The Sky Club

Terry Roberts

Description

1. Southern Fiction: Terry Roberts is at his best with Southern Fiction, as evidenced in his debut novel, A Short Time to Stay Here, which won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. His novels have received endorsements from critically-acclaimed authors including Lee Smith, Elizabeth Spencer, Robert Morgan, Silas House, and others. His 2021 release, My Mistress’ Eyes are Raven Black, was a SIBA Read This Next pick of the summer.
2. Award-Winning Author: Roberts’ second novel, That Bright Land, won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South, and received a starred review from PW. 
3. Strong, Complicated Protagonist: The Sky Club is a vivid portrayal of the evolution of a strong and resourceful woman. 
4. Gripping Historical Setting: Set in the 1930s, readers will be enthralled by this Jazz Age tale as the Great Depression forces Jo Salter into the glamorous, dangerous world of bootlegging and jazz.

Sujets

• Historical
• Carolina del Norte
• Great Depression
• Jazz Age
• Asheville, North Carolina
• North Carolina
• Asheville
• Fiction
• Caroline du Nord

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 19 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781684428540
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Praise for THE SKY CLUB
“ The Sky Club portrays diverse, unexpected facets of the Appalachian region in the years of the Great Depression. It is a novel of climbing, social, financial, emotional, romantic, to a mountaintop, to The Sky Club, to risk and wealth, to danger, and, ultimately, to enduring love.”
—Robert Morgan, Author of Gap Creek and Chasing the North Star
“Ever since Terry Roberts took up writing about his ancestors in Western North Carolina, he has produced a remarkably varied and valuable shelf of novels.… but The Sky Club is the best one yet! Wildly original, this is a truly Appalachian novel all about money, sex, drinking, and the Great Depression.… along with the more familiar themes of place and family. I especially admire the apparent ease with which Roberts has created the tough, true, funny and unforgettable Jo Salter, an independent pistol of a woman who tells this lively tale set in a speakeasy on top of a mountain.”
—Lee Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Girls
“ The Sky Club is a wagonload of perilous fun. Terry Roberts has engaged, with customary vigor, many of his favorite themes: local Appalachian history, mountain cultures rural and urban, personal and communal courage, individuality. The resulting story is sprightly and steady in the manner of its heroine, the gifted Jo Salter. Every page here shines with truthful surprise. Bravo! ”
—Fred Chappell, Author of I Am One of You Forever
“Roberts has captured a moment in Asheville’s history that to this day affects our way of life. It is a well-told tale, reminiscent of John Ehle’s great novel, Last One Home . I think Ehle would have been proud of The Sky Club .”
—Wayne Caldwell, Author of Cataloochee
ALSO BY TERRY ROBERTS
My Mistress’ Eyes Are Raven Black
The Holy Ghost Speakeasy and Revival
That Bright Land
A Short Time to Stay Here

