“I remember when Mama was alive,” she looked off pensively into the lonely blue of the hills, “we had one Christmas. The people brought in holly and you mixed punch in a big bowl and people came, unless the snow was too deep. And once I remember you took my mother to church, but she came home unhappy because you stood outside and talked politics all through the service. But after that you were seldom at home.”
“I made her unhappy too often,” he reproached himself. “I was trying to help build a nation, Patsy. We were living in perilous times. Why, you must remember the war—when Tarleton came to Monticello? I rode sixty miles in one night to get here in time to get you all safely away from the British dragoons.”
“I was five. I remember. Aunt Martha Carr was here with her boys and we were all piled into the chaise, with some of the servants sitting on behind with their legs dangling and old Jupiter lashing the horses to a gallop. Mother cried because she was sure they would capture you and burn the house down. She said that if Tarleton could capture the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, the king would make him a general.”
“Not to speak boastfully, that likely was true. But he didn’t capture me nor burn the house. Instead Captain McLeod made himself very comfortable in it for two days, while poor old black Caesar was hidden under the planks of the portico, where he had crawled to hide all our silver. He had pried up the floor and dropped down under, and black Martin saw some horsemen galloping up the drive and dropped the planks back, and there was faithful old Caesar underneath, hungry and scared for two days.”
“I remember hearing about it,” said Martha, “and about the soldier who pushed a gun into Martin’s face and ordered him to tell which way you had gone or he would shoot. Martin said, ‘Go ahead, shoot!’ And after that he never got tired of telling it. But, Papa, we were supposed to be talking about Christmas!”
How could he make himself clear to her, how could he explain to his literal downright-minded daughter, that harried and anxious Thomas Jefferson had been turned away by destiny from all the simple folkways and beliefs? From all the prosaic and ordinary things that were good and dedicated to wholesome living into a world of desperate struggle, intrigue, cabal, tragedy, and strife?
Now that he was becalmed in this quiet backwater of life he could see his own career and know that it had been always headlong, more than a little frenzied, and too much of it precipitate and unpredictable and little under his own control—and in that chaotic whirling by of history there had been too little time for a man to meditate and even assay his own beliefs.
“I,” he said, “have lived, Patsy, like a man snatched up by a whirlwind. That is why I am so disassociated from simple things like celebrating Christmas. Give me time to adjust and learn the value of things. You know that I do not even yet fit smoothly into the rhythms of life, even here at Monticello. I still want to alter and tear down and rebuild and that distresses you; but I am trying, my dear—I am sincerely trying. Ultimately I shall learn to be a quiescent ancient, grateful for a fireside and an easy chair. And if you wish to celebrate Christmas, by all means let us celebrate Christmas. Shall we have a great house full of guests and much feasting and merrymaking?”
“Oh, no!” she lifted both hands. “Papa, you know you can’t afford it!”
He laughed. “And how are we to celebrate if we lack the proper materials and incentive? Shall we merely hang the holly high and slaughter the goose and carol a few stanzas under the mistletoe?”