Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  “All but a few of us, Mother, are in agreement he’s the worst president in U.S. history. I don’t know why—”

  “Because I said so, Annie, and you don’t get to eat if you’re going to go on about the depredations of Mr. Bush or the Republicans.” Looking at her brother and husband, already into a second bottle, she added, “Or the War.”

  “Good God, woman, this is totalitarianism!” cried Duke Johnston in mock outrage.

  “Sic semper tyrannis!” cried Gaston Jarvis. “Jerry, what else will we talk about?”

  “Oh come now, darling,” Duke pleaded. “I don’t get to see Gaston that often anymore … really except for a distant wave across the Nineteenth Hole, it’s just Christmas and funerals. Can’t we have a little more War?”

  Bo heard the sadness in his father’s smiling protest; he looked at Annie who looked back at him meaningfully, having heard it too.

  Then Bo’s father stood up, unsurely, raising a hand. “I say, as my ancestor Joseph E. Johnston said many a time, ‘Retreat! Retreat!’”

  “Perhaps we shall bivouac, Colonel, in your private study?” Gaston said, richly.

  Yes, the Civil War Study, crammed with pistols, sabers, musket balls, medals, maps and period Bibles, Dad’s inner sanctum, housing the Confederate relics the old men could venerate, toys these overgrown boys could play with. But also Dad’s whiskey cache.

  As Gaston lumbered to his feet, Jerene said with especial sharpness, “I’m calling a cab for you, Gaston, if you start slurring your speech. And you, too, Joseph—you can sleep it off at the Club.” Dad’s given name, Joseph, only came out in threats and warnings.

  “I promise moderation,” Bo’s father said. “I’ve had the pistols restored and Gaston can inspect them for his next opus. Perhaps Cordelia Florabloom can shoot her way out of a Union garrison.”

  “Yes, but not before she’s passed around like a blow-up doll, letting the officers desport themselves—”

  “OUT,” said Jerene. Then she turned her attention to her giggling children: “My Christmas wish is that you all would grow up. You’d never know any of you were in your thirties. Not including you, Jerilyn—you’re the only well-behaved one in the family.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Annie and Bo said in unison.

  But to Bo Jerilyn did not seem well behaved as much as sullen. He asked, “Jerilyn, is something wrong?”

  Skip answered for her. “Big-time cramps this morning—”

  Jerilyn: “Oh shut up. Don’t tell them that.”

  Bo and Annie, Skip and Jerilyn decamped to the dining room, where after a surreptitious pass at the first-course items on the server, a pick here, a nibble there, they sat at the table. Annie, Bo regretted, sat directly across from the seats he had picked out for himself and Kate, who soon emerged from the kitchen. Kate ferried a tray of congealed salads, red and green marshmallows suspended in an off-white gelatin, a Betty Feezor holiday recipe from time immemorial. She went along the table setting the small plates at the upper left of the three silver forks, engraved , at each place setting. “Are the boys still defending the Southern entry into the War? Are y’all gonna talk like this when Dorrie gets here?”

  Skip asked to be reminded who Dorrie was.

  “Josh’s black friend,” Bo heard himself say in a whisper. Why did he whisper black? It was the same way he would go sotto voce to say someone had cancer, or you know her husband drinks …

  “His girlfriend?” Skip pursued.

  Kate’s eyes went wide, almost smiling. “No, they’re just friends,” she quickly supplied.

  Annie crossed her arms. “Jerry, do you not know about…”

  Now Jerilyn was whispering, so their parents in the next room wouldn’t hear. “That he might be gay, yes, I know. How do I know if he’s one hundred percent? For all I know that was a phase and Josh and Dorrie are a couple.”

  “I can assure you,” Annie said, an edge in her voice, seeing a new campaign, “it is not a phase. And Dorrie’s definitely gay, too.”

  Skip snorted. “Shit, why don’t they just get married and have one of those cover marriages? I bet your mom would prefer that to, you know, the other.”

  Annie: “They won’t do that because the calendar does not say that it’s 1957 but rather 2007 and gay people don’t have to do that bullshit—”

  “Ssssh,” said Bo, eyeing Alma and his mother through the doorway. “Let’s not out Josh before he gets here.”