KEYLIGHT BOOKS
AN IMPRINT OF TURNER PUBLISHING COMPANY
Nashville, Tennessee
www .turnerpublishing .com
The Sky Club
Copyright © 2022 Terry Roberts. All rights reserved.
This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design by Emily Mahon
Cover photo by Jesse L. Roberts
Text design by William Ruoto
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Roberts, Terry, 1956- author.
Title: The sky bar / a novel by Terry Roberts.
Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Turner Publishing Company, [2022] | Identifiers: LCCN 2021042067 (print) | LCCN 2021042068 (ebook) | ISBN 9781684428526 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684428533 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781684428540 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3618.O3164 S57 2022 (print) | LCC PS3618.O3164 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20211018
LC record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2021042067
LC ebook record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2021042068
Printed in the United States of America
In Memory of …
Belva Anderson Roberts (1888–1974)
Grandma Roberts
who bade me tell the stories.
“Money often costs too much.”
—EMERSON
PART ONE SPRING 1929
1
Y OU COULD SAY THAT MY life began with my mother’s death.
For up until that time, I was slated to become one kind of woman, and after that, everything changed. Everything changed and I became another.
She passed in the first few days of February 1929, which was harsh and cold in the Big Pine Valley. Not an especially bitter winter as mountain winters go, but even so, it was long and dark, as mean a season as you can imagine. The rhododendron leaves curled tight for days and lambs born overnight froze to death in the pasture grass before dawn.
My mother’s name was Mary Freeman Salter. She was fifty-eight when she died of measles. Of all the things in this solid world to die of … measles. The doctor, when we were finally able to get him up the icy dirt roads to home, said the measles caused her brain to swell and led into pneumonia. In the end, she couldn’t breathe, the doctor said, and so she suffocated.
But you should know this, here at the beginning. None of those things killed my mother. Exhaustion is what killed her. Fifty-eight years of farm work—from before first light to after dark. Oh, my father worked, make no mistake, but she was up an hour before him to stoke the cookstove and boil the coffee; and she was darning and knitting for an hour after he was snoring by the fireplace. Fifty-eight years of that plus seven children born at home—my brothers and me.
In the last few days of January, when her head had begun to hurt her terribly but she still had breath, she called me in from the kitchen to sit with her. It was a bleak afternoon, and the whole house stank of wood smoke and grease from having been shut up since Thanksgiving. We were the only ones there as Papa had the boys in the woods felling trees to cut into railroad ties.
She stroked my hand and told me two large things. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” was the first. “Don’t you ever feel sorry for me. I chose this life, and I loved this place. Loved your father often as not. Bottom line, I chose this right here, and I was up to the task, both the daytime of it and the night.”
She paused and coughed. Not an outright coughing fit. That came later. But a hoarse rattle in her lungs that she couldn’t clear. “I chose it and it’s my life … But it is not your life.” This was the second thing.
“What do you mean?” I asked. She startled me, and I asked it loud enough to be heard in the yard.
“I mean when this is finished,” she murmured. “When I’m dead and buried … you get the hell out of here. Make a life for …” Her voice was shriveling up, and I leaned over her, for at that point she was no longer contagious. My chest against her chest, my ear close by her lips to hear the rest. “Make a life somewhere else … a life that I can’t even imagine.”
She made me promise her. Which I was glad to do. For it was a relief to be shut of my father and the two brothers still at home. All of whom I loved, of course, but all those men require a lot. Plus there’s this: when my mother died at fifty-eight, she looked seventy at least. Her dear old face was wrinkled like a dried apple and her hair a dirty white.
We buried her in her best dress at Crooked Ridge Cemetery with fresh snow falling around us. My father did not cry or weep but neither did he speak. Stood trembling with his jaw clenched shut like a sprung trap.
The preacher talked about how we’d better get right with Jesus if we ever expected to see her in heaven. And how she’d climb up out of that grave on some last day, along with the rest of the saints. Something else about a trumpet blast. But for once, he didn’t talk overlong because it was so damn cold. The boys—my brothers—had dug the grave out of frozen, rocky soil with pick and shovel, and when the preacher said amen, they filled it in again. They—all six of them—too sad and cold to even cuss the ground.
And so, at the ripe age of twenty-six, an old maid by country count, I came to live in the big, bold town of Asheville, North Carolina. Came to live by mutual agreement in Uncle Frank and Aunt Brenda Morgan’s house on Charlotte Street. Twenty-six years old, I was to look for a job and pay a percentage for room and board. I was old but not a maid. I’d taken care of that little piece of business when I was fifteen.
2
Y OU’VE GOT A BOY’S BODY.”
“Well, the … with you …”
“Don’t take it wrong. I have a body like a cow. Bo-vine. I could smoke two packs a day and starve myself silly and I still wouldn’t be as skinny as you.”
My cousin, Sissy Morgan, was watching me unpack the trunk that contained just about all my worldly possessions, a half-dozen books and a few things to hang in the closet.
I gave her the same critical once-over she was obviously giving me. “I’ve had to do with a lot of cows in my time and I don’t think …”
“Humpf.” That was the sound she made. “Easy for you to say. You didn’t get stuck with these mammaries like I did.” She was sitting on what was to be my bed and leaned back against the headboard to heft her own breasts.
“Seen bigger,” I said. “Men seem to …”
“Not here,” she said. “Maybe up there in the holler where you come from. But it’s 1929 down here, and men expect you to look lithe and lissome.”
“What?”
“You know. Lean, muscular. Like you could dance all night with a cigarette in one hand and a gin in the other.”
“Preacher says you’ll go to hell tomorrow for dancing.”
“Well then, we’re going there,” she said. “You and me.”
I grinned at her. “Could be we will. But I have a feeling I’ve got a lot to learn first about … 1929.”
“A hell of a lot,” she agreed. “God, Josephine, are those really your clothes?”
I was half in the closet, slipping one of my three dresses onto a wire hanger. My best dress, really, at least what I’d worn to church on special Sundays up home. I had to bite my lip before I replied to Sissy, for I’d grown up around all those brothers, and I had a salty tongue. Didn’t want to make an enemy on the first day and the dress itself was almost ten years old, a velvet number that was worn paper thin in places.
When I did turn around, Sissy was going through the clothes left in the trunk, carefully laying one dress or skirt or blouse out on the bed after another. “I said, are these really your clothes?” she repeated herself.
“I heard you,” I said carefully. “Some of it’s mine. Mostly my mother’s.”
She looked up suddenly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …”
I shook my head at her, more roughly than I intended. For I could feel my face crumpling up, and tears. A real, honest-to-God, ugly crying fit.
And you need to understand. I don’t cry. Not since I was sixteen or seventeen