Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  “You will not run for re-election. Nor will you accept these newfound friends of ours’ invitation to higher office. No congressional race, no mayoral race, no governor’s race. You are out of politics. It is the price of keeping me as your wife.”

  It was all over—like that.

  The political future that had been assumed, worn grandly like a cape, throughout his young adulthood, brandished in his confident striding through his thirties, the club, the law practice, was torn from his shoulders by her words. No, his destiny was annihilated by his actions—her words merely followed his folly. But it was Jerene who made the decision. And he acquiesced. He had relived the moment almost every day of his life and he, in each iteration of the scenario, still sat there acquiescing but he said more eloquent things, asked to be heard, recited the reasons that once Miranda disappeared, they would be safe to pursue political office again, but even in his fantasy do-over, she nonetheless would say what she said that night:

  “Politics brings out the worst in men, and I do not need to be standing beside you at some press conference, supporting my man while he confesses to some liaison with a call girl or some tabloid-fodder love child or a tango in the reflecting pools with exotic dancers. I am not that wife. You’ll go back to your law firm and our normal life, which, you must admit, had a superior tone to the circus we live in now.”

  “Quite.”

  “I thought you might protest my edict.”

  “I will never protest anything you dictate ever again, Jerene. I am your unworthy but grateful, loving husband.”

  “For this weekend, you can sleep in your study. We’ll be back to normal, eventually.” She paused. “When her perfume is one hundred percent gone. Gone from your clothes, your hair.”

  “I’ll burn all my suits in the yard, and go buy new clothes.”

  She would not be charmed, and reconciliation, words passing between them that were not freighted with extra meanings and latent accusations, were still months away. “Good night,” she said, as crisply as she’d said it to Miranda. Then she climbed the stairs. Then she closed the bedroom door—not a slam, but there was a discernible increase of force in it.

  There was a brief appearance at the old law firm; it was not exactly welcome that he return and divide the profits of the firm by another partner, but having been a city councilman, he would be in a position to draw new business … but it never happened, his return. The matter was left to drift and a reprise was never formalized.

  What occupied him, for the next moment, and then the rest of the 1980s and most of the 1990s, was the undeveloped land around the Catawba River trestle south of Charlotte. Duke lent his considerable popularity to the cause of raising money and buying up the marginal land not owned by industry or the railway. Then he met with those industries and those railways that used the trestle to see if they would support his plan for a memorial and a park and a regular re-creation of the skirmish there. The most hard to persuade of any group were the developers who had their eye on the surrounding land. No one then imagined luxury homes could be in view of the trestle—the noise of freight, the association of boxcars and hobos—but they did have leases and water rights and hopes that the train track might be relocated so there had been some just-in-case purchases and Duke had to use his smooth, easygoing charm to talk them into selling, as well as selling to his not-for-profit foundation for a reasonable price.

  So many expectations and hopes for the life of Joseph Beauregard “Duke” Johnston, and he whittled himself down to one project, distilled his considerable advantages and gifts into a single trifling purpose, and now look.

  * * *

  Annie pulled into her parents’ driveway. She looked at her watch again. “I think I’ll come inside,” she said. “Dad, perhaps I should warn you that…”

  “Perhaps you should warn me of what?”

  “Nothing. Let’s go inside.”

  Duke saw she wanted to tell him something more, but he had borne enough events and revelations for one afternoon. Even though Annie had a key to the front door, she hung behind, making him get his keys out of his pocket and open the door for her.

  Surprise!

  “Oh goodness!” Duke said, laughing, clutching at his heart like a pretend heart attack.

  There was Joshua and his friend Dorrie, who had been so helpful with the Skirmish website. There was Bo and Kate. There was Dillard, looking like her old self. There was Jerilyn—all of them laughing, pleased with themselves. Alma was now lighting the candles on a cake on the dining room table; the dessert plates were set around the table for nine.

  “I thought I expressly forbade any notice being taken of my birthday,” he said, shaking his finger at them all.

  “It is,” Jerene explained, setting linen napkins by each plate, “the day after your birthday.”

