The Hermit's Story (19 page)

“Books were very rare, very expensive, in Mr. Jefferson's day,” she tells them. “As you can see, however, he valued them highly, felt them to be the highest form of democracy—free speech coupled with the rational, considered, crafted expression of intellect. He was a prodigious reader, almost insatiable.” Her lips glisten slightly at this last word, and she begins to warm to her audience, sharing her man with them, relaxing visibly as she feels them growing into his admirers as well.

“Knew seven foreign languages fluently. Taught himself Spanish in twenty days, en route to that country in 1791. Departed the shores of this country on his voyage not knowing a word of it, and landed in Spain speaking it like a native.

“He was a connoisseur of fine wines, and as prodigious a correspondent as he was a reader.” A sidelong, almost sultry slipping into his study, which adjoins his bedroom. “He scribed over twenty thousand letters in his lifetime, writing to friends and family and statesmen around the world.

“Notice the contraption perched above his desk,” she instructs them—another elegant arrangement of chains and pulleys, leverage and manipulation. A blank writing tablet on the other side of the desk, and an iron claw gripping a fountain pen at that tablet, so that as Mr. Jefferson sat at his desk and wrote, the iron claw of the ghost-grip seated at the table across from him would mirror his movements, reproducing his letter in duplicate, complete with every little nuance of script.

“Thus are his records preserved,” says Mr. Jefferson's lover. “Another of his many inventions.” A pause, as if winded. Her heart—and, she is pleased to see, those of many in her audience, now—fluttering. She might as easily at this point climb up on the desk and shout through cupped hands: “They just don't make men like they used to!”

“Here, his bedroom,” she says simply, pausing for the briefest of moments—the bare requisite minimum—and pointedly avoiding looking at the tiny bed (which does not appear as if it could have housed a man of six foot two and one quarter), gazing instead fixedly at the fireplace. One of her hands trembles slightly, but her voice remains steady. He is far away, it is true, but it is also true he can travel no farther; the distance will get no worse than this. She can hold steady from this point on. She can endure.

“Here, his telescope, through which he could keep up with the distant daily progress on the construction of one of his pet projects, the groundbreaking for the University of Virginia. An avid and learned astronomer, as well. Of course.”

Light comes in through the ancient curved windows through glass that Mr. Jefferson ordered from England—he sent out the dimensions, complete with trigonometric taper and calculated arc and radius; waited a year for the glass to be custom made and carried home across the swirling, tempestuous ocean. Imagine, please, his shuddering delight when that English glass finally made its way to him, when the carpenters lifted it carefully from the wagon, uncrated it intact, and held it gently, lovingly, up to the frames, fitting each piece into its waiting frame. It seems to be a tired but beautiful light, wavering green and gold, as if transmitting not just sunlight but also the botanical exuberance of the gardens outside—the dream, the vision, of Monticello.

On the tourists' arms and faces this old light seems subaqueous and calming, as if they have entered into some finer, stiller place, where their full potential, their dreams and aspirations, can still be achieved, and are but a day, or even only a moment, away.

The guide seems suddenly tired, and why not, for what could be more exhausting than waiting for a thing that's never going to come?

“Complex times,” she says simply, jarring the tourists' thoughts back to her world, to Mr. Jefferson's. “He said that slavery was an abomination to the Lord, even though he remained a slaveowner all his life. He said that he trembled at the thought of this country's fate when he considered that his Lord was a just Lord.” The tiniest of shrugs, and, despite a sadness of expression, a brave nonchalance in her voice almost approaches a lilt. “One of his slaves, Sally Hemings, bore a child that carried Jefferson family DNA,” she says. One of the audience members is up to date on the scandal and whispers loudly that the father couldn't have been any of Jefferson's brothers, as they were all out of the country at the time the conception would have occurred. The guide's eyes glitter and flash, but she ignores the blasphemer. On to the next room.

