The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel (15 page)

"Well, this has been most helpful, Mr. Poe. You'll need to go off to parade now, and I'm expected at Captain Hitchcock's, so I'll just--"

I turned to find him kneeling in the grass. His face tilted down. Muttering like a crow.

"What is it, Mr. Poe?"

"I saw them from the roof," he said. "They didn't fit, you see. So I didn't..." His voice trailed off into more muttering.

"I'm not quite clear yet, Mr. Poe."

"Scorch marks!" he cried. "Quickly, now!"

He tore a page from my notebook and spread it across the grass and began shading the page with the pencil, in brisk sweeping motions that soon filled the paper--or nearly filled it. For when he raised the paper to the light, we could see, like a message painted on a misty window:

"It looks like... SHJ," read Poe. "Society of..."

Oh, yes, we ran through all the societies we could think of. Sororities. Schools, spaniels. An ungodly time we spent there, kneeling in the grass, combing our brains.

"Hold off," Poe said suddenly.

He squinted at the paper and, in a low voice, said, "If the individual letters are reversed, mightn't we then expect the whole message to be reversed?"

At once I tore off a new page and wrote out the letters in large, bold strokes so they filled the paper from end to end.

"Jesus Christ," said Poe.

I tipped myself back into a sitting position and gave my knees a rub. Then I reached for some tobacco.
"Common enough inscription in the old days," I said. "I don't believe I've ever seen it written backward, though."

"Unless," said Poe, "someone other than Christ was being invoked. Someone directly opposite to Christ."

I was sitting in the grass, chewing my plug. Poe was studying a train of clouds. A blackbird was whistling, and a tree toad was gargling. Everything was different.

"You know," I said finally, "I've got a friend who might be of some use to us."

Poe only half glanced at me. "Is that a fact?"

"Oh yes," I said, "he's quite the expert on symbols and... rituals and the like. He's got an extensive collection of books pertaining to the--to the..."

"The occult," Poe answered.

And after a few more seconds of chewing, I allowed as how occult probably was the right word for it.

"Fascinating fellow," I said. "My friend, I mean. Name of Professor Pawpaw."

"What an extraordinary name!"

I explained to Poe that Pawpaw was Indian by birth, or rather half Indian and, oh, a quarter French and God knows what else. And Poe asked me then if he was a genuine professor. And I said well he's a scholar, no doubt about that, in great demand among society ladies. Mrs. Livingston once paid him twelve silver dollars for the pleasure of a single hour of his time.

Poe gave a negligent shrug. "I hope you have some means of paying him, then," he said. "I'm in arrears myself, and Mr. Allan won't even send me money for mathematical instruments."

I told him not to worry, I would take care of it. Then I bid him good day and watched his slender figure picking its way (with no great speed) down the Plain.

What I never got around to telling him was this (and didn't the very thought of it make me laugh out loud as I walked back to the hotel?): I had already found the best possible compensation for Professor Pawpaw. I would bring him the head of Edgar A. Poe.

Narrative of Gus Landor

12

November 3rd

Professor Pawpaw's cottage is only a league or so inland from mine, but it lies at the end of a steep climb, and the path is so overgrown you must, fifty yards short of the house, abandon your horse and hack your way through a lane of cedar bushes. You are rewarded then with a piazza wreathed in jasmine and sweet honeysuckle. Oh, and a dead pear tree, with a long cloak of bignonia blossoms and, dangling from every arm, wicker birdcages full of mockingbirds, orioles, bobolinks, and canaries, all of them singing from dusk to dawn without cease. No obvious harmony, but if you listen long enough, either the jangling will take on a pattern or (this is Pawpaw's theory) you'll give up on pattern altogether.

Now, if Poe had got his way, we'd have made the trip to Pawpaw's that very night. I said we'd never find the place in the dark. Besides, I wanted to give the professor a bit of warning. That very night, an Academy messenger was dispatched with a note from me.

The next morning, Poe woke up, chewed a piece of chalk, and then presented his white tongue to Dr. Marquis, who sent him off with a fistful of calomel powders and a note excusing him from duties. Poe then squirmed through a loose fence board in the woodyard and met me just south of the guard post, where we mounted Horse and set off on the high road from Buttermilk Falls.

