Somerset

by Leila Meacham

  Leave it to a Frenchman’s flights of fantasy to prompt such a proposal, Silas had thought, but Jessica, recorder of the minutes, had been enchanted by the notion and commenced to write down every detail and word exchanged in the discussion. “What a lovely idea!” she’d exclaimed. “I’m going to include this meeting in my journal, which someday I hope to turn into a history of the Tolivers, Warwicks, and DuMonts of Texas, proud founders of the town of Howbutker.”

  “And what will you name your book, my dear?” Henri had asked.

  “A simple name,” Jessica said. “I shall entitle my book Roses.”

  Silas paused a moment to observe another accomplishment of which he was very proud: his son Thomas, born June 1, 1837. “There’s no denying who he takes his looks after!” Jessica had said, and indeed, as the year went by, there was no denying the boy was a true descendant of the Toliver line. His dark blue eyes gave way to light green, his chin dimple deepened, and his hair, with its slight but distinctive V-shape on his forehead, grew blacker.

  There had been one other miscarriage after the birth of Thomas, but no other hint of pregnancy since. Jessica’s thickening journal contained genealogical charts of the three ruling heads of Howbutker’s leading families. Jeremy and Henri had married in 1837, and the names of their two children were posted and others were to be added when the men became fathers for the third time in July. The space alongside Thomas’s was blank across the page, and Silas had the uneasy feeling it would remain so.

  Joshua, seeing Silas come around the house, called be­seech­ingly, “Papa! Come play horsey with Thomas. I’m tired of him riding me!”

  “Let him ride your stick horse,” Silas said, swinging Thomas up into his arms. At three and a half years of age, he was almost too big for his mother to pick up.

  Joshua stuck out his lip. “I don’t want him playing with it. He might break it.”

  Silas rumpled Joshua’s hair but did not chastise him for not sharing the stick horse Jessica had presented him when he was four years old. It wasn’t selfishness that kept Joshua from allowing his younger brother to play with his possessions, but the value he placed on particular ones. The wooden alphabet blocks and carved farm figures had long lost their paint, which Tippy had collected to restore for Thomas, but the stick horse was special to Joshua, as was the outgrown buckskin jacket Tippy had sewn for his fifth birthday. As young as he was, Joshua had come to know that the sentiment attached to certain things made them too valuable to entrust to other hands.

  “It’s too cold for you boys to be outside anyway,” Silas said. “Come on into the house, and I’m sure your mother will read to you from one of your Christmas books.”

  “Oh, Papa, I’m too old to read to,” Joshua said.

  Jessica had come out onto the wraparound porch, drawing a shawl around her. “Then how about reading to your little brother and me?” she said, obviously having overheard the conversation. “I love to hear you read.”

  Silas looked at his wife, his throat suddenly stung by a rush of feeling that almost brought tears to his eyes. There were days when he was so caught up with the endless demands of the plantation and nights when he was so tired he could hardly remove his boots that he barely noticed her, as a man is not aware of the air he breathes. But she was there, her presence a constant sustenance, and he could not imagine his life without her. They were happy together in this place despite crop failures, Indian scares, never-ceasing labor, and the womb deaths of their unborn children. He had never lost his desire for her or enjoyment of her company. In fact, both had increased over the years until his absences from her to see his cotton to its destination were almost more than he could bear. Would Jessica ever entirely believe it wasn’t her father’s money that kept him by her side but his love and need of her? Did a woman’s heart ever cease to remember what her mind had chosen to forget?

  His savings would purchase his neighbor’s small land grant that would give him direct access to the Sabine and allow him to build a landing from which he could float his cotton on flatboats down to Galveston and onto commercial steamers bound for New Orleans and ports beyond. He would be spared the arduous transport of his cotton by wagon to a landing farther upstream and the usage fees the owner charged. In time he could charge his own usage fees.

  “Silas?” Jessica came down the porch stairs, and Thomas wriggled out of his arms to run to her. “You’re lost in thought again. Whatever are you thinking?”

