Chapter Fifty-Eight
The night of April 12, 1861, just before dawn, Silas cried out in his sleep from a nightmare in which he heard his mother’s prediction again. “No!” he howled, startling Jessica awake beside him. She glanced at the large-faced clock on the mantel made visible by the moonlight streaming through the open window. It was 4:30.
“Silas, wake up! You’re having a bad dream!” she said, shaking his bare shoulder. She jerked her hand away. “My goodness, it’s cold in here, and you’re perspiring.”
Silas opened his eyes, the clutch of his nightmare releasing him in the semidarkness chilled by the last breath of a long winter. “I was having that dream again,” he said.
“What dream?”
Silas pushed himself up against the headboard and ran his hand through his damp hair. He reached for a glass of water on his bedside table and took a long swallow to relieve his drought-dry mouth. He had never told Jessica of the curse his mother had predicted would fall on Somerset or of his terror that it meant to manifest itself by taking the life of his last surviving child. On and off the past anxious year, his mother had come to him in a dream with her dire threat, and he’d jerk awake with his heartbeat pounding in his ears and his skin clammy from a fear so deep he would rise from his bed for the rest of the night so as not to return to the dream again.
But never before had his imagined horror come to reality in his nightmares. Tonight in his dream he saw his mother pointing to something hidden by tall stands of cotton in the fields of Somerset. See! she cried. I told you your land was cursed! and the sprawled figure between the burgeoning rows toward which she aimed her finger was the body of Thomas.
Before reason—and his usual caution—could prevent him, he blurted, “Jessica, do you believe in curses?”
There was no immediate response, and Silas turned his blurred gaze to her, alarmed by his outburst and her thoughtful silence. Was she remembering her words at the time they discovered Joshua’s still body? Had he disturbed old coals that had lain quietly burning beneath layers of ashes all these years?
“I believe that…what we call a curse is really a withholding of natural blessings,” Jessica said. “Like rain that should fall at the proper season, but it does not.”
Like women made to be wonderful mothers who cannot conceive or hold their babies in their wombs, Silas thought. “You do not think a curse is punishment administered by God for past sins?” he asked.
He hoped for a breezy dismissal of the subject as nonsense. He did not know if his wife believed in a divine being. Jessica attended church to go along with his belief in Sunday tradition and to expose Thomas to the teachings of the Christian faith their son was at liberty to accept or reject, but she seemed to have no interest in established religion. Silas had never heard her call upon the name of God, even in times of great despair, or seen her read from the Bible. To his knowledge, the King James Version upon which she’d laid her hand at the exchange of their wedding vows had never been moved from whatever shelf it had been assigned.
“I’ve never thought about it,” Jessica said. She cuddled closer to him and laid her head on his bare chest. “Tell me about this persistent dream of yours, beloved. I’m assuming it has something to do with a curse.”
Beloved…an endearment soft with solace and the willingness to listen and understand. Silas was surprised by a sensation of tears. Jessica called their son “sweetheart” occasionally, but Silas could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she’d addressed him by a similar term of affection. She was not the type of woman, like Camellia and Bess, and, Lord have mercy, Stephanie Davis, to drop intimate expressions of address willy-nilly, and so they carried more value. Comforted, he kissed the top of her head. Did he dare tell her of his mother’s prediction that had haunted him since he’d dropped the first seeds into the soil of Somerset? Should he tell her of the drastic solution he was contemplating to eliminate the greatest fear of his life—of their lives?
It was not a course to decide alone.
“My mother prophesied a curse would fall upon Somerset for the sacrifice I made to fulfill my ambition of having a plantation of my own,” Silas began. “I paid no attention to it. It was the prediction of an angry and disappointed woman for my not marrying the girl she wanted as a daughter-in-law, I thought. But then our first child miscarried, the child conceived in such passion and joy, and there was another miscarriage after the birth of Thomas, and after that…you…seemed unable to conceive. And then when we lost Joshua….”
Jessica stirred abruptly in his arms, and he held her tighter to prevent her from moving away in hurt and pain. He continued. “And you said to me, “‘Silas, we are cursed.’ Do you remember?”
A nod of her head on his chest indicated acknowledgment. “I remember.”
“The possibility possessed me like a demon that perhaps we were cursed. I and my innocent wife were being punished for the deal I made with the devil back in South Carolina, the injury I caused to Lettie, the selfish and willful trades I made for the sake of the land.”
Jessica lay still, and Silas realized she may have taken his words wrongly. How could she not? He lifted her chin and looked into her eyes. “Not that I regret a second of the decision I made to marry you, Jessica. Tell me you are sure of that.”