“We know that he loved trees, forests,” she says. “All of nature. A fine and eloquent writer, as well.” She closes her eyes with an expression that seems to suggest she is recalling last night's kisses.

“His
Notes on the State of Virginia,
initially a response to a questionnaire sent to him in 1780 by Francois Marbois, then the secretary to the French legation in Philadelphia, is one of our most remarkable documents from the age of Enlightenment and remains one of the most influential scientific books ever written by an American.” She squeezes her eyes shut tighter, continues to murmur his praises like a dove cooing or a breeze moving quietly through the boughs of tall pines.

“His was a remarkable blending of scientific and literary sensibilities. He was one of the first philosophers to argue for the concept we know now as ‘biodiversity,' when he stated: ‘We must learn to accept that not all beauty exists primarily to serve our hungers, but can exist on its own grounds. The earth contains not less than thirty or forty thousand kinds of plants; not less than six or seven hundred of birds; nor less than three or four hundred of quadrupeds; to say nothing of the thousand species of fishes. Of reptiles and insects, there are more than can be numbered. To all these must be added the swarms and varieties of animalcules and minute vegetables not visible to the natural eye, but whose existence is surely reciprocal with those of the greater beings.'

“‘On comparing this vast profusion of life and multiplicity of beings with the few grains and grasses and livestock of those species immediately serviceable to the wants of man, it is difficult to understand the compulsion within us to erase or remodel every work of nature by a destruction not only of individuals, but of entire species; and not only of a few species, but of every species that does not seem to serve our immediate accommodations.'

“‘All wilderness has beauty. And from that beauty, worth on its own accord.'”

The guide pauses, as if remembering days she spent with Mr. Jefferson, youthful days, days in a love nearly as deep as the one she possesses for him now. She pauses, casts her eyes to the soft hills of the horizon. “‘The Tulip Tree,' she says, recalling more of his text. “‘It creates astonishment, in the spring, to behold trees of such a magnitude, bearing a flower for a fortnight together in its shape, size, and color resembling tulips. In some places these marvelous leaves possess the appellation of a woman's smock.'” A glance to the east garden. “‘And the dogwood: among the curious plants growing in our wilderness, none contribute more to the beauty of the springtime than the delightful dogwood. Our natives have the custom of tying a flowering branch of this tree around the catties' neck, when they fall down exhausted by heat in the summer, imagining that its redolent odor and other ornamental virtues contributes to their recovery.'

“‘In all, our wild forests will continue surely to be one of our nation's greatest treasures and sources of strength, and will provide with their grace and might a durable example of proper moral fiber and endless inspiration. The men who oversee their destruction for the quickness of profit are no better than murderers, in my account.'”

Which brings her to the Lewis and Clark room. More gold light seeping in through those old and molten windows, and just outside the curved glass, the elegant leaves of an Osage orange, brought back by the intrepid voyagers on their return from the Great West—a place Mr. Jefferson had always wanted to visit but never saw.

The guide has permission to open those ancient windows, and she does so with such care that it is as if she is taking a sacrament. The scent of spring floats in, as does true sunlight now, and the children as well as the adults stir and lift their sleepy heads, are refreshed, invigorated again, as if some great and living personage—not dusty history and bygone greatness—has just entered the room.

It would be impossible to overestimate how deeply in love Mason and Alice once were. Suffice it to say that the velocity and mass of it were enough to carry them even on momentum alone to this point and place, still loyal and conjoined, twenty years later.

It was like a tsunami originating far out at sea, and still the shore, and the flattening of the tide, has not yet been reached, though surely they can see the shore now and can take in the scent of olive branches and citrus groves, apple orchards and meadows; the odor of fresh water, of the future, of the journey's end and the challenge's failure.

The children look out the window and see only sunlight.

