The Hermit's Story

by Rick Bass

  Other failures—things he could not control—included the growth of trees and the grapes in his vineyard. Any guidebook will tell the reader what a genius the man was (inventor, statesman, writer, politician, gentleman farmer), but again, secret folly: the red clay atop that lovely hill would not nurture domestic grapes, only the native wild Mustang variety—his imports from his beloved France failed, and failed, and failed (two hundred years later, vineyards in the region would learn to graft the French bodies on to the native roots, and in that manner, finally, make passable wine); and it was another of his great and hidden frustrations that the trees he planted as an old man would never mature in his lifetime.

  “If I could beseech favor from an opportune heaven,” he wrote in his eightieth year, “it would be to live to see the sight of these trees I have planted fully mature, their leaves brilliant in autumn, bare and elegant in winter, lush emeralds in spring, and deep-shaded during the shimmering roar of summer.”

  He declared that the cutting of stately trees was an act “nothing less than murder,” and he built at the edge of his vast vegetable garden a tiny lighthouse overlooking the Shenandoah Valley, so that after each evening’s gardening he could sit in that little glass turret, wine glass in hand, and stare at, and be calmed by, the lithe and supple folds of those endless blue hills, the fog hanging in folds and crevices far below him and the mountains seeming to move slowly away, like the slow waves upon a faraway ocean.

  All of his frustrations were hidden; history was kind to him, and chance and forgetfulness were his flatterers. His errors and failures have not traveled the same distance as his successes.

  He wanted to have weeping willows lining the path of the stone walk that led down to his family’s cemetery, where, among others, his father, the mapmaker, was buried. Jefferson invented a form of drip irrigation that kept the plants watered well enough during the few years he had remaining that they were able to stay alive, though they grew slowly and died not long after he died; it was simply not the right kind of country for them. Untenable. Even now, however, according to his wishes, the managers of his estate plant new willows every few years in the thin clay soil along that graveyard walk, on that hill that is too steep for willows—pulling up the old dead ones that always grow too far beyond their nutrients like an outsized mind hungering, starving for stimulation but finding none.

  Each year’s plantings never come close to reaching the cool and elegant heights envisioned by their dreamer, though still, two hundred years later, his acolytes persist, as if hoping or believing even now, and still, that the dream might take hold.

  Luck attended him almost always; he hid his failures and frustrations so well that perhaps he forgot he had them; in that manner, the failures were released and perhaps truly did depart. Where the vineyards languished after his death, wild hollyhocks, iris, and roses grew, as did orchards of apples, plums, and pears.

  It was almost a hundred years after his death before a scholar found, in the depths of his thousands of pages of private journals and correspondence, his blue dream of that strange elk, existing always in that perfect distance between the hearth and the ravening, ungovernable wilderness.

  Where the garden would not grow blueberries, he planted asparagus and kale. The ghostlike, almost translucent leaves of the latter bloomed wildly beneath the overturned clay pots that encased the plants like crypts—again, such a gardening method was one of his many inventions—the eternal darkness rendering the vegetables’ milk-colored flesh (the color of a blind cave-creature, beneath those pots, sweating in the Virginia sun) as crisp as crackers.

  He ate meat very sparingly, only a thin bite or two every now and again, using it not as a staple but as a condiment to accent or supplement the taste of the vegetables from his garden. A rabbit might last him in that manner a fortnight; a venison ham, a whole year. The great elk itself, two or three lifetimes, had he deigned to kill it.

  ***

  Mason’s wife is an artist. She has an artist’s temperament, even more so than does Mason, who likewise seems too often to be passing back and forth too wildly between the fields of peace and the fields of war, between elegant self-control and passionate recklessness, between heaven and hell, between beauty and agony. This one fine afternoon, though, things are not as bad as they often are, which is as if one or both of them has been wounded—a musket ball shattering a foreleg, a piercement of the lungs, and a crooked, wandering spattering trail of blood wherever they go, with no pleasant outcome in sight able to be forecast by either themselves or anyone who knows them.

  (The children, the children, what is to become of the children?)

  Again and again, Mason and Alice keep telling themselves—after each setback—that they will try harder, that they will not give up.

  This day, however—this shining afternoon—for some reason, exhaustion perhaps, they are not fighting, and Alice is sitting by Mason’s side, holding his arm with both hands like a young bride, and they are watching their two young daughters roll down the hill like logs, clasping each other’s hands like acrobats as they laugh and shout and roll down the steep green manicured lawn: to the bottom, back up to the top; to the bottom, back up to the top. It feels, in the peace and happiness of the moment, as if Alice and Mason in their chronic unhappiness have somehow—perhaps through the miracle of endurance, or even luck; surely not through any ingenuity—pierced some thin but resistant membrane that has heretofore separated them from such happiness.

  The sun is warm upon their skin.

  The girls are lying midslope, heads on each other’s shoulders, warm wind ruffling their beautiful hair. The oldest is sketching in her journal a portrait not of the dome of Monticello—ignoring it much as Mason had, so long ago—but instead of the slave quarters, which lie behind them.

  The five-year-old watches her big sister with both raptness and pleasure—in the younger sister’s eyes, the eight-year-old can do no wrong. The eight-year-old takes after her mother and is a great artist with the knack for reproducing things exactly as they are. The light on the old red bricks of the quarters (brick that was baked on the premises, the slaves gathering the raw red earth in buckets and then shaping it into the bricks that would later imprison them, so that in that strange manner it was somehow as if the earth itself, upon which they lived, in whose gardens they grubbed and hoed, and at whose red hillsides they now clawed, was imprisoning them; as if their imprisonment were being rendered by the movement of their own two hands, each of them, if not by their hearts’ or minds’ will)—is striking the bricks in yellowish slants, and the two colors, the yellow sunlight and the red bricks, ignite each other so that the whole structure is glowing, with both colors thus accentuated.

