In the bathroom, Russell settled in on the toilet and stared out the open window at the garden beyond. The lace curtains fluttered in the morning breeze. As Russell was gazing, a mule’s enormous head appeared from out of nowhere, startling him considerably. The mule looked as if he had come to inspect something, and, not knowing what the mule wanted, Russell handed him one end of the roll of toilet paper, which the mule took in his enormous teeth and then walked away carefully, gently, drawing the toilet paper out in a steady unspooling.
Russell watched, mesmerized, as the mule wandered randomly around the garden and through the field and then around the corner, around toward the front of the restaurant, as if laying down the borders of some newly claimed territory—and it was not until the spool of paper was nearly unwound that Russell had the presence of mind to snap it off and save some for himself.
When he emerged, the old men and the waitress were staring at him as if wondering what he might do next, and he and Sissy went out and began gathering the toilet paper, even as the mule now moved along behind them, grazing on the paper.
At first the owl would not let them near their car, hissing and snapping at them, but Russell got a branch and was able to dislodge it; they watched as it launched itself hale and hearty into silent flight, and disappeared, a hunter, into the woods. They waved goodbye to the old men and the waitress and drove off, and as they were leaving the parking lot they saw another truck turning in, a beat-up old red truck carrying in the back of it a single immense hog, which looked none too excited about the journey, as if knowing—maybe from the odor of the smokehouse—what stage of life’s journey he was now entering.
“Are you always like this?” Sissy asked as they drove on farther, deeper into the mountains, anticipating the day.
“Like what?” Russell asked.
The Distance
1
WHEN MASON WAS sixteen, he traveled with a group of Explorer Scouts from Texas to all the great cultural landmarks along the East Coast, including Monticello. He remembers precious little from that trip and those long days. The fetid odor from the Greyhound bus’s toilet, a disgusting mix of urine, feces, and antiseptic. A ravenous hunger for junk food. The incessant crunching of Doritos from every youth on the bus, at any and all hours—mandibles clacking as if a brigade of giant insects was on the move. A dull, pervasive homesickness—his first trip of any distance or length—that was at times overwhelming.
Of the grounds at Monticello, and the great house that was a dream made real, Mason remembers almost nothing, save for the vague and uneasy sense that Jefferson had been a crackpot, quite possibly a loser, or at best a bully—trying to impose his rigid principles on everybody around him.
Everyone kept raving about what a marvelous structure Monticello was, so democratic and modern, etc., but to Mason it just looked old and used-up, awkward and boring. Mason was neither strong nor smart for his age, and for much of the first twenty-five years or so of his life it seemed to him that he slept not just at night but through the days. Later in his life, the love of an exciting woman, different from any he had ever known, would be the one thing that most awakened him. But from that time, that trip to Monticello, he can’t even remember if it was raining or if the sun was shining.
Only the perpetual smell of the toilet, mixed with the diesel fumes each time the bus would slosh forward from a stoplight. The crunching of the Doritos.
The steady homesickness. The first hint of the feeling that something hugely important—the great and vast reservoir of the essence of time itself, previously unerodable—was beginning, slowly and finally, to be consumed. A few days of his life, just a few but for the first time ever being nibbled away, as the ocean washes away at the sand grains poised at the edge of the tide’s far reach.
2
It’s been more than a quarter of a century, but now Mason finds himself back at Monticello, at the age of forty-two, in the company of that woman who helped awaken him and their two daughters, just-turned eight and five. Mason and his family live in Montana now, east of Great Falls, in the prairie, where Mason is a schoolteacher. It’s spring break, and in Virginia, at Monticello, the sun is shining.
Huge dragon-headed clouds tower in an azure sky, and nine-masted schooners plow in all directions the eternal blue, trailing in their wake schools of leaping porpoises. Any thought that ever crossed a person’s mind is represented in the towering swirl of clouds, this fine spring day. Anything a person wants to see can be found there in the sky, this beautiful breezy day.
After a winter of squabbling, the girls are playing, for the first time in a long time, like little angels; as if in that mild spring breeze some spirit is passing through the high branches of the great trees planted by the hand of the distant gentleman himself, so long ago. How he had wanted to control his world, and, for a little while, how he had succeeded. Jefferson had kept pet mockingbirds that were trained to fly in and out of his open windows. He had once owned a semidomesticated bull elk that would wander the grounds, not too tame and yet not too wild, either, moving along always in that blurred perimeter between the groomed orchard and
