to whatever wild and disorderly actions he might witness along the streets that day. The polling station, rather than being a dark dungeon of cruelty-as your Baron finds it necessary to envision it-may well have been seen by Poe as a sanctuary, a place where there would likely be the semblance of some order. Poe went in for help that, alas, was too late to be found. In this way, we have thoroughly followed Poe from his disembarking to his futile rescue by Snodgrass."
"But Poe's words from the hospital," I said. "His shouts of 'Reynolds'-could this not be an indication of some responsibility or knowledge on the part of Henry Reynolds, that carpenter who served as ward judge for the election in the location where Poe was found?"
Duponte's face broke out in genuine amusement.
"Do you not believe it?" I asked.
"I haven't a reason to disbelieve it as a factual possibility, if that is your meaning, Monsieur Clark. Others will think they can guess what is unusual in Poe's mind-an impossibility to do for anyone, much less for a genius. To do that, read his tales, read his poems; you shall get all that is extraordinary and singular-that is, not repeated in mental currents outside of Poe. But to understand the steps in his death, you must accept what is ordinary in him, in anyone, and in all around him that crash into his genius-these will be answers.
"That Poe called this word, 'Reynolds,' for many hours the night of his death in the hospital is exactly what we should not pay attention to-if our purpose is to understand how he died. Poe was not in his clear mind, arising from the joining of disparate circumstances that we have already enumerated. That the Baron, that other observers might fixate on it demonstrates the common lack of understanding about how and why people think and act as they do. Even without profound consideration of the matter, we may remember that Poe is in a state of feeling completely alone. In truth, he could have been calling for anybody. It might have been the last name he had heard, perhaps belonging to that same carpenter who visited us in your parlor, or it might have been the name of a man whose part in a deadly affair of several years past renders it far too dangerous for either of us to speak about. [2] Most likely, though, it has something to do with a matter far distant from his death that we must never know about, for that is what Poe would be thinking about, just as a man trapped in a pit would be thinking of escape, not of the pit. Not about the death that is all too close upon him, but about life left behind.
"You understand now. All this, all that he did in the days since stepping off the boat from Richmond, was an escape from Baltimore-from his lack of home. This city had once been his home, the land of his father and grandfather, the birthplace of his wife and adored mother-in-law, whom he called Muddy, Mother, yet he had no home there any longer-
"I reach'd my home-my home no more-
For all had flown who made it so."
Here Duponte seemed ready, quite unconscious of me, to recite more of Poe's verses, but stopped himself. "No, he had no home here. Not this Baltimore, where he did not trust his remaining relatives of the name Poe even to inform them of his presence, and indeed they were afterward ashamed enough of their response to his demise to say so little about it as to appear suspicious. Nor was home New York, where his wife, Virginia, was dead and buried and he was preparing to flee forever; not the city of Richmond either, where the marriage with a childhood love was still only a plan, however attractive, and his memories of losing that place as a home once before and losing his mother and adoptive parents were still strong. Not Philadelphia, where he once resided and wrote, where he was obliged to use another name or risk losing the last loving letter of the one relation still devoted to him, where somehow he found now that he could not even reach it on a train.
"You see clearly now the map of Poe's attempted movements in his last epoch of life-from Richmond to try to go to New York, from Baltimore trying to go to Philadelphia -it is no small fact that