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 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.”
