My Monticello(37)
Knox and I claimed the glass-faced greenhouse room that jutted from Thomas Jefferson’s cabinet and library. We dragged a bedroll from the floor above and made a padded place to lie beneath the windows. Those windows that opened tall as doors and looked onto the terrace and over Mulberry Row.
* * *
Five cloistered days, we explored Jefferson’s little mountain. Uprooted as we were, we filled those first days with discovery. We found a green old-timey carriage with giant black wheels, near the upper gift shop. We found the carcasses of a den of baby foxes in the pasture, their decaying bodies alive with flies. We found mice droppings along the low cellars and heard their plush and scurrying battalion advancing after dark. At dawn, a family of deer nosed up to our windows, necks elegant, ears low and fearless. We found a heap of downturned wheelbarrows entwined with vines. We untangled them and used them to cart things up the pale path past the welcome pavilion: bags of dried bean soups, lavender lotion, bottles of wine with a picture of the house on their labels. Soon we were making soups for supper, slugging saucers of wine while it lasted, with Ezra partaking zealously. On the second night, after dinner, I saw him stagger across the south lawn in the rain only to pee in the small muddy fishpond. We used boiling water, poured into basins, to wash our bodies and launder the clothing that we traded among us, so that I wore Knox’s shirt for a day, and he wore Mr. Byrd’s and so on. We opened up a locked storage shed and found old lawn equipment: chainsaws, mowers, a few precious canisters of gasoline.
On the third day, Georgie jogged up from the welcome pavilion to join us. He came on his own, wheelbarrowing a cache of snack bars he’d squirreled away. At the top of the hill, he relinquished his bounty to Ms. Edith’s table, like an oath. I looked down the yard behind him, anxious or eager that Devin would be heading up too, along with Elijah. We had already sent down several shifts of guards to replace or buttress them, but Devin did not come up—not that day. I let myself feel relieved too, even if I missed seeing his face with its familiar contours.
Those first nights the sky would darken with rainfall so that the hazy light of the moon barely glimmered through. I’d lie beside Knox in our windowed room, feeling my stomach for some sign of change, one way or the other. I’d worry over MaViolet’s breathing, listening for her sighing exhalations beneath the insistent thrum of rain. She only had that one half-used inhaler—but how easy it would’ve been for me to grab the others. My shame for failing to bring what she most needed smoldered in my chest. A gust of wind would rattle the windows, and I’d be up on my feet, mazing through furniture, to make sure she was not wheezing again. Whenever she asked, I’d shepherd her all the way through the house and down the narrow stairwell to the old privy bathroom, or—because she preferred them—to new toilets near the gift shop, which had so little natural light but were smooth and modern and familiar. I’d fumble with matches to light a candle, then afterward, I’d help her back to bed. Those nights, I hardly slept. But I know I slept some, because, more than once, I startled awake with some fresh and terrible vision flashing in my mind. One night, I heard men banging guns against the greenhouse window and when I looked out, I saw First Street again. A windowless van sat on the far side of the road and a group of grown men were dragging somebody toward it. They were dragging that teen, the one they’d bloodied when he ran out toward them. In sleep, all I could do was watch as they held him by his ankles, his armpits, as he bucked and called out, Ma! Ma! Ma! Whenever I woke, I knew those men had dragged that teen on First, for real, after striking him with their rifle. When I woke up, I remembered.
On our third morning in the house, Carol’s hens offered up four perfect eggs. She brought them to morning rations in a basket she’d found, lined with cloth. Are we waiting? Carol asked again, looking back at Ira, who’d claimed a leather-backed chair. Ms. Edith surveyed the eggs, announcing we would crack them into our soup’s salted boiling water that evening.
Waiting? Sure! Let’s wait and wait, Ira said.
After breakfast, I found myself down below the long walkway of the southern terrace. Without thinking, I’d made my way to the windowless exhibit on the life of my namesake: Sally Hemings. Last summer, there’d been a video looping, projecting birds in flight onto a headless dress form and the wall behind. I stood for some time at the openmouthed entrance, peering into darkness.
If we were waiting, I couldn’t yet say what we were waiting for. Felt like Ms. Edith thought we were waiting for heaven. And LaToya, who’d spent a day sequestered in her room, appeared to be waiting for grace. When I brought a hot bowl of food to set by her door, she opened it abruptly, as if she’d been waiting silently on the other side to take it from my hands.
Ezra acted like we were waiting just to get it together so we could get back and make those men pay. He swore he’d gather all the boys and men near First Street, like the ones who lived in the yellow house next door to his daddy’s house. Somebody’s got to pay, Ezra said, upending our last bottle of wine, and looking down the dark path to the welcome pavilion. But for his brother’s steadiness, Ezra probably would have gone back on his own.
Some wet and sweltering afternoons, when Ms. Edith came to sit with MaViolet, and if Knox was off addressing some issue with Mr. Byrd, I’d find myself on my own. I’d rove the house, its three floors and damp basement, its backroom docents’ library full of books. I read because I’ve always read. I read to try to escape the tenuousness of our situation. I read to distract from the fact of my pregnancy, which was becoming more founded with each passing hour. How was it that I had ended up here, and knocked up, not knowing for sure who the father was? And what did it mean if Knox was the father, if Devin was? How had the world gotten so badly broken? I could feel my own jagged, rattling pieces reflecting light and dark, like a kaleidoscope.