by Barry Moser
I can’t say for certain, but that could have been the beginning of our life of general conflict, because when I was a kid I thought that Tommy sometimes beat me up just for exercise and for the fun of it. And for the longest time, I wouldn’t fight back. Mother told me to stand up to him. She said that if I did, he’d leave me alone. She told me that many times as she wiped away my tears. But I would not stand up to him and he did not leave me alone. The immutable facts of the three-year difference in our ages and his being only a year ahead of me in school undoubtedly played a part in his acrimony toward me, and until I was sixteen or seventeen I simply took whatever he dished out, even if I had to ball myself up to protect my face, hoping that Mother—or someone—would come to my rescue, or that Tommy would just stop it, go away, and leave me alone, which he sometimes did. My usual retaliation was to tell on him, hoping that Daddy or Mother would mete out whatever punishment they thought he deserved—which was usually having his allowance suspended (we both got fifty cents a week) or being confined to his room, which, being our room, meant that I was locked out of it. What I really hoped for was that Mother would make him go cut a switch from the forsythia bush. We were never really whipped, or spanked (other than with Daddy’s harmless hairbrush), but occasionally Mother did make us cut our own switches, and forsythia branches are very long and very limber.
Model airplanes
As we got older our fights usually began with bouts of name-calling, then graduated to pushing and shoving contests, then punches were thrown to the shoulder, gut, or groin. As a kid, I never threw that first punch. Every time I thought about hitting him in the face, the muscles in my arms grew leaden. The best I could muster was a shot at his shoulder. Usually our fights ended up on the floor in a wrestling match.
For fourteen years Tommy and I shared a bedroom. Mother favored pastel colors, so our little room was a pastel green. There were twin double-hung windows that faced west. The windows were dressed with white curtains and white, wood-slatted venetian blinds. Tommy’s bed was tucked into the corner of the room away from the windows. My bed was right next to them. The beds, maple four posters, were made up with matching chenille bedspreads, when mine was made. Tommy was a lot better about making up his bed than I was. He was better organized, too, from the clothes hanging in the closet to the socks organized in his sock drawer. His things were rarely out of place. For me, things were kicked under the bed and jammed into whatever drawer had room. Out of sight, out of mind. There were two chests of drawers, one for each of us, and a cotton rug on the wood floor between the beds. At the foot of his bed was a nightlight that was left on every night. Ever since our great-aunt had punished Tommy by locking him in a closet, he had been afraid of the dark.
Above my bed hung a dozen model airplanes, maybe more. They hung from the ceiling by a tack and a length of string. If Tommy hung any models above his bed I don’t remember, but if he did there were not many. Maybe one or two. Making models was not his favorite activity as it was mine. There is a photograph I have of him as a boy of eight or nine standing at the end of his bed in dark slacks and a white long-sleeve shirt and what looks to be a tie. He’s holding a broom and smiling broadly.
Picking up our room was an occasion for mayhem. I was good at making messes, but not so good about picking up after myself. Tommy could tolerate my slovenliness just so long. When we were very young he would tell Mother that I had shoved a mess of some sort under the bed and she would come and make me clean it up. As we got older Tommy took it on himself to make me keep my side of the room tidy, and to his standards of tidiness. Our rows over neatness intensified to the point of becoming unbearable for Mother.
In the midfifties Mother and Daddy enclosed the back porch intending it to be a family room, and for a year or two that’s what it was used for. But when our fights got to be too much for Mother to handle, they let me have the back room for my bedroom, and only Mother fussed at me about keeping it neat.
Mother never fussed at Tommy about keeping his room neat. She didn’t have to. Tommy always liked things neat and orderly: his person, his environment, the bombs he dropped from the belly of his imaginary bombers. If there had been such a thing as a “neat cadet” ribbon in the real world, my brother would have had a chest full of them. Spit and polish got into his bloodstream early on.
I, on the other hand, was, and still am, more like Nap Turner, whose tailor shop was calculated pandemonium. My sense of order is to stack things in piles. To keep up with Tommy, I would have had to cut too deeply into the time I had to draw and build models. Not much has changed. There are stacks of books on tables and on the floor of my studio. To look at my drawing table, my desk, the counters you would think that I could never find anything, and sometimes that is precisely the case. But most of the time I know where things are. When I don’t I wish I were more like Tommy.
SOMETIMES OUR FIGHTS began when Tommy ordered me to do something that I did not want to do. I was stubborn, if not pugilistic.
One summer morning, 1956 or 1957, I was in Bob’s basement workshop about to apply varnish to a coffee table that I was making for my room. Bob was at the lake fishing with Daddy. Velma was upstairs alone, watching television or puttering around in her kitchen. Without any warning Tommy stormed through the door and said,
“I need you to come with me down to the house, now.”
“Why?”
“I need you to help me clean out the gutters.”
Had I dropped what I was doing and gone with him everything would have been copacetic. I hated taking orders from my brother, especially when I doing something I wanted to do that didn’t involve him. I said,
“I’ll be along in a minute, just as soon as I finish doing what I’m doing.”
He growled something at me and left. I locked the shop door from the inside and went back to my work. He came back in half an hour or so, and when he found the door locked, he started pounding on it and thundered at me,
“Get your fat ass in high gear and come help me.”
I didn’t respond.
