by Robert Inman
* * * * *
It began with Trout’s great-grandfather, Broadus Moseley. And it began with great promise in 1885 when Broadus moved with his wife and family from the North Carolina piedmont to what was then nothing but a quiet rural Georgia crossroads with a scattering of ramshackle houses. There had been some sort of unpleasantness in North Carolina, a family falling-out, the details of which remained murky. The family settled some money upon Broadus, but that was not its most important gift. Rather, it was an inbred business acumen and a knowledge of the burgeoning cotton mill industry.
There were three things to recommend the site he picked for his venture: it lay along the road from Augusta to Atlanta; the tracks of the Georgia Line were nearby; and the farm economy thereabouts was flat busted. It was exactly the combination Broadus was looking for: decent transportation, cheap land, hungry people. First he bought a great deal of land, far more than he needed for a mill. Then he built a railroad spur from the Georgia Line and erected a nondescript two-story brick building, powered it with coal-fired steam, and equipped it with looms, the latest European design. And the people came, ragged from the hardscrabble farms -- reluctant to give up their independence, but desperate to survive.
Broadus intended it to be more than a mill town. He used the mill as a magnet to draw commerce. And since he owned the land, he shaped the growing town as he wished -- parceling out tracts for business ventures and homes, laying out the streets to suit him. He named the town Moseley and the main street Broadus Street. (“Broad Street?” visitors would ask. “No, Broadus,” the natives would answer, enjoying the quirk.) When it had progressed to a village of several hundred souls, he saw to its incorporation. And as its patriarch and principal wage-payer, he saw to its politics. Broadus was a staunch Democrat who nevertheless admired certain Republican principles: chiefly, that men with sense enough to have money ought to call the shots.
By the time Moseley’s main thoroughfare had become U.S. Highway 278, paved all the way from Atlanta to Augusta, the town was a thriving commercial center with a variety of retail businesses, a bank, schools, a newspaper, and a water and sewer system. The agricultural economy thereabouts enjoyed something of a revival, and the town served as its hub and meeting place, its chief source of feed, seed, fertilizer and loans. And Moseley Cotton Mill was the economic anchor -- supplying steady employment and an economic base for the community. Broadus was careful not to repeat the mistake of so many in the southern textile business -- getting too big in boom times and then having to scramble to stay afloat in bad. He kept the business prudently in check and kept plenty of reserves in the bank. He boasted of never having laid off a worker for economic reasons. Moseley Mill employees would never make a great deal of money, but as long as they behaved themselves, they wouldn’t find themselves out on the street, either.
By the end of World War Two, about a thousand people lived in Moseley in a residential area that radiated north and south along the main thoroughfare.
At the Augusta end of town there was the mill building, and beyond it, a spiderweb of unpaved streets and small white frame houses -- owned, tended and ruled by Moseley Cotton Mill. Broadus kept the mill and mill village outside the city limits. It was his domain.
At the Atlanta end of town, separated from the mill end by the business district, was where the Moseleys and others of a certain stature lived. There were sidewalks here, canopied by oak trees that grew to great girth over the years. The houses were gracious if not particularly imposing, with wide bannistered porches and a good deal of ornamental ironwork. Broadus Moseley’s house was the only one with columns, but they were modest columns, one-story in height, supporting the porch that ran the length of the house and down both sides. Broadus believed in status but not ostentation.
As a buffer between the business district and his neighborhood, Broadus laid out and landscaped a small park -- an acre of St. Augustine grass and oak trees with a bandshell in the middle.
There might be two ends to Broadus Street, but both were simply part of U.S. 278. In its best days, the mill end and the money end of town shared a certain vibrancy -- the commonalty of diesel fumes and the steady rumble of traffic that eased into town, stopped fitfully at the one traffic light at the center of the business district, then ambled on. The Koffee Kup Kafe became a favorite lunch-time stopping place for Atlanta-to-Augusta travelers. Southern Living magazine lauded its sweet potato pie. And no right-thinking politician seeking statewide office would pass up the opportunity for a rally at the bandshell in Broadus Moseley Park. It was unstated, but understood, that only Democrats would get much of a welcome. A Republican seeking the governorship ventured by in the late sixties, but only five people and a stray dog came to hear him, and three of the people were out-of-towners who wandered over after lunch at the Koffee Kup.
