Dead Letters: The Stranger

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent
 

I have written about many dead writers. This is the only one I helped carry.

I was in Baltimore on October 3, 1849, covering the state elections for a wire service that no longer exists. It was raining — not hard, but steadily, the kind of rain that turns a dirt street into a problem. I was making my way to Gunner's Hall on East Lombard Street, which was serving as the Fourth Ward polling place and was also, as was the custom, a tavern. I wanted the election results. What I found was Edgar Allan Poe.

He was on the ground outside the entrance. Not in the gutter — I want to be precise about that. He was on the wooden sidewalk, half-sitting against the doorframe, wearing clothes that did not belong to him. I knew they didn't belong to him because they didn't fit. The coat was too large. The trousers were too short. The shoes were wrong. Everything about the man's appearance suggested that he had been dressed by someone else, in a hurry, from a pile of whatever was available. The rain had soaked through all of it.

A printer named Joseph Walker was already with him. Walker had recognised the man — or thought he had — and was trying to determine whether he was drunk, ill, or dying. It was not immediately obvious which.

I helped Walker move him inside. This is the detail I have carried for the rest of my life, and the one I wish I could return: the weight of him. He was lighter than a man should be. His arm, when I took it, was hot through the sleeve. The clothes smelled of damp wool and something else — something stale and sour that I could not identify and did not want to. Water dripped from his coat onto the tavern floor and no one moved to wipe it up.

Inside, we set him in a chair. Walker sent a note to a physician named Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, an acquaintance of Poe's. I did not know who the man was. Walker told me. I did not believe him. The man in the chair — trembling, soaked, wearing a stranger's coat — did not look like the author of "The Raven" or "The Fall of the House of Usher" or anything else. He looked like a man who had been taken apart and put back together incorrectly.

He was not coherent. He spoke, but what he said did not connect to anything in the room. At one point he gripped the arm of the chair and said a name — it sounded like "Reynolds," though I cannot be certain — with an urgency that made everyone near him go quiet. He said it several times. No one knew who Reynolds was. No one has ever determined who Reynolds was.

Dr. Snodgrass arrived with Poe's uncle, a man named Henry Herring. They took one look at him and arranged for a carriage to take him to Washington College Hospital. I helped move him again. This time he was less conscious. His eyes were open but they were not looking at the room. They were looking at something else, something behind the room, and whatever it was, it was not good.

I did not go to the hospital. I had an election to cover. I filed my results and went back to my lodgings and sat on the edge of the bed without removing my coat. I could still feel the weight of his arm. I could still smell the clothes.

He died four days later, on October 7th, at approximately five in the morning. He was forty years old. The attending physician reported his last words as "Lord, help my poor soul," though the physician's credibility has been questioned ever since, and I am not in a position to confirm or deny what a man said in a room I was not in.

No one has ever established what happened to him during the five days before he appeared outside Gunner's Hall. The theories are numerous. None of them explain the clothes.

I still feel the weight of his arm when I think about it. Lighter than a man should be. Hotter than a man should be.

I never got the quote. For the first time in my career, I am grateful.

— F.M.
 

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.