The Devil's bed

Tom Jorgenson left his house and headed to the barn. Although the night air was warm, he took with him a Thermos of hot coffee laced with Bushmills Irish Whiskey. He paused a moment in the yard and looked west where he could see the waning moon descending in the sky above his apple trees. To Tom Jorgenson, there was nothing quite so lovely. Myrna had believed there was special power in the moon. As she lay dying in the room at Bethesda Naval Hospital, the last request she ever made of her husband was that he open the curtains so she could see the moon.

All his life, Jorgenson had been a man up at first light and about his business until well after dark. “Slow down, Tom,” Myrna had always advised at the end of the day when he tottered near exhaustion. “Come and look at the moon with me.” He hadn’t accepted her offer often enough. After she died, he created a ritual of watching the moon. New, crescent, gibbous, full, he’d learned to observe and appreciate the phases and, in doing so, had learned to better observe and appreciate himself. That, of course, had been Myrna’s purpose all along. How a man could be offered such wisdom and so consistently ignore it was a question that, in the twenty-three years since his wife’s death, he asked himself a thousand times. It had been easy to believe that the political concerns that occupied his life were so vastly important. But Myrna only smiled patiently at his too-full agenda, and whenever he’d felt so pressed he could barely breathe, she would take his hand and say, “Time to look at the moon.”

She died near the end of his second term as vice president. When his obligation to the electorate was complete, he retired from politics and returned to Minnesota, intending to spend his time finishing the raising of his teenage children, caring for his apple trees, and practicing the nightly ritual that was part of his wife’s legacy.

The apple trees were the glory of the Jorgenson estate, a large tract of land called Wildwood that crowned a quarter mile of bluff along the St. Croix River. The orchards had been a Jorgenson hobby since the last part of the nineteenth century, when the family fortune was secured in the granite halls of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. During Tom Jorgenson’s absence in Washington, D.C., while he served the people of Minnesota as their senator and then the nation as vice president, care of the orchards had been in the hands of his sister, Annie, and his brother, Roland, neither of whom had married. Annie had helped raise the children, and Roland-well, Roland had been himself and there hadn’t been much Tom Jorgenson could do to change that.

As he opened the barn door and switched on the light, Jorgenson thought about how fortunate he had been in the person he’d chosen to love and to marry. Kate, it seemed, had not been so lucky. That evening, he’d watched his daughter sit with her husband under the scrutiny of the entire nation. To those who didn’t know her well, she appeared to be in a good relationship, to have made a good match. But Tom Jorgenson, who spoke with her regularly, knew there was a mask over the true face of the marriage, knew the rumblings that lay below. He’d hoped his children would be as happy in their marriages as he had been, but he understood the odds were against it.

When his son-in-law entered the White House, Jorgenson had actually been hopeful. Alan Carpathian was Clay Dixon’s mentor and his chief of staff, and Carpathian was as good as they came. Unfortunately, Carpathian had died in a skiing accident less than a year after Dixon took office. The focus of the presidency seemed to die with him. Although Jorgenson didn’t dislike Clay Dixon, he understood that men often became their fathers. The more he’d observed of the president’s politics recently the more he saw the specter of Senator William Dixon. Tom Jorgenson knew the president’s father well, knew him to be a man charming on the surface but ruthless underneath, and the shadow he cast over the White House was a chilling one.

At Wildwood, Jorgenson always observed the moon from the same place, a bluff at the end of his orchards that overlooked the river. He would have preferred to walk, but he’d twisted his knee a week before and was still hobbling gingerly. He’d been driving his new Kubota tractor the quarter mile instead. He tucked his Thermos under the tractor seat, kicked the engine over, and pulled out of the barn. Annie was in the house, filling a teakettle at the kitchen sink, and she waved to him through the window as he passed.