Monticello: Late summer, 1809
Monticello: Late summer, 1809
The house was almost complete now. He had torn away what did not please him and rebuilt some parts to suit his matured ideas. New white paint gleamed on the cornices; the square windows in what he had called his “sky room” on the third floor had been replaced by round and half-round openings. But now in what he had wished would be a quiet summer he was plagued by the same hosts that for several years had made George Washington’s life miserable.
Too many visitors came to Monticello. They came uninvited to see the man who had written the Declaration of Independence. They came from miles away, some on horseback, some in carriages, some even in ox-drawn wagons. Patsy, who had hoped to return to her own place at Bedford long enough to see to the preservation of the vegetables and fruits for winter, abandoned the idea and stayed on with her children.
“These people, these strangers—what are we to do with them?” she worried. “Some of them come great distances.They have to be kept for the night; they must be fed. Your pet steward, Petit, is getting really fractious, Papa, and I have to keep the people cooking practically night and day. They look at this handsome house and believe that Thomas Jefferson is a rich man, that he can afford to entertain them—people we’ve never seen before and will likely never see again—and, Papa, you know it isn’t true. You aren’t rich enough to afford housing and feeding so many. The farms don’t pay as they should, and we are often hard pressed to feed and clothe our own people.”
“I know,” he said heavily, “but what is a Virginia gentleman to do? We cannot turn people away. There is no inn anywhere near where they can buy food or lodging.”
“Why not put up some barriers?” suggested young Jefferson Randolph. “Charge everyone a shilling to come in. We might make enough to pay the taxes.”
“A poor joke, my son. We would outrage every tradition of Southern hospitality. But I do wish that some part of this house that I built for my family could be private and belong only to us. They invade every corner without leave or apology. Yesterday they were all over my study. They wanted to see everything. They even pulled out the drawers in my desk and turned over some personal papers. And these were people of some quality too—from Delaware, they said.”
In the dining room Jefferson had devised a dumb-waiter at either end of the mantelpiece. These ingenious carriers descended into the basement close by the wine cellars and were used to bring things up from the cool rooms below by an easy pull on the rope. Not long since he had found a man in the dining room fascinated by the device and happily running the carriers up and down.
“What do you reckon he’s got this here for?” he demandedof Jefferson. “Was he fixing a place to hide quick from the Injuns?”
Courteously Jefferson explained the working of the device. “It has never talked back in all the years it has been in operation,” he said, “so we call it a dumb-waiter.”
“These rich people got it mighty fine,” commented the stranger. “My old lady took a fancy to that bed he’s got in yonder,” said the intruder blandly, “one pulls up out of the way in daytime. We only got a two-room house. Be mighty handy to have one of them there, put the young-uns in it, and haul ’em out of sight when we get tired of their racket. All these young-uns ain’t Jefferson’s, I figure? Got quite a passel of ’em around, ain’t he?”
“Most of these are my grandchildren—some are nieces and nephews. Are those your children in there?” Jefferson pointed with some annoyance to four towheaded youngsters, none of them too clean, who were bouncing up and down on the tapestried seats of the gilt chairs in the drawing room.
“Yeh, them’s my brats. Reckon they’re gettin’ kind of hungry. Old lady said we’d ought to leave ’em home down Culpepper way but I said, No, this here Thomas Jefferson was the people’s friend, even if he did get to be president, and they’d ought to git a chance to see him. He around here any place?”
“I am Thomas Jefferson,” said the ex-president coolly. “And I suggest that you educate your children to have respect for the property of other people, sir. Those chairs they are jumping about on were brought all the way from France.”
The stranger stared incredulously at the elderly figure before him. Shabby old brown coat. Faded velveteen breeches. Home-knit hose that showed signs of much mending,and, most unbelievable of all, a pair of old run-down carpet slippers.
“Law, sir!” he exclaimed. “I took you for a butler or a footman or something. You, Caleb and Beulah! Get away from them fancy cheers. Git outside, all you-uns, and go sit in the wagon.”
Dreadful as some of them were, they could not be sent away hungry. Food that should have been sent to market to provide money for the family expenses, these visitors ate and ate like locusts. Patsy rebelled at using the beautiful Chippendale table that had been given Jefferson by his old friend and teacher, George Wythe of Williamsburg. So trestle tables were set up in the warming kitchens in the basement and picnic hampers passed about by servants on the lawn on fine days. A few important and genteel groups were dined in the big dining room, but there were often too many of those. All those letters that her father wrote, she thought impatiently, probably half of them were invitations to people in Philadelphia or Washington or New York to come to Monticello for long visits.
