The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel (8 page)

Her voice was as flat as a table, but it didn't stop Jack de Windt. "Ohh," he moaned. "I'm a famished man, Miss Patsy."

"Mm," she said. "Hum." And passed her hands across her eyes and disappeared into the kitchen.

"What's grieving her?" I asked.

"Oh." Blind Jasper shook his head darkly. "You'll have to excuse her, Landor. She lost one of her boys."

"That so?"

"You must have heard," said Benny. "Fellow name of Fry. Once gave me a Macintosh blanket for two shots of whiskey. Not his own blanket, goes without saying. Well, the poor devil hanged himself the other night..." Casting his eyes left and right, he leaned into me and, in the loudest possible whisper, added, "What I heard? Pack of wolves tore the liver right out of his body." He straightened again, wiped a tankard with great care. "Ah, but why'm I telling you, Landor? You've been up at the Point yourself."

"Where'd you hear that, Benny?"

"The whippoorwill, I think."

The smaller the town, the faster word gets around. And Buttermilk Falls is nothing but small. Even its citizens are a mite smaller than the mean. Except for a gigantic tinplate peddler who blows in twice a year, I may well be the tallest man about.

"Whippoorwills are chatty beasts," said Blind Jasper, nodding sullenly.

"Listen, Benny," I said. "You ever talk to Fry yourself ?"

"Once or twice, is all. Poor lad needed help with his conic sections."

"Oh," said Jack, "I don't think it was his conic sections he wanted help with." He might have said more in the same line, but Patsy was coming out again, with a plate of bannocks. Shamed us into silence. Only when she passed within a foot of me did I dare to touch her hem.

"I'm sorry, Patsy. I didn't know this Fry fellow was..."

"He wasn't," she said. "Not in that way. But he wanted to be, and that has to count for something, don't you think?"

"Tell us," said Jasper, half panting. "What kept him out of your favor, Patsy?"

"Nothing he could help. But Lord, you know I like a darker coloring in a man. Red hair is all well on top, but it won't do below. It's one of my principles." She set down the plate and frowned at the floor. "I can't understand what would possess a boy to do such a thing to himself. When he's too young even to do it proper."

"What do you mean, "proper'?" I asked.

"Why, Gus, he couldn't even measure the rope right. They say it took him three hours to die."

" "They,' Patsy? Who is this "they'?"

She thought about it for some moments before lowering her original estimate. "Him," is what she said, nudging her head toward the far corner.

This was the corner farthest from Benny's fire, occupied on this particular evening by a young cadet. His musket rested against the wall behind him. His leather cap lay at the very edge of the table. His black hair was smeared with sweat, and his pale swollen head bobbed in the half shadows.

Hard to say how many rules he'd broken by coming here. Leaving the West Point reservation without authorization... visiting a place where spirituous liquors were sold... visiting said place for the purpose of drinking said liquors. Many another cadet, of course, had broken these same rules, but almost always at night, when the watchdogs were abed. This was the first time I'd seen Benny's broached in daylight.

He never saw me coming, Cadet Fourth Classman Poe. Whether it was reverie or stupor, I can't say, but I stood there a good half minute, waiting for him to lift his head, and I had about given up on him when I heard faint sounds coming from somewhere in his neighborhood: words, maybe, or spells.

"Afternoon," I said.

His head snapped back; his enormous gray eyes swiveled. "Oh, it's you!" he cried.

Half tipping his chair over, he rose and seized my hand and began pumping it.

"Dear me. Sit. Yes, sit down, won't you please? Mr. Havens! Another drink for my friend here."

"And who would be paying?" I heard Benny mutter, but the young cadet must not have heard, for he beckoned me toward him and, under his breath, said, "Mr. Havens, there..." "What's he saying about me, Landor?"

Laughing, Poe cupped his hands round his mouth. "Mr. Havens is the only congenial man in this whole godforsaken desert!"

"And it's touched I am to hear it."

There was, I should make this clear, a doubleness to everything Benny said. You had to be a long-timer to catch it: the thing said and the comment on the thing said, both happening at the same moment. Poe was not a long-timer, and so his impulse was to say his piece again-- louder.