  “Ah, that is why Annie was checking her watch—she was the shill sent out to occupy dear doddering Papa and bring him back home at precisely five P.M. Very clever, very clever.” Annie almost told him about the party as they walked inside—wanted to give him time, perhaps, to pull himself together. Well, he was together. How could he not be with such adoration.

  “Where are your cars?” he suddenly asked.

  Parked around the block, they told him.

  “Happy birthday, Dad,” said Bo, who with Kate gave him a five-volume set of The Army of Virginia, one more History Channel retelling of the winning-then-losing campaigns of Lee and company.

  “Happy birthday, brother,” said Dillard, presenting a lovely cashmere cardigan. “Now don’t smoke your pipe around it and turn it into a walking ashtray.”

  “Sister, I intend to do exactly that,” he said, kissing her cheek.

  “Happy birthday, Dad,” said Jerilyn, who gave him, in a ring box, a bullet she had ordered from a Civil War collector’s emporium in New Orleans. “This can replace the one I shot,” she said, as everyone slowly laughed after they saw her laughing. “Is it the right caliber?”

  “Good Lord, it is!” he marveled.

  And after the applause, “Happy birthday, Mr. J.,” said Dorrie. She had brought him some kind of spyware-spamware-virus-stopping device for his Skirmish at the Trestle website. Ah, alas, the Skirmish would have to live on solely on that website, he thought, with a fresh new pang. That was now all that there would ever be.

  “Happy birthday, Dad,” said Joshua, who had something wrapped in beige packing paper that was either a fishing pole … no, a walking stick … no—as Duke tore into the paper: a flagpole. One of those flagpoles you install on your front stoop. And wrapped around it was the state flag of North Carolina.

  “Y’all can move down to South Carolina,” Josh explained, “but we want you to remind all those rich neighbors where your loyalties truly lie.” Widespread yeahs and booming agreement. A little more laughter, but it soon died down as Duke stood there, momentarily speechless, starting to say something, then not. Then crossing his arms.

  “About that. I don’t think we will be moving to South Carolina, after all.”

  Jerene popped her head up, all ears.

  “General Joseph E. Johnston, our Civil War ancestor, never forgot the magnanimity of the surrender terms offered by Sherman. He came to respect, even love General Sherman in post-war years. When anyone dared say a word against Sherman—and you can still hear people condemn Sherman even now—Johnston refused to tolerate that sort of talk. They shared a wonderful, superb correspondence … as you know, one or two of the letters I own. And they remained close until the end of their days. Sherman died and Johnston was a pallbearer. He went to New York City where it was very cold, very rainy. You don’t cover your head when you’re a pallbearer, and people at the funeral came up to Johnston and said, sir, at your age, you must put your hat back on, you’ll catch your death of cold. And he said, ‘If I were in his place and he were standing here in mine, he would not put on his hat.’ And so he didn’t. And he did catch cold. And that cold became pneumonia, which, weeks later, kill
ed him.

  “Johnston is often said to have failed the Confederate cause by his timidity, his unwillingness to fight the big battles—certainly Jefferson Davis thought so, and General Hood, some others. But that last gesture, toward the general that defeated him, showed honor.”

  All of them now were watching him. He searched their faces, settling on Kate who projected her considerable warmth; perhaps she was even moved by what he was saying.

  “So,” he concluded, “I can find no honor in taking that home in South Carolina, since the developers have violated every agreement we had, made a mess of the historical site. I would not be happy living there, having gained such a home at the expense of a bit of earth I sought to preserve.”

  Annie knew his situation better than the other children. With real concern she asked, “But Dad. Where are you going to go? You have to live—”

  “If he doesn’t want to live in South Carolina,” Jerene interrupted, “I, for one, am happy not to go there. Never liked the idea anyway. Now cake is served.”