  The old lilacs that shroud the slave quarters are drooping purple and sugar-scented over those glowing red bricks, and tourists are walking back and forth in low murmuring conversations. Mason and Alice’s daughters continue to lie in the center of the lawn, one sketching earnestly, the other admiring her. Mason and Alice are sitting farther up the hill, halfway between the slave quarters and the girls, looking down upon the girls, and Mason has to wonder if the oldest is sketching them, too.

  Is it of note to mention again that their marriage after twenty years has foundered; that the river of not just love but even simple care and compassion has run all but dry, and that too many days now they stumble as if blind through their lives with confusion and lack of resolve or commitment—they, who were once so strong?

  It doesn’t matter. This day, this one day with the girls, their precious masters, lying together farther down the hill, shoulder to shoulder, their hair tousled by the wind, Mason and Alice seem to be drawn along, for once—or for the first time in a long time—all of them drawn along, parents and children alike, as if on some idyllic, gliding sleigh. As if the world has been created for their pleasure, so that they might participate in its many sharp beauties; and as if, though in the not-too-distant past they have gotten lost or sidetracked from that m
ission, they have now wandered back onto the path and been found again.

  As if the simple sight of their oldest daughter sketching in her journal—as if constructing some master plan for something—is enough to bring them back into the world, and back onto the path of love.

  Doesn’t anyone, everyone, after twenty years of sameness, encounter such crises? Aren’t we all extraordinarily frail and in the end remarkably unimpressive, creatures too often of boring repetition and habit rather than bold imagination?

  Who will rescue us, if not ourselves? Who will emancipate us, if not ourselves?

  There is no one among us, Mason thinks, who does not dream of that wild elk. There is no one who is not, in some part, to some degree, both the animal itself—torn between wanting to slip off down farther into the dark wilderness, and back up into the clean lawns and orchards of the tame, the possessed, the cared-for—and yet also the viewer rather than the elk—the watcher who waits and watches and hungers for that elk.

  Eyes staring, right at dusk, for movement right at the edge of the great woods.

  Waiting, right at dusk, for that lift of heart, upon first seeing the great beast take its first step from out of the impenetrable, magnificent wilderness.

  3

  The tour guide stands before their group in the first great room to the north of the Rotunda and stares unseeing through the gathered and waiting throng separated from her by a velvet rope.

  She stands poised like a diver perched at the top of a high platform, arms raised aloft in a flamelike taper, unblinking. She appears to be in her mid-fifties, still high-cheekboned, her hair still red-tinged, cut neat and short. Her eyes seem to glitter with an anger, the source of which the tour members cannot at first place, but slowly, it comes to Mason: she is angry that Mr. Jefferson is dead. She is in love with Mr. Jefferson.

  Three tours per hour, thirty people per tour, eight hours a day, five days a week: she testifies to her love for the man to 180,000 people per year, face to face.

  She tells them right up front that he was a genius. “He loved to build clocks,” she says. “His mind was like a clock. Here we see a Swiss clock that Mr. Jefferson designed and built by his own hand,” she says, gesturing to an immense contraption resting directly above the entranceway like a gargoyle or some instrument of torture: huge and iron-laden enough to take flight, like some primitive flying machine.

  Various chains and pulleys hang from it in all directions, with iron balls of varying sizes weighting each chain with just the right tension so as to perfectly pull all the cogs and gears in the precise manner necessary to keep perfect time. “It hasn’t missed a minute in over two hundred years,” the guide says proudly. As if she had been around during the building of it and might have somehow participated.

  “The clock was designed so that it would inform one not only of the hour of the day, but of the day of the week. However, the balls on the lowermost chains, which drove Saturday and Sunday, ran out of room and got tangled on the floor, so Mr. Jefferson cut a hole in the floor through which the chains could pass into the basement.” A sweep of her hand toward the saw notch in the corner, which indeed does swallow the ball and chains. A tiny, chaste smile. Her waist is pinched tight, and she wears an elegant long velour dress. Her eyes are bright, damp. Eighteen minutes to go. She moves like a metronome, aware of where she stands each second of her time remaining, the audience’s time remaining. The time remaining in the story itself.

  She ushers the group into the next room, the library. She walks backwards as she speaks, keeping the narrative running; she pirouettes in just the right place to fold herself into a little cleft to allow the others to flow into the small curved room. Some part of her beholds them as the lion tamer with his whip and chair might behold the lion: somewhat frightened of, but also attracted to, their hunger.

  “Here are his boots,” she says, pointing, as if he might have pulled them off only last night. “Here is his writing table,” she says, “where he stood by this window and composed music. As you can see by the height of the table,” she says, “he was a tall man—six foot two and a quarter. Very elegant, very graceful, even into old age.” The faintest touch of a smile.

  Another flourish, quarter turn, and sweep to the left: dancing with his ghost as if at some grand cotillion, chin held high, her eyes sparkling now. A gesture to the wall of olden books in the library. (Has she read them all? Doubtless, and by candlelight—her fingertips resting lightly on the pages upon which his hands, too, had rested. The flames flickering, and roughly the same thoughts and images passing from those pages into her mind as passed into his, until she is so close to him—almost there—that it seems surely he will come around the corner at any moment; that he has simply been gone for a while and will be coming home soon, with the evening late, and weary from so long a journey.)

  “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 Montice
llo.

  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.