Lookaway, Lookaway (39 page)

“Now now. You can tell me about the fun you had in jail.”

“I held the niggas off. Your boy is alllll man.”

“I’m all man, too, Calvin.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I certainly do.”

*   *   *

Josh had achieved a mastery of getting out of family occasions.

The store made for a good excuse. Josh had established the story that his temperamental boss, Mr. Mundy, was always calling him to work on weekends, at all hours of the day and night—Josh could invoke each branch around town (and miles north at Concord Mills) as a site of a crisis that required him to speed away and miss whatever family requirement he had begrudgingly committed to.

“I believe I shall have to have a word with that slavedriver you work for,” his mother said once, quite cross when Josh skipped a Mint by Gaslight one year.

Truth was, Josh worked exactly when he wanted; Mr. Mundy was a softhearted old queen who let him do as he pleased. Josh wasn’t sure the clothing store made any money at all. It was called Uomo Modal, and the flagship store which Josh managed was prominent in the South Park Mall. These stores featured mostly silk Italian-cut shirts and ties, plus terribly expensive faux-European accessories with Italian names, Bulgari platinum tie clips with an inlay of tanzanite—what was tanzanite? Josh sold that stuff without having a clue—Raffaello cuff links, Armani Executive sunglasses. Joshua assumed Mr. Mundy was independently wealthy and the stores were a front for importing something criminal …
or
a losing enterprise convenient to Mr. Mundy’s tax portfolio …
or
an excuse for constant trips to Italy, where a whole lavish vacation to Fashion Week in Milan might be a business write-off …
or
an excuse to hire and be surrounded by lovely, mostly indolent Southern gayboys who looked good in Italian clothes.

Josh usually worked alongside Manuel, who dabbled in drag on weekends. He was just starting to compete in pageants. He barely had to shave and had that African-American lean smoothness which is the envy of the drag-performing world—no Adam’s apple, too. Manuel put on a wig and he was halfway there. A lovely young man, but not macho (or dark) enough for Josh to obsess about. Josh had heard that some clerks (i.e, Manuel) and branch managers had “grown close” to Mr. Mundy; some had even gotten to come along to Milan some years.

Dorrie would say, “I’d get in the stream, if I got to go to Milan.”

“Can’t do it. Can’t get in that stream,” Josh said glumly.

At thirty-two years old, Josh felt the full weight of having no career to speak of. Maybe Mr. Mundy would let him take over the empire when Mr. Mundy retired. Maybe Josh would one day be the soft, overdressed old queen with too much cologne, wearing rose-pastel-tinted linens, silk shirts with cravats covering the aging throat, hiring young twinks to be clerks and cashiers. Josh played this scenario of life failure to goad himself to greater ambitions, but it never worked. Didn’t sound so bad, actually.

Anyway, the Golden Age of Family Avoidance was done. After Jerilyn’s infamy as the Christmas Dinner Shooter, there had been lots of family interaction, a circling of the wagons and SUVs. Dad was on TV with regularity as the family front person—good Lord, his father was charming, that comforting buttery North Carolina accent soothing and explaining away every rough edge.

“Your dad must’ve never lost a court case,” Dorrie said.

And all the bad Jerilyn publicity had proven good publicity for the Skirmish at the Trestle Civil War Re-enactment coming up April 19, 2008. Dorrie, whose profession was setting up attractive webpages, was summoned to help Mr. Johnston expand and improve his event site, so people could register (with a credit card), commit to permitted commercial activities (hot dogs and funnel cakes, horseback rides for the kids), sign oaths not to shoot real ordnance, promise not to be drunk, use foul language—this was a family event—and promise not to come as a Confederate general. That was a real problem in Civil War re-enactments, no one wanted to be a grunt, everyone craved rank—generals outnumbered privates at these things, if you didn’t curtail it. And no one wanted to play a Yankee soldier, because that would mean investing in a Union uniform, which was not how the ardent Southern re-enactor chose to spend his disposable income.

The real estate tycoons and Mr. Boatwright, though they might be every bit the shysters and crooks that Annie made them out to be (and she would know), had done the Johnston family the great favor of revitalizing their patriarch. Josh loved to hear his father talking with the other committee members on the Catawba River Trestle Historical Preservation Society (a group of old Civil War–crazy codgers, like his dad), at the Charlottetowne Country Club, in the doldrums of a big Sunday lunch.

