The Hermit's Story Read online

  “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.

  4

  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 bl
ooming 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.

  There’s a grate welded over the top of the well to prevent people from falling inside, and their girls kneel before the grate and drop pebbles down into its vast darkness.

  They can barely see the glint of the still water so far, far below. (The well is not used anymore; water is instead piped uphill from the Shenandoah River.)

  They count the long, long moments it takes for each pebble to plink into the sky’s reflection far below. It’s astounding how deep the searchers had had to dig to arrive at even that meager and distant trickle; and in the number of seconds it takes for each pebble to splash, and in the distance of time it then takes for the sound of that splash to travel back up to them, the listeners above can measure precisely the frustration, and sometimes perhaps even terror, Mr. Jefferson must have felt, night and day, that he had built his home, his life, his dream, on a substrate that was not adequate for either his needs nor his desires.

  How many countless days, and then years, was water instead hauled, bucket after bucket, from the distant shining river at the base of the mountain—hauled bucket by bucket in an endless and ceaseless procession of brute labor—curl of deltoid, sheen of broad back, and laboring mule?

  Such folly! A beautiful edifice, but he should never have built here.

  The girls take turns clutching their little twig. As Mason remembered next to nothing from his first trip to Monticello, what, in turn, will they remember?

  Perhaps the light through the old glass. Perhaps the giant Osage orange tree, or perhaps the dry clink the pebbles made as they tumbled all the way down the nearly dry well to the distant water so far below. Waiting, in their child’s game, to hear the tiny plink!, as long ago the anxious dreamer himself, with far less pleasure, might have leaned over this very well and listened likewise, watching and waiting for the well to recharge, so slowly, with so much other beauty all around him.

  Mason and Alice glance at each other nervously. Always, Mason tells himself, we should remember what is at stake. Our little slaves.

  Something catches the corner of his eye: some distant movement, back in the woods. Something blue and wild and powerful.

  He turns away.

  Two Deer

  IT WAS JANUARY when the first deer went through the ice. I was out in the barn working, and Martha came running out of the cabin to tell me.

  I grabbed a rope and went running down to the lake. The deer, a doe, had gone out onto the new ice, all the way to the middle, and had crashed through. It was twenty below and supposed to get colder. The deer had punched a car-sized hole in the center and was swimming in circles, flailing and trying to pull herself up onto the ice with her black shiny hooves. She would work her front legs up and prop herself on the ice that way, like a woman resting her elbows at a table, and then she would kick and thrash, trying to pull herself back up, but would crash through again and slide back into the water. Then she would resume swimming in circles, panicked.

  I hurried out onto the ice. The ice cracked under my feet; I slowed down. I knew my wife was watching from the window and I could feel her thinking, stupid, stupid, as I went out across the ice. We had a new baby.

  The doe’s eyes widened. She swam harder, certain that I was coming to leap on her back and bite her neck. The ice was making splintering sounds, so I got down on all fours and crept closer. I was almost close enough to throw the rope.

  One knee punched through the ice, and I sank into the water up to midthigh. I lay spread-eagled to keep from sinking any deeper. Cold water swirled around my chest. I could feel the cake of ice I was lying on breaking away from the rest; it began to bob and float, and then sink. I figured I was going down as well, and it was a sour feeling to realize Martha and baby were watching me. I hoped they weren’t filming me; we had gotten a new video camera because of the baby, and Martha was always filming everything. It would be a stupid death, captured on tape.

  I rolled onto my back—water rushing all around me—and wriggled backwards from the floating ice onto the firmer shelf ice behind me, sliding away from the hole in the ice, away from the thing I was trying to save.

  The deer was, I’m sure, wondering only if it would go under or be leapt upon.

  ***

  The second deer leapt in front of my headlights in March. Another doe, it just came sailing up over a snowbank. Her feet never touched the road. I slammed on the brakes and tried to swerve but hit her in mid-flight, as if she were a bird. The truck struck her left shoulder and knocked her into the snowbank.

