other side, clipped in order, Jefferson’s neat handwritten answers. Short paused at a paragraph giving the exact latitude and longitude of Mason and Dixon’s Line and made a mental calculation. Marbois had returned to France in early 1781. So Jefferson must have written out his answers while he sat all summer in the long, miserable retreat at Poplar Forest, after the disastrous flight over Carter’s Mountain.
He ran his pencil to the bottom of the page: “These boundaries include an area somewhat triangular, of 121525 square miles, whereof 79650 lie westward of the Allegany mountains.” Short pinched the bridge of his nose hard with two fingers. Square miles. Longitude. Where were Jefferson’s
feelings
? To write like this—calm, meaningless fact after fact—when up and down the state your enemies were laughing at the “horseback governor.” Short twisted his mouth in irritation. Obviously feelings would sink out of sight, crushed by the sheer leaden weight of
facts
. Was that Jefferson’s motive? To build a cairn of numbers over his feelings? Short reached for sheet number five, spotted a long smudge of ink like a lizard along its margin, and read Query II with a sinking heart.
A notice of its rivers, rivulets, and bow far they are navigable?
How far navigable. He rubbed his eyes and looked up. Outside the shop, wagons, voitures, horses clattered by in their own perpetual river of noise and life. A trio of laughing
grisettes
, young shopgirls in gray dresses, peered in through a pane and waved at Pierres, who grumpily turned his back. They drifted away, giggling.
No one actually crushes his feelings, Short thought. The best you can do is disguise them. His mind flickered back to the entry in Jefferson’s journal five days after his wife’s death, the grotesquely factual account of how to stuff a dead bird. Feelings rebounded. Feelings came out at an angle sometimes, like a ricocheting bullet.
He smoothed the proof sheet over the counter.
The
Mississippi
will be one of the principal channels of future commerce for the country westward of the Alleghaney. From the mouth of this river to where it receives the Ohio, is 1000 miles by water, but only 500 by land … What was the Eastern Channel has now become a lake, 9 miles in length … which yields turtle of a peculiar kind, perch, trout, gar, pike, mullets, herrings, carp, spatula fish of 50 lb. weight, cat fish of an hundred pounds weight …
This was better, Short told himself, rubbing his face. You would need an ear of stone to miss the note of patriotism here. You wrote this way if you loved the land like a suitor, every dimple, rivulet, and spatula fish in it. But when had Jefferson ever made a secret of
that
? How many times had he said that the longer he stayed in Paris, the more beautiful Virginia became?
Short flipped ahead. Ports. Mountains. Caverns. He picked up a poorly inked sketch of Madison’s Cave, on the north side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. After it an indented title, “The Natural Bridge.”
The
Natural bridge
, the most sublime of Nature’s works, though not comprehended under the present head, must not be pretermitted.
Short frowned and drew his finger down a battery of numbers. Then:
Its breadth in the middle, is about 60 feet, but more at the ends, and the thickness of the mass at the summit of the arch, about 40 feet. A part of this thickness is constituted by a coat of earth, which gives growth to many large trees. The residue, with the hill on both sides, is one solid rock of lime-stone.… Though the sides of this bridge are provided in some parts with a parapet of fixed rocks, yet few men have resolution to walk to them and look over into the abyss. You involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creep to the parapet and peep over it. Looking down from this height about a minute, gave me a violent head ach.
“I use the word
sublime
in its technical aesthetic sense,” Jefferson said behind him. Short whirled around,
He ran his pencil to the bottom of the page: “These boundaries include an area somewhat triangular, of 121525 square miles, whereof 79650 lie westward of the Allegany mountains.” Short pinched the bridge of his nose hard with two fingers. Square miles. Longitude. Where were Jefferson’s
feelings
? To write like this—calm, meaningless fact after fact—when up and down the state your enemies were laughing at the “horseback governor.” Short twisted his mouth in irritation. Obviously feelings would sink out of sight, crushed by the sheer leaden weight of
facts
. Was that Jefferson’s motive? To build a cairn of numbers over his feelings? Short reached for sheet number five, spotted a long smudge of ink like a lizard along its margin, and read Query II with a sinking heart.
A notice of its rivers, rivulets, and bow far they are navigable?
How far navigable. He rubbed his eyes and looked up. Outside the shop, wagons, voitures, horses clattered by in their own perpetual river of noise and life. A trio of laughing
grisettes
, young shopgirls in gray dresses, peered in through a pane and waved at Pierres, who grumpily turned his back. They drifted away, giggling.
No one actually crushes his feelings, Short thought. The best you can do is disguise them. His mind flickered back to the entry in Jefferson’s journal five days after his wife’s death, the grotesquely factual account of how to stuff a dead bird. Feelings rebounded. Feelings came out at an angle sometimes, like a ricocheting bullet.
He smoothed the proof sheet over the counter.
The
Mississippi
will be one of the principal channels of future commerce for the country westward of the Alleghaney. From the mouth of this river to where it receives the Ohio, is 1000 miles by water, but only 500 by land … What was the Eastern Channel has now become a lake, 9 miles in length … which yields turtle of a peculiar kind, perch, trout, gar, pike, mullets, herrings, carp, spatula fish of 50 lb. weight, cat fish of an hundred pounds weight …
This was better, Short told himself, rubbing his face. You would need an ear of stone to miss the note of patriotism here. You wrote this way if you loved the land like a suitor, every dimple, rivulet, and spatula fish in it. But when had Jefferson ever made a secret of
that
? How many times had he said that the longer he stayed in Paris, the more beautiful Virginia became?
Short flipped ahead. Ports. Mountains. Caverns. He picked up a poorly inked sketch of Madison’s Cave, on the north side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. After it an indented title, “The Natural Bridge.”
The
Natural bridge
, the most sublime of Nature’s works, though not comprehended under the present head, must not be pretermitted.
Short frowned and drew his finger down a battery of numbers. Then:
Its breadth in the middle, is about 60 feet, but more at the ends, and the thickness of the mass at the summit of the arch, about 40 feet. A part of this thickness is constituted by a coat of earth, which gives growth to many large trees. The residue, with the hill on both sides, is one solid rock of lime-stone.… Though the sides of this bridge are provided in some parts with a parapet of fixed rocks, yet few men have resolution to walk to them and look over into the abyss. You involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creep to the parapet and peep over it. Looking down from this height about a minute, gave me a violent head ach.
“I use the word
sublime
in its technical aesthetic sense,” Jefferson said behind him. Short whirled around,
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