We Were Brothers (9 page)

But then that, too, changed.

In 1961, Daddy was hired to be the manager of the Chattanooga Golf and Country Club and one of his perquisites was a handsome two-bedroom apartment on the second floor. A large picture window in the living room overlooked the Tennessee River and Missionary Ridge beyond. But it meant that, once again, Tommy and I would share a bedroom.

I was in my final year at the University of Chattanooga and was working as assistant minister at Newnan Springs Methodist Church in north Georgia. I was recently engaged to Kay, who had moved to Chattanooga from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, two or three years earlier.

It was a Sunday afternoon and Tommy had been to his weekend drill with his unit of the Army National Guard. I had done my morning duties at Newnan Springs and was killing some time before going back for my Methodist Youth Fellowship meeting and the evening services.

I was lying on my bed reading a
Mad
comic book. He came in and was in a foul mood. He had been up since before dawn. He was tired and wanted to rest, so he slapped the comic book out of my hands and stood over me.

“Get the hell out of here, I want to take a nap, asshole. Go somewhere else to read your goddamned comic book.” What I really wanted to tell him was,
Shove it up your ass, I’m not going anywhere.
But being a newly minted preacher boy, I had cleaned up my penchant for profanity and said,

“No.”

By this time Tommy was reluctant to hit me, knowing that I was no longer going to take his abuse without some sort of physical reaction in like kind. I don’t think that he entirely trusted my new “turn the other cheek” philosophy, so he started bad-mouthing Kay.

And I was getting
really
irritated. He was in a rant, and then he said,

“You know, you used to be a pretty good kid until you took up with that Yankee bitch, Kay.”

By this time I was sitting on the side of my bed. He was standing, looking down at me. His fists were balled up. The name “Kay” had scarcely passed his lips when I brought my fist to meet his mouth and nose. I hit him so hard he flew backward across his bed, bounced against the wall beyond that, and crumpled to the floor. By this time Mother came in and pleaded with us not to fight. She didn’t want any club members to hear, afraid that it might impact Daddy’s new position. I went to the back porch to finish my reading. Tommy got his way, but not without payment.

That was the first and only time that I ever hit Tommy before he hit me, the first time I ever penetrated what Andre Dubus III refers to as breaking “through that invisible membrane around another’s face.” And it proved that Mother was right all along: I stood up to him, I coldcocked him, and that put an end to physical altercations between us for the rest of our lives. I wonder what our relationship might have been if I had coldcocked him at an early age, if I had cracked a bunch of eggs on his head, if I had had the courage to just let go and swing at his face. Bust his lip or his nose and let him taste the salty iron of
his
blood.

Looking back through the long lens of time, I can’t imagine that the issues that fueled our skirmishes were very different from those of a lot of siblings. Perhaps most, even. I remember my two oldest daughters fighting a lot in their teen years, but their bones of contention usually begot nothing more serious than a few weeks—or months—of their not speaking to each other. I remember thinking how silly it was for them to fall out over unimportant things. The long lens of time becomes blurred when I look back hoping to fathom why what seems to have been ordinary postadolescent discord between Tommy and me prompted such violent and physical conflicts that were so completely out of proportion with the cause of them.

DESPITE THE DIFFICULT TIMES,
Tommy and I had moments that bordered on the fraternal. I went hunting with him. And fishing, although if it were possible to decline an invitation to go fishing, I declined. I hated fishing. Bored me to death. I much preferred staying home to draw or to build a model. I hated fishing so much I’d go to church to avoid it.

But when we were very young Velma liked to take us carp fishing down on Chickamauga Creek. The creek was only a couple of miles from our house, and sometimes we’d walk, carrying our poles, bait, and lunch. We often stopped and picked blackberries along the side of the road. More often than not, we drove to our fishing hole in her black Model A roadster. Tommy and I shared the rumble seat, a treat we never tired of. Nor did we ever tire of the “ahooga” sound of the horn.