  “How much I love you,” he said, his voice hoarse from emotion. “If I were Morris I would quote from Proverbs, but I’d alter the verse. ‘I have found a virtuous woman, and her price is beyond rubies.’”

  “Well, thank God you’re not Morris,” Jessica said, never one for gushing sentiments, but her face colored from what Silas knew to be surprised pleasure. They did not often speak of love. “Are you coming in?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. He had made his decision. “I’m riding over to the Wiltons’ place to talk with Carl about buying his acres. He wants a decision by this afternoon.”

  “We have the money for that?”

  “I’ve put a bit aside, and Carl is willing to let his land go for under market price. I’m not liable to get another half-section so cheaply.”

  “Very good, then, but you’ll be back by supper time?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it, and afterwards”—Silas directed his smile to Joshua, who had gone to get warm under Jessica’s shawl—“I’ll play horsey with Thomas.”

  “Very good, Papa,” Joshua said, parroting Jessica’s familiar expression.

  Silas did not go at once to saddle his horse but watched Jessica herd his sons into their log house, smoke from the chimney rising cozily into the winter sky. Before closing the door, she glanced back at him, and he hoped she could not read his guilt at once again favoring Somerset over her.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Withdrawing from the crowd that had gathered to celebrate the seventh anniversary of the establishment of the Willow Grove colony, Jeremy selected a bench in the shade of a southern red oak to take stock of his surroundings and to mull over the years that had delivered them to this location and date in July 1843. He gave himself a little credit for the unanimous decision to settle in the spot. From the moment the wagon train had entered the pine woods, he’d been entranced by the area. Another vocation besides farming had called to him, stirred his blood, and he may not have moved on to the blackland prairies farther west. Silas knew him well. He had sensed his friend’s hesitancy to push on toward their intended destination, and it may have been that reluctance that led Silas to say, “How about here?”

  In any event, he and Silas and Henri had chosen well the location for the town they had hoped to build. Howbutker was gaining in importance because it was the first community this side of the Sabine that settlers passed through when coming into Texas from Louisiana, many of whom stayed, and the only town that could brag of several major stage coach lines offering transportation into the heart of the growing republic. Ground had been broken for a courthouse, church, and school, and the main street had been laid out in a circle around the town common that would become the setting of the courthouse if the land commissioner chose Howbutker for the county seat.

  It had been a productive seven years for himself and his fellow founders. Henri had his dry goods store up and thriving, thanks in large part to Tippy’s amazing talents that had contributed to its elegant inventory. With Jessica’s permission and with know-how gained from working with Henri’s father, Tippy had gone straight from Jean DuMont’s emporium to his son’s visible hope to best him. Henri’s establishment had expanded in size and rich display of goods each season until his customers now came from as far away as San Antonio and Houston and the metropolis of Galveston to stock up on items they could never find at home.

  Somerset had become the largest plantation in the settlement, and still Silas had plans for further expansion. Jeremy knew from whom the money came that allowed his friend to
buy more land and slaves and draft animals, erect more farm buildings and workers’ cottages (the timber bought from the Warwick Lumber Company), but Silas could give his own business acumen and land management just due for the prosperity of his plantation.

  The Warwick Lumber Company of Howbutker had not enjoyed such prosperity—not yet. The business had been difficult to get off the ground. Jeremy had built a water-powered sawmill and lumberyard, but though there was a large demand for building timber in the expanding republic, getting it to the source of need was a problem. Overland roads were few and the rivers nonnavigable except in prime flowing times. His trees were cut by ax and saw, tediously and slowly dragged by draft animals to his mill or to the river bank, where his timber was joined into rafts and floated to coastal mills that paid him for his haul. Both operations were difficult and at the mercy of slippery soils and frequently bad weather, but Jeremy was inclined to be patient. He saw better times ahead. It was only a matter of a few years before Texas would be annexed to the union, and the financing of roads for hauling commerce to market would be the first item the United States would be petitioned to address. Eventually steamboats would make their way upriver and provide a mode for transporting his timber to coastal cities, and the railroads were bound to come. New tools were being invented to make logging safer and faster, and meanwhile the cry for building timber would continue to grow. Jeremy prepared for the day the Warwick Lumber Company would be among the biggest timber operations in Texas by buying up tracts of pine forests on the Sabine, around Howbutker, and south to Nacogdoches, the oldest town in Texas. To supplement his inheritance and income, he had bought into several thriving businesses on the coast. Also, he had married.

