I have said that—however justly deserved—the death of my demented half-sister cast a deep and sorrowful shadow upon my soul. For the citizens of Baltimore, however—whose wonted tranquillity had been severely disrupted by the string of savage killings—the resolution of the case meant that a fearful pall had been lifted.
My own invaluable contributions to the affair did not fail to make the deepest impression upon the police. Captain Russell in particular was profuse in his praise—as well as in his apologies for those suspicions that had caused him, however briefly, to perceive me as the culprit. The analytical means by which I had disentangled the mystery struck him as little short of miraculous, and—among the emissaries of the law—my inductive abilities quickly assumed the status of legend.
In the popular mind, however, it was not myself but rather the heroic figure of Crockett who loomed most prominently in the drama—an impression that the inveterately self-aggrandizing frontiersman did little to modify. In his statements to the press following our return to the city, he evinced little shyness in attributing the successful termination of the case to his own unshrinking efforts—though he never failed to acknowledge the “splendiferous help” he had received from his “little chum, Eddie Poe”
Under the circumstances, I could not begrudge my friend these outrageous overstatements of his own rôle in the affair. He had, after all, saved my life on several occasions and—following my abduction by Hans Neuendorf and his gang—rescued me from a fate of unspeakable ghastliness. Moreover, the crude acclamation of the mob—so desperately courted by Crockett—was infinitely less consequential to me than the profound respect—if not outright awe—that I had earned from the cognoscenti of the law.
In the end, whatever political benefit Crockett had hoped to accrue from our triumphant resolution of the case failed to materialize. Sadly—and much to my own surprise, in light of the great esteem in which the public clearly held him—he lost his attempt to regain his congressional seat in the 1835 elections and found himself exiled from political life.
By then, my own circumstances had undergone a radical alteration. In August of 1835—slightly more than one year following the extraordinary events recounted in the foregoing pages—I moved back to Richmond, the city of my youth, having been offered a remunerative position as editorial assistant on Mr. Thomas White’s journal, the Southern Literary Messenger. One month later, my deepest prayers were answered when my darling little Sissy and I were joined as husband and bride. By the middle of October, the two of us—along with our dear, all-devoted Muddy—were settled in a handsome brick boarding house on the southeast corner of Bank and Eleventh Streets, belonging to a kindly widow named Mrs. Yarrington.
In addition to these vast improvements in my financial and domestic arrangements, I had also undergone a period of remarkable creative inspiration. Having concluded that there was unsuspected merit in Crockett’s literary advice (to wit, that the surest way to achieve commercial success was for an author to write about his own experiences), I had embarked on a series of tales based upon those incidents and situations to which I myself had been so recently exposed: the savage butchery of the landlady—the masked ball visited by the dread figure of Death—the torture dungeon equipped with a bottomless pit—the mutilated old man concealed beneath the floorboards—and so on. Having altered certain details of the actual events to accord with the rigorous requirements of the short-story form, I had succeeded in producing a handful of tales that were, I devoutly believed, among my finest fictional efforts to date.
By way of acknowledging the assistance he had thus afforded me, I had mailed a handwritten copy of one of these tales to the frontiersman, along with a letter informing him of my recent nuptials. I had not received an answer, however, and assumed either that he had not received my package, or that his recent political defeat had left him too dispirited to reply.
It was a brisk, brilliantly sunny afternoon at the very end of October—more than a year since I had last set eyes on the frontiersman. Seated at my writing table in front of the second-story window that overlooked Capitol Square, I was so deeply absorbed in my latest endeavor—the composition of a story about a man haunted by a mysterious doppelgänger—that only by slow degrees did I became aware of a strange commotion on the street outside my boarding house.
Glancing out the window, I gave a start of surprise. There, mounted on a handsome black steed, was a singularly imposing figure, garbed in the colorful, buck-skin attire of the backwoods huntsman. I saw at once that it was none other than my erstwhile companion, Davy Crockett, whose presence had already attracted a large, excited crowd of neighborhood children.
Leaping from my place, I dashed down the stairs and into the parlor, where Muddy, seated upon a chair before the dormer window, was thoroughly engrossed in her needlework. Stretched out, face downwards, in the center of the floor was my darling little wife, who—crayon in hand—was busily drawing a delightful sketch of a frolicking puppy, while humming softly to herself.
“Muddy! Sissy!” I cried. “You must come at once! We have a most unexpected, if inordinately welcome, visitor.”
Accompanying their actions with many expressions of curiosity and wonder, my loved ones immediately suspended their occupations, rose to their feet, and followed me out the front door. Excited ejaculations burst from their lips at their first glimpse of the frontiersman. Making our way through the chattering crowd of children, we hurried toward our visitor—myself in the lead, Muddy and Sissy following closely at my heels.
