We Were Brothers (13 page)

WILLIAM LOGAN, WRITING IN
Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue
, observed that ”truth is the first victim of memoir.” And that may well be the case. I know for certain that if my brother were alive, and if he were to read this, he would find many things to challenge. His memory of people’s names, of places traveled to, and family legends and lore was always better than mine. And I am sure that he would put himself in a better light. I can say the same of my mother, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, and all the characters in this story. Every one of them could make major and minor corrections and amendments. I cannot, and do not, claim that my memories are infallible or historically true. On the other hand, I can say that the stories I have told are true to the best of my recollections. True to my history as I recall it from a distant perspective. If I have looked back in error, or if I have forgotten the sequence of an event, or a date, or a person’s name, or the exact location of an event, it is because the inexorable creep of time has rendered my memory old and imperfect, and I ask forgiveness if I have it wrong.

My childhood lingers in my memory like old movies filmed in a limited palette—dull ochres, deep umbers, with fleeting moments of rose madder—all framed by a peripheral gray-green fog. The kind of peripheral fog that frames my dreams, too. And I confess that many of my memories are influenced by photographs: the hue of the old pictures, the loss of focus of the faded ones, and the cracked emulsion and missing parts of the damaged ones.

By the same token, I suspect that some of my memories have been invented over the years around those pictures and that they are not, in fact, true historical memories. I do not know how to separate the invented from the remembered. But I do know that none of these stories are outright fiction.

Fiction does, however, play its part. The memories of my childhood abide in my mind like the bits and pieces of laundry that Mother and I hung on the backyard clothesline—a tiny pair of kid’s skivvies here, a large chenille bedspread there—all held together by a line that is sometimes visible and other times not. They are like islands in an archipelago, as my friend the photographer Yola Monakhov has it. Each island is connected, under the surface, to the next, yet separated by water. Water that is sometimes bright and clear and other times dark and murky. I sometimes remember the beginning and the end of a story, but not the middle. I remember what happened, but not where—or when, exactly. So I have caulked the gaps in my memory with fictive elements.

Toward the end of the summer 2013, I wrote to my brother’s sons. I said, “I am truly sorry that your Daddy ain’t around to read this memoir. I’m rough on him here and there, but I’m rough on myself, too . . . but, hey, that’s what a troubled brotherhood is about. I’m trying to tell the story as best I can. He and I had the best times the last few years he was alive. We buried our hatchets and enjoyed a few short years without an instance of anger or discord. In a way, this memoir is an homage to him as well as a history of our burdened brotherhood.”

Jeannie Braham, Paul Mariani, Bret Lott, Mira Bartok, Ann Patchett, and Tony Johnston for generously reading early drafts and parts of early drafts and offering helpful advice.

At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga: Verbie Prevost, Steve Cox, Chapel Crowden, Kittrell Rushing, Hugh Prevost.

My good friend Charles Johnson.

Dr. Timothy Parsons for medical advice. 

Todd Moser for photographing his great-grandfather’s sword for me. 

Tyson Moser for telling me stories about his daddy. 

My brother, Tom; my step-sister Jeanne; my cousin Wayland, all of whom allowed me to interview them when the project was only an idea. They have all gone on ahead. 

Mildred Rawlings, director of the Hedges Library at Baylor School and her colleagues Betsy Carmichael and Barbara Kennedy. 

Karen Brown and her associates in the Local History and Genealogy Department of the Chattanooga Public Library. 

Kathy Pories for making the story better than it was. 

Craig Popelars for getting the first draft on Kathy Pories’s desk. 

And most of all to my beloved wife, Emily Crowe, for loving me, and for believing in me and this project. I love you, Miss Em, and this book is dedicated to you. 

Parts of
Brothers
have previously appeared, in different forms, in the
Sewanee Review
,
Image Journal
, the
Oxford American
, the
Southern Review
, the
Ontario Review
, and
Parenthesis
.