Somerset

  “Thank you, Mother and Daddy,” Regina had said in her effusively appreciative way when they’d opened presents earlier. (Vernon and David had remembered her with silk stockings and her grandmother with enameled hair clips.) “When I wear this pin I will always remember the wonderful party you gave me on my sixteenth birthday.”

  Priscilla had taken the ornament to attach to Regina’s dress, but Thomas had stopped her by suggesting she pin it in the center of the headband. “Daddy! What a darling idea!” Regina had cried, and Thomas had ignored the speculative look Priscilla shot him while his idea was put in place.

  How he wished Mrs. Chastain were here to see the display of her creation. Priscilla had told Regina that it had been designed just for her and bragged that no one else in town had anything like it. The newspaper pictures the photographer had taken of his daughter would not do it justice.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Thomas,” Barnabas, Petunia’s husband and the Tolivers’ houseman, whispered into his ear. “The Mrs. Jacqueline Chastain you were expecting is at the door.” He handed Thomas her calling card.

  Thomas’s heart jumped. “Well, then, by all means, let’s go collect her, Barnabas.”

  She stood in the chandelier-lit, overfurnished foyer with a dignity meant to hide the uncertainty of her reception, Thomas perceived at once. He felt his ire rise. He would make sure no one gave her reason to feel unwelcome in his house. He walked toward her smiling and held out his hand. She wore a white dress that forswore the lavishly trimmed, bustled, tightly corseted gowns every woman in the party was wearing in favor of a loosely fitted creation that flowed from her shoulders—her own design, Thomas guessed, and admired her courage in swimming against the stream. Her dark hair was arranged in a coronet atop her head and entwined with yellow satin ribbons.

  “Mrs. Chastain,” he said, taking her hand. “How good of you to come.”

  “It is my pleasure, if slightly dampened by nervousness, Mr. Toliver,” Jacqueline said.

  Thomas presented his arm. “I’ve just the thing to correct that, Mrs. Chastain. Let’s head for the punch table.”

  Priscilla greeted their guest with her practiced hostess charm that did not bother to hide her pointed surprise the milliner had had the audacity to show up. “I so hope we haven’t put you out to come on such short notice, Mrs. Chastain. My husband can be…overly enthusiastic sometimes.”

  “Not at all, Mrs. Toliver, and I admire enthusiasm. It is such a generous trait.”

  When Thomas escorted the new arrival to meet his daughter, Regina threw her arms around her. “I love, love, love my hairpiece, Mrs. Chastain. Thank you so much for all the creativity and time and effort you put into it.”

  “Seeing it worn in your hair makes the time and effort insignificant, Miss Toliver.”

  “Oh, do please call me Regina, and may I call you Jacqueline? It’s such a beautiful name. French, isn’t it?”

  Thomas could have hugged his daughter. When Jacqueline turned to meet Vernon and David, who’d been waved over for introductions, he drew Regina to his side and kissed her temple. “I love you, Poppy.”

  “I love you, too, Daddy.”

  When he introduced Jacqueline to his mother, Thomas caught the imperceptible quirk of a maternal eyebrow directed at him, in his youth a definite precursor of a talk to come. She put Jacqueline at ease immediately by complimenting her dress.

  “I see you agree, as I do, with Oscar Wilde’s view that these ‘dress improvers’”—Jessica swiped at her bustle—“are a modern-day monstrosity. My friend Tippy—Isabel—is now designing dresses free of these abominations. Do you know of Isabel?”

  “Indeed I do, Mrs. Toliver,” Jacqueline said, looking amazed. “You know Isabel? Personally?”

  “I most certainly do.”

  Elated, Thomas watched the two women put their heads together in an animated discussion of his mother’s history with Tippy. Before long, other guests gathered around, the wives admiring Jacqueline’s dress, the men admiring Jacqueline.

  At the end of the evening, Thomas said, “How did you arrive, Mrs. Chastain?”

  “By livery. I told the driver to return by ten.”

  “Jackson is probably drunk in the local tavern by now. I will summon my driver and carriage to take you home.”

  He would have preferred to go himself, but that would have tempted fate. He saw her out to the carriage and gave his driver explicit instructions not to leave until Mrs. Chastain was safely ensconced in her quarters above her shop. They shook hands. “Good-bye…Jacqueline. Thank you so much for coming.”

  “You were kind to invite me…Thomas.”