“Open this fucking door.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Oh, God, did that send him into a deep, almost maniacal rage. He kicked and pounded on the door until the lock gave way. I dropped the paintbrush and turned to face him, determined not to let him do anything to ruin my table, something that he was certainly capable of. More than once, in fits of rage, Tommy smashed a model I was building or tore up a drawing.
Two steps led down to the shop floor and before he got to the second step I tackled him, hauled him up on my shoulders and drove him out into the yard. His back caught an exposed lightbulb that broke and cut him badly enough to bleed but not seriously enough to warrant first aid. He was pummeling my back with his fists and trying to get in a position so that he could hit my head or face. He was screaming and yelling at me,
“Fight me fair, goddamn you, you chickenshit, fight me fair!”
Tommy was six-foot-one with long arms. I was five-foot-eight with short arms. He had a good five- or six-inch reach on me, so there could be no such thing as a fair fight standing toe to toe with him. The only thing that equipped me for a fair fight was my training as a wrestler at Baylor, and even though I never won a match, I could still hold my own.
I threw him on the dewy ground in the shadow of the house, but I didn’t turn him loose. I tied him up in some now-long-forgotten wrestling hold and it felt good being the one doing the pinning for a change. His eyes were a yellow tempest of fury, but since he had never wrestled, he didn’t know how to get away from me.
“Let me go, you fuckin’ chickenshit!”
I had him tied up so tight he could hardly move. My face was inches from his and I had my right hand free. I said,
“You know, I could beat the shit out of you right now if I wanted to.”
“Go ahead. You’re too goddamned chicken.”
He was right.
Lady barked and nipped at both of us as we struggled in the we
t grass. Velma heard the ruckus and came down her back steps wringing her hands and pleading with us to stop.
“I’ll have a heart attack if y’all don’t stop that right now. You wanna see me dead? Oh, oh, oh, God! Stop it! Stop it!”
Had I been she, I would have turned the hose on us, as I would on a pair of fighting dogs, but she just stood over us wringing her hands and wailing.
“I’m willing to quit if you are,” I said to Tommy.
“OK. OK. Just turn me loose.”
I turned him loose and stood up. When he got to his feet, he took a big swing and wham, his fist found my face hard and I went down. He stormed away. I went back to my work with a bloody and swollen lower lip. I never did help him with whatever it was that he wanted help with.
I wish that there had been some kind of “equal and opposite reaction” to the violent episodes that blew up between us. Somehow. Sometime. But there were not. Certainly there were days, even weeks of détente, but there were never any explosions of brotherly affection. If there were brotherly embraces I don’t remember them. There were no shared confidences. No solidarity that might have balanced and ameliorated the violent episodes. That might have softened the edges of the rift that would continue to ossify over the next five decades.
ANOTHER SUMMER SATURDAY, an afternoon this time, Mother was away visiting a friend and doing her grocery shopping. I was in my back room drawing and listening to Saturday Afternoon at the Opera. Tommy came in and demanded that I help him bathe Penny, our collie. It was his idea to bathe her, not Mother’s, and certainly not mine, but he insisted that I help him.
I refused.
He hit me.
I tackled him, and the fight was on.
The altercation migrated from my bedroom into the back hallway, through the kitchen, across the dining room, and was in full tilt in the living room when Mother came home.
When she came in and saw her dining room chairs overturned, the living room floor lamp in pieces on the floor, the door leading to the hallway broken, and a hole in the living room wall. She screamed and pleaded for us to stop. We would not.
She phoned Floyd, who happened to be home that afternoon, and begged for help. By that point our fight had been going on for a half an hour or better.
Floyd was a tall, strong man, a chain-gang boss who was used to dealing with convicts. But when he tried to separate us, we turned on him in a rare moment of brotherly solidarity. I don’t know why, but perhaps our shared, pent-up anger at him for his years of sullenness and irascibility toward us kicked in. No matter, we took him by his arms, dragged him out onto the front porch, and threw him bodily into the front yard. I wonder why Tommy and I did not establish an immediate détente and start laughing our asses off at this little victory over our tyrant uncle, but we didn’t. We just went back to shoving and pushing and calling each other the foulest names we could think of. Floyd must have been humiliated because he went home quietly and without offering any further assistance. Mother never asked him to break up another of our fights.
Now she was frantic. She was at the end of her rope (as she was wont to say), and as a last resort, she called the police. Ten minutes later, the fight was still under way, but by that time we were exhausted and it was more pushing and shoving and more name-calling. We both wanted to quit, but couldn’t.
The police officer arrived and parked his black cruiser in the front yard. He left the red bubble-gum-machine beacon on the roof flashing. When he came in, Mother took him by the arm begging him for help. The presence of a policeman in our living room was enough to make us stop our brawl. He did not threaten us in any way, other than keeping his hand on his nightstick, but he did warn us that he could, and would, haul our sorry asses in and book us on any number of charges if we ever did this again. The idea of spending time in a Chattanooga jailhouse was plenty sobering. The officer left. I went to my room. Tommy to his. Never mind the broken furniture.
YOU WOULD THINK THAT age and maturity would have diluted the animosity between us, but it did not. At least not altogether. Our fights became less frequent, given that I had been away in Alabama studying at Auburn and Tommy had been away in Oklahoma for Basic Training at Fort Sill. Our paths simply did not cross very often.
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.
BRIDGES
DESPITE THE DIFFICULT TIMES, Tommy and I had moments that bordered on the fraternal. I went hunting with him. And fishing, althoug
h 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,