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 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
