Lookaway, Lookaway (60 page)
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.
Cover design by Rob Grom
Cover illustration by René Milot
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Barnhardt, 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