Arc d'X

2

THIRTY-FOUR YEARS LATER, down the hall from Thomas’ boyhood room, as the smoke of revolution settled over the countryside, a nine-year-old slavegirl called Sally stood in another room watching her mistress’ last hours. Along with Sally were her mother, brother and most of the other houseslaves. In bed a dying young woman glided in and out of consciousness, gripping her husband’s hand. The heavy blue curtains were closed to the sun; the dank smell of childbirth and the woman’s dying mixed with the fragrances of lilac and musk, which a bedchamber slave frantically wafted through the room until Sally thought she’d gag. Thomas finally wrested himself from his stunned bewilderment. “Please,” he whispered, so low Sally could barely hear him, “no more perfume.” It was the only thing anyone had said in hours, and the stricken husband returned to his silent vigil.

In fact the mistress of the house had been weak and in poor health as long as Sally could remember, and had lain on this particular edge of death for some time. The smell of placenta and blood that still hung in the bedchamber was from the birth of the mistress’ third daughter. Throughout the recent weeks visitors had come to the house from across Virginia not to offer best wishes to the sick woman but to pay respects to the departed one, since news traveled prematurely that she had already died. All summer Thomas walked the halls of the house in a trance. Racked first with the sorrow of his impending loss and the denial of its inevitability, he’d nearly come to that point where such denial becomes anticipation, as a consequence of which such sorrow becomes guilt. His hand perpetually in hers, he was both ready to pull her back as she was sucked into the afterworld and to squeeze her fingers goodbye in his encouragement that she go.

At night in their quarters the slaves talked about what would happen to them when the mistress was gone. It wasn’t that they feared their treatment at the hands of the master. The master treated the slaves better than the mistress, actually; no one had ever seen him beat a slave or order a slave beaten. Once in town Sally watched with awe as Thomas, who at more than six feet tall towered over most men, seized a stick from a handyman who was beating a slave. Thomas neither bought slaves nor sold them; he’d inherited his from his father. But most of the slaves belonged to the mistress when she married Thomas, and over the years of their marriage the master had remained incomprehensible to them when not appearing simply eccentric. He was dreamy and distracted and perhaps, for all anyone could tell, a bit addled — a lawyer who never had any clients, a tinkerer who built peculiar contraptions with arcane functions. To the nine-year-old slavegirl Sally there was something godlike about his calm. She was mesmerized by his immaculate silence, his chaste reflectiveness. The rest of the slaves were more unsettled than reassured by his strange otherness. They didn’t know what to make of it when Thomas occasionally rode off to Williamsburg to propose laws that declared no one would own any more slaves.

Thus, standing at the deathbed of the mistress on this September afternoon, the watching slaves were as much distressed by the uncertainty of the moment as by its gravity. When the sun finally fell and the blue curtains were pulled aside from the window, the mistress woke from her stupor with a start. “Tom,” she said calmly, “I want to tell my children goodbye.”

Thomas visibly shuddered. Slowly he turned to look over his shoulder. For a breathless moment Sally thought he was looking at her; she raised her hand to her chest. But in fact Thomas was looking at Sally’s mother, who turned and left the room and then reappeared with the two older daughters, Patsy and Polly. The wetnurse brought the baby, Lucy. Stoic and purposeful only moments before, the mistress dissolved at the sight of her two little girls, calling to them hysterically with her arms open. Patsy, at ten the older of the two, gamely went to her mother, but the younger Polly, terrified, turned and ran straight into Sally, clutching Sally’s skirt. Sally’s mother gently pulled Polly away. The mistress sobbed uncontrollably. Thomas stared at the scene in devastation. Sally’s mother took Patsy and Polly from the room. The wetnurse approached the mistress tentatively with the baby whose birth had killed her; the dying woman only shook her head once and seemed to lapse again into unconsciousness. A quarter of an hour later she began to speak as before. “It’s not right,” she said, “that they should have another mother.”

Thomas looked up in surprise. He’d assumed she was asleep.

“It’s not right,” she said firmly. “Tell me.”

“What?” said Thomas.

“Tell me please, Tom,” she begged, “that our little girls won’t call some other woman mother.”

“But how can they have another mother?” Thomas asked blankly, confused. “They have only one mother.”

“Then you won’t marry another,” Sally heard the mistress say, “they’ll be our little girls forever. I’ll be your wife forever as you’ll be my husband.”

“You’ll always be my wife,” Sally heard the master say.

“Tell me,” the woman whispered. The sun had fallen behind the hills, and the room was dark.

Sally heard him say, “Yes.”

She died an hour later, not long after someone lit the candles. All the summer goodbyes Thomas had squeezed into his wife’s hand were forgotten. He rose slowly as the life left her, and as he stared down at her there was in the candlelight on his face no goodbye, no yes, only no, only horror and incredulity; and then he made a sound like nothing any of the slaves had ever heard. It was so terrible, so wordlessly abysmal, that nine-year-old Sally ran from the room. The slaves were torn between their instinct to embrace the master and their fear of approaching the source of such a sound. The sound didn’t stop. Sally’s older brother James grabbed Thomas and took him from the bedchamber. Sally’s mother tended to the corpse as the young slavegirl stood in the hallway where James led Thomas to the library. Other slaves now came into the hall from outside, and Thomas’ two little girls also came running in, Patsy with her face in her hands and Polly crying. In the library was a sudden crash. Sally got to the library doorway to see Thomas on the floor, a small table in pieces beneath him where he’d collapsed. Sally didn’t see him again for weeks, during which Thomas remained in the dark library speaking to no one.

Sally wouldn’t realize it until years later, but her mother had originally belonged to the mistress’ father, who — as was not uncommon in Virginia — had a taste for fucking his female slaves. Such an encounter begat Sally. The mistress’ father, then, was in fact Sally’s father; Thomas’ dying wife was in fact also Sally’s dying half-sister. This was as much a bond between Sally and Thomas as the deathbed assurance he would never remarry, and as would be yet another bond made between them five years later, one not so easy to break as a promise.