Our hole was in the shade of a rusting old Pratt truss bridge. The bank was packed red dirt and was downright slick in some places. The bank on the other side was overgrown with wild hydrangea, swamp milkweed, and elderberry. The whole of the creek, which was always a café au lait color, was vaulted by an understory of tall river birch, sycamores, elms, and willow trees. The tiny waves made quiet, gentle sounds as they slapped rhythmically against the bank. Iridescent snake doctors darted and hovered above the water and then darted off again, often paired and flying as one. We did not swim in that water, ever, because it was a well-known fact (or myth) that Chickamauga Creek was home to resident cottonmouths. Southeast Tennessee is not the normal range of the western cottonmouth, but people often talked of seeing them, and it’s not a big stretch to imagine a few fugitives making their way up from north Georgia. Of all the times we fished that shady hole, we saw only one, we thought, and that was from the safety of the bridge.

The fishing poles we used were right out of
Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn
. Old cane poles. No reels or anything, just a line with a hook and sinker tied to the end. If we were feeling lazy, we put a red-and-white bob on our lines, stuck the poles in the ground or wedged them between rocks, and lay back and dozed in the cool mottled shade. When Velma packed our lunch she packed a whole loaf of fresh sandwich bread. After eating sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly usually, she rolled up the leftover bread into tight, dense dough balls for bait. Carp adore them, and we caught a few every time, but we threw them all back. I asked Velma one day why we ate catfish but not carp, and she said,

“Honey, only niggers eat carp.”

However, I did find that running trot lines and juglines with Daddy was fun. We were not just sitting doing nothing but drowning worms. We were doing something most of the time—pulling up the lines, harvesting fish, and baiting large hooks with big chunks of raw beef. And we almost always caught a few catfish, and I got to clean them when we got home. This was one job that Tommy refused to do. Catfish don’t have scales like crappies or bass. They have skin very much like a shark’s skin and the skin has to come off before they are cooked. It was my job to clean and skin them. For a boy intensely interested in biology this was not a terrible chore. I cut the belly open and scooped out the entrails with my hands and slopped them into a bucket that then went to Grace’s cat and chickens. I put the fish on a wooden plank and drove a nail through its head and into the plank to secure it. I made a V-cut with my knife right behind the skull and then scraped up a bit of the hide and pulled the skin off with pliers. It doesn’t come off easily. That’s why you nail the head to a plank. Tommy couldn’t stand being in the basement with me when I cleaned catfish. Made him sick. May have been a reason why he wouldn’t eat anything that had fins, either.

ONE SATURDAY MORNING
not long after Tommy got his driver’s license he asked me to go crow hunting with him. We drove out north on Tunnel Boulevard and turned off onto a dirt road that led up to the foot of a low ridge that overlooked Chickamauga Creek in places.

Crows are notoriously difficult birds to shoot, and even more so if you don’t know what you’re doing, and we did not know what we were doing. Tommy had a shotgun, Daddy’s 12-gauge Remington 870, and I had a Remington, too, but mine was a much smaller .410/.22 over and under: a double-barrel gun that has a .410 shotgun barrel on bottom and a .22 rifle barrel on top. There’s a little barrel selector button on the right side of the gun. If the selector is in the up position the hammer fires the “over” barrel, the .22. If it’s in the down position the hammer fires the “under” barrel, the .410 shotgun barrel.

It was early fall and the leaves on trees were just beginning to turn color and the sunlight was dappled on tree trunks and forest floor. We took a path that stayed mostly on the crest of the ridge, Tommy’s gun at the ready, mine on my shoulder. We walked for a good while and heard a lot of cawing, but we didn’t see any birds. A few minutes later, still walking the path, we spotted one. It was perched on a tree branch close to the trunk. Tommy shouldered his 12-gauge. Just as he squeezed the trigger the crow stepped behind the tree trunk. Didn’t fly away, just ducked behind the trunk. The pattern of the gun’s shot tore away a good part of the tree where the crow had been. My ears were ringing and the air was thick with the smell of cordite. Then that damned crow stepped out in the open on another branch, turned away from us, twitched its tail like he wanted us to kiss it, bobbed, and flew away.

The morning grew long and then it was time for us to get back home. We heard lots of crows, saw lots on the wing, but saw only that one bird in the tree. I had not fired a shot the whole morning, so when a blue jay landed on a limb above me I shouldered my little Remington and squeezed off a shot. I thought the barrel selector was in the up position, but it was not. To my surprise the shotgun barrel fired and once again the air smelled of cordite, my ears were ringing, and the air around us was a blizzard of blue and white feathers.

