“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.”
High 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