Chapter 33

The idea is crazy, but no crazier than the circumstances. At least that’s what Walt Whitman tells himself as he steers the freight wagon north on Broadway, Mr. Poe leaning on his shoulder, clutching a bottle of whiskey. The farther north they travel, the quieter the streets and the nicer the buildings are. The trees are well groomed and part of an overall landscape design that Five Points residents have neither the time nor the resources to consider.

They had taken the freight wagon from a dairy farm a few blocks away from Mr. Poe’s residence. They’d waited behind the two-story white house until the farmer disappeared inside the barn, before they hopped into the driver’s seat and drove away, the farmer’s voice ringing out behind them.

Outside the burial ground gates now, Walt stops the horses and listens. The only sound is the wind that brushes through him like a whisper. He lights the lantern.

From the seat of the wagon, he scans the headstones until he locates a grave, the name A. STOWE carved into stone above the years 1807–1843. His sight wavers, he is suddenly dizzy, and a sickness comes over him at what they are about to do. Edgar Poe sits up straight beside him, a great sweat upon his forehead, his cheeks bloodless as chalk.

“We’ve arrived, have we?”

Whitman lifts himself down from the driver’s seat and stretches. His legs and arms are stiff already, and they haven’t yet begun the real work. From the wagon bed, he gathers the pickax and shovel.

Walt turns to Mr. Poe. “Are you coming?”

Mr. Poe takes a drink from the whiskey bottle. “I will keep a lookout while you dig.” Then he offers a drink to Walt.

Whitman shakes his head and sets the lantern on the gravestone.

Mr. Poe smiles and waves from the wagon seat. “Let me know if I can spell you in a while.”

Walt begins by loosening the dirt with the pickax, and at first, the pointed end barely penetrates the frozen ground at all. With every swing, however, he moves more dirt, and he thinks he has made real progress, until he realizes it has taken over an hour just to break up the dirt enough to dig.

Mr. Poe, meanwhile, has crawled into the wagon bed, stretched out in the hay, and fallen asleep.

Whitman switches to the shovel. The deeper he goes, the easier the digging becomes, and while he works, he has a strange sensation that he is somehow outside himself, watching himself dig. He enjoys the monotony of physical labor, and he is able to settle his mind.

He reflects on the materiality of death, how his beliefs have altered because of it, and how naïve he had been before he experienced death firsthand. Indeed, not long ago, in his story “The Tomb Blossoms,” he boasted how he does not dread the grave. There is many a time when I could lay down, and pass my immortal part through the valley of the shadow, as composedly as I quaff water after a tiresome walk.

As he moves the dirt with his shovel, awe spreads over him for the ubiquitous power of death. Not a moment passes without a body, and its flesh becomes one with the earth’s flesh, a reminder of nature’s fecundity, the boundless and endless growth and decay that encompasses them all.

The digging takes so long that Whitman wonders if Samuel Clement has already removed the body. When he hears the sound of metal on wood, he is both surprised and relieved. He stops and wipes his brow with his sleeve. His hands are torn apart, and his whole body aches. Despite the cold, he is sweating, a heat from the inside out, that almost burns in the wind. He glances around him. The horses stand still, Mr. Poe still sleeps, and beyond the lantern, all he can see is blackness.

Still, he can’t shake the feeling that they are not alone.

In the grave, Whitman clears away the dirt around the casket. To get to the body, he has to remove the top half of the casket lid. With the pickax, he chisels around the edge and pries up the nails, just as he had seen Clement do. It takes all his strength to get the lid off. The force of it flings Walt against the wall of the grave, and from where he lands, he can’t see into the casket, so he rotates forward and peers inside.

Abraham Stowe’s skin is pasty gray. A shirt and tie constrict his bloated neck and body, and his dark suit is stretched tight from his arms to his legs. The body appears pumped full of air, as if a pin will make it explode. The body is Abraham, recognizable as the man Walt Whitman regarded as a surrogate father. But the form has changed. Walt remembers the night Abraham told him to mend things with his own father because none of us knows when our time will come, when we will vanish from this earth. Something has vanished from the man he knew, and it is crushing. This isn’t the man who said those words to him. This is not Abraham.

Whitman wraps a handkerchief around his mouth and nose. Then, using his knife, he cuts off the buttons of Abraham’s shirt one by one. Maggots swarm the insides of the body and buzz like fingernails on a chalkboard. Walt clears as many of the maggots away with the shovel as he can so he can examine the chest area. The incision, sewn together with black thread, runs up the middle of the corpse, from its navel to the base of its throat—the same as Henry’s.