  I stopped the truck and got out and picked up her limp body, and loaded her into the back of the truck with my dogs. She was heavy, and I had to wonder if she was pregnant from back in the fall, from the wild rut that goes on in November, deer chasing each other all over the place, a carnival of deer breeding.

  The day before I hit the doe had been the first mild day since winter, the first one where you could feel the sun again, and I’d noticed all the animals walking around slowly, blinking and standing out in meadows as if marveling that such a thing as sun and grass, and open ground, existed.

  This deer had eluded starvation, coyotes, and lions, had survived the long hard winter, and now I had snuffed her out, here on the cusp of spring. All of that brave suffering had been for nothing.

  My dogs were in the back of the truck with her. It was just into nightfall—seven o’clock. At first the dogs were excited by the deer, but once we started down the road they calmed some, and by the time we got to the cabin those sweet hounds had moved over next to the deer and were lying with their heads resting on her shoulder and flanks, as if keeping her warm. I saw with some surprise that the deer had her head up and was looking around.

  I whistled the dogs out and shone a light on the deer. She had just a little bump on her head, and I left the tailgate open, hoping she would jump out and run back into the woods. It was a clear night with stars, and later I crept out and laid a heavy blanket over her. I kept checking on her through the night.

  Gradually her head went lower and lower, though, and her breathing grew more ragged. She began to cough, and in the morning she was dead, stiff, her eyes shaded to a dull and opaque blue.

  I pulled her out of the truck and took her behind the barn and cleaned her. I was slightly sickened to discover upon gutting her that her shoulder was shattered hopelessly and that her stomach lining had ruptured, so that all of her intestines and other organs (except for the heart) had slid down into the lower half of her body. It was a terrible mess. And she’d just been holding up her head like nothing was wrong. It was dumb to think she could’ve been all right. I could scarcely believe, looking at her, my childish hopes of the night before—that she might hop down out of the truck and go back off into the woods, and survive, even prosper. I cleaned her and hung her in the barn to age for five days.

  The third deer ran through my yard the very next day. I was in the barn trying to work, huddled over a quickly cooling cup of coffee, and I heard the dogs barking the way they do when they see coyotes. They were snarling and barking—Ann howling like a wolf—and I jumped up and ran out into the snow, nearly colliding with this deer, which was bounding through the deep drifts.

  A big coyote was right on its tail, and my dogs were chasing the coyote as it chased the deer. We all arrived at the same place at the same time.

  The coyote stopped i
n his tracks when he saw me, but the deer kept going. The coyote whirled and ran in the opposite direction. The dogs chased him a short distance, then turned and trotted back.

  I felt like I’d saved that deer, which helped dull the guilt I’d been feeling about the other deer, but it wasn’t an altogether clean trade, because I knew that coyotes had to eat. I had saved the deer but had messed up the coyote.

  ***

  Our lives move deeper and slower—as if they are taking on weight. It’s good weight, most of it, but it alarms us, I think, at the way it feels like that added weight tries to sink us.

  It’s like sinking through snow up to your ankles, or deeper. It’s like not being sure, one day, that the ice will hold you—when every day before, it has. It may be my imagination, but it seems like Martha doesn’t want to talk about this—perhaps does not even believe that this accrual of weight is happening. As if she believes that any day now—tomorrow, for instance—things will begin to get lighter and freer again—if she would even admit to this weight-gathering occurring in the first place.

  Martha says all things are cyclic, and they are, but this thing—us—is somehow different.

  The things outside of us seem never to change, beyond the constancy of the four seasons—birth, life, death, rebirth—but I’m convinced that our lives are different, just a tad above or below these constant cycles. As if we are on some march through the woods toward some final, newer place.

  But Martha won’t listen to this kind of talk. She says it’s all one cycle, that nothing’s changing. And still: despite the endlessness of the days, there are fractures and gaps where whole chunks of time will fall away—as if calving away from the core. Things that were assumed to lock-solid, rock-sure, weaken and fall away, leaving only loss, emptiness, and confusion.