  “Why not?” Annie said. “You wanna talk about bullshit. The whole of Charlotte knows these two are gay except for Mom and Dad—”

  “It’s not for you to tell your parents,” Kate said with too much haste.

  “I wasn’t going to tell, Kate, my parents about my brother’s orientation, but it’s nice of you to weigh in.”

  “Let’s change the topic,” Bo said, staring daggers into his older sister.

  “Fine. This family needs to be issued a memo before we get together for these empty jump-through-the-hoop holiday meals about what topics are proscribed and what topics can be permitted to be dwelled on at a depth of one to two inches.”

  Alma burst in with a long silver tray of cranberry sauce. Everyone was quiet.

  “I know you all are talking Civil War and slave times,” Alma said with her level, unexcitable tone. “I can hear every word. Keep talking so God can hear what you’re saying and take note.”

  “The boys are in the study,” Kate said, “so the cannons have gone quiet.”

  “About the cranberry sauce,” Bo mumbled, looking at the Jarvis traditional recipe with berry skins, seeds, orange peels, bitter walnut pieces.

  “Yes, Mother’s cranberry compost.” Annie, each year, was determined to thwart her mother’s twigs, seeds and kernels for the Ocean Spray can of molded gelatin, and in this, she had allies. “Shall we go get the Ocean Spray?”

  “I have to drive or I get carsick,” Kate improvised, staring desperately, telepathically at Bo. “And our van isn’t blocked in the driveway, we parked on the street, so…” Bo and she furiously tried to think of a reason Annie couldn’t accompany them.

  Bo: “Yes, and you don’t drive a stick, Annie. The van is manual. I’ll go with you, sweetheart.”

  They were out the door before Annie could invite herself along and they had to invent a lie about why the sixteen-seater van didn’t have room for one more passenger. They walked across the lawn without comment. They sat in the car and fastened their seat belts without comment. Kate started the car and drove around the corner and then permitted herself a scream: “Aaaaaaiiiiiii…”

  Bo patted his wife’s arm. “It’ll be over soon. Just a few more hours.”

  “Annie tries so hard to make common cause with me and I suspect I agree with ninety percent of her views but I just hate her in the most un-Christian way! Her opinions do not spring from any constant source. I feel my faith—which she takes great pains to insult—informs all my positions and I understand having to fight tooth and nail with right-wingers who can’t believe a fellow Christian doesn’t agree with them, but I swear it’s worse arguing with your own side. I think of my politics as humane, and I think her politics are just politics, just stances she likes hearing herself promote.”

  “I grew up with her. What do you think that was like?”

  Kate was calming down as the Harris Teeter was coming into view. “She’s so smart. I’m underequipped to tangle with her.”

  “You’re not the one with three husbands, the current one which you’ll note is a no-show for the umpteenth year.”

  “I’m not up to debating your uncle, either, who makes the Southern cause so reasonable. It was a fight to keep people in chains, lynching, hobbling, selling off the men, breaking up slave families, whipping, every sadism imaginable—”

  “Save it for the table. I agree with you.”

  “I’m not opening my mouth one more time because I’m already non grata with your mother.”

  “My mom likes you!” Bo felt his mother did like Kat
e, but just like his choice of profession, would it have hurt him to marry from his own background? Someone who could be an ornament to his social standing, maybe invite the Johnstons over for a good dinner now and then, as families usually do? Kate refused to host Jerene and Duke—what was the point, she always said. I’d have to cater it. Or sneak in other people’s cooking and pass it off as her own, and that just wasn’t Kate.

  They pulled into the Harris Teeter lot beside another van with a MCCAIN ’08 sticker. “That’s the first one of those I’ve seen,” Kate said. “I’ll get the cranberry sauce, you can stay in the car.”

  Bo thought, as he did in all solitary moments, about his next sermon. There was always a next sermon. The good thing about Methodism was that a minister could work up a few showstoppers and hit new congregations with polished chestnuts every few years after you moved churches, but there were no summer repeats like TV for a Presbyterian minister. Not that you didn’t circle over familiar territory, time and again.

