Lookaway, Lookaway
Page 47
“I don’t think…”
“No, of course you don’t. This is something you’ll have to think about for some amount of time. But this is an option for you. You see, I would be honored if, once I’m in the cemetery, the Jarvis Trust for American Art passes on to you as chief trustee. You see, if you married Josh, you’d be family. Perhaps the line would end there. No one seems to be having any children; maybe it’s time the Jarvises crawled to their collective graves.” Another laugh. “You’ll note my sordid old mother hangs on and on—she is the one who will outlive us all. But all I can ask is that you think about it. Josh would gain the most from it. I fear he’s a bit adrift, following in his father’s footsteps where career and ambition are concerned—”
There was an explosive sound—a loud pop.
They stared at each other.
Then they realized what they’d heard simultaneously.
Jerene sprang from the chair. “Not again!”
Dorrie came running after.
They rounded the corner of the living room: both men clutching the dueling pistols, both men lying on the carpet, the smell of burnt powder in the air.
Gaston was feeling himself. “Did you hit me? Good God, Duke, I don’t think you fired—I’m not hit!”
Jerene ran to her husband on the far side of the room.
“Sorry, darling. It’ll be quicker for both of us this way.”
“What … what—Joseph Johnston? Are you shot? A duel? A duel in 2012? Are you both insane—well, yes, you are both insane!” Jerene looked with incredulity straight up at the ceiling. “That goes without saying! You could have been killed.”
Dorrie screamed out, “Jerene!” She pointed down to Duke’s side, redirecting Jerene’s gaze: a pool of blood was soaking into the rug, under his waist. Jerene knelt and pulled up the cardigan. He was hit above his hip.
Jerene said faintly, “Call 911.”
Gaston drunkenly from his position on the floor demanded, “Duke, take another shot … I don’t think you hit me.”
Dorrie fumbled with her cell phone, dropping it—it had become a piece of soap. She chased after it. She dialed 911. “Hello, we’ve had an accident here, with guns … Jerene, what’s the address?”
Jerene bent farther down and surrounded her husband’s face with both hands, pressing her own face into his, not so much a kiss as a futile gesture of closeness to breathe the same air, to live the same moment.
“Duke, old boy, you didn’t hit me,” uttered Gaston.
So Duke with his good arm raised the pistol as if he might take another shot.
But Jerene snatched it from him, hopping up. “For the love of God! How long is this Civil War nonsense…” She marched over to the fireplace. “… going to haunt this benighted family?” She threw the $11,500 antique 1854 French dueling pistol into the fireplace.
Gaston: “No, Jerry, I don’t think it…”
And then the unfired gun still full of powder, roasting for a moment in the fireplace grill, exploded. This sent its chamber, its fractured handle, a spray of metal and a .22 caliber ball whizzing across the room. Dorrie ducked instinctively. The base of a lamp, struck with some piece of it, disintegrated. Dorrie, now from floor level, saw the ball roll across the room, having bounced off the far wall. It rolled past her to the heating vent and disappeared.
“Mrs. J.? The address here?”
Jerene was standing perfectly still.
“Jerene, what’s…” Dorrie looked up: Jerene pulled back her silk jacket to reveal her blouse. Upon her shoulder there was a small black tear … and Jerene’s fingers came back from their exploration red.
“You’ve been hit,” said Dorrie.
“This is a three-hundred-dollar blouse. Just bought it at Nordstrom, of all the…” Jerene nearly tripped making her way beside her husband to the nearby armchair, which she fell into. Duke groaned and she reached down to take his hand and hold it in her own. “It will be all right, Duke. Just stay still.”
“Did Dorrie say you’d been hit?”
“Sssh, stay calm. Let me think.”
“My only love.”
“Sssh, now.”
Gaston blurted out his Wendover Road address. Dorrie told the dispatch they would need a second ambulance, and as Gaston moaned away, unable to raise himself, saying his arm was broken, maybe they should send a third. And when the red flashing lights arrived, casting their patterns on the ceiling, Dorrie realized she had not stopped staring at Jerene.
Her face registered no pain, but in her eyes … Before this night was out, Mrs. Johnston would likely be a widow. Soon enough she would be at her brother’s funeral, too. And this improbable gunplay would make for a risible scandal with ten times the publicity of what her daughter occasioned. So perhaps the art would have to be auctioned, and the Trust disbanded, and this house sold too, and maybe this was the long-feared ruin, the long-deferred sundering of family destiny, of legacy and repute, the work of years, the vainglorious work of years, slipping blithely from her tenuous purchase. Was that what was in her eyes? Defeat? At the very last—defeat?
Jerene Jarvis Johnston then looked at Dorrie squarely, her squint, her usual steel serenity returned, with just a touch of annoyance. Having seen all she cared to see of oblivion, she turned a resolute face to the difficult pathway ahead.
“My land,” she said.
Acknowledgments
To answer the reader’s most burning question: yes—yes!—Colonel P. S. Cocke DID defend Balls Ford, in July of 1861. Valiantly defending Balls, Cocke was spent and soon withdrew from military life, unable to engage again.
There are a great many more books than I include here to which I am indebted, but most indispensable were The Civil War in North Carolina by John Gilchrist Barrett, Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography by Craig L. Symonds, Storm in the Mountains: Thomas’ Confederate Legion of Cherokee Indians and Mountaineers by Vernon H. Crow, When Whites Riot by Sheila Smith McKoy, The Free People of Color of New Orleans by Mary Gehman, Thomas W. Hanchett’s incomparable Sorting Out the New South City, and The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans by the always splendid Charles Royster.
There are also too many friends and fellow writers to list who fed, clothed, housed, laundered, and generally sustained me along the way, but for all administrative mercies shown by my department head Antony Harrison, for the collegiality and beneficial conspiracies of my MFA brothers- and sisters-in-arms—John Balaban, John Kessel, Dorianne Laux, and Jill McCorkle—at North Carolina State University, an immense and loving thanks. If you’re going to the debutante ball, one could have no finer escort than Nora Shepard; Susan Langford earns thanks for a magnificent copyedit. I further celebrate my damn good fortune to have come to George Witte’s attention, first at Picador then at St. Martin’s Press, and I feel like thanking myself for my inspired inertia, staying happily put with my extraordinary literary agent, Henry Dunow, for twenty-four years and counting.
NOVELS BY WILTON BARNHARDT
Emma Who Saved My Life
Gospel
Show World
Lookaway, Lookaway
About the Author
WILTON BARNHARDT is the author of three previous novels: Emma Who Saved My Life, Gospel, and Show World. A native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he teaches fiction in the master of fine arts program in creative writing at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he lives.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
LOOKAWAY, LOOKAWAY. Copyright © 2013 by Wilton Barnhardt. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Rob Grom
Cover illustration by René Milot
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Bar
nhardt, Wilton.
Lookaway, Lookaway / Wilton Barnhardt. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-250-02083-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-02150-2 (e-book)
1. Upper class—Fiction. 2. Dysfunctional families—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.A6994L66 2013
813'.54—dc23
2013004035
e-ISBN 9781250021502
First Edition: August 2013