We Were Brothers: A Memoir by Barry Moser · Audiobook preview

Recorded Books and One Click Digital present We Were Brothers by Barry Moser. Narrated by the author. Prologue. I have a family photograph that was taken on a Christmas Eve sometime in the early 1960s. We are in my aunt's living room. Two generations pose in front of a fireplace that, as far as I know, never entertained an actual fire. Above the garlanded mantle hangs a portrait of my aunt's late husband that I painted when I was in high school. The people in the picture are my mother's people. Her husband, sisters, and brother are there, as well as my brother and me. Most of us live cheek to jowl on a short stretch of a Chattanooga country road. All the people in the picture are dead now. Mother, daddy, aunts, uncles, cousins, and my brother Tommy. I am the only one still alive. Since my brother died, I have reflected on our relationship, mostly in the context of that country road and those people in the picture, Haggard's, Holmes's, Cox's, Moore's, Moser's, and I have reflected on the culture that shaped them and shaped my brother into me. Without opportunity to be otherwise, Tommy and I were racists, born into the Byzantine machinations of the Jim Crow South. Tommy in 1937, I in 1940. As we grew up, Tommy and I went our separate ways. He stayed in the South. I moved to New England, and for nearly 40 years the distance between us widened, and at one point it seemed that the Gulf had become so vast it would never be bridged, and we would be forever strangers. We both hardened, but I hardened more than he. Though when I read novels and stories or see films in which brothers are close and go places together and have adventures, I often weep. I weep even when they fight, as they do in Jim Harrison's splendid novella, Legends of the Fall, because in the end blood and love went out over the divisiveness that once separated the brothers, or the contentious yet deeply affectionate relationship between Norman McLean and his estranged brother Paul in A Rubber Runs Through It, or between Alvin and Lyle Straight in The Straight Story. The childhood miseries of Frank and Malachy McCourt and Angela's ashes move me profoundly because they were shared miseries between the brothers. In Abraham Verghese's Transcendent Cutting for Stone, Shiva Stone, a surgeon, says that life is in the end about fixing holes. Though Shiva speaks about surgical holes, his twin brother Marion Stone, who is also a surgeon, takes it as a metaphor for another kind of hole, and that is the hole that divides a family. What he owes his brother most is to tell the story. Only the telling can heal the rift that separates my brother and me, he says. Yes, I have infinite faith in the craft of surgery, but no surgeon can heal the kind of wound that divides two brothers. Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed. Our father, Arthur Boyd Moser, had no siblings. However, our daddy, our stepfather, Cheshire Holmes, had four brothers, all younger than he, and all of whom lived in Chattanooga or within easy driving distance. The few times we saw his brothers were at breakfast on Christmas Day at their mother's place on the western slope of Missionary Ridge. That was our only connection. None of his brothers ever set foot in our house on Chaliford Road. Daddy told me once that he had raised his four brothers, his daughter and my brother and me, and that may very well be the case. Certainly the last part of it is. But the thing is, daddy didn't much talk about his brothers. All he told stories about his brother David, who had a goat cart as a boy, and about his brother Martin, who was an extra in a war movie that starred Victor Mature. But that's about all. He didn't fish or hunt with his brothers, nor did he socialize with them. As a family, we visited his youngest brother Gene at his home when he was recuperating from a motorcycle accident in which he lost one of his legs. We visited his brother Dan and his wife Beverly at his mother's house after Beverly had given birth to a new baby. And I have a vague memory of visiting with his brother David after he returned from the European theater in World War II. He gave daddy a 9mm Mauser rifle that he brought home as a war trophy. My brother and I were never privy to any personal interactions between the Holmes brothers other than those on Christmas mornings when they bantered about themselves while they posed for photographs with their aging mother. All of them smiling broadly, presenting the face of a congenial family. And maybe they were, who knows. But there were never any displays of affection. There was no playful roughhousing of the sort that would make affection seem to be part of the fabric of their relationship. On the other hand, my brother and I were not privy to any discord if there was any among the Holmes brothers. To us, they were a world apart. Five entities who went about their individual lives unconnected to and seemingly unconcerned with each other. It was like that with my uncle Bob, too. He had two brothers, but he spent his weekends fishing with daddy rather than hanging out with his kin. Like daddy, he saw them on special occasions, their mother's and father's birthdays, Christmas, New Year's Day. I know more about my grandfather, Albert Moser, and his relationship with his two brothers, Will and George, than I do of any of the other brotherhoods in my family. From a 1932 letter George Moser wrote to his nephew, my father, I know that those brothers fought, that they went to hog auctions together, that they loved dogs, that they harbored deep resentments about the outcome of the Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction. And I know that George greatly admired his older brother, Albert. But the only brotherhood I have any first-hand knowledge of is my own. And for the most part, it was heavy-laden and naughty. Like all siblings, we vied for the attention of our elders. We both wanted to be the favorite son. We both wanted to have the most friends and to be one specific friend's best friend. When I see the genuine and gentle interactions between my four nephews, I respond with gladness and