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“I keep telling people – anybody can do anything, but if you need actual magic, you need Uncle Jean-Paul!”
“You are so right, Louisa – I did some research and some good eavesdropping, and I found out that him and Captain Hamilton and Captain Lee all used to work together and had nicknames: 'The Clinician, the Tactician, and the Magician'! Captain Hamilton will show you how to find it. Captain Lee will show you ways to find it that no one has ever thought of before. But if you need magic to find it, you already know who the Magician is!”
Nine-year-old Louisa Dubois Chennault and her best friend Vertran Stepforth were talking about the latest exploit of one of their favorite people: Major Jean-Paul Philippe Dubois, retired from the Judge Advocate General service (JAG) of the U.S. Army and ten years in Interpol. This master investigator and lawyer brought fresh eyes to Lofton County, and he saw things other eyes had been seeing and passing all their lives … such as the final resting place of the small 19th-century yacht known in Lofton County lore as the Waterspout Traveller.
The Waterspout Traveller – two Ls because there was a Lee involved, and General R.E. Lee's horse Traveller just dominated all discussions in Virginia after 1862 – was not exactly where you would have expected it to be, which is why Major Dubois was assumed to have conjured it out of thin air in the summer of 2020.
The major and his niece had seen pawpaws growing in a clearing in the woods near Lofton County's famous Lake Esmeralda, so they had returned the next day with buckets to pick the fruit … but then Major Dubois noticed something. A huge old pine tree had died and fallen down and taken many tangled weeds with it, and a single shaft of light not able to get through for 206 years bounced off a piece of glass. It was atop a little cliff, set up above the level ground, but Major Dubois was six feet three and let Louisa climb up on his shoulders as they got closer.
“Uncle, there's a whole old ship up there!”
Then they had climbed the rocks to go see, and there, well-weathered but still intact, was the legendary Waterspout Traveller, having outlasted the tree it had landed against. Here and there were flecks of gaudy green paint and 22-carat gold trim that identified it for what it was.
This find confirmed that one of the most legendary incidents in Lofton County history had in fact occurred, and were not the ramblings of a senile old man.
“Yes, but, any decent investigator looking at history could have figured out that since Admiral Lee clearly made it home, and since his yacht wasn't at the bottom of Lake Esmeralda, what he and many others said happened had to have happened, more or less,” Captain Hamilton said to Major Dubois.
“Ironwood, how often has Lofton County had decent investigators?”
“I keep forgetting, Jean-Paul … in Lofton County, a good investigator is generally a nuisance.”
As in many other places in American history, the misbehavior of the many is hidden behind the merits of a few … the Lofton brothers, General Joseph James and Major Jonathan Lofton, had given the county their name and its opinion of itself, and behind them the misadventures and bad behavior of their father and elder brothers and cousins were forgotten, along with the bad and even mad and murderous behavior of their neighbors the Slocums.
In their lifetimes, the Lofton brothers provided refuge for many victims of the dominant families of the region, and the Lees who had come from Robert E. Lee's family line and stayed down in the valleys had fallen into their pattern. But they were a minority, replacing a minority of Lees who had come much earlier. The last and most striking of that earlier Lee line had been Admiral Wilson Thomas Lee, best known by 2020 for being the father of Major Lofton's second wife, Rebecca.
“The old admiral in his own time was the most famous man in what would become Lofton County,” Captain Hamilton said in telling the story to the Dubois family on Zoom. “He got his start in the Revolutionary War, having convinced more people around him to turn their pewter over to the Continental Army to make bullets than anyone his age – he was 11 years old at the finish, and General Washington, General Lafayette, and his distant cousin Colonel “Light-Horse” Harry Lee each ruffled his little head and gave him a gold coin.
“So: little W.T. was rich and an international sensation at 11 years old, and was never headed after that, making his mark in the Continental Navy, the Carolina and Georgia Gold Rushes, Michigan -- how the U.S. got the iron-rich land from Canada was partially his doing -- and England, having walked off with Lady Esmeralda, the daughter of the Duke of Wolford, in 1804.”
“There is a great natural lake on the lands the duke held, and one day Lady Esmeralda said to her new Virginian husband how much she missed walking around it. Admiral Lee absolutely worshiped his wife, so, he dug out Lake Esmeralda here in Lofton County to those exact specifications, down to its exact depth of 167 feet. He got that done in 1805 – and paid every worker.
“This is where the story starts to turn left: the Slocums and most of the Loftons were completely embarrassed by Admiral Lee freeing all his slaves because Lady Esmeralda said to him, 'You are too important and powerful a man to take the risk of having all these people around who hate working for you – if you free them and hire freely, you will protect us with their love for you.' She was right, but Admiral Lee's neighbors, who were already jealous of him, resented him and her all the more for that.