“Where shall I sleep thirty-one people?” she worried, on a July night. “And, Papa, we had better plan on having a lot more linen woven right away. The woman washed fifty sheets yesterday. They’ll wear out fast at that rate.”
Jefferson sighed. “I came home to find peace and there is no peace. What have I done in my past, my dear, that such hordes of admirers should descend upon me? I’ve been a very ordinary fellow. I’ve always been homely, ungainly, entirely unprepossessing. No one was more surprised than I when your mother agreed to marry me. There she was—a beautiful and gracious woman with a fortune of her own—and I a struggling young lawyer, a long-legged shide-poke of a fellow, freckled and coarse-maned as a lion, withno grace except that I could fiddle. And you know I was an unpopular president. The number of them that hated me was legion.”
“Not the good plain people. Not these people who come up here in old carts or riding raw-boned nags just to get a glimpse of Thomas Jefferson, champion of the people,” his daughter said. “Two words of yours will never die in their ears: ‘Free and Equal.’ And because you made them feel free and equal, they come to see you—in droves!”
“I haven’t slept in my own bed all summer,” complained Ann, the oldest daughter. “I’ve slept on hard pallets laid down on the floor till all my bones are worn raw.”
“The worst is the curious women—the young ones,” said Ellen. “They open our wardrobes and finger our clothes. They even open drawers and jewel boxes. We should have locks on everything, Grandfather. One girl from away down on the Eastern Shore asked me to give her my chip-straw bonnet. The one Mrs. Adams sent me last summer. She said we were all rich and her folks were terribly poor and she hadn’t a decent bonnet to get married in because they were fishermen and the run of shad had been bad this year.”
“You could have given her the bonnet, Ellen. I would have bought you another one,” said her grandfather.
And gone in debt for it, thought his daughter, with a tinge of exasperation—when he had so many debts already!
Jefferson put his arms about his granddaughters. “Soon, my dears, there will come a frost and deep snows and sleet and the roads will become difficult or impassable. Then nobody will come to see us and you will be moping around the house because you are bored and lonely.”
“Ann won’t,” declared her sister, “not if young MisterBankhead has a horse long-legged enough to wade the drifts.”
“And you,” flashed back her sister, “will be primping and ordering all the servants and the children about in case young Mister Coolidge should decide to come riding down the road.”
“Mother says I’m too young,” sighed Ellen, “but you know, Grandfather, that fourteen isn’t terribly young. Why, mother was only seventeen when she married.”
“And look what happened to me!” cried her mother. “Six of you great greedy daughters, all clamoring that you should have beaux before you are out of pinafores.”
“When you are seventeen, Ellen,” Jefferson assured the girl, “I personally shall dispatch a very polite invitation to young Mister Coolidge, whoever he is, to come calling at Monticello.”
“He won’t want to come then. He’ll think I’m an old maid and I will be! He’ll be looking for somebody young and fresh like Virginia.”
“Hah! I wouldn’t look at him,” sniffed redheaded Virginia, who had a crop of bright coppery freckles like her grandfather. “By the time he’s an old man he’ll be fat as a pig and probably grunt when he moves and squeal when he’s fed.”
“He will not!” flared Ellen. “Anyway you’re just jealous. She doesn’t like having red hair, Grandfather, and she hates every one of us who haven’t got it.”
“Why, I have red hair and I’m very proud of it!” he exclaimed. “Shame on you all for quarreling among yourselves. I used to have a wise old friend named Benjamin Franklin—”
“We know about him. You told us before.”
“We know what he said too,” put in Ellen patiently. “If we don’t hang together we may all hang separately.” Definitely, she was thinking, grandfather could at times be a bit tiresome. “And a penny saved is a penny earned.”
“But not one of us ever sees a penny!”
“A sad situation,” remarked Jefferson, rummaging through the pocket of his worn old green breeches. “Ah, I do seem to have a few pennies. Let me count. There must be one apiece. Now”—he announced as he laid a coin in each warm eager palm—“you have each the foundation for a fortune. Guard it well, for there are long years ahead of you.”