  So much laughter and relief that night at the Johnston household. Everyone said they had to leave, but no one left. People stayed to tell more stories and remember the house, the house that would soon remove itself from all their lives. Annie’s five-year-old trip and fall down the foyer stairs and ride to the hospital in the ambulance where it was shown that nothing was broken or injured—but it was Duke who banged his head on the ambulance door frame and had to have stitches! Bo, at seven, breaking the front window grand-slamming a baseball that Duke had pitched to him. Not just that: the ball breaking the window, flying onto the dining room table, destroying the centerpiece, then bouncing into the china cabinet, taking out the protective glass and a porcelain statuette. Jerene was a firestorm of indignation, bursting from the house, confiscating the bat, sentencing son and husband to the hard labor of cleaning up their mess, while they giggled and she grew more enraged, which made them giggle even more. Joshua with a Super 8 movie camera playing director, getting out the ladder without permission and filming an overhead shot from the roof and then being too terrified to climb down, staying up there for hours until his parents came home.

  “Dillard’s sweater must be woven of Persian cat hair,” Duke said, after a second slice of cake, after a burst of familial laughter. “Let me go get my allergy medicine before my eyes turn red as coals.”

  He padded up the stairs to the bedroom. He locked the door to the bathroom.

  He was not going to take allergy medicine. He was weeping, tears pouring out in profusion. Of joy or self-pity he wasn’t yet sure. What a worthless old father and husband he had been, what a fraud, an inconsequential dabbler, a muddle. And they loved him anyway! Hadn’t it nearly always been that way, once he escaped his father’s home? Hadn’t he been liked and admired and had people drawn to him all his life? At Hampden-Sydney, at university, how they streamed into Arcadia to be with him. People elected him to office, people made him partner in a law firm, people invited him to everything and brightened when he entered a room. Downstairs were eight people, eight wonderful dear people, who were anxious that he should return because they loved him. Love that was not the least bit called for or deserved. To be loved for no good reason—well, he supposed, that was what love really was, but still, how remarkable to be on the receiving end of such bounty, such largesse.

  He pressed a towel to his face. He laughed a little. This is what that elusive quality must feel like, he convinced himself: accomplishment.

  Kate

  She knew things. That was her gift. Others had the gift of music or cooking to comfort people, some Christians had prophecy and healing, but her gift was small yet ever with her. A woman would say “Good morning” to Kate and she’d ask what was wrong and twenty minutes later, they were discussing the dissolution of the woman’s marriage. A boy would complain about being mediocre in his math class and a half hour later he was telling Kate that he suspected he was gay. People confessed to her, confided in her, sought her counsel. They knew she would not judge, or if she disapproved of something (stealing from the petty cash, sneaking pills out of mom’s purse, texting nude pictures to the boyfriend of the moment), she would at least be corrective in an unhysterical manner, always clear, always lucidly laying out the moral precept to be considered—you would never say she was ethically squishy or lax—but always patented, unjudgmental, loving Kate.

  Lately she had been thinking about taking a hiatus from Stallings Presbyterian and going to work for three months with some of the foreign charities in the developing world. She needed another Peace Corps fix. She wanted to dig a well and get the water pump working. She wanted to put a permanent metal roof on the community center where there were now palm fronds. She hungered for it and could talk herself, most days, into thinking this is what God wanted her to do. But then there’d be another young teenager in the church who was cutting herself and told Kate and no one else. A wife who had slipped into an affair with a co-worker and told Kate and no one else. That child in the family just moved here from Maryland, where an uncle had touched her inappropriately and whose parents did not believe her. Was she certain this call to mission work was really what God wanted or wasn’t she where He wanted her, right here, doing what she alone could do at Stallings Presbyterian.

  She might have counseled herself to sit still successfully but then the church Monthly Bulletin fell into her lap when Stewart quit. Stewart was a youth counselor and assistant; they shared him with Gold Hill Presbyterian. Stewart was smiley and full of energy and, though thirty, sort of a big kid himself, which maybe meant—Kate was never sure—that he bonded well with the youth group in the church, but she uncharitably distrusted all that bouncy energy and guilelessness, kept waiting to hear he was molesting the girls, suspected him of bad things which she never confided to Bo because it was nothing but un-Christian malice.

  But then Stewart quit, getting a full-time youth director job at an uptown Charlotte church.

  “Look, I’ll take the kids to Carowinds,” Bo volunteered. “I know you don’t want to do that.”

