Jefferson (14 page)

Short backed his horse to one side. Even at this late hour in the afternoon a line of carts and wagons stood in front of the central turnstile, the only one open, and the drivers waited stoically, arms folded, while the tax collectors, the hated
gabelous
, unpacked their loads, examined each bundle, and calculated the tax. The hands—or pockets—of the Farmers-General were everywhere, Jefferson liked to say. To enter Paris with merchandise of any kind—milk, eggs, silk, salt—you had to pay a duty; there were similar gates and collectors all around the city, at every gate in the wall. In Virginia, Short thought, the collectors would have been lynched, the walls long ago blasted into democratic rubble. Here, he knew from observation, by dawn all four turnstiles in the gate would be open and the lines of patient carts would stretch miles down the road.

He glanced at his gold watch. Five o’clock, the dinner hour.

He would keep Preeson Bowdoin’s damnable letter in his pocket unopened. He would place it sealed on the mantel in his room. Look at it every day, morning and night, as a memento moriae. A reminder of Folly.

He spurred his horse viciously back into the road. How the
devil
did Jefferson, of all men, know about the Ace of Spades?

“Colonel Humphreys sent a message he wouldn’t be in tonight, sir. Mr. Williamos gone to stay in Versailles.”

James Hemings closed the door and decided against practicing his French on Short this night. You gauge them like a strange horse, he thought, no matter how many times you’ve seen them. Horse you’ve known all your life still can kick. Short the politest man on earth, but he walks in flushed like a field hand, chewing his mouth, cords in his neck tight as a whip. James watched him scrape his boots hard on the floor. Woman trouble, one thousand—one million to one.

“Williamos gone
again
?”

James nodded and took Short’s hat and his light outer riding coat, mentally noting that the hat should be brushed for dust and that the coat smelled of manure.

“Not back till when?”

James shrugged. “Didn’t say, sir.” Williamos was another of
Jefferson’s unofficial boarders, a n’er-do-well drifter with nothing to recommend him but a hangdog look and a fund of stories about the Revolutionary War. They would come for a week, stay for months. The young men keep me young, Jefferson would say.

“Nobody called then?” Short asked, looking into the study.

“Nobody did.” Dropping the
sir
out of sheer piss.

“No messages, letters?” Short was tapping the pockets of his neat silk jacket. Fine white powder shook from the curls of his hair like a little cloud of snow.

James shook his head slowly. No powder, no snow.

“I’ll be upstairs tonight. I don’t need dinner. If somebody does call—anybody—I’m not in.”

Not in. Working. Showing SERIOUS APPLICATION.

Short crossed the room to adjust his curtains. Even in April the light lasted longer here than in Virginia. Across the horizon the sun still cast a low orange glow; the houses on the next street held a tenuous silhouette. If they moved to the Champs-Élysées, they would look out on the wall, soldiers, tax collectors. From his present window he could see only the occasional spark of horseshoe against stone. Not even a light in the arching
réverbères
over the rue Taitbout. Vandals stole the oil and candles so often that the city lit them now only on completely moonless nights, four or five times a month. In western Virginia, Short thought, beyond the Chesapeake plantations you could stand by a window every night for years on end and see no
réverbères
, no carriages, no buildings at all, only the endless oceanic forest along whose black bottom you seemed to crawl like some warped species of fish, deaf or blind.

Mesmerism and manure.

Abruptly he let the curtain drop and turned to his desk. Across the length of it, between two new candles, he had arranged stacks of letters to file or else to copy in diplomatic code (Jefferson loved to write in code); printer’s proofs of the book, six well-sharpened pens in a row. By the time Jefferson returned, Short would have done a week’s worth of work, disciplined his mind to a fine, hard edge. He rubbed his hands together briskly and sat down.

Memoirs of Jefferson
—
3

I
N THE RUGGED WESTERN FRONTIER OF
Virginia, no man ever achieved a more spectacular reputation for physical strength than Peter Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s father.

Our Jefferson, then a boy of nine or ten, remembered his father once striding out into the barnyard of the old Tuckahoe plantation, in the fierce heat of a July noon, and waving aside the party of slaves who were struggling to lift upright a spilled shipment of tobacco barrels. Peter Jefferson was well over six feet tall and muscular even beyond his extraordinary height. While the admiring blacks squatted in a circle and looked on, this Virginia Samson gripped one hogshead of tobacco in his right hand, a second hogshead in his left, and started to pull. His face turned red, the veins sprang out on his neck and forehead; the left barrel rose, then the right, and with a final grunt he pulled them both straight up on their ends. His son later weighed a similar set of barrels and found that each one came to more than five hundred pounds.

On another occasion, when Jefferson was twelve or so (with his father’s height but never his bulk—“Tall Tom,” the slaves called him), his father came upon three timberjacks trying to pull down a ruined shed near the James River. After watching them heave fruitlessly for five minutes at their girdle of ropes, Peter Jefferson pushed them away, seized one end of a rope himself, and dragged the whole shed down in an instant.

Years later, visitors to Monticello would be surprised to find the great statesman tinkering with a machine (of his own invention), made of levers and weights, that measured strength. It was Jefferson’s habit, in fact, even after he retired from the presidency in 1809, to challenge the younger men to strong-arm contests on it. Thomas Mann Randolph, his luckless son-in-law, was never able to beat the old man. I was still in my forties, Jefferson in his sixties when I came to Monticello to inspect some neighboring property. Should I say how uncomfortable and embarrassed I was when, after being shown a prize copy of
Piers Plowman
more than two hundred and fifty years old, I was led back into the entrance hall
and had my hand and forearm slapped into the machine’s main lever, this to pull with all my strength while a marker rose up the wall? Should I add that Jefferson beat me?

Odd thought: Jefferson’s cool, measured, amazingly lucid prose, likewise impossible to match, has often struck me as made of levers and weights, like his machine. He can lift an idea higher than anyone else.

Short drew an inky line across the blotter on his desk. The first letter on his stack was addressed to John Jay, the secretary for foreign affairs in Philadelphia. It concerned the enthralling matter of the Comte de Vergennes and tobacco duties. Jefferson’s code consisted of a little booklet of ciphers for which Jay had the key, and it was Short’s task to encode all proper names and whatever words he thought important. He glanced at the open booklet. For the word
by
Jefferson had devised the symbol “1461.” Short dutifully dipped his pen in the inkwell again. A bead of ink formed at the tip, like a drop of blood.

He was clearly not in the mood to write. It would be far easier to read. The next installment of printer’s proofs lay in the halo of his candle, Queries VIII-XVIII of
Noted on Virginia
. At random he chose a page from the middle and in less than a minute saw exactly why Jefferson had kept them a secret.

N
ot in a better mood, James Hemings thought.

He stood by the window fiddling with the string on the curtain and watched William Short take his seat at the long dining table opposite Jefferson. It was eight o’clock, early for Short, late for Jefferson, who had already gone through his invariable morning routine of washing his feet in a basin of cold water and writing for twenty minutes in his letterbook. Then he had played his violin in his room for an hour.
Then
sat down to have breakfast and open his mail. Now Short comes in carrying a stack of long printed papers and staring pop-eyed like a frog at
him
.