America's First Daughter: A Novel(181)

“Dear God, Papa.” I brushed back welling tears.

He took both my hands. “Burwell, Joe Fosset, and Johnny Hemings . . . I intend to free them with a stipend and tools and a log house for each of them. And the boys, Madison and Eston—they’ll go free on their twenty-first birthdays. I’ll petition the legislature for them to be allowed to remain in the state as if it were a favor to Johnny Hemings, naming them as his apprentices so that he can start a carpentry business.”

It was, I supposed, the only option. My father couldn’t do for Sally’s younger boys what he’d done with Beverly and Harriet without depriving their mother of all her children. But I believed anyone might be able to see right through emancipation of Madison and Eston unless . . .

The ruse, of course, depended upon Sally’s enslavement. Papa wouldn’t free her, couldn’t free her without exposing everything. Which is why he was leaving it to me.

In the end he left everything—all of it—to me.





“TELL THEM TO MAKE MY COFFIN NOW,” Papa said from the confines of his sickbed, where I fanned the flies away from him in the still heat of summer.

He’d come home from some business in Charlottesville, slumped in the saddle, scarcely able to hold the reins in his crippled hands. Old Eagle clopped slowly along, careful and somber, as if he knew just how feeble Papa was. And once we got Papa down from the horse, it became manifest that his powers were failing him.

His plan was to fight old age off by never admitting the approach of helplessness. Not even in the approach of his death, which he intended to arrange to his satisfaction.

My father used his life, his talent, and his fortune to secure the rights of men to control their own destinies, and he still intended to command his. He’d decided to die, and nothing could discourage him, not even my cry of pure anguish when he ordered his coffin be made.

After that, my whole world reduced to the intervals of wakefulness and consciousness between my father’s slumber. I shuddered when he said, “Take heart, Patsy. Jeff has promised to never abandon you. And when I’m gone, you’ll find within that drawer,” he said, spending his precious strength to point to it, “a little casket of gifts for you.”

The pain that swept through me in anticipation of the end was nothing I’d ever experienced before, even for all the other losses. Nothing I thought I could survive. Even the thought of losing my father was a crushing, grinding agony of the spirit that left me not just shuddering, but quaking in its wake. “No, Papa. Not yet . . .”

“Not yet,” he agreed, taking shallow, rasping breaths upon his pillow. “I want to breathe my last on that great day, the birthday of my country.”

July the fourth, he meant. The fiftieth anniversary of our Independence. The day he became the most profound voice of his age. Of any age.

“Mother, let us relieve your vigil,” Jeff insisted, his comforting hand upon my shoulder. “We’ll stay with him all night. We’ll drag in pallets so that he’s never alone for a moment, if only you’ll get some rest.”

I couldn’t consent to it—especially not when Sally sat so resolutely, her spine straight upon a wooden chair nearby. I don’t know what words of farewell she exchanged with Papa.

What they’d shielded from the world all their lives they still kept, with possessive silence, to themselves. And I had to be coaxed away from my father’s sickbed like a lamed animal to water. So violent was my own pain at the expectation of him being torn from me, I had to be pried away . . . until, at long last, on the third of July, my father’s suffering seemed to demand a wish for the end.

Struggling for breath, Papa would ask, “Is it the Fourth?”

Because we couldn’t bear for him to perish with even one more disappointment, we told him it was. An expression came over his countenance that my children naively believed to mean: just as I wished.

But I don’t believe my father was deceived. Even after his limbs took on the clamminess of death and his pulse was so faint only the doctor could feel it, Papa stirred again to ask, “Is it the Fourth?”

This time the doctor said, “It soon shall be.”

I stared at the clock, willing the hands to move. Wishing I had my father’s indomitable will to shape the world and make the laws of the universe bend. Gladly would I give up a day of my own life, a day from the lives of everyone living, to deliver my father into the morning of his glorious Fourth.

But the physician said softly, “He has no more than fifteen minutes now. . . .”

An hour later my father was still alive and refused his laudanum. He then fell back into a disturbed sleep, and in a vivid dream, he roused himself, anxiously gesturing with his hands, as if to write upon a tablet. “The Committee of Safety ought to be warned!”

My children wondered what he could be dreaming about. I didn’t have to wonder. I knew. He was, in his final breaths, readying for the British invasion, readying to fight the war for Independence all over again.

We’d later learn that in Quincy, Massachusetts, John Adams was also on his deathbed, equally determined to see the morning of the Fourth. He’d die on the cherished day, my father’s name on his lips, but all we knew was that in Virginia, the struggle went on, and on.

My Papa’s frail chest rose and fell under the obelisk clock that ticked the interminable stretch. Mr. Short had that clock made for Papa; and in remembering that, it seemed as if William, too, was hovering over Papa in vigil. Burwell helped to arrange Papa’s head upon his pillow. Jeff swept his lips with a wet sponge, which my father sucked and appeared to relish.