Lookaway, Lookaway (31 page)

Bo looked up at Jerilyn in terror. He tried to form a kind expression, look at her as a loving brother would, but he knew he was not convincing. Kate was clinging to his arm, now at his side, looking greenish but freshly adrenalinized, as they all were.

“I told you,” Jerilyn muttered, maybe to Skip, “about thingy thing…”

“Maybe she should put the gun down,” Gaston whispered.

“Only one ball and only one chamber,” Duke assured them all as he walked to his daughter and relieved her of the weapon.

*   *   *

Bo and Kate drove home after a long vigil at the hospital. It was 3:27
A.M.
They threw their coats over the sofa, and headed for the kitchen. Bo punched in the code for phone messages and there were more than fifty. Too tired to hold the phone to his ear, he trapped it against his face and the wall and let the messages play. There were a few let-us-know-if-we-can-do-anything offers of help, food, prayers. And then there were the others:
I hope next Sunday you will address how it comes to be that your sister, Reverend, is in the news for shooting her husband
 … Biddies, busybodies, gossips, mean old men, all the familiars from their tenure at Stallings Presbyterian. Bo punched in the code to delete every message.

“Bet there’re some good ones,” Kate sang out.

“Yep. It made the local TV news. The congregation is all aflutter.”

He looked at his wife who was boiling some water for some decaffeinated tea, her nighttime ritual, even on this night. She looked at him.

Bo: “This ought to just about finish us off at Stallings, don’t you think?”

Kate: “We were doomed anyway.”

“Poor Skip.”

Since it was clear he wasn’t going to die, they all had been much relieved. He was shot near the heart but with a weakly propelled lead ball. There was, naturally, an infection risk. If Skip died somehow, well, that would be the end of several worlds. Prison for Jerilyn? Bankruptcy for the family? “Liddibelle is a suer,” Jerene told them both, riding to the hospital. Bo decided not to think about it. That is until he would get on his knees and pray about it, but he wasn’t up to the heavy lifting quite yet.

Bo had been waiting for a quiet moment alone with Kate. “I snapped at you at the dinner table and I was wrong to do it. I didn’t even truly mean what I said. You can say what you damn well please to the people at Stallings. I was drunk and I’m never drunk.”

“No, I deserved it,” she said, surprising him. “Drunk off my ass. Telling Jerene Jarvis Johnston about my trailer-park ex-army boyfriend knocking me up and getting an abortion at sixteen at
her Christmas dinner table.
You have the right to dump a whole pot of leftovers over my head. I will somehow, someway, make it up to your mom.”

“You don’t have to do anything. You were great at the hospital. She loves you, I promise.”

The kettle whistled.

Kate shrugged. “Well, come on. We
had
to drink that wine. We’ll never have better wine.”

“Did you have the Lynch-Bages?”

She lowered herself carefully, so as not to spill the mug of tea, onto the deep sofa beside her husband. “I had it, all right. Tasted good going down and coming up—now
that’s
a wine.”

It was the first laugh they’d had in hours.

Kate nestled into his shoulder. “How do you think Jerilyn is holding up?” Kate asked despite knowing Bo didn’t know either.

There were three parties after the shooting—the party that went with Skip and the ambulance to the hospital, who called Skip’s mother, Liddibelle (Jerene did that unpleasant piece of business, cold as ice), who stayed until Skip came out of surgery and was transferred to the ICU; that group was Jerene, Bo and Kate, Joshua and, for a while, Dorrie. Then there was the party that followed the police car to the station where Jerilyn was being questioned—Duke and Annie; and then there were the escapees, Aunt Dillard staggering into Uncle Gaston’s Porsche, getting as far from the scandal as they could, fast as they could.

“It wasn’t an accident, I don’t think,” Bo said.

“I don’t either,” said Kate. “She didn’t say it was an accident. Right when we came in, it would have been a good opportunity to get that story going.”

“What was it she was babbling about?”

“Something about a thingy thing. She wasn’t connected to reality.”

“Do you think he tried to … do something violent to her? Her blouse was open. Maybe he put a hand to her.”

“Nah. He was rubbing against her the whole dinner; he was running his leg up her leg, under the table—I was noticing. Maybe he tried something sexual?”