  “Ride roller coasters for Jesus, no, thank you.”

  But putting together the Monthly Bulletin was the drawing of a short short straw. She’d never paid much attention to the little magazine, but now that she did, she was appalled. Senior Spotlight. Look, the seniors are going to Concord Mills outdoor mall on a field trip, God be praised. Calling all young adults! Hoops4Him. “Basketball for Jesus, really?”

  “That’s an interchurch activity. We’ve been doing Hoops4Him for years.” Bo paused. “You don’t approve?”

  “Don’t recall the twelve disciples playing one-on-one.”

  The Book Group was reading some piece of Christian fiction with a serial killer in it. The Covenant Class was renting and discussing Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. It’s time for the Young Men’s Retreat. Between bouts of sock wrestling, log throwing, skeet shooting and paintball war, fifteen young men of the faith will grow closer to each other and to God. Participation fee $45.00.

  “I don’t suppose any slight hint of working toward Christ’s kingdom could trickle into our scheduled activities for our congregation.”

  “Hey, the church is getting along again. Bonding. All this is good.”

  “No, it is not good. What are we? Cruise directors? We’re becoming like that awful Charlottetowne Country Club you used to go to, except for lower-middle-class people.”

  Bo sat on the edge of her desk. “I think it’s great that we can get a turnout for these social activities. Not long ago, the church had too many battle lines to do any of these things.”

  Kate, silently, continued to typeset the issue left up in the air by Stewart’s departure.

  Bo cleared his throat. “Um, you want the Men’s Group to go visit the prisoners in county lockup. You want the Women’s Group to take a shift at the women’s shelter. You want the youngsters not to go to Carowinds but to eat their vegetables.”

  Kate wasn’t f
inding him charming today. “Choose for yourselves this day,” she said, while typing, “whom you will serve…”

  “Oh boy. When you start quoting Bible at the preacher, I know it’s time to clear out.”

  “… whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the god of Carowinds or the Harry Potter movie marathon at seven tonight in the Activity Building or the graven idol the Amorites called Putt-Putt Miniature Golf. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

  But dissatisfied as Kate was, that was nothing compared to how she felt when Bo made a unilateral decision for both of them. A complete betrayal—not asking her about it first. Because, of course, he knew what she would say.

  So, in divine payback, she would indeed tag along on some mission project or undertake a three-month service contract with one of many developing-world charities that were out there. Médecins Sans Frontières, CARE, Red Cross—heck, Red Crescent. That’d get the old geezers talking. And she would commit herself and present it, as her husband had done his little surprise, as a fait accompli. Odd. She was more nervous about telling Jerene, her mother-in-law, about this detour than she was her husband.

  * * *

  Kate admired Jerene—she really did. She admired her devotion to the Trust, her family, their place in society. She was fascinated by Mrs. Johnston; she was worthy of a sociological treatise, anthropological research, a kind of Southern woman not long for the twenty-first-century world. She also feared Jerene. Bodies were surely buried in her backyard, enemies had no doubt drunk poison from her crystalware.

  Maybe Kate could begin her temporary withdrawal from Johnston family life by degrees. The first thing, she figured, as she found a place in the Mint Museum parking lot, miles from the door, was that she should be excused from this committee. Why in God’s Holy Name had she been invited to be a part of the Jarvis Trust for American Art in the first place? Who was less qualified than she? She knew nothing about art, nothing about trusts, had no business at a high-society rich-lady gabfest at some precious overpriced lunch emporium, with Jerene at the end of the table presiding, a queen in her court. (Mind you, the fried oyster salads at Noble’s were out of this world.) Anyway, Kate had never properly understood why the Jarvis Collection even needed trustees—didn’t all actions flow from Jerene, the Maximum Leader? No doubt there was some tax advantage beyond Kate’s comprehension, but it looked for all the world like Jerene had merely selected some girlfriends from school, some Charlotte grandes dames, maybe a rival or two, and positioned them around her for show, to have her own glory reflected back upon her. Payton Disher. Belle Bennette. Kitty King Haywood. God, even the names of the ladies spoke of an old dying matriarchal regime.