“But that’s just it, Ben,” he heard his father tell Mr. Badger, “if the grounds were simply a public park with some picnic tables and a plaque, think of how it would be graffitied. Kids would come and drink beer there, gangs would make drug deals. But as a preserve within a gated community, the land is especially preserved. Anyone can be permitted to visit the historical park,” Duke added with animation. “School groups, historical societies—I have the developers’ word that the gatekeepers will let anyone through to a proposed small parking lot near the clearing, and the riverfront and trestle.”

“Well, it
would
be advantageous to keep the riffraff out,” said Mr. Haslett, a man who wore his white beard in flowing nineteenth-century fashion. All the better to portray his many-times-removed ancestor General Jubal Early. With the passion for
J
names in the family, Josh was quietly happy not to have been named “Jubal.”

Said Mr. Haslett, “You get your college liberal types who might want to protest a Confederate shrine, so a shrine on private property might not be such a bad thing. I suppose we can vote as a committee to allow this development deal.”

By February, the family house on Providence Road had become command and control, a barely functioning chaos. Preservation Committee members came in and out of the house at all hours (according to Alma, who was beckoned to provide hospitality regardless), small crises erupted and the phone rang into the night (according to his mother), otherwise habitable venues were turned into war rooms, maps and posters and battle diagrams draped over sofas and propped themselves against lamps …

“I’m putting everyone to work!” Duke Johnston declared, enlivened by a steady flow of coffee. “You’re the English major,” his father pronounced, hands on Joshua’s shoulders, pinned to the chair at the dinner table. “Be nice to get something back from my exorbitant investment in a Chapel Hill education.”

“Dad, I think you know I did nothing but drink and spend money on expensive restaurant meals and home décor while I was in Chapel Hill.”

“I was indeed aware, but I have always hoped that you might have brushed against the English language from time to time.”

Josh, conscripted, was in charge of Written Materiel.

April 19, 1865 … the War was winding toward defeat for the Confederacy and Richmond, Atlanta, and Columbia lay in ruins. Charlotte was now the only major city of consequence left standing in the South. Sherman burned Jackson, Mississippi; left three buildings standing in what was once Oxford; dismantled and razed the whole of Meridian, pulling down churches, schools, private homes. From Chattanooga to Atlanta to Macon, he famously plundered in a 60-mile-wide blight of scorched-earth destruction.

Then he turned to South Carolina.
“
I almost tremble at her fate,” wrote Sherman, the
her
being South Carolina, “but feel that she deserves all that seems in store for her.” After Orangeburg and Columbia, which Sherman watched burn to the ground, it was Charlotte’s turn, and the city braced itself for the inevitable William Tecumseh Sherman treatment.

Gold and silver were buried in backyards, jewels hidden, women and children packed off to points north and west (the famed diarist Mary Chestnut was sent to Lincolnton), while the men formed militias. Norfolk had fallen long ago but its famous ironworks, the forges that made artillery, shells, bullets, had been relocated to Charlotte, and the trains that steamed to and from Charlotte were laden with arms for the final battles of the long conflict. Columbia was merely ninety miles away—how could Sherman resist Charlotte?

Yet General Sherman could not resupply himself or his colossal army or the phalanx of freed slaves forming another army behind him. So after a feint or two in Charlotte’s direction, he headed east for the sea.

For the moment, Charlotte’s rail supremacy remained untouched. Foodstuffs, clothes, medical supplies, all were transported along the most important rail link left to the ravaged South, the line that had supplied General Lee before his surrender at Appomattox, the line that now shipped supplies to the cities smoldering in Sherman’s wake. And this mighty iron highway had but one vulnerable passage, the longest river bridge on any north-south railway, the trestle over the Catawba River at Nations Ford, ten miles south of Charlotte in Fort Mill, South Carolina.

“It’s just too terribly exciting, isn’t it?” Mr. Johnston said, clapping his hands. “And Joshua, it’s properly ‘Nation Ford.’ A colonial-era Indian reserve was made for the Catawba Nation; Fort Mill was built to defend them against the Shawnees, who kept attacking. Somehow the Ford picked up the
s
after the War.”

