Olga, having assumed their accustomed spots in the church pew. The Sabbath sermon is under way, and the reverend doctor, a robust man of impressive girth, is having his say. Hays looks up to study the prelate’s curiously small but bright eyes gazing paternally down on his congregation.

“Women,” the man of God shouts over the gathered heads, knowing his voice to be a magnificent instrument, “what shall we do with them? They must learn their place. Our young women, these women we care for and love, I ask you, do we dare let them find their own way in this harsh and unforgiving world? Do we dare let them have their heads? Look no further lest we forget her, poor Mary Cecilia Rogers. How far did this aggrieved maiden stray from the Lord? Who among us is prepared to answer the question? To endure the consequence? No, we must come to the fore. We, with the help of the Lord, must be their guide.”

After the service the pastor stands just outside the open double church doors on the topmost step, greeting his parishioners as they exit and descend.

Hays shakes the man’s warm, puffy hand. “Well said,” the high constable
compliments, with a wink to his daughter and only, perhaps, the slightest touch of detectable mischief.

“Do you think so?” The tiny, luminous eyes of the reverend doctor sparkle with pleasure.

“I think so,” rejoins Hays.

Olga takes her father’s arm and they descend the church steps together, the reverend doctor having failed to even register Olga’s mixed look of scorn and pity.

Old Hays smiles at her. “Don’t think I’ll be permitting you out again,” he teases somberly. “You’ll not have another job outside the home on my watch.”

“Oh, Papa,” she laughs gaily. She has always very much enjoyed her father’s sense of humor, rare as it sometimes was.

“It’s a different age, I’ll give the reverend doctor credit for recognizing that much. But somehow I don’t think him standing up there lecturing, ‘Don’t do this!’ and ‘Don’t do that!’ is going to put an end to it.”

“No, I think not,” she agrees.

“Still, it’s the fashion of the time, just as the reverend doctor says.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Or beginning to be such.”

“All you have to do is look at me, your own daughter, if you have any doubt, Mr. Jacob Hays.”

He couldn’t or wouldn’t argue.

“Shall we walk?” he offers instead. “It’s a beautiful day, and I prefer a lively jaunt to the sedentary carriage right now.”

“We certainly can walk, Papa. I prefer the physical exertion myself.”

“High Constable?”

Old Hays knew the voice, the tone, and what it meant, too well. “Yes?”

“Sir?” The man waits. It is Sergeant McArdel, standing with Hays’ driver, Balboa. Balboa is outfitted in his Sunday best, forest green pantaloons, yellow shirt, yellow stock. Both men, McArdel and Balboa, were at attention.

As dictated by local ordinance, chains were set up at either end of streets fronting churches to keep away traffic and keep down the din during Sunday services. The Scotch Presbyterian Church on Mott Street was no exception.

The black police barouche was parked at the kerb just outside the chain link.

McArdel tipped his hat at Olga. “Morning, missy,” he says.

“Morning, Sergeant,” Olga answers.

“Sir?” McArdel turns. “I need your ear.”

“Then have it,” Hays grumbles, taking a step to the side and saying, “Excuse us, dear,” to his daughter.

With that the sergeant joins him and they walk off a little distance. “My apologies, sir, but there’s been a rather grisly discovery behind Cow Bay this morning.”

“Where?”

“In the rear alley that leads from the tenement.”

“What kind of discovery?”

“Three bodies, including a little girl.”

Hays glances over at his daughter. She is taken in rather heated conversation with the reverend doctor. Balboa is holding the carriage horse, Old Joe, by the rein.

“Do we know who they are?”

“We certainly do, sir. The Butcher Boy Ruby Pearl is one of them.”

“And the others?”

“The wife and child of Tommy Coleman, sir.”