Читать книгу The Quickening - Lynde Francis - Страница 8

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Thomas Jefferson's grandfather, Caleb the elder, was an old man before his son, Caleb the younger, went to the wars, and he figured in the recollections of those who remembered him as a grim, white-haired octogenarian who was one day carried home from the iron-furnace which he had built, and put to bed, dead in every part save his eyes. The eyes lived on for a year or more, following the movements of the sympathetic or curious visitor with a quiet, divining gaze; never sleeping, they said—though that could hardly be—until that last day of all when they fixed themselves on the wall and followed nothing more in this world.

Caleb, the son, was well past his first youth when the Civil War broke out; yet youthful ardor was not wanting, nor patriotism, as he defined it, to make him the first of the Paradise folk to write his name on the muster-roll of the South. And it was his good fortune, rather than any lack of battle hazards, that brought him through the four fighting years to the Appomattox end of that last running fight on the Petersburg and Lynchburg road in which, with his own hands, he had helped to destroy the guns of his battery.

Being alive and not dead on the memorable April Sunday when his commander-in-chief signed the articles of capitulation in Wilmer McLean's parlor in Appomattox town, this soldier Gordon was one among the haggard thousands who shared the enemy's rations to bridge over the hunger gap; and it was the sane, equable Gordon blood that enabled him to eat his portion of the bread of defeat manfully and without bitterness.

Later it was the steadfast Gordon courage that helped him to mount the crippled battery horse which had been his own contribution to the lost cause; to mount and ride painfully to the distant Southern valley, facing the weary journey, and the uncertain future in a land despoiled, as only a brave man might.

His homing was to the old furnace and the still older house at the foot of Lebanon. The tale of the years succeeding may be briefed in a bare sentence or two. It was said of him that he reached Paradise and the old homestead late one evening, and that the next day he was making ready for a run of iron in the antiquated blast-furnace. This may be only neighborhood tradition, but it depicts the man: sturdy, tenacious, dogged; a man to knot up the thread of life broken by untoward events, following it thereafter much as if nothing had happened.

Such men are your true conservatives. When his son was born, nine years after the great struggle had passed into history, Caleb, the soldier, was still using charcoal for fuel and blowing his cupola fire with the wooden air-pump whose staves had been hooped together by the hands of his father, and whose motive power was a huge overshot wheel swinging rhythmically below the stone dam in the creek.

The primitive air-blast being still in commission, it may itself say that the South, in spite of the war upheaval and the far more seismic convulsion of the reconstruction period, was still the Old South when Caleb married Martha Crafts.

It was as much a love match as middle-age marriages are wont to be, and following it there was Paradise gossip to assert that Caleb's wife brought gracious womanly reforms to the cheerless bachelor house at the furnace. Be this as it may, she certainly brought one innovation—an atmosphere of wholesome, if somewhat austere, piety hitherto unbreathed by the master or any of his dusky vassals.

Such moderate prosperity as the steadily pulsating iron-furnace could bring was Martha Gordon's portion from the beginning. Yet there was a fly in her pot of precious ointment; an obstacle to her complete happiness which Caleb Gordon never understood, nor could be made to understand. Like other zealous members of her communion, she took the Bible in its entirety for her creed, striving, as frail humanity may, to live up to it. But among the many admonitions which, for her, were no less than divine commands, was one which she had wilfully disregarded: Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.

Caleb respected her religion; stood a little in awe of it, if the truth were known, and was careful to put no straw of hindrance in the thorny upward way. But there are times when neutrality bites deeper than open antagonism. In the slippery middle ground of tolerance there is no foothold for one who would push or pull another into the kingdom of Heaven.

Under such conditions Thomas Jefferson was sure to be the child of many prayers on the mother's part; and perhaps of some naturally prideful hopes on Caleb's. When a man touches forty before his firstborn is put into his arms, he is likely to take the event seriously. Martha Gordon would have named her son after the great apostle of her faith, but Caleb asserted himself here and would have a manlier name-father for the boy. So Thomas Jefferson was named, not for an apostle, nor yet for the statesman—save by way of an intermediary. For Caleb's "Thomas Jefferson" was the stout old schoolmaster-warrior, Stonewall Jackson; the soldier iron-master's general while he lived, and his deified hero ever afterward.

When the mother was able to sit up in bed she wrote a letter to her brother Silas, the South Tredegar preacher. On the margin of the paper she tried the name, writing it "Reverend Thomas Jefferson Gordon." It was a rather appalling mouthful, not nearly so euphonious as the name of the apostle would have been. But she comforted herself with the thought that the boy would probably curtail it when he should come to a realizing sense of ownership; and "Reverend" would fit any of the curtailments.

So now we see to what high calling Thomas Jefferson's mother purposed devoting him while yet he was a helpless monad in pinning-blankets; to what end she had striven with many prayers and groanings that could not be uttered, from year to year of his childhood.

Does it account in some measure for the self-conscious young Pharisee kneeling on the top of the high rock under the cedars, and crying out on the girl scoffer that she was no better than she should be?