Union General George Stoneman, whose rogue operations and sneak attacks throughout the South had made fearsome legends of “Stoneman’s Raiders,” steadily advanced down the Catawba River Valley with a goal of destroying this essential trestle. A band of Raiders under Colonel William J. Palmer, with just four hundred men, crossed the mountains, marched through the foothills, and traversed the river valley, encountering skirmishes at Morganton and at Statesville.

The Charlotte Home Guards, valiant men who for years had dreaded the war finally coming to their community, who had trained for just such an assault, built fortifications on the Charlotte side of the river; Confederate General Sam Ferguson and the Third South Carolina Cavalry made their way to Charlotte.

His father weighed in: “Not much of a force, but we’ll not advertise that. Or what a slowpoke Ferguson was. He marched his South Carolinians to Charlotte doing God knows what, while Palmer slipped easily past him to the bridge. Did Ferguson imagine Palmer was going to march the Raiders right down Tryon Street? Of course, Claymore Ferguson, his ancestor, will come with the Ashley Dragoons from the South Carolina Third—oh that will be quite a show. This website is not the place to question General Ferguson’s failure to go straight to the trestle.”

Josh and his father spent the morning writing and rewriting. Finally, their ramble came to the Skirmish itself. Shots were exchanged. Palmer set fire to the trestle, and that put an end to the rail link. The Skirmish at the Trestle … over in a few minutes, from what it sounded like. Fortunately, his father and his cohorts were planning for this historical profundity to play out over an entire weekend.

Duke and his confederates had checked the train timetables to make sure the proposed cannon display did not coincide with the afternoon hundred-car freight runs. Norfolk & Southern were anything but cooperative. No person shall walk upon the tracks; any occupation of the bridge over the Catawba itself will be considered trespassing and the person subject to immediate arrest. In fact, N & S assured them they would have an extra cadre of railroad cops on duty for the weekend.

None of that stopped the Skirmish plans from turning baroque. “Major” Badger wondered if a stuntman could be hired. Five Yankees could take the bridge, brandishing explosives, but before they could do their dastardly work, the Charlotte Home Guards would heroically appear on the bank and impressively pick them off. Oh, the four non-stuntmen could fall on the trestle, but the stuntman could stagger to the edge and plummet forty feet into the river. Didn’t they make Hollywood movies down in Wilmington now? Couldn’t someone find a falling-off-a-trestle specialist? A month was put into this project only to learn that no stuntman was interested in plummeting into the rocky two-foot depth of the mighty Catawba. They could perhaps fasten a giant foam landing cushion to the nearby rocks but that … that sort of lowered the tone, somehow.

What about, Colonel Haslett suggested, one of those stationary fireworks displays from the trestle? Pinwheels and fountains of sparks and a few noisemakers booming away from the top of the bridge? The families and kids would love that!

“Mr. Johnston,” said the representative of Norfolk & Southern, this time making a quite serious home visit, standing in the Johnston family foyer. “Under no circumstances is anyone ever to set foot on the railroad trestle, a railroad, I might add, in constant use through the day and night. Every bit the vital link in 2008 that it was in 1865.” Josh drifted away from the scene, leaving his father to it when the railroad lawyer pulled out papers, injunctions, cease and desist court orders. He heard mild defeat in his father’s tone: “Oh really now…” and “You think all this bother is necessary?” and “Why don’t we sit down and talk about it over some of Alma’s legendary chocolate chess pie?”

A final hush-hush secret mission was undertaken to bribe the nearest stationmaster to turn a blind eye on the day of the event. Attempts to appeal to Southern Civil War sentiment failed, mainly because the line manager had strict orders and, inconveniently, was African-American. Very well. The railroad didn’t object, did it, to the trestle being illuminated in red shimmery lights in the evening to suggest its being burned down? The line manager gave the go-ahead for that, receiving the thanks of a grateful Confederacy. They offered him free entry passes for the whole family. He politely declined.

Duke Johnston and the high command surrendered on all plans involving the trestle; there was a note of sour grapes when Major Badger said, “Well. Why even bother illuminating the trestle? What are we celebrating—its destruction by Yankees?”