Historians say that for much of Jefferson’s later life, after the first elk vanished, he kept hoping to train another elk to fill that space, and those crepuscular moments, in the same fashion, but he was never again quite successful; all the other elk either became too tame, wandering up onto the porches even in the broad light of day, hoping for handouts, or were too wild, bolting for the deep woods immediately upon being released, and never being seen again.
How his precisionist’s heart must have raged against this fluidity, this refusal to adhere specifically to his ironclad plans and schemes. He died on the fourth of July, fifty years after he and his peers had penned the Declaration of Independence—lingering on his deathbed for weeks, it is said, in order to make it to that anniversary—and yet Mason has to wonder if in his last moments Jefferson was not remembering any declarations scripted, but instead dreaming yet again of that mythic antlered beast, the one whose force he wished to harness and whose dim blue shadow he had been able to glimpse out his window at that one and perfect hour, each dusk, striding just barely in sight through the trees and the failing light, at the far and outer reaches of reality, less than a bound, a step, away from the land of dreams. A messenger, each evening, between that world and this one.
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
