A bloody fight erupts outside my room one steaming September night when the dormitory rooms refuse to cool.
Charles Wickliffe from Kentucky pounds upon a shirtless classmate whose face I can’t even see at first, and once Wickliffe tires his competitor out, he sinks his teeth into the fellow’s left arm and bites him from his shoulder down to his elbow. By now I can view the anguished expression of the victim, who squeals with a sound akin to a pig in a slaughterhouse, but then, even worse, he goes utterly silent, his mouth stuck wide open in a muted version of his squealing, his face blanching, lips purpling, eyes rolling into the back of his head. I rock back on my heels, on the verge of a swoon, just from watching his agony.
Two professors pry Wickliffe off him and bark out the word “expulsion.” One of the professors examines the damaged arm—a bloodied, bruised, and mangled mess that again makes me light-headed. It is likely that pieces of flesh as large as my hand will be obliged to be cut out to save the limb. Blood soaks the bricks outside my door, and a professor calls for the janitor to fetch a mop and warns me, “Be careful not to slip.”
I close the door and lay down on my bed, cradling my left arm as though I’ve myself been bitten. The victim’s squeals echo through my head.
What would such barbarity feel like? I wonder, and to investigate such pain, I free myself from my clammy shirt and bite my own flesh to a point just before the breakage of skin. My teeth leave an imprint.
I bite again, daring myself to go further, but can’t do it.
Once my pulse slows, and the dizziness dims, I stand back up and resume a task I’d been undertaking when I first heard the scuffle outside my door. Using my dwindling lump of charcoal, I climb onto my chair and recreate an illustration of a winged giant from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage on my ceiling—my latest masterpiece.
My thoughts soon return to the student’s mangled arm.
So much blood!
So much gore—strips of flesh just hanging off the victim’s gleaming wounds!
My preoccupation with his injuries, coupled with the book of Lord Byron’s writings lying open before me, leads me to ruminate on Byron’s death during the Greek War of Independence, just two years earlier. I recall all the printed accounts of the ceaseless bloodletting his physicians employed to cure him of illnesses. They bled Byron dry, turned him feverish, and he perished in Greece, not yet even forty years old.
Oh, Byron. What brilliance would you have showered upon us in your years of Eld had ye lived to a hundred!
My mind then strays to the death of Pa’s uncle William in the middle of tea and pancakes—not a bloody or a heroic demise, to be sure, and yet still a troubling one, according to Pa, who witnessed it—which leads me to an epiphany.
I shall try appealing to Uncle William’s son James for a loan.
“Yes, yes, yes!” I declare, jumping off the chair.
I pen a letter then and there, and my hope escalates.
Perhaps I can pay off my debts before the session ends in December.
Perhaps I can sleep better at night, knowing for certain I’ll return for a second session in February.
Mr. Spotswood knocks on my door and asks again about the money I owe for the servant he’s lent me, and I say, “I’m working on a letter to remedy this problem right now, Mr. Spotswood. And watch out for the blood on the bricks.”
I close the door and fetch a stick of sealing wax and my seal from the drawer of my writing box.
Someone else knocks, and before I can even rise to my feet, a band of neighbors barges into my room.
“Tell us about the fight,” they say.
“Spare no details,” they urge.
“You’re the perfect person to have witnessed the gore, Poe. Describe it all in that whispery, eerie voice you like to use.”
I hide my plea to James Galt beneath a library book.
“Once upon a stark September . . .,” I say, turning to my audience, but the lack of blood in my brain from the previous spells of dizziness continues to silence my macabre muse. Or maybe she loathes that my poems lie in a jungle of cobwebs on the floor . . .
“Poe?” asks Tom. “Are you unwell?”
I look down at my bare left arm and envision the limb caked in blood from puncture wounds made by my own teeth. I imagine what Pa would say to all of this—the exploration of pain for the sake of my art, the desperate letter to his cousin, the glassy-eyed boys packed into my room, begging for a show, the punchbowls brimming with mint-sling and peach and honey, and the debts.
Oh, the debts.
The debts.
The debts.
The debts.
I swoon right then and there in front of my fellow students, which entertains the lads far more than any of my stories or drawings ever have. I come to at the sound of them all applauding what they believe to have been a performance.
“Bravo!”
“Well done!”
“A nice touch with your temple smacking the floor.”
My brain rolls about in my head, and once my vision clears, the first items I view down there on the floorboards (which smell like brandy and my own feet) are my manuscripts, lying in dust and spiderwebs like a pair of winter boots crammed under a bed for the summer. I close my eyes again, even at my friends’ urgings to stand up, for this life of mine tires me, and I simply want to sleep.
Cousin James Galt sent me a short, cordial letter to say he cannot offer me a loan. I don’t blame him in the slightest, for I have no collateral to offer, and we’re not especially close, even though he’s a mere four years older than myself.
“But, really, James,” I say, crumpling his fine white stationery into a ball between my hands, “would it have inconvenienced you so terribly to assist a cousin in need?”
I hurl the letter into my fireplace, grateful for the free kindling, and the flames consume his rejection with sharp snaps of their jaws.
In early November, I tear open a letter sealed with Pa’s scarlet wax and find one hundred dollars enclosed with a note from Pa that tells me the money ought to cover my outstanding expenses. I press my elbows against my table with groaning creaks of the wood, scratch my forehead, and laugh in exasperation, wondering how I can possibly turn one hundred dollars into the two thousand I now need to pay off my debts without some sort of sorcery—without more gambling.
And so—yet again—I pay a visit to the card tables, armed with the crisp set of bills.
“Sorry, Poe,” says Upton Beall—yet again—when my money disappears into other students’ pockets. “It seems that Luck is simply no friend of yours.”
The days shorten. Each morning when I hustle to my seven o’clock class, frosts coat the paling grasses of the Lawn. Up in the Ragged Mountain, the trees shed their crisped leaves, and the hills soon rise above Charlottesville as sere and bristly mounds that no longer call to me. The sky clouds with plumes of hickory smoke piping out of hundreds of dormitories stocked with stacks of firewood—and yet the only substance passing through my own chimney is the whistling wind that ices my bed and my blood. I wear three pairs of socks each night to keep my toes from numbing and bluing.
I study, and I gamble, but I do not write what I wish to write. My poems—the ones that aren’t meant to entertain the university masses—remain on the ground beneath my desk, abandoned to my studies and my fretting, peppered in dust, entombed in cobwebs.
There isn’t any time to tend to my muse.
There isn’t any use.