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.”