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?
But sometimes, after he and Jessica had made love, he would lie awake long into the night assaulted by the demons that rose from their lairs to haunt the souls of the guilty, and wonder if his wife’s womb held the curse. Nonsense, he would say in the morning light. Jessica was simply…barren. Nothing—certainly not a curse—was at fault. Joshua had died by the hand of a thoughtless blacksmith who’d allowed him to ride an unknown horse. If he should feel guilty about anything—and he did—Silas thought to himself as he watched Carson ceremoniously light the contract with the glowing tip of his cigar, it was that he had gone back on his intention to hand over a banknote for the sum the man had paid him to marry his daughter. How he would like to see the bully’s face—and Jessica’s—when Carson realized that all his son-in-law possessed, including his daughter’s love, had been earned by his own hand. Silas Toliver was free and clear of any debt he owed Carson Wyndham, and Jessica at last had proof that love alone kept her husband by her side.
But it was wishful fantasizing. The lure to develop and improve his land had been too great. After building his river landing, he’d begun saving again, but a blacksmith in Illinois named John Deere invented and manufactured a type of steel plow that could cut through sticky soil without clogging, and Silas had given in to the temptation to buy several. The single horse-drawn plows had saved him time and money because the steel blades, unlike the wooden plow that farmers had used for centuries, could turn a furrow in any kind of weather or condition of the ground. Before, he’d have to wait several days for soggy soil to dry, or, if hard, employ three men and several strong animals to plow a field.
There had been other, irresistible “siren songs” to which he’d listened and yielded in the ten years of his indebtedness to Carson until his extra money was depleted. Jessica had never been aware of his intention to pay back her father. It was a secret—and a regret—that Silas would take to his grave. As he observed the contract become ashes in a crockery saucer, the shame of his failure burned like acid to hear his father-in-law, with a condescending sweep of his cigar about his six-room log house, say, “This is all well and good, Silas, but it’s time my daughter lived in a proper house. As I promised, the money for it is in your bank, and I’ll send a good architect to you.”
Eunice, sitting next to Jessica, patted her daughter’s arm. “Wouldn’t you like a big new house that becomes you, dear?” But even as she said it, a bleak movement in her eyes betrayed again the dismay her expression had clearly shown when she saw her daughter for the first time in ten years. “My goodness, but you’ve…weathered the years well,” she had said, to cover her embarrassment at her reaction to Jessica’s thin frame in her simple, countrywoman’s dress, her red hair drawn in a severe bun below her bonnet.
“Thank you, Mama,” Jessica had said when meeting her parents at the stagecoach station. She had planned to greet them in the one gown she’d allowed Tippy to sew for her that reflected the new bell-shaped skirt and low, pointed waist, but the seam line of the narrower sleeves restricted her arm movements, so she’d elected to wear the type of simple homespun dress she wore every day.
“One that becomes me?” Jessica repeated her mother’s question.
“As a Wyndham, as…” Eunice glanced at Silas, and though she appeared galled to say it, added, “the wife of your prominent husband here in the new state of Texas.”
Silas puffed on his cigarillo, uncomfortable with the conversation in the presence of Thomas. It was another source of shame that his son would never learn that Somerset and the manor house were financed by anyone else but his father. Thomas was only nine years old, but inquisitive and already able to discern innuendo, moods, veiled conversations.
“What’s a contract?” he’d asked when Carson had referred to it and drawn the document from his coat pocket.
“A signed agreement,” Carson had answered. “This one is between your father and me.”
“What did you agree to?”
“I’ll let your father tell you if he’s so inclined,” Carson said with a smirk at Silas.
“That is business between your grandfather and me only, Thomas,” Silas had said. “Go help Jasper with the new foal.”
“Jasper!” Carson exclaimed. “Are you talking about that skinny little colored boy I let you have, Jessica?”
“Yes, Papa,” Jessica answered between tight lips. She had listened to the exchange between Silas and her father in visible contempt—for both of them, Silas had no doubt. “I don’t know what we’d do without him. Jasper is around twenty-eight now, married, and has several fine children. One, a daughter, is especially dear to me. Her name is Petunia.”
Carson’s faint quirk of an eyebrow at his wife clearly stated their daughter, at twenty-eight, hadn’t changed much. With a motion of his cigar, he dismissed the subject of a slave and his offspring. “Let Thomas stay,” he overrode Silas’s order. “His grandmother and I will have little enough time with him as it is.”
“Yes, Papa, let me stay,” Thomas begged.
“To the barn, son. I’ll come get you in a little while to be with your grandparents.”
Glaring at Carson to let him know he’d be damned before he allowed him to embarrass him before his son, Silas was startled to hear Jessica say unexpectedly, “I’d like the house built in town on the street with the DuMonts and Warwicks.”
Silas removed his cigarillo in surprise. “Not here on Somerset?”
“No, in Howbutker, on Houston Avenue, down the street from our friends.”
“Well, since I’m buying, I say my daughter can build her house anywhere she damn well pleases,” Carson said. He stuck his cigar into his mouth and tilted back his porch chair with thumbs hooked into his vest pockets to see what his son-in-law thought of that.
Ignoring Carson, Silas studied his wife. She had lost some of her fire since Joshua’s death. She and Joshua had been unusually close, mutually caring of the downtrodden, animals, and nature, interested in books and learning. Thomas was more attuned to the songs and voices of the land, never happier than when accompanying his father into the fields—Like riding through clouds, Papa!—and almost from infancy had shown an interest in harvests and ginning. Why does the soil have to be warm before you plant? How are the seeds separated from the fiber, Papa?
Unlike Joshua, there was no mistaking that Thomas realized his place as the son of the master of Somerset. He played with the children of the slaves—Jessica saw to that—but he did not call them his friends as Joshua had. His friends were among the sons of the Warwicks and DuMonts and Davises. Slowly, as Thomas evolved from the toddler stage, Silas saw him become what his sweet-natured brother could never have been: a descendant of his Toliver lineage to the bone.
Not long after Joshua’s death, Silas had come upon Jessica storing away the boy’s treasured stick horse and buckskin jacket. “Shouldn’t we give those to Thomas in memory of his brother?” he had suggested.
“No, Thomas would only use them until they were as worn as his memory of Joshua, then discard them,” she said, startling Silas with her bitterness. “I prefer to keep them in memory of…my memory of Joshua.”
As he deliberated on his wife, the thought occurred to Silas that she desired to live away from the plantation because she did not wish to see the hold the planter system had begun to have on their son. Perhaps she did not wish to remain in the house of Joshua’s home and where her miscarriages had occurred. Or…Silas noted Jessica’s gaze on the ashes of the contract. After today, could it be that his wife no longer wished to live surrounded by the reminder of the trade that had brought her to live here?
“What about you, Thomas?” Jessica asked. “Wouldn’t you like to live in Howbutker close to Jeremy Jr. and Stephen and Armand and Philippe?”
“I like it here,” Thomas said.
“Of course you do,” Jessica murmured.
That night before he climbed into bed next to his wife, Silas tucked a red rose into a water glass and left it by the stove. The next morning Jessica twirled it at him as he entered the kitchen. “What is this for?”
“To say I’m sorry.”
He expected her to say For what? But she did not. She knew.
“We’ll build the house in Howbutker,” Silas said.