Bo: “In the next room, with the whole family coming and going?”

Kate shrugged. “That might have been the point. Something extra exciting. They’re newlyweds. You remember how we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We’d do an old-folks-home visit and we’d almost have to do it in the car in the parking lot. Maybe they’ve got some kind of co-dependent control-freak thing going on and Jerilyn snapped.”

“I have never gotten to know Jerilyn.” Bo sighed. “Another black mark in my book. We’re going to have to expand my black-mark book into a second volume, it looks like.”

“You don’t think it’s going to come out,” Kate then asked, “about all the fighting that was going on? I mean, there’s no one who would tell the police or newspapers that we were all arguing, right? I mean, I don’t want anyone saying we had a big family fight and somehow things got so heated that Jerilyn shot her husband, because that’s not what it was like at all.”

“No. Anyhow, she barely said a word during all the nonsense.”

Kate rested a hand on his shoulder. “Let it come,” she said, after a moment. “Let them fire us. Let’s get a severance package and go do something God wants us to do. Médecins Sans Frontières, or Red Cross, or famine relief, or building a village water purifier in the south of Sudan. That church is done with us, but not nearly as much as I am done with them. I look forward to the next chapter. And I have some ideas about what we might do for God and they don’t involve the Presbyterian Church.”

It was because it was late and that Bo was exhausted by events that he thought something small and unworthy:
They’re not so much done with me as they are with you, Kate. If you’d tried to function as a standard minister’s wife, we wouldn’t be at this pass.
Then he disposed of the thought. He was on her side, he would leave any church for her, he would always choose Kate, the best person he had ever known. Kate was where God was, over on His side. In the gentlest scenario, Bo would not have his contract renewed. The question was when. Actually, he perked up, a flash of sheer panic reawakening him; the most pressing question was what he was going to say from the pulpit—
tomorrow
!

After a surprisingly deep sleep of a few hours, Bo padded down the sidewalk to see if this little incident made the morning paper. A wave of foreclosures … questions about Bank of America’s practices, Wachovia Bank, too … Then he flipped the paper over, below the fold.

SOCIETY NEWLYWED SHOOTS SPOUSE WITH 1854 PISTOL

CHARLOTTE
—In what two fine old Charlotte families are calling a regrettable misadventure, a young woman shot her husband of six months with a Civil War–era dueling pistol, during a holiday dinner.

Jerilyn Baylor, 22, daughter of former city councilman Joseph “Duke” Johnston, noted Civil War preservationist, and Jerene Johnston, trustee of the Jarvis Trust for American Art at the Mint Museum of Charlotte, shot her husband Beckleford “Skip” Baylor III, 23, in the study of the Johnstons’ Providence Road home. Baylor is the son of Liddibelle Baylor and the late “Becks” Baylor, former CEO of Piedmont-Catawba Mill & Textile. Baylor was taken to Presbyterian Hospital where he is listed in satisfactory condition.

Police are investigating the incident, and Jerilyn Johnston was taken to the Providence Division offices for questioning and later released. Said Det. Jack D. Kessel, “We don’t have any information to give at this juncture. I will say ballistics will have a time with this. This is the sort of injury we haven’t seen since 1860 or so.”

He would not confirm whether the couple was checked for alcohol.

Jerilyn Johnston is the niece of famed author Gaston Jarvis, noted for a series of Civil War–themed bestsellers. Jarvis was in attendance earlier in the evening but, according to family members, had departed the house before the shooting. He could not be reached for comment.

Duke Johnston, speaking to reporters from his front porch, identified the pistols as Gastinne Rennetes. They are French-made pistols that were popular in New Orleans before the war.

“Like most dueling pistols of the period,” explained Johnston, “they are designed to wound rather than to kill, so the men could walk away with honor satisfied. Ten grams of gunpowder, a small ball, and smoothbore, with no rifling or hidden rifling or else the wound would have been much more serious.”

The pistol, when united with its pair, is valued at $11,500.

How the pistol came to be loaded, Johnston could only speculate.