“Because Admiral Lee was so high-handed and proud, it was a special joy to many to see him brought low by Lady Esmeralda's death in 1814. Not that Admiral Lee was thinking of the many. He clung to sanity as long as he could for the sake of his devastated daughter, Rebecca, who was nine at the time, but one summer day like this one, he dropped her off with his mother. The next morning, his servants noticed he skipped breakfast and started drinking instead. He then took his horse and went down to Lake Esmeralda at around 1, on a day that was growing dark with clouds and wind.
“Weather records record that a hurricane had come ashore on the Carolina coast, and it was so big that some of that energy had boiled north into southern Virginia and was trapped against the Blue Ridge and forced backwards – thus rotating, all down the Roanoke Valley.
“The aging sailor knew this wasn't the kind of day to take his yacht out, not unless you were going on a last journey. He had buried his wife on the shores of Lake Esmeralda, and he was going to leave his body in the deep there with their pleasure vessel painted green and gold – emerald-green for her, gold for him, and his embrace. The plan was to drop anchor, scuttle the yacht, and blow his brains out, in that order.”
“No!” little Louisa cried, nearly shattering the collective Dubois family eardrums. “He just can't do that! What is poor Rebecca supposed to do without her father! What is he thinking! No!”
She started crying, and Major Dubois reached out his strong arms to her.
“The story is not over yet,” he said gently as she ran to him and he kissed away the tears from her little dark-chocolate colored face.
Captain Hamilton smiled kindly when Louisa at last calmed down and looked up.
“The Lord was of the same opinion that you are, Louisa, but he knew that Admiral Lee was in too much heart pain over losing Lady Esmeralda to be thinking well. So, the Lord set up a rescue.”
“Okay – now we finally get to the good part!” Louisa said.
“All his servants said they saw what he saw just before it happened – the sky turned dark green. Esmeralda means 'emerald,' and they assumed that the spirit of his wife was basically saying what you had just said – that he had to live. He took it as her welcoming him to the great beyond, and it slowed him down long enough to have him go below decks to open the hatches at just the right moment.
“We know today that just how the sea at the surface looks a darker blue than the sky and looks green further down, a stack of water high enough above you – very tall clouds – can let light through in such a way as to make for striking blue and green effects. The problem is, generally, is that such an event indicates a very organized vertical stack, and I mentioned that the storm energy coming up from the south was hitting the Blue Ridge and was being forced backwards – so, the whole thing was rotating. Admiral Lee, being a sailor, was thinking of a squall. He was under a tornado-producing supercell instead.”
“And, a waterspout is just a tornado over water,” Major Dubois said. “Hence, the last journey of the Waterspout Traveller.”
“Yep,” Captain Hamilton said. “Thousands of people in Lofton County who had come out to look at the tornado saw the yacht sailing through the air, around and around with the millions of gallons of water the waterspout also sucked up. Lake Esmeralda lost about one-eighth of its water that day, all gone up into the clouds, and the servants had to run for it as the waterspout approached them.
“All of this caused great consternation. No one expected that Lady Esmeralda, good as she was, was such a saint that she could get that high-handed husband of hers assumed into heaven. This was a massive theological problem, instantly – but then solved because Admiral Lee walked home the next day, bumped, bruised, and with partial amnesia, but alive.
“However, this left Admiral Lee's enemies dealing with the knowledge that this already legendary man they hated, who had freed his slaves and was still getting richer and richer, had out-sailed a waterspout, through the air, safely. So, since Admiral Lee never could remember where he landed or how he got out of the yacht and to his house, they in his later years started saying it was all a drunken dream of his.”
“But it wasn't – he made it – and Uncle Jean-Paul found the yacht!” Louisa cried.
“Yes, indeed, Louisa and Dubois family, it all happened just as the admiral and the witnesses said it did. The waterspout dropped the yacht into the woods, and the water, trees, and bushes broke the fall so that Admiral Lee, below decks, survived.”
“God was looking out for him and his daughter Rebecca!” Louisa cried.
“Yes, indeed. The old admiral would live another 56 years to 1870, and died a humble, repentant man of faith at 100 years old – he made it to where Lady Esmeralda is at the right time, after all.”
Louisa ran and jumped up between her grandparents, Jean-Luc and Ébène-Cerise Dubois.
“If one of you dies first, the other one can't do anything crazy – I need you!”
“On promet – we promise!” they said, and kissed away the tears from her little dark-chocolate face.