Chapter Forty-Two
Somerset, January 1841
His father had touted his belief that a man should gauge his life in segments of five years, Silas recalled. Only then did he have a clear view of the gains and losses, rewards and consequences resulting from his decisions that would then determine his resolutions for the future. Bullocks, Silas thought with his usual anger at the memory of his father. He faced a situation that none of the gains and losses, rewards and consequences from the decisions he’d made in the last five years could shed light on, and God knew the journey to this time and place was littered with plenty of each.
The voices of his two sons at boisterous play in the side yard of the family’s log house drew him to the window, music that always soothed the beasts that roamed within him. Today’s beast conjured up the memory of his mother’s blazing face in the drawing room at Queenscrown when she delivered her prediction that his land in Texas would be cursed: Nothing good can come from what has been built on such sacrifice and selfishness and greed.
But was it selfishness and greed to wish to expand his holdings for the benefit of his family? A sacrifice, yes. His conscience forced him to see that if he diverted the money he’d saved to pay back Carson Wyndham to buy more land, he would be sacrificing his capability to offer Jessica her freedom. He was certain she would not leave him and the home they’d made even if it were offered, but the feat of paying back her father every penny he’d paid to be rid of her would prove to Jessica that their odious agreement was not the reason her husband stayed married to her. But did his wife need that assurance? Not since New Orleans had she referred to the contract. Jessica loved him, though perhaps not wholly, and he loved her, if not exclusively. The issue of slavery was always between them, like smoke they fanned away at the dinner table and in the bedroom and in the presence of their children, and part of his heart belonged to the mistress lying beyond his house that demanded his attention from sunup to sundown.
So, really, what was the point of returning Carson’s money other than as a matter of his own personal pride and the satisfaction of imagining the man’s face when his agent handed him a banknote worth the full sum he’d doled out over the years?
Weary from his thoughts, Silas went outside to be with his sons, Joshua, now ten, and Thomas, three and a half. There had been another son, but he had passed from his mother’s womb prematurely in September 1836, four months before he was to be born, one of the losses on the journey to this time and place.
This time and place. Silas looked about him at what had been accomplished in the past five years and allowed himself a rare feeling of pride, a pleasure he believed should be reserved for the fulfillment of his dream for Somerset rather than its inception. Still, he was justified in taking pride in the spread of his pine-cleared fields beyond his expanded house, the slave compound he’d built within a footrace distance, and most certainly the cotton gin whose cost he’d convinced his neighbors to share and build on his property. Having their own gin saved ginning fees and the bother of hauling their cotton to the closest one ten miles away. In a few years the gin would pay for itself, and the owners could charge their own ginning fees.
His snug house was bounded on one side by well-maintained barns and sheds and corrals; on the other, a tidy yard where the boys could play, an orchard, and two gardens, their soil recently turned. They looked a bit abject this cold January day, the ground in one awaiting its seeds; the pruned, bare branches in the other dormant until spring when each plot would yield its individual bounties of vegetables and roses.
It had been Henri’s idea for Silas and Jeremy to plant both the York and Lancaster roses in each other’s gardens as a symbol of unity between their houses. The three of them had been elected the framers of the new community, which the settlers whimsically and unanimously agreed should be called and spelled Howboutchere, named for the more literate question—“How about here?”—that Silas had posed the second day of the wagon train’s encampment in the pine trees. He and his fellow planters had recoiled at the folksiness of the suggestion and wangled a compromise: The name of their town would be spelled Howbutker, with the sharp accent on the last syllable.
Henri would grow both his friends’ roses as well, he announced to Silas and Jeremy in one of their meetings. It was his feeling that, when disagreements arose among them, as they inevitably would, the roses should serve as tokens to express what men of pride such as they could not bring themselves to articulate in speech. “So if ever I should offend you, I will send a red rose to ask forgiveness,” he said, “and if ever I receive one tendered for that purpose, I will return a white rose to say that all is forgiven.”
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.