America's First Daughter: A Novel(10)

I wondered how I could. Polly was a willful child who never listened and Lucy was just a baby, crying for milk. Still, I couldn’t deny my mother. “I’ll try, Mama.”

“That’s my strong girl.” She sank deeper into the feather bed, alarming me with the labored rasp of her breath. “Help your father through his sorrow.”

I nodded because my throat hurt too much to speak. Mama motioned with a trembling finger toward a book on her night table. The volume was Tristram Shandy, one of my father’s favorites. It was her habit to copy from the text, words that echoed the sentiments of her heart. With difficulty, she lifted herself against the pillows and insisted that I lay the tray with the book and feathered quill over her knees. When I did, she took the pen and dipped it in the inkwell before copying words in a spidery hand:

Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of windy day never to return—more everything presses on—

She stopped there, too weary to go on. I took the quill from her shaking hand just as my father came in. His blue eyes were red-rimmed with exhaustion but he injected a false note of cheer into his voice. “What have we here, my dearest?” One glance at what she’d written and he blanched. “None of this, Martha. You only need rest, my love. You only need rest.”

But by the next morning, my mother was plainly fighting a rest of the everlasting kind. She gasped through lips tinged with blue and our house servants drew near, as if straining to hear her last breath. These Hemings slaves had been with Mama since she was a child and some whispered they were kin. Though such things should never be spoken, much less repeated, on a plantation, I’d heard that Nance, Critta, and Sally were all my mother’s sisters. That my grandfather Wayles got them upon their enslaved mother, Betty, who now stroked Mama’s face as if she were her own daughter.

I didn’t know if it was true but I knew better than to ask. What I knew was that in her final hours, my mother wanted the Hemingses near, and I was left to huddle by my Aunt Elizabeth’s knees with the heat of the fireplace at my back. I didn’t know what else I should do, but stayed silent for fear someone would usher me from the room if they remembered me there.

Papa drew his leather chair close so that he could hold my mother’s hand. In a faltering voice, Mama told him everything she wanted done. She gave instructions for matters weighty and mundane. She was letting go of life, giving everything away. Even the little bronze bell she used to ring for servants, she gave to Sally, who pressed a cheek against her mistress’s hand.

At last, my mother’s gaze fell upon me. Watch over your father when I am gone, her eyes said, but I still couldn’t believe that she’d go. “The children . . .” Mama wept.

My throat went tight, and I desperately wanted my father to help her—to make matters right, as he always did. But Papa’s expression crumbled as if her sobs lashed against his spirit, and I knew with terrible certainty that not all things were in his power. Papa leaned to her, until their foreheads touched, their intimacy unbearably tender.

We ought to have left them alone, but none of us could move. We were, all of us, riveted by my mother’s every halting word. She drew back and lifted three shaking fingers, spreading them for my father to see. “Three children we still have together,” she said, with great difficulty. “I cannot die happy if I know my daughters must have a stepmother brought in over them.”

A sound of anguish escaped my father’s throat, as if he couldn’t bear the thought of any other woman. There was no hesitation in him when he took my mother’s limp hand to make his solemn vow. “Only you, Martha. I swear I’ll have no other wife. Only you, my love.”

My mother’s chest hollowed in a long wheeze and tears squeezed from the corners of her eyes. She was beyond speech, but motioned as if she wished to write. At my mother’s gesture, Sally was quick to obey. The slave girl jumped to fetch the tray with the book and the inkwell. Then Sally pressed the quill pen into my mother’s unsteady hand. But my mother couldn’t hold it. In exacting promises from us, Mama had used all the strength left in her.

Answering the silent plea in her eyes, my father wrapped his hand round her delicate fingers and finished writing the passage she began the day before.

—and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make!

At the sight of his handwriting in bold dark ink, my mother smiled. These were the words she wanted to leave for him. So he folded it and tucked it inside his coat against his heart, where he carried it the rest of his life.

Then my mother closed her eyes and did not open them again. I held my breath as her chest rose, fell, rose, then fell, until she was still. Perfectly still. And the world went quiet.

Her angelic beauty was bathed in the morning sunlight that filtered in from the tall window. Surely she had become an angel, I thought as tears blurred my vision and tightened my throat. My mournful cry broke free. The sound was echoed by my father, his eyes wide in a state of insensibility. And his cry was like the hollow howl of the grave.

Rushing to his side, my aunt hurried to lead my father from the room before grief unmanned him before his slaves. I was numb watching them go. Then I remembered my promise. I followed, calling, “Papa!”