"In this whole benighted, godforsaken ... den of... rapacious philistines. The only one, may God strike me down if I'm a liar!"

"You'll make me weep, you go on, Mr. Poe."

"And his lovely wife," said the young man. "And Patsy. The blessed... the Hebe of the Highlands!" Pleased with this coinage, he raised his glass to the woman who had inspired it.

"How many drinks would this be?" I asked, sounding uncomfortably like Sylvanus Thayer to my own ears.

"I don't recall," he said.

In fact, four empty glasses lay in formation alongside his right elbow. He caught me in the act of counting them.

"Not mine, Mr. Landor, I assure you. It appears Patsy isn't keeping the place as neat as she might. Owing to grief."

"You do seem a bit... liquid, Mr. Poe."

"You're referring, probably, to my fearfully delicate constitution. It takes but one drink to rob me of my senses. Two, and I'm staggering like a pugilist. It's a medical condition, corroborated by several eminent physicians."

"Most unfortunate, Mr. Poe."

With the curtest of nods, he accepted my sympathy.

"Now, maybe," I said, "before you start staggering, you can tell me something."

"I would be honored."

"How did you come to learn about the position of Leroy Fry's body?"

The question affected him as an insult. "Why, from Huntoon, of course. He's been spouting the news like a town crier. Perhaps someone will hang him before long."
" "Hang him," " I repeated. "I assume you don't mean to imply that someone hanged Mr. Fry?"

"I don't mean to imply anything."

"Tell me, then. Why do you think the man who took Leroy Fry's heart was a poet?"

This was a different sort of inquiry, for he was all business now. Pushing away his glass. Correcting the sleeves of his coatee.

"Mr. Landor," he said, "the heart is symbol, or it is nothing. Take away the symbol, and what do you have? A fistful of muscle, of no more aesthetic interest than a bladder. To remove a man's heart is to traffic in symbol. Who better equipped for such labor than a poet?"

"An awfully literal-minded poet, it seems to me."

"Oh, you cannot tell me, Mr. Landor, you cannot pretend that this act of savagery did not startle literary resonances from the very crevices of your mind. Shall I delineate my own train of association? I thought in the first moment of Childe Harold: "The heart will break, yet brokenly live on." My next thought was for Lord Suckling's charming song: "I prithee send me back my heart / Since I cannot have thine." The surprise, given how little use I have for religious orthodoxy, is how often I am thrown back on the Bible: "Create in me a clean heart, O God."... "A broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." "

"Then we might just as easily be seeking a religious maniac, Mr. Poe."

"Ah!" He brought his fist down on the table. "A statement of creed, is that what you're saying? Go back to the original Latin, then: the verb credere is derived from the noun cardia, meaning--meaning "heart," yes? In English, of course, heart has no predicative form. Hence we translate credo as "I believe," when literally it means "I set my heart' or "I place my heart." A matter not of denying the body, in other words, nor of transcending it, but rather of expropriating it. A trajectory of secular faith." Smiling grimly, he leaned back in his chair. "In other words, poetry."

Maybe he saw the corners of my mouth shrink, for he seemed all at once to be questioning himself... and then just as suddenly, he laughed and rapped himself on the temple.

"I neglected to tell you, Mr. Landor! I am a poet myself. Hence inclined to think as one. I cannot help myself, you see."

"Another medical condition, Mr. Poe?"

"Yes," he said, unblinking. "I shall have to donate my body to science."

It was the first time I figured him for being good at cards. For he was able to carry a bluff as far as it could go.

"I'm afraid I don't get round to poetry much," I said.

"Why should you?" he replied. "You're an American."

"And you, Mr. Poe?" "An artist. That is to say, without country."

He liked the sound of this, too. Let it revolve in the air, like a doubloon.

"Well, now," I said, standing to go. "I do thank you, Mr. Poe. You've been a great help."

"Oh!" He grabbed my arm and drew me back down. (Great force in those slender fingers.) "You'll want a second look at a cadet named Loughborough."

"Why is that, Mr. Poe?"

"At evening parade last night, I happened to notice his steps were amiss.

He repeatedly confused "left face' with "about face." This indicated to me a mind laboring under distraction. In addition, his demeanor at mess this morning was altered."