Mr. Jefferson's lover reaches one of her long and slender hands out the open window to snap off a twig from one of the giant trees growing just outside. The sun strikes the creamy skin of her wrist like something spilled. She hands the little branch to Mason and Alice's youngest daughter and tells the group that this tree, a massive-trunked Osage orange planted by Mr. Jefferson himself, is grown from a single cutting brought back by Lewis and Clark from their 1803–5 expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase. “You may have this,” she tells the girl. “You may take it home and plant it, wherever you live, and perhaps someday two hundred years from now your tree will be as revered and significant as this one is now, carried so far to be planted by a caring hand, so long ago.”

Their daughter, shy with the sudden notoriety, thanks her. The guide has no way of knowing that Mason and Alice are from eastern Montana, that they live along the Missouri River, probably not far—a dozen miles? fifty?—from where this specimen was first gathered. What unseen hand, or ghost, guides her to choose them as the recipient of this small symbolism? To carry a tree across parts of three centuries, and an entire continent and that continent's wars, only to have the tree turn around and head right back to where it started from, as if those two-hundred-plus years of this one Osage orange's journey had all been a mistake in the first place?

Into the final room, the end of the tour. Their daughters take turns clutching the souvenir of the Osage orange. Into the Tea Room, where there are the busts of sixty-four American heroes and friends, including Jefferson's beloved wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson.

“After what Mr. Jefferson called ‘ten years of unchequered happiness,'” their guide tells them, “Martha dies at the age of thirty-four from complications resulting from childbirth. Family accounts report that she was vivacious, intelligent, attractive, and musical. ‘A single event wiped away all my plans and left me a blank which I had not the spirits to fill back up,' Mr. Jefferson wrote. But he did fill them back up. Slowly,” the guide says, “slowly, but they filled back up.”

***

What did Mason know, when he first came here, so long ago? He was sixteen. He was asleep. He would be awakened; he would fall back asleep. He tried to stay awake for as long as he could. He tried to hold on to love for as long as he could. In the end it proved to be vaporous, ungraspable: as elusive as any impassioned dream.

The tour is over. Their guide slips from them with nary a farewell nor conclusion. She wanders down into the forest to commune with the spirits. Her dress is damp against her. They cannot see the blue elk, nor can she; it scents her coming and moves away from her, farther into the woods. She can feel the heat of its presence, where it was, and in the woods, following this heat, she trails it, squinting and trying to remember, and still hoping, still hoping as a young woman or even a girl hopes.

He built on a hill, a mountaintop, where the view was sublime, but where, of course, there was no water. This from a man who had said, “No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture so comparable to that of the garden.”

The gardens and orchards were kept watered, certainly. Catchment basins were carved in the stony cranium of the mountaintop, and wells were hammered out, blow by blow, as if to the center of the earth, deep wells that ran dry each day after only a few buckets and which recharged too slowly, as the mountain seeps and springs filled gradually back in on themselves, as if some slow weeping were occurring underground. He was so rich and gifted above the ground, but so impoverished below.

Daffodils, monk's hood, sea kale, and pear trees, and a thousand other thirsty drinkers, in the gardens and orchards—those desperate willows!—as well as the thirsting demands of the human household, and the many slaves, and the stock. It was so much more than the mountain could give.

Those pear trees, whose blossoms fly through the air like handfuls of flashing fish scales? That beauty, and all the mansion's beauty, was dreamed by Mr. Jefferson but crafted by the hands and feet, the muscled labor, of the slaves.

Mason and Alice stare at all. the beauty, sensing some disparity, some incongruousness—something like horror metamorphosed across the centuries into beauty—like blooming love vine growing from the rotting carcasses of an old fallen tree, or even the corpse of a fallen soldier—and yet still they cannot name or grasp the specifics of the wrong, so stark and soothing is the great beauty in which they stand.

They know that the past was wrong, but where, in the present, amidst such beauty, can anyone see that wrongness? They can sense the echo of it beneath the soil and in their blood and in their minds, but they cannot see it.

They leave the mansion, in the green light of spring—those petals blowing past them now like confetti thrown at the loveliest of weddings—and stop and peer down into the depths of one of the wells, next to the slave quarters.