“Howdy there, pard!” Crockett declared with a broad grin as he saw me approach. “I am mighty tickled to see you again” Swiftly dismounting from his horse, he gave my hand a powerful shake before turning his attention to the women.
“Why, I’ll be hanged if you two gals ain’t got even purtier since I last clapped eyes on you!” Enveloping Muddy in his arms, he hugged her warmly, then turned to Sissy and—placing his hands upon her slender waist—raised her high in the air for a moment before setting her back down upon her feet.
“Miz Virginny, I reckon that marriage plumb agrees with you, for you are lit up just as bright as a glow-worm on a summer night!”
As Virginia giggled with pleasure, Crockett turned back towards his steed, reached into his saddlebag, and extracted a large, oddly shaped bundle, crudely wrapped in brown paper and twine. Thrusting this object towards Sissy, he said: “This here’s a wedding present for you and Eddie.”
Squealing with excitement, Sissy quickly tore off the wrapping, then emitted a sharp gasp of astonishment as she found herself holding a medium-sized, taxidermically preserved member of the species Procyon lotor—more generally known as the common raccoon.
“I shot, skinned, and stuffed her myself,” proudly declared Crockett, who was wearing a hat that closely resembled our wedding gift. “Why, she’s as fine a varmint as any you’ll find in Mr. Peale’s museum.”
“Indeed,” I said, “it is a most handsome specimen.” Removing the creature from Sissy’s hands, which had begun to tremble slightly, I continued: “But to what circumstance do we owe the pleasure of this wholly unanticipated visit?”
“Why, I had to take care of some unfinished business in Washington City. So I reckoned I’d stop by and say howdy on my way back.”
“Did you receive the package I mailed you some weeks ago?”
“Yes sir, I did. I read over your story concerning that ol’ Asher house, too, and it war a humdinger—though I will say there are considerable many stretchers in it.”
“But that,” I replied, “is the very essence of the fictional prose tale. The skillful literary artist does not fashion his thoughts to accommodate his incidents, but having deliberately conceived a certain single effect to be wrought, he then invents such incidents, he then combines such events, and discusses them in such tone as may best serve him in establishing this preconceived effect”
For a moment, Davy merely stared at me in silence. Then, chuckling softly, he said: “I’ll be kicked to death by grasshoppers if I ain’t missed hearing that highfalutin palaver of yours, Eddie. Why don’t you come along with me?”
“Come along?” I said. “To where?”
“Why, to Texas,” he replied.
“Texas!” I exclaimed.
“Yes sir,” declared the frontiersman. “I have made up my mind to head out West and give the Texians a helping hand on the high road to freedom. Davy Crockett has always been fond of having his spoon in a mess of that kind—for if there is anything in the world that is worth living and dying for, it is freedom.”
A reverential silence had, by this point, descended upon Crockett’s juvenile audience, who gaped up at him with undisguised wonder as—hands on hips and chest thrust forward—he continued thusly:
“When the folks back home chose to throw me out of Congress and elect a timber-toed rascal in my place, I told them that they might all go to hell, and I would go to Texas. There is a world of country to be settled out there, and a man may make a fortune for himself and his family quicker than it would take lightning to run around a potato patch.”
“I wish you well, Davy,” said I. “But the boundless and untamed expanse of the great Western frontier— rich though it may be in material opportunity—possesses little, if any, allure to me .”
“No,” Crockett said fondly, “I reckon you ain’t the wilderness type, Eddie.”
At that moment, as though to recall his attention to more pressing obligations, Crockett’s magnificent black stallion shook his great head and emitted a snort.
“Reckon I’d best be on my way,” said Crockett, patting the creature on the neck.
“Won’t you stay and have dinner with us, Colonel?” exclaimed Muddy.
“No thank you, ma’am,” said the frontiersman. “I have a heap of travelling to do before the sun goes down. But seeing you all again has made me feel happier than a soaped eel.”
“Thank you for the lovely gift,” Virginia said sweetly, if not (to my ears) with entirely wholehearted conviction.
Crockett, however, merely beamed with delight. “You are almighty welcome, Miz Virginny,” he said.
All at once, a young, freckle-faced boy at the front of the crowd exclaimed: “But Davy, ain’t you going to tell us a story?”
“Ain’t got time, young ’un,” replied the frontiersman. “But Mr. Poe here is a mighty splendiferous storyteller—and if you ask him real polite, I am tolerable certain that he will tell you all about the rip-roarious times him and me had together.”
He inserted a foot in the stirrup of his saddle and swung himself onto his steed “Farewell, friends!” he cried, doffing his coonskin cap and waving it high in the air.
Then he wheeled his horse around and, sitting erect in the saddle, trotted off in a westerly direction—towards the wild, majestic territory where Immortality awaited.