It was a chill, clouded morning. The only heat seemed to come from the trees, rearing up from pale granite ledges, and from the dead leaves that shone out of pools and glens and beds of spongy moss. The path rose quickly as we crept round bulging faces of stone, and Poe yammered in my ear about Tintern Abbey and Burke's principle of the sublime, and Nature is America's truest poet, Mr. Landor, and the more he talked the more I felt the dread wrapping me round. Here I was, smuggling a cadet off the reservation--knowing full well that Hitchcock and his officers made a point of inspecting barracks quarters every day. Woe to the cadet who reported himself "sick" and failed to answer the double knock on the door!

Well, rather than think about those consequences, I told Poe all I knew about Pawpaw.

His mother was a Huron squaw, his father a French-Canadian arms trader. At a young age he was taken in by a tribe of Wyandot Indians, who were massacred in short order by purposeful Iroquois. The lone survivor, Pawpaw was rescued by a Utica bone dealer who gave him a Christian name and raised him on strict terms: church twice a day; catechism and hymns before bed; seventy Bible verses a week. (In all respects, it was the same as my own upbringing, except that Pawpaw was allowed to play cards.) After six years, the bone dealer fell prey to scrofula. The boy then landed in the home of a charity-minded textile titan, who died soon after and left Pawpaw six thousand a year. Pawpaw promptly reclaimed his Indian name and removed himself to a Jersey-freestone house in Warren Street, where he issued monographs on alcoholism, manumission, henbane--and the reading of the human skull. Just as his fame was cresting, he removed himself again, this time to the Highlands. He communicates now mostly by post, bathes twice a year, and regards his past with a certain wryness. Once, upon being called a noble savage, Pawpaw was heard to say, "Why spoil it with the noble part?"

All that Sunday school, you see: he needs to shock people. Which was why, maybe, he'd prepared for our coming by hanging a dead rattlesnake over the door and strewing the front walk with frog bones. The bones crunched softly beneath our feet and stuck in the crevices of our boots so that we were still picking them out when Pawpaw appeared. Compact and heavychested, he stood in the doorway with an absent air, as though he'd come out simply to gauge the weather. We stared at him, for Pawpaw is made for staring--it's his cause and his effect. The first time I came, he greeted me in full Indian regalia, waving a flint arrowhead. Today, for reasons beyond me or even him, he was dressed as an old Dutch farmer. Homespun coats and breeches, pewter buckles, and the most enormous shoes I have ever seen: you could have packed a man in them. The only things not quite in keeping were the eagle's claw that dangled round his neck and the skinny line of indigo that ran from his right temple to the tip of his nose (a new touch).

Slowly, those handsome hazel eyes of his began to glimmer with understanding. "Ohh!" He cut straight for Poe. Grabbed him by the arm, hauled him over the doorsill. "You were right!" the professor shouted back to me. "He's perfectly remarkable. Such an enlarged organ!"

By now, he and Poe were half running toward the parlor. Which gave me leave to stroll down the professor's front hall, to see once again the bison rug and the stuffed screech owl, the flails and harnesses hanging on the walls like museum relics. By the time I reached the parlor, a row of apples was spluttering in the hearth, Poe had been flung into a Duncan Phyfe armchair, and over him stood Pawpaw, with his silver-copper skin and potato nose, rubbing his fingertips together and proffering, in lieu of a cordial, the gapped line of his own gray teeth.

"Young man," he said. "Would you do me the favor of removing your hat?"

With some hesitation, Poe took the leather pot off his head and set it on the Brussels carpet.

"This won't hurt in the least," said the professor.

Were I meeting Pawpaw for the first time, I might have doubted. He had the trembling hands of a man pulling up his very first petticoat as he wound a length of string round the densest part of Poe's skull.

"Twenty-three inches. Not so large as I would have guessed. Clearly it is the proportions that are so shocking. Mr. Poe, how much do you weigh?"

"One hundred forty-three pounds."

"And your height?"

"Five feet eight. And one half."

"Oh, one half, is it? Now, young man, I wish to feel your head. Don't look like that. There will be no pain, unless rendering up your soul through the medium of fingers be agony. You need only remain still, can you do that?"