The years ahead of them! Thinking of those years brought back the old touch of anxiety. What would he be able to do for them, for these young things, born of his blood, hostages to fortune?
“He who watches the pence need not be anxious about the pounds,” he quoted more of his old friend Franklin, dubiously aware that his audience were no longer listening. Slowly he walked back to his study, turning to close the door almost in the face of a man who escorted three women.
“I am sorry, sir,” Jefferson said as the three stared indignantly. “I am Thomas Jefferson. You are very welcome in my house but at this moment I must beg to be excused and be about some urgent business.” And he turned the key in the lock.
The letter lay in the drawer where he had left it. He took it out, lifted the seal again, and let the single sheet slide out into his hand.
It was a very brief and slightly curt note from a Philadelphia banker. A friend for whom Jefferson had felt a sudden compassion and whom he had trusted had abruptly gone bankrupt. The note Jefferson had endorsed for thisfriend, with the hope of helping him recoup his fortunes, was now long overdue, unpaid and collectible; since Mr. Jefferson had put his personal endorsement upon the paper he was now legally assumed to be liable for the full amount of payment.
The note was drawn for twenty thousand dollars.
Monticello: Autumn, 1809
Monticello: Autumn, 1809
With a frantic kind of energy that early autumn, Jefferson forsook his books and set himself to the job of assaying and recuperating his own personal estate. During his long absences, Thomas Randolph, and his son, young Jefferson after him, had done their best by the vast property—the acres about Monticello, and the farm, Poplar Grove, a few miles away. But many fields had been neglected and weeds and brush had taken over; the slaves, having no firm master, had learned to shirk tasks cleverly and leave much undone.
Thomas Jefferson had never been a harsh master, but now he became a stern and demanding one. Nails must be made and bricks burned, both for his own building plans and for sale in the market. His French friend, Du Pont de Nemours, on his last visit had brought him a small flock of merino sheep. Jefferson enjoyed supervising the shearing of these sheep, and the washing of the wool, and watched the carding, spinning, and weaving going on under Martha’s supervision. He decided to have a suit of clothes made fromhis own fine woolen cloth and busied himself drawing patterns, measuring, and figuring for days.
The wrist that had been broken in Paris had never been properly set, and he found using drawing tools and writing letters more and more of a painful chore. And always he was interrupted by guests. Some he had invited, regretting later his hospitable impulse, but the uninvited continued to find their way up the winding road to his mountain.
He must, he determined, have a place that was his own where he could study and work undisturbed either by the family or by these strangers, most of whom he was certain had only one desire—to be able to go home and boast that they had seen the great Thomas Jefferson and the fabulous house he had created.
He would have a study built at the far end of the north promenade immediately. So promptly he set about having seasoned lumber hauled from the sawmill, bricks burned, and nails and hardware forged in the smithy. He spent a day drawing a plan for a small, one-room building.
Meanwhile he found an opportunity occasionally to slip away with one or two grandchildren for a brief stay at Poplar Grove, his farm, where he could have a little quiet and relaxation. But always an impelling urgency drove him. He must write letters. He must counsel James Madison about whether or not it would be wise to keep America out of war, with conflicts raging all over Europe. Napoleon was running wild and perhaps the British should be left alone to contain and subdue him.
He must write, too, to his old friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, and invite him to Monticello for a visit. Lafayette had been in prison, and suffered hardships and loss of fortune. The debt America owed Lafayette had never been paid, and, to Jefferson’s mind, had never been adequatelyacknowledged, and he felt responsibility to prod the consciences of men in power to do something about that. All these ideas possessed him, then at times were diminished by a kind of inner irony. Who was he, to be so concerned about a debt owed to any man when he himself was likely faced with a weight of debts he had not yet had the courage to calculate?
Some time soon when his private lair was completed he must sit down for a day or a week and put all his books and accounts in order. It was a kind of cowardice in him, he knew, that put off the reckoning from one day to another.
Meanwhile his new wool suit was finished and he was more pleased than ever with the fineness of the material. With the coming of winter, Martha had taken her own brood back to their plantation, but when she returned for a brief visit Jefferson dressed up in his new clothes and paraded before her, grinning like a happy boy.
Martha gave a little surprise shriek. “Papa! Pantaloons! I never would have believed you would give up those old knee breeches and long stockings.”