tears. I envy them that, prodigiously. Though our personalities were like oil and water, I loved my brother and he loved me. It just took too long for us to understand it, to admit it, and to try to do something about it. The blame for our conflicts does not lie at my brother's feet alone, because I certainly contributed to the strife that so nettled our relationship. But I am the teller of this story, or at least I am the teller of this version of this story, and I can only see it through my eyes. I can recall it only through my memories, and thus I have the advantage. In the end, I rue the fact that during our lifetimes, my brother, Thomas Lafayette Moser, and I rarely experienced deeply affectionate moments like those real and fictive that I have observed and read about. Only near the end of his life, and after forty years of living a thousand miles apart, both geographically and emotionally, a distance that was punctuated by rare visits and infrequent phone calls, did the rancor genuinely abate. We were both in our sixties. What follows is the story of that brotherhood, but to tell you the story of that brotherhood, I have to tell as well as my abilities will allow the story of our family and of the neighborhood we lived in. Part One Shaliford The thing is, all memory is fiction. You have to remember that. Of course, there are things that actually certifiably happened, things where you can pinpoint the day, the hour, and the minute. When you think about it, though, those things mostly seem to happen to other people. Robert Gulrick Heading out to Wonderful Shaliford Road Shaliford Road originates at the western foot of Missionary Ridge, the scene of a fierce and bloody battle in the Civil War, part of the greater Battle of Chattanooga. The road ascends steeply, northward up the side where it crowns the brow of the ridge, and then gently descends the eastern slope until it levels out and meanders out into the country. My brother, Tommy, and I grew up in a small five-room house on Shaliford Road just after it levels out at the eastern foot of the ridge, number 509. It was a white bungalow, the most popular style for houses built in America between 1930 and 1940. It had a low-pitched gable roof and an unenclosed porch, supported on the corners by square, tapered columns that sat on masonry pedestals. This style of architecture originated in Southern California and gained popularity nationally because the houses were so practical and easy to build. Bungalows became so popular that a customer could mail-order one and have it shipped and assembled on site. It was said that a bungalow could be built by anyone who could swing a hammer. Arthur Boyd Moser, our father, bought the house from my mother, as best I can figure, from a family named Childers sometime around 1930. If that is so, it may have been a wedding present for Mother since she and Arthur Boyd married on November 11, 1930. It was right next door to the house belonging to Mother's brother, Floyd Haggard, and his wife, Grace. Mother's sister, Velma, and her husband, Bob, lived next door to Floyd and Grace, one house farther up the street toward the ridge. All our houses faced onto Shaliford Road, and from all our front porches we saw the same landscape on the other side of the street, a steep clay bank the color of turmeric, the result of the road being cut out of the hillside, the hill from which the road was cut, which was covered with dun colored grass, and two houses at the top of the hill. The last time I drove by in 2009, it was all overgrown. There is no longer any evidence of the turmeric-colored bank, the grassy field, or either of the two houses that stood on the high ground. My father made a lot of money. I have an incongruous photograph of him wearing a shirt and bow tie with standard oil embroidered above the breast pocket. He had a changemaker hanging from his belt. But a man doesn't make the kind of money Arthur Boyd made, nor live as well as he did by pumping gas. No, he made his money illegally. He shot craps in basements in Chattanooga, a rough and tumbled town in those days. Even when I was a boy, the city had one of the highest crime rates in the nation, a manifestation, I was told, of making illegal corn whiskey. Ironically, it also boasted one of the highest per capita ratios of churches. He drove around town in a big black Buick convertible. Mother said that it was the only car in Chattanooga with a radio in it. I don't know whether that was true or not. When he had a particularly good night at the local tables, he'd come home and wake up mother and off they'd go to Chicago to shoot craps and speakeasies in the windy city. Mother told stories about the mobsters she ran into and the machine guns she saw up in the balconies of the Arthur Boyd was a large man. He stood well over six feet tall and weighed about 300 pounds. Mother didn't even come up to his shoulder. There were no clothes in an ordinary haberdashery to fit him, so he had them made by a black tailor named Napoleon Knapp Turner. From the photographs I have of my father, he mostly favored light-colored suits and matching ties, fedoras, and shoes. Arthur Boyd, most everybody called him by both his given names, was an easygoing man who rarely lost his temper, though when he did, mother told me, he threw skillets and broke furniture, but he never hit her. I was told that I took after him in looks and personality. I wouldn't know since I never knew him, but I am an easygoing man who happens to have a god-awful temper. Like Arthur Boyd's, it rarely goes off, but when it does, I tend to break things too. Tommy, on the other hand, took after the Haggard side of the family, resembling our irascible Uncle Floyd Haggard more than he did Arthur Boyd. Floyd was a tall man, handsome, who favored dark suits. He had a beautiful smile when he smiled, but his temper was quick and often violent. He nearly killed a friend of his once for throwing a peach. Hey, Floyd, catch! Floyd turned and caught it, not knowing what it was. He had such a loathing of the texture of an unwashed peach that he recoiled even at the thought of touching one. He nearly beat his friend to death because