Too cowed even to nod, Poe merely blinked. The professor drew in two draughts of air and suffered his twitching fingers to merge with that virgin scalp. A sigh, the barest breath of air, emerged from his gray lips.

"Amativeness," intoned Pawpaw. "Moderate."

He lowered his ear to Poe's cranium, like a farmer sounding for gophers, while his fingers threshed through the matted black hair.

"Inhabitiveness," said the professor, more loudly. "Small. Adhesiveness: full. Intellectual faculties: large--no, very large." A smile from Poe there. "Love of approbation: full." A smile from me. "Philoprogenitiveness: very small."
On it went, Reader. Cautiousness, benevolence, hope: trait by trait, that skull was forced to yield up its secrets. Yield them to the world, I should say, for the professor roared out each finding like an auctioneer; only when his dark-grained baritone began to taper away did I know he was coming to a close.

"Mr. Poe, you have the bumps of a rootless disposition. The portion of your skull devoted purely to animal propensities--by which I mean the lower posterior and the lower lateral-- that area is somewhat less developed. However, secretiveness and combativeness are both highly developed. I discern in your character a violent and almost certainly fatal division."

"Mr. Landor," said Poe, quailing a little. "You never told me the professor was a seer."

"Repeat that!" barked Pawpaw.

"You... you never..."

"Yes, yes."

"Told me the--"

"Richmond!" cried Pawpaw.

Pinned to his chair, Poe began to stammer. "That's--that's true, I am..."

"And if I'm not mistaken," I put in, "he spent a few years in England."

Poe's eyes were fanned wide now.

"The Reverend John Bransby of Stoke Newington," I explained. "That noted authority on spelling."

Pawpaw clapped his hands. "Ah, very good. Excellent, Landor! The British overtone chimes so easily with the woodland notes of the South. Let me see now, what else can we say about this young man? He is an artist. With those hands, he can be nothing else."

"An artist of sorts," said Poe, blushing.

"He is also..." A moment of suspension before Pawpaw thrust his index finger into the young man's face and cried, "An orphan!"

"That is also true," said Poe quietly. "My parents--my real parents-- died in a fire. The Richmond theater fire of eighteen-eleven."

"And what business did they have going to the theater?" growled Pawpaw.

"They were actors," said Poe. "Very fine actors. Renowned."

"Ah, renowned," said the professor, turning away in disgust. Some awkwardness then. Poe in his chair, achy with resentment. The professor stalking the room, trying to blow all the pathos away. And me: waiting. Until the quiet had stretched so far and no more, at which point I said:

"Professor, I was wondering if we might come to the business at hand."

"So be it," he said, frowning.

He made us tea first of all. It came in a warped silver pot and tasted like tar: spiky on the tongue, gluey in the throat. I drank three cups, one after another, like shots of whiskey. What choice did I have? Pawpaw kept no spirits here.

"Now, then, Professor," I said. "What are we to make of this?"

I brought out the drawing Poe and I had made, of the triangle within the circle, and laid it on Pawpaw's table, which was no more than a steamer trunk laid over with pressed tin.

"Well," said the professor, "it depends on whom you talk to. Summon an ancient Greek, an alchemist, and he would tell you the circle is an ourobouros, a symbol of eternal unity. Summon a medieval thinker"--his eyes swerved upward--"he would say it is both creation and the void toward which creation must always tend." His eyes settled once more on the paper. "This, however--this can only be a magic circle."

Poe and I exchanged a look.

"Yes, yes," continued Pawpaw. "I remember seeing one in Le Veritable Dragon Rouge. If I recall aright, the magician would stand... there ... in the triangle."

"The magician alone?" I asked.

"Oh, he might have a group of assistants, all of them inside the triangle with him. Candles on either side, and in front--there, let us say--a brazier. Light everywhere, a festival of light."

I closed my eyes, trying to imagine it.

"The people who performed these ceremonies," said Poe. "Would they have been Christians?"

"Often, yes. Magic was not solely the province of darkness. In your own drawing, as you can see, you have the Christian inscription--"

His finger was resting now on the inverted JHS, and you might have thought the letters were speaking straight into his skin, for he snatched his hand away and rose to his feet and backed off two paces. A hard peevish cast came over his face.

"Dear God, Landor, why did you let me go on? You think I have all day? Come!"