  The run from Thanksgiving—let God be thanked for our gifts—to Advent—our Savior is coming—to Christmas—the Christ child is born—to Epiphany—the babe in the manger is divine—was cake. Just read the passages and sew together some heartwarming hokum, home for the holidays, a time of peace and good cheer, Christmas in our hearts, blah blah, blah blah; then came the onerous winter stretch.

  Every year Bo wanted to do a series. It was good to do a series. Ten sermons on the Ten Commandments. Twelve sermons on the twelve apostles—one really had to dig for stuff about some of the no-names on the disciple backbench, though. For a month, Bo had been thinking about an eight-parter about God’s manifestations in the Bible, how surreal, impractical, and often counterproductive they were. When God became flesh in Christ Jesus, it ended in Him getting executed, so God in His earthly appearances, we should admit, must take a very long view.

  God appears man-like, without fanfare, to Abraham, though it’s an angel that stops the sacrifice of Isaac. Jacob and the Wrestling Angel—except the Bible says it was a man and that Jacob comprehended that the man’s face was the face of God. A burning bush to Moses. Pillars of cloud and fire to the Jews freed from Egyptian bondage—good material there. A man with a drawn sword to Joshua. Balaam’s ass. Chariots of fire. And then God starts showing up on thrones: First Kings, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel—not much metaphor or poetry in God on a throne, an anthropomorphic comedown, really, God sitting in a chair like an earthly ruler. And then the writing on the wall in Daniel—you can get some rhetorical mileage out of that. But the last time he thought about Balaam’s ass, he really stalled out.

  Balaam is on his way to ritually curse Israel but God takes control of his voice and he keeps blessing Israel instead, despite the continued encouragement of the priests of Baal. When he sneaks off to perform another curse an angel appears that only his donkey can see. When Balaam can’t get his donkey to go forward, he beats it, and God has the donkey speak to him, and then he can see the angel. (Why not have the angel appear so Balaam can see him, and save the circuitous route through the talking donkey?) Anyway, the angel says he might have killed Balaam if not for the donkey. Doesn’t God have control of his angels? Would this angel have been permitted to kill God’s prophet if God had not made the donkey speak? Bo read a number of rabbinical commentaries (all more ingenious than the ludicrous biblical episode upon which their commentaries were based), and also some Christian commentaries. The same Christian book went on to insist that Jacob wrestled Jesus, Abraham walked with Jesus, that Joshua’s man with the sword must have been Jesus too, who is God, who was/is eternal, who is God’s stand-in when he needs to incarnate.

  And in a wave, a full complete conclusive rush of sense and reason, he knew all these fairy tales and myths and corrupted pre-existing pagan legends were all junk. A waste of time. He could see his expectant congregation befuddled, their upturned faces seeking an answer from the pulpit, wanting useful truth, meaning, and Bo couldn’t very well say, “C’mon, you know this kind of biblical tale is nonsense.” It was anthropologically interesting, the way Lord Vishnu becoming a fish or a tortoise says something about Hindu notions or Zeus becoming a swan or a white bull captures the salaciousness of the Greek imagination, but it’s all lore and campfire legends, fairy tales, unlike the New Testament which is mercifully modern, pertinent to how we treat our fellow man, how we live now.

  Though Bo, when in this mood, suspected that the magical baggage about Jesus wasn’t true either, walking on the water, the Transfiguration, rising from the dead. If the authors of the New Testament sat down and set out to make the most unconvincing and incredible account of a resurrection, with a sometimes incorporeal appearing and disappearing Jesus, a Jesus no one much recognized, a risen Jesus who before the Roman authorities and the world can see him and bear witness to the might of God, has disappeared up into the sky—well, then you would have the gospel accounts of Jesus’ rising from the dead.

