America's First Daughter: A Novel(12)

He wouldn’t touch the trays of food brought to his room, for he had no appetite. My aunts tried to put baby Lucy in his arms, but he wouldn’t hold her, for she was the squalling infant that had hastened my mother’s death. And when Polly came to the door, my father became unsteady on his feet, as if he might swoon away, for my little sister so closely resembled my mother. It was the same reason, I think, he could not even bear the sight of Sally Hemings; the set of her mouth and shape of her eyes appeared familiar even then and greatly disturbed him.

Papa would have only me at his side.

Maybe it was because I was long and lanky like a boy, with ginger hair just like his, that he chose me to be his constant companion. Or maybe he sensed in me more than a daughter. A kindred spirit in the darkness.

Whatever the reason, mourning forged us together like hot metal under a smith’s hammer. I was afraid to leave him for fear that if I did, I would be motherless and fatherless. I think he feared it, too.

Only I could coax him out of the house to bury my mother beneath the great oak tree in Monticello’s graveyard, where my father blinked unseeingly into the afternoon sun and Aunt Elizabeth tried to offer comfort. “Our Martha has found a happier station. She’s in heaven, now. Alas, until we join her we all must attend ourselves to this life.”

My father’s frown made it clear he didn’t believe a word of it, but he avoided arguments, with silence, whenever possible. Still, he knew he must say something, for my mother’s kinsmen had gathered to pay their respects. His voice caught with emotion. “If there is, beyond the grave, any concern for this world, then there’s one angel who must pity the misery to which life confines me. I’m in a stupor of mind that has rendered me as dead to the world as she whose loss occasioned it.”

These words hushed not only the small crowd of stooped slaves, but also the stern-faced men in powdered wigs and their weepy women in bonnets. The depths of my father’s despair seemed to shame them. And him. Papa said nothing more during Mama’s funeral, but together, we read the words carved on her tombstone. Not a quote from the Bible, but from Homer’s Iliad:

NAY IF EVEN IN THE HOUSE OF HADES THE DEAD FORGET THEIR DEAD, YET WILL I EVEN THERE BE MINDFUL OF MY DEAR COMRADE.

Below that, a simple accounting of her:

TO THE MEMORY OF MARTHA JEFFERSON,

DAUGHTER OF JOHN WAYLES;

BORN OCTOBER 19TH, 1748, O.S.

INTERMARRIED WITH THOMAS JEFFERSON JANUARY 1ST, 1772

—TORN FROM HIM BY DEATH SEPTEMBER 6TH, 1782

THIS MONUMENT OF HIS LOVE IS INSCRIBED.

The slaves used ropes to lower my mother’s coffin into the ground and then shoveled earth over her, rivers of sweat running down their black faces. Then she was gone from us. Truly gone.

One of our neighbors murmured, “Poor Mrs. Jefferson, another victim of the British. Her death is the aftermath of fright . . .”

As if struck guilty by those words, my father stumbled toward her grave. Was it the fault of the British? Had our flight from Monticello and fearful hiding from enemy soldiers stolen my mother’s life? And would we have been forced to hide if Papa had not been a revolutionary?

Papa’s stricken expression told me that he counted himself to blame.

It was Mr. Short and I who steadied Papa, even when my father tried to push away from our assistance. When Papa found his footing again, he uttered the briefest niceties to my mother’s kinsmen, before retreating up the long path to the house, forcing me to chase after him.

Straightaway, he sat down at the table where the pistol still rested, but he didn’t touch it. Instead he took up his Garden Book. He hadn’t made entries since summer. But in the moments after my mother’s burial, I watched him write feverishly, scratching ink to paper with each hasty stroke. Curious, I peered over his shoulder, wondering what he was so keen to record, now of all times. . . .

I was shocked by what I saw.

W. Hornsby’s Method of Preserving Birds

In painstaking detail, my father wrote . . . a macabre description of how to preserve dead birds in salt and nitre, mortar and pepper.

I clasped a hand to my mouth. Is this what my aunts did to my mother before setting her to rest in her coffin?

Mama was delicate; my father used to tease that she had the bones of a bird. I think he would’ve preserved her for all time, if he could have. He would’ve used salt and nitre, mortar and pepper, or any other means to keep some part of her with him. But he had only her belongings, her letters, the little scrap of paper still tucked against his heart . . . and her daughters.

Could that ever be enough?

Just then a knock came at the door. My father did not look up from his writing table. Papa continued to scratch notes about dead birds—and I was suddenly vexed that our servants let anyone into the house when Papa was in such a state.

Aunt Elizabeth must have been similarly vexed, for I heard her address our visitor on the other side of the door. “Mr. Short, he cannot receive you. I fear he has lost his wits.”

Mortified, I pressed my hot cheek against the cool door and heard Mr. Short chastise my aunt in no uncertain terms. “Never say it! Or you’ll inspire every man of Tory sympathies left in the country to crow that the author of the Declaration of Independence has gone mad.”

Papa couldn’t be mad. I wouldn’t let him go mad. He was writing about birds, but at least he was writing again. Though the sight of my sisters still disturbed him, he was eating again, too. Little nibbles, here and there. And that night, when he collapsed onto his pallet in exhaustion, I stroked Papa’s red hair, singing softly a song my mother used to sing to soothe him.