On that note Poe bolted from the editorial offices of the Gentleman’s Magazine, leaving his ex-boss Bilious Billy staring after him, his beady little eyes swallowed by his fleshy face.
Poe’s desire is to answer to no one but himself. To sit as his own arbiter. To his thinking, to coin one’s brain into silver, at the nod of a master, is the hardest task on earth. He loathes to work for another imbecile again. He will tell you the greatest number of those who hold high place in our poetical literature are absolute ninnies. Nincompoops. Name your names: Longfellow, Cooper, Irving, Halleck, Bryant. Bloated reputations, derivative aesthetics, undeserving practitioners.
The laudation of the unworthy is to the worthy the most bitter of all wrongs, Poe would tell you. Yet no man living loved the praise of others better than he. So he trods the smoothly cobbled streets of Philadelphia on his way to Central Station, to some opportunity, to the unknown. Head down, keeping his eyes upon the ground, studying the herringbone of cobblestones, the stereotomy of the streets. Benjamin Franklin once said the Philadelphian could always be told from the New Yorker. New York was so crudely cobbled the poor Gothamite found himself listing merely from habit while walking fair Quakerdom’s smooth stones.
Poe himself was fairly listing at that very moment, with each step the momentary shreds of optimism and resolve falling away from him, him fairly falling, falling into that strange beaten posture of his, as if fate has had her final say and there is nothing more to be done.
During the remainder of a dull, dark, and soundless day, he goes on, his West Point greatcoat pulled close. Philadelphia so quiet that day, as every day, striking him as Sunday.
The wind is shifting. Above him the cloud cover is shredding. As he walks the sky splits apart, revealing slivers of bright blue and streaks of glistening yellow sunshine. He straightens hopefully to his full height. The crack of blue sky and warming golden rays no more than a mere wink and nod for him, him rejecting any signs of any good in the cosmos, as transient as a glint of gold in the ether.
He coughs.
He removes a frayed clean handkerchief from his pocket and presses it to his lips. God save her. God, please, save his innocent little wifey.
Somewhere Deep in the Distance Stereotomy
Somewhere 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