  The Rabbi-Spiritual Jesus was enough for Bo. He knew Kate felt and believed and lived the Resurrection Jesus. Bo thought the Jews were much nobler for not being moral in order to achieve an afterlife, no pie-in-the-sky payoff for earlier sufferings and sacrifices. Christian preaching usually dwelled in the land of Hell and Judgment, Antichrist and Apocalypse, and how we would never never never die, seeing granny and your dog Spot again at the Pearly Gates … all far from the message of compassion and living for others that Jesus embodied. He didn’t want to preach about or dignify any of the Special Effects claptrap. He wanted the basement of Stallings Presbyterian to be a Hispanic day care for working mothers, legally or illegally in the country. He wanted to take over the Five Churches Soup Kitchen which was run so desultorily, held at arm’s length from all the congregations, charity delegated, outsourced … every one of Stallings’s congregants should be taking a turn at the soup pot. I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not visit me. Who in his church, including himself, had visited one man in lockup at the county jail?

  He saw Kate crossing the parking lot with a straining plastic bag weighed down with cranberry sauce cans.

  I could leave the ministry, and I probably should leave it, Bo thought. I wonder if Kate would then leave me, too.

  * * *

  Another car—Joshua’s beat-up old bomb—was parked in the street, so Josh and Dorrie had arrived.

  Kate sighed. “I’m always eager to see what Josh is wearing.”

  Bo shrugged as they, not so quickly, made their way back to the front door of the house. “I thought the job in the clothing store was going to be temporary, but the years go by. I guess he doesn’t want any kind of career, just a job.”

  Kate chuckled. “I would have loved to be satisfied with just a job. Why did we ever think we wanted vocations?”

  “We were twenty-something and thought we were going to save the world.”

  Kate looked at him, squinting. “I’m still gonna save the world. When did you drop out?” Before he could answer, she grabbed his upper arm and pushed him toward the front door. “We’ll go save the world after we survive Christmas dinner.”

  When Bo and Kate returned, they saw Joshua and his friend Dorrie Jourdain were already drinking wine, ensconced at the table with Uncle Gaston, his father, and Aunt Dillard. Despite the fatwa against Civil War talk, the Gatling guns and cannonade were again ablaze.

  “That’s getting into history no one likes to talk about,” Gaston was saying. “The freedmen blacks of Charlotte gave five hundred dollars, raised at their church, to support the Confederate war cause.”

  “Probably the best five hundred bucks they ever spent,” Dorrie said. “Probably kept that little church from getting burned down. But you were saying about blacks and Indians who fought for the South.”

  Kate and Bo slipped into the kitchen and with the conspiratorial help of Alma were given a can opener and a silver dish to slide the molded cranberry gelatin into. They subtly po
sitioned the contraband on the server, next to the seeds-and-peels cranberry sauce, and resumed their seats.

  “… because the Cherokees were slave holders,” Gaston was elaborating. “The Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, Osage, all fought for the South. Colonel William Thomas and North Carolina’s ‘Thomas Legion,’ with the Qualla band of four hundred Cherokee warriors and another two thousand mountain whites. General Stand Watie was a Cherokee brigadier general.”

  Bo then asked, taking his seat, “All those Indian tribes couldn’t have owned slaves, though, could they?”

  “No, but the Indians in Oklahoma didn’t like what they saw with John Brown and Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, arresting landowners willy-nilly. They thought the South would honor their treaties where politicians from the North had proven more malign toward the native peoples. Oregon and Nebraska were free states where the whites grabbed Indian land with impunity. I keep coming back to this business about secession. Everyone down South thought they had the right to do this peacefully, and when Lincoln stormed into the South with troops that included prisoners and indigents gathered up in slum clearances of the Northern cities, troops that started burning and looting and pillaging, the Indians threw their cards in with the locals.” Uncle Gaston turned to Bo’s father. “Even after your ancestor surrendered to Mr. Sherman, sometime in April—”

  “April twenty-sixth,” Bo’s father supplied. “Did I ever take you kids to the little cabin outside of Durham where Johnston surrendered to Sherman?”

  Yes, Dad, said three out of four children simultaneously.

  “Anyway, after April twenty-sixth, the Indian boys kept fighting. They sure didn’t desert, like the white troops. Last shot fired east of the Mississippi was from the Thomas Legion, up in a skirmish in Waynesville. And Watie fought until June. Last Confederate general to surrender, in fact—”