Chapter Sixty-Nine
It was early October 1866 before Jessica could resume the thirtieth year of recording the affairs affecting the Tolivers, Warwicks, and DuMonts. One morning, her heart full, she opened the stiff paper cover of her new notebook in her suite where she had begun tending to her correspondence after she turned the full management of the household over to Priscilla. With the passing of the diadem had come her surrender of the morning room to her daughter-in-law, the only caveat being the removal of her secretary upstairs to her suite. Autumn had arrived with a vengeance, and a cold rain slashed at the windows but a fire blazed in the grate. Petunia had brought her up a pot of steaming tea.
Jessica stared at the blank, white page. Where to begin to record for posterity—and for her own memory when it began to fade—the end of an era she had known for forty-nine years? Today was her birthday. She poured a cup of tea and reflected. Was there any other place to start but the place where she was born?
The “homeland,” as many from the Willowshire wagon train continued to refer to South Carolina, had been the most severely punished of all in General Sherman’s march through the South. Its infrastructure lay in ruins. Railroads, bridges, roads, wharfs, gins, and warehouses had been demolished. Plantations had been plundered, homes and buildings and fields burned to the ground, livestock stolen or slaughtered, and farming equipment destroyed. None of the three planter families of the Wyndhams, Warwicks, and Tolivers remaining behind had escaped the devastation. Michael now lived with his family in a two-room cabin on what was once Willowshire. One of Jeremy’s brothers had been killed futilely defending the family property, and the other had pulled up stakes and taken his family to South America to begin again. Morris died of a heart attack shortly after Sherman’s army reached Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, and his two sons did not survive the Battle of Shiloh. Lettie and her daughter had gone to live with her sister in Savannah.
Jessica made a note to herself: Begin where it all began.
The fortunes of the Texas Warwicks and DuMonts would make for happier recording. Jeremy and Henri had fared well economically, Henri reasonably; Jeremy especially. Everything Jeremy touched seemed to turn to gold, his insisted form of payment. In April, the U.S. Telegraph Company, in which he held many shares, was absorbed by Western union , making it the largest telegram company in the country and Jeremy a very wealthy man. He would bat away expressions of admiration for his successful enterprises with the back of his hand. His heart lay in the lumber industry and his optimism had never waned. “The real wealth in Texas, my friends, is in timber,” he would say. “You just wait and see.”
His surviving sons had married and presented their parents with numerous grandchildren. The oldest, a boy a year older than Vernon, was named Jeremy III. Camellia laughingly referred to the bearers of her husband’s name by “Jeremy the father, Jeremy the son, and Jeremy the holy terror.”
The blockade had interfered with the importation of Henri’s European inventory, but his connections with the French, who were a presence in Mexico and had been sympathetic to the Confederate cause, partially took up the slack. Through diplomatic immunity, French couriers could bring goods across the Texas border, and stock that could not be transported was smuggled. Henri, following Jeremy’s advice, had also deposited prewar profits in a northern bank. He shared his friend’s enthusiasm for the growth that was bound to come to Texas because of the exodus of people from the South seeking new beginnings in a state not ravaged by war. With that conviction in mind, he had purchased lots in Howbutker to lease as residential and commercial property.
Of the two DuMont sons, Armand alone had married and sired a robust son his parents chose to name Abel. He was the same age as Jeremy III, and expectations were that Vernon and the boys would grow up to enjoy friendships as close as the ones shared by their grandfathers and fathers.
The page still blank, Jessica reflected on what—and how much—she should include of her own family’s affairs the past seventeen months. Regardless of jealousies and personal resentments against the Tolivers, community sentiment held they must be given their just due, and the family name had emerged from the war more influential than ever. The outcome of events had exonerated Silas’s views. There were many who wished they’d listened to his wise words of counsel and followed his example. Thomas, criticized for not shouldering his gun to fight in the Southland, was recognized as having been among the bravest in defending his native state, and Jessica had been assigned a legendary status in the annals of Howbutker history for…well, being Jessica.
Somerset had been among the few plantations in East Texas to rise from the ashes with a sound foothold on survival. Silas had managed to transport a large shipment of cotton to England before the union blockade, and thousands of dollars in payment waited to be collected after the war. Combined with the money Thomas had been astonished to learn his mother had stashed away in a Boston bank, her son had the income to replace aged equipment and draft animals, make repairs, and pay his former slaves so well that few had left his workforce. This year the harvest had been good and cotton trade with northern and European markets had commenced with renewed vigor.
Vernon was nearly a year and a half old and the joy of their lives. For all of them, he bridged the abyss of Silas’s loss. There were times, watching her grandson, when Jessica thought she would explode from the yearning that Silas could have known him. She had worried that as the child grew he would be affected by the tension between his parents, but by the time he was old enough to become aware of it, their marriage had been coated with a patina of courtesy and mutual acceptance of the other that passed for the appearance of love. For a while, Priscilla had seemed like a new woman, freer, livelier, happier. Jessica had no proof that Major Duncan was the man responsible for the change, but it began the week of the opening of the new school. Priscilla bloomed. Jessica was sure the blooming had nothing to do with teaching numbers, the alphabet, and script to a group of wriggling, tittering, unwashed black children confined in a hot and humid schoolroom. She recognized the nature of Priscilla’s giddy laughter, sparkling eyes, and bouncy step from nights she’d enjoyed with Silas.
Jessica kept a tight lid on her speculations. She could only hope for her daughter-in-law’s discretion and Thomas’s blind unawareness of the reason for the new Priscilla. Gradually the girl shed her timidity, indecisiveness, and apprehension that had increased after she married Thomas—because she’d married Thomas, in Jessica’s opinion. But her son did notice.
“Teaching becomes you,” he said to his wife, and Jessica observed his heightened interest in her. He began coming home earlier, and at first Jessica feared he suspected something, but he had only wanted to be home with his wife and son. Jessica came to excuse herself after supper on some pretext to allow him and Priscilla and the baby time alone in the parlor to enjoy a private evening together.
Their love life appeared to improve. One morning, Jessica came down to find herself the only one at breakfast.
“Where are my son and daughter-in-law?” she asked Petunia.
“They’re not out of bed yet,” Petunia answered with a sheepish smile. “I’ve taken care of the baby.”
Two months after the school opened, three events occurred almost simultaneously that were to make Jessica forever wonder if they were related. The school burned to the ground, an act of arson surprising to no one since there were factions in the community outraged at its temerity to exist, but it ended Priscilla’s teaching career. Shortly after, Major Duncan asked for and received a transfer, and Priscilla announced she was pregnant.