The smell has gotten to him, and so he crawls out of the hole and lies down until the nausea passes. Above him, the night sky is now framed by morning light. A house behind the cemetery has since become visible, along with a small church next to it. Exhaustion hits him, and if not so cold, he might fall asleep.

The horses don’t sound like horses at first—the rhythmic clomping dances along the wind like rustling leaves and shifting trees.

“Did you hear that?” Walt whispers. “Mr. Poe!”

Mr. Poe’s head pokes up, looks around: “’Tis the wind and nothing more.”

But the horses only draw closer.

Whitman hurries back to the body and holds his breath while he threads the rope around the left arm twice, then around the neck and right arm. He climbs out of the grave, takes one end of the rope in each hand and ties them together around his waist.

In the distance, a lantern hovers.

The weight of Dr. Stowe’s body surprises him. On his first try, the body doesn’t budge at all. He takes a deep breath and readjusts his grip. He tries again. This time, he moves the body a few feet until Abraham Stowe’s head pokes out of the ground, maggots pouring out of his chest.

The noises grow louder. Metal on wood. Breathing.

Walt pulls the rope again, and this time, he heaves the body out of the casket and onto the ground. He drags it to the wagon, where he hoists it in the back next to Mr. Poe. Walt covers the body with a tarp, then pulls himself up into the driver’s seat and holds the reins ready.

Outside the burial ground, on the road, the voices have stopped.

Then footsteps on the frozen earth.

They have come for him.

All Walt Whitman can do is watch as the carriage rolls closer. He recognizes the sheriff in the driver’s seat, his square jaw and broad shoulders highlighted by the hanging lamp. “I’m impressed,” the sheriff says. “You don’t give up easily.”

“What makes you think I’m giving up now?”

“I know about the committee of safety and your conspiracy theories, but you’re sniffing down a snake hole, son, and you’re going to get bit.” Petty spits on the ground. “Now, why don’t you come with me and I’ll go easy on you.”

“If I go with you,” Walt says, “we will all be complicit in the death of an innocent woman.”

“Stop the bullshit, Mr. Whitman. Your reporting has done more damage to law enforcement credibility than anything I’ve ever seen,” Petty snarls.

Mr. Poe’s voice catches both men by surprise. It sings from the darkness, from an invisible space as if from the graves themselves: “We have put her living in the tomb,” he calls out. “I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I hear them even now.”

The voice continues: “Have I not heard her footsteps on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart?”

Mr. Poe springs furiously from the wagon and charges the sheriff, who fires a warning shot in the air. The carriage lunges forward just enough to clear the way for Whitman. He doesn’t hesitate, flipping the reins hard to make the horses go. The freight wagon races toward Petty, who has no choice but to scatter as it speeds past him and out into the street. Walt glances over his shoulder once, and he can’t believe it: Mr. Poe is dancing in front of Petty, blocking his way, waving his empty whiskey bottle in the air, screaming “Madman! Madman! Madman!”

Walt needs to find Broadway, the most direct route south, so he takes a combination of streets southwest that will lead him there. The farther south he drives, the more people are out and about, and the more vehicles on the road. On one street, he gets stuck behind a milk wagon. He tries to go around it, but the traffic coming the other way is too heavy.

Whitman checks behind him and sees the sheriff’s phaeton barreling toward him on the narrow cobblestone street. When Walt spurs his team into a gallop, his own wagon skids on the cobblestone as he drives around the milk wagon. An oncoming carriage drives onto the sidewalk to avoid him, and the horses kick up their legs, toppling the carriage. Whitman regains his spot on the right side of the road without causing any more accidents, but his actions have cleared the way for Sheriff Petty too.

Walt steers the freight wagon around the next corner and almost crashes into the stairway of the outermost row house.

The sheriff takes the same corner easily and closes the gap. The two vehicles drive side by side, Walt trying desperately to outmaneuver Petty.

“Pull over,” Petty yells.

Swinging his phaeton almost into the wagon, Petty reaches for Whitman, narrowly missing him. He tries again, but this time, Walt kicks him in the side.

Whitman tries to speed up, but Sheriff Petty matches his speed. The sheriff’s carriage swerves into the freight wagon again, and Petty stands up and makes ready to jump into the back of the freight wagon.

Walt checks his grip on the reins. He waits until the last moment, right when Petty jumps, to throw the brake. When he does, the horses skid and the brakes screech. The sheriff flies past the wagon and hits the ground in a roll. The sheriff’s phaeton tips over and scrapes to a stop, showering sparks along the street. Walt regains control of the freight wagon and navigates it around the sheriff and his wrecked vehicle.

He hopes the sheriff is not too seriously injured, but he knows he can’t dwell. It is almost nine in the morning, and the streets are full of people—a tricky scenario for someone with a corpse in the back of his wagon.