She removed herself from his arms and adjusted pillows at her back to sit up beside him. “I am sure of that, Silas. Where is this discussion leading?”
“I don’t think the curse is through with us yet,” he said flatly. “I believe it intends a final stoke of vengeance.” He threw back his covers and got out of bed wearing only drawers. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked, wrapping a robe around him.
“Not if it will clear your head of this foolishness,” Jessica said.
Silas lit a cheroot and drew in deeply. “Is it foolishness, Jessica?”
“Silas Toliver!” Jessica scowled at him, her tone sharp. “I was insane with grief when Joshua died and would have said anything. At the time I did feel we were cursed with our inability to have and keep children, but I later realized that such were the quirks of nature. Joshua’s death was an accident that could have befallen any inquisitive, adventuresome twelve-year-old boy. Let’s be grateful that we’ve been blessed with a healthy, intelligent, industrious son—a perfect heir to your Somerset. Our only concern should be his survival.”
“Exactly!” Silas jabbed the air with the cheroot. “For our son to live—that’s what we both want if we could ask for anything in the world. His life is the most important thing on earth—more important than Somerset.”
Jessica turned an ear to him as if she had not heard him clearly. “What are you getting at, Silas?”
He placed the smoking cheroot in an ashtray and came to sit beside her on the bed. Jessica drew back uncertainly, doubt of his sanity clouding her dark eyes.
“What if…because of my obsession with Somerset…the curse takes Thomas?” he said. “What if God, as final punishment for the deal I struck with your father, means to leave no heir to possess the plantation?”
Jessica smacked his arm in rebuke. “Ridiculous!” she said. “Absurd. If—if Thomas perishes, a curse will have nothing to do with it. The stupid men who make war will be responsible!”
“But to make sure, I…Jessica…I…” His voice sounded raspy as a saw cutting wood. “I’m…I’m thinking of giving up Somerset—selling it—taking it out of Toliver hands, anything to get out from under the curse and bring our boy safely home.”
Jessica, pale as the bed pillows, clutched him by both arms. “Silas, do you hear yourself? You are talking superstitious nonsense. There is no such thing as a curse. God couldn’t give a fig whether you give up Somerset or not. Honestly, do you really believe that forfeiting the plantation will guarantee Thomas’s safety?” She shook him. “Do you?”
Her voice had risen on a note of incredulity and panic. Silas pulled out of her grasp and got up from the bed, putting a finger to his mouth. Their son’s room was next to theirs. “Lower your tone,” he said. “The window’s open, and I don’t want Thomas to hear this.”
“I should say not,” Jessica snapped. “Now answer my question. Do you really believe such a sacrifice will bring Thomas back?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “In my dream tonight, I saw Thomas lying dead between the cotton rows of Somerset. I saw his body clear as day.”
That silenced her. Jessica pressed her lips together, and he could tell she was envisioning the scene. Silas picked up the cheroot and inhaled until he could feel the smoke burn his lungs.
“It was just a dream,” Jessica said finally. “Only that, Silas, nothing more. If you sell Somerset, you will be selling Thomas’s heart. Whether he survives or not, either way he cannot live without his heart.”
“He’ll be alive,” Silas said.
“But will he live?” Jessica pushed away the covers, drew on night slippers, and went to slide her arms up around his neck. “Silas, if you hadn’t, as you say, ‘made the deal with the devil,’ look at what you would have saved yourself from. You wouldn’t have married me. I’d be growing old in a convent in England, never having known what it was like to love and be loved, to have been a wife and mother. You wouldn’t be the father of Thomas. You wouldn’t be the master of a land that is yours by right of courage and hard work and perseverance. You would never have fulfilled the calling of your heritage, nor enjoyed the prosperity, respect, and happiness you’ve earned. You would have been spared all that to live the life prescribed for you at Queenscrown. Tell me truthfully, my darling. As it’s all turned out—Lettie apparently happy, your mother surrounded by grandchildren, you and I meant to be—where is the curse in all that? Rather than a vengeful God, can you not believe that Providence was looking after you when you made the deal with the devil?”
Tears seared Silas’s eyes. He could feel Jessica’s recital of all that never would have been—the logic of it—working to release him from the demons that bound him. Could it be that he was guilty of nothing but pursuing the destiny set for him? God knew, the burden of being a Toliver was sentence enough. He laid aside the cheroot and folded his arms around his wife.
“I have never loved you more than at this moment,” he said, his voice cracking on the wonder of his shackles falling free.
“Then you may prove it to me,” Jessica said, leading him back to bed.