Johnston said, “We go down to the Catawba River railroad bridge near Fort Mill, South Carolina, every spring to mark the anniversary of Stoneman’s assault on Charlotte, known as the Skirmish at the Trestle. The pistol was likely loaded then for a target demonstration and our re-creators failed to make use of it or perhaps the powder became damp and never fired. I’ve told all my children, more times than they can count, not to play with the antique weaponry in my collection in the study.”

No charges have been filed.

Bo and Kate entered the church from the kitchen entrance in the activity building. They made a hurried dash to his office and shut the door. He had made up his mind not to read anything prepared, he would just talk to his congregation. The words would come. If they rose up and demanded his resignation, then so be it.

The service began normally, with a prayer, with a hymn, and then he took the pulpit early in the order of service.

The silence was heavy as a stone.

“Heard any good stories lately? Anything in the news…”

That got a few chuckles.

“Well, here’s the inside story. We have a lot of guns in our family. Living in this part of the country, I don’t think growing up with rifles, shotguns, pistols, is all that unusual. Any gun owners out there?”

Predictably, about a third of the men raised their hands. Bet it was more than that, but some gun owners were too paranoid to raise their hands; the minister might be working with leftist forces to confiscate their weapons, naturally.

“When I was young my dad taught me how to shoot…”

Okay, skeet shooting at the club, but if they got the impression that he, manfully, had a history of blowing away small animals in the woods, he would let them believe that.

“… and as they say in those NRA gun-safety courses, as it has been drilled into me a thousand times: there’s no such thing as an unloaded gun. Right? So my father, you may, some of you, remember him, Duke Johnston, he was a Republican city councilman in Charlotte for many years. And he devotes himself now to the—well, you couldn’t call it a battle, it’s called ‘the Skirmish at the Trestle,’ where the locals faced down Stoneman’s Raiders out at the Catawba River. Every year around April, they open up those grounds and they have a small ceremony and my father…” Why was he sounding like some prep-school snot?
My father. Oh Father, can’t I borrow the roadster for the regatta?
“… Dad, he brings out all these antique guns and pistols and gets them ready for the big day, and they were lying out this Christmas, where our whole big family gathers every year for this incredible feed my mom puts on.

“There are so many people named Johnston in the world, you might not connect that the defender of the Carolinas, the last general to face General Sherman, was my ancestor General Joseph E. Johnston. The Civil War didn’t end when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, it ended when my cousin, many times removed, surrendered to Sherman outside of Durham, sparing North Carolina the Sherman scorched-earth policy that South Carolina enjoyed. Charlotte, Raleigh, Salisbury, Gastonia, Lincolnton, all these old towns still standing and prosperous because General Johnston said, enough, it’s over.”

He didn’t meet Kate’s eyes. He hoped she was smiling. Some actors say they can feel when they have the audience, that a kind of telepathy transpires where you’re linked—preachers have that, too. He felt the tide turning. He felt the old men who had written him off as some kind of liberal pantywaist taking another look, going,
Well whadya know?
He thought: this is Bo Johnston working the crowd here, running perpetually for class president of his high school, leader of the Student Association at Davidson, he can pander and manipulate with the best of them. He knows his audience and, when he wants to, he can push the right buttons. Republicans. Guns. Confederate sentiment.

“And so, there we were, talking Civil War, and Jerilyn and her husband head off to my dad’s study where the guns are, and my little sister picks up a pistol—which should have been unloaded—and she’s waving it about joking about shooting Skip, my brother-in-law … and bang. The gun went off. And nobody was laughing after that. Skip will be all right. He’s in good condition at Presbyterian, and I think he has a sense of humor about it, bless him. I worry about Jerilyn. She can’t forgive herself quite yet. Truly it was a Christmas miracle that Skip is still with us. It’s also a miracle my little sister could get a shot off like that, one-handed.”

Some real chuckles.

“I hope these two newlyweds can survive this. You gotta admit, folks, that’s a strange start to a marriage: sorry about that time I shot you with that pistol from 1854…”

Oh, you should have seen the congregation at the end of the service. An especially long line to shake hands, pat his shoulder, even the old goats who avoided him, who had pointedly refused to shake his hand, they were there.
You hang in there, Reverend.

He heard about how Leroy Hargett got shot by his little brother by accident when he was sixteen.