That was our one kill for the day. We were laughing about it when we got back to the car and headed home. We never again killed anything when we hunted together.

Crows in a field, December 31, 1958

A FEW YEARS
LATER
we went crow hunting again. Tommy was twenty-one, I was eighteen. I was home for the Christmas break from Auburn, where I had begun college in September. It was New Year’s Eve and I was going to a big party up on Lookout Mountain that night with some old Baylor buddies. It was midafternoon and Tommy and I were bored watching a football game that wasn’t very interesting. The sun and blue sky outside were a lot more inviting than a boring football game on a black-and-white television set, so we decided to go shoot crows.

I was the odd one in the family in that I was never much interested in guns any more than I was fishing gear. But guns were a significant part of my Baylor education, and at home they were plentiful and hard to ignore. Daddy and Tommy had a collection that ranged from a bolt-action 30-06 to the German 9mm Mauser rifle that Daddy’s brother gave him. We had handguns, too, a German P38 Luger and a .38 Colt snub-nosed revolver that was kept loaded in a holster on a belt that hung from the bedpost on Daddy’s side of the bed. At Baylor I became intimately familiar with the anatomy of my M1 Garand and as a senior was checked out with it on a Chattahooche, Georgia, firing range. I did moderately well but was a far cry from being a sharpshooter. The only guns that ever belonged to me personally were my Daisy BB gun, my Red Ryder air gun that I had as a little boy, and a .22 revolver that I bought before leaving Tennessee in 1967, took to New England with me, and eventually gave away.

Tommy chose Daddy’s pump-action 20-gauge shotgun, and I packed the same little Remington .410/.22 over and under that I always took. It was an unusually warm day for that time of the year, so I slipped on a thin jacket over the white T-shirt I’d been sitting around in. We packed the guns into the trunk of Tommy’s MG convertible and headed out toward the airport with the top down.

When we got out near what is now the Vulcan Materials stone quarry, we parked the car, put the top up, and took out our guns and a box of shells.

We had learned a bit more about crow hunting since our hunt a few years earlier, so we waded out into a field of high grass where, near the middle, there was an uprooted tree. We decided to use the tangled old tree as a makeshift blind, so we crawled in among its twisted and broken limbs and settled down. Once we were situated and still, Tommy began blowing on the wooden crow call Daddy had given him for Christmas. I was standing behind him, holding my gun in my left hand. My right hand was in the pocket of my jacket. For no particular reason I shifted my weight from my right foot to my left and put the gun in my right hand. At that precise moment I felt a snag at my jacket. A fraction of a second later I heard the report of a rifle.

Up near the edge of the field near where we left the car, there was a person with a .22 rifle. When he heard Tommy’s crow calling he squeezed off a shot in the direction of the cawing, hoping, I suppose, to scare up whatever crow or crows that might be hanging out in that derelict tree.

That random bullet went between my right arm and my rib cage and ripped through the pocket of my jacket where my hand had just been.

We scrambled out of that dead hackberry tree as fast as we could and chased down the guy who had fired the shot. He was a kid about our age and I was afraid for him. Tommy rarely got into fights with anybody but me, but this afternoon I thought my big brother might hurt this boy. I was thinking about hurting him myself. In fact, I wanted to stomp the living shit out of him right there and then.

“What the hell were you thinking, asshole?” I said.

But the poor guy was so scared and upset when he found out what had happened he started shaking. So we tried to comfort him.

“No harm done, buddy,” Tommy said. “Close call, that’s all.”

We asked his name. He said, “Turner.”

I don’t remember his first name but it turned out that he was the son of our fourth-grade teacher. She was a wonderful person, my absolute favorite of all six of my Sunnyside teachers. Tommy’s, too.

When I got home I took off my jacket and was about to clean my gun even though it had not been fired, when Tommy said,

“What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“Those holes in your T-shirt,” he said.

“What holes?”

I looked down and saw two small holes about an inch apart. Turner’s bullet not only went through my jacket’s pocket, it went through my T-shirt as well—but it did not touch my skin.

So many things about that day were serendipitous, and they called for introspection. I did not go to the party that night. I stayed close to home.

So did Tommy.