  Her name was Camellia Grant, and Jeremy had been introduced to her when he met her father, a banker, in New Orleans in 1837. Bruce Warwick, Jeremy’s beloved father, had died, leaving his youngest son his share of Meadowlands in cash. The United States had suffered a monetary crisis that year and few banks were sound and solvent, of which August Grant’s was one. Jeremy had remained in New Orleans for a month to court and marry Camellia, then brought her to his modest but comfortable dwelling in the pine woods of Texas. Becoming pregnant on their wedding night, his wife had returned to the more splendid comforts of her parents’ home in New Orleans for the nine months before delivery and did so with every pregnancy afterwards. She had delivered their third child two summers ago and come to remain in Howbutker with a husband who was finally getting to know her.

  The anniversary festivities were taking place in the center of the fledgling town. The Warwick Lumber Company had provided the rough-hewn benches on which people sat under trees and inside tents for shade. From his bench, Jeremy had a good view of Jessica Toliver inside one of them. She was serving cake and punch to the line of slave children eagerly awaiting their turn, their excited chatter carrying to him across the common.

  Hard to believe Jessica was now twenty-five and already a legend in her own time, if not the most misunderstood and underappreciated one. Rumors circulated that she’d rescued a Comanche warrior who’d come to some sort of grief beside a creek outside Howbutker. Silas was away with his cotton down to Galveston at the time. Jessica had enlisted Tippy to help nurse the warrior back to health and send him on his way before the community got wind of his presence and strung him up from the red oak under which Jeremy sat. If the rumor was true—and who would doubt Jessica’s aiding an enemy warrior since her view of the white man’s theft of Indian lands was well known—logic would shout that he had come to scout the place for attack. Jeremy believed the rumor and credited Jessica’s kindness for saving Howbutker and the surrounding homesteads from the savage Comanche raids other settlements had suffered.

  Jeremy loved his wife. She was gentle and sweet-tempered and soft as a kitten cuddled next to him at night and, furthermore, worshiped the ground on which he walked. She had bravely borne him three sons—they had had their last child, for he would not have her separate herself from him again—but Camellia would have wilted like her namesake if forced to face the responsibilities and challenges Jessica met daily at Somerset. For that reason Jeremy had built his wife a house in town managed by a covey of servants to ensure her the leisure she was accustomed to. Meanwhile, out at Somerset, Jessica administered to the needs of family and slaves, supervised the orchard and gardens, served as nurse, doctor, teacher, and veterinarian as well as oversaw the endless tasks of cleaning, laundering, sewing, spinning, cooking, and preserving. Now and then, her daily routine was disturbed by a wild animal come to call, a poisonous snake in the house, an outbreak of malaria, an accident, a death.

  On many occasions, Jeremy had shaken his head in wonder at the strength of the girl he had first met wearing a brocaded gown and satin slippers and an emerald brooch at her eighteenth birthday party.

  Excitement began to mount at the appearance of a daguerreotype photographer and his assistant whom Silas had ridden to his landing to collect. The photographer had come upriver from Galveston to take photographs of the families who could afford them. While the man set up his bulky equipment, women gathered their husbands and children together, if not to pose for the camera, at least to watch the amazing invention of a contraption that could capture the likenesses of people and landscapes on a copper plate. Jessica left her station in Tippy’s hands to join Camellia and Henri’s wife, Bess, both wearing their finest and attempting to corral their two-year-old toddlers while their husbands strolled off to collect their missing six sons. Joshua, aged twelve, would be with Jake Davis and their friends, and Thomas, turned six in June, would be with Jeremy Jr. and Stephen Warwick, aged six and four, and Henri’s sons, Armand, six, and Philippe, five.