That was Moseley, Georgia in its heyday. By the time Trout Moseley came to call it home, it had changed considerably. Now, most folks knew Moseley as a name on a big green sign on Interstate 20 that paralleled U.S. 278 a couple of miles from the center of town. Now, you could stand on the sidewalk in the middle of the business district at mid-afternoon and not see a car move for five minutes.
On one side of the street were City Hall and the next-door police station along with a few businesses that clung hopefully to life on the strength of local trade -- a small grocery, a women’s and men’s ready-to-wear, the post office, the bank, and a former dry cleaners now occupied by the County Welfare Department.
The other side of the street was less fortunate. It boasted of a hardware operated by Trout’s Uncle Cicero, who was also the police chief, and next door to Cicero, a struggling feed-and-seed. It sold more lawn and garden fertilizer and bug spray than farm supplies, most of the farmers in the county having given up on row crops and planted pine trees in the wake of the latest agri-business downturn. Next to the feed-and-seed was a large weed-grown vacant lot where a furniture and appliance store had burned to the ground not long after the Interstate opened. People had taken it as an omen. It gave the business district a gap-toothed appearance. Beyond the lot were the Koffee Kup Kafe and a row of vacant storefronts. One had been home to the newspaper until it had gone out of business shortly after the opening of the Interstate and the furniture store fire. As business dwindled, there were no longer enough advertisers to support the weekly, and not enough circulation to keep it afloat. People who lived beyond the city limits didn’t give a hoot about what happened in Moseley.
One thing that had not changed about Moseley was its reputation as a church town. There were six churches in Moseley proper, not counting the AME Zion for the black folks which was two miles outside the city limits toward Augusta.
In the general vicinity of the mill were a Church of God, a Free-Will Baptist and a Pentecostal Holiness. In his day, Broadus had referred to them as “sect” churches, full of shouting and carryings-on that kept his mill workers up all night during revival week. But he co-opted them all by subsidizing their physical facilities and their preachers’ salaries, in return for which the preachers espoused thrift, hard work, loyalty to the Moseleys, and a disdain for liquor and unions.
Adjacent the business district at the Augusta end of town was a sturdy brick Baptist with a stubby white steeple, and on a back street a block away, a modest Presbyterian.
But the other end of town was reserved for Broadus Moseley’s church. Moseley Memorial Methodist was directly across the street from Broadus’ home where he could keep an eye on it. Broadus built it as the mill and town grew and prospered. It was constructed of dark red brick with a cedar shake roof. It had twelve stained-glass windows -- four on each side and two each on the front and back -- each depicting one of the Twelve Disciples. The parsonage was next door to the church so that Broadus could keep an eye on it and its occupants, too.
In the town’s most prosperous days it was a thriving church with a reputation and influence among Georgia Methodists far beyond its size. Young preachers who were marked by th
e Bishop for great things often pulled a tour of duty in Moseley on their way up the ladder of the church hierarchy. Back in the fifties there had been some talk about expanding the sanctuary, tearing down the parsonage next door and extending a wing in that direction. But the Moseleys vetoed that. Broadus Moseley was long in the grave by then and his son Leland, Joe Pike’s father, was running Moseley Cotton Mill. Yes, Leland saw the need for more space. But it was the church Broadus Moseley had built, and his shadow still lay long across the community and the congregation. He had never taken kindly to folks questioning his judgment. And he would not now, Leland said, take kindly to folks meddling with his church and his stained-glass windows. So instead, they added an early-morning service which became quite popular and was at the time a novelty among Georgia Methodists. That lasted until the early seventies when I-20 took the starch out of the town. Not long thereafter, Moseley Memorial Methodist retreated to a single eleven o’clock service. It was all that was necessary.