“They’re warmer,” Jefferson turned and posed naively, “and the London papers that still come through in spite of the embargo say that they are the new style in England. Jemmy Madison wrote that he had a pair made—black broadcloth. Every hair and bit of lint sticks to that stuff. I’m sending Jemmy enough of this goods to have himself a suit made. With the president wearing it, we might be able to sell more in Washington. Some friends who were here last week said the cloth was better than the finest wool that comes from England.”
“It will certainly help if you can find a new product to market. All these visitors this summer devoured so much of our substance that should have gone for ready money, andmoney, Papa, is what you need badly, as I’m sure you know.”
“Too well, Patsy. Too well! I’m admitting now to you what you must have surmised or suspected for a long time. I am a fine farmer on paper. I’ve been full of wonderful plans and theories, and on paper they looked fine and profitable, but somehow they have all failed to pay off in cash. All those vineyards and olive groves I planted so hopefully—I have just compelled myself to compute the cost and returns on that venture. The whole project adds up to a substantial loss.”
“And because of this trouble with the shipping your wheat is mildewing in the bins because it can’t be shipped to market,” she reminded him.
“And across the ocean people in need of bread are starving,” he added sorrowfully. “If there were any way to give the stuff away to those who suffer for lack of it—but alas, there is none!”
The people, always the people, thought his daughter. A world full of people, and if he had his way he would free and feed all of them. In the meantime he was dubious about spending the money for a new pair of spectacles, but bent close to his desk peering through an old pair that had one bow mended with black thread stiffened with glue.
“You’d better have a new cushion in that old chair, Papa,” she suggested. “If you sit on that thin one in those wool breeches, they’ll be worn to a shine and show thin spots mighty quickly. I’ll tell one of the women to stitch up a stout canvas cover and stuff it with plenty of feathers.” She moved to the high window and looked off across the hill. “Those mountains look like winter,” she observed. “In spring and summer a blue haze makes them dim and far and restful to look at, but in winter their crests stand out sharpand blue and cold and a bit hostile. I hope you’ve had plenty of wood cut and piled. You’ll need big fires, especially if everyone comes home for Christmas.”
He frowned a little, looked startled. “Christmas?” he repeated. “Is it near—and is it so important?”
She drew back a little. “Of course it’s important! Don’t tell me, Papa, that those people who called you Jefferson the Infidel had any truth to back up their accusations? Don’t tell me that you don’t believe that the Son of God was born on Christmas day and that it is a holy day to be remembered?”
“I am not an infidel,” he said soberly. “I have never denied the existence and the power of God. And I have studied extensively the sayings of Jesus. I have also never discovered in all my reading any proof that he was born on the twenty-fifth of December—especially as the calendar has been changed several times since the period began that men call Anno Domini.”
“It is the day the Church sets apart as a holy day. For me, Papa, and for my children, that’s enough,” said Martha a bit tartly. “Surely there have been times when Christmas was important in your life, though you’ve been at home so little?”
“Oh, yes.” He was quick to try to mollify her. Patsy in an acid mood, he remembered, could be a trifle difficult. “I remember times at Shadwell when my mother was alive. And before my father died there was always some kind of feasting, a goose saved and fattened and a fat pig killed for the Negroes, and mother usually had suckets of some sort for the young ones and opened her best brandied peaches and preserves.”
“I remember when Mama was alive,” she looked off pensively into the lonely blue of the hills, “we had oneChristmas. The people brought in holly and you mixed punch in a big bowl and people came, unless the snow was too deep. And once I remember you took my mother to church, but she came home unhappy because you stood outside and talked politics all through the service. But after that you were seldom at home.”
“I made her unhappy too often,” he reproached himself. “I was trying to help build a nation, Patsy. We were living in perilous times. Why, you must remember the war—when Tarleton came to Monticello? I rode sixty miles in one night to get here in time to get you all safely away from the British dragoons.”
“I was five. I remember. Aunt Martha Carr was here with her boys and we were all piled into the chaise, with some of the servants sitting on behind with their legs dangling and old Jupiter lashing the horses to a gallop. Mother cried because she was sure they would capture you and burn the house down. She said that if Tarleton could capture the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, the king would make him a general.”
“Not to speak boastfully, that likely was true. But he didn’t capture me nor burn the house. Instead Captain McLeod made himself very comfortable in it for two days, while poor old black Caesar was hidden under the planks of the portico, where he had crawled to hide all our silver. He had pried up the floor and dropped down under, and black Martin saw some horsemen galloping up the drive and dropped the planks back, and there was faithful old Caesar underneath, hungry and scared for two days.”
