Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

“Yes,” Thomas answered.

“Why did you bring her here?” Patsy’s face was still buried in his handkerchief.

Thomas gestured to Sally and said gently to his daughter, “This isn’t her fault. She doesn’t deserve your fury, your fury’s with me.” He took Patsy by the arm and they began to walk around the border of the church. In her pew Sally watched them circle in silence. For a long time they just walked, not talking at all, as though in the early-morning carriage ride from Paris Thomas had no luck trying to figure out what he would say at this moment. In the empty resonance of the church the buzz of their voices finally reached Sally, but it wasn’t until their third time around she made out the words. “Do you know,” she heard Patsy plead, “the way they say your name here? In the street the common people say it when they need to fill their hearts with hope. I never believed,” she said bitterly, “that my father was just another fine Virginia aristocrat, having relations with his slavewomen.”

Thomas led Patsy to a pew, where they sat down. He continued to hold her hand. “There are things,” he said, “a man can explain least of all to those whom he most owes explanations. Something happened to me after your mother died. Something happened to me after Maria left.” The abbess watched intently from the altar. “I’m not here to make you promises,” Thomas said to Patsy. “I’m here to try and dissuade you from a decision I believe you’re making not because it’s what you want but because you’re angry with me. I want to dissuade you from this decision because it will hurt you more than me, because you’re only using your own life to reproach me.”

“I’ve heard that Grandfather Wayles had many slavewomen,” Patsy said.

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard—” She looked at Sally.

“I believe,” Thomas said, “that Sally is Grandfather Wayles’ daughter.”

“Then she and Mother were sisters?” Patsy said angrily. “Then she’s my aunt?” Patsy asked in disbelief, pointing at Sally. “Will she next be my mother?”

The abbess hurried over from the altar now. “It’s most irregular, monsieur,” she announced in French, hovering at their side. “It’s time for the girl to return to her chores and duties.”

Thomas stood up from the pew. He looked down at Patsy and sighed. “I’m taking you home. You’re still of an age that I can make these decisions for you.”

“You should think of the child,” the abbess protested.

“Of course.”

“It’s unfortunate,” said the abbess, “that your own hatred of God blinds you to—”

“I can appreciate that she’s politically valuable to you,” Thomas said to the abbess in English. “She is after all the daughter of someone your church fears and despises. But I’m taking her back, for as long as I have something to say about it, as her father. Later Patsy may decide for herself.”

“For your daughter’s sake, let’s pray she never comes to share your contempt for God and his works.”

“I have nothing but reverence for God and his works,” Thomas answered. He was already walking toward the door with Patsy under his arm and Sally behind them. “It’s the base machinations of power conducted in the name of God for which I have contempt.” Outside, the carriage was waiting where Thomas and Sally had left it. With his daughter and lover, Thomas stepped into the carriage while the abbess seethed in the doorway. “I’ll send someone in a few days for her things,” he said.

Outside Paris they stopped at an inn to have breakfast. While Thomas and Patsy ate in the guest room by the fire, Sally sat in the servants’ quarters in back. Through the window of the kitchen she could see the snow of the winter and through the door of the kitchen she could hear Thomas’ and Patsy’s laughter. In her fine Parisian dress she quietly picked at her meal while the other servants watched; the wine-red gloves lay on the bench beside her. The servants offered cheese and bread with jam. After a while they turned their attention from Sally to discuss kings and republicans.

By the time Thomas and Patsy and Sally returned to Paris it was a gray wintry noon. Bedlam rose from the city like a swarm. The boulevard St-Germain was raucous, enraged people stopping coaches in the streets and rocking them back and forth to overturn them while the passengers frantically hurled money out the windows. Throngs made the bridges impassable. From her window Sally could see approaching on the horizon of the Seine an angry black-and-red current. The revolution was trickling in by river, a rebel navy of flaming boats advancing to seize the docks and block the king’s commerce; one by one the boats beached on the quays. Sailors stormed ashore with torches burning beneath the black winter sky.

People were reaching inside Thomas’ carriage. They grabbed at Thomas and Patsy and at Sally in her fine Parisian clothes. Someone yanked one of the gloves off her hand and, when she reached to seize it back, she was almost pulled from the coach. The turmoil became uncontrollable. The carriage was about to be pitched over the side of the bridge into the river when someone shouted, “Mais c’est Jefferson!” and then there was a hush, and the recurring murmur, “Jefferson,” over and over. A roar rose from one end of the mob to the other. “Jefferson,” men and women cried, “the people’s champion!”

The crowd grew larger, cheering his name, people dashing from shops and looking from windows. Those around the carriage now reached in not to grab Thomas but simply to touch him; soon it became clear he would have to say something to them before they’d stop. He opened the carriage door and stood on the step of the coach and the crowd shouted at the sight of him, the giant with his hair of light and his old worn disheveled clothes. For a long time this wild demonstration continued. He kept trying to talk but no one could hear him amid the furor. “My dear friends,” he said in his halting French, once the mob finally became quiet; his voice was so soft that inside the coach Sally could barely make it out. No one in the rapt crowd was so rude as to call for him to speak up. “My dear friends,” he started once more, fumbling his hands, “please forgive the poor French of an American savage,” and people laughed and the cheering began all over again.

When it faded, he went on. “My friends in this country,” he said, still stumbling and nearly inaudible, “which I’ve come to love as though it were my own … what can I say to you that wouldn’t be presumptuous? What can I say that won’t be a … small whisper against the bold shout of your streets. The witness I bear here humbles me, and I’m not worthy of it—” and someone in the crowd began to protest but Thomas continued, “—I’m not worthy of it, but I’m grateful to see it.”

He stopped. Behind him the revolution continued upriver. In the cold of the winter his words left tiny clouds before his face. “I’m a poor champion,” he finally said after a moment. No one spoke. “I’m only as bright as the whitest light in any man can be, tempered as it is in every man by whatever black impulse he can’t ignore. At my best I have only been the slave of a great idea. It’s an idea which no man holds but which rather holds him. It’s to no man’s credit that he has such an idea, it’s merely his good fortune that such an idea possesses him with such force and clarity that he can’t help but serve it. What you do here stirs the slaves of the world to life. What you do here leaves the world’s sleeping tyrants with no dreams but the endless counting of the few remaining days left to them. You should remember,” and now Sally almost thought she could hear his voice break, “that whenever a poor champion fails a great idea, it’s not the failure of the idea itself. The idea is as great as it ever was. It survives its poor champion and goes on and on. You should remember that when the final reckoning comes with God in his heaven, when the final battle of old prophecies is fought here on this sphere, it will be between those noble enough to have been slaves, and those arrogant enough to presume themselves masters. Let no one doubt on whose side God will be.”