* * * * *
Trout would learn all this over time. At the beginning there was only Aunt Alma, Joe Pike’s older sister. She was enough.
Alma took care of everything. She sent a Moseley Cotton Mill truck and two men to the Ohatchee parsonage on a Friday morning, a week after the Bishop had broken the news to the congregation about Joe Pike’s transfer. By noon they had loaded everything Joe Pike’s family owned. Imogene Belton had seen to the packing. There wasn’t a great deal -- hanging clothes on a bar the men had rigged across the back of the truck, a stack of boxes including several from Joe Pike’s study at the church, a few odds and ends like Trout’s bicycle and his mother’s sewing machine and his father’s old mahogany bookcase. The furniture and furnishings in the parsonage belonged to the congregation, right down to the pots and pans, mostly odds and ends donated over the years by its members as they updated their own homes.
The chairman of the Official Board of the Ohatchee Methodist Church came by at mid-morning and stayed while the men from Moseley Mill packed and loaded. He tried to appear helpful, but Trout knew he was there to make sure the Moseleys didn’t make off with anything they weren’t supposed to. Trout decided not to take offense. After all, it was an altogether strange business. An air of doom hung over the parsonage and everything in it.
The last thing was the statue. Trout wrapped it in an old blanket and put it in the front seat of the car. Then he went back to the house and made one last check before the chairman of the Official Board locked up.
“Trout, I’m sorry things turned out the way they did,” the chairman said, pocketing the key and offering Trout his hand. “But the Lord works in strange and mysterious ways, His wonders to behold.”
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Trout could still hear the echo of the motorcycle pulling away from Ohatchee Methodist on Easter Sunday morning. Now, that was a wonder to behold. But it wouldn’t do to say that to the chairman of the Official Board. So Trout said, “Yes sir.”
“Your daddy’s a fine man. He just needs a change of scene.”
“That’s what the Bishop said.”
“You take care of him now, you hear. And give him my best.”
“I’ll do that.”
Trout followed the truck from Ohatchee three hours north to Moseley, driving Joe Pike’s green Dodge. It was mid-afternoon when they arrived. The May sun was still strong above the oak trees along Moseley’s main street as Trout eased the car up to the curb between the church and the adjacent parsonage. He parked next to the Georgia State Historical Society marker dedicated to his great-grandfather: BROADUS MOSELEY. CIVIC VISIONARY AND TEXTILE PIONEER. 1861-1934.
There were several vehicles parked at the curb and in the parsonage driveway. A group of workmen clustered about an opening in the brickwork on one side of the house, peering into the dark underbelly. Another man was clipping the shrubbery in front. And two men were carrying a floral print sofa from a van with big letters on the side that read: BUCKLEY FURNITURE COMPANY, AUGUSTA, GA. Aunt Alma was standing on the porch directing traffic.
Alma was in her mid-fifties, tall and angular. She was rather attractive in a sharp-featured way, and Trout thought she probably had been something of a beauty as a girl. But now there was a sort of pinched severity about Alma. Her graying hair was close-cropped, almost boyish. She wore a plain gray dress with a lot of pleats at the waist, a little long at the hem, and glasses with plain gold rims. Trout thought she looked like someone who had stepped out of one of the old issues of Life Magazine that Joe Pike kept in his church study.
She met Trout halfway down the sidewalk and gave him in a hug. “Trout! Welcome home!” She smelled of flowers, something not quite perfume. Trout’s mother Irene had never worn scents, or any makeup for that matter, and it always surprised him a bit when a woman had the smell of flowers about her.
“Hello, Aunt Alma. You smell good.”
“Lilac water,” she said. She released him, held him at arm’s length, looked him up and down. “You look more like your grandfather Leland every day. He was a bit on the thin side, but he had nice blue eyes and a good chin. I think a good chin is important on a man. Your grandfather Leland looked like he knew what he was doing. And he could add columns of numbers in his head. You couldn’t fool Leland Moseley when it came to numbers.”
