And when we’re done, he says, “Send for Jeff. I cannot die without making friends with him, cannot leave him in anguish as my father left me.”
My heart fills at that. Jeff comes straightaway. My husband asks for my son’s forgiveness, and my tall, upright boy has the heart to give it. Tom has kind words for me and the children and the grandchildren. We nurse him, stroke his hair, hold his hands. His daughters surround the bed, fanning him of his fever during the day and his sons through the night.
Tom gives some strange directions about his shrouding and burial, then takes them back, fearing they’ll confirm the idea that he’s insane. And he looks to me, a bit fearfully, as he asks to be buried not at Tuckahoe with his kin and his own father but with my father at the head of his tombstone.
“It’s only fitting,” I tell him, moved by this final request, even though I know it will put Tom eternally in the shadow of my father’s monument, as he was all his life.
Then Tom begs for Jeff to stay with him in his dying hours.
All I want is for his suffering to end and for him to die in peace with everybody. Which is just what he does, on the twentieth of June, without a struggle or a moan.
My sons must dig the grave because my father’s people have been sold off. I’m told the auction at Monticello was no less heartrending than the sacking of an ancient city with children wailing and women rending their garments. And I feel as if I hear the echo of their anguish here.
They’re all long gone except for Burwell, who continues from habit to tidy the empty house. Sally and her sons live in Charlottesville now, so I know better than to look for her at the grave site. But once we bury Tom and make the slow walk home past Mulberry Row, my eyes drift to her old cabin, as if I expect to see her standing in the doorway in her apron, those amber eyes saying: “Now it’s done. We’ve both buried our husbands now.”
And so we have.
Every unkind feeling has been buried, too.
No longer an object of terror or apprehension, Tom became one of deep sympathy. But the bonds of affection were so much weakened by the events of the last years of his life, that after the first burst of grief is over, we cannot but acknowledge that all is for the best.
Returning health would’ve brought with it the same passions and jealousies. The Randolph was quite beyond his control. It would’ve poisoned our family and our memory of him. His peace and good end is Tom’s legacy. I’m afraid he has no other.
The whole of his possessions amount to some six hundred dollars’ worth of books and a twenty-dollar horse. And it’s left to Ellen to write an epitaph for him:
THOMAS MANN RANDOLPH, OF TUCKAHOE VIRGINIA.
BORN 1768. DIED JUNE 20, 1828.
HE WAS A MAN OF TALENT AND OF LEARNING.
CHARITABLE TO THE POOR.
A GOOD SON TO HIS MOTHER, AND A
KIND FATHER TO HIS DAUGHTERS.
“NO FARTHER SEEK HIS MERITS TO DISCLOSE,
OR DRAW HIS FRAILTIES FROM THEIR DREAD ABODE.”
A fair and fitting tribute.
I know of only one way to do him the basic justice Papa and I always wished him to have. Tom will be remembered, almost entirely I think, through his letters to my father, and my father’s letters to him.
Of which I will shape every word.
Chapter Forty-three
Monticello, 1829
From Martha Jefferson Randolph to Ellen Randolph Coolidge
We are at present engaged in a business that precludes work, writing and reading of every kind but the one: revising and correcting the copies of the manuscripts.
THIS IS THE LAST LETTER I’ll write from Monticello.
It’s now a house of ghosts, dark and dilapidated with age and neglect. Bare trees loom like skeletal fingers in the yard, all pointing toward the heavens, where my father and his angels surely now reside. The hall, once filled with statues and natural curiosities, is empty but for a single bust of my father. Bare walls once covered with paintings and a defaced floor no longer polished to a high sheen open into the once gay and splendid drawing room, now comfortless.
And yet, Monticello is still an attraction for tourists. A vulgar herd of strangers has stomped over the gardens, taking away my choicest flower roots, my yellow jasmines, fig bushes, grapevines, and everything and anything they fancy.
I feel like a spirit of the place that has survived the death of its body, now deprived of even its purpose in going on because my father’s papers are ready to publish.
On the day the work is done, I somehow rouse myself from a cold bed to watch the last wagonload of books and papers packed into crates to be shipped away for sale. There will be no groundbreaking, no bugles blowing, no commemoration dinners for this patriotic monument. But I perceive in it an achievement.