"And what would that tell us?"

"Well, if you were acquainted with him, you would know that he jabbers more than Cassandra, and to similar effect. No one listens, you see, not even his best friends. Today, he desired no listeners."

As though to dramatize the scene, he draped his face with an invisible veil and sat there, as wrapped in thought as Loughborough himself. There was this difference, though: Poe brightened in a flash, as though someone had tossed a match into him.

"I don't think I mentioned," he said. "Loughborough was, in former days, Leroy Fry's roommate. Until they had a falling out, the nature of which remains uncertain."

"Strange you should know of this, Mr. Poe."

A lazy shrug. "Someone must have told me," he said, "for how else would I know? People do tend to confide in me, Mr. Landor. I hail from a long line of Frankish chieftains. From the dawn of civilization, great trusts have been placed in us; these trusts have never been misplaced."

Once again, the head was thrown back in that accent of defiance--the gesture I remembered from the superintendent's garden. He would brave any scorn.

"Mr. Poe," I said, "you'll pardon me. I'm still getting a fix on the Academy's comings and goings, but it seems to me more than likely you're expected somewhere."

He gave me the wildest look just then, as if I'd jostled him from a fever dream. Shoved his glass away and sprang to his feet.

"What time is it?" he gasped.

"Ohhh, let's see," I said, drawing the watch from my pocket. "Twenty... twenty-two minutes past three."

No reply. "p.m.," I added.

Behind those gray eyes, something began to kindle.

"Mr. Havens," he announced, "I shall have to make good next time."

"Oh, there's always next time, Mr. Poe."

As calmly as he could, he put the leather pot back on his head, rebuck-led the yellow-brass bullet buttons, grasped his musket. Easily done: five months of cadet routine had left their stamp on him. Walking, though, this was another thing. He crossed the floor with great care, as though he were stepping over a creek bed, and upon reaching the door, he steadied himself against the lintel and, smiling, said:

"Ladies. Gentlemen. I bid you good day."

Then he flung himself through the open door.

I don't know what drove me after him. I would like to think I had some concern for his welfare, but more likely, he was a story that had not ended. And so I followed... hard on his heels... and as we passed up the stone steps, I heard a measured tramp of boots, echoing from the south and fast converging on us.

Poe was already running toward the sound. And when he reached the topmost step, he turned and gave me a fractured smile and put a finger to his lips before twining his head round the trunk of an elm tree to see what was coming up the butt road.

There came the familiar rattle of the drum and then, through the frames of the trees, the silhouettes of bodies. It was a double rank of cadets, mounting a long hill and already, by the looks of things, halfway through a day march. Slowly they came, bodies tipped forward, shoulders slumping beneath knapsacks. So exhausted they gave us not a sidelong glance as they passed, but simply threaded by, and only when they were nearly out of sight did Poe set off in pursuit, gradually shrinking the distance between him and them. Fifteen feet... ten... and at last he was abreast, marching into the very back of the column--tucking himself in as safely as an acorn--and then off he went, over the crest of the hill and into a shower of russet leaves, nothing to separate him from his fellows but his carriage, slightly stiffened, and this, too: a brief farewell flutter of his hand as he disappeared from view.

I watched a few moments longer, not quite willing to break the memory of him. Then I turned back to the tavern, where I arrived just in time to hear the Reverend Lippard say, "I'd have joined the Army myself if I'd known you could drink so regular."

Narrative of Gus Landor

7

October 29th

The next order of business was to interview Leroy Fry's intimates. Lined up, they were, outside the officers' dining rooms--grim young men with lips greased by dinner. As they came in, Hitchcock returned their salutes and said, "Stand at ease," and they clasped their hands behind their backs and pushed out their jaws and if that is "at ease," Reader, you can have it. It took them a minute or two to understand that I would be the one questioning them, and still they kept their eyes fixed on the commandant, and when the interview was finished, they asked, still looking at Hitchcock, "Will that be all, sir?" Yes, the commandant said, and they saluted and stalked out, and in this way, a dozen or so cadets passed in and out of our care in under an hour. After the last of them left, Hitchcock turned to me and said, "I'm afraid we've wasted your time."

"Why is that, Captain?"