We Were Brothers
Authors: Barry Moser
Barry Moser
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
2015
Barry and Tommy Moser, c. 1943
CONTENTS
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 mantel 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 lived 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—Haggards, Holmeses, Coxes, Moores, Mosers. And I have reflected on the culture that shaped them and shaped my brother and 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 forty 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 win out over the divisiveness that once separated the brothers. Or the contentious, yet deeply affectionate relationship between Norman Maclean and his estranged brother, Paul, in
A River Runs Through It
, or between Alvin and Lyle Straight in the
The Straight Story
. The childhood miseries of Frank and Malachy McCourt in
Angela’s Ashes
moved 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), Chesher 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 Shallowford 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. Oh, 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 on those Christmas mornings when they bantered among 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 firsthand knowledge of is my own, and, for the most part, it was heavy ladened and knotty. 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 or 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. Prodigously.
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
SHAL
L
OWFORD
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
m
inute. When you think about it, though, those things mostly seem to happen to other people.
ROBERT GOOLRICK
Heading Out to Wonderful
SHALLOWFORD 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 Shallowford 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 for 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 Shallowford 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 tumeric, the result of the road being cut out of a 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 tumeric-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 has a change maker 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 tumble 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 in 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 Chicago gambling joints.
Arthur Boyd was a large man. He stood well over six feet tall and weighed about three hundred 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 “Nap” 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 him a peach.
“Hey, Floyd, catch!”
Floyd turned and caught it, not knowing what it was.
Wilhelmina and Arthur Moser, c. 1935
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 us.
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 and 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 rattraps 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 mortgage—eventually two of them. Had it not been for Mother’s childhood friend Verneta, I am not sure she could have coped.