by Barry Moser
“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 call
ed for introspection. I did not go to the party that night. I stayed close to home.
So did Tommy.
PART THREE
BROTHERS
Love is not love that can only love those already flawless. That kind of love requires no enlargement of the self: It requires no love.
—ANDREW HUDGINS
The Joker
ONE
ON THE SECOND DAY OF December 1997, my brother phoned me from Nashville. I was working on an illustration for a new, upcoming Pennyroyal Caxton Press edition of the King James Bible, and was deep into engraving an image of the Archangels Gabriel and Michael.
Tommy called to tell me that our cousin Wayland had died the week before. It wasn’t terribly sad news to me because there had been so little communication among the three of us over the past thirty or so years and the affections that were once strong had considerably diminished. The conversation began pleasantly, as most of our telephone conversations did. Eventually the chitchat turned to family history. Tommy was retelling a story about an attempted robbery that took place in our grandfather Haggard’s grocery store before either of us were born.
Tommy with Uno, our cousin’s pup, c. 1951
Our grandfather, Will Haggard, was an ill-tempered man, a trait that he evidently passed on to his son, Floyd, though not so much to his four daughters. An oddly formal grocerman, he wore a three-piece business suit that, in photographs at least, seemed to soften his hard demeanor. He carried a pocket watch in his vest that was attached to a watch chain and a T bar. According to Tommy, the robber, who was black and probably drunk, was afraid of our grandfather and probably wished he had never started this shit. Will Haggard was a Klansman, as was his son, and he wasn’t afraid of the robber and didn’t back away from him. He probably went under the counter and brought out the billy club he kept there for just this kind of situation. The robber responded by pulling out a knife. But when the old man still showed no fear, the robber, who by now must have been about to lose control of his bowels, thrust his knife at our grandfather’s belly. But the point of the knife blade struck the watch in Will Haggard’s vest pocket and stuck in the watch’s gold cover.
Nobody knows the rest of the story. If there is an ending of some sort, neither Tommy nor I remembered it.
When he finished telling the story, I chuckled and said,
“You know, Tommy, it’s funny how we remember the same story with different details. You know damned well that we heard it told by the same storyteller. You know, like out on Velma’s porch after churning ice cream on a summer evening. And what’s funny is that I don’t remember that it was a black guy who stabbed old man Haggard, but a white guy who shot him and the bullet hit the pocket watch.”
Tommy’s response was immediate and terse.
“We still call ’em niggers down here.”
There was a long pause as that word echoed in my head. He had done it again. I was trying to control my anger. Then I said, quietly,
“Well, I don’t.”
“I know you don’t. Hell, you probably think it’s OK that we give ’em all we give ’em, too, dontcha?”
“If we keep this up, Tommy, I’m gonna get mighty pissed off.”
“So will I, just in the other direction.”
“Fuck you . . . and don’t bother ever calling me again until you can act like an adult human being.”
I slammed the phone down.
I was shaking all over, weeping deeply, wondering what it would have been like to have grown up—and old—with a brother who allowed some room for my perspective. I couldn’t work anymore because my hands were shaking. I couldn’t eat either, so I went to my bedroom and tried to sleep.
The next morning I got up at five. I cleaned out the drawers in the bathroom cabinets. I made coffee. I fed my dogs. I did the morning chores.
And then I sat down to write my brother a letter. A letter incorporating as succinctly as I possibly could what I had been thinking about all through my sleepless night and my anxious morning. This is the text of that letter:
Tommy—
I am very sorry for the way our conversation ended yesterday. I really didn’t mean to say that you shouldn’t call me unless you could act like an adult human being. When I lose my composure my mind slips out of its usual fluency and I say dumb things like that.
No, what I really meant to say—what I really wish I had had the presence of mind to say at that very moment—was that you shouldn’t call me until you can act like something other than an ignorant fucking redneck.
I have spent the better part of thirty-five years—in my classrooms and in my work—combating your brand of blind and stupid prejudice, your simpleminded and ignorant bigotry, and your arrogant and malignant notions of white superiority and supremacy. It saddens me beyond anything you can imagine that you, my brother, are the purebred and banal embodiment of all the things I hate.