“I’m not much good at math,” Trout said.
Alma shook her head and looked at him down the length of her nose. “You’re not all Moseley. But I suppose you can’t help that, can you?”
Trout shrugged. “No ma’am. I guess not.”
“Well, come on in and let me show you what I’ve done.”
The two men carrying the floral print sofa were in the living room, still holding it. “Over there,” Alma ordered, and they set it against a side wall. Trout’s gaze swept the room and he felt his eyes go wide. Everything was brand spanking new, with the rich smell of lacquers and pristine fabrics -- sofa, two occasional chairs, love seat, coffee table (with copies of the Methodist Christian Advocate and Southern Living on top), fern stand (with artificial fern), knick-knack shelf (with knick-knacks, an assortment of porcelain stuff), brass fireplace set, persian rug.
“I simply cleaned it out,” Alma said with a sweep of her arm. “Took everything to the mill and stacked it outside the gate and told ’em to take what they wanted. It was all gone in thirty minutes, down to the waste baskets. Then I went to Augusta and went shopping.”
Trout looked at their image in the big mirror above the mantle and felt a little unclean, as if he had gone straight from mowing the grass to the Lord’s Supper. He imagined sitting buck naked on the big floral print sofa. No. You would take great pains not to even break wind in a room like this. Alma was looking at him. She expected him to say something. “Gee,” he said.
“That’s just for starters,” Alma said, and marched off. Trout followed her through the dining room, down a long hallway past two bedrooms into the big kitchen and finally to a third bedroom at the back of the house. Alma gave him a detailed inventory as they went, ticking off items in her strong, clear voice. She seemed to have committed the bill of lading to memory. Everything was new, right down to the set of Corningware dishes in the kitchen cabinets and the oak seats on the commodes.
Trout’s room had twin beds, a desk with a brass study lamp, a low bookcase, a five-drawer dresser -- all in maple. The window curtains and bedspreads were a coordinated plaid, deep reds and dark blues, the same colors as the oval braided rug. Above the desk there was a large framed picture of Jesus’ hands, clasped in prayer. He went to the window and looked out at Moseley Memorial Methodist Church next door. This side of the building was shaded by pecan trees and it appeared that every light in the sanctuary was on. You could see the stained glass windows clearly, four of them on this side, each one a Disciple, each likeness with a name at the bottom. Simon the Cannanean, Bartholomew, Judas Iscariot, James the son of Zebedee. Sort of the third string disciples, Trout thought. He wondered how the artist knew what they looked l
ike.
Trout turned back to Aunt Alma. She stood in the doorway, arms crossed. Watching him. Waiting. “It’s real nice,” he said. “We never had a place this nice.” Then he heard some bumping about under the house.
“Central air,” Alma said. “They’re finishing up. The place had window units, but I took them all out. I put in a new heat pump, new ductwork. Everything.” Trout noticed that she kept saying, “I.” Not “we” not “the church.” She gave another sweep of her arm. She also seemed inclined toward sweeping gestures. “There’s nothing,” Alma said with a firm smile, “like starting over.”
Trout thought about his father. Joe Pike liked to put his feet up on the furniture or throw one leg over the arm of a living room chair. You’d think twice about doing that here. But then, there was a lot Joe Pike Moseley would have to think twice about now. He was, indeed, starting over.
“When is Daddy gonna be here?” Trout asked.
Alma didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she pursed her lips as if she were drawing on a straw. “When have you talked to him?”
“Last week.”
“How did he sound?”
“Tired.”
“Well,” Alma said, “he hasn’t talked to me. I’ve just had to handle everything on my own. But I understand that Joe Pike will be here tomorrow.”
Alma turned around and walked out of the room, left Trout standing there staring at her back. He found her a few minutes later on the front porch, directing the men from the Moseley Mill truck who were carrying boxes up the front steps. “Put the clothes in the closets and take all the boxes to the kitchen. We’ll unpack them there. Don’t set anything down on the new furniture.”