“I remember hearing about it,” said Martha, “and about the soldier who pushed a gun into Martin’s face and ordered him to tell which way you had gone or he would shoot. Martin said, ‘Go ahead, shoot!’ And after that henever got tired of telling it. But, Papa, we were supposed to be talking about Christmas!”
How could he make himself clear to her, how could he explain to his literal downright-minded daughter, that harried and anxious Thomas Jefferson had been turned away by destiny from all the simple folkways and beliefs? From all the prosaic and ordinary things that were good and dedicated to wholesome living into a world of desperate struggle, intrigue, cabal, tragedy, and strife?
Now that he was becalmed in this quiet backwater of life he could see his own career and know that it had been always headlong, more than a little frenzied, and too much of it precipitate and unpredictable and little under his own control—and in that chaotic whirling by of history there had been too little time for a man to meditate and even assay his own beliefs.
“I,” he said, “have lived, Patsy, like a man snatched up by a whirlwind. That is why I am so disassociated from simple things like celebrating Christmas. Give me time to adjust and learn the value of things. You know that I do not even yet fit smoothly into the rhythms of life, even here at Monticello. I still want to alter and tear down and rebuild and that distresses you; but I am trying, my dear—I am sincerely trying. Ultimately I shall learn to be a quiescent ancient, grateful for a fireside and an easy chair. And if you wish to celebrate Christmas, by all means let us celebrate Christmas. Shall we have a great house full of guests and much feasting and merrymaking?”
“Oh, no!” she lifted both hands. “Papa, you know you can’t afford it!”
He laughed. “And how are we to celebrate if we lack the proper materials and incentive? Shall we merely hang theholly high and slaughter the goose and carol a few stanzas under the mistletoe?”
“Do you realize, sir,” she faced him sternly, “that you have not spent a Christmas day in this house since I was a little girl?”
“You have kept count all these years?”
“I have kept count. And so has every one at Monticello. You owe something to Monticello in my opinion.”
“Then by all means, that is one debt that I shall pay,” he smiled, letting his long, thin lips relax, and his voice sink to a caressing murmur. “Plan it all, Daughter. Plan it all well and then simply tell your old father what it is that you want him to do.”
Monticello: Christmas, 1809
Monticello: Christmas, 1809
Of all the people on Jefferson’s Little Mountain, old Burwell was happiest in those lowering, chilly December days.
This, the old man orated happily in the servant’s quarters below stairs, was the way things ought to be on a gentleman’s estate in Virginia. Plenty of cider cooling ready to be sent posthaste up to the dining room, riding Mister Tom’s dumb-waiter. Women running up and down the steep, narrow curving stairways at either end of the house carrying pitchers of hot water and clean sheets, and heating irons in the rooms below to press voluminous dresses for the young misses. Trula, the laundress, kept a whole row of sadirons heating on the hearth of her little brick-floored room, and in the warming kitchens were rows of clean scrubbed bricks heating too, ready to be wrapped in flannel and carried upstairs should some members of the family find the clean linen sheets too icy for their feet.
Mr. Jack Eppes had come riding up from Eppington, bringing a haunch of venison that he had hung for days to tender it, and now it was turning slowly on a great ironspit, with a half-grown Negro boy sitting by with a mop of clean lint to dip into melted fat and wine vinegar whenever the meat needed basting. For days the service yard had been full of squawkings and drifting feathers as the women killed and dressed turkeys and geese. A fat ham simmered, and plump plum puddings boiled and bubbled, with sauce being beaten up in earthen bowls.
“This here now,” stated Burwell, pompously, “is going to be a sure-enough Christmas.”
All the fine china had been taken down from the cupboards and washed, and every wineglass on the place rubbed to a shine. Burwell himself had polished the silver, not trusting any other servant to that special task because Mister Tom wanted things right when he took a fancy notion. Right now he had the notion and had it through and through.
Cayce, the new young body servant Burwell was training, was pressing his master’s new wool pantaloons and the old Negro stood by, supervising and grumbling.