the man knew about this aversion and hoodwinked him into catching it anyway. Arthur Boyd's gambling days ended when he was thirty years old. He developed brain cancer and died on August 1, 1941. He had been hospitalized in Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta for several months, during which time he lost most of his cognitive functions to the tumors that were swelling inside his head. He could count only to ten, and when he got to ten, he went back to one again, and again, and again. Despite everything, he always recognized Mother's footsteps when she came walking down the hall toward his room. His face lit up, and he smiled, Mother told. I was ten months old when Arthur Boyd died. Tommy was just about to turn three. Years later, Tommy told me that he had a few memories of the man in his car, but they were very hazy. When Arthur Boyd died, Mother's luxurious life came to an abrupt end. Just as the cancers had ravaged his brain, they also ravaged his accumulated wealth. In the early days of her youthful widowhood, all Mother had were the gifts he had given her. The bungalow, an engagement ring that was a full carat diamond in a platinum setting, a few furs, a car, two baby boys, and his social security. It was a long way down for her. Before she and Arthur Boyd moved into their pretty little house, they lived in a comfortable apartment downtown where Mother had a black maid who reported to work in a gray and white uniform and answered to Mother's silver bell. I never heard that woman's name, or if I did, I don't remember it. Even though the bungalow was paid for, there was hardly any money for upkeep and maintenance, so the property declined. Rats moved into the basement, and since there was no money for exterminators or pest control, they thrived. Not even a dozen of the large victor rat traps were up to the killing job. When Tommy was older, he did all he could to keep the house painted, the hedges trimmed, and the lawn manicured. But the lack of money inevitably showed, so while we were growing up, it became an ordinary little house, and Mother became familiar with a Had it not been for Mother's childhood friend Vernita, I'm not sure she could have coped. Vernita. Vernita was a black woman. Mother called her a nigris accent on the first syllable, which rhymes with fig, when she had to call her by something other than her name. She lived in the large green and white farmhouse at the top of the hill across the street from us. It was very rare for black and white families in the South at that time to live that close together. Rarer still when the black folks' houses were on the higher ground. Be that as it may, there was always a pleasant harmony between our families, because, as my mother often said, we all knew our places, both black and white. Knew and respected them. Vernita helped take care of Tommy and me after Arthur Boyd died, but not in any formal capacity as a nanny or a maid. She did make her living as a domestic, but she took care of us boys because she loved Mother and was Mother's closest friend. Tommy and I both adored Vernita. She and Mother grew up together in the 1910s and 1920s, a scant 50 years after Appomattox. These were the days of forced segregation when black and white children could not learn together, worship together, or eat or drink together in any public place, but they could run barefoot together in the summertime and play and laugh and become lifelong friends as these two little girls did. One of the places they played together was in the family grocery store. Will Haggard, Mother's father, owned and ran the store until he died in 1931. Her sister Velma took over and was running the store when Tommy and I were little boys. It had a wide front porch and double screen doors with metal push plates declaring that colonial bread is good bread. All that remains of that store today is a slab of concrete at the corner of Chaliford Road and Rockway Drive. The porch was where men gathered to sit on benches and drink Cokes and swap stories. It was dark inside the store, especially when you came in from bright sunlight. Up front near the screen doors was a candy case that had a lot of nose prints on the glass that Tommy and I left. Behind the candy case were two wooden counters, an ornate brass cash register set atop one, a small roll of brown wrapping paper on the other. The interior walls were shelved from the uneven wooden floor to the stamped metal ceiling. They were full of provisions that needed no refrigeration. Crispy saltine crackers, ovaltine, jams and preserves, cans of coffee, fruits and vegetables, pet milk, patent medicines, and cartons of cigarettes. Green pendant lamps hung from the ceiling in two evenly spaced rows. There were small windows up near the ceiling that let in a little light that was often hazy from Velma's cigarettes. Farther toward the back of the store was a refrigerated case where fresh cuts of meat, weenies, cheese and eggs were kept. Sticky yellow fly paper hung here and there, each one black dotted with its emerald-eyed victims. Behind the meat case was a walk-in cooler. Sides of beef and pork hung inside as well as a few bins for produce that needed or benefited from refrigeration, watermelons in particular. Next to the cooler was a storage room. It had a single double-hung window that looked west across a hayfield toward Missionary Ridge. A light bulb hung from the ceiling by an electrical wire that was tied off in a bowline knot and looked for all the world like a hangman's noose. You turned the light on by pulling a cord that had a bus token tied to the end of it. This was where Wilhagard kept his bulk stores, cracker barrels, flour barrels, salt. One day in 1918 or 1919, my mother, who was always called Billy, and little Vernita were playing together at the store as they often did. Mother's older sisters, Velma and Annie Lee, came slapping in through those two big screen doors and announced that they were going downtown to see a moving picture show. They wanted to know if little Billy We hope you enjoyed this preview. To continue listening to this audiobook on Google Playbooks, use the link in the video description.