Roses (3 page)

It had all come about one early October morning in 1945. Just discharged from the army, with no job on the horizon and nowhere
to hang his hat, he was on his way to Houston to see a sister he barely knew when the train stopped briefly outside a little
burg with a sign over the station house that read:
W
elcome to
H
owbutker,
H
eart of the
P
iney
W
oods of
T
exas. He’d gotten off to stretch his legs when a teenage boy with green eyes and hair as black as a cornfield crow ran up
to the conductor hollering, “Hold the train! Hold the train!”

“Got a ticket, son?”

“No, sir, I—”

“Well, then, you’ll have to wait for the next train. This one’s full to capacity from here to Houston.”

Amos had looked at the flushed face of the boy, his breath coming out in fast, chilled puffs, and recognized the desperation
of a boy running away from home. He’s taking too much with him, he’d thought, recalling his own experience as a boy of fifteen
on the lam from his parents. He hadn’t made it. That’s when he’d handed the boy his ticket. “Here. Take mine,” he’d said.
“I’ll wait for the next train.”

The boy—whom he later discovered to be the seventeen-year-old nephew of Mary Toliver DuMont—had rushed out on the platform
to wave at him as the train bore him away, never to return to Howbutker to live. And Amos had never left. He’d hoisted his
duffel and started into town with the idea of staying only one night, but the morning train had taken off without him. He’d
often reflected on the irony of it… how William’s exit out of Howbutker had been his entrance in, and he’d never regretted
a single day of it. Until now.

He took a fiery swallow of the Scotch, feeling it go down like broken razor blades.
Dammit, Mary, what in the world possessed you to do such a deplorable thing?
He ran a hand over his bald scalp. What in God’s name had he missed that would explain—
excuse
—what she had done? He’d thought he knew her history and those of Ollie DuMont and Percy Warwick inside out. What he hadn’t
read, he had heard from their own mouths. Naturally, he had arrived too late to witness the beginning of their stories, but
he’d made a point to fill in the gaps. Nowhere had he come across anything—not a scrap of gossip, newspaper clipping, journal,
not a word from people who had known them all their lives—that would explain why Mary had severed Rachel’s ties to her birthright
and destroyed her lifelong dream.

A sudden thought drove him to a bookshelf. He sought and found a volume that he took to his desk.
Could the answer be here?
He’d not read the history of the founding families of Howbutker since that October morning he’d helped William escape. Later
in town, he’d learned that a search was on for the runaway, son of the late Miles Toliver, brother of Mary Toliver DuMont,
who’d subsequently adopted the boy and given him everything. Bitterly recalling his own mistreatment when he’d been dragged
back to his parents, he’d gone to the library seeking information about the rich DuMonts that would help him decide whether
he should alert the authorities to the boy’s destination or keep his silence. There a librarian had handed him a copy of this
book written by Jessica Toliver, Mary’s great-grandmother. Now that he was looking, a clue to Mary’s motives might pop out
that he’d missed forty years ago. The title of the book was
Roses.

The narrative began with the immigration of Silas William Toliver and Jeremy Matthew Warwick to Texas in the fall of 1836.
As the youngest sons of two of South Carolina’s most prominent plantation families, they stood little chance of becoming masters
of their fathers’ estates and thus set out together to establish plantations of their own in a loam-rich area they’d been
told existed in the eastern part of the new republic of Texas. Both were blue-blooded descendants of English royalty, though
they sprang from warring houses—the Lancasters and the Yorks. In the middle of the 1600s, descendants of their families, who
had been enemies during the War of the Roses, found themselves settling cheek by jowl on plantations in the New World near
the future site of Charleston, which they helped to establish in 1670. Out of mutual dependence, the two families had buried
their ancestral differences, retaining only the emblems by which their allegiance to their respective houses in England were
known—their roses. The Warwicks, descended from the House of York, grew only white roses in their gardens, while the Tolivers
cultivated exclusively red roses, the symbol of the House of Lancaster.

