Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

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In some ways Thomas Jefferson finds death more appealing than life. Nothing he does matters anymore, and so he is able to lose himself more completely in the moment. Now he is lost in the emerald translucency of locust leaves in dawn light. Now in a cloud of indigo butterflies fluttering over meadow grass. And now his heart is broken by the contest between joy and despair in every note of birdsong. Birds have three springs inside their heads, and seven cogs, and are not actually capable of choice, and yet, all day, every day, they sing of joy’s inability to outlast despair. There is something in this that Thomas Jefferson finds unspeakably beautiful.

Thomas Jefferson is on his knees in a window seat, looking down a long reddish road shaded by two rows of poplar saplings. He is ten years old and holding a pocket watch to his ear. He hears a dog bark, the whispery commotion of wind in leaves, a crow’s caw — but only silence from the watch. As he lowers it to take another look, he can hear and feel the tiny impacts of minute gears and screws tumbling through its complex interior. “This watch used to belong to my father,” Thomas Jefferson’s own father told him only three days ago. “He gave it to me so that, by marking time, I might learn not to waste it. I hope you will learn the same lesson.”

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