Chapter Eighty
After the funeral, early one morning, Thomas rode out to Somerset and dismounted on the rise of land where his father was buried. The red oak leaves were turning, as were those of the sumac, black gum, and hickory buried among the pines lining the road to the plantation. He knew that he would not live enough years for orange-and-gold October mornings not to bring the memory of the day before the sun fully rose when his youngest child met the instrument of his death. Thomas removed his hat and squatted before the headstone. He stared at it, remembering in particular a part of the conversation he’d overheard between his mother and father twenty-two years ago. He recalled fragments of his father’s words.
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.…I paid no attention to it.…But then, our first child miscarried, and there was another miscarriage after the birth of Thomas…and after that…you…seemed unable to conceive. And then when we lost Joshua…
Thomas had never forgotten the sound of his father’s anguish in his confession to his mother. The possibility possessed me like a demon that perhaps we were cursed…and being punished for…the selfish and willful trades I made for the sake of the land.…
Thomas shook his head to dislodge any thought of believing his son’s death was the fault of a curse, but his mind would not let go. He had come here today where he’d often brought concerns, anxieties, hopes, triumphs, most often seeking guidance and answers, as if his father could counsel him from the grave. He rarely left without an easier heart, a firmer resolve, a clearer sense of direction. Today he came to seek release from the ridiculous notion that had bedeviled him unmercifully since his little boy was brought home already in the throes of death from a morning of baseball practice, but as he stared at the headstone, Thomas had the awful feeling he’d come to the wrong place.
In his mind’s eye, he could see his father as he best remembered him: tall, straight, in command, the wisdom of the ages etched in his handsome, strong face, the eyes direct and steady. Today, though, the memory of that clear green gaze held no affirmation of Thomas’s opinion that the Toliver curse was an absurdity. On the contrary, he believed his father may have argued the point with him.
It was a fact that he, too, like his father, had sacrificed another person’s happiness for his own self-interest, and he had lived to regret it, which had been curse enough. Thomas often wondered, especially now when sometimes he thought Priscilla hated him, how much happier she would have been if she’d married a man who loved her. He had robbed her of that happiness, and for that theft he had paid with his own personal happiness, which had been a sacrifice of his own. But had the “selfish and willful trades” he’d made for the sake of the land resulted in David’s death? Of course not. Men married women for less reason than love all the time, and their children died. No hex was involved. Henri and Bess had lost a daughter; Jeremy and Camellia Warwick a son. Were they under a curse, too?
Thomas stood, replaced his hat, and looked out over the infinite rows of cotton where his real solace lay. The workers were making the second pass at the still-abundant fields. It was a beautiful sight. The width, expanse—the power—of all that whiteness stretching farther than it was possible for the eye to see filled his soul, he could not deny it. He remembered his father explaining to Priscilla when they were first engaged: “Tolivers are not seamen. We were not born to ply oceans and sail ships. For better or worse, we are men controlled by some inherited need to master the land—great parcels of it—and make it our own as our ancestors did in England and South Carolina.”
How could a man deny who and what he was, what he’d been born to do, what he needed to survive, what he believed with all his heart he must pass on to his progeny? If his grief swelled at the sight of the legacy his younger son had not lived to share with his brother, it was due to an irony of fate, not a curse. He’d been robbed of an heir he’d married a woman he did not love to produce, but his loss had nothing to do with the sacrifices he or his father had made on behalf of Somerset. Thomas vowed to continue to remember that.