By 1830, cotton was king in the South, and the two youngest sons yearned for plantations of their own in a place where they
might establish a town that reflected the noblest ideals of their English and southern culture. Joining their wagon train
were families of lesser breeding and education who nonetheless shared the same dreams, and regard for hard work, God, and
their southern heritage. Included also were the slaves—men, women, and children—upon whose backs these dreams were to be made
possible. They started west, taking the southern route along the trails that had lured men like Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie.
Near New Orleans, a Frenchman, tall and slim in the saddle, rode out to meet them. He introduced himself as Henri DuMont and
asked if he could join the train. He was dressed in a suit of the finest cut and cloth and exuded charm and sophistication.
He, too, was an aristocrat, a descendant of King Louis VI, whose family had immigrated to Louisiana to escape the horrors
of the French Revolution. Owing to a falling-out with his father over how to run their exclusive mercantile store in New Orleans,
it was now his intention to establish his own emporium in Texas, without paternal interference. Silas and Jeremy welcomed
him.

Had they continued a bit farther west toward a town now called Corsicana, so Jessica Toliver informed the reader, they would
have reached the land they were seeking, an area rich in a soil known as “black waxy” that was to yield huge crops of corn
and cotton to future landowners. As it was, horses and travelers were tired by the time the wagon train crossed the Sabine
River from Louisiana into Texas, and a weary Silas William Toliver surveyed the pine-covered hillsides and drawled, “How about
here?”

The question was passed and repeated among the settlers, though with less refined tongues, and by the end of the line it had
become: “How ’bout cher?” Thus it was that the town came to be called after the question to which the colonizers unanimously
answered yes. The founding fathers gave in to the consensus that the town be so named only on the condition that the
ch
be hardened to a
k
and spelled and pronounced as “How-but-ker.”

Despite its rather yokelish name, the first inhabitants were determined to set a cultured tone for the community not unlike
the gracious way of life they’d known, or wanted to know. They were in accord that here among the pine trees, life would be
lived in the traditional southern fashion. As it turned out, few became plantation owners. There were too many trees to clear
from the land, and the hillsides were difficult to work. There were other vocations to which a man could turn his hands if
he was able and willing. Some settled for smaller farms, others chose cattle raising, a few went into dairy farming. A number
opened businesses built to the exact specifications laid out by the city planning commission and agreed upon by the voting
citizens of the young community. Jeremy Warwick saw his financial future assured in the cutting and selling of timber. His
eye was on the markets to be found in Dallas and Galveston and other cities springing up in the new republic.

Henri DuMont opened a dry-goods store in the center of town that in time surpassed the elegance of his father’s in New Orleans.
In addition, he bought and developed property for commercial purposes, renting his buildings to shopkeepers lured to Howbutker
by its reputation for civic-mindedness, law and order, and the sobriety of its citizens. But Silas William Toliver had not
been willing to turn his hands to another occupation. Convinced that man’s only vocation was land, he set about with his slaves
to cultivate and plant his acres in cotton, using his profits to expand his holdings. Within a few years, he owned the largest
tract of land along the Sabine River, which afforded easy transport of his cotton by raft to the Gulf of Mexico.

He permitted only one alteration to the life he had envisioned when he left South Carolina. Rather than constructing the plantation
manor on the land he cleared, he built it in town as a concession to his wife. She preferred to reside among her friends dwelling
in other mansions of southern inspiration on a street named Houston Avenue. Along this street, known locally as Founders Row,
lived the DuMonts and Warwicks.

Silas called his plantation Somerset, after the English duke from whom he was descended.

Not surprisingly, at the first meeting to discuss the creation of the town, its layout and design, the reins of leadership
were voted over to Silas and Jeremy and Henri. As a student of world history, Henri was familiar with the War of the Roses
in England and the part his colleagues’ families had played in the thirty-two-year conflict. He had noted the root-wrapped
rosebushes each family had labored to bring from South Carolina and understood their significance. After the meeting, he made
a private suggestion to the two family heads. Why not grow both colors of roses in their gardens, plant the white and red
to mingle equally as a show of unity?