Over the years I have tolerated your racial slurs in every conversation we have had, painful to me as they have been. I have suffered your insensitive slurs about women, too, especially painful since I am the father of three women whom I adore and the grandfather of five little girls. (“You know why they spank babies when they’re born? So they’ll knock the dicks off the dumb ones.”) And I have endured your arrogant airs of superiority about matters that (as you confessed to me) you know nothing about—especially national and international politics. I have not called you to account for these things as I would have anybody else. I should have, because every time I have looked the other way, every time I have turned the other cheek, every time I have kept my mouth shut, my innate humanity has been diminished. And so has yours, though you don’t know it.
And you are wrong that “we still call them niggers down here.” I am still a southerner myself despite my place of residence—and if you don’t understand that you do not understand what it means to be a true southerner. I travel throughout the South (far more than you, even though you live there) teaching and lecturing at places like Clemson and the Universities of Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, and the like. I am close friends with many of the finest southern writers, educators, and journalists. And I can tell you that educated and cultured people in the South most assuredly do not think the way you think and do not call them niggers. Fortunately they, and not you and your ilk, are the ones who are molding the future of the American South.
The only people today who do think and speak the way you think and speak (in the South and elsewhere) are the ones who, like you, are full of hate, fear, and anger. And, curiously, they also seem to be the ones who, like you, speak inarticulately, slur their words, and are utterly incapable of correctly conjugating verbs. Their/your positions are not only intellectually indefensible, they are morally corrupt and contribute to the perpetuation of the greatest sickness of our age—racism.
You are an embarrassment to me, Tommy. You are an embarrassment because of your sadly comic sense of superiority and your outrageously bigoted attitudes. But mostly because of your persistent, rabid, and unapologetic racism. I am hurt and diminished by these things every time we talk and I do not wish to endure it ever again. I am ashamed that I am kin to you and will continue to be ashamed of our kinship as long as you harbor these perverted values and persist in rubbing my nose in them as you have done all my life. If you only knew how much pain you have inflicted on me over the past fifty years or so you couldn’t help but be ashamed. If you can ever see the world from a slightly broader perspective than middle Tennessee, then perhaps we can salvage something of value from a brotherhood that has never amounted to very much—the saddest fact of my life.
Barry
December 3, 1997
TWO
FOUR MONTHS LATER, in April 1998, I was in Redlands, California, giving a talk at a conference of elementary school teachers. The talk had not gone well. It was the wrong speech for the wrong audience. The person who introduced me said (without querying me beforehand) that my presentation was going
to be “fun.” It was not. As soon as I was free of my obligations I walked back to the B&B where I was staying. I was down in the mouth because the morning had not gone well, so I lay down on the bed, thinking about my ineffectual speech. I picked up the phone and called home. When Cara, my oldest daughter, answered the phone, I asked her if there were any problems that needed my attention. She said,
“No. But you have a letter here from your brother.”
I sat up and asked her if it was a thin envelope or a fat one.
“A fat one.”
I bunched up a couple of pillows, lay back against them, and asked her to read the letter to me. What follows is the letter my brother wrote to me.
(For the record, I do not remember a Mary at the Country Club, nor a Johnnie B. Tommy always had a better memory for names than I have. I do remember Jimmy, the bartender. I have no idea who Nobie or Delores are or were, and neither do Tommy’s sons. Why he brings up our cousin Helen Haggard as he does is not at all clear to me. He mentions watching Huckleberry Finn and is referencing a 1985 PBS film.)
Barry,
I am going to answer your question without any bullshit. I am going to save the first question for last. But first I want you to think, use that head of yours for something other than drawing pictures and writing letters showing off your intellectual wizardry.
Frankly the tone of your first letter has made me wonder if you deserve this letter. I too have not gone a day without thinking of you and you must believe that what I am about to tell you is the truth. At this late stage of our lives the air must be cleared.