“Old times in Washington,” he declared, “Mister Tom wouldn’t be seen in old plain long-leg breeches like them there. Up there we got him up all dandified in white satin knee breeches and long silk stockings and a swingy-tail coat. Ruffles all starched.—Boy, did he strut! ‘Mister President!’ everybody say, and bow, and some ladies scrooch way down till they petticoats lay all out on the floor. Won’t see no more times like that. But anyhow, we puttin’ the big pot in the little one, this Christmas.”
“He got Dely ironing a ruffled shirt right now,” insisted Cayce, “but he say he ain’t wearin’ no buckle shoes. They hurt his feet. Dunno how I git them old slippers off’n him, but Miss Patsy say I got it to do.”
The young Randolphs and Carrs and Francis Eppes, allred-cheeked and excited, were running in and out of the house, lugging in branches of cedar and pine and holly, scattering needles and berries and trash over the shining floors so that two women had to follow around with brooms and mops to shine up to suit Miss Patsy. But in the library, where a great fire burned under the mirrored mantel and bookshelves mounted to the ceiling on every wall, Thomas Jefferson sat in his revolving chair and looked long into the gold and scarlet leap of the flames.
His thin legs were clothed in a disreputable old pair of homemade linsey-woolsey breeches, his woolen stockings sagging around his ankles. His daughter looked at him and sighed, forbearing to nag at him, since he had promised to be properly and elegantly dressed for the Christmas dinner.
“I wish he’d dress up,” she murmured to her daughter, Ann. “Aunt Anna will be driving in soon and whenever he looks shabby and uncared for, Aunt Anna always looks at me as though it were my fault.”
“Let him be,” urged Ann. “He’s old, Mother, and tired and he has earned the right to do as he pleases in his own house. At least he is letting us have a real Christmas, so maybe people will stop saying Thomas Jefferson is a great man but that he is also a heathen.”
“Do they say things like that, Ann?” asked her mother anxiously. “Surely not.”
“I’ve heard them. So has Jeff. So I asked him straightway this morning, ‘Grandfather, do you really believe in God?’”
“And what did he answer?”
“He didn’t speak at all till he had taken me by the arm and led me over to that long window. Then he pointed at the far mountains and there was a cloud lying on top with a little touch of sun like gold shining over it. ‘Did any manmake that?’ he asked me. Then he went back to his book again and never looked up.”
“At least you have your answer. Daughter, a great man is like a pillar that stands a little higher than the commonalty. There is always an itch in the crowd of lesser humanity to throw rocks and mud at it. It was the new laws he wrote for Virginia that started that infidel canard. The law freed the people of the state from being taxed to support the Church. It left them free to worship and pay tithes where they pleased, and naturally the bishops and other clergy resented it. So the story was circulated that Thomas Jefferson had no religion, and to my knowledge he has never spoken one word to refute that libel.”
“He disdained to answer it, Mother. He knew what he was and what he believed and to his mind it was no concern of any one else. He was Jefferson who belonged to the people, but what was in his heart and mind belonged only to himself. Now, at Monticello, he belongs to himself and he is just learning how to live with himself.”
Martha sighed as she bent to rescue a falling pine cone that had shattered down on the hearth. “The children haven’t secured these wreaths very well,” she remarked, “and that one in the drawing room is hung too low. The fire will dry it out and it might begin to burn. I’ll tell Burwell to do something about it. Ever since Shadwell burned before ever father was married, he has been uneasy about fire. He lost all his precious books and papers then and nothing was saved but his fiddle.”
“I wish he’d play again,” sighed Ann. “I’ve never heard him since I was very small.”
“He and my mother played together constantly,” Martha said. “When you grow older memories sharpen and sometimesthey hurt. I doubt if he will ever play again. He made both Polly and me learn to play in France, but after we came home again we could never persuade him to play with us. He said we couldn’t keep time like Mama, but I knew even then that he couldn’t bear to remember.”
“What was she like, Mother—your mama?”
“Slender and lovely—and she held herself proudly. But in the years I remember she had children too fast and she was ill and weak a great deal of the time. And Polly inherited her frailty and faded away so very young. I’m glad you are all stout and healthy,” said her mother.
“Ellen is letting herself get fat. She eats too many sweets and won’t walk ten steps if she can help it. I scold her all the time. Ellen could be pretty, if she doesn’t ruin her face with too many chins.”