  The fathers found all six boys admiring a stallion in a paddock behind the blacksmith’s shop, a white-and-russet pinto with legs of white from the knees and hocks down. The animal was strong-boned but delicate in the head and neck, which at the moment was arched in wary observance of the boys. The horse had caught Joshua’s attention particularly. The boy stood on a rung of the fence trying to coax the pinto to his open hand.

  “He’s for sale at a good price,” the blacksmith said to Silas. “He came to me by way of payment for a debt. Your son seems right smitten with him. Isn’t it time the boy had a horse of his own?”

  Jeremy sensed Silas bristling and backed away from the sparks that were bound to fly. It had not gone unnoticed that Silas was overly protective of his sons. Jessica had suffered two miscarriages in their seven-year marriage, and Silas had confided to Jeremy he had given up hope for another heir.

  “He’s too young,” Silas responded to the blacksmith, his flinty glare advising him to mind his own business.

  “Too young?” the blacksmith guffawed. “Why, my boys had their own horses before they were eight. Get ’em in the saddle young, and they never know to be afraid.”

  “Papa…” Joshua pleaded. “Jake has his own horse.”

  Silas lifted Joshua, slight for his age, down from the fence. “Maybe next year for your birthday, son. Now let’s go get your picture taken.”

  The photographer instructed his subjects: “You’ll have to hold absolutely still for fifteen minutes. No talking. No fidgeting. No smiling. The slightest movement will ruin the daguerreotype. Anybody need a neck brace, my assistant will fit you with one.”

  The families of the Tolivers, Warwicks, and DuMonts held perfectly still, even the toddlers who had fallen asleep in their mothers’ arms during the process. It was the last and only picture of Joshua Toliver. While his parents were enjoying ice cream with their friends in the evening shade, Joshua mounted the pinto saddled for him by the blacksmith.

  “Ride him around the pasture to get the feel of him, then trot him on down to the town common. When your paw sees how well you manage him, I’ll bet he’ll buy ’em for you.”

  It was the blacksmith who rode to the town common. “Your boy—” he began in a choked voice, startling the Tolivers sitting on their pine benches in
a circle of friends. “He—he was thrown from the horse he was looking at this afternoon. You better come quick.”

  The whole gathering flew to the grassy paddock to find Joshua lying still in the shadow of a giant sweet gum tree, life already gone. Jessica, kneeling by his body, looked up at Silas through a flood of tears and said words to him that would shrill in his nightmares the rest of his life. “We are cursed, Silas. We are cursed.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  In the spring of 1846, Carson and Eunice Wyndham called on their daughter and son-in-law at Somerset. They had come specifically for the purposes of finalizing the business between Silas and Carson and to meet their new grandson, who immediately won Eunice’s heart. “I just wish Benjamin had lived to see the boy,” she said. “He’d be pleased to see that his grandson looks a Toliver through and through. Morris’s boys…well, they take after Lettie and have little interest in the plantation.”

  “In that regard, they take after Morris,” Silas said dryly, feeling a moment’s disloyalty at the thought of Lettie producing three healthy children—two sons and a daughter Eunice described as regrettably having Morris’s “heavy bones.”

  The five of them sat in chairs on the front porch of the Tolivers’ log house, and a glance at his wife’s stoically expressionless face at this news made Silas ashamed of his brief envy. He knew what she must be thinking. He would have reached for her hand to offer comfort, but that would only embarrass her and aggravate the pain she was trying to hide.

  Ever since Somerset’s first acre was cleared, even as he rebuked himself for giving a thought to it, Silas had wondered how—when—the “curse” on his land would manifest itself. Where was the curse in his cotton production, which, after a rough beginning, had increased year after year? Where did it lurk in the abundant rainfall at just the right times, in the robust health of his slaves and animals, the deliverance of his family and workers from crippling accidents and disease, and from fire that could wipe out a farmer’s crops and buildings in the twinkling of an eye? How were all those blessings jinxed by his mother’s prediction?