An uncomfortable silence met this proposal. Henri placed a hand on the shoulder of each man and said quietly, “There are bound
to be differences between you. You have brought them with you in the guise of your roses.”

“They are the symbols of our lineage, of who we are,” protested Silas Toliver.

“That is so,” agreed Henri. “They are symbols of what you are
individually,
but they must also represent what you are
collectively.
You are men of responsibility. Responsible men reason out their differences. They do not make war to solve them. As long
as your gardens boast only the symbol of your own house to the exclusion of the other, there will be the suggestion of war—at
best, estrangement—as an alternate course, the course your forebears chose in England.”

“What about you?” one of them asked. “You are with us in this enterprise. What will you grow in your garden?”

“Why…” The Frenchman spread his hands in the manner of his countrymen. “The red and white rose, what else? They will be a
reminder of my duty to our friendship, to our joint endeavors. And if ever I should offend you, I will send a red rose to
ask forgiveness. And if ever I receive one tendered for that purpose, I will return a white rose to say that all is forgiven.”

The two men mused over the suggestion. “We are men of great pride,” Jeremy Warwick finally conceded. “It is difficult for
men like us to admit our mistakes to those we offend.”

“And as hard to give voice to forgiveness,” offered Silas Toliver. “Having in our gardens the pick of both roses would allow
us to ask for and grant pardon without words.” He reflected a moment. “What if… pardon is not granted? What then? Do we grow
pink roses as well?”

“
Pink
roses?” Henri scoffed. “What a pithless color for such a noble flower. No, gentlemen, I would suggest white and red only.
The presence of any other implies the possibility of the unthinkable. Among men of honest intentions and goodwill, there is
no mistake, no error of human judgment, no faux pas, that cannot be forgiven. Come now, what do you say?”

For answer, Jeremy lifted his champagne glass, and Silas followed suit. “Hear! Hear!” they chorused. “Here’s to the red and
white. May they grow in our gardens forever!”

Amos let out a sigh and closed the book. Fascinating reading, but no use continuing. The volume ended with an optimistic listing
of the progeny expected to carry on in the illustrious tradition of its patriarchs and descendants, namely Percy Warwick,
Ollie DuMont, and Miles and Mary Toliver. Since the book was published in 1901, Mary would have been one year old, the boys
only five. The answers he sought lay in their later lives.
Roses
would contain nothing of Mary’s hint of a tragedy the families had shared that would account for her actions. But what?

It was a well-known fact that while they lived in one another’s pockets socially, they worked and prospered separately. It
was a rule established at the beginning that each man’s enterprise must rise and fall by his own merits—without financial
aid or assistance from the others. Amos thought “Neither a lender nor a borrower be” an unneighborly maxim among friends,
but as far as he knew, the policy had never been breached. The Tolivers grew cotton, the Warwicks mined timber, the DuMonts
sold luxury dry goods, and never—even when Mary Toliver had married Ollie DuMont—had they mingled their entities or relied
on one another’s resources.

Then why would Mary leave Somerset to Percy?

You came into our lives when our stories were done,
Mary had said, and he was now willing to believe that he had. Only one man could supply the missing chapters. He longed to
storm to Warwick Hall, pound on the door, and demand that Percy tell him what had led Mary to sell Toliver Farms, bequeath
him her family’s 160-year-old plantation, and disenfranchise the great-niece she loved from her heritage. What in the name
of all that was holy had driven her to draw up this unthinkable, irrevocable codicil in the last weeks of her life?

But as Mary’s attorney, he had no choice but to choke on his silence and hope the fallout from this unexpected turn of events
would not be as explosive as he feared. He wished Mary luck tomorrow when she dropped her bomb on her great-niece. It broke
his heart to think it, but he would not be one bit surprised if Rachel ordered pink roses for her grave. What a sad mantle
to Mary’s memory. What a tragic ending to the special relationship they had shared.