  She smiled at him, the moonlight glowing in the darkness of her hair, on the yellow satin ribbons. “Perhaps we will have the opportunity to meet again,” he said.

  “I hardly think that’s likely, but the thought is nice. Good-bye…Mr. Toliver.”

  Thomas watched the carriage pull away and swallowed the ache in his throat.

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  David Toliver, aged fifteen, dressed quietly in the darkness of the bedroom he shared with his older brother, Vernon, but apparently, not quietly enough.

  “David, what are you doing?”

  His brother’s voice, strong, authoritative, startled him. There was nothing that got past Vernon, David thought irritably. “Dressing,” he said shortly.

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to the old mill lot to practice.”

  “No, you’re not. Daddy will have your hide. You know he expects us out at Somerset to help with the ginning this morning.”

  “I’ll be back before he knows I’m gone.”

  Vernon sat up in bed, running a hand through his black, sleep-tousled hair. “It’s too dark to play baseball, and I don’t want you going by yourself.”

  David finished buttoning his shirt. “Who’re you? My father? Just because you’re eighteen doesn’t give you the right to tell me what to do. Sam and Nick are going to meet me there, okay? We’ll practice a few hours, then I’ll be back in time for breakfast. Don’t tell on me. Promise, brother?”

  “I don’t like it, David. Not one bit. That old mill pond attracts all kinds of critters at night, and it’s dark as pitch outside. Also, I heard rumors the Ku Klux Klan could be out tonight.”

  “We won’t be playing in the pond, David, and it’s five o’clock, almost dawn. Don’t you hear the chimes? And the KKK isn’t going to bother one of the Toliver sons.”

  “What with the bales we’ll be lifting, why do you feel you have to practice at all? Won’t you need to rest your arm before the game Sunday?”

  David pushed his arms into his jacket and grinned at his brother. Of the two, Vernon had the edge on looks. David’s short, stocky build and heavy facial features were in notable contrast to his brother’s tall, sleek figure and chiseled physiognomy, not to mention the attraction of Vernon’s unruly raven-black hair, which David teasingly called “the Toliver crown.” By comparison, his younger brother’s baby-fine cap was a nondescript brown.

  But David’s personality made up for the unfair disparity. His ready grin lit up eyes the purplish blue of bluebonnets and suggested the quick wit and impish humor just below a reserved manner that made him more the favorite among their friends than his serious-minded brother. He was the pet of the girls if not their sweetheart; the indispensable spark of the party if not the beau of the ball. He was the occasional despair of his mother and the daily cheer of his father. His grandmother and siblings adored him.

  “If you played baseball, Vernon, you’d understand. A baseman’s arm needs daily training and conditioning, especially if you play third. It takes a strong arm to get a ball from third to first.”

  His brother drew the covers back over his head. “Just be careful,” he said under the muffle of the blankets.

  David soundlessly let himself out through the side entrance of the house rather than risk leaving by the back kitchen door. Amy and her husband and their daughter Sassie’s q
uarters were right off the pantry, and since her mother had died last year, Amy could wake up at the pad of a mouse’s feet in the parlor. She’d try to talk him out of going, and that would create a ruckus that his parents might hear in their room upstairs right over the kitchen. The threat of the “white knights,” as the sheeted members of the Ku Klux Klan called themselves, kept everybody off the streets until daylight, and Amy had an unholy fear of them.

  “You may be a Toliver, but what if you come across them and witness something you shouldn’t, and they see you,” she’d said to him on another morning when she’d caught him sneaking out of the house to meet the boys at their playing site. “Once they get the liquor in them, that ignorant bunch of riff-raff hidin’ under them white sheets wouldn’t care if you were Jesus’s son, they’d make sure you never told nothin’ to nobody.”

  David hadn’t let on that he already knew most of the identities of the riff-raff under the hoods because his baseball buddy, Sam Darrow, had told him, swearing him to secrecy. Mr. Darrow rode with them. David figured he had nothing to worry about because of Sam’s dad.

  David set his cap more firmly, stuffed his fingerless fielder’s glove into his jacket pocket, and, with his baseball bat anchored over his shoulder, set off into the chilly darkness. He breathed in deeply of the bracing morning air. Jiminy jumping frogs, it was good to be alive, especially at this time of year. He loved fall when the leaves began to blaze and the days turned crisp—perfect baseball weather—and he had years and years to enjoy playing the sport. He didn’t have to give it up when he became a man. That amazing recognition had come to him at his sister’s sixteenth birthday party in the spring. He’d happened to look across the room at his father standing with his best friends, Armand DuMont and Jeremy Jr. and Stephen Warwick, all in their middle forties and still hale and hearty, and did a little calculating. He had over thirty years to swing a bat and pitch a ball to first base before he reached their age. The boys’ group he played with now, made up of the sons of his fathers’ friends, would just grow into men’s teams like the one Marshall had formed last year. Until then, Howbutker would probably never have an adult team. Men like his father couldn’t see the point of grown men trying to hit a ball with a stick of wood and then run to touch a sack of sawdust without getting tagged. They couldn’t see the skill and strategy involved, how the pitcher can baffle and fool a batter, or know the great feeling of striking a home run or hitting one deep. They just didn’t get it, though all the fathers were fine with their sons’ interest in the sport as long as nobody got hurt.

  He was one lucky fellow, David had decided at the party. He got to do the two things he loved best in all the world: grow cotton and play baseball. He had the best parents and brother and sister and grandmother in all the world, too, though he’d get an argument over that claim from his friends in the Warwick and DuMont clans, who thought their families pretty rare.

  Sam Darrow and Nick Logan were waiting for him at the playing site, impatient to lose the shivers in their jackets from the heat of play. Behind them, the derelict mill loomed in the darkness, its outline blurred by steam rising from pond water still warm from Indian summer when struck by the cold front that had come through in the night. The abandoned lot next to the mill and pond had been commandeered years ago by the local boys as their playing and gathering field. Sunday’s game against Marshall would be officially played in the city park that offered a bandstand and room for spectators.

  Sam and Nick were the only ones on the team willing and brave enough to skip out without their parents’ knowledge to meet this early in the morning. David knew his mother did not approve of his association with “their kind.” She was haughty like that. The boys were not from Houston Avenue, where the other players lived. Their homes were in the country, and their fathers did not wear frock coats and vests to work. One was a brakeman for the Southern Pacific railroad, and the other worked in a tannery. As with David, their fathers had chores waiting for them after breakfast on Saturday when everybody worked until dusk, and their mothers absolutely refused to let them out of the house once supper was over and night fell. No sneaking out then. In the Darrow and Logan households, Saturday nights were for bathing and polishing shoes for Sunday school and church. So it was either at the crack of dawn today or never that they’d all get one last chance to practice before the game tomorrow afternoon.

  “Hey, boys!” David called, feeling his grin crack his cold face. The others responded likewise, ready for the workout to begin. The drill this morning was for Sam to practice his pitching, Nick his hitting, and David his fielding. These were their special abilities, skills at which they were the best on the team. Dawn was breaking when the boys shed their jackets and David slipped on his fingerless, thin leather glove recently manufactured for the protection of a fielder’s hand. Nick got in position to bat, Sam to pitch, and David to catch or chase after the ball.

  At the first crack of Nick’s bat, the ball sailed over the pitcher’s and David’s heads and landed in the darkness of the pond’s bank. “Great hit!” David called, running after the ball before it could disappear from sight. “Do that a few times tomorrow and the game is ours!”

  Dang, where did it go? David wondered, straining in the darkness and shade of cypresses to find the brown leather ball buried in the damp high grass and swamp flora. He didn’t dare lose it. It was an A. G. Spalding ball his father had given him for Christmas, the one they meant to use in tomorrow’s game. He heard one of the boys cry out, “David, look out for snakes!”—Nick, he thought it was—when he saw the ball and reached for it with his left hand to spare his fielder’s glove from getting wet.

  Too late he saw the black menace the ball had disturbed and froze in horror as a water moccasin lunged straight at him, its open mouth brilliant white in the dimness, and sank its fangs deep into the back of his hand. The snake held on until David tore it from his flesh and flung it toward the pond. He heard it plop into the water as he staggered backwards out of the danger zone staring at the puncture wounds beginning to ooze blood. Within seconds, his hand felt as if it had been jammed into a bed of hot coals.

  The boys ran screaming toward him. “I’ve been bit,” David said, already tasting metal in his mouth. He felt his heart rhythm change, his lungs begin to strain. His vision blurred and his bowels loosened. He heard Sam wail as nausea rose, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” and thought of the game he would not live to play.

  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 ra
rely 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?