“Don’t be critical of your sisters.—Ah, here’s Aunt Anna’s carriage now. Do run and call Cayce and tell him to replenish the fire in the south bedroom. Aunt Anna has refused to climb our crooked stairs for years.” Martha hurried away to welcome Thomas Jefferson’s sister and led her into the library. “Papa, here’s Aunt Anna!”
Jefferson came forward, his hands outstretched. He loved this younger sister and pulled her down into a deep chair without giving her time to take off her bonnet.
“Toast your feet,” he ordered. “I know how this first cold gets into old bones.”
“Old?” she laughed. “Since when did you decide to be old, Tom Jefferson? You’ll be hammering up things on this hill twenty years from now.—Well, Randolph wouldn’t come,” she went on in a tone of disgust. “Only twenty miles and he said it was too hard a trip in cold weather. That’s your only brother for you, Tom. How long since you have seen him?”
“Two years,” Jefferson pulled a chair up beside her. “He came over and brought me a cask of young carp for my fish pond. He stayed one night.”
“Uncle Randolph said he couldn’t sleep,” put in young Jefferson. “He said he was expecting every minute that his bed would go crashing up against the ceiling.”
“Tom and his tinkering.” She had a hearty laugh. “Well, my bed will have a stout chore to do if it hoists me to the ceiling tonight. For Heavens’ sake, Tom, get yourself elected governor again so we can have some decent roads in Virginia. Even on that turnpike the mud was hub deep and my horses traveled grunting like oxen. But if you do get elected, Tom,” she gave him an amiable prod with her knuckles, “get yourself a haircut! What’s the matter with Burwell? Has old age caught up with him too?”
“We’ll arrange to be barbered up beautifully this afternoon,” Jefferson assured her. “The people have all been busy. They are bound this shall be the most elaborate Christmas ever celebrated in Albemarle County.”
“Time there was some life in this house,” she said bluntly. “One thing you must never do is shut yourself up here like a hermit. He will, Patsy, unless you keep after him. He’ll read ten thousand books and never know his stockings are bagging down around his ankles.”
“Papa,” began Martha, hesitantly, “there’s a Christmas Eve service at the church tonight. It’s not snowing—and it’s only three miles. Would you go, Papa?”
He looked up at her with a direct, searching look. “What are you thinking, Patsy? Though I think I can read it in your face. You think it would have made her happy. Very well. Order the chaise around—but, as for me, I shall ride Eagle. I’ll go to church with you.”
“How people will stare!” whispered Ellen, in theirroom as the girls dressed for supper. “Nobody will even look at the minister.”
“Grandfather won’t even know they are staring,” declared Cornelia. “He’s been stared at with bands playing and soldiers standing at attention.”
“Grandfather,” remarked Ann, “is as aloof and untouchable as one of those mountains out there.”
“But people love him. Look how they swarmed over this place all summer.”
“Have you noticed how low and gently he speaks lately? Even to the servants, some of the stupidest ones, he never raises his voice. And they scramble like anything to do what he wants done.”
“It’s because he knows he is great and famous. Like the mountains. They know they are going to be there forever and nothing can ever destroy them. Greatness, real greatness, is always simple,” insisted Ann.
There was the fragrance of evergreens and of many candles burning in the church and a feebly burning wood fire strove to take a bit of the chill off the place. Martha wrapped her heavy cloak around her knees, then lifted a fold of it and spread it over her father’s thin legs as he sat, stiffly upright beside her on the hard pew. There was a silence as the minister came in, his vestment and stole very white in the dim light. Then in the gallery high at the back came a humming, and the slaves seated there began singing, low at first, then higher and clearer, rich deep harmony filling the raftered spaces above where candle smoke softly drifted.
Who got weary? Christmas day! Christmas day!Oh, no, Lawd! Ain’t nobody weary. Nobody weary Christmas day!
Who got weary? Christmas day! Christmas day!
Oh, no, Lawd! Ain’t nobody weary. Nobody weary Christmas day!
Thomas Jefferson gripped his daughter’s hand hard. “She sang that,” he whispered. “She liked that song.”
The age-old words rang out: “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid.”
Martha Randolph saw her father’s lips moving. Was he praying? No, his eyes were not cast down and there was no humility in the set of his shoulders. He was looking straight ahead and upward, into the high lift of the ceiling above the chancel where a round window framed an indigo-dark circle of the sky. She caught the faint whisper from his lips.
“I am here,